Tag Archives: Lynn Lowry

Film Review: A Stranger In The Woods (dir by József Gallai)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“My humor is a bit abstract.”

— Victor Browning (Bill Oberst, Jr.)

“He’s a very strange guy.”

— Edith (Laura Ellen Wilson)

A Stranger In The Woods opens with a car driving into the woods.  The skies are cloudy.  The road is isolated.  It’s unsettling because, other than the driver of the car, there aren’t any other people around.  Other than the road, there are no signs of civilization.  It’s the type of image that causes the viewer to consider just how much we take for granted the idea of interacting with other people and living in a world where our needs are taken care of.  Today, we view anyone who would separate themselves from civilization as being an eccentric.  In the past, though, that was how most people lived.  They lived alone in home that they built for themselves and visitors and strangers were viewed with suspicion.  It’s a way of life that many people had forced upon them from 2020 to 2021 and it led to the anger and societal anxiety that is still shaking the world today.  Living in isolation is not easy for most people in the modern world, which is perhaps why we are so fascinated with people who can actually handle it.

Driving the car is Edith (Laura Ellen Wilson), a 20-something film student who has been given a tip by one of her professors.  There is a man named Victor Browning (Bill Oberst, Jr.) who lives by himself in the woods.  He’s known for being a bit off-key but he is considered to be generally harmless.  He lives in a cabin, spending his time in what appears to be self-imposed exile from the world.  He only occasionally leaves his cabin so he can get supplies.  Victor has agreed to be interviewed by Edith for a student documentary.

The first meeting with Victor is a bit awkward but he soon starts to open up to Edith.  Victor seems to be friendly and polite, even if he does appear to be a bit haunted by things that happened in the past.  Then again, Edith has things in her past that haunt her as well.  However, as Edith’s stay with Victor continues, she starts to notice some odd and eventually disturbing things about Victor and his isolated existence….

A Stranger In The Woods is a found footage film, playing out as a combination of the footage that Edith shot for her documentary and audio recordings of phone calls that she placed to various people.  As a result, we learn about Victor’s secrets along with Edith.  Like Edith, we start the film liking Victor for his shy manners and his seemingly gentle sense of humor and, just like Edith, we are shocked to witness his sudden changes in mood and his seeming reluctance to discuss certain aspects of his life.  Bill Oberst, Jr. gives a performance that keeps you guessing about just who Victor is and what he’s doing out in the woods.  Oberst is sometimes likable and sometimes frightening and he always keeps the audience from getting too complacent while watching the story unfold.  Victor Browning’s name brings to mind such Universal horror icons as Victor Frankenstein and director Tod Browning and, like the characters who appeared in those classic horror films, he is compelling even when we’re not sure what’s going on inside his head.

A Stranger In The Woods is an atmospheric film, one that understands that there’s nothing scarier than being alone in the middle of nowhere in the dark.  Victor is a fascinating character and fans of 70s horror will want to watch for Lynn Lowry’s cameo during the second half of the film.  A Stranger In The Woods is an effectively creepy portrait of a very strange guy.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: I Drink Your Blood (dir by David E. Durston)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Put yourself in the shoes of the townspeople in 1971’s I Drink Your Blood.

Here you are.  You’re minding your own business.  Life isn’t great because of the economic downtown.  Your town is nearly deserted and is basically full of empty buildings.  In fact, it seems like there are currently more construction workers around then townspeople.  The workers are working on the dam.  Maybe a dam will help the area.  Maybe it won’t.

The sexist construction workers are kind of a pain but then, things get even worse when a bunch of hippies show up.  Led by the mysterious Horace Bones (played by dancer Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury), these are not your typical (if annoying) peace-and-love hippies.  These hippies have more in common with the Manson Family than they do with the commune folks from Easy Rider.  They are a remarkably diverse group of hippies.  Some of them are young.  Some of them are older.  Some of them really enjoy attacking other people.  Some of them are just along for the ride.  For his part, Horace is really into Satanism and human sacrifice and he encourages his followers to feel the same way.  Has anyone nice ever been named Horace Bones?

When the cultists assault a local girl named Sylvia (Arlene Farber), they are confronted in the abandoned building in which they are squatting by Sylvia’s grandfather, Doc Banner (Richard Bowler).  They proceed to beat up the kindly doctor and they force him to take LSD.  Sylvia’s younger brother, Pete (Riley Mills), get revenge by injecting the blood of a rabid dog into several pies and then selling them to Horace and his hippies.  Almost all of the hippies eat the pies and soon, they are foaming at the mouth and rampaging through the countryside, infected by and spreading rabies.  One of the hippie women ends up having sex with all of the construction workers, which leads to the rabies spreading even more.  Soon, it’s hippies vs hardhats as the fights happening across the real world are repeated in small town America.  Of course, there’s no police around to break up the fights and, thanks to the rabies, everyone is fighting to the death.  Heads are ripped off.  Electric knives are used to carve more than just food.  People are set on fire.  Blood is definitely drank.

Only one hippie didn’t eat the pies.  Andy (Tyde Kierney) was never a big fan of Horace’s Manson-like tendencies and he pretty much draws the line at human sacrifice.  Andy flees from Horace’s world and finds himself with Sylvia, Pete, and Mildred (Elizabeth Marner-Brooks), the owner of the local bakery.  The four of them struggle to survive in a world that has literally gone mad.

I Drink Your Blood was, not surprisingly, controversial when it was first released.  It was one of the few films to be given an X-rating for its violence as opposed to its sexual content.  It is definitely violent, though it’s really nowhere near as graphic as some of the R-rated horror films that have come out over the past few years.

I Drink Your Blood is a classic grindhouse film, one that takes a fairly ridiculous premise and works wonders with it.  The crazed hippies fighting the far more blue collar construction workers stand in for the fanatical soldiers in America’s cultural wars, with innocents like Sylvia, Pete, and Mildred caught in the middle with Andy.  Director David Durston mixes horror and satire with a deft hand, suggesting that the rabies is ultimately just allowing people to show their true selves.  I Drink Your Blood is an underground classic and thematically, it’s portrayal of a rabid world is just as relevant today as when it was first released.

Film Review: Fang (dir by Richard Burgin)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Poor Billy.

Billy (Dylan LaRay) lives in Chicago and, at first glance, he’s typical of the many anonymous young men who we see everyday, working in dead-end jobs and just trying to make it day-to-day without having to deal with too much trouble.  Billy works at a meatpacking plant, for a condescending boss who brags about being able to pay his daughter’s Princeton tuition while, at the same time, telling Billy that he needs to work harder sweeping up the place.  “Do you think my daughter got into Princeton by taking sick days?” the boss asks, not seeming to realize that Billy will never be going to Princeton regardless of how many hours he spends pushing his broom around the warehouse.  Indeed, Billy dropped out of school a few years ago.  His mother, Gina (Lynn Lowry of I Drink Your Blood and Crazies fame), is suffering from Parkinson’s-related dementia and Billy is constantly rushing home to check on her.  Billy never knows if he’s going to be embraced or attacked when he steps through his front door.  Billy takes a daily regimen of pills to keep his mind stable.  He obsessively washes and sanitizes his hands.  He needs everything to be in its proper place but he lives in an increasingly chaotic and unpredictable world.

The one thing that Billy has going for him is that he’s an artist.  He’s created an entire fictional world through his drawings, one in which a group of people escape from a dying Earth but then continue to make the exact same mistakes in their new home.  His mother’s maid, Myra (Jess Paul), even suggests that Billy should try to get his work published but Billy is resistant.  His art is his escape and, though it’s never specifically stated, one gets the feeling that it’s an escape that he wants to keep only for himself.  If Billy ever gets out of this world, he’s not planning on taking anyone along with him.

Billy is haunted by the things that he sees as he walks to and from work.  Death, whether represented by a dead rodent under a car or by the run-down neighborhood in which he lives, seems to be all-around.  After a rat invades his room and bites him, Billy is rushed to the hospital and, despite his frantic protests, he’s injected with the rabies vaccine.  (The film’s use of rabies and it’s close-up of a hypodermic needle piercing Billy’s skin will remind some viewers of another Lynn Lowry film, I Drink Your Blood.)  Whenever Billy is alone, he sees a hole growing on his arm, one that is full of coarse hair, almost as if there is something living within Billy’s skin.  Fang mixes Cronenbergian body horror with visions of Romero-style urban decline.  Billy’s Chicago is almost as run-down and bleak as Romero’s Philadelphia was in Martin.  The stark imagery leaves little doubt that Billy, at the young age of 23, has basically advanced as far as he’s going to advance in the world.  He’s hit a dead end and Billy’s sudden visions of open wounds, vacuous comedians, and rats would seem to suggest that, if there is another world out there, it’s not much of an improvement on the one in which Billy is leaving.  Much like the characters in his artwork, Billy is trapped in a never-ending cycle of mistakes and decay.  

Fang is a well-directed, well-acted, and well-visualized portrayal of life on the fringes of society, one that captures both the timeless theme of loneliness and the uniquely paranoid atmosphere of today.  Though the COVID fears of the past two years are never explicitly mentioned, it’s hard not to think of them as Billy obsessively washes and sanitizes his hands and as he panics over getting the rabies shot.  Billy, like so many people today, feels lost and powerless and even his fantasy of escape is tempered by the knowledge that a fantasy can still go wrong.  Dylan LaRay does a good job of capturing Billy’s fear and his anger and Jess Paul is sympathetic as one of the few people to actually cares about what Billy and his mother are going through.  Lynn Lowry steals the film, playing Billy’s mother as someone who is both frightening and heart-breakingly sad.  Much like Billy, she’s no longer is control of her fears and her actions.  Fang is a film that captures the horrors of everyday life.

 

Horror Film Review: The Crazies (dir by George Romero)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Ah, The Crazies.  The original Crazies.

This 1973 film is one of George Romero’s best non-Dead films, though it never seems to get the respect that it really deserves.  Even today, the original is often overlooked in favor of the remake.  And don’t get me wrong — the remake of The Crazies is good and it features several effective jump scares.  But the remake is a slick Hollywood film and, watching it, you always have the safety of knowing that you’re watching a slick Hollywood film.  The original, though, is rough and low-budget and it looks and it feels real.  As a result, it sticks with you long after the haunting final scenes.

The storyline is simple but effective.  People in a small Pennsylvania town are going crazy and murdering each other.  Usually, it’s impossible to tell who is infected until they’re already attacking you.  The infected are just like the zombies from Night of the Living Dead with one key difference.  The crazies may be as relentless as the Dead but they’re also human beings.  They think.  They plan.  They scheme.  And when they die, they die like humans and we’re reminded that, just a few short hours ago, they were friendly and, more or less, harmless.

The government, of course, shows up in the town and tries to contain the outbreak.  The main image that most people will carry away from The Crazies is of men in white hazmat suits, walking through small-town America and killing almost everyone they see.  As is typical for a Romero film, the so-called solution often seems to be worse than the problem.  We also get the typical conflict between the scientists and the military.  The  military wants to destroy the infected.  The scientists want to cure them.  The film is bleakly cynical as the one man who knows how to cure the disease is ignored and finally killed in a stampede of quarantined citizens.

The film follows six people as they attempt to escape from the town and avoid getting sick themselves.  Needless to say, it’s not as easy as it sounds.  The characters who everyone seems to remember are Artie (Richard Liberty) and his daughter, Kathy (Lynn Lowry).  What happens to them is perhaps the most disturbing moment in a film that’s full of them.  The other members of the group can only hope to survive, even as they slowly lose their grip on sanity.

It’s a disturbing film, precisely because it’s not slick.  The actors are not movie star handsome and the attacks are not perfectly choreographed.  The grainy cinematography gives the entire film a documentary feel and serves as a reminder that Romero made industrial films before he revolutionized the horror genre.  The Crazies works because it feel like it could be happening in your community or your back yard.  And, ultimately, it offers up no solution.  Mankind could save itself, Romero seems to be saying, if only mankind wasn’t so stupid.

Needlessly to say, a film as bleak as The Crazies was not a hit in 1973.  But it’s lived on and continued to influence other horror makers.  It’s one of Romero’s best.

Horror Film Review: Cat People (dir by Paul Schrader)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Cat_People_1982_movie

Before I get around to actually reviewing Paul Schrader’s 1982 reimagining of Cat People, I’m going to suggest that you take a few minutes to watch the film’s opening credits.  Say what you will about Schrader’s Cat People, it has a great opening, one that perfectly sets up the rest of the film.

In this version of Cat People, Irena (Natassja Kinski) is a naive young woman (and virgin) who, after the death of her parents, has spent most of her previous life in foster care.  Irena travels to New Orleans, where she reconnects with her older brother, Paul (Malcolm McDowell).  From the minute that Irena meets her brother and his housekeeper (Ruby Dee), it’s obvious that something is off.  When Paul looks at her, he does so with an unsettling intensity.  At night, while Irena sleeps, Paul wanders the dark streets of New Orleans.

One morning, Irena wakes up to discover that Paul is missing.  Having nothing else to do, Irena wanders around New Orleans.  When she visits the zoo, she feels an immediate connection to a caged panther who stares at her with a familiar intensity.  It turns out that the panther was captured the previous night, after he mysteriously appeared in a sleazy motel and mauled a prostitute.

It’s at the zoo that Irena meets zookeeper Oliver Yates (John Heard).  Oliver gets Irena a job working at the zoo gift shop. where Irena is befriended by Oliver’s co-worker, Alice (Annette O’Toole).  One day, Irena witnesses the panther kill another zookeeper before it then escapes from its cage.

That night, Paul suddenly shows up in Irena’s bedroom.  He explains to her that they are a cursed species.  Having sex causes them to turn into panthers and the only way to avoid the curse is through incest.  A terrified Irena flees her brother and soon finds herself living with and falling in love with the increasingly obsessive Oliver, all the while knowing that giving herself to him physically will lead to her transformation.

From the very first second of the film. Schrader’s Cat People is an exercise in pure style.  If the original Cat People was largely distinguished by its restraint, Schrader’s version is all about excess.  Everything that was merely suggested in the original is made explicit in this version.  As tempting as it may be to try, it’s somewhat pointless to try to compare these two versions.  Though they may both be about a woman who turns into a panther when she has sex, they are two very different films.

Schrader’s Cat People walks a very fine line between moodiness and absurdity, which is perhaps why I enjoyed it.  Making great use of both the sultry New Orleans setting and Giorgio Moroder’s atmospheric score, Cat People is compulsively dream-like and enjoyably over-the-top.  Cat People is often described as being an example of a movie that could have only been made in the coked up 80s  and truly, this is one of those films that’s so excessive that it’s becomes fascinating to watch.

(I think that often we are too quick to assume that excess is necessarily a bad thing.  If you can’t be excessive when you’ve got Malcolm McDowell playing an incest-minded cat person in New Orleans, when can you be excessive?)

Schrader’s Cat People may not have much in common with the original version but the film’s best scene is the only one that is a direct recreation of a scene from the original.  In fact, in recreating the scene where Alice is menaced while swimming in a public pool, Schrader actually improves on the original.  Brilliantly performed by both Annette O’Toole and Natassja Kinski (whose cat-like features made her perfect for the role of Irena), it’s the only scene in the film that can truly be called scary.  Starting with a tracking shock that follows Alice as she jogs, the stalking scene is practically a master class in effective horror cinema.  If nothing else, you should see Cat People for that one scene.

And you should also see it for the wonderful soundtrack!  Let’s end this review with David Bowie’s theme song, which you may also remember from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

 

 

 

What Lisa Watched Last Night: Basement Jack (dir. by Michael Shelton)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

There’s several very good films that I need to review over the next few days but, at the moment, I really need to write about Basement Jack, a low-budget 2009 slasher film that I watched on Chiller.  Why do I need to write about Basement Jack?  Well, I’m already hesitant to go to sleep because I know I’m going to have nightmares about this film.  So, consider this to be my attempt at a quickie exorcism.  Indulge me because I need to get this film out of my system.

Why Was I Watching This:

I love horror movies and, even though they always seem to end up giving me nightmares, these old school slasher films are like catnip to me.  I can’t resist watching them, if just to see if they can keep the inherently predictable conventions of genre interesting.

What’s The Movie About:

Basement Jack (Eric Peter Kaiser) is a serial killer because when you’ve got a name like Basement Jack, it’s not like you’re going to become an accountant.  Anyway, Jack’s thing is that he goes from town-to-town, selects a family  to kill, and then secretly moves into their basement until there’s a thunder-storm.  Once it starts raining, Jack proceeds to brutally kill the family.

Karen (Michelle Marrow) is only person to have ever survived being attacked by Jack.  Now, Jack is obsessed with Karen and follows her from town to town.  So, Karen decides to turn the tables and she starts following Jack.  Except, of course, Jack was already following her so it would seem like for her to follow him, all she would really have to do would be turn around.  But anyway, I guess the important thing is that Karen-and-Jack have one of those hunter/hunted connections.

Jack and Karen both end up in a new small town where Jack sets off on another murder spree while Karen hunts for him.  She does this by teaming up with a seriously incompetent cop named Chris (Sam Skoryna).  Unfortunately, all of Chris’s fellow officers are 1) convinced that Karen is the murderer and 2) kinda stupid.  Will Karen be able to convince the cops that Jack is real?  Will Jack continually manage to stand back up after taking more damage than anyone should, realistically, be able to take?  And most importantly, will Lisa be able to sleep tonight?

What Worked?

Oh my God, this film should not have disturbed me as much as it did.  Seriously, I’ve seen thousands of horror movies that all had better production values, better gore effects, and better acting.  And yet, Basement Jack really made me paranoid.  I think that’s because director Shelton does manage to create a legitimate feeling of dread that saturates every ludicrous frame of this movie.  There is remarkably little humor in this film and, as opposed to a lot of slasher films, all of the victims here just come across as normal, likable people (as opposed to being slasher movie stereotypes).

Kaiser is a genuinely scary killer and Morrow makes for a sympathetic protagonist.  She brings a lot of conviction to her role.  Exploitation vet Lynn Lowry (remember her from the original Crazies and I Drink Your Blood?) plays Basement Jack’s domineering mother and wow, she is scary.

Now, I’m going to admit there’s one image in this film that I know is going to give me nightmares tonight.  It’s of a policewoman who, after being gutted by Jack, is seen lying on the floor, trying to stuff her intestines back into her body and oh my God, I wish I hadn’t seen that because it really got to me.  I’ve read several other reviews that have all criticized the CGI gore effects as looking fake.  Maybe they do, I’m not really an expert on anatomy.  All I know is that image of those intestines sprouting out across a twitching body; that image is trapped in my head.  It’s something that I truly wish I hadn’t seen but I still have to list it as something that worked because film horror is supposed to leave the viewer uncomfortable.

What Didn’t Work:

Oh, trust me, a lot didn’t work.  Like most slasher films, this one was riddled with a combination of plot holes and characters just acting as stupid as can be.

As our male lead, Sam Skoryna displayed all the charisma of a spilled intestine and, to be honest, most of the other actors gave performances that were fairly atrocious.  For some reason, one of the film’s detectives is played by musician Billy Morrison and his English accent is just so jarringly out-of-place in the film’s middle American setting.  (What makes the situation especially odd is that no one in the film ever comments on his accent.  Trust me — I live in middle America.  Hell, I’ll be really pretentious — I mean like Sasha Stone pretentious — and say that I am Middle America.  No, actually, forget I said that.  That sounds really stupid.  Anyway, my point is that if you’re the only Englishman in town, people are going to remind you of that every chance they get.)

An attempt was made to give Basement Jack some backstory and to explain why he does what he does.  And by that, I mean that this is one of those movies where the action comes to a sudden halt every few minutes juts so we can be told that a man,who hides in people’s basements and only kills when it’s raining, is mentally ill.  Gee, filmmakers, thanks for clearing that up.

And finally (SPOILER!), I am so sick of seeing slasher movies that end with a close-up of the killer’s signature killing tool just so we can suddenly see the killer’s hand come out of nowhere and grab the weapon.  I mean, is anyone ever surprised by this anymore?  I guess, at one time, this seemed like a twist ending but today, it just comes across as being lazy. (END OF SPOILER!)

“Oh my God!  Just like me!” Moments:

Just like our heroine Karen, I usually try to flirt my way out of traffic tickets as well.

Lessons Learned:

It doesn’t take much to give me nightmares.