Inferno (1980, dir by Dario Argento, DP: Romana Albano)
Today’s horror song of the day comes from Keith Emerson’s soundtrack of Dario Argento’s Inferno. Emerson did not have an enviable task, having to follow up Goblin’s soundtrack for Suspiria. But Emerson pulled it off, crafting a score that compliments Goblin’s earlier work while maintaining an identity of its own.
The 1997 Italian horror film, Wax Mask, takes place in Rome at the turn of the 20th Century.
The film opens in 1900, with a young girl named Sonia witnessing the murder of her parents by a man with an iron claw and a wax mask. 12 years later, Sonia (Romina Mondello) steps into a Rome’s newest sensation, a wax museum where all of the wax figures appear to either be victims or murderers. The museum is meant to scare people. One man accepted a dare to spend the night in the museum and he was found dead the next morning, frightened to death. Sonia’s not interested in being scared. She just needs a job. Her mother taught her how to make clothes for wax figures. The owner of the museum, Boris (Robert Hossein), hires her.
When Sonia leaves the museum, her picture is taken by Andrea (Riccardo Serventi Longhi), a reporter who is investigating the mysterious deaths that have been connected to the museum. Meanwhile, Inspector Lanvin (Aldo Massasso) contacts Sonia to let her know that he’s following up some new leads concerning the still-unsolved deaths of her parents. He seems quite concerned about her working at the museum. When Lanvin later turns up dead, Sonia becomes concerned as well.
You can probably guess where all of this is going. Wax Mask is a remake of House of Wax, with the action moved to Rome and also with a lot more nudity and considerably more gore. The murders are brutal and bloody and the same can be said of what Sonia discovers when she starts to take a closer look at the wax figures in the museum. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this film is the idea that the wax figures are actually suspended in a state between life and death, aware of what is happening but unable to move, speak, or do anything about it. Wax Mask is a frequently diverting throwback to the bloody but atmospheric giallo films of the 70s. Suspense is mixed with special effects, some of which are more effective than others.
Wax Mask was originally meant to be Lucio Fulci’s final film. Dario Argento saw his old cinematic rival, Lucio Fulci, in 1994, by which point Fulci was using a wheelchair and was in frequent pain. Thinking that working on a movie might be good for Fulci’s state-of-mind and overall health, Argento agreed to produce Fulci’s next film. The idea that they came up with was to remake House of Wax. While Argento wanted to concentrate on spectacular death scenes, Fulci wrote a script that emphasized atmosphere over blood. Tragically, Fulci died in 1997 while the film was still in pre-production. Argento replaced Fulci with Sergio Stivaletti, a special effects artist who has worked on several Argento films.
Stivaletti rewrote the script and put the emphasis back on the special effects. (In the end, the killer has as much in common with The Terminator than with a traditional giallo killer.) Stivaletti does a good job directing the film. There are plenty of scary scenes. The film looks good. Even the special effect shots that don’t quite work still have a certain charm to them. That said, it’s hard to watch the film without thinking about what Fucli, at his best, could have done with the material.
In the end, though, Wax Mask is an effective work of late era Italian horror.
There’s something living under the streets of New York City.
That’s the basic idea behind 1984’s C.H.U.D., a film that opens with an upper class woman and her little dog being dragged into the sewers by a creature the reaches out of a manhole. People are disappearing all over the city but the authorities obviously aren’t revealing everything that they know. Even after the wife of NYPD Captain Bosch (Christopher Curry) disappears, the city government doesn’t seem to be too eager to dig into what exactly is happening.
Instead, it falls to two activists. Photographer George Cooper (John Heard) specializes in taking picture of the homeless, especially the one who live underground in the New York subways. He’s like a well-groomed version of Larry Clark, I guess. Social activist A.J. “The Reverend” Shepherd (Daniel Stern) runs a homeless shelter and is convinced that something is preying on the most vulnerable citizens of New York. When the police won’t do their job, George and the Reverend step up!
So, what’s living in the sewers? Could it be that there actually are cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers out there? Everyone in New York City has heard the legends but, much like stories of the alligators in the Chicago sewers, most people chose not to believe them. Or could the disappearance have something to do with the cannisters labeled Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal that are being left in the sewers by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Wilson (George Martin) of the NRC says that they would never purposefully mutate the people living underground but Wilson works for the government so who in their right mind is going to trust him?
C.H.U.D. is a horror film with a social conscience. It’s very much an 80s films because, while you have Shepherd running around and attacking everyone for not taking care of the most vulnerable members of society, the true villain is ultimately revealed to be the members of a regulatory agency. Instead of finding a safe way to get rid of their nuclear waste, they just found a sneaky way to abandon it all in New York and obviously, they assumed no one would care because …. well, it’s New York. Everyone in the country knows that New York City isn’t safe so who is going to notice a few underground monsters, right?
The idea behind C.H.U.D. has a lot of potential but the execution is a bit lackluster. For every good C.H.U.D. kill, there’s long passages where the story drags. Considering that Heard spent most of his career typecast as the type of authority figure who would dump nuclear waste under New York City, it’s actually kind of interesting to see him playing a sympathetic role here. Daniel Stern, on the other hand, is miscast and rather hyperactive as Shepherd. You really do want someone to tell him to calm down for a few minutes. Watching C.H.U.D., one gets the feeling that it’s a film with an identity crisis. Is it a horror film, an action flick, a work of social commentary, or a dark comedy? There’s no reason why it can’t be all four but C.H.U.D. just never really comes together. It ultimately feels more like a mix of several different films instead of being a film made with one clear and coherent vision.
In the end, Death Line remains the film to see about underground cannibals.
“Have you ever been kissed by a girl like this?” a disembodied voice asks at the start of 1953’s Mesa For Lost Women as a pair hands with claw-like fingernails caresses the face of someone who is later identified as being “Doc” Tucker (Allan Nixon).
Things get stranger from there. A couple is found lost and dehydrated in the Mexican desert. Grant Phillips (Robert Knapp) rambles about “super bugs” out in the desert and how they have to be destroyed. American land surveyor Frank (John Martin) assumes that Grant must be delirious but Frank’s assistant, Pepe (Chris Pin Martin), knows differently. We know that Pepe knows differently because the narrator tells us that Pepe had heard all about the monsters in the desert but Pepe keeps that information to himself….
Who is this narrator and why is he so condescending? (For the record, he’s actor Lyle Talbot, who split his career between major, Oscar-winning productions and stuff like this.) Have you ever noticed that a narrator usually just leaves you feeling even more confused by what you just watched? There’s a trailer playing right now for a film called Ella McCay that opens with Julie Kavner saying, “Hi, I’m the narrator!” and whenever I hear that line, I’m just like, “Oh, this film is going to be so bad!”
I think it’s because most narrators are added after the fact, in an attempt to give some sort of uniformity to a badly constructed movie. The narrator is there to tell us stuff that a good movie would be able to show us. For instance, in the trailer for Ella McCay, Julie Kavner tells us that “I’m nuts about her,” as a way to assure us that Ella McCay is someone worth making a movie about. Now, ideally, you wouldn’t have to have someone tell you that. You would just watch the movie and say, “Hey, Ella McCay! She deserves all the happiness in the world!” But when your trailer is a bunch of scenes of Ella McCay acting a bit immature for someone who is destined to become “governor of the state you were born and raised in,” you need that narrator to say, “No, she’s likable, I promise!”
By that same logic, Mesa of Lost Women was apparently a mash-up of several different films, none of which had a complete script. Narrator Lyle Talbot is here to tell us that, despite what we’re seeing, Mesa of Lost Women is an actual movie with an actual story as opposed to just a bunch of random scenes that were haphazardly crammed together. We get a flashback of a scientist named Masterson (Harmon Stevens) traveling to the laboratory of Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan) and discovering that Aranya is creating giant tarantulas and transforming human women into mind-controlled slaves with the instincts of a spider. Masterson doesn’t think that’s ethical so Aranya’s assistant, Tarantella (Tandra Quinn), gives him an injection that turns him into a simpleton. Masterson ends up in a mental hospital, though he later escapes. Meanwhile, an American businessman and his girlfriend (Mary Hill) come to Mexico and witness Tarantella dancing in a bar. Masterson shows up and shoots Tarantella and then takes everyone hostage so that he can force Grant, who we now discover is a pilot, to fly him to the mesa of lost women …. or something.
Despite the best efforts of the narrator, the film is impossible to follow. A big problem is that Dr. Aarnya’s plan never makes much sense. How is creating a giant spider and a bunch of women who think that they’re spiders going to help him conquer the world? The other problem is that the film had two directors, one of whom was an enigmatic German named Herbert Tevos who got the job by claiming to have directed Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Tevos’s footage of Dr. Aranya, the giant tarantula, and the “lost women” was not enough to secure the film distribution so a second director, Ron Ormond, was brought in to shoot a bunch of new footage to make the film more commercial. Tevos’s film became an extended flashback in the middle of Ormond’s film and the whole thing is a big mess.
In fact, the film is such a mess that some people insist Ed Wood must have been involved. It is true that narrator Lyle Talbot also appeared in Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. Plan 9‘s Mona McKinnon appears as a spider woman. So does Dolores Fuller, who was Wood’s girlfriend at the time. Wood later “borrowed” Mesa of Lost Women‘s score for Jail Bait. Mesa of Lost Women was definitely Wood-adjacent but, by all accounts, Wood didn’t actually do any work on the film. This mess of a film belongs to Tevos and Ormond.
And it is a mess. It’s a watchable mess, in much the same way that a nuclear meltdown would probably be watchable. But, nonetheless, it’s still a mess and the incoherence of the plot really does get on one’s nerves, despite the best efforts of Lyle Talbot. Talbot can’t sell the viewer on Mesa of Lost Women. Maybe he would have had better luck with Ella McCay.
Oh, how I love Bride of the Monster.
First released in 1955 and directed by the legendary Ed Wood, Bride of the Monster is a classic mix of a haunted house, a mad scientist, a lumbering assistant, and a giant octopus. The plot may be impossible to follow but it doesn’t matter when you’ve got Tor Johnson grunting and Bela Lugosi giving a surprisingly good performance as the persecuted Dr. Vornoff, a man who “tampered in God’s domain.”
A lot of people consider this to be Wood’s best film. Personally, I would go with Plan 9 From Outer Space but Bride of the Monster is still an entertaining look at monsters and madmen.
1957’s Final Curtain is a short, 22-minute film in which a mysterious man (Duke Moore) wanders around a creepy and seemingly abandoned theater. While Dudley Manlove (who played Eros the Alien in Plan Nine From Outer Space) provides narration, the man sees many strange things in the theater. What is real and what is merely a hallucination? Watch to find out!
Final Curtain was envisioned, by director Edward D. Wood, as being the pilot for a horror anthology series. Though none of the networks were interested in buying Wood’s proposed series, Wood considered Final Curtain to be his finest film and it certainly is a bit more atmospheric than the typical Wood film. The role of the mysterious man was written for Bela Lugosi but, after Lugosi passed away, Duke Moore was cast in the role instead.
From 1957, here is Final Curtain.
1963’s The Sadist opens with three teachers driving to a baseball game.
Ed (Richard Alden), Doris (Helen Hovey), and Carl (Don Russell) are planning on just having a nice night out but their plans change when they have car trouble out in the middle of nowhere. They pull into a gas station/junkyard that happens to be sitting off the side of the road. The teachers look for the owner of the gas station or at least someone who works there. Instead, what they find is Charlie Tibbs (Arch Hall, Jr,) and bis girlfriend, Judy Bradshaw (Marilyn Manning).
Charlie is carrying a gun and he demands that the teachers repair their car and then give it to him so that he and Judy can continue their journey across the country. Charlie has been switching cars frequently, largely because the cops are looking for him. That’s because Charlie has been killing people all up and down the highway. The intellectual teachers find themselves being held hostage by Charlie and Judy, two teenagers who may not be as smart as them but who have the killer instinct that the teachers lack.
It’s interesting to watch The Sadist after watching Eegah! Arch Hall, Jr. and Marilyn Manning played boyfriend and girlfriend in that one as well but neither Hall nor Manning were particularly credible in their roles. Hall seems uncomfortable with the whole teen idol angle of his role while Manning seemed a bit too mature for the role of a teenager. In The Sadist, however, they’re both not only believable but they’re terrifying as well.
Charlie and Judy are almost feral in their ferocity, with both taking a disturbing glee in taunting the teachers. Charlie kills without blinking and Judy enjoys every minute of it. It’s easy to imagine Charlie and Judy at a drive-in showing of Eegah!, laughing at the sight of the caveman getting gunned down by the police and never considering that violence in real life is different from killing in the movies. The teachers discover that it’s impossible to negotiate with Charlie and that Charlie’s promise not to try to kill them if they fix the car is ultimately an empty one. And yet the teachers, dedicated to education and trying to reach even the most difficult of students, struggle to fight back. They’re held back by their conscience, something that Charlie does not possess. It’s intelligence vs instinct and this film suggests that often, intelligence does not win.
It’s a pretty intense and dark film, one that makes great use of that junkyard setting and which is notable for being the first film to feature the cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond. For those who appreciate B-movies, it’s memorable for showing that, when he wasn’t being pushed to be a squeaky-clean hero who sang sappy ballads in films directed by his father, Arch Hall, Jr. actually was capable of giving a very good performance.
The Sadist was based on the true-life crimes of Charlie Starkweather and Caryl Ann Fugate. Interestingly enough, their crimes also inspired Terence Malick’s Badlands.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988. The show can be found on Hulu and, for purchase, on Prime!
This week, St. Elsewhere tries something different.
Episode 2.19 “The Women”
(Dir by Bruce Paltrow, originally aired on March 28th, 1984)
Four women share a room at St. Eligius.
Evelyn Milbourne (Eva La Galliene) is elderly, headstrong, and rich. She’s also about to lose her independence as it’s clear that she can no longer live on her own.
Rose Orso (Brenda Vacarro) is only in her 40s but is already showing signs of dementia. She struggles to remember who she is. Her husband is becoming a stranger. At one point, she grabs some scissors. At first, it seems like she might be planning on attacking one of the other women. Instead, she cuts her hair and doesn’t do a very good job of it.
Paige (Blythe Danner) is in for a nose job and she tells a lot of stories about her glamorous life outside of the hospital. Towards the end of the episode, she confesses that she’s actually a pathological liar who got her nose job because she didn’t have anything better to do.
The fourth woman never speaks. She’s in a coma. She dies in the middle of the night and is rolled out of the room with disturbing efficiency.
This episode was basically a play. A few of the regulars got scenes of their own but, for the most part, the action stayed in that one hotel room and it focused on the four women. When I first realized what this episode was going to be like, I really thought I was going to hate it. It seemed like the sort of thing that would bring out the worst in the show’s writers. Instead, it turned out to be a very well-done and extremely well-acted episode, one that reminded the viewer that every patient has their own story. After spending most of this season focusing on the doctors, The Women announced that the patients matter too.
Charles Manson was a bore.
That was one of the first thoughts I had while watching 2024’s Manson: Summer of Blood. The film opens with Charles Manson (Wes Gillum) sitting in a prison cell, with his long scraggly hair and his gray beard. (Actor Wes Gillum doesn’t really look like Manson but he does possess a certain resemblance to Josh Brolin.) Manson is being interviewed about his crimes by an almost unnaturally calm man named Jacob Cohen (Joseph Boehm).
Manson goes through the usual facts of his early life. He talks about not knowing who his father was. He talks about spending the majority of his life in prison. Even before he became famous as the leader of the Family, Manson was a career criminal. Manson talks about trying to pursue a musical career in Los Angeles. He kisses Dennis Wilson’s feet. He gets angry when he feels that record producer Terry Melcher (Chad Bozarth) cheated him out of a record deal. He talks about picking up hitchhikers and making them a part of the Family. And, as he speaks, he uses all of the familiar phrases. He talks about how the members of the Family are “your children.” Blah blah blah blah.
For all the attention that Charles Manson was given over the course of his life, he was essentially a third-rate intellect who picked up a few key phrases in the 50s and 60s and repeated them ad nauseum. Manson’s words and justifications meant nothing but, because he said them so often and they were slightly more poetic than the usual career criminal blathering, there were people got into their heads that Manson was some sort of rebel philosopher. The truth of the matter was that the only people dumber than Manson were the ones who decided to live with him at Spahn Ranch.
Unfortunately, dumb people can still hurt people. That was certainly the case with Charles Manson. The film depicts the murders of Gary Hinman, Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and, to a lesser extent, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. It’s difficult to watch and that’s the way it should be. I remember, when Once Upon A Time In Hollywood came out, there were a lot of people who objected to Rick Dalton setting “Sadie” on fire in his pool. If those people knew even the slightest details of what Sadie — real name: Susan Atkins — actually did and said to Sharon Tate and her unborn child, they would understand why she got exactly what she deserved in Tarantino’s reimagining of that terrible night.
As for Manson: Summer of Blood, my initial reaction while I was watching it was that it was another movie that exploited a real life tragedy. I found myself wondering why we should care what Charles Manson had to say about himself and his crimes. But that was before the final ten minutes of the film. The final ten minutes of the film features a wonderful twist, one that truly gave that old bore Manson the ending that he deserved. I’m still not sure that we needed another film about Charles Manson and his crimes but I do know it would be nice if most serial killer films ended the same way was Manson: Summer of Blood.
First released in 1962, Eegah! has a reputation for being one of the worst films ever made.
Usually, whenever I come across a film with that type of reputation, my natural instinct is to be a contrarian and to argue that the film is not so much bad as its just misunderstood. I can’t really do that with Eegah! Eegah! is a legitimately bad movie, though I don’t know if I’d call it one of the worst. It’s a low budget vanity project and, quite frankly, I think snarkiness is better directed at big budget vanity projects. Eegah! is bad but it’s also bad enough to be entertaining in a train wreck sort of way and there’s something to be said for that.
While driving at night, 30 year-old teenager Roxy Miller (Marilyn Miller) runs over Eegah (Richard Kiel), a giant caveman who has somehow gone unnoticed up until that moment. Eegah runs off into the desert. Roxy tells her boyfriend, Tom (Arch Hall, Jr.) and Tom’s father, Robert (Arch Hall, Sr., who also directed) about her encounter. While Tom plays his guitar and sings a sappy ballad, Robert goes into the desert in search of Eegah. When Robert doesn’t return, Tom and Roxy grab a dune buddy and head into the desert.
Roxy finds Eegah and Robert first. Eegah grabs Roxy and takes her to a nearby cave, where Robert is waiting for them. Eegah can’t speak and does most of his communication by swinging around a club and being a bit too handsy. (There’s one painting on the wall of his cave but it’s not very good.) Eegah, despite his fearsome appearance, seems to actually be pretty amiable. But then he falls in love with Roxy and becomes rather possessive. When Roxy gives Robert a shave, the bearded Eegah demands a shave as well. He’s fairly handsome without the beard but still, it’s hard not to get grossed out by the way he tries to lick up the thick shaving cream that’s covering his face.
Eventually, Tom rescues Roxy and Robert and not a minute too soon! There’s a party in town and Tom and his band are scheduled to play! Eegah, upset that Roxy has left him, picks up his club, puts on his best animal skin, and heads into town on a rampage!
Eegah (and, yes, I’m dropping the exclamation point) was produced and directed by Arch Hall, Sr. (He receives a story credit as well.) It was actually one of many movies that Hall Sr. made, all in an effort to make his son into a film star. In Eegah, Arch Hall, Jr. performs two songs and dances with Roxy. The film positions him as a teen idol but Hall, Jr. doesn’t seem to be particularly comfortable with the role. Of course, it doesn’t help that he’s working with an absolutely terrible script.
I do, however, appreciate the performance of Richard Kiel as Eegah. Kiel does the best that anyone could with the role, playing him as being giant who simply doesn’t understand that you can’t walk around with the a club in public without someone calling the police. Poor Eegah! He doesn’t even know what the police are.
Eegah! (yeah, I’ll return it’s exclamation point for the next-to-last paragraph) is a film that is so ineptly done and poorly written that it becomes rather fascinating to watch. It’s boring only if you’re the type who can’t appreciate terrible dialogue, terrible camera placement, and the type of acting that can only be found in a film that was directed, produced, and essentially written by one guy trying to make his reluctant son into a star.
Arch Hall, Jr. was far less interested in being a star and instead became a pilot and pursued his love of flying. As for Richard Kiel, he went on to play Jaws, one the greatest of the James Bond henchmen.
Through the Shattered Lens 