Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to the one and only Sigourney Weaver. Seen here with Jonesy the Cat, Weaver will always be best-remembered for bringing to life Ellen Ripley and totally revolutionizing both horror and science fiction!
Today’s song of the day comes from Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic score for Alien.
This October, I’m going to be doing something a little bit different with my contribution to 4 Shots From 4 Films. I’m going to be taking a little chronological tour of the history of horror cinema, moving from decade to decade.
Today, we complete the 1930s.
4 Shots From 4 Films
Dracula’s Daughter (1936, dir by Lambert Hillyer)
Revolt of the Zombies (1936, dir by Victor Halperin)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936, dir by George King)
Son of Frankenstein (1939, dir by Rowland V. Lee)
Get to know your neighbors, people!
That’s really the main message that I took away from the 1982 film, The Seduction. In The Seduction, Morgan Fairchild stars as Jamie Douglas. Jamie is a anchorwoman for a local news channel in Los Angeles. She has an older boyfriend named Brandon (Michael Sarrazin). She has a sex-crazed best friend named Robin (Colleen Camp). She has a beautiful home in the Hollywood Hills. She’s doing wonderfully for someone whose main talent is the ability to read what’s on the teleprompter. Much like Ron Burgundy, she’ll read whatever is put on that teleprompter without even thinking about it. Some might say that indicates that Jamie is a fairly vacuous character and …. well, they’re right. She is.
Jamie starts receiving flowers at work and mysterious phone calls from someone named Derek. Derek (Andrew Stevens) is a fashion photographer. He’s young. He’s handsome. He’s charismatic. His assistant, Julie (Wendy Smith Howard), is absolutely in love with him. In fact, Derek would seem to have it all but he’s obsessed with Jamie. Soon, he’s breaking into Jamie’s house so that he can watch her undress and then confronting her at the mall. At one point, he shows up in her living room and starts taking pictures of her. Jamie screams. Brandon beats him up. After Derek leaves, Jamie and Brandon go to the police and ask if there’s something that they can do about Derek. The police say that there are not many options because Derek has not technically broken the law …. uhm, what? I get that things were different in the 80s but I still find it hard to believe that showing up in someone else’s living ro0om without an invitation and then refusing to leave would have been considered legal back then. As you probably already guessed, Derek’s obsession soon turns lethal.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about The Seduction is that Derek is basically Jamie’s neighbor but she doesn’t ever seem to realize it. Watching this film, there were time when I really had to wonder if maybe Jamie was just an idiot. As well, throughout the film, Jamie reports on an unknown serial killer who is terrorizing Los Angeles. The killer is dubbed the Sweetheart Killer and, when I watched this film, I wondered if the Sweetheart Killer and Derek were one in the same. I don’t think that they were but, still, why introduce an unknown serial killer without providing any sort of resolution? It’s all indicative of just how sloppy the plotting on The Seduction truly was. That’s especially true of the ludicrous ending of the film. A murder is committed in Jamie’s hot tub and when Jamie calls the police to report it, she’s put on hold. Meanwhile, Derek buries the body in Jamie’s backyard and somehow manages to do it without really breaking a sweat or being noticed by anyone. Derek’s big secret turns out to be not that much of a shock.
Morgan Fairchild’s performance isn’t great but that’s largely because she’s stuck with a character who is never allowed to behave in a consistent manner. Andrew Stevens is a bit more convincing as Derek, playing him as a photographer who doesn’t need cocaine because he’s already get his obsessive personality keeping up at nights. Michael Sarrazin, as Brandon, bellows nearly all of his lines and gives a performance that just shouts out, “Why did I agree to do this movie!?” He’s amusing. As for director David Schmoeller, he did much better with both Tourist Trap and Crawlspace.
Seriously, though, a lot of the horror and drama in this film could have been avoided by Jamie just getting to know her neighbors. I’ve been very lucky to have some very good neighbors over the years. When my Dad passed away, my neighbors Hunter and Hannah checked in on my nearly every day afterwards and let me use their hot tub whenever I wanted to. Neighbors, they can be pretty special.
“Another name for Mars is …. DEATH!”
The 1958 sci-fi/horror hybrid, It! The Terror From Beyond Space, opens with a NASA press conference. The assembled reporters are reminded that, earlier in the year, America’s first manned mission to Mars was presumed to have been lost. However, a second mission was sent to Mars and they discovered that the commander of the first mission, Edward L. Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), was still alive.
Unfortunately, all of Carruthers’s crewmates were dead. Carruthers claimed that the murders were committed by a monster. The commander of the second mission, Col. Van Heusen (Kim Spalding), instead suspected that Carruthers killed his crewmates when he realized they were stranded on Mars. The ship had enough provisions to last the entire crew for one year or ten years for just one man.
The second mission is now on their way back to Earth, with Carruthers under house arrest. While one crewman does believe that Carruthers’s story could be true, the others are convinced that Carruthers is a murderer. What they don’t know is that the monster from Carruthers’s story is not only real but that it also snuck onto their ship during lift-off. Tall and scaly with huge claws and a permanently angry face, the Monster — It, for lack of a more formal name — is lurking in the lower levels of the ship and hunting for food.
To state what is probably already obvious, It! is not a film that worries much about being scientifically accurate. While it does explain how living on the surface of Mars caused It to develop into the predator that it is, this is also a science fiction film from 1958. It’s a film where, instead of going to the Moon, the first manned spaceflight is to Mars. It’s also a film where there’s no weightlessness in space, the two women on the ship serve everyone coffee, and a nuclear reactor is casually unshielded at one point in an attempt to destroy It. Bullets are fired on the spaceship. Grenades are tossed. Airlocks are rather casually opened.
Fortunately, none of that matters. Clocking in at a mere 69 minutes, It! is a surprisingly suspenseful horror film, one that makes good use of its claustrophobic locations (a lot of the action takes place in an air duct) and which features a surprisingly convincing and, at times, even scary monster. It may be a man in a rubber suit but that doesn’t make it any less shocking when its claw bursts out of an an open hatch and starts trying to grab everything nearby. The cast of It! are all convincing in their roles. Watching them, you really do believe that they are a crew who have seen a lot together and it makes the subsequent deaths all the more effective,
It! was a troubled production, The monster was played by veteran stuntman Ray Corrigan, who reportedly showed up drunk a few times and also managed to damage the monster suit. Many members of the cast were not happy about being cast in a B-movie. (Fortunately, their resentment probably helped their performances as the similarly resentful crew of the second mission to Mars.) Marshall Thompson, who played Carruthers, was one of the few cast members who enjoyed making It! and, perhaps not surprisingly, he also gives the best performance in the film.
Troubled production or not, It! was not only a box office success but, along with Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, it was later cited as one of the inspiration for Alien. At its best, It! has the same sort of claustrophobic feel as Alien. The scene where one of the crewman is found in an air duct brings to mind the fate of Tom Skerritt’s character in Alien.
It! is still a very effective work of sci-fi horror. Remember, another name for Mars is …. DEATH!
“Today it is science fiction, tomorrow it will be science fact….”
So declared the trailer from 1973’s The Clones.
One of the first films to be made about cloning, this movie tells the story of Dr. Gerald Appleby (Michael Greene), who discovers that there’s another version of him living his life. Dr. Appleby and his clone both find themselves being pursued by two government agents (Gregory Sierra and Otis Brown) and a mad scientist (Stanley Adams).
The Clones requires some patience. It moves at its own deliberate pace and there’s quite a few scenes of Dr. Appleby running through the desert. That said, the film builds up to wonderfully twisted conclusion and the final roller coaster shoot-out makes everything more than worth it.
Ever since I first saw this ennui-drenched film in 2012, I’ve been recommending it to people. I’m happy to share it with you today!
by Art Sussman
This artistic cover is from 1953.
Directed by Russell Mulcahy, the video for Wild Boys cost over a million pounds, which was considered to be an astronomical sum in 1984. Both the video and the song is based on the William S. Burroughs novel, The Wild Boys. Mulcahy had long-wanted to adapt the book into a film and the song was written to serve as a part of the soundtrack of the proposed film. (The film itself was never made.)
The costumes in the video were left over from The Road Warrior. The video, featuring all of the members of Duran Duran being tortured in different ways, was controversial but ultimately very popular.
Enjoy!
Today’s episode of televised horror is The Silent Scream, the seventh episode of Hammer House of Horror. It was originally broadcast in the UK on October 25th, 1980.
A quick content warning for everyone: This episode features some scenes of animals in distress so I personally would advise viewer discretion. That said, I simply had to share this episode because it features Peter Cushing’s final performance for Hammer Studios. He plays a seemingly kindly old man who has a very dark secret. A youngish Brian Cox plays the ex-con who gets a job working for Cushing. This is a very unnerving episode with an ending that truly sticks with you.
You have 30 seconds to decide who is the werewolf. Is it the professor? Is it the wife of the big game hunter? Is it the long-haired hippie who has a history of cannibalism? Is it the concert pianist? Is it the diplomat? Make your guess and then….
This is the challenge that is presented to the viewers of the 1974 film, The Beast Must Die. The Beast Must Die is a werewolf film. Calvin Lockhart stars as millionaire big game hunter Tom Newcliffe. Tom has invited a group of people to his English mansion because, according to him, one of them is a werewolf and he plans to hunt down whoever it is. It’s not a terrible premise and I imagine that, in 1974, it was probably quite revolutionary to cast a black actor as a millionaire with a large British estate. (In America, the film was marketed as being a blaxploitation film under the title Black Werewolf.)
That said, The Beast Must Die is still best-known for its “Werewolf Breaks.” At certain points in the film, a stopwatch appears on the screen and a narrator asks us if we’ve figured out who the werewolf is yet. The viewer is given 30 seconds to make a guess before the film continues. The “Werewolf Breaks” were apparently added to the film after production was completed and director Paul Annett was not happy about them. The Beast Must Die is, in many ways, a pretty grim film or, at least, it would be if not for the campy narrator telling us that it’s up to us to solve the mystery.
But you know what? I like the Werewolf Breaks. They’re fun and, without them, The Beast Must Die would come across as being a film that takes itself way too seriously. Calvin Lockhart, who was so good in Melinda, overacts to a tremendous degree as Tom Newcliffe and, as the film progresses, he goes from being merely eccentric to actually coming across as being rather unhinged in his attempts to discover who is the werewolf. It’s never really clear how he settled on his suspects. (All of them are described as being in the area of several unexplained deaths but it seems like the same could be said of probably hundreds of other people as well.) But once he has them at the mansion, he’s determined to keep them there until he figures out which is infected with lycanthropy. (In this film, the werewolf curse is described as basically being a virus.)
Fortunately, the suspects are played by an interesting gallery of British and American character actors. Charles Gray plays the shady diplomat. Malene Clark is Tom’s wife. Michael Gambon is the pianist while Ciaran Madden plays his wife. Tom Chadbon plays the hippie cannibal while Anton Diffring shows up as the head of security for the mansion. Best of all, Peter Cushing plays the professor who is an expert on werewolves. It’s always a joy to see Peter Cushing in any film. He’s particularly good here, handling his often overwritten dialogue like the pro that he was.
The Beast Must Die is an uneven film. The opening sequence, which features Tom testing the mansion’s security systems, seems to go on forever and the plot is full of twists that fall apart if you give them too much thought, But the Werewolf Breaks made me smile and the supporting cast is a delight. It’s a fun film to watch during the Halloween season.
In 2016’s L.A. Slasher, an androgynous killer wearing a white suit and a mask decides that reality stars are the worst people in the world so he starts kidnapping them and torturing them and live-streaming their murders. Even worse, he talks to them and talks to us about how he feels about them. I say “even worse” because the voice of the Slasher is provided by Andy Dick. Andy Dick’s nasal voice is even more whiny than usual in this film and it left me wondering what if perhaps death would preferable to listening to Dick speak.
L.A. Slasher is meant to be a satire and I will give it some credit. It hits its targets and there’s even some bite to the scenes in which people on social media start talking about how much they love the slasher. In many ways, this film predicted the Cult of Luigi. Unfortunately, the film itself is so overdirected and cartoonishly-staged that it’s never quite as effective as it wants to be. It’s essentially a live action cartoon and a fairly exhausting one of that. The flashing lights, the constantly prowling camera, the jump cuts, the neon, it’s meant to be overwhelming but instead it’s just annoying.
There are a lot of familiar faces in the cast. Dave Bautista and Danny Trejo shows up as drug dealers. Mischa Barton is the Actress. Drake Bell is the Popstar. Brooke Hogan is the Reality Star. And, of course, Eric Roberts shows up very briefly as The Mayor. Personally, I think the film would have worked better if Andy Dick had played the Mayor and if Roberts had been the voice of the Slasher. Roberts has a much better voice and, with Dick playing the Mayor, it would be easy to just leave his scenes on the cutting room floor.
In the end, I think the main problem is that L.A. Slasher is a film from 2016 that acts as if it’s the first film to ever criticize reality television and the people who populate it. Even in 2016, that argument was hardly new or original. It certainly didn’t need to be made in the voice of Andy Dick.
Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:
Through the Shattered Lens 