Mardi Gras Film Review: Gothic Harvest (dir by Ashley Hamilton)

Posted on February 23, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Are you currently heading to New Orleans for Mardi Gras? Or are you already in New Orleans, getting drunk and dreaming about how many beads you’ll end up with by the end of Tuesday night? If that’s the case, have fun but be careful. New Orleans is a town that’s full of ghosts and voodoo.

At least, that’s what the movies would have you believe. Whenever you see a horror film that’s set in New Orleans, you know that voodoo is going to somehow play into it. The other thing that you can usually count on is that there will be at least one scene set during Mardi Gras. Really, that’s not surprising. Mardi Gras in New Orleans is not only a great party but it’s also uniquely cinematic in a way that Mardi Gras in Dallas never is.

(Yes, we celebrate Mardi Gras in Dallas. It’s nothing to get too excited about.)

The 2018 film, Gothic Harvest, is all about Mardi Gras and voodoo. When four college students head down to New Orleans for the party of the year, they have no idea that they’re about to get sucked into a centuries old curse. When Hope (Abbie Gayle) meets the handsome and enigmatic Gar (Ashley Hamilton, who also directed the film), she goes off with him without bothering to tell her friends where she’s going. That turns out to be a mistake because it turns out that Gar is a member of a cursed family. The family is immortal but that immortality comes with a price. Every year, they have to find and sacrifice a young woman in order to stay alive. It’s all because the family, centuries ago, ran afoul the queen of New Orleans voodoo, Marie Laveau (Janee Michelle).

Hope’s friends are concerned about her disappearance but they can’t get anyone to help them out. After all, it’s Mardi Gras and the entire city is full of people who are probably going to wake up in a strange bed with a hangover on Wednesday morning. However, Hope’s friends do eventually run into an undercover cop named Detective Hollis (Bill Moseley). Hollis has an impressive beard and brags about how his favorite band is Pantera. He seems to be a bit strange but he agrees to help the girls look for Hope.

Hope, meanwhile, has now met the cursed and immortal Boudine family and, not surprisingly, they’re an interesting group of characters. What distinguished them from other cursed immortals is that they all seem to be hate being stuck with each other but they hate the idea of dying even more. So, they keep doing what they have to do even though it makes them all miserable. The family matriarch is Griselda (Lin Shayne) while her daughter, Amelia (Sofia Mattson), is a self-styled dominatrix. And then there’s Dolly (Ciara Rizzo), who is obsessed with dolls.

Gothic Harvest is a bit of a strange viewing experience. This was Ashley Hamilton’s directorial debut and the film itself can be confusing upon first viewing. The timeline jumps back and forth, from the past to the present, and it can often be hard to keep track of just who is doing what or why. It’s hard not to feel that the film might have worked better if it had dropped the modern storyline and instead just concentrated on telling the story of how the family came to be cursed. That said, Gothic Harvest does occasionally achieve a dream-like intensity and Hamilton makes good use of New Orleans’s spooky atmosphere. This is a flawed film that doesn’t really work but I would still be interested in seeing what Hamilton directs next.

The cast is a bit of a mixed bag. Hope and her friends are not particularly memorable but Bill Moseley and Lin Shaye are both ideally cast. Moseley, in particular, appears to be having fun and there’s a great scene where he sits in a truck and recites some of the worst pick-up lines ever. Finally, Janee Michelle goes totally over the top as Marie Laveau but that’s exactly the right approach to take to the character. The Queen of New Orleans Voodoo isn’t going to be a quiet or a reserved character.

For those of you celebrating, have fun but use your common sense. If someone says that he needs to sacrifice you so that his family can continue to live forever, don’t go off with him regardless of how many beads he offers.

Cleaning Out The DVR: The Love-Ins (dir by Arthur Dreifuss)

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Hi there! So, as you may know because I’ve been talking about it on this site all year, I have got way too much stuff on my DVR. Seriously, I currently have 179 things recorded! I’ve decided that, on February 1st, I am going to erase everything on the DVR, regardless of whether I’ve watched it or not. So, that means that I’ve now have only have a month to clean out the DVR! Will I make it? Keep checking this site to find out! I recorded the 1967 film, The Love-Ins, off of TCM on September 28th, 2017!)

“We now enter Haight Ashbury. The promised land of the love movement. The utopia of LSD…and now we take you to Golden Gate Park for a hippie love-in!”

— A San Francisco Tour Guide in The Love-Ins (1967)

I doubt I could ever be a hippie. I don’t mind the drugs, the free love, or the music but the whole lack of showers and underwear would be too much for me. Add to that, from what I’ve seen, it appears that whenever there was a hippie gathering, it would inevitably lead to the arrival of mimes and who wants to deal with that? That said, I certainly do enjoy watching movies about hippies.

Take The Love-Ins for instance!

This 1967 film is all about hippies, or at the very least the popular perception of hippies. There’s even a lengthy sequence that takes place at a hippie gathering in San Francisco. While the hippies plays bongo drums, blow bubbles, dance, and stare at multi-colored umbrellas with stoned eyes, they’re watched by Jonathan Barnett (Richard Todd). Barnett used to be a respected philosophy professor but then he resigned his teaching position in protest after two students were expelled for publishing an underground newspaper. This led to Barnett appearing on a right-wing talk show where the antagonistic host told him that, if he loved the hippies so much, maybe he should got to Haight Ashbury and see how they really live. Barnett does just that and it blows his mind!

Soon, Barnett has re-invented himself. He’s now a psychedelic prophet, living in a commune with the expelled students and encouraging everyone to “Be more. Sense more. Love more.” That doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as “Tune in. Turn On. Drop out,” but it’s the same basic idea. Soon, hippies from all over the country are flocking to Prof. Barnett, dropping LSD, and doing interpretive dances. Not even the local outlaw bikers can stop Barnett from spreading his message.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long for his newfound fame to go to Barnett’s head. He soon stops listening to Larry (James MacArthur), the student whose expulsion started the whole movement, and instead surrounds himself with sycophants like Elliott (Mark Goddard). Barnett goes from being an idealist to a messianic cult leader. Soon, hippies are fighting in the streets, setting fired to newspaper they don’t like, and jumping out of windows. (“LSD told him he could fly. Gravity had different plans.” No one actually said that in the movie but I wish they had.) After discovering that his girlfriend (Susan Oliver) has been impregnated by Barnett, Larry realizes that he has to stop his former professor, one way or the other.

The Love-Ins was made by the same people responsible for Riot on Sunset Strip but, whereas Sunset Strip at least pretended to take an even-handed, documentary-like approach, The Love-Ins is a psychedelic freakout. Whereas Sunset Strip features Mimsy Farmer taking LSD and then staring at her hand, The Love-Ins features Susan Oliver taking LSD, transforming into Alice in Wonderland, and then dancing with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. And whereas Sunset Strip tried to be on the side of both the young and the old, The Love-Ins leaves little doubt that those hippies are no good! (While Larry may be a the film’s hero, he looks like he would be more comfortable in the ROTC than at Woodstock.) Barnett’s love-ins are revealed to be as choreographed as any political rally and, if there’s any doubt that he’s become a really bad guy, he even starts to perform impromptu wedding ceremonies. “How dare you make a mockery of marriage!?” an outraged observer shouts.

Seen today, the main value of The Love-Ins is a chance to see how many adults viewed the counter-culture and its leaders in 1967. (Director Arthur Dreifuss was 60 when he directed this film and the film often views its young characters with the detachment of someone not sure of how close he can really get before being attacked.) Of course, the main reason I liked The Love-Ins was because of the psychedelic dance scenes. (Though no one’s going to mistake this film for another Face in the Crowd, I also enjoyed some of the film’s satiric jabs at the cult of celebrity, which was apparently just as big in 1967 as it is in 2018.) It’s definitely a film of its time, though whether or not the people involved with the movie actually understood their time is another issue all together.

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Scream Blacula Scream (dir by Bob Kelljan)

Posted on October 17, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Am I correct in assuming that everyone knows who Blacula was?

Blacula is often described as being the black Dracula but actually, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. In life, he was an African prince named Mamuwalde who, in 1780, went to Dracula’s castle and asked for the count’s help in suppressing the slave trade. Dracula turned him into a vampire instead and, after declaring that Mamuwalde would forever be known as Blacula, he proceeded to lock Mamuwalde in a coffin. That’s where Mamuwalde remained for 290 years, until he managed to escape. By that point, his coffin had been relocated from Transylvania to Los Angeles.

All of that was revealed in the 1972 film, Blacula. Blacula, which starred a distinguished Shakespearean actor named William Marshall in the lead role, was a surprise hit so, of course, Mamuwalde (played again by Marshall) returned the following year in a sequel. It didn’t matter that the first Blacula ended with Mamuwalde deliberately ending his existence by walking out into the sunlight. Blacula would return!

It also didn’t matter if anyone in the audience for Scream, Blacula, Scream had somehow missed seeing the first movie. Scream, Blacula, Scream features lengthy flashbacks to the first film. It makes sense, really. Why waste money on all new footage when you can just pad the sequel with scenes from its predecessor?

I’m disappointed to say that Scream, Blacula, Scream did not feature any disco action. When I saw that this movie would be airing on TCM Underground, I decided to watch it specifically because I figured there would be at least one scene of Blacula dancing underneath a spinning disco ball. I mean, it was a movie from the 70s, right? Honestly, I think that if Scream, Blacula, Scream had been made later in the decade, it would have featured at least one disco dance scene.

What the film did have was a lot of voodoo. Judging from this movie, Live and Let Die, and the House on Skull Mountain, it would appear that people in the early 70s were really obsessed with voodoo. When the movie opens, a voodoo priestess named Mama Loa is dying and she’s just named her apprentice, Lisa (Pam Grier), as the new head of the cult. Mama Loa’s son, Willis (Richard Lawson), isn’t happy about this decision so, for some reason, he decides that it would be a good idea to bring Blacula back to life.

Willis apparently thought that the revived Blacula would be his servant but it doesn’t work out like that. First off, Blacula was perfectly happy being dead. Secondly, he is no one’s servant. Blacula promptly bites Willis on the neck and then proceeds to vampirize nearly everyone that he comes across. Soon, Blacula has an army of vampires but all he wants is to be human again.

And who can help him reach that goal?

How about the city’s newest voodoo priestess, Lisa?

Now, I will say this about Scream, Blacula, Blacula. The main character is named Lisa and that automatically makes it an above average movie. The entire movie features people saying, “Lisa” over and over again and you know I loved listening to that.

Other than that, though, the movie was kind of a mess. It was obviously written and filmed in a hurry and, as a result, a lot of the action felt like padding. For a subplot that wasn’t that interesting to begin with, the voodoo cult power struggle got way too much screen time. On the plus side, William Marshall and Pam Grier were both a hundred times better than the material that they had to work with. Regardless of how ludicrous the dialogue was, Marshall delivered it with dignity and just the right hint of ennui.

Scream, Blacula, Scream is not a particularly good film but it’s worth seeing for Marshall and Grier.

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: The House on Skull Mountain (dir by Ron Honthaner)

Posted on October 7, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Before I say anything else about 1974’s The House on Skull Mountain, I just want to say how much I love the film’s poster. Seriously, that poster is everything that you could hope for from an exploitation film print ad. Everything about it, from the lightning to the giant skull to the mansion to the unfortunate person plunging to her doom is pure perfection. I especially like the question at the bottom of the poster: “Which of these five will come down alive?”

And, to be honest, it’s actually a fairly honest poster. The majority of the film really does take place in a house on a mountain that has features that look like a skull. Of course, the skull in the movie is not quite as prominent as the one in the poster. The house actually does look a lot like the one on the poster. There’s also a lot of lightning in the movie. It’s the same basic lightning stock footage that has appeared in almost every film ever produced by Roger Corman. In The House on Skull Mountain, it’s used as a transitional device. “Is that scene over?” you might find yourself wondering. Well, don’t worry. The lightning stock footage will let you know.

One reason that I’m focusing on the poster is because the film itself is kind of anemic. In the movie, the house on top of Skull Mountains belongs to Pauline Christophe, a direct descendant of the first king of Haiti. Upon her death, Pauline’s four great granchildren are invited to hear the reading of her will. None of the four have ever met Pauline or each other. Phillippe (Mike Evans) is an alcoholic who says stuff like, “Baby, what’s the scene?” Harriet (Xernona Clayton) is fragile and nervous and it certainly doesn’t help her nerves when she briefly sees a hooded skeleton sitting a few rows in front of her on her flight to Atlanta. Lorena (Janee Michelle) drives too fast but is otherwise responsible and mature. And then there’s Dr. Andrew Cunningham (Victor French), who shows up late and turns out to be white.

“You’re the wrong color!” Phillippe snaps at him.

Andrew shrugs and says that he’ll explain it all later. He does eventually tell a story about being abandoned on the front steps of an orphanage but the dialogue is so awkwardly-written and delivered that I’m not sure if he is being serious or if he is poking fun at Phillippe’s shock.

Because Andrew showed up late, the four of them have to stay in the house for a week until Pauline’s lawyer returns to read the will. Keeping them company is the butler, Thomas (Jean Durand), and Loutte (Ella Woods) the maid.

And that’s not all! It also appears that there is a robed skeleton wandering around the house as well! Add to that, the relatives start having visions. One falls down an elevator shaft. Another has a heart attack after someone stabs doll with a pin. Could all of this have something to do with the fact that Pauline and her servants were all dedicated practitioners of voodoo?

Sad to say but the House on Skull Mountain is pretty dull. The film does provide a brief history lesson concerning how Haiti was the only nation to be formed as a result of a slave rebellion and how the real-life Henri Christophe went from being a slave to a king but the film doesn’t really do much with the information. It’s tempting to look for some sort of subtext in the film’s plot but it’s really just not there. Much like Andrew being the only white member of a historically important black family, the history of Haiti and the actual origins of Haitian voodoo are elements that are brought up and then quickly abandoned. There is one good and lengthy voodoo ceremony but otherwise, the whole film is almost all filler. When it’s not showing us the same lighting stock footage, it’s showing us Andrew and Lorena wandering around Atlanta.

But seriously, that movie poster is to die for.