Tag Archives: review

October Hacks: Silent Night, Bloody Night (dir by Theodore Gershuny)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Filmed in 1972 and subsequently released in 1974, Silent Night Bloody Night is a real treat, an atmospheric thriller that has a wonderfully complicated plot that will keep you guessing.

Silent Night Bloody Night opens with attorney John Carter (Patrick O’Neal) arriving in a small town on Christmas Eve.  He’s traveling with his assistant and mistress, Ingrid (Astrid Heeren).  He’s been hired by Jeff Butler (James Patterson) to oversee the sell of his grandfather’s home.  When Carter arrives, he finds that the town is run by a group of elderly eccentrics, including the mute Charlie Towman (John Carradine).  Charlie communicates by ringing a bell and he’s the editor of the town newspaper.  Carter convinces the town council to buy the Butler mansion.  Then, Carter and Ingrid go to the mansion, make love, and are promptly brutally hacked to death by an unseen assailant with an axe.  It’s a shocking moment because, up until their death scene, Carter and Ingrid seemed to be our main characters.  Much as with Marion Crane’s shower in Psycho, their murder leaves an absence at the heart of the film.

That night, our new hero, Jeff Butler (James Patterson) comes to the isolated town to check on how the sale is going.  He finds the mansion locked up and no one willing to talk about John Carter.  With the help of local girl Diane (Mary Woronov), Jeff investigates his grandfather’s death and discovers that the town is full of secrets and people who are willing to kill to maintain them.  As we discover through some wonderfully dream-like flashbacks, Jeff’s grandfather died nearly 40 years ago when he was set on fire in his own home.  Those aren’t the only flashbacks to the film.  In an extended sepia-toned flashback, we learn about the previous inhabitants of the house.  They are all played by former Warhol superstars, including Candy Darling, Ondine, Tally Brown, Charlotte Fairchild, Lewis Love, Harvey Cohen, George Trakas, Susan Rothenberg, and Jack Smith.  (Mary Woronov was, herself, a former member of Warhol’s entourage.)

Silent Night Bloody Night has a terrible reputation.  Mary Woronov, who was married to director Theodore Gershuny at the time she made the film, later described it as being “lousy.”  Personally, I think the film’s reputation has more to do with all of the grainy, bad copies of the film that have turned up in various Mill Creek box sets over the years than the quality of the film itself.  (Silent Night Bloody Night is in public domain.)  The film itself is atmospheric, memorably bloody, and — for those who have the patience to deal with the occasional slow spot — effectively creepy.  Mary Woronov is a likable lead and the Warhol superstars definitely make an impression.  The film plays out at its own deliberate pace and, at its best, it duplicates the feeling of a particularly macabre holiday dream.

Director Theodore Gershuny uses the low budget to his advantage and the sepia-toned flashbacks are truly disturbing and haunting.  Ultimately, Silent Night Bloody Night feels like a dream itself and the mystery’s solution is less important than the journey taken to reach it.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Messiah of Evil (dir by Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I can still remember the first time that I saw the 1973 film, Messiah of Evil.

It was on a Monday night, many years ago. I had recently picked up a 10-movie DVD box set called Tales of Terror and I was using the movies inside to try to deal with a bout of insomnia. I had already watched The Hatchet Murders (a.k,a. Deep Red) and The House At The Edge of the Park and, at two in the morning, I was faced with a decision. Should I try to sleep or should I watch one more movie?

Naturally, I chose to watch one more movie and the movie I picked was Messiah of Evil. So, there I was at two in the morning, sitting at the edge of my bed in my underwear and watching an obscure horror movie while rain fell outside.

And, seriously — this movie totally FREAKED me out!

Messiah of Evil opens with a man (played by future director Walter Hill) stumbling through the night, obviously trying to escape from something.  A mysterious woman appears and kills him.  We’re left to wonder who the man was supposed to be as the film doesn’t ever really return to his murder.  In most films this would be a weakness but it feels appropriate for Messiah of Evil, a film that plays out with the visual style and fragmented logic of a particularly intense nightmare.

The rest of the story tells the story of Arletty (Marianna Hill), a neurotic woman who drives to an isolated California town in order to visit her father. Her father is an artist who specializes in painting eerie pictures of large groups of black-clad people. However, once she arrives at his home, Arletty discovers that her father has vanished and left behind a diary where he claims that a darkness has overtaken the town.  Meanwhile, it sometimes appear as if the people in the paintings are moving or threatening to come out of the walls.

Meanwhile, one crazed man (Elisha Cook, Jr.) explains that “the dark stranger” is returning.  An albino (Bennie Robinson) drives a truck up and down the street and talks about how he likes to listen to “Wagner.”  The back of the truck is full of blank-faced people staring at the sky and the Albino eats a rat.  Finally, a mysterious man named Thom (Michael Greer) is wandering about town with two groupies (played by Anitaa Ford and Joy Bang) and interviewing random townspeople.  After meeting Arletty, they all end up moving into her father’s house.

Messiah of Evil is literally one of the strangest films that I’ve ever seen. It’s shot in a dream-like fashion and the much of the film is left open to the viewer’s interpretation.  Joy Bang goes to see a Sammy Davis, Jr. western and doesn’t notice as the theater slowly fills up with pale, red-eyed townspeople.  Anitra Ford goes to a grocery store late at night and discovers the townspeople indulging in their appetites.  If the film was only distinguished by those two scenes, it would still be worth saying.  However, Messiah of Evil is a total and complete experience, a film where every scene matters and the audience is tasked with putting the puzzle together.

This film was directed by Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, two longtime associates of George Lucas.  (They wrote the screenplay for American Graffiti and Huyck directed Howard The Duck.)  There’s absolutely nothing else in their filmography that is as surreal as Messiah of Evil, leading me to suspect that the film itself might be a very fortunate accident.  Apparently, the production ran out of money before Katz and Huyck finished principal photography, which is what led to the film’s disjointed nature.  Accident or not, Messiah of Evil is a masterpiece of surreal horror.

Messiah of Evil (1973, directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz)

Horror Novel Review: Teddy by John Gault

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Yesterday, I wrote about a Canadian horror film called The Pit.  I mentioned that it was a film about a creepy 12 year-old named Jamie who had conversations with his teddy bear, developed a not-so-innocent crush on his babysitter, and who regularly fed the people he disliked to a bunch of underground monsters who lived in a pit in the woods.

Yesterday, I also read Teddy, the 1980 novelization of The Pit.

(The Pit was originally titled Teddy.)

Teddy is even more creepy than The Pit, largely because it includes all of the disturbing details that were either cut from the finished film or perhaps dropped when the script was rewritten.  Jamie is still a creepy 12 year-old who talks to his teddy bear.  Unlike the film, the novel makes it clear that Teddy is actually a living force of evil and that his words are not just a figment of Jamie’s imagination.  The book actually suggests that Teddy moves from child to child, corrupting each of its owners.  Teddy in the book is also a hundred times more pervy than Teddy in the movie, making some rather crude comments about Jamie’s mom and later encouraging Jamie to join him in checking out some porno magazines.

The book also delves into the investigations surrounding the disappearance of Jamie’s many victims.  As a result, we get to know the victims a bit better in the book than we did in the movie.  Also as a result, Jamie also comes across as much more deliberately evil in the book than he does in the movie.  Even if he is under the possible demonic influence of Teddy, Jamie still seems to take way too much pleasure in people dying.  This is especially true of the scene where his babysitter falls into the pit.  In the movie, Jamie tries to help her escape.  In the book, Jamie not only pushes her but smiles afterwards as he listens to her screams.

Agck!  What a creepy kid!

Teddy is a pretty effective little horror novelization.  It’s also not easy to find a physical copy.  However, you can read it at Open Library.

October True Crime: Murder So Sweet (dir by Larry Peerce)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1993’s Murder So Sweet, also known a Poisoned By The Love: The Kern County Murders (seriously, try to say that ten times fast), tells the story of Steven David Catlin.

Steven David Catlin lived in Bakersfield, California.  Catlin was a career criminal who was married six times and who found some personal redemption for himself as a member of the pit crew for a professional race car driver in Fresno.  Trust me, I’ve lived in enough small, country towns to know that people will overlook a lot as long as someone knows how to work on a car.

One thing that people noticed about Catlin is that the people around him had a habit of dying of mysterious illnesses.  Multiple wives, his adoptive parents, they all died with fluid in their lungs and they left behind not only a medical mystery but also quite a bit of money for Steven David Catlin.  Catlin would always insist on holding a cremation just days after his loved ones passed away.  Not only did that allow Catlin to move on but also kept anyone from being able to do a thorough autopsy.

Eventually, the police figured out that Catlin was just poisoning anyone who got on his nerves or threatened to divorce him.  He wasn’t even a particularly clever poisoner.  He used paraquet, a highly toxic herbicide and he kept the bottle sitting in plain view in his garage.  He might as well have just labeled it his “Poisoning Thermos.”  Catlin was convicted of multiple murders and he was sentenced to die in 1990.  Of course, this being California, Catlin is sill alive and sitting in San Quentin.  This really is a case of “If you lived in Texas, you’d be dead by now.”

In Murder My Sweet, Catlin is played Harry Hamlin, who steals the film as a dumb but charming redneck who walks with a confident swagger and has no fear of hitting on his ex-wife, even after he realizes that she’s trying to convince the police that he’s a murderer.  Helen Shaver played Edie Bellew, the ex who knows better than to trust Catlin.  Her current husband is played by Terence Knox and there’s plenty of scenes of him telling Edie that she needs to back off and that everyone knows that Steve Catlin isn’t a murderer.  In many ways, this is the ultimate Lifetime film in that Edie Bellew not only gets to put her ex-husband in prison but she also proves that her current husband doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Murder My Sweet takes place in rural California and, as a result, everyone in the film speaks with a shrill country accent and we spend a lot of time in a really tacky beauty parlor.  Indeed, the film portrayal of country eccentricity is so over-the-top that I was tempted to say that it seemed as if the director was trying to rip-off David Lynch.  However, Lynch may have made films about eccentric characters but he never portrayed them as being caricatures.  Lynch loved his eccentrics while this film takes a bit of a condescending attitude towards them.  Still, it’s worth watching for Harry Hamlin’s sleazy turn as Steve Catlin, a guy who enjoys fast cars and making ice cream.

Just don’t eat that ice cream….

Horror Song of the Day: Main Title Theme From Alien By Jerry Goldsmith

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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.

Horror Film Review: The Seduction (dir by David Schmoeller)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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.

Horror Film Review: It! The Terror From Beyond Space (dir by Edward L. Cahn)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“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!

Horror On The Lens: The Clones (dir by Lamar Card and Paul Hunt)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“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!

 

Music Film Review: Tommy (dir by Ken Russell)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Tommy, can you hear me?”

That’s a question that’s asked frequently in the 1975 film, Tommy.  An adaptation of the famous rock opera by the Who (though Pete Townshend apparently felt that the film’s vision was more director Ken Russell’s than anything that he had meant to say), Tommy tells the story of a “deaf, dumb, and blind kid” who grows up to play a mean pinball and then become a cult leader.  Why pinball?  Who knows?  Townshend’s the one who wrote Pinball Wizard but Ken Russell is the one who decided to have Elton John sing it while wearing giant platform shoes.

Tommy opens, like so many British films of the 70s, with the blitz.  With London in ruins, Captain Walker (the almost beatifically handsome Robert Powell) leaves his wife behind as he fights for his country.  When Walker is believed to be dead, Nora (Ann-Margaret) takes Tommy to a holiday camp run by Frank (Oliver Reed).  Oliver Reed might not be the first person you would expect to see in a musical and it is true that he wasn’t much of a singer.  However, it’s also true that he was Oliver Reed and, as such, he was impossible to look away from.  Even his tuneless warbling is somehow charmingly dangerous.  Nora falls for Frank but — uh oh! — Captain Walker’s not dead.  When the scarred captain surprises Frank in bed with Nora, Frank hits him over the head and kills him.  Young Tommy witnesses the crime and is told that he didn’t see anything and he didn’t hear anything and that he’s not going to say anything.

And so, as played by Roger Daltrey, Tommy grows up to be “deaf, dumb, and blind.”  Various cures — from drugs to religion to therapy — are pursued to no avail.  As the Acid Queen, Tina Turner sings and dances as if she’s stealing Tommy’s soul.  As the Therapist, Jack Nicholson is all smarmy charm as he gently croons to Ann-Margaret.  Eric Clapton performs in front of a statue of Marilyn Monroe.  Ann-Margaret dances in a pool of beans and chocolate and rides a phallic shaped pillow. As for Tommy, he eventually becomes the Pinball Wizard and also a new age messiah.  But it turns out that his new followers are just as destructive as the people who exploited him when he was younger.   It’s very much a Ken Russell film, full of imagery that is shocking and occasionally campy but always memorable.

I love Tommy.  It’s just so over-the-top and absurd that there’s no way you can ignore it.  Ann-Margaret sings and dances as if the fate of the world depends upon it while Oliver Reed drinks and glowers with the type of dangerous charisma that makes it clear why he was apparently seriously considered as Sean Connery’s replacement in the roles of James Bond.  As every scene is surreal and every line of dialogue is sung, it’s probably easy to read too much into the film.  It could very well be Ken Russell’s commentary on the New Age movement and the dangers of false messiahs.  It could also just be that Ken Russell enjoyed confusing people and 1975 was a year when directors could still get away with doing that.  With each subsequent viewing of Tommy, I become more convinced that some of the film’s most enigmatic moments are just Russell having a bit of fun.  The scenes of Tommy running underwater are so crudely put together that you can’t help but feel that Russell was having a laugh at the expense of people looking for some sort of deeper meaning in Tommy’s journey.  In the end, Tommy is a true masterpiece of pop art, an explosion of style and mystery.

Tommy may seem like a strange film for me to review in October.  It’s not a horror film, though it does contain elements of the genre, from the scarred face of the returned to Captain Walker to the Acid Queen sequence to a memorable side story that features a singer who looks like a junior Frankenstein.  To me, though, Tommy is a great Halloween film.  Halloween is about costumes and Tommy is ultimately about the costumes that people wear and the personas that they assume as they go through their lives.  Oliver Reed goes from wearing the polo shirt of a holiday camp owner to the monocle of a tycoon to the drab jumpsuits of a communist cult leader.  Ann-Margaret’s wardrobe is literally a character of its own.  Everyone in the film is looking for meaning and identity and the ultimate message (if there is one) appears to be that the search never ends.

 

October Positivity: I’m In Love With A Church Girl (dir by Steve Race)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2013’s I’m In Love With A Church Girl, future Fyre Festival promoter Ja Rule stars as Miles Montego.

Miles is wealthy and powerful and glamorous and he owes it all to his career as a drug dealer.  However, at heart, he’s still a good son who loves his mother and who worries about disappointing her with his criminal lifestyle.  His mother is big into church and she wants Miles to settle down with a good Christian girl.  Miles is like, “It’ll never happen.”  But then, at a party thrown by his accountant (Vincent Pastore), Miles meets and falls for Vanessa Leon (Adrienne Bailon).  Vanessa is a …. wait for it …. church girl!

Falling in love with Vanessa changes Miles.  He realizes that there’s more to life than just making money and hanging out with the members of his drug-dealing crew.  He goes to church with Vanessa and is shocked to discover that the preacher owns a nice suit and drives a fancy car.  The preacher explains that it’s not a sin to by stylish.  Tell that to the Amish, preach.

Anyway, Miles may be finding God but the DEA still wants to take down Miles and his crew.  Martin Kove appears in one scene as the DEA supervisor who orders Stephen Baldwin and Michael Madsen to make Miles their number one priority.  Madsen isn’t in much of the film but Baldwin makes many appearances, popping up regularly to remind us that Miles is still under surveillance.

Miles’s new-found faith is tested when his mother dies.  Then, when Vanessa ends up in the hospital, Miles really struggles.  If you’ve ever wanted to see Ja Rule deliver an angry and impassioned monologue about faith, I’m In Love With A Church Girl is the film for you!

To give credit where credit is due, I’m In Love With A Church Girl was clearly made with the best of intentions.  The film was written by Galley Molina, a real life former drug dealer who later became a preacher.  Molina reportedly based the film on his own life story and the end result is an very earnest film that does seem to believe it’s own message.  That’s a good thing.

The bad thing is that the film, with its 2-hour running time, is almost painfully slow and the rather simple story is stretched so thin that the film itself becomes a bit of an endurance test.  The other problem is that Ja Rule is, to put it charitably, not a very good actor.  He sleepwalks through the film with a somewhat dazed expression on his face, projecting little of the charisma that you would probably need to get an otherwise sensible person like Vanessa to overlook your drug dealing career.  He certainly doesn’t have the screen presence to carry a two-hour film and he big dramatic monologue is more likely to inspire laughter than tears.

(It doesn’t help that it’s hard to look at him without thinking about him bragging about how great the Fyre Festival was going to be.)

The film is so well-intentioned that I kind of hate to be critical of it but I’m In Love With A Church Girl doesn’t really work.