4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, the Shattered Lens celebrates German director Wolfgang Petersen. It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Wolfgang Petersen Films
Das Boot (1981, dir by Wolfgang Petersen, DP: Jost Vocano)
The NeverEnding Story (1984, dir by Wolfgang Petersen, DP: Jost Vocano)
In The LIne of Fire (1993, dir by Wolfgang Petersen, DP: John Bailey)
The Perfect Storm (2000, dir by Wolfgang Petersen, DP: John Seale)
Depending on where you live, Friday the 13th is either over or nearly over! And, if you’re reading this, you survived!!!!!
Obviously, you listened to Crazy Ralph and you did not have sex, smoke weed, skinny dip, go out at night, take a boat trip to Manhattan, go into space, go to sleep, go out for firewood, ask any strange people if they needed help, go looking for your friends, strip down to your underwear so you could go run around in the rain, or have any fun whatsoever!
In other words, today was a boring day for you! But you survived!
In honor of your survival, here’s the end theme from Friday the 13th. This was composed by Harry Manfredini and, believe it or not, it’s actually a rather beautiful piece of music. So, celebrate your survival by listening.
And be prepared to make up for lost time on Saturday the 14th! Be bad…be very bad….
A spaceship that has just recently visited one of Saturn’s moons has crashed into a space station that is orbiting Earth’s moon. An American corporation sends another crew up to investigate the wreck but, when they arrive, they discover that a German corporation has beat them to it. They also discover that all of the Germans are dead, with the exception of Hans Hofner (Klaus Kinski). Hofner claims that an alien creature killed all of the other Germans and now, the creature will be coming after the Americans as well.
Would you allow Klaus Kinski on your spaceship? That was one of the main things that I found myself wondering as I watched Creature. Kinski was a German actor who was widely acknowledged as being one of the best actors in the world. For instance, Doctor Zhivago is a beautiful but very slow film that suddenly comes to life during Klaus Kinski’s fifteen minutes of screentime. He was also widely acknowledged as being incredibly difficult to work with, prone to paranoia and wild rages. His frequent collaborator, director Werner Herzog, has frequently talked about being tempted to kill Kinski while working with him and Kinski reportedly threatened to kill Herzog as well but the two of them still worked together because Kinski’s talent made the pain worth it. (At least, for a while….) It’s probably open to debate just how much of Kinski’s bad behavior was performative and how much of it was actually due to Kinski being mentally unstable but it’s also true that any experienced filmgoer knows better than to trust any character played by Klaus Kinski.
Now, it should be noted that, while Kinski was a great actor, that doesn’t always mean that he gave performances that were appropriate for the film in which he was appearing. If Kinski got bored during shooting, he would pretty much just do whatever he wanted. That’s the feeling that one gets while watching him in Creature. Kinski alternates between being overly twitchy and being obviously disinterested. When he makes his first appearance, he randomly gropes an actress, a move that was apparently not scripted. Later, Kinski eats a sandwich and talks with his mouth full. From the disgusted looks of the other cast members, it’s hard not to suspect that this was another improvisation on Kinski’s part. Kinski is always watchable but his performance is still one of the weaker elements of Creature.
That’s a shame because the rest of the cast — Lyman Ward, Stan Ivar, Wendy Schaal, Robert Jaffe, Diane Salinger — all do a pretty good job of bringing their characters to life. That Creature is essentially a rip-off of Alien is no great secret. But the film itself still works, due to some memorably grotesque effects work, William Malone’s quickly paced direction, and the performances of the majority of the cast. It’s an enjoyable B-movie, obviously made by people with a deep appreciation for the science fiction genre. Usually, Kinski is the element the redeems a B-movie. In this case, he’s almost superfluous. The film would have worked just as well — perhaps even better — if he hadn’t shown up.
Would I let Klaus Kinski on my spaceship?
In this case, I’d tell him to wait for the next shuttle. He’s not needed.
Would you watch a reality show produced by Joe Estevez?
Of course not! Reality TV …. hey, that’s the form of entertainment that is destroying our culture and leaving viewers unable to think for themselves! Reality TV is a pox on our house. Thanks to reality TV, the Kardashians are more famous than they have any right to be. Jennifer Welch has become a political pundit despite having all the charm of a sour lemon. People now feel like they have to live every moment as if there’s a million people watching and as a result, it’s become difficult to connect in any meaningful way…..
Eh. Actually, I like reality TV more than I should and I probably would watch a reality show produced by Joe Estevez.
I mean, why not? The best reality shows are always kind of sleazy and there are few actors who are as talented at playing sleazy characters as Joe Estevez. If Martin Sheen often seems as if he’s auditioning to be the Pope, his brother Joe comes across as if he’s auditioning to be the tabloid reporter who writes a slanderous story about the Pope. The fact that Joe Estevez looks like a drunk version of his brother only serves to make him all the more effective as someone who you wouldn’t necessarily want to be associated with. (Unless, of course, he could make you a lot of money….)
In Hell Asylum, Joe Estevez plays Stan, a network television executive. The movie opens with a show being pitched to him. The pitch, like many of the scenes in Hell Asylum, goes on way too long. Basically, a group of models have been recruited to spend the night in a supposedly haunted asylum while being filmed. The pitch is nothing special but Stan needs a hit.
Of course, it turns out that the asylum really is haunted. It takes a while but eventually, the models and the television crew end up being stalked by a bunch of mysterious hooded figures. (Brinke Stevens is credited as being the “Head Spectre.”) The murders are filmed with a blue tint, which is creepy at first but eventually just hurts your eyes. There’s some gore, but it’s mostly just some red gloop and rope meant to stand-in for spilled intestines. It’s not particularly scary but at least it’s only 72 minutes.
Of course, Joe Estevez thinks that he has his hands on America’s hottest new reality show. At first, I thought the movie was being a bit too cynical but then I thought about all of the real-life deaths that I’ve seen posted to twitter and YouTube and I realized that I was probably being naive. We actually did have a reality show in which each episode ended with someone pretending to “die.” Murder in Small Town X was set up like Survivor, except that no one was voted off the island. Instead, they were voted to meet the killer. Even though no one actually died, I would have to think it would be more infinitely more traumatic to know that a bunch of people voted for you to be pretend-killed instead of pretend-exiled. That said, Murder In Small Town X was actually a lot of fun!
Miranda (Arrielle Edwards) awakens in her coffin. Tall with long red hair, she makes for a haunting figure as she strides across a snowy field and heads to a carnival where she finds her next victim. Though the film is shot on video, director Chris Alexander still manages to make our real world feel like some sort of otherworldly fantasy, a vision that balances on the line between being a dream and being a nightmare. Everything about the carnival feels off-center and off-balance. Even the familiar rides and the posters of 21st century pop cultural icons like Captain Jack Sparrow add to the overall otherworldliness of the location. Dracula and Sparrow, represented at the same carnival? The past is meeting the present.
Miranda takes her victims back to a cheap motel, the type of place where everyone has probably spent at least one night. It’s the type of motel that you see sitting off the side of the road while you’re driving and you think to yourself, “How does that place even stay open?” But, when it’s late at night and your eyelids are feeling heavy, you’re happy to see it. It reminded me a bit of the motel where 11 year-old me lived for a few months with my mom and my sisters. My mom and my two eldest sisters paid for our stay by working as maids. Me, I spent my days exploring the hallways and listening at the doors. Every night, I would look out the window of my room and watch a movie playing at a drive-in that sat on the other side of a nearby creek. I would make up my own stories and dialogue to go along with the images. Who needs sound when you’ve got imagination?
Much like those drive-in movies that I watched, Parasite Lady is a bit of an enigma. There’s very little dialogue. The majority of the 43-minute film features a soundtrack made up of muted music and sound effects. Instead, it’s all about the imagery. Much like the vampire films of Jean Rollin, the film plays out like a cinematic dream. It’s less important to understand why Miranda exists than to just accept that she does. Why do her victims seem to be instantly drawn to her? Well, why is anyone drawn to self-destruction? That’s the world in which we live. That’s also the world in which Miranda lives, though she doesn’t necessarily want to. Parasite Lady is drenched in an atmosphere of ennui.
Earlier, I compared the film to the works of Jean Rollin. I would also compare this film to Jess Franco’s wonderfully atmospheric Female Vampire. The scenes of Miranda walking through the snow and the carnival bring to mind the lengthy shots of Lina Romay walking through the wilderness in Franco’s film. Much like Female Vampire, Parasite Lady leaves one wondering if eternal life is really worth all of the angst and the suffering. Arielle Edwards has a strong physical presence that, much like Lina Romay in Female Vampire, allows her to dominate the screen without having to speak.
Executive produced by Charles Band and released by Full Moon Pictures, Parasite Lady is an unforgettable dream of dark and disturbing things.
1977’s The Crater Lake Monster takes place in a small town in Northern California.
There’s not much to the town of Crater Lake, other than it’s beautiful lake and the dreams of brave residents like Arnie (Glenn Roberts) and Mitch (Mark Siegel). Arnie and Mitch are convinced that they’re going to get rich by renting boats out to tourists. “Our boats …. our boats …. our boats,” as Mitch puts it. Arnie has long hair and a beard. Mitch is going bald and seems to be a little bit goofy at times. One gets the feeling that they may have dropped too much acid in the 60s but they still seem like good people. They’re the type of people who you could only find in a town like Crater Lake.
When a group of scientists explore the caves near the lake, they discover drawings that suggest that cavemen knew about dinosaurs. The drawings prove that cavemen and dinosaurs existed at the same time! Take that, Charles Darwin! However, a sudden meteorite strike causes the cave to collapse. The scientists manage to escape but what of the drawings?
Actually, the scientists may not need the drawing to prove that men and dinosaurs existed at the same time. After the meteorite hits, a real dinosaur — perhaps the same one from the drawings — shows up and people start of disappear around the lake. The local sheriff (Richard Cardella) is skeptical but soon, even he has to admit that a Plesiosaurus has apparently claimed the lake as its own.
At one point, a U.S. Senator (Marv Eliot) rents a boat from Arnie and Mitch so that he can enjoy a peaceful day on the lake. The Senator gets eaten. I think something like this would usually be considered a national emergency but no, the National Guard never arrives. It’s left to the citizens of Crater Lake to deal with their monster.
Oh, how I love this stupid movie. Don’t get me wrong. It’s definitely a low-budget affair. With the exception of Glenn Roberts and Mark Siegel (Arnie and Mitch forever!), the cast is forgettable. The sheriff looks more like a struggling bass player than a member of law enforcement. The film moves a bit slowly. There are some scenes that appear to be way too underlit, though that may have more to do with the bad quality of the uploads that I’ve watched than anything else. The Crater Lake Monster is one of those films that has appeared in a countless number of Mill Creek Box Sets.
And yet, I can’t help but enjoy the film. No matter what else you may want to say about the film, the stop-motion dinosaur is a lot of fun to watch and, in a few scenes, it actually does seem to be genuinely menacing. At its best, the film is an enjoyably goofy tribute to the monster movies of the 50s and, as such, the bad acting and the risible dialogue feels rather appropriate. That said, it’s still a film of the 70s and the ending is surprisingly bleak. You’ll be saying, “Our boats …. our boats….” for hours after watching The Crater Lake Monster.
The Crater Lake Monster is a fun, low-budget monster flick. On this Friday the 13th, it’s a reminder that Jason isn’t the only thing waiting in the wilderness.
Hey, give it up for 2015’s Buddy Hutchins. No matter what else one might say about this film, that’s a great tag line. It not only captures your attention but it’s also honest about the film. Buddy is having a very bad day. As a matter of fact, Buddy has several bad days. It takes him a while but when he snaps, he makes sure that everyone else has an even worse day. Whoever came up with that line better have gotten a raise.
Unfortunately, the film itself doesn’t really live up to the tag line. Jamie Kennedy plays the title character. Buddy Hutchins used to be a boozer. Now, he’s just a loser. He’s unhappily divorced. He rarely gets to see his young daughter. He owns a dry cleaning store that no one frequents. He can’t even afford to pay his one employee. (“Things are going to pick up!” Buddy says, over and over again.) He’s just learned that the man he thought was his father isn’t actually his father. No one has much respect for Buddy. Not even the cop who is called out whenever Buddy causes a scene in the neighborhood can summon up much sympathy for Buddy. Buddy spends most of the movie wishing that he could get his old band back together. When it becomes obvious that isn’t going to happen, he grabs his chainsaw.
Buddy goes on a rampage. That’s not a surprise. What is a surprise is how long it takes him to do it. As played by Kennedy, Buddy is twitchy and obviously unstable from the minute that we first see him. When the film started, I thought Kennedy was just overacting but, as it progressed, I came to realize that Kennedy was actually very convincing as the type of person who you would dread being stuck in a room with. At times, I worried that Buddy was going to drown in a deepening pool of self-pity. Then again, if that had happened, it wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad thing. It would have saved several lives and it would have also shut him up.
Buddy Hutchins was also released under the title Falling Down Again. There are definite similarities to Falling Down but there’s quite a few differences as well. In Falling Down, Michael Douglas plays a burned-out engineer who snaps on a very hot day in Los Angeles and who is eventually stunned to realize that he is now the “bad guy.” Falling Down‘s D-Fens is not really a sympathetic character but one can still understand what’s happening in his head and mourn the man that once was. In Buddy Hutchins, Buddy is basically a loser who can’t succeed at life because he’s a moron. He doesn’t snap because of the frustrations of everyday life in the big city. He snaps because he’s too much of an idiot to do anything else.
FallingDown is a flawed film but it does at least have the courage of its convictions. It may end on a sad note but it was really the only way the story could end. BuddyHutchins ends with a twist that doesn’t feel at all earned. The film may end with justice for Buddy but where’s the justice for those of us who just spent 90 minutes watching him?
When I first started writing for Through the Shattered Lens, I wasn’t sure how long my reviews should be. I went over to Rotten Tomatoes and I read their guidelines for reviews and I discovered that a review should be, at minimum, 300 words long.
300 words? I thought, I can do that!
Truth be told, sometimes I can’t. Sometimes, you see a movie where it’s a struggle to even come up with 300 words. When that happens, I resort to filler. I’ll tell you about my weekend. I’ll tell you about a funny thing that happened to me in high school. I’ll give you a long-winded story about my early days as a TSL reviewer. I’ll do whatever I need to do to make sure that I can reach at least 300 words.
The importance of filler was clearly on the mind of David DeCoteau when he directed the 1999 film, Witchouse. (And yes, that’s how the title is spelled.) Typically, a film has to run a minimum of 65 to 70 minutes for it to be considered a feature film. Witchouse features three minutes of opening credits, three minutes of closing credits, and a lot of stock footage from a film called Dark Angel: The Ascent. In fact, the film uses the Dark Angel stock footage not once but twice. The finished film runs 72 minutes so obviously David DeCoteau and Full Moon Pictures got what they needed out of all that filler. Fortunately, the audience gets what it needs as well. Witchouse is a film that announces from the start that it shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
The film takes place at a mansion in Dunwich, Massachusetts on a stormy night. Elizabeth (Ashley McKinney) has gathered together a group of friends for a party. When her friends arrived, I assumed they had all gone to high school together. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the characters were all supposed to still be in high school! Elizabeth wants to hold a seance so that she can contact the spirit of her ancestor, a witch named Lilith (Ariauna Albright). Centuries ago, Lilith was burned at the stake. Elizabeth is hoping to bring Lilith back from the dead and she’s willing to sacrifice her friends to do it. Her friends, for the most part, just want to have sex in a big creepy mansion and who can blame them?
If this plot sounds familiar, it’s probably because the story itself was largely lifted from Night of the Demons, with the horribly burned Lilith even resembling the decaying Angels from Kevin Tenney’s classic shocker. Witchouse is never quite as much fun as Night of the Demons. For instance, there’s nothing in Witchouse that can match the subversive oddness of the lipstick scene from Night of the Demons. At its best, Witchouse is occasionally atmospheric and it features decent performances from Ashley McKinney and Monica Serene Garnich. At its worst, the film is kind of boring.
That said, I will give Witchouse credit for totally frustrating my autocorrect. How does one pronounce Witchouse?
1999’s Totem opens with a young woman named Alma Groves (Marissa Tait) running through the wilderness.
She runs until she reaches an isolated cabin. Entering the cabin, she finds five other people have already arrived. She doesn’t know who they are and they don’t know her. In fact, she doesn’t even know why she suddenly felt the need to stop eating lunch and to run until she found the cabin. She’s not even sure how she found herself in the wilderness to begin with. Everyone else at the cabin has a similar story. They were all going about their day until, suddenly, an image of the cabin entered their mind and they felt compelled to run until they found it.
At first, Paul (Jason Faunt) comes across as being a chivalrous and friendly jock type. Leonard McKinney (Eric W. Edwards) is a cocky womanizer who is upset that he was compelled to leave in the middle of having sex (or so he claims). Robert Cole (Tyler Anderson) is the angry rebel who is reluctant to talk about his past. As for the other women, Roz (Sacha Spencer) is sarcastic while Tina (Alicia Lagano) is a seemingly innocent high school student. Along with Alma, the six of them are trapped in the area by an invisible force field.
While trying to determine where the invisible barriers have been placed, the six of them come across a cemetery and three sinister-looking statues. As the night continues, it becomes clear that, whenever someone dies, one of the statues comes to life. But why are there six people and only three statues? “Three to be killed and three to kill!” Robert says.
Directed by David DeCoteau and produced by Charles Band’s Full Moon Pictures, Totem is about as incoherent as you would probably expect from this production team. However, it’s a cheerful sort of incoherence, one where the confusing story is at least told with some energy and the entire thing has a “make it up as you go along” sort of feel to it. It’s remarkable how the people in the cabin keep figuring out all of the extra rules that determine how the three killer statues work. Myself, I sat through all 68 minutes of this film and I’m still not quite exactly sure what was going on. That said, the confusing nature of the story works to the film’s advantage. At its best, Totem manages to achieve a sort of dream-like intensity. Who hasn’t had that dream about finding yourself in the middle of nowhere with absolutely zero clue how you got there or how to get home?
You know what else works to this film’s advantage? That 68 minute running time. The film essentially feels like an extended episode of an old horror anthology show. Think of it as being a bloody episode of something like Night Gallery or Tales From The Crypt. It’s a piece of gory fun that doesn’t really require too much of the audience. It’s cinematic junk food and that is definitely meant as a compliment.
1987’s Cellar Dweller opens with Jeffrey Combs playing an artist.
Sitting in his art studio (located in the cellar of his home), Combs draws a picture of a monster and he adds a few Lovecraftian occult symbols and — uh oh! — the monster comes to life and start to destroy everything that Combs holds dear. Combs discovers that he can stop the monster by setting his drawings on fire but, in the process, Combs also destroys himself.
This ten minute prologue features Jeffrey Combs at his best, bringing his neurotic Re-Animator energy to the role of the artist who discovers just how dangerous an active imagination can be. One reason why Combs is a horror icon is that he can win your sympathy even while playing a character who does some objectively stupid and terrible things. Unfortunately, once the prologue is over, so is Jeffrey Combs’s role in the film. He may be first-billed but he doesn’t appear after the opening credits.
The film jumps forward to 1987. Cartoonist Whitney Taylor (Debrah Farentino) is the latest artist to take residence at Mrs. Briggs’s Institute For The Arts, which just happens to be in the same house that was once home to Jeffrey Combs’s artist. Mrs. Briggs (Yvonne DeCarlo) is a noted critic of modern art. In fact, Whitney and Mrs. Briggs disagree so vehemently about art that you really do wonder why Whitney would apply to the Institute in the first place.
There’s a few artists at the Institute. Norman (Vince Edwards) is a tough guy writer. Philip (Brian Robbins) is a bad boy artist. Amanda (Pamela Bellwood) is a former rival of Whitney’s and the two still hate each other. (Whitney seems to rub a lot of people the wrong way.) Best of all, there’s a performance artist named …. LISA!
Lisa is played by Miranda Wilson.
Frustrated with Amanda, Whitney gives into her worst instincts and draws a cartoon the features a monster killing her rival. Uh-oh. Soon, the monster has reemerged from the cellar and Amanda has disappeared. One-by-one, the other residents are picked off and their deaths appear in Whitney’s cartoons. The monster claims that he dwells wherever there is imagination but Whitney is convinced she’s figure out a way to destroy him and bring everyone back. Has she? You’ll have to watch the film to find out!
Produced by Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, Cellar Dweller is an enjoyably macabre little tale. It’s only 77 minutes long and the fast pace makes the film feel like an extended episode of a horror anthology series. The monster and the plot feel like they could have been lifted from a 50s horror comic and the other artist are all memorably eccentric. The cast appears to be having a ball. It’s a fun treat for horror fans like you and me.
Cellar Dweller was directed by special effects specialist John Carl Buechler and he does a good job with the monster. It’s both intimidating and kind of goofy at the same time. A year after Cellar Dweller, Buechler directed his best known film, Friday the 13th Part VII — The New Blood. That film too was likably goofy.
Through the Shattered Lens