Thrill Me!

How was my heart to know that these songs exist?

2012-03-10T23:29:00.000-08:00

I just discovered two pop songs based on the main theme of Dressed to Kill, presumably recorded for the Japanese LP of the soundtrack. Since I can find no information about the tracks other than the lyrics were written by a woman named Carol Connors (no relation to Thora Birch's porn star mother, I'm sure), I'll just stick with that theory. The Japanese LP of Blow Out – itself an interesting lounge re-recording of the score – also featured two such songs, though they were not derived from Pino Donaggio's music. Japan sure loves pop music on their soundtracks, even if the songs weren't actually in the movie at all. (Sometimes, as was the case with Tenebre, they put a pop song over the end credits of the film without the filmmakers' knowledge.) Who knows why they do this, but it gives me something to post about so what the hell. If anyone knows the origin of these tracks, please fill me in. Listening to them, I find myself relieved that they were never used in the movie.

In Memory of Lina Romay (1954-2012)

2012-02-23T20:27:00.000-08:00

News spread like wildfire through the Internet today that actress Lina Romay – real name: Rosa María Almirall – longtime companion, muse, and caregiver of director Jess Franco, died from cancer on February 15th at the age of 57. This is a tremendous blow to the cult film community, perhaps more than most people realize. Romay worked with Franco on well over one hundred films, not only as an actress, but as a writer, an editor, and a co-director, enabling him to become possibly the most prolific director of all-time. Not all of these films were "good", but they had a unique sense of style and atmosphere that continues to entrance and fascinate. Lina was a trouper – you'll see why if you do an unfiltered Google image search – and I, for one, will miss her terribly. I can't even begin to imagine how poor Jess feels, being in such bad health these days. R.I.P., dear Lina.

Here are some of Lina's movies that I recommend watching. This list isn't as long as it should be, because I still have to watch a lot of them. There are so many!

Female Vampire (1973)
Lorna the Exorcist (1974)
Jack the Ripper (1976)
Ilsa, the Wicked Warden (1977)
Exorcism (1979)
Revenge in the House of Usher (1982)
Lulu's Talking Ass (1986) - Haven't watched this yet, but the title alone makes it a must-see.

I'm saving your life, stupid.

2012-02-02T16:43:00.000-08:00

Gena Rowlands and Juan Adames in Gloria (1980)

Movie Review: 'Hell Night' (1981)

2012-01-20T22:47:00.000-08:00

Ah, it's our old friend 1981 again. I already wrote about the plethora of slasher films released that year when discussing how well Night School held up. Hell Night isn't so fortunate, but because the great Final Girl picked it for her prestigious Film Club, and because I was planning to revisit this film sooner or later, I decided to write a review.

I must admit I never loved Hell Night; I merely tolerated it. I thought it would improve with a few years between viewings, but I was very wrong. In fact, I probably dislike this film more than I did before. The problem lies mostly in the writing – if there was a script. It's almost as if the filmmakers let loose four college students in a creepy mansion without telling them what to say or do. They kind of wander around or jump over each other in bed whilst giggling and jiggling, and you don't really care what happens to them. Shit, the running time would be cut in half if only the director had told the actors to walk a little faster.

I like Linda Blair, really I do, but she and her heaving bosom aren't given much to do here. The other actors are either bland or, in the case of Vincent Van Patten, irritating. Sometimes if a slow-moving slasher has boring characters it can be saved by atmosphere and really good special effects (see The Prowler), but Hell Night's murders aren't anything special. The only part that remotely resonated with me was the ending, and that's probably because I was happy the film was over.

I'm quite puzzled by the affection many slasher aficionados feel for Hell Night. It's competently made, yet completely devoid of the elements that I enjoy in these films, namely a story with sympathetic characters. But what do I know? I suppose it would make a somewhat decent triple feature with the similarly-themed (and superior) Humongous and Anthropophagus. Though the latter is often painfully dull, it has fantastic atmosphere and outrageous kills to spice it up. Oh, Hell Night. Such wasted potential!

My Original Poster Collection

2011-12-27T15:02:00.000-08:00

I figured it's about time I posted again, and since I will finally be buying a few frames for some of my original posters, I decided to post pictures of them here to share with everyone. I've been fortunate to find a number of these inexpensively on eBay – although there are a few for which I paid more than I probably should have – and I'm quite proud of my little collection. A couple of the daybills (Monster, Motel Hell, and Nosferatu) were given to me by my good friend Dee Raphael Glen. Thanks again, Dee!

I grabbed these pictures from various websites (mostly Wrong Side of the Art), so you can see what the posters look like.


ALICE, SWEET ALICE (1976) – U.S. ONE SHEET

THE ATTIC (1980) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

BLOW OUT (1981) – AUSTRALIAN DAYBILL

BODY DOUBLE (1984) – U.S. ONE-SHEET


CARRIE (1976) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

DEADLY BLESSING (1981) – U.S. ONE SHEET


DON'T LOOK NOW (1973) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

THE FLY (1986) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

THE FURY (1978) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

GLORIA (1980) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

HE KNOWS YOU'RE ALONE (1980) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

HOWLING II (1985) – U.S. ONE-SHEET


LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971) – AUSTRALIAN DAYBILL

(This is my actual poster. The picture was taken from the eBay listing I purchased it from. I've never seen another one since I got it, so it must be rare!)

MONSTER (aka HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP) (1980) – AUSTRALIAN DAYBILL

MOTEL HELL (1980) – AUSTRALIAN DAYBILL

NOSFERATU (1979) – AUSTRALIAN DAYBILL

PIECES (1983) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

THE PREMONITION (1976) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

THE PSYCHIC (1977) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

PSYCHO II (1983) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

THE SENTINEL (1977) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

SISTERS (1973) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

STRANGE SHADOWS IN AN EMPTY ROOM (aka A SPECIAL MAGNUM FOR TONY SAITTA) (1976) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

TERROR TRAIN (1980) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

THEY CAME FROM WITHIN (aka SHIVERS) (1975) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

TORSO (1973) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

WHEN A STRANGER CALLS (1979) – U.S. ONE-SHEET

Ten Blu-rays That Prove Old Movies Can Look Great

2011-12-13T00:33:00.000-08:00

One of my biggest annoyances as a film buff is hearing people say that old films don't look as good as new films. Of course, "good" is subjective. Movies have certainly gotten slicker with new technology, but does that make them better-looking? Many would argue that it does... but they likely have not seen these movies on Blu-ray:

10. I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978, DIR. MEIR ZARCHI) – ANCHOR BAY

You mean a cheap exploitation film from the late 70s looks fantastic on Blu-ray? You bet. There is a bit of flickering throughout, but the image is so sharp and colorful that it's easy to ignore. Buy it at Amazon.

9. THE TOOLBOX MURDERS (1978, DIR. DENNIS DONNELLY) – BLUE UNDERGROUND

This film is even cheaper and more exploitation-y than I Spit on Your Grave, and, surprisingly, it looks even better. Some people tell me they don't want low-budget films to look too good, and I can kind of understand that, but it still looks like a 70s film – just a lot clearer. Buy it at Amazon.

8. M (1931, DIR. FRITZ LANG) – CRITERION

Who would have thought a movie from the 30s would look so stunning? It really makes you wonder why so many movies made after this one aren't so lucky. Looking past the old clothes and the fact that it's in black and white, the clarity of this transfer is comparable to that of a modern movie. Buy it at Amazon.

7. DEEP RED (1975, DIR. DARIO ARGENTO) – BLUE UNDERGROUND

So many Italian films on Blu-ray suffer from heavy noise (not to be confused with grain, which is natural), but Deep Red probably fares the best. It's incredibly bright, sharp, and colorful; those nail polish reds really pop. Buy it at Amazon.

6. FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980, DIR. SEAN S. CUNNINGHAM) – PARAMOUNT

This transfer is very impressive for an independent slasher film made thirty-one years ago in New Jersey. Especially beautiful are the daytime scenes – the trees in the woods are incredibly detailed! Unfortunately, this is the much-demanded uncut version that extends the deaths and makes a couple of them look more fake (especially the Kevin Bacon arrow-in-the-neck scene) than they did in the R-rated version. But the Blu-ray is worth owning for the gorgeous transfer and fun extras. Buy it at Amazon.

5. THE SHINING (1980, DIR. STANLEY KUBRICK) – WARNER
That helicopter shot during the opening credits looks absolutely amazing on this Blu-ray. The rest of the film looks great, too. The groovy carpet patterns and wallpapers are almost 3-D. Buy it at Amazon.

4. THE EXORCIST (1973, DIR. WILLIAM FRIEDKIN) – WARNER
This Blu-ray is so sharp and clear that you'll feel like you got hit in the face with pea soup. Buy it at Amazon.

3. PSYCHO (1960, DIR. ALFRED HITCHCOCK) – UNIVERSAL
I think that screenshot pretty much says it all, doesn't it? The transfer is pretty damn excellent if you can make out every single eyelash on Norman Bates' face. Buy it at Amazon.

2. THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975, DIR. JIM SHARMAN) – 20TH CENTURY FOX
Anybody who says Rocky Horror is badly made need only watch the Blu-ray. The cinematography really shines. Those reds! Occasionally the film switches to what appears to be an SD source (or else the shots are just really out of focus), but the rest of the transfer is so gorgeous that I'm willing to look past it. Buy it at Amazon.

1. TAXI DRIVER (1976, DIR. MARTIN SCORSESE) – SONY PICTURES
I'd say this is probably the best-looking older film I own on Blu-ray. The restoration is just superb. They didn't restore the original color scheme of the ending, but that's okay. I actually think the desaturation makes the violent ending more disturbing. Buy it at Amazon.

Here are some more excellent Blu-rays that I highly recommend:

North by Northwest
Inferno
The New York Ripper
Creepshow
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Alien
Videodrome
Young Frankenstein
Basket Case
Troll 2

Buy My Stuff Part 3-D

2011-12-10T12:27:00.001-08:00

I need some dough so I'm selling a few more things on eBay. Click on the pictures and please read all descriptions before bidding:

Scans from Beyond #5: In Colour

2011-12-09T22:49:00.001-08:00

Let's Scare Jessica to Death Lobby Card

Ten Art House Films That Aren't Boring

2011-12-06T12:54:00.001-08:00

The stereotypical art house film has little or no plot. More often than not it's a foreign film, and what little dialogue there is comes subtitled to frustrate the masses. Most Americans couldn't be bothered with these films, which is why they typically do not play in multiplexes – hence the need for an art house. I wish to dispel the conception that art house films are boring. A few of these are not usually thought of as art house films, but for me, any film that stands outside the margins of the mainstream, and alienates even the niche audience, is an art film. Also note that #5-1 are not foreign language films, but they might as well be.

10. FAT GIRL (2001, DIR. CATHERINE BREILLAT)

It is imperative that you see this terrifying French drama without reading anything whatsoever about it. I mean NOTHING. So that's what I'm going to say.

9. DAY FOR NIGHT (1973, DIR. FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT)

Quite simply one of the greatest films about filmmaking ever made, Day for Night conveys all of the joy and heartache of the process. Truffaut himself plays the director of the movie in the movie, and it's perfect casting. Valentina Cortese is brilliant and hilarious in her Oscar-nominated performance as the alcoholic, veteran actress who can't hit her mark.

8. JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975, DIR. CHANTAL AKERMAN)

"Whaaaaat?!" you exclaim. "A three and a half hour movie about a housewife's daily routine, the highlights of which are preparing veal cutlets and making coffee, is not boring?!" Hear me out. On the surface, such a film could be perceived as mind-numbingly dull. If you are not open to the pace of this particular film, you are never going to see its virtues. But, for those of us who are, a strange thing happens while watching Jeanne Dielman. We become familiar with Jeanne's habits and we notice when things are out of order – signaling her mental breakdown as she prostitutes herself while her son is at school – and the film becomes a microscopic story as fascinating as any other.

7. MARTHA (1974, DIR. RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER)
Perhaps the closest Fassbinder ever came to making a horror film, Martha relates the story of a thirty year-old virgin (the always amazing Margit Carstensen) whose happiness unconsciously depends on being controlled by a man. After her domineering father dies unexpectedly, Martha marries Helmut, an engineer played by Karlheinz Böhm (whom most of you will remember from Peeping Tom). She becomes paranoid due to his sadistic treatment of her, which grows more and more twisted as the film goes on, and eventually she believes that he is trying to kill her. This is pretty heavy stuff for a TV movie, but one should expect no less from Fassbinder.

6. MADEMOISELLE (1966, DIR. TONY RICHARDSON)

Based on a Jean Genet story, Mademoiselle is about a well-respected French schoolteacher (Jeanne Moreau in a quietly chilling performance) who, for no apparent reason, wreaks havoc on her village by causing fires and floods, and killing animals, on a regular basis. She falls in love with an Italian woodcutter who is suspected of the crimes because of the town's prejudice against outsiders, but his young son Bruno, a student in her class, knows the truth. Several depictions of animal violence make this a very disturbing film, in particular a gruesome scene in which Bruno kills a rabbit out of anger by repeatedly bashing it against a woodpile. If you are able to look past these moments, you will find an extremely beautiful, erotic, and obsessive work that is maddeningly oblique, yet says a great deal about mental illness and love. The film contains one of the most arousing sequences I have ever seen, wherein lustful Mademoiselle spies on the woodcutter taking a nap in the woods. Close-up shots of his sweaty underarms, stomach, and face as he snores, and Moreau hungrily licking her lips, suggest much more than a sex scene ever would.

5. INTERIORS (1978, DIR. WOODY ALLEN)

Woody Allen's first drama is also his first film in which he does not appear. Geraldine Page is the suicidal, neurotic mother of three neurotic women played by Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, and Kristin Griffith. Creepshow's E.G. Marshall is their father, who leaves the family and remarries to the vibrant Maureen Stapleton. Much drama ensues. Interiors was nominated for five Oscars – Best Actress for Page, Best Supporting Actress for Stapleton, Best Art Direction, Best Director, and Best Writing – and yet it remains an overlooked, under-appreciated film in Woody's oeuvre. Perhaps he tries too hard to emulate his hero, Ingmar Bergman, but his dramatic works have always been my favorite.

4. THE HONEYMOON KILLERS (1970, DIR. LEONARD KASTLE)

Shirley Stoler is a force to be reckoned with in Leonard Kastle's one-off masterpiece. She plays Martha Beck of the real life murder couple, the "Lonely Hearts Killers", and it's one of the greatest performances committed to film. What a range! One minute she is tender and beautiful, the next she is cold and cruel. I must also praise Mary Jane Higby for her excellent portrayal of Janet Fay. Her murder scene, while not gory, is one of the most disturbing things I have ever witnessed. Someone once said watching this movie is like looking through a keyhole, and it's so true. You feel rotten for watching such horrendous acts being committed, but everything about this film is so clever, and even humorous, that you can't look away.

3. THE TENANT (1976, DIR. ROMAN POLANSKI)

Yes, that's Roman Polanski in drag. He directs and stars in this nearly word-for-word adaptation of Roland Topor's novel. It doesn't really make a lot of sense, but it sure is creepy. Polanski is a young bachelor who moves into an apartment in France. The previous tenant attempted suicide by throwing herself out the window. He becomes obsessed with her and progressively more paranoid because the other tenants seem to be plotting against him. This film ranks right up there with Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion.

2. A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974, DIR. JOHN CASSAVETES)
Everyone thinks Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) is crazy, except her husband, Peter Falk. "Mabel's not crazy, she's unusual," he insists. I believe him, even though witnessing her mental breakdown is like watching an exorcism. John Cassavetes had such a loose, realistic directorial style that he fooled everybody into thinking his films were improvised when they were actually tightly scripted. A Woman Under the Influence is without a doubt his greatest work (though Gloria is my personal favorite), and it is one of the most moving, harrowing, and draining movie experiences of my life.

1. 3 WOMEN (1977, DIR. ROBERT ALTMAN)
The enigmatic tagline for this film was "One woman became two. Two women became three. Three women became one." You have to allow this film to overtake you. You can't think about it too clearly, because the basic idea was derived from a dream and it was shot without a finished script. When you know that, the depth of this film is very surprising. Shelley Duvall as the superficial Millie Lammoreaux is such a true character – she's the kind of girl that exists everywhere and the kind of person you hope you aren't. I don't watch this film that often because I'm afraid it will lose its mysterious aura.

2011-11-20T11:50:00.001-08:00

Sorry I haven't posted anything lately. Because the title of my blog, while clearly a reference to Tom Atkin's immortal line from Night of the Creeps, does not specify that this is a horror blog, I am going to open up my writing to include any type of film that excites me. This may alienate some of my readers who do not care about the cinematic delights of John Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, or John Waters, but I believe that any genre can be thrilling, not just horror or suspense films. Of course, I will point out connections to horror films when applicable.

I don't have much else to say at the moment, so I will leave you with this:

Ecstasy of Fear: Melodious Moments from Horror Films

2011-11-01T21:49:00.000-07:00

I was going to post this on Halloween, but, true to form, it took longer than I thought to remaster each song to the best of my ability. Maybe I'll make it a tradition to not post anything on Halloween, because I talk about horror movies year round anyway. Regardless, here is a compilation I put together with some of my favorite pleasant horror film music. There's not a scary track to be found here (well, except for maybe the beginning and end of the Young Frankenstein theme). These songs are alternately joyful, depressing and erotic; perhaps irritating to those with a low tolerance for strings or warbly pop singers. Enjoy!

Track List:
1. Jane (from "Cannibal Apocalypse") - Alessandro Blonksteiner
2. Tirassegno (from "Dawn of the Dead") - Goblin
3. Love Theme (from "Deadly Blessing") - James Horner
4. Stay Forever (from "Let's Scare Jessica to Death") - Mariclare Costello
5. The Call (from "Blacula") - Gene Page
6. The Message (from "Vampyros Lesbos") - Manfred Hubler and Siegfried Schwab
7. Università (from "Torso") - Guido and Maurizio De Angelis
8. It's the Night Again (from "He Knows You're Alone") - Vini Canali
9. Main Title (from "Carrie") - Pino Donaggio
10. The New Ambassador (from "The Omen") - Jerry Goldsmith
11. A Flower Is All You Need (from "Night Train Murders") - Demis Roussos
12. Sighs and Sighs (from "Phantom of the Opera") - Ennio Morricone
13. Edwina's Theme (from "Theater of Blood") - Michael J. Lewis
14. Quei Giorni Insieme a Te (from "Don't Torture a Duckling") - Ornella Vanoni
15. Now You're All Alone (from "The Last House on the Left") - David Hess
16. Main Title (from "Young Frankenstein") - John Morris
17. End of a Myth (from "Flesh for Frankenstein") - Claudio Gizzi
18. Opera (from "Opera") - Claudio Simonetti
19. Sail Away, Tiny Sparrow (Instrumental Version) (from "Friday the 13th") - Harry Manfredini
20. Laura's Theme (The Last Farewell) (from "Don't Look Now") - Pino Donaggio
21. Teenagers Cha Cha Cha (Film Version) (from "A Bay of Blood") - Stelvio Cipriani

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Buy My Stuff Part II

2011-10-26T16:07:00.000-07:00

I am selling some of my VHS tapes, DVDs, and books on eBay. A few of them are pretty rare, so check 'em out! I'll be putting up more in the day ahead.

Scans from Beyond #4: Don't Go in the House on Friday the 13th

2011-10-26T02:40:00.000-07:00

Broadway and 47th, NYC, 1980.

Scans from Beyond #3: Unsane

2011-10-21T13:42:00.000-07:00

American ad sheet for Dario Argento's Tenebre.

Movie Review: 'Spasms' (1983)

2011-10-20T23:57:00.000-07:00

Spasms is the best Oliver Reed vs. Snake movie ever made. Believe it or not, there is more than one. Venom (1981) has a better premise, but ultimately disappoints because all you really want to see is Reed and Klaus Kinski kicking each other's ass. Spasms is a little more schlocky, but way more consistent and entertaining. It's also Canadian, which helps a good deal. Canada looks nearly identical to the United States and regularly stands in for that country on film, so what is it about the atmosphere of Canada that makes the films shot there instantly recognizable? The majority of audiences probably wouldn't notice the difference, but someone weaned on Prom Night, Black Christmas, The Brood, and Humongous definitely would.

Reed plays a limping millionaire with a psychic link to the monstrous snake taken from an island inhabited by dancing natives. The snake killed his brother many years ago, so Reed hires a college professor (Peter Fonda) to study it. A botched attempt by snake-worshipping Satanists to steal it from the lab sends the snake on a killing spree around the campus. Every time it attacks someone, Reed sees the snake's blue-tinted point of view. It's kind of like Eyes of Laura Mars with a giant reptile, only not as glamorous.

My description makes Spasms sound better than it actually is, but I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the film. I wasn't really expecting to like it at all, despite Reed's reliable presence. The female lead, played by Kerrie Keane, has really big hair and stares a lot. Fonda starts off joking around and later says his lines like a superhero. Al Waxman is a sleazy detective hired by the Satanists to steal the snake. You can tell his death scene was supposed to be the film's big set-piece, but the filmmakers really mishandled it. The pictures printed in Fangoria Magazine in 1983 show a very detailed transformation by Dick Smith. Unfortunately, most of it doesn't appear in the film. There's an effective dorm room attack that involves a shower door and much thrashing about. Sometimes all you need is a little blood on glass to make things right.

Yes, the ending feels rushed. Yes, there is a distinct lack of characterization, and no explanations are given for the characters' actions. Spasms is what it was intended to be – a cheap horror movie about Oliver Reed sweating profusely while a gigantic snake bites people – and nothing more. Uneven though the execution may be, director William Fruet (Killer Party, Death Weekend) managed to deliver an entertaining mess despite the odds. And that's all you can ask from such a film.

DVD Review: 'Night School' (1981)

2011-10-19T01:12:00.000-07:00

If you're a regular reader of my blog, I'm sure I don't have to tell you that 1981 was a big year for slasher films. I can't think of a better way to start this review, so why not name them all? Halloween II, Friday the 13th Part II, The Burning, The House by the Cemetery, Graduation Day, Deadly Blessing, The Prowler, My Bloody Valentine, Final Exam, Happy Birthday to Me, Bloody Birthday, Nightmare, The Hand, Just Before Dawn, Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Hell Night, Student Bodies, Madhouse, The Funhouse, Bloody Moon, The Demon, Don't Go in the Woods, Eyes of a Stranger, The Fan, Home Sweet Home, Scream (no, not that one), Evilspeak, Lady Stay Dead, A Day of Judgment, and Strange Behavior. Whew! That's a lotta slashers for one year. A lot of clichés, too, although I must admit I haven't seen a few of these yet. Is that good or bad?

But there's one I didn't mention: Night School, also known as "Terror Eyes" in the U.K. (where it unjustly ran into some trouble as a Video Nasty). Clearly, this film had a lot of competition, so it isn't surprising that it got lost in the pack. What is surprising is that it holds up after all these years when so many of the above films do not or never did. Released theatrically by Paramount, who have shunned every slasher film they put out except the Friday the 13th series, Night School is classier and more clever than most, with a minimum of bloodshed. This is probably because it was directed by the same guy who made Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the infamous Mae West flop musical Sextette. If the subject matter weren't so gruesome, I would hesitate to call it a slasher film, but it bears many hallmarks of that genre, giving a kinky twist to the traditional college massacre.

One thing that this film does remarkably well is setting up the audience's sympathy for the victims in a relatively short amount of time. Too many slashers (more recent ones especially) don't bother to do this, and when the deaths occur, the audience is usually indifferent, or worse, rooting for the killer. It's not that Night School has an ingenious script with abundant character development – far from it. Somehow the filmmakers were able to elicit honest performances from the victims that instantly put the viewer on their side with a modicum of dialogue.

I'm not a big fan of horror films about detectives or the police department, but Night School doesn't bother me despite being just this. Maybe it's because the detective, who is also the lead character, doesn't really have much to do but examine the crime scenes and question suspects. He is played by the kinda cute, kinda funny-looking Leonard Mann, who has appeared in countless Italian westerns and horror films, and he receives top billing here. He gets the job done, but he's not interesting enough to get a screencap.

The supporting characters are more engaging. The lesbian headmistress of the all-girl college takes her students to bed when they confide in her. How politically incorrect! A retarded pervert stalks women as if he's the killer. The anthropology professor who also sleeps with his students – what kind of a college is this? – and his assistant / lover (the overemotional Rachel Ward, by far the sexiest and best known of the cast) provide the impetus for the murders fashioned after the headhunting rituals of New Guinea. My favorite is the feminist waitress who sports a blonde Tootsie wig and says lines like, "Is it true that he fools around with all his students?... I wouldn't throw him outta bed myself!" only to be cruelly dispatched as she's closing up. Ward spends the majority of her screen time pouting, crying, pleading, and generally acting like a good suspect should.

The death scenes are so well done – brutal, yet restrained – that they kind of make up for the lack of a strong lead. The locker room murder is particularly vicious, and it's mostly due to the editing and the reactions of the victim. The "heads submerged in water" aspect of the story felt very original (though I swear I've seen another movie that used it), but I felt bad when the turtle in the aquarium got hit in the head by the... um, head.

Night School was originally released on VHS by Key Video in the 80s, and it was re-released on that format in the 90s by Warner Home Video. Warner Archive should be commended for giving this underrated horror film its DVD debut and for bothering to remaster it. The transfer is marred by a lot of white specks throughout the movie, but otherwise looks excellent. The quality is miles ahead of the VHS. They even included the theatrical trailer, and it's a good one.

For those who are averse to paying twenty bucks for a DVD-R, let me tell you that the Warner Archive releases I've seen are top notch. Except for the DVD's blue bottom, you'd never know it wasn't a "real" DVD. I doubt we'll ever see another release of Night School in the U.S., so anyone who is interested should buy it.

Scans from Beyond #2: Prom Night (Everything Is All Right)

2011-10-18T11:37:00.000-07:00

My VHS Wishlist

2011-10-17T18:33:00.000-07:00

For me, the desire to buy old VHS tapes comes and goes, but there are certain titles that I will always want, and that is because most of them are nearly impossible to find at an affordable price, if at all. Looking through my wish list, I was surprised at just how many tapes I already acquired from it, so I decided to start over and only focus on the ones that I would practically kill to own.

Make Them Die Slowly (1981) – ThrillerVideo

We'll start off with what is probably my most wanted tape of all-time, the notorious cannibal shocker better known today as Cannibal Ferox. My nine year-old self was mesmerized by this tape while browsing through the video store. The giant WARNING on the front of the big box made it look so urgent and scary. Also, the lack of any pictures on the back cover, a tactic that really got my imagination running, made it even more frightening. It's tough to find this tape with the box intact for a reasonable price, so who knows when I'll ever get to own it.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) – Wizard Video

This tape must be pretty rare, because I have never seen it in a video store. Wizard also released a video game based on the film. As much as I love the Media Entertainment tape of Texas Chainsaw (which I used to own, but I sold it along with most of my other tapes when I got into DVD... damn!), Wizard's cover art is the best. The black and white and red just looks perfect.

A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1971) – Wizard Video

Did I mention I'm a Wizard Video whore? Here is yet another of their tapes I would give my right arm to own. The cover art is beautiful, which means it has absolutely nothing to do with the actual film. I hated this movie when I first rented it, and I had to rewind the ending three times because I kept falling asleep! Luckily, I rented (and eventually bought) the Image Entertainment DVD with the original cut of the film, sans Jean Rollin's shitty zombie footage, and found out it's actually a good film if you like Jess Franco.

Breeders (1986) – Wizard Video

This might be my favorite bad movie of all-time. Dare I say it's funnier than Troll 2? Breeders was direct-to-video, but shot on film by porn director Tim Kincaid. I have the MGM DVD, which is in 16:9 widescreen (!), but for me the big box tape will always be better.

I Spit on Your Grave (1978) – Wizard Video

I am so in love with Wizard that I've got to own both the original small box and the big box of this title. They are the only VHS company I can think of that actually started out packaging their tapes in small boxes, only to switch to big boxes and then back again to small ones. Both are valuable, which means I probably won't be owning them anytime soon.

Zombie (1979) – Wizard Video

Yet another Wizard tape that I'd like to buy two copies of. Have you noticed I'm obsessed with their packaging? I would probably buy any Wizard VHS if it was cheap enough, even if the movie didn't interest me. Fortunately, Zombie is a favorite of mine. I remember the quality of this tape being really, really bad – it's horribly cropped and murky – and that angered me at the time, but now it's a must-own.

Pink Flamingos (1972) – Wizard Video

I had no idea until I started putting together this post that Wizard released John Waters' infamous cult classic. Look at that sexy, pink small box. It's another tape I will probably never own because I have a feeling it's extremely rare.

Female Trouble (1974) – Continental?

I'm pretty sure Continental released a big box of this John Waters movie (one of my favorites), but I can't find a picture of it. If I don't get this tape eventually, I'm gonna knock over a Christmas tree!

Desperate Living (1977) – Continental

I did find a (crappy) picture of the Continental tape for this Waters' film. I saw it on eBay years ago, but it was too expensive so I didn't buy it. I'm thinking it hasn't shown up for sale much in the intervening years. Queen Carlotta's royal proclamation is to send me a copy of this tape. Damn, damn, dammit!!

Carrie (1976) – Magnetic Video

Common film, rare tape. Magnetic Video was the first company to release a VHS tape in the United States. This wasn't it, but it's one of the earlier ones, so it's pretty hard to find. I want to own this tape mainly because it's the one I rented when I saw the film uncut for the first time (after watching the TV version, and it was probably the first time I ever saw nudity). I just bought the Beta version of this tape really cheap on eBay, though, and that's close enough for now! The picture is actually of the Beta tape, but it looks almost exactly like the VHS.

The Body Shop (1973) – Paragon Video Productions

I'd much rather have this VHS than the one called Doctor Gore. The cover art is classic! Poorly illustrated, but gruesome. I really thought this movie was terrible when I rented it -- and it is -- but eventually The Body Shop's low-budget charm put me under its spell. I'm a proud owner of the Something Weird DVD, but I would love to have this big box tape!

Ms. 45 (1981) – U.S.A. Home Video

This beautiful, blue big box is just begging me to take her home... except she's a bit too costly for my blood. I don't even own this movie on DVD (it would help if somebody would re-release it uncut on that format in this country), so it hurts doubly that I don't have this tape.

Vengeance (1980) – Magnum Entertainment

I used to see this one in the video store all the time. I never bothered to rent it, because it was in the action section and I wasn't really into those at the time. I was able to download the film, also known as Scream for Vengeance, but I haven't seen it yet. Perhaps I'm afraid that watching the film will tarnish the vivid mental picture that the glorious VHS art conjures.

Bay of Blood (1971) – Gorgon Video

I own Mario Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve (as I like to call it) on both Blu-ray and DVD, but I'm sure neither could compare with the thrill of owning this tape. The cover art is so delightfully extreme, and the ugly yellow/green backgrounds are the perfect match.

The Attic (1980) – Monterey Home Video

This is the best picture I could find of the rarest VHS release of this obscure drama-thriller. I don't feel that bad for not owning it, because I have the original poster with the same artwork. The film was later released by Key Video in a small box, and those tapes have their own appeal, but I just can't resist the lure of the big box.

Buried Alive (1979) – ThrillerVideo

Another ThrillerVideo tape (along with Make Them Die Slowly) that contained a movie so gruesome Elvira refused to host it. They really should have boasted that on the cover, but the reappearance of the giant WARNING does the job just fine. The film is actually Joe D'Amato's Beyond the Darkness (a masterpiece of violent Euro sleaze that I reviewed here), but when you're a VHS collector, or even just a lover of exploitation films, you get used to these retitlings.

7 Doors of Death (1981) – ThrillerVideo

Again with the retitlings. Lucio Fulci's The Beyond is even more nonsensical – if that's possible – in its U.S. theatrical cut. This is the way people saw the film until Grindhouse Releasing restored the original version and released it to theaters in 1998 and then to DVD. I've never come across this tape in a video store, but I would certainly buy it for the right price.

Savage Intruder (1970) – Unicorn Video

I haven't seen this movie (I did download it under the title Hollywood Horror House, but I have not watched it), but I want this tape for the cover art alone. It kind of reminds me of the artwork for Doctor Gore and Camp Video's VHS of The Thrill Killers (see below). It's supposed to be one of the rarest tapes around, so I don't think I will ever be lucky enough to own it. Today, it's hard to imagine video stores displaying artwork like this out in the open, but they did. Don't be misled, though. The movie itself is supposed to be a Baby Jane-esque thriller starring Miriam Hopkins in her last role, and it's probably not nearly as gory as the cover suggests.

The Thrill Killers (1964) – Camp Video

This is the best picture I could find of this big box tape, which I did rent once upon a time. I actually liked the film, and I still do. It's probably Ray Dennis Steckler's most accomplished feature, and it is pretty effective for the most part. Again, not as gory as the cover art, but, save for H.G. Lewis, this was pretty strong stuff for 1964 film. The DVD is well worth owning. I'd love to have the tape for old time's sake, but it's pretty hard to come by.

The Prowler (1981) – VCII

Again, sorry for the low quality picture, but I wanted to show the big box version of the VCII tape I rented as a kid. The small box is attractive and much more common, but the big box is really striking. The label on the tape itself is a giant sticker with the cover art on it! That alone makes this a must-own. I will never forget watching The Prowler for the first time and how scary and atmospheric it was. I own the Blu-ray now, and the atmosphere holds up (and the murder scenes are the best out of any slasher film), but now I find it somewhat boring. Still, there's something about this film that draws me to it. I suspect a lot of that has to do with renting this glorious tape.

Video Violence Part 2: The Exploitation! (1987) – Camp Video

The original Video Violence was my first experience with shot on video horror, and I'd never seen anything like it before. It actually disturbed me, even though it was cheesy and poorly acted, because it also seemed kind of real. When I finally got the chance to rent the sequel, after talking my mom into taking us the next town over to rent a garbage bag full of tapes, I was disappointed. Video Violence 2 is not at all like the first film. It's more clever, but I didn't realize that at the time. I have the DVD of both films, but holding the VHS in my hands would bring back memories. The cover art is great!

House on the Edge of the Park (1980) – Vestron Video

I already wrote about my love for this film in a previous entry, but I never once ran across this tape in a video store. The artwork, which is the same as the DVD, is so wonderful that I wouldn't mind owning a copy. As with many of these types of films (Sleepaway Camp immediately comes to mind), there are no pictures from the movie on the back cover, which used to creep me out.

Last House on the Left (1972) – Vestron Video

I already own the R-rated VHS that Vestron put out before, which I think is less common to find, but this is the one I rented when I first saw the movie a long time ago. Watching it was a truly memorable experience, because I'm not sure I'd ever seen such a gritty and raw film, except perhaps The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The Blu-ray is considerably sharper (at least as sharp as Last House can get) but VHS is the best way to watch this kind of film. I love the orange spine and back cover with the blurry picture of Jeramie Rain looking ferocious.

The Mutilator (1985) - Vestron Video

I could kick myself for selling this tape when I first got into DVD, because now it's worth a bit of money. I didn't like the film then, and I'm still not sure, but, as with The Prowler, there is something that draws you to it. The gore is pretty effective, too. Vestron released The Mutilator in Unrated and R-rated versions, but the Unrated tape is the only one for me.

Blood Couple (1973) – Video Gems

I didn't actually see this film until a couple of years ago under its original title Ganja & Hess. I wasn't sure how I felt about it at first, but the haunting atmosphere, music, and performances grabbed me, and I couldn't stop thinking about the film after it was over. Blood Couple is a different, and supposedly inferior, edit. I saw the tape for sale years ago, but never bothered to pick it up. If I knew then what I know now! I'd also like to buy the DVD, but it is out of print and worth a lot of money. Damn!

Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973) – Video Gems

Andy Warhol's Dracula (1974) – Video Gems

I've never seen either of these tapes around, but the cover art is gorgeous. Renting Andy Warhol's Frankenstein as a kid was another memorable experience, even though I was definitely too young to watch it. I hated it at the time because of the abundant sex (yeah, I was a weird kid). I didn't see Dracula until I was in high school, and I didn't care for it either. Now they're two of my all-time favorites. Go figure!

Prom Night (1980) – MCA and Virgin Vision

I love this movie so much that I've just got to have both tapes. The MCA VHS is pretty rare. I saw it for sale once in Pittsburgh, but I didn't buy it because the box was cut and it was kinda pricey. I hate cut boxes, and I refuse to buy tapes in that condition unless they are practically given away for free. The Virgin Vision tape is more common, and that's the one I rented the first time I saw the film. The decapitated head on the back cover really scared me!

Day of the Maniac (1974) – Super Video

This is another tape that I've never seen around, but the film, better known as All the Colors of the Dark starring the stunning cult actress Edwige Fenech, is one of my favorite gialli. The cover art is wonderfully misleading, making it look like a zombie film!

The Gruesome Twosome (1967) – Midnight Video

The Wizard of Gore (1970) – Midnight Video

The Gore Gore Girls (1974) – Midnight Video

These are three of H.G. Lewis' best films (The Gore Gore Girls being my personal favorite) and the big box tapes are very valuable because of the extraordinary artwork. I believe Continental also put out The Wizard of Gore.

I found the pictures for this post from various websites, including the wonderful Critical Condition and Basement of Ghoulish Decadence. Oh, and if anyone wants to sell me these tapes, by all means contact me.

Scans from Beyond #1: Burt Young

2011-10-16T13:51:00.000-07:00

Movie Review: 'House on the Edge of the Park' (1980)

2011-10-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

Ruggero Deodato's House on the Edge of the Park (1980) was one of my earliest excursions into the delightfully twisted world of sleazy, badly-dubbed, European sex thrillers. Often cited as a rip-off of The Last House on the Left, it's really more of a home invasion story, a genre I do not consider Last House to be a part of. I'm not even sure why I'm writing this, because it isn't easy to explain the ecstasy I experience from watching movies like this -- if they're good. And House on the Edge of the Park is very, very good. If it starred anyone but David Hess, the film would come off as extremely mean-spirited. But Hess is such a jovial villain in this film, chewing the scenery at every opportunity with Grand Guignol-style excess, that you can't help but love his character even while he's raping and mutilating beautiful women.

I suppose a big reason for that is the "good" characters are all shallow, rich bastards with almost no characterization whatsoever. Alex (Hess) and his slow-witted friend Ricky (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), two mechanics who are invited to a party in a mansion by a rich couple who need their car fixed in a hurry, are the only people in the film who are real. They constantly show their true colors after the party turns deadly and Hess humiliates and tortures the party-goers. Their personalities would make any sane person run screaming from the room, but when you hate the victims, what can you do except relate to the bad guys? Especially when they're as hilarious as David Hess is in this movie.

When I say that Hess's teeth-gnashing performance is over-the-top, that's not a criticism. I genuinely love this performance, and if I ran the Academy, he would have been nominated and won (and he would have won for his work in Last House, too). Hess is this movie, basically. He's running the show. The viewer begins to feel as if he, too, is being taken hostage by him.

Though I'd give House on the Edge of the Park a nearly perfect rating, it's a wildly uneven film in the sense that it is alternately humorous and intense. But it isn't the same hilarity that transpires in Last House. You aren't laughing at what's going on, you're laughing at Hess's priceless facial expressions and dialogue, and the Italians' other-worldly idea of reality. And yet, the violent scenes are so unbelievably tense -- a young girl is slashed several times with a straight razor while Alex looms over her, laughing maniacally -- that you almost feel bad for laughing. The sheer offensiveness of it all is enough to entertain you for weeks by just thinking about it.

A few things I love about House on the Edge of the Park:

Riz Ortolani's delicate theme song, "Sweetly", which plays repeatedly over the rape scenes.

Alex saying "Helllllooo, laaaady!" whenever he's about to assault a woman.

The mansion set with its fancy furniture, luxurious bathroom, and the giant picture of a model on the wall. I also really like their stereo, and I wish it was mine.

The amazing dance moves of Radice and Lorraine De Selle during the incredible disco number "Do It to Me" (one of my all-time favorite songs), which is played a few times in the first half of the movie.

The beautiful, bald black woman (lovingly nicknamed "Roots" by Alex) who expresses her enthusiasm during said disco number by shouting "Dig it!" and "Hot diggity!", and Alex's subsequent stares.

Roots's hoop earrings that make her look like Mr. Clean.

Lorraine De Selle's dubbing. And her dress. And her hair. And her makeup. I love that woman! Her presence is such a comfort in these sleazy Italian flicks.

Alex telling Lisa that when she drinks straight from a bottle she looks like she's giving it head. Her response? "And you look like you belong in a cage." The sexual tension between these two is tremendous!

The fact that the rape scenes are all very uneasy and disturbing, but the love scenes between Alex and Lisa are tender and erotic. It's an effective contradiction.

Alex's shocked reaction when, in a sudden outburst, Ricky tells him to shut up.

Alex's belly laugh as he pees on Howard after punching him out and throwing him in the pool.

Christian Borromeo's cute face getting bashed into a table over and over by Alex.

Alex calling the women cunts and twats, and telling Lisa she's a slut who "just can't get enough of that all-American stuff."

Alex sticking his hand down poor Cindy's pants and, in a shocked tone of voice, exclaiming, "She's a virgin!"

Alex regularly calling Tom a faggot and saying "Aw, the faggot's jeaaaalous!"

Alex's unexpected, realistic affection towards Ricky when he accidentally slashes him in the stomach with his razor.

The moronic (yet effective) twist ending.

Alex's reaction to being shot in the crotch.

Hey, Hey, He Was a Friend of Mine: A Conversation with David Hess (1942-2011)

2011-10-09T01:46:00.000-07:00

Some might be shocked to learn that the man who created such depraved, reprehensible characters as Krug Stillo (The Last House on the Left), Alex (House on the Edge of the Park), and Adam (Hitch-Hike) was actually a teddy bear. Music was his first love, and he was an accomplished musician, having written and performed the soundtrack for Last House, released a few of his own albums, and penned chart hits for other singers such as Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. He even directed what is perhaps the first Santa slasher film, To All a Goodnight. I became friends with David Hess on Facebook, a powerful tool for fans to network and interact with their favorite celebrities. Unlike many of them, David actually took the time to reply, and when I asked him if he would do an interview for my BlogTalkRadio show, "A Taste of Blood", he agreed. I knew from his other interviews that David wasn't the scary person he portrayed in movies, so I was not inordinately nervous while talking to him. He had a way of putting you at ease, and I immediately felt like I'd been talking to him for years.

Though I never met him in person, when I read that he died on October 7th at the age of 69, I felt a great sense of sadness. I felt like I'd lost a good friend, and I realized that David Hess was my friend -- not just on Facebook, but from his movies, too. He played rapists and murderers in his most famous films, and played them very well, but there was a likability beneath the surface. I believe that this was David's larger-than-life personality infusing the characters, and each of the films benefit greatly from his presence. I have transcribed the hour-long conversation we had on my show almost exactly a year ago, and I'm posting it here in tribute to him. I've cleaned it up and clarified a few things, and I edited it a little bit because it amounted to almost fourteen pages of dialogue, but I hope that David's spirit remains intact. He was wrong about one thing, though: This conversation was enlightening. Rest in peace, my friend.

Ryan Clark: Can you talk about how yougot started the music business?

David Hess: Well, I kinda grew up withmusic. My mom was an opera singer, and so she was constantly singingaround the house. She tells everybody that the first thing I ever saidwas “The Bronx Symphony”. Bronx, Bronx, Bronx... It was “Bronze” Iwas trying to say, but I called it “Bronx” because I lived in New York. You know, I guess from thereit’s always been a part of me. I tell people very seriously, although alittle tongue in cheek, “Don’t make me choose between making films and makingmusic, ‘cause you won’t get any films anymore.”

RC: (laughs) You’ve written popular songs for Elvis Presley and PatBoone. What would you say is your favorite song of the ones you’ve written? Your personal favorite?

DH: Of the hits? Of the early hits, you’re saying?

RC: Well, any song.

DH: Thatreally [runs the gamut], because I’ve done a lot of recordings myself, and alot of them have been hits overseas. Do you have Caught Up in theMoment? Were you able to get a hold of that CD? ‘Cause there’s one[song] that’s been recorded like crazy. It’s called “Vagabond”. You cango on my Myspace and download it; it’s there. But I don’t know, of theearly songs, I think “I Got Stung” for Presley. I loved “Daddy Rollin'Stone” which [The Who and Otis Blackwell] recorded, which was one of my firstsongs. Lemme see, what else. “Come Along”. Presley recordedthat, too. You know, I think it’s a misnomer. I think songwritersperhaps sing songs that they like a lot, and some songs that they perhaps justwrote for the money they don’t sing, but to say that you have a favorite... Ilike ‘em all. I do. The thing is that – as a songwriter, musician,whatever – you don’t learn this until you get into it a little bit; sometimesyou never learn it, but you can’t move on until you finish that song, ‘causeyou’re stuck on it. Now, you can try and write something else, but itdoesn’t necessarily work as well as it could work if you finish it. Ifyou kinda move on and say, “That’s it!” You know? You may come backto it later and rewrite some stuff, but at that point in time, you say,"It’s done. It’s ready to go." It’s very hard to move onunless you can say that to yourself. And I think that parallels raising afamily; doing a whole lot of things. You gotta throw the baby out withthe bathwater, so to speak, eventually.

RC: We have a caller! I might know who this is. You’re on the air.

Caller: Hi, my name is Ryan. I hada question about To All a Goodnight. I was wondering if you knew if there was ever going to be any DVD release, ‘causeI honestly consider it one of the most underrated Christmas movies of the80s. It’s absolutely fun, and there’s so many deaths in it. It’s socrazy how this is not on DVD right now!

DH: (laughs) No, I’ve often asked that question myself, because I know thewoman who owns it. Sandy Cobe originally produced it with [Media HomeEntertainment], and it’s gone through a whole bunch of iterations. I thinkthat MGM may have it now. I don’t know. I’d like to see itreleased; I think it’d be great. But it’s hard to get thingsreleased. You deal with the grey suits, and they’re all, “Bottom line,what are we gonna make on this?” They don’t care about thecreativity. But I’m glad you reminded me. People keep reminding meand asking me. As long as you keep reminding me, I’ll keep going to vouchfor it.

Caller: I was also wondering if theversion that was released by Media Entertainment back in the 80s was the uncutversion, or if there was something cut out of it.

DH: No, I don’t remember anything ever being cut out of it. You can still getit on VHS, although it’s rare.

Caller: I was also wondering if you everfelt at the time during the 80s that you felt like you were typecast as thistype of mean guy, and if it affected you in your career or personal life.

DH: I’ve always been kind of a violent person anyway. I played rugby; I wascaptain of the U.S. rugby team for a while. I like that physical contact, and Idid a lot of my own stunts. I think I typecast myself, perhaps. I’ma no-nonsense person. I don’t take any shit from anybody, and neverhave. I guess that kind of rubs off on people regardless of whether youtell people that or not. They kind of sense it. I’ve always feltthat Hollywood and the money machine takes the easy way out. They kind oftook the easy way out with me. But that’s okay, too, because it helped meto support a family and not end up homeless.

Caller: I just wanted to let you know Iabsolutely loved House on the Edge ofthe Park, because the host right now introduced me to the song “Do It to Me” [by Riz Ortolani]. It’s been in my head forever.

DH: (laughs) Is that wishful thinking or just the love of the song?

Caller: I love the movie, but that songbrings it over-the-top for me. And the bald-headed African Americanwoman [Marie Claude Joseph]. That sends it way over.

DH: She wasFrench, and she didn’t speak a word of English. During the downtime, Iused to tease the shit out of her in English, and she wouldn’t know what I wassaying. And I’m a bad tease, I’ll tell you. I can reallytease. So that was kind of fun.

RC: Thanks so much for calling in, Ryan. Those were some goodquestions. In fact, I was gonna bring up To All a Goodnight myself, butI’m glad he did so I didn’t have to. (laughs)

DH: Lucky you! I may have really gotten on your case about it, but him I wanted tobe polite with. I’m essentially a misanthrope. Can’t you tell?

RC: I guess so! (laughs) I’m sure you’ve talked about this before on the DVDof Last House on the Left, but howdid you get the role? Did you answer an audition?

DH: Well, it was kind of comical in a way. My sister was living with an actornamed Marty Kove, who subsequently went on to do a lot of films, but at thetime he did Savages, theMerchant-Ivory film, and they’d just finished filming it. He knew about [Last House], and he didn’t want to doit because the film was originally supposed to be a porno film. Wes[Craven] and Sean [Cunningham] were heavily into making pornos at that timejust to fund themselves so they could make their own movies. So [Marty] said, “Well,you gotta go up on this role, because it’s just a great role, it’s so right foryou.” And here I am, I’m writing music, and I’m captain of my rugby team,and I’m playing rugby. I’ve never been violent-violent, but I’m not aperson to mess with, never have been. It seemed just up my alley. I’m a big guy, and Marty said to me, “You’re not big enough.” I said,“What are you talking about?” He says, “No, you’re not big enough. This really calls for a big guy.” And this is in the middle of thefuckin’ summer, so he loads me up with these sweaters, and the last sweater isthis Irish knit which doesn’t breathe, ‘cause it’s waterproof. We jump inmy sister’s car and we’re driving through Manhattan with the windows open,because she doesn’t have any air conditioning and it’s ninety degrees out. I’m sweating, and I’m getting more pissed off by the moment, and the sweatersare itching, and I’m sweating, and we’re driving, and we’re not getting theresoon enough – the office was on 46^th[Street], between 5^thand 6^th [Avenues] – and finally, when we got there, I jumped out ofthe fucking car and ran helter skelter down the street. I went up, took the stepsthree at a time, busted through the office, and I said, "I'M DAVID HESS, NOW WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?!" And Wes and Sean are sittingthere; they don’t know what’s hit ‘em. The girl behind the desk ducksdown; she thinks I’m about to fire at her with a gun or something. Noanswer. “WHAT DO YOU WANT?! GODDAMMIT!” ‘Cause I’m reallypissed. And Wes comes up to me. “Wait a minute. Sean, come herewith me.” They walk into the other room, and I’m saying, “Oh Christ,they’re gonna call the cops on me. What did I do? I blew this wholething.” The girl’s not coming back from behind the desk. (laughs) And I’m pacing back and forth, and they come out, and Wes has this big smile onhis face, and he says, “You got the role.” “I GOT WHAT?! I GOT THE ROLE?! Oh, I got the role. Oh. Uh, oh,uh, I got the role? I got the role!” (laughs) And I’m goingon like this as they’re laughing their asses off, and my sister and Marty comebouncing up the stairs. He just set me up. You go in there and justbe as absolutely angry and as over-the-top as possible. And that’s theway that happened. For all you would-be actors out there that study likecrazy and do all your lines and everything like that: You don’t need todo that! You just have to go into an office and scream your head off andintimidate ‘em to the degree that they have to give you the role. Butdon’t forget to carry a pen with you.

RC: A friend of mine was wondering, because he’s a big fan of Nicholas Worthand you worked with him in Swamp Thing,if you had any stories about him, or any recollections of him, or LouisJourdan. I don’t remember if you had scenes with him or not.

DH: I did. I had a couple scenes with Louis, and Nicholas and I kinda workedtogether as a team on the film. Tragic, tragic, tragic. Nicholas diedyoung, was a wonderful actor, very wonderful person – just a sweetheart, Imean, just a real sweetheart. Here’s another guy who was totallytypecast. Could have done anything, and was a really good actor. Unfortunately he’s gone, so there’s nothing I can say except good luck whereveryou are, Nicky. You were a good guy.

RC: Do you have any stories from the set with him that you can remember?

DH: Well, we did that whole Abbott and Costello thing, and Wes only took about twoor three minutes of it. “Where’s Charlie? Oh, Charlie’s over therein the bushes!” “No, Charlie’s not in the bushes, he’s across thestreet!” We riffed on Abbott and Costello, when that scene was beingshot, for a good hour. They were rolling; guys had tears in their eyes;the camera operator had to stop because he was laughing so hard! Thecamera started to shake! It was funny. And we just kept going, youknow. This is a kind of an important thing, I think, to say: A lotof actors that are cast as heavies – and I have to consider myself one; Nicholas was one, too – are very funny people. I mean, they could almostdo stand-up comedy if you wanted them to, because they don’t take themselvesseriously, because when you’re doing a heavy, it’s not you. You’re reallyplaying the ultimate role that’s not you. Of course, you have to dig intoyour past or whatever it is that motivates you to be able to play that part,and play it as realistically as you can. But bottom line, it’s notyou. You don’t go out killing people. So being a heavy is the mostfun thing of all, because you don’t necessarily bring yourself to it.

RC: I must say you do a great job of it. You’re not that way,obviously. I know it.

DH: How do you know that?(laughs)

RC: I mean, I’ve seen interviews with you, and I know you’re a softie deepinside. You don’t wanna kill people! (laughs)

DH: Not unless I have to. (laughs)

RC: It is unfair that a lot of people see you in these movies – not just you, a lotof actors who play heavy type of roles – and they think you are thatcharacter. I know you’ve said about how people would look at you after Last House on the Left came out andthey’d cross the street, ‘cause they didn’t want to run into you. Andit’s not fair, because actors are actors, they’re not really that character, soI definitely understand what you mean by that.

DH: It’s a compliment in a way, Ryan, because it means you’ve really done your jobwell. So you can look at it from that point of view, too. Andbottom line is that when you’re an actor, you want the job. There’s no point in being an actor if you don’t havethe platform or ways to show your craft. As far as Louis Jourdan went [onSwamp Thing], that was a tragedy onthe set, because I think about a week before we were scheduled to film, his soncommitted suicide.

RC: That’s horrible! I didn’t know that.

DH: Yeah. So he was on the set and had to leave. I think they postponedthe funeral, because he really wanted to do the film. And I understandwhy; he wanted to get as far away from that tragedy as he could and try toclear his own head. That was a real tragedy.

RC: I could ask you about Last House on theLeft, but I think I’ll ask you about Houseon the Edge of the Park and Hitch-Hike,because there’s already been a lot said about Last House, and I know it’s an important movie – I love it; it’sone of my favorites – but there’s not as much said about Hitch-Hike and House on theEdge of the Park, and those are great Italian films. How did you getstarted working in Italy?

DH: They called me. They said, “Come over, we got a role for you.” Isaid, “Well, get in touch with my agent.” “No, we wanna talk toyou.” I said, “You better get in touch with my agent, unless you make mean offer I can’t refuse, literally.” They said, “Okay, we’ll pay you thismuch.” I said, “That’s not enough.” They said, “Well, how much isenough?” “Oh, this much.” “Okay, between that and what we offeredyou, we’ll split the difference.” “Fine,” I said, because that’s what Ifigured with the number, and I went. It was that simple. No agent,no nothing. And they gave me a piece of the action on the film. Ihad the sales for the United States, or part of the sales, I think it was 25percent. And guess what? Contrary to what most people tell youabout the Italians, how they withhold your money? No. They gave meeverything that they owed me. They were very honest. Very, veryhonest. So I had nothing but good experiences there. And of course,Hitch-Hike was with Franco Nero andCorinne Clery, and it was after I’d done a film called 21 Hours at Munich where I played Berger. He was a wrestlerfor the Columbia wrestling team. He usedto work out at the same gym that I worked out in when I was playing rugby, sothat was kind of a strange situation because the Israelis all got shot. He was the only American on the Israeli wrestling team. And Franco [Nero]saw my acting. He says, “You wanna do this film with me?” I said,“Sure, why not? Let’s do it together.” He says, “This is thestory. Here’s the script.” I read the script; I loved every minuteof it, and I guess, if truth be told, I was on this quest, unbeknownst to me,but somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious, studying what socio-pathologyis all about. What is it like to be a sociopath? What do youfeel? So all three films have that kind of overview, and then, of course,I went on to do other films. None of them really fit into that mold, perse. People have started calling that the trilogy, and I guess it is, in away. At least, my trilogy.

RC: But there’s differences in all three of those characters that you played. They’re not the same character at all, even though they’re all violent people.

DH: There are parallels in the characters, but they’re not the same circumstances.

RC: And I love all of them, but I have to say Hitch-Hike in particular is a very underrated gem of a movie. It’s just a wonderful movie and I think more people should see that one.

DH: Well, thank you. It’s a classy movie. It was made by a very classydirector, Pasquale Festa Campanile, who is an intellectual who [was nominated for an Oscar] for writing. He was head of the literary department atthe University of Bologna, and there was another tragedy, he died very early.

RC: That is a shame, but it’s not surprising that he was an intellectual. Youcan see it in the movie; it’s not just another exploitation movie. There’s nothing wrong with exploitation movies, but there’s somethingmore there in that film in particular. I think it’s very important topoint that out.

DH: I think he did try. Anybody that has a sense of self and a sense of world wants to exploreit. What are we all about, if not finding out about ourselves? Youwonder. It’s a lifelong struggle to find out what you’re all about.

RC: Back to Last House on the Left. Tell us about writing the music for that film. It’s a really interestingsoundtrack, because it definitely contrasts what is going on in themovie. It’s not traditional horror movie music.

DH: Well, it was intentional. That’s what I said I wanted to do when Wesasked me if I wanted to write the score. It came at the same time that Igot the role. Two seconds later: “Will you write the score?” “Yeah, sure.” I think he was more aware of my music than he probably wasabout my acting abilities, ‘cause he didn’t really see them until we were onthe set, but he knew about my music. And I told him, when we sat down andtalked about it. I said, “If you want me to do a traditional score, I’mnot gonna do that. I want thematic material, I want songs, I want stuffthat counterpoints what’s going on on the screen, ‘cause as a musician, Ireally wanna twist the knife in, to the visual. So if you like that idea,then hey, we’ll go for it. If not, then maybe you need to get someoneelse to write the score.” “No, no, no, no, no! I like thatidea! Let’s do it.”

RC: That’s a good thing, because it’s really a remarkable score.

DH: I wouldn’t say that it was easy to come by, ‘cause there’s nothing that’s evereasy to come by, but it was natural to come by, given the permission to do whatI wanted to do. And luckily, that’s what happened.

RC: Were you ever approached at the time to release the soundtrack?

DH: I was with Epic Records at the time and they dropped me because of thefilm. Not only did my record company drop me, but my agent dropped mealso. It was such an unconventional film; contrary to whatthey were used to seeing. It upset a lot of people.

RC: There had never been anything like that before. I can’t think of anothermovie before Last House on the Leftthat had that raw, gritty, violent feel to it. Texas Chainsaw Massacre did, but thatcame later.

DH: Right. Well, they kinda faulted me for it, Ryan. They faulted me,being the lead actor, I guess. I don’t think that’s my imagination. Maybe they wondered how much of what I was doing was the real me or how much ofit was acting. Of course, you bring yourself to a role, but the bottomline is that wasn’t me. It was an acting job.

RC: On one hand, as you mentioned, it could be a compliment that they took it soseriously, because you did such a great job of turning yourself into thismonster, but on the other hand, it can probably be very frustrating to betypecast as that type of character, because people think that’s who you are andyou’re not.

DH: It’s a strange phenomenon, because that film obviously changed the course of mycareer in many respects, but having said that, women – and I say “women” as awhole; I mean, maybe there’s some that don’t – but they can’t help but likeKrug somehow. And they all tell me that. “Gee, we really likedhim!” “We hated him!” “But we liked him!” “We hatedhim!” “But we liked him!” That’s a bit schizophrenic, isn’t it? Yeah, you’re not supposed to like that character.

RC:(laughs) You know, on the surface though, I can understand whythey said that. While he’s not a likable character, there is stillsomething you put into all three of those characters in the “trilogy” that kindof make them likable even though they are despicable characters. Krughaving the scene where they’re remorseful for what they did for a moment andlittle things throughout the movie, and Alex in House on the Edge of the Park is a scary character, but he’s kindof goofy at times and likable in small moments. Not thinking about whathe’s doing, you know, cutting people up and everything.

DH: None of them do. That’s the whole thing. It’s even more than nottaking responsibility: It’s not being able to take ownership because youreally don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. You’re living your lifethe way you should live it, and, “Oh my god, I’ve just killed somebody, butokay.”

RC: They get caught up in it.

DH: It’s not an issue. And I think that’s the frightening thing.

RC: Speaking of being frightened, there’s the famous story of Sandra Cassell beingscared of you on the set [of Last House]. Do you think she was justified in being frightened? Were you really intoyour character so much that she would be terrified of you?

DH: Yeah. I think I picked on her a little bit. I mean, notintentionally, but I had this feeling that I had to keep her on her toes,because there was just so much of what that film was about that really hingedon her being totally frightened, that if I broke character, it would causesomething different. I don’t know whether that is true or not, but at thetime I felt that I had to stay in character. So yeah, I was really meanto her.

RC: On one hand, I hope you didn’t scar her for life, but on the other hand, it wasvery effective for the movie, because she was so believable as this frightenedlittle girl in the movie.

DH: She was wonderful. Totally wonderful.

RC: I think everybody in themovie – well, maybe except for the parents, but they’re not that bad, I’ve seenworse (laugh) – is just fantastic. So itreally worked.

DH: Well, you don’t know it until afterwards. And even then you’re not sure,but I guess that’s true, that it did work. The ensemble in that film justsomehow created magic. And it was allowed to happen, and many times whenyou’re on a set, it’s not allowed to happen. There will be controlissues: The director will want everything done exactly the way he wantsit; the writer, "Don’t change a line"; the producer, "We need you to do therole this way, that’s what you were cast for", you know? None ofthat happened.

RC: This is something that’s been brought up a lot when this film is discussed onthe Internet, but I just wanted to get your opinion about it. The film,while it’s often hailed as a classic – which it is – it’s also sometimescriticized for the comedic scenes, and I wanted to get your opinion about thosescenes. Do you think they work in the movie, or do they break off thescary quality of it? What’s your take on that?

DH: Oh, I think if you didn’t have them, the audience would be pulling their hairout. They’d be screaming. The film ratchets up the tension so muchthat you need a break. The comic relief – and it was dumb, stupidslapstick, essentially – breaks that tension. I think if it had been anyslicker, then it wouldn’t have had the same effect.

RC: I’ve always defended this movie when people say that the comedic scenes ruinit, because I think there’s something charming in those scenes. Like yousaid, it helps to ease the tension. I think without those scenes, itwould just be too grim. It would not be as watchable. I don’t mindit. I think it’s very enjoyable; it’s all part of the experience.

DH: It absolutely is. I don’t know how much you can call the movie itself aslice of life; I’m sure that’s what we all had in mind, even though we may nothave thought it at the time. But there are buffoons that live in ourworld, and there are people that are totally inept. I mean, the wholePeter Principle was based on that, you know? You rise to the level ofyour ineptitude. And that came out about the same time. So it makessense that there are people that can’t get it done.

RC: You know about the Video Nasties in the U.K., and Last House had quite a bit of trouble back then when it wasreleased on video there. What’s your take on that? It was a verytroubling time [for films] in the U.K.

DH: I didn’t expend too much emotional energy on that. I went to Europeshortly thereafter and did a lot of work there, and the film was alwaysbubbling under and hanging around, and it never let go. I knew that therewas something about it that was really special, so I didn’t waste any energy onwondering why it wasn’t getting a release in the U.K. I figuredeventually it would, and if it didn’t, then they would get it some otherway. That didn’t alter my performance or anything; that just meant thatthere were some people in the U.K. that were pretty stupid about their ideas ofwhat moviemaking was all about.

RC: As much as I hate censorship, I also believe that without censorship, a lot ofthe things that are remembered through the years would not be asremembered. Last House mightstill be known, but if it hadn’t had all these problems – not just Last House, but any film that’scontroversial -- maybe its legacy wouldn’t be as strong.

DH: You keep using the word “problems”. Would you call them problems? They’re not problems; they’re just challenges. The film doesn’t have theproblem; it’s the people that are looking at the film, that are passingjudgment on it, that are sitting in positions of power, so to speak, and they’rethe ones that are calling the shots. It doesn’t affect the film. Itaffects the time.

RC: The reason I kept saying the film has “problems”: I’m seeing it in termsof the potential audience not being able to see the film the way it wasoriginally intended. I don’t mean the film itself has problems. Imeant there are problems with people being able to see it. But you’reright. Now you can see whatever you want, mostly. So it all worksout.

DH: Incidentally, I happen to agree with you when it comes to censorship. Ithink that censorship in the hands of wrong people is a burden that we reallydon’t need. But I think that if it’s treated justly, which I think itprobably is by most people, then it’s okay, because there are things that wedon’t want, for instance, our kids particularly to be exposed to, at least at acertain age. You know, there are a whole lot of things where censorshipcan be a good thing, but it should be a collective decision, not one person’sdecision.

RC: I don’t condone censorship at all. I agree with you that kids should notsee certain things, but I think that’s really up to the parents. And ifthey can’t do it, then... I don’t know. I just think it’s the parents’responsibility.

DH: And look at the parents that you have, just even in our country alone. Look at ‘em.

RC: I agree with you. It’s terrible—

DH: What are you talkingabout? This fuckin’ country is falling apart when it comes toparenting. Falling apart! The parents are dumber than theirkids! What do we expect? We got a bunch of dumb parents out therethat are waving the fundamentalist flag every single chance they get. Iget really pissed off when I see that, because a kid doesn’t have any way tofight back. What can they do? Leave the house at three?

RC: It’s a very unfortunate situation.

DH: Do you have any kids,Ryan?

RC: Oh, no. Well, I’m gay – I’m not saying I couldn’t have kids, but I’m notinterested in having kids. I see what you mean, but I also think thatkids being exposed to certain things doesn’t always turn out bad. Forexample, I was pretty young when I saw Last House on the Left. I wasabout eleven, I think. I know some people have probably seen it youngerthan that. And I’m not going out and killing people, even though otherkids would always make fun of me and say, “Oh, you’re gonna grow up to become aserial killer ‘cause you watch these movies.” And I haven’t. (laughs) It depends on the people. Certain children can deal withthings better than others, I think. I was watching movies harder than Last House on the Left. I wasjust interested in it. I wasn’t going out and doing it, obviously.

DH: You’re probably interested in what they have to say. There’s noquestion that it’s a very wide-open area of filmmaking, cult films. Youmay call them exploitive, but you can also say whatever you want to say withinthe context of a horror film, a slasher, an action-thriller, whatever. You get a much better sense of reality, of truism, by the words that peoplespeak. That’s what I like more than anything. Speaking of which,did you see the post I put up [on Facebook]? You did, didn’t you?

RC: About the bullying?

DH: About the gay kids that are committing suicide. I can’t stand that! My god!

RC: Yes, I did see that post. Thank you so much for writing that. That was a great post, and I totally agree with you. It’sridiculous, the situation that we’re in right now in this country. And Iwish it could stop, but it probably won’t because people are just stupid, Ithink. (laughs)

DH: You’re right. That’s a whole area that’s gonna take a while, because mostof the country’s been brainwashed to such a degree that now they have to beunbrainwashed, and that can take just as long. I mean, that poorkid! What, jumping off a bridge? ‘Cause he’s...?

RC: It really disgusts me.

DH: That so disturbed me. But not just that. The idea that there’s thispercentage – and a good percentage of the population – that can’t get past theidea that women are sleeping with women and men are sleeping with men. "That’s not supposed to happen." Well, who says that? Who? Imean, where did this happen? What law? The church? This is “theword of god”? Go fuck yourself, “the word of god”! God has noopinions.

RC: I’m not religious at all, but I understand that even people who aren’treligious can still have those ideas in the back of their mind thathomosexuality is a sin and all this stuff, because we’re so brainwashed tobelieve it, and we can’t think for ourselves. Sometimes I find myselfthinking about religious things that I don’t believe in – like “heaven”, thatsomebody who died is up in heaven, or something. I don’t believe that,but I still think about it, because I’ve been brainwashed.

DH: Why not? They may be in a better place. It may not be the way it’sdescribed.

RC: I don’t claim to know what the truth is, but I don’t want people telling mewhat they think the truth is, and forcing me to believe that. I’d ratherjust see what happens instead of believing something that might not be true.

DH: That’s presupposition, which I resent also. Their minds are made up beforethey even get into the situation, just because this is what they expect toexperience based on past knowledge, which they don’t have anyway. It’s amess.

RC: It’s a horrible thing we’re all in, and who knows when it will change. I’m sure it’ll change eventually, but it’ll take some time.

DH: Things are a lot different in the rest of the world. I think we lagbehind the rest of the world in terms of accepting individuals for who theyare, not for what we think they are. We have a very puritanical conceptof humanity, and that doesn’t surprise me because this country was settled bythe Puritans. So why should it be a surprise? It shouldn’t.

RC: It’s not surprising if you look at history, but so many things havechanged that you just want everything that annoys you to change, and it’s veryfrustrating when we’re just stuck here in this position, and there are allthese closed-minded people around.

DH: Well, you change what you can change, and what you can’t change, be smartenough to know that you can’t change it.

RC: (laughs) Exactly.

DH: I’m gonna run, Ryan. It’s been really great talking to you. It’s alot of fun, and I’m glad we opened up the conversation to some other things.

RC: Before you leave, is there anything you want to plug or promote that you wantpeople to know?

DH: I’m doing a newalbum. I have no idea what it’s gonna be called, but hopefully it’ll bebetter than the last one. I think it is, but there again, I’m in themiddle of it so I can’t really say. I’m doing a film also next year withmy oldest son, Jesse, that my partner and I essentially wrote for him, but it’snot just based on him, it’s based on a couple of other things. I’ll begoing to Rock and Shock this coming weekend, and I’ll be at Cinema Wastelandnext year, in April, and I’m gonna try to do four or five conventions a year sothat I can get out there and say hello to people. And then RuggeroDeodato and I are doing another film, and on and on and on. Just keepworking, that’s all. Just keep working! Bottom line is I just wantto keep working and having fun. ‘Cause I’m having a lot of fun at thispoint.

RC: Thank you so much. This has been an honor to talk to you, really. I’m just such a fan, and it’s been enlightening.

DH: I don’t know how enlightening it’s been, but thank you for having me, ‘causeit’s always fun to talk to somebody who’s got intelligent questions and who’sthoughtful.

RC: Aw, thank you. I appreciate that so much. It’s been great.

DH: All right, talk to you soon, hopefully.

RC: Okay, I’ll keep in touch. Thank you!

DH: ‘Bye.

RC: ‘Bye, David.

Goodbye, David.

How can you watch that stuff?

2011-10-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

"John!"

Author John Kenneth Muir wrote an entry on his blog yesterday entitled "The Blackboard Boogeymen: Your Horror Film High School Curriculum". It's a fascinating piece in which he makes a solid argument that horror films, and especially high school horror films, are socially valuable and even enlightening to our society; the genre's detractors would scoff at such a thought. Of particular interest to me were the first few paragraphs, because Muir describes the most common exchange horror fans must deal with. He writes:

I get asked all the time – particularly when I discuss my admiration for Wes Craven's The Last House on The Left (1972) – how I can "defend" such gruesome, explicit and upsetting horror movies.

In particular, people comment that I seem like such a "nice guy" to watch that sort of stuff, the inference being that because I like and enjoy horror movies, I'm somehow unbalanced, or that my public persona hides a darker, more sinister facet.
My by-now-rote answer to this interrogative goes to the very core of the genre: horror movies are socially valuable, socially responsible and yes, socially necessary because – at their very finest – they examine aspects of our culture that mainstream dramas do not. A really good horror movie can go to places where non-genre movies fear to tread.
Horror movies are not afraid to transgress, break decorum, and shatter taboos so as to really get at new, provocative and meaningful truths about violence, war, race relations and other forbidden topics. In other words, the great horror films contextualize our world, our culture, our leadership, our politics, and our national fears in an illuminating, imaginative and wholly entertaining fashion.

I'm tempted to quote the above in the future whenever someone looks down on me for liking horror films. I don't think I've read a better explanation of their appeal, at least for people who enjoy these films for more than simply getting off on violence. I've been a horror fanatic ever since I first saw The Ghost of Frankenstein as a young child, and through the years I have had to deal with all manner of condescension; in elementary school, I got in trouble for telling my friends about the horror films I watched, because one of the parents complained that their child was having nightmares. My "friends" insisted that I was going to be a serial killer because I talked about Halloween too much. My family has always derided me about my enthusiasm for the genre. It never seems to end, and I wasn't able to sufficiently justify my obsession until now, so thanks to John Kenneth Muir for expressing what I never could. The reason the horror genre is so disreputable is that it lays bare all of the things most people try to avoid – pain, humiliation, despair, death, and the ultimate masochistic inclination, hypocrisy. People use their squeamishness to deny the power of the horror film, but I think they secretly love it.

DVD Review: 'Herschell Gordon Lewis -- The Godfather of Gore' (2010) Documentary

2011-10-04T03:02:00.000-07:00

All things have a beginning, and for the gore film that beginning was Blood Feast. It came out at a time when such films were not being made. The director, Herschell Gordon Lewis, is fond of saying the film is like a Walt Whitman poem: "It was no good, but it was the first of its kind". If Lewis and producer David F. Friedman hadn't thought of it first, someone else would have. The Curse of Frankenstein and Psycho pushed the boundaries of on-screen violence, and Blood Feast was the next logical step. It is, of course, a very tame and silly film these days, primarily because of the crude special effects and wretched acting, but it has a certain magic that, when viewed in the right frame of mind, can transport you back to a time when illusion was so facile. I'm still shocked that I showed the theatrical trailer during a presentation on Lewis in my high school speech class. I don't know how I got away with that one, even in today's desensitized climate.

Lewis is a difficult director to appreciate unless you, as a viewer, are willing to take everything that makes a movie good (competent acting, direction, sound, cinematography, and set design), as well as the entire notion of film as an art, and chuck them out the window. I never rate Lewis's films on the same level as so-called "normal" films, because they simply are not like other films. They are, along with all of the films released under the Something Weird Video label, entirely in a realm of their own.

There have been a couple of books written about Lewis, including the essential, albeit brief, Godfather of Gore by Randy Palmer, and Lewis graciously provided informative audio commentaries on nearly every DVD of his films, but never has a full-length documentary been attempted. Director Frank Henenlotter (world-famous for his cult classics such as Basket Case and Frankenhooker), in collaboration with producer/director Jimmy Maslon, has lovingly assembled this tribute to the man who inspired him to make films. Considering Henenlotter's work with Something Weird Video and his massive collection of obscure B-movies and loops that very few would have thought to save, there is no better man for the job.

Lewis himself is a warm, affable, extremely well-spoken fellow who never seems to run out of amusing stories from his filmmaking days. It's not surprising that the man who thinks film should be a purely financial endeavor would later make his fortune as the king of direct mail (a more polite term for "junk mail") after leaving the film business in the early 70s. The Gore Gore Girls, his last feature until he returned decades later to make Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, is perhaps his only "good" film, and it's my personal favorite. There is a low-rent competency at work in The Gore Gore Girls that his previous films lacked, most of the jokes are actually funny, and the acting from the leads is surprisingly decent.

Despite this end-of-career surge of production value, Lewis made many films that are downright painful to watch (see How to Make a Doll and Miss Nymphet's Zap-In -- or don't!), and Henenlotter's documentary tries to explain what it is about these movies that make them so damn appealing all these years later, even when they aren't any good. For the most part he succeeds, but I'm not sure you'll be won over if you aren't already a fan of H.G. Lewis. It turns out that the staying power of his films was purely an accident, and nobody involved thought these films would ever see the light of day after a couple of weeks at the drive-in. From "nudie cuties" and nudist camps to hardcore gore, feminist biker gangs, teenage destruction, and Colonel Sanders (!), nearly all of Lewis's career is covered, and many of the films that aren't -- another genre he and Friedman pioneered, the "roughie", is skipped over entirely in the actual documentary -- are included in over an hour's worth of deleted scenes.

The documentary features interviews with a number of the cast and crew of Lewis's films, including Mal Arnold (Fuad Ramses from Blood Feast), Ray Sager (The Wizard of Gore), and the late David F. Friedman; genre scholars and Lewis devotees Joe Bob Briggs and John Waters (who was among the first to champion Lewis and interviewed him for his classic book Shock Value); and it even contains a re-enactment of the opening scene of Two Thousand Maniacs in St. Cloud, Florida and a visit to the hotel they used as a location, both of which seem untouched by time. There are also scenes from an incomplete film called Eye for an Eye, and believe me, perhaps we're better off. The most charming thing about Lewis and pretty much everyone involved with his films is that they have a sense of humor about their product. Most of them readily admit that these films never aspired to be anything more than a fast buck. This documentary, however, is a stunning achievement. Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore stands out among all the genre documentaries that have been cropping up in the last few years, because it focuses on a compelling subject with a strong life story.

Buy it at Amazon.

And while you're at it, pick up Lewis's The Blood Trilogy (Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs, and Color Me Blood Red) and Henenlotter's Basket Case, newly released on Blu-ray in stunning hi-def!

Top Ten Favorite H.G. Lewis Films:

1. The Gore Gore Girls
2. The Wizard of Gore
3. The Gruesome Twosome
4. Something Weird
5. Blood Feast
6. The Alley Tramp
7. She-Devils on Wheels
8. Color Me Blood Red
9. Two Thousand Maniacs
10. A Taste of Blood

Disturbing Moments in Film #3

2011-08-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)

Watch this scene.

Bitches & Bastards, Pt. 1

2011-08-16T12:24:00.000-07:00

Few things in cinema are better than a good villain. "Good villain" sounds like a contradiction, but in a way the best movie villains are alternative heroes. You root for them when: 1) the actual hero is too boring, 2) you're in a bitchy mood, 3) they're just too cool for their own good, or 4) all of the above. What makes a good villain? Why are some cinematic bitches and bastards so damn endearing? It's hard to quantify, but it helps when the actor (or writer) is thoughtful enough to give the character sympathetic qualities. If we can see why a character behaves the way they do, we can forgive their actions in a sense. Of course, not all villains are sympathetic. Some are just assholes. We can still find room in our hearts for these characters, because the actors are skilled enough to give even an irredeemably evil person perverse charm.

To celebrate these scoundrels, I'm counting down my top ten favorite bitches and bastards from the movies. I'm doing this in two separate posts. This is not meant to be one of those definitive lists compiled by god-knows-who to represent popular opinion. No, this blog represents my opinion, and if I like a bitch, I'm gonna write about her even if she didn't really do anything that terrible. Also, there are some spoilers, so feel free to skip a passage if you haven't seen the film.

First, make way for the bitches:

10. WILMA "BILLIE" NORTHRUP (ADRIENNE BARBEAU) – CREEPSHOW

Wilma – oops, I'm sorry, Billie! – didn't really deserve her fate. True, she tormented her husband mercilessly and embarrassed him at dinner parties, but we never got her side of the story. Perhaps there was a reason for her animosity towards Henry. Maybe he snored. We'll never know, because Billie has long been digested. Henry is probably fantasizing about shooting his new wife and hoping to discover another mysterious crate beneath the steps of Carnegie Mellon University.

9. CONCHA (BLANCA GUERRA) – SANTA SANGRE

And you thought Mrs. Bates was bad. Poor Concha's arms were chopped off by her cheating husband because she poured acid on his genitals, so she forces her son to be her arms and uses them to kill any woman she feels threatened by. Typical mother-son relationship. Did I mention they're a family of circus performers?

8. JUDY (KAREN FIELDS) – SLEEPAWAY CAMP

Judy is a classic high school bitch, only ten times more snotty, and she has the best insults: "She's a real carpenter's dream. Flat as a board and needs a screw!" Yet, the reason for Judy's unnecessary bitchiness remains a mystery. Perhaps her home life wasn't the best. Her character is somewhat unresolved, and while watching Sleepaway Camp one yearns for more of her. We never do find out if she survived, though sources tell me Judy is back and out for revenge.

7. CLEOPATRA (OLGA BACLANOVA) – FREAKS

Yet another tale of circus vengeance. Trapeze artist Cleopatra got what she deserved because she violated rule numero uno: You don't mess with sideshow performers. You just don't. The conclusion of Freaks is all the more terrifying because you only see the aftermath of their entirely reasonable revenge. Cleopatra continued to entertain audiences for many years, although her status as a human was questionable.

6. PAMELA VOORHEES (BETSY PALMER) – FRIDAY THE 13TH

Mrs. Voorhees' inclusion as a bona-fide, big-screen bitch is debatable, but Palmer's intense, teeth-gnashing performance needs no justification. Pamela was one of the few homicidal maniacs who could win the Mother of the Year award.

5. ANNIE WILKES (KATHY BATES) – MISERY

Like Mrs. Voorhees, many of the best bitches are ambiguous. Sure, Annie broke a couple of ankles, hit a man on the groin with a ream of paper, and shot the sheriff (Bob Marley eliminated the word "cockadoodie" from the song), but she wasn't trying to do anything but nurse her favorite writer back to health and urge him to write the be-all and end-all of Misery Chastain novels. Annie was proof that bitches make sacrifices, too.

4. BARB (MARGOT KIDDER) – BLACK CHRISTMAS

Okay, Barb's probably the least villainous woman on this list next to Creepshow's Billie. She wasn't really a bitch; she was just a lush. She had every reason to be, considering she was asthmatic and her gold-plated whore mother ditched her on Christmas. And let's face it, she was the most talented resident of Phi Kappa Sigma (beside Mrs. MacHenry of the MacHenry Sisters of Vaudeville, of course): She could spot an amateur obscene phone caller a mile away.

3. WENDY (EDDIE BENTON) – PROM NIGHT

One could make the argument that Wendy was a poor man's Chris Hargenson, but she had her own charms. Her snarky attitude was just perfect. And while her revenge was rather lame (briefly kidnap the prom queen so she can wear the crown on stage – come on, Wendy, you can do better than that!), she did gain a couple of sympathy points by telling her Neanderthal date Lou that she didn't want to hurt anybody in the process. She also had the best (and most famous) line in the movie: "It's not who you go with, honey. It's who takes you home."

2. LILA LOOMIS (VERA MILES) – PSYCHO II

This is a rare case of a movie character becoming a bitch gradually rather than being born into it, making her perhaps the most fascinating character on my list. In the original Psycho, Lila was a concerned, forceful young woman searching for her sister. By the time Psycho II rolled around, she had turned into a quite a bitter lady and rightly so. Her intentions were good – trying to keep a homicidal maniac institutionalized – but she went about it all wrong and her mission backfired. Coercing her daughter into helping her make Norman Bates crazy again was a really bitchy thing to do.

1. CHRIS HARGENSEN (NANCY ALLEN) – CARRIE

Did you really think my #1 bitch could be anyone else? I'll make no bones about it: Chris was a grade-A cunt. Inadvertently killing off her entire class via the telekinetic Carrie, she's also arguably the deadliest bitch on my list. Yet, I'm convinced there was a softer side to Chris. At first glance, she was a typical high school twat, but Nancy Allen has stated that she always thought Chris was just misunderstood. You can see it in the scene when Miss Collins asks her who she's taking to the prom, and Chris looks at her in an almost innocent way and answers, "Billy Nolan", before having to repeat herself two times. No wonder she brings out the attitude! When Chris rebels during detention and tells Miss Collins to stick the final ten minutes up her ass, she cuts herself short and looks rather frightened when Miss Collins walks up to her and gives her a slap. It's a very thoughtful performance from Ms. Allen, and I wish Chris had at least one more scene before being incinerated.

A Blogger's Crisis of Faith

2011-08-02T23:34:00.000-07:00

This is the quite semi-serious post where I take time off from writing about movies (of course, I post so infrequently that one could argue I've been taking time off for weeks) to question my desire to have a blog. I probably shouldn't even be posting this here -- why divulge the extent of my neuroses? -- but, fuck it, there's nothing else I want to write about. At least I'm writing... right?

I've never considered deleting this blog, because, well, what's the point in that? I'd rather have a blog that I occasionally update when I'm not sitting here thinking about writing instead of doing it (which is about 98% of the time) than not have one at all. Then I look around at all the other blogs; the ones with better writers, better topics, better everything, and I ask myself why I bother. The lack of comments, for one thing, is very discouraging. Not that I'm begging people to comment on my posts or anything. 'Cause I'm not. Nope.

Writing a successful blog is a long, uphill battle with lots of steep slopes (much like my stats page) before you get to the top. Maybe I'm just not willing to put that much effort into it. It's too much work to keep those fingers moving! But that doesn't mean I don't get the urge now and then.

Movie Review: 'Deadly Blessing' (1981)

2011-07-15T11:05:00.001-07:00

No, not the one with that goofy robot and reanimated Kristy Swanson throwing a basketball at Anne Ramsey's head. That's Deadly Friend. I'm talking about Deadly Blessing, the 1981 thriller about three girls living in a house near a Hittite community that thinks the girls have a direct line to Satan because they drive cars and wear negligees. What exactly are Hittites? Well, it's a group that once existed in the Bronze Age, but in the movie they are basically portrayed as Amish people, except they're really, really mean.

I seriously don't understand the lack of love for this movie. Through the years, all I've read are mediocre-to-poor reviews, but Deadly Blessing is far better than people give it credit for. Sure, some of the goings-on don't exactly make sense, and it looks like a TV movie, and the middle portion drags a bit, but Ernest Borgnine and Lois Nettleton are awesome in peripheral, sort-of-important-but-not-really roles, and the scares are effective because the filmmakers weren't afraid to get surreal with the imagery. There's a memorable bathtub scene that rivals the one in Cronenberg's Shivers and foreshadows the more famous one in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

"Wes, can I close my legs now?"

One also gets the sense that, despite the fact that this obscure movie must not be one of Wes Craven's favorites, the depiction of family battles among the Hittite community in Deadly Blessing is a reflection of Craven's relationship with his own mother, who was a strict Baptist and kept her son from watching movies until he went off to college. As told by Jason Zinoman in the excellent new book "Shock Value", Craven rebelled by doing things his mother would not approve of, including directing porn films and The Last House on the Left, which was successful enough to allow him to continue making horror films (and just so happened to revolutionize the genre at the same time). His mother refused to see any of the films her son made until his first and only non-horror movie, Music of the Heart, in 1999. I'm not saying that Deadly Blessing is a deeply personal film or anything -- in fact, I'm pretty sure the producers just wanted to make another slasher film (they were awfully popular in 1981), but it turned out to be more interesting than I think anyone anticipated.

"You shall not associate with Patti Simcox. Rizzo said so."

I've seen a lot of horror films, so if I tell you this film has scenes that made my eyes bug out, that really means something. There's the aforementioned snake-in-the-bathtub scene, and there's a scene where a spider drops into Sharon Stone's open mouth (apparently they used a real spider – ew!). The ending, which you can tell was tacked on by producers, is completely awesome in a random sort of way. And, perhaps most disturbing of all, I realized that one of the male leads looks like Jack Lemmon; I was convinced they must be related, but there seems to be no connection.

That face does not belong on a young body!

A lot of people shit on Deadly Blessing, but it's actually one of Wes Craven's best movies, so just see it. If you can. 'Cause, you know, it's not on DVD in the U.S. I have no idea why Deadly Friend got a DVD release years ago, but Deadly Blessing has not. The world is more fucked up than I thought.


"I can't wait to be famous!"

If I concentrate hard enough, I can move things.

2011-07-13T22:47:00.000-07:00

Today I created a Facebook fan page for a book about the making of Brian De Palma's Carrie. Now, you may be asking yourself why I've created a fan page for a book that doesn't exist yet, and probably won't exist for quite some time. There are several reasons – first of all, I'm convinced that Facebook can be an excellent tool to generate interest if you use it correctly. I can't say I'm highly experienced at this, but I'm certainly going to try. Having a group of people who want this book to be published will motivate me to keep going until I am able to finish it. It could also help when I'm trying to get a book deal, and I like the idea of allowing fans of the film to sound off on what they would like to read and see in such a book.

I've waxed rhapsodic about Carrie several times on this blog, and I want to put my enthusiasm to work in documenting the production. Carrie was made 35 years ago, and not having been present on the set (nor even being born at that time) poses a great difficulty in reconstructing what went on behind-the-scenes, but I will form a story through interviews with most of the people involved. I already have a couple of people who are interested in being interviewed, so I'm on my way!

If anyone reading this has any leads as to how to get in touch with anyone involved in the making of Carrie, please contact me through the fan page or through my regular Facebook page. Many of the bit players and crew members seem to have vanished off the face of the earth (or at least the Net), so I'll need all the help I can get. The support of the horror community is extremely important to me.

Book Review: 'Shock Value' by Jason Zinoman

2011-07-09T02:35:00.000-07:00

Finally, we have a book that gives major consideration to the horror genre without regurgitating the same old stories behind the making of these classic films. There’s the expected overlap, because the context of the films must be explained to readers who aren’t overly familiar with them, but Zinoman has a fresh point of view. He examines these films as the products of a close-knit group of radical directors – the Martin Scorseses and Francis Ford Coppolas of horror, if you will.

While focusing on the ground-breaking early films of Carpenter, Craven, Romero, and Hooper is a no-brainer, what I appreciate most about Shock Value is that Zinoman gives equal weight to the work of two extremely undervalued filmmakers, Dan O’Bannon (who co-wrote the original screenplay that became Alien and directed The Return of the Living Dead) and Brian De Palma (Carrie, Dressed to Kill). He dishes out juicy tidbits concerning their private lives and the making of their most famous horror films, and refuses to shy away from exposing the personal flaws of each of the people discussed in the book, giving their stories a very human edge rather than propping them up on a pedestal.

My only complaint about Shock Value is that it jumps around a lot, which can be slightly disorienting. There are also a couple of easy-to-spot errors, but that’s forgivable considering the overall quality of the book. Shock Value is part behind-the-scenes narrative, part cinema study, and part cultural analysis. Readers looking for any, or all, of the above will be pleased, and even the most experienced horror connoisseur will be enlightened.

Buy it at Amazon.

2011-07-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't been updating lately! My lack of inspiration is startling. The only thing getting me up off my ass at this point is the fact that I have a Traumafession posted over at the wonderful website Kindertrauma. Check it out!

Whoopi Goldberg to Star in New Remake of 'Godzilla'?

2011-05-28T23:25:00.000-07:00

Movie Review: 'Beyond the Darkness' (1979)

2011-05-27T03:44:00.000-07:00

Beyond the Darkness, also known as Buio Omega, Blue Holocaust, and Buried Alive (so many Bs) is one weird-ass movie. On the surface, it's a sleazy, Italian reworking of Psycho -- but it's really so much more. Actually, it's not much like Psycho except that it has a young man who preserves the body of a loved one and keeps it in his house. The male lead, Frank, played by Kieran Canter (whose hair changes with every scene and whose attractiveness varies from shot to shot), is a spoiled, rich boy caught in a sexual stranglehold by his possessive housekeeper, Iris. As portrayed by the inimitable Italian actress Franca Stoppi, Iris is a woman with a rather severe expression on her face at all times, yet she's perversely erotic in a sexy, middle-aged librarian sort of way. Iris has somehow dominated Frank's life by utilizing a voodoo doll to kill off everyone he loves so she can have him all to herself. When his beloved girlfriend Anna dies, Frank goes off the deep end and steals her corpse, embalming it and even resorting to cannibalism (!) to keep her alive in his mind. These scenes are really quite revolting and fairly convincing for a low-budget Italian horror film from 1979.

Of course, various people discover Frank's secret along the way, and clearly they must die. Iris is all too eager to help him clean up the mess, thinking that if she indulges him, he'll forget about the corpse and go for the real deal – and he does, seemingly with every girl but Iris. Eventually, she blackmails him into agreeing to marry her, but he embarrasses her in front of guests as she's announcing their engagement, so she does what every schoolmarmish sexpot would do: She gets drunk and lets her hair down. That'll show him!

Meanwhile, there's a mortician (actually, I'm not really sure what he is, but since he's in a funeral home the first time we see him, I'll go with mortician) sneaking around; investigating because he caught Frank injecting Anna's corpse with embalming fluid. He's mostly boring and you really want him to go out Martin Balsam-style, but it wasn't meant to be.

In any other movie, Frank and Iris would be extremely unlikable, and the viewer would eagerly await their downfall. The fact that there is no one else to root for in this movie – certainly not the suspicious mortician, who doesn't even report the illicit activity -- forces the viewer to identify with the villains. This gives Buio Omega a queasy air, because these are despicable people and you should want them to be stopped... but then, the movie would be over, so let them continue mutilating for a while. Adding to the uneasy feeling are bizarre scenes like the one where Frank is disgusted by Iris' sloppy eating habits. This is a man who, not long before, bit into a human heart and watched his housekeeper-turned-lover chop up an innocent hitchhiker and toss her body parts in a tub full of acid -- and now he wants to vomit?

As cold and utterly brutal as this movie is, there's a considerable amount of suspense, and while director Joe D'Amato may not have been fond of the horror genre, he used his expertise in the sex film industry to infuse his violent scenes with a viciousness that could only be described as animalistic. One wonders if he didn't tell Canter to act as if he was fucking the poor hitchhiker when he was actually ripping out her fingernails. The film is really hard to watch, yet it's so compelling you can't look away. Not to mention Franca Stoppi's unique presence -- Buio Omega wouldn't be half as good without her creepiness. And did I mention the Goblin soundtrack? It's a good one.

By the way, Shriek Show's new Blu-ray is impressive, even if it is missing some footage. Not that the missing footage is important to the story or anything. It's just a brief snippet where nothing happens and nobody remembers it anyway. Since the footage is on the DVD, which is included with the Blu-ray for all you diehards out there who just have to see thirty seconds of Kieran Canter carrying a box, there's really no reason not to pick up this set. The picture and sound are very much improved over the old, smeary-looking DVD. It's not the best looking Blu-ray ever, but I've seen far worse.

Buy my stuff!

2011-05-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

I am selling a couple of DVDs on eBay -- check 'em out!

(Click on the pictures)

Reborn to Have It All

2011-05-22T21:17:00.000-07:00

Word has been going around the web for the last few days that MGM plans to remake Stephen King's Carrie once again. I don't want to come right out and say that it'll suck, because you never know. But studio executives should prrrobably learn from the past and consider it carefully before moving ahead.

First, they turned it into a notorious Broadway musical that closed after only five performances – and sixteen previews, but five sounds more like a flop, doesn't it? – in 1988. The musical, to be fair, would have been a financial success if it had remained open long enough. Every show sold out, but bad reviews convinced the financiers to pull out and Carrie the Musical could not go on.

In 1999, MGM released the belated sequel The Rage: Carrie 2, which had little to do with the original. It starred Emily Bergl as another telekinetic teenager who just happens to be the love child of Carrie's father and the schizophrenic woman for whom he left Margaret (Ralphie sure knew how to pick 'em). Amy Irving returned as Sue Snell, now the guidance counselor at the new Bates High School -- the old one burned down, remember? For a late 90s sequel to a classic 70s film, Carrie 2 is really not that bad. It's probably as good as it could be under the circumstances. Bergl was a likable presence, and it was nice to see Irving return. And there was a shock comparable to one in the original.

Then, Carrie was made into a 2002 TV movie starring Angela Bettis as Carrie and Patricia Clarkson as Margaret White. This was an honest attempt to stay close to the novel, but, despite decent performances from the leads, the low production values hampered it. Inspired by the success of The Dead Zone, it was intended to be the pilot episode for a series, but low ratings and bad reviews proved to NBC that viewers were not interested.

Anyone who knows me (or who reads this blog) knows that I am absolutely obsessed with the original film. I can't really explain my fanaticism about this movie. I've been fascinated by it since I was a child, when I came across a picture of the blood-drenched Sissy Spacek in a book. I showed the photo to my mom, and she told me about the movie and let me watch the tape she had recorded from TV years before. I have two distinct memories of my first viewing of Carrie; the first being the locker room scene, which was mangled in the TV version. (You can watch the TV version of the scene here. I uploaded it myself from that very tape.) Being a child, I didn't understand what a menstrual period was, and my mom, who started watching the movie with me, but quickly lost interest and left to do whatever it is adults do that children are so oblivious to, simply explained that a period was something that happened to women. Because the TV version removed any shots that implied the blood was coming from Carrie's nether-regions, I went around for a while thinking that a period was when a woman's hand started bleeding. Don't even ask what I thought stigmata meant!

My second memory of that first viewing is of being too terrified to continue watching once Carrie returned home. I think I was fine during the prom sequence – although I'm sure the death of a certain character took me by surprise – but somehow the tension in the air during Carrie's homecoming was too much for me. I even recall the precise moment I turned off the movie: The shot where Carrie was unzipping her bloody prom dress to take a bath. I told my friends about the movie and about how scared I was to finish watching it. They came over to watch it with me, but they were too frightened to finish as well, so Carrie was shut off once again. Eventually, I worked up the courage to watch the rest of it – only to get the scare of my life at the end!

Carrie remained a favorite of mine over the years, but it wasn't until I was in middle school that I discovered it was the movie I loved more than any other. I used to listen to the CD soundtrack every morning on the bus. It's difficult to explain why, but the brilliant acting and direction, the Pino Donaggio score, the amazing 70s fashions that hardly seem dated today, and the emotionally involving set-pieces like the opening locker room scene, the prom sequence, and that ending -- they all just really speak to me. I've seen the movie so often that I could recite almost every line if I tried, and the little bits, like Edie McClurg's face when Betty Buckley informs the class that their prom tickets might be revoked, or Sydney Lassick's "Thank you!" when he accepts the ballots from P.J. Soles, give me so much joy. Even the background players are great. It's just a perfect movie from beginning to end.

That's why this news of yet another remake baffles me. If it didn't work in 2002, why bother to try again? Granted, a big screen remake has never been attempted, but the only reason would be to update it superficially, which is unnecessary. I realize the majority of people don't care to watch any movie made before they were born, but Carrie is a timeless story that speaks to all generations, regardless of clothes, hairstyles, and technology. It's even more timely now with all this talk of bullying. When asked for his opinion on the upcoming remake, Stephen King suggested either David Cronenberg or David Lynch to direct. I'm not sure about the latter, but I, for one, would kill to see David Cronenberg's Carrie. I'm afraid it's the only way this project stands a chance of actually being good.

Of course, I'm such a sucker for anything Carrie-related that I'll surely be in line to see the remake at the theater. And I can think of at least one thing I'd like to see: An interpretation of a scene in the novel in which a young Carrie talks to a neighbor girl who is sunbathing, observing the fact that she has breasts. Margaret catches them and has a fit, practically howling like a wolf at the sight of her daughter being corrupted by a girl she perceives as immoral. She takes Carrie into the house, and as she is screaming and forcing Carrie to repent, stones fall upon the house out of nowhere. This was actually filmed for the 1976 film, with adult Sissy Spacek playing Carrie as a little girl (!), but they couldn't get the stones to work, so it wasn't used. All that remains of the scene is a few photos. I'm kind of glad they cut it out, because I'm not sure it would have fit in with the rest of the action, and I love the beginning of the film as it is. But this passage, which is told from the point of view of the neighbor girl in the form of an interview excerpt in a book within the book (whew!), is so well-written that it's a shame it never showed up elsewhere, not even in the 2002 remake. It's a reminder of what a master Stephen King is with dialogue, and, in fact, much of the dialogue from the 1976 film was taken directly from the novel. I'll leave you with this:

"Of course she was strange," Estelle Horan tells me, lighting a second Virginia Slim a moment after stubbing out her first. "The whole family was strange. Ralph was a construction worker, and people on the street said he carried a Bible and a .38 revolver to work with him every day. The Bible was for his coffee break and lunch. The .38 was in case he met Antichrist on the job. I can remember the Bible myself. The revolver... who knows? He was a big olive-skinned man with his hair always shaved into a flattop crewcut. He always looked mean. And you didn't meet his eyes, not ever. They were so intense they actually seemed to glow. When you saw him coming you crossed the street and you never stuck out your tongue at his back, not ever. That's how spooky he was."

She pauses, puffing clouds of cigarette smoke toward the pseudo-redwood beams that cross the ceiling. Stella Horan lived on Carlin Street until she was twenty, commuting to day classes at Lewin Business College in Motton. But she remembers the incident of the stones very clearly.

"There are times," she says, "when I wonder if I might have caused it. Their back yard was next to ours, and Mrs. White put a hedge in but it hadn't grown out yet. She'd called my mother dozens of times about the "show" I was putting on in my back yard. Well, my bathing suit was perfectly decent – prudish by today's standards – nothing but a plain old one-piece Jantzen. Mrs. White used to go on and on about what a scandal it was for 'her baby'. My mother... well, she tries to be polite, but her temper is so quick. I don't know what Margaret White said to finally push her over the edge – called me the Whore of Babylon, I suppose – but my mother told her our yard was our yard and I'd go out and dance the hootchie-kootchie buck-naked if that was her pleasure and mine. She also told her that she was a dirty old woman with a can of worms for a mind. There was a lot more shouting, but that was the upshot of it.

"I wanted to stop sunbathing right then. I hate trouble. It upsets my stomach. But Mom – when she gets a case, she's a terror. She came home from Jordan Marsh with a little white bikini. Told me I might as well get all the sun I could. 'After all,' she said, 'the privacy of our own back yard and all.'"

Stella Horan smiles a little at the memory and crushes out her cigarette.

"I tried to argue with her, tell her I didn't want any more trouble, didn't want to be a pawn in their back-fence war. Didn't do a bit of good. Trying to stop my mom when she gets a bee in her hat is like trying to stop a Mack truck going downhill with no brakes. Actually, there was more to it. I was scared of the Whites. Real religious nuts are nothing to fool with. Sure, Ralph White was dead, but what if Margaret still had that .38 around?

"But there I was on Saturday afternoon, spread out on a blanket in the back yard, covered with suntan lotion and listening to Top Forty on the radio. Mom hated that stuff and usually she'd yell out at least twice for me to turn it down before she went nuts. But that day she turned it up twice herself. I started to feel like the Whore of Babylon myself.

"But nobody came out of the Whites' place. Not even the old lady to hang her wash. There's something else – she never hung any undies on the back line. Not even Carrie's, and she was only three back then. Always in the house.

"I started to relax. I guess I was thinking Margaret must have taken Carrie to the park to worship God in the raw or something. Anyway, after a little while I rolled on my back, put one arm over my eyes, and dozed off.

"When I woke up, Carrie was standing next to me and looking down at my body."

She breaks off, frowning into space. Outside, the cars are whizzing by endlessly. I can hear the steady little whine my tape recorder makes. But it all seems a little too brittle, too glossy, just a cheap patina over a darker world – a real world where nightmares happen.

"She was such a pretty girl," Stella Horan resumes, lighting another cigarette. "I've seen some high school pictures of her, and that horrible fuzzy black-and-white photo on the cover of Newsweek. I look at them and all I can think is, Dear God, where did she go? What did that woman do to her? Then I feel sick and sorry. She was so pretty, with pink cheeks and bright brown eyes, and her hair the shade of blonde you know will darken and get mousy. Sweet is the only word that fits. Sweet and bright and innocent. Her mother's sickness hadn't touched her very deeply, not then.

"I kind of started up awake and tried to smile. It was hard to think what to do. I was logy from the sun and my mind felt sticky and slow. I said 'Hi.' She was wearing a little yellow dress, sort of cute but awfully long for a little girl in the summer. It came down to her shins.

"She didn't smile back. She just pointed and said, 'What are those?'

"I looked down and saw that my top had slipped while I was asleep. So I fixed it and said, 'Those are my breasts, Carrie.'

"Then she said -- very solemnly: 'I wish I had some.'

"I said: 'You have to wait, Carrie. You won't start to get them for another... oh, eight or nine years.'

"'No, I won't,' she said. 'Momma says good girls don't.' She looked strange for a little girl, half sad and half self-righteous.

"I could hardly believe it, and the first thing that popped into my mind also popped right out of my mouth. I said: 'Well, I'm a good girl. And doesn't your mother have breasts?'

"She lowered her head and said something so softly I couldn't hear it. When I asked her to repeat it, she looked at me defiantly and said that her momma had been bad when she made her and that was why she had them. She called them dirtypillows, as if it was all one word.

"I couldn't believe it. I was just dumbfounded. There was nothing at all I could think to say. We just stared at each other, and what I wanted to do was grab that sad little scrap of a girl and run away with her.

"And that was when Margaret White came out of her back door and saw us.

"For a minute she just goggled as if she couldn't believe it. Then she opened her mouth and whooped. That's the ugliest sound I've ever heard in my life. It was like the noise a bull alligator would make in a swamp. She just whooped. Rage. Complete, insane rage. Her face went just as red as the side of a fire truck and she curled her hands into fists and whooped at the sky. She was just shaking all over. I thought she was having a stroke. Her face was all scrunched up, and it was a gargoyle's face.

"I thought Carrie was going to faint – or die on the spot. She sucked in all her breath and that little face went a cottage-cheesy color.

"Her mother yelled: 'CAAAARRRIEEEEEE!'

"I jumped up and yelled back: 'Don't you yell at her that way! You ought to be ashamed!' Something stupid like that. I don't remember. Carrie started to go back and then she stopped and then started again, and just before she crossed over from our lawn to theirs she looked back at me and there was a look... oh, dreadful. I can't say it. Wanting and hating and fearing... and misery. As if life itself had fallen on her like stones, all at the age of three.

"My mother came out on the back stoop and her face just crumpled when she saw the child. And Margaret... oh, she was screaming things about sluts and strumpets and the sins of the fathers being visited even unto the seventh generation. My tongue felt like a little dried-up plant.

"For a second Carrie stood swaying back and forth between the two yards, and then Margaret White looked upward and I swear sweet Jesus that woman bayed at the sky. And then she started to... to hurt herself, scourge herself. She was clawing at her neck and cheeks, making red marks and scratches. She tore her dress.

"Carrie screamed out 'Momma!' and ran to her.

"Mrs. White kind of... squatted, like a frog, and her arms swooped wide open. I thought she was going to crush her and I screamed. The woman was grinning. Grinning and drooling right down her chin. Oh, I was sick. Jesus, I was so sick."

-- From Carrie by Stephen King

Disturbing Moments in Film #2

2011-05-22T03:00:00.000-07:00

Lego re-enactment by Eric Weber.

The Honeymoon Killers (1970)

Watch this scene.

R.I.P. Leonard Kastle

Top Five Horror Remakes

2011-05-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

I thought I was fairly easy-going when it comes to remakes, and I don't complain about them too often, although it does upset me when a bunch of them come out all at once. But then I realized, hey, it's REALLY difficult to think of a truly stellar remake. Some are enjoyable, but very few come close to the originals. I was going to do a list of ten, but I don't love the last five enough to write about them, so I cut my list in half. I considered including The Last House on the Left (1972), because it was inspired by Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring and has a very similar plot, but I decided to stick to straight remakes.

5. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1989, DIR. DWIGHT H. LITTLE)

Many deride this version of the classic tale for being yet another gory Freddy Krueger rip-off, which is unfair, because this is a very original update of the story that demands reassessment. Robert Englund's take on the character does share some similarities with Krueger, but his Eric is a much more terrifying villain. The lush production values and the beautiful score really help this movie stand out. I think it's the best Phantom adaptation next to the Lon Chaney original, which technically is a remake itself, because it followed a 1916 German adaptation that's now lost, but what the hell.

4. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1990, DIR. TOM SAVINI)

Tom Savini's remake of the first modern zombie film is quite effective, because it takes your expectations of the characters from the original and spins them around. Barbara begins as a mousy, schoolteacher-type, but, instead of turning into an all-but-comatose victim, she toughens up as the film progresses. Apparently, this version of Night of the Living Dead was changed drastically from Savini's vision – the gore was edited, for one thing -- but it turned out just fine.

3. DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931, DIR. ROUBEN MAMOULIAN)

People forget that this Oscar-winning horror film (one of the few) is a remake, but it was preceded by seven (!) versions of the Robert Louis Stevenson tale, all of them silent films, most of them now lost. This, the first talkie version, remains the best. Frederic March won the Oscar for his dual performance, and it's a marvel. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is still a surprisingly strong film, having been made during the pre-code era – a time when Hollywood was still ignoring the Hays Code, which would be strictly enforced beginning in 1934 – and the filmmakers were allowed to be a bit more risque in the scenes featuring a prostitute (Miriam Hopkins) than they would have if the movie had been filmed a couple of years later. The violent scenes are also quite vicious. This is one of the most intense classic films you'll ever see.

2. FRANKENSTEIN (1931, DIR. JAMES WHALE)

Ah, another one from good ol' 1931. So what if the original Frankenstein was only sixteen minutes long? Actually, there were two more versions of the story after the 1910 version – Life Without Soul (1915) and an Italian film called The Monster of Frankenstein (1921) – but they're both lost. That leads us to the iconic Boris Karloff version, and what more can I really say about it that others haven't? Karloff's performance is Oscar-worthy and it's just a brilliant, brilliant film. The infamous lake scene has stuck with me since I was a child. Most prefer The Bride of Frankenstein, but I don't.

1. THE FLY (1986, DIR. DAVID CRONENBERG)

Cronenberg's masterpiece is one of the only remakes that surpasses the iconic original... and not just because it features the best comeback ever:

Actually, The Fly is full of great lines. "Be afraid, be very afraid" is still quoted by people who don't know where the line originated. The movie isn't just scary and gross, it's ultimately a very sweet movie about sticking by your loved ones even if they have a horrible disease that gives them the ability to liquify your appendages.

Disturbing Moments in Film #1

2011-05-15T00:03:00.000-07:00

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Watch This Scene.

2011-05-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

Movie Review: 'Scream 4' (2011)

2011-05-07T00:54:00.000-07:00

Fifteen years and an entire horror cycle later, the rules have not changed much. The cinematography is better, and there's an all-new cast of fresh-faced, cynical cherubs to laugh in the face of death, but while watching Wes Craven's latest installment of the series, one gets the distinct feeling of 1996. Is it possible to "feel" a year? Maybe not, but Scream 4 is nothing but the same pile of cliches packaged for a new generation – just like the original Scream, with a post-modern twist. Scream was a clever film for its time. Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson haven't moved beyond that.

Cliches are not necessarily a bad thing. Did I complain when films like He Knows You're Alone, Prom Night, The Burning, and Terror Train riffed on the imitable elements of Halloween and Friday the 13th? Hell no, I love all of those movies. It's not the repetition of Scream 4 that bothers me so much as the lack of a gimmick. Let's face it, this kind of film needs one. I suppose Craven and company thought the film itself was enough of a gimmick to keep us in our seats; it's been eleven years since the last one, the original cast is older now, and everybody wants to know who will live and who will die. It is funny that this series has become exactly what it mocks, as it has been ever since Scream 2 was green-lit. You'd think they would have tried something different by now. The opening scene of Scream 4 shows two soon-to-be victims watching "Stab 7", which depicts two soon-to-be victims watching "Stab 6", but the movie we're watching is just as dumb as the movie within the movie within the movie.

The mistake Scream 4 makes is the same mistake made by ALL of today's slasher films: There are no likable characters. Except for the veteran Scream cast members, who actually have a history (albeit a shallow one), you want all of these people to die. That's not what this genre is about, despite the misguided youth with a thirst for mayhem who devour films like Saw 3-D. Most great horror films are about identifying with the victims, NOT with the killers. The victims of modern slasher films are empty shells, facsimiles of human beings without a soul. There's nothing for us to relate to, and this is why these films consistently fail.

Besides that, the older cast members of Scream 4 aren't given anything remotely interesting to do. Gale Weathers, the only colorful character, is her lovably bitchy self, of course. Nothing is made of how the characters are dealing with past tragedies. I realize this is "just a slasher movie", but more could be said than simply name-dropping famous horror films and poking fun at the supposedly declining state of the genre today (which was correct when the original came out, but the genre is, despite the myriad of remakes, in a better place today than it was in 1996). Scream 4 is full of missed opportunities like that.

As for the ending, I had a couple ideas of my own for the outcome, but I wasn't even close. I thought, why isn't Gale Weathers the killer? After establishing early on that Gale's fiction-writing career is going nowhere, why wouldn't an aging Gale knock off a few teenagers to boost book sales? Or maybe Sidney, driven mad by the events of the last three films, proves that she really is the "angel of death" by going on a murderous rampage. But no, these ideas are too extreme. Better to stick to something moderately shocking, something more conventional and palatable. We don't want to alienate our audience, now do we?

The Woes of Being a VHS Collector

2010-11-19T14:56:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, life was easy for the VHS collector. DVD was newly adopted by pretty much everyone; VHS was all but abandoned, and people were willing to practically give them away. But in the last couple of years, there has been sort of a renaissance of appreciation for VHS – mostly for the cover art.

To someone who is not a collector, this might seem like a good thing for the VHS enthusiast. It's nice to see public appreciation for your interests. However, to someone actively searching for VHS at decent prices, this has made it much harder to find those special tapes, those holy grails that all VHS collectors are dying to get their hands on, without paying out the ass for it. Just look on eBay. All the tapes worth buying are often $20 or more. It's no longer common to find a seller who doesn't know that his tapes are valuable. Some collectors will gladly pay these prices, but most will not. Note to sellers: Ever notice that your tapes with inflated prices do not sell?

I, personally, don't even own a VCR anymore, and I can't pay that much money for something I'm not going to use. Cover art is nice, but a tape isn't a poster; it'll just languish in my closet instead of being displayed on my wall. And if I did have a VCR, I still wouldn't pay those prices, because there is always a chance that my tape will be eaten, and there goes my money down the drain. This actually happened to my Media tape of Maniac when I was testing it at my dad's. We couldn't get the tape out of the machine, so he just tossed the entire thing. Bye, bye $12. At least I still have the VHS box.

A lot of collectors and non-collectors would argue that the box is the only thing that matters about a tape anymore, and they would be right. The picture quality of VHS was NEVER good, and it looked even worse compared to laserdisc, DVD, and now Blu-Ray. But there is an aura about the quality of a tape that can enhance the cinematic experience if you're in the right frame of mind. Certainly, movies like The Last House on the Left and Maniac can be made sleazier by watching them on the format. (In fact, that's why I was testing my tape of Maniac when it got eaten; I wanted to see if my sleaze theory held up.)

But the thing I miss most about VHS is the experience of going into a video store and seeing all of those crusty, dusty covers adorning the shelves, and marveling about what each tape could possibly contain based on the often lurid artwork. When I think back on that time, I can still smell the musty mixture of cardboard and cigarette smoke, and I realize how lucky I was to have been born at the tail end of the VHS era. I will miss it. I regret that today's children will never experience that unique thrill.

Character Actor of the Week: Karen Black

2010-11-16T02:18:00.000-08:00

Karen Black in Family Plot

I recently watched Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, and, while it's not a horror film, its amazing ensemble cast inspired me to devote some time each week to one actor whose work I enjoy. Since Karen Black had what was, for me, the most interesting role in that film (as a post-op transsexual), I decided to start with her. Fitting that her first film was a little-known 1959 drama called The Prime Time, directed by the man who would, a couple of years later, invent the gore film and forever change the course of horror films to come, Herschell Gordon Lewis. Black would find fame as a result of her Oscar-nominated performance in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces.

While Ms. Black insists that she's never acted in a horror film -- she prefers the term "science fiction" -- she has, in fact, starred in a few. Her most famous horror performance was in the final segment of Trilogy of Terror as the woman terrorized by the persistent Zuni Fetish Doll. The fact that nobody seems to care much for the previous two segments of this film, both of them also starring Black, is not really surprising, because neither of them are very good. The final segment, "Amelia", is absolutely thrilling and terrifying, and it's not hard to see why people remember it. For a TV movie (though it was made in the 70s, back when TV movies were often as good as theatrical films), it really does pack a wallop. Don't go straight to sleep after viewing that final shot!


Burnt Offerings

A couple years later she appeared in Burnt Offerings, a chilling haunted house tale in which she was married to Oliver Reed (who likely gave the house a run for its money!). The film also starred Bette Davis as the sympathetic Aunt Elizabeth, and Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart in near-cameos as the house's owners. This film has quite a few frightening scenes, and it remains one of the best haunted house movies. Black is, as always, very good, but her role is perhaps not as memorable as her one woman routine in the finale of Trilogy of Terror.

She also appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot, which isn't science fiction, but deserves a mention for being so underrated. I don't understand why people are so down on this movie. They either claim it lacks the Hitchcock touch, or they ignore it completely. For me, it's one of Hitchcock's most humorous films and features a great cast (Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, Karen Black, William Devane, Katherine Helmond, Ed Lauter). Black spends the first part of the film disguised in a blonde wig similar to the one she wore in the second segment of Trilogy of Terror. Hitchcock doesn't give her a lot to do, but she and Devane have good chemistry as the villains. Where the film really shines is in the interplay between Barbara Harris, who is quite charming as the phony psychic, and Bruce Dern as her lover. The scene where they are trapped in a car speeding downhill, unable to stop because someone has sabotaged the brakes, is one of the funniest I've ever seen.

House of 1000 Corpses

Black was fairly memorable as the Baby Jane-esque matriarch in House of 1000 Corpses, but she allegedly wanted too much money to appear in the sequel, The Devil's Rejects, so Rob Zombie cast Leslie Easterbrook instead. She was also featured in Italian director Ruggero Deodato's action-adventure/horror film Cut and Run, though I honestly don't remember her in it (and that's not the only thing I don't remember about that film).

Karen Black has been in other horror-ish films, such as The Pyx, The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver (a TV movie that actually sounds pretty amazing), an episode of "The Hitchhiker", the remake of Invaders from Mars (which I guess really IS sci-fi!), It's Alive III: Island of the Alive, Out of the Dark (which featured another of my favorite character actors, Divine, in one of his final screen appearances), Evil Spirits, Night Angel, Mirror Mirror, Haunting Fear, Auntie Lee's Meat Pies, and Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering. God, for someone who looks down on horror films, she sure has acted in a lot of them!

Does this woman ever turn down a role? We should be thankful she doesn't, because Karen Black is a unique presence, and that is rare in films today.

Finally! The Complete Score to 'Carrie' Available on CD

2010-11-15T14:15:00.000-08:00

It's as if the movie soundtrack gods read my last post praising Pino Donaggio, because the complete score to my favorite movie of all-time, Carrie, is finally available. Well, right now it's only up for pre-order, but considering this CD is limited to 1200 copies, and considering the huge fanbase this movie has – if you want it, you'd better place your order asap.

Why is this important? The original soundtrack album first released by United Artists in the 70s, and later reissued twice on CD by RykoDisc and Varese Sarabande respectively, was woefully incomplete. Most of the cues were from the second half of the film, and a couple of the tracks were altered slightly from the movie versions, specifically "Bucket of Blood" and "Sue's Dream". Kritzerland has discovered the original master tapes of this score, and they're putting out it in its complete form with the exception of a couple songs that they couldn't find or get the rights to (such as "Heat Wave" by Martha and the Vandellas, and the song that plays during the Nancy Allen-talks-while-simultaneously-giving-a-blowjob scene). For fans of the film, it is a dream come true. (For everyone else, it will be a NIGHTMARE, as the trailer says.)

And to prove that it's no hoax, Kritzerland has even provided some audio samples, including the funky track that plays over the detention scene. I have a crappy bootleg download of the score and this sounds much, MUCH better. I'm so excited about this, I ordered two copies. Hail Kritzerland!!!

Kritzerland is proud to present a very special and historic 2 CD limited edition soundtrack release – for the first time ever, the complete score to:

Carrie
Music Composed and Conducted by Pino Donaggio

In 1976, director Brian De Palma had already established a reputation as a cult director of such films as Greetings, Hi, Mom, and more importantly, Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, and Obsession. But it was his film of Stephen King’s classic, best-selling first novel, Carrie, that would catapult him into major director status. Many directors have tackled Stephen King, including King himself, all to varying degrees of success, but Carrie is the film that leads the pack.

De Palma got everything right – the casting (an amazing group of actors, including Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, William Katt, John Travolta, Nancy Allen, P.J. Soles, and Betty Buckley), the adaptation by Lawrence D. Cohen, the art direction (Jack Fisk and Bill Kenney), camerawork (Mario Tosi), editing (Paul Hirsch) – everything just came together magically and perfectly. The film works so well because there is not only great horror (as to be expected), but also a large helping of emotion and pathos (thanks to Sissy Spacek’s affecting and brilliant performance as Carrie). There is a depth to the characterizations that elevate the film way beyond a simple scary movie. The film also has a sly sense of humor and it’s just fun in a way horror films seldom are – thrills, chills, laughs, and one of the most amazing jump-out-of-your seat scares in the history of cinema.

Horror films are rarely nominated for Academy Awards, but Carrie was one of the exceptions with Sissy Spacek getting a Best Actress nod and Piper Laurie getting one for Best Supporting Actress. Over the years, the film has never lost on iota of its popularity, thanks to numerous releases on every home video format, most recently on blu-ray.

Of all the decisions De Palma made, one of the most important was choosing Pino Donaggio as composer. De Palma had used Bernard Herrmann on two of his films – Sisters and Obsession, but Herrmann had passed away in 1975. In 1976, Donaggio only had one major film to his credit, but his score to that film was masterful – Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. However De Palma came to choose Donaggio, it was a perfect marriage of composer and film. Donaggio’s score hits all the right notes – he brings out every emotion and all the subtext, with great suspense and horror music, plaintive and yearning music for the character of Carrie, two songs for the prom sequence (with lyrics by Merritt Malloy) that help make that sequence so magical and memorable, and light and infectious music for the calisthenics sequence and the scene at the tux shop. It is, in fact, a perfect score, a masterpiece of film scoring, with unforgettable themes that capture every nuance of the film.

United Artists released the soundtrack album on LP. It was an odd presentation in that almost all of the music was from the film’s second half, save for the main title sequence (which was repeated verbatim at the end of the album). The album ran thirty-five minutes. That LP was released twice on CD – first by Ryko (with dialogue snippets included to pad out the running time), and then by Varese Sarabande (with the dialogue snippets gone). Ryko used the album master, and the Varese was a clone of the Ryko release (the pop songs used in the film were not available to them or to us).

For this very special release, we are pleased to say that our detective work paid off in spades – we found 13 reels of the original session masters and they included the entire score, about twenty-five minutes of never-before-released score cues. Since both film and score are iconic, it was the greatest kind of discovery we could have made.

So, it is with great pleasure that we offer for the first time the complete score to Carrie in film order. We also found two instrumentals of the songs, which we’ve included as bonus tracks. Additionally, on CD 2 we offer the original album, newly remastered for this release.

This release is limited to 1200 copies only. The price of this special 2 CD set is our usual one CD price – $19.98, plus shipping. Additionally, we are offering a special deal with the purchase of this release. Go to the item page and click on the link to find out about it.

CD will ship the third week of December – however, preorders placed directly through Kritzerland usually ship one to five weeks earlier (we’ve been averaging four weeks early).

UPDATE: The CD is now sold out.

My Favorite Composer: Pino Donaggio

2010-11-10T00:41:00.000-08:00

My love of soundtracks is boundless, especially the orchestral kind. My favorite composer of all-time is Pino Donaggio, who has scored such classics as Carrie (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981), Body Double (1984), Don't Look Now (1973), The Howling (1981), Tourist Trap (1979), Raising Cain (1992), Piranha (1978), and even Seed of Chucky (2004) (!).

Before he became a soundtrack composer, Donaggio was a successful pop singer/songwriter in the 60s; his most famous song, "Io Che Non Vivo", was later adapted into the huge hit "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" by Dusty Springfield. I think his background as a pop singer is a huge reason why his film scores are so catchy and moving.

Don't Look Now was his first score, and it remains one of his greatest. In particular, the love theme is quite spectacular and greatly enhanced the controversial sex scene.

Brian De Palma remembered the music of Don't Look Now when Bernard Herrmann died and he was looking for another composer for Carrie. De Palma and Donaggio collaborated for several movies and each score is stunning. The main theme of Carrie is my favorite movie theme; it perfectly captures the heartbreak and tragedy of the story, yet it punctuates the last moments of happiness in the locker room before the shit hits the fan.

The score for Blow Out is another masterpiece by Donaggio. The last twenty minutes of that film are absolutely breathtaking and devastating, thanks in large part to the music and to the performances of John Travolta and Nancy Allen. The terrible, morbid irony of the final shot is almost unbearable.

And who could forget Body Double, with its beautifully tacky, 80s synth-pop melodies and sweeping, romantic strings?

His last De Palma score, for Raising Cain, is one of Donaggio's most underrated efforts. Say what you will about the film itself (which I happen to enjoy), but you cannot deny that Donaggio's music is masterful.

One of Donaggio's best non-De Palma scores is for The Howling. He had collaborated with Joe Dante before on Piranha, which is a great score in its own right, but this score is even better because it's so eclectic. The end titles theme is one of my favorites. As with a lot of his music, I can listen to it over and over! Fun fact: Donaggio's translator on both of these films was none other than actor/director Paul Bartel. Bartel and Donaggio both spoke Spanish, and Dante would relay information to Bartel, who would translate it into Spanish for Donaggio.

Ennio Morricone is the most celebrated Italian composer, and he's great, but Donaggio is under-appreciated. Quentin Tarantino showed his appreciation by including the theme from Blow Out in his film Death Proof; other than that, not a lot of people have come forward to claim his music as an influence. Joe Hisaishi did a wonderful tribute to Donaggio by performing his Dressed to Kill theme at a concert with the New Japan Philharmonic, and it's absolutely gorgeous and extremely faithful to the original.

I really wish Brian De Palma would use Donaggio when he returns to making thrillers. His previous efforts, Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, were rather weak and a big reason is the scores were not composed with the lush attention to detail that makes the work of Pino Donaggio so memorable.

RCA Italiana to Destroy Original Master Tapes of Italian Film Soundtracks?

2010-11-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

Just read some upsetting news from John Bender at the European Film Score Society on Yahoo! Groups:

"There have come disturbing reports from professionals within the relatively small world of soundtrack CD production of the destruction of master tape recordings of Italian film scores from the Silver Age (1960 -1980). This destruction of irreplaceable recordings is (supposedly) occurring at the facilities of RCA Italiana located in Rome. If these reports are true (and firm confirmation has yet to be obtained) the actions are, in a strictly cultural sense, criminal. All such master tape materials are invaluable and representative of the marvelous cinematic cultural heritage of Italy. Italy has been blessed with a great number of the world's finest composers of music for cinema, not just Ennio Morricone but dozens, maybe hundreds, of other talented artists have produced glorious music for literally thousands of movies over the past several decades. The destruction of these artifacts is truly a crime inacted against all future generations who are, in effect, being robbed of their chance to assimilate and appreciate a glorious chapter in the history of Western culture. We all must do everything in our power to A) confirm these reports, and B) put a stop to the destruction. Please use the internet to help in any way you may believe to be of potential value. - John Bender (Pittsburgh USA - 11/08/12)"

If this is true, I hope there's a way to stop this before it's too late! Perhaps spreading the news will call somebody to action. John wants all fans of soundtracks, particularly of Italian composers, to post his message all over the Internet so that maybe someone with the means to do so (and who can speak Italian) will contact RCA Italiana and prevent the destruction of these tapes from happening.

UPDATE: Thankfully, it turns out this is most likely not true. I'm glad it's only a rumor and not a reality!

Why I Love Something Weird Video

2010-11-07T18:22:00.000-08:00

I own a lot of DVDs. Okay, maybe not as many as some people, but for a college student I own quite a lot of them. And it's not a casual hobby, either – I'm really into DVD companies, and I keep track of when they release new titles. I also frequently check to see if DVDs I own have gone out of print; mostly out of curiosity and not because I actually want to sell my DVDs. (Although I'm sure if a particular title was netting enough money, I would certainly consider it.)

One company whose titles I've been collecting for a few years now is Something Weird Video. There truly is something weird about my fascination with this company, since I'm a gay man, and their movies usually feature numerous busty broads taking their tops off, the plots not allowing for much else. They have released violent films (H.G. Lewis, whose film Blood Feast started it all, comes to mind), but the majority of Something Weird Video's catalog is based on sex. These are films of a type that became less and less common once hardcore porn went mainstream – softcore and occasionally erotic; often featuring two people rolling around on the floor or on a bed or on a couch. They vaguely simulate what appears to be intercourse, but sometimes you just can't figure out what the hell they're doing.

Sound boring? Well, yes, it can be. You might have to bear witness to numerous cinematic atrocities, but then you find gems like Confessions of a Psycho Cat; Doctor Gore; A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine; The Amazing Transplant; Indecent Desires; Basket Case; Blood Feast; Bad Girls Go to Hell; Another Day, Another Man; The Gruesome Twosome; The Wizard of Gore; The Gore Gore Girls; Something Weird; Hitch-Hike to Hell; Kidnapped Coed; Murder a la Mod; The Psycho Lover; A Scream in the Streets; Toys Are Not for Children; Alley Tramp. That makes the hunt worthwhile.

Sometimes even the good ones can be a mixed bag. For example, A Scream in the Streets features a psychotic, poorly-dressed transvestite murdering women in a park, but you'll have to watch endless scenes of people having bordering-on-hardcore sex to get there. Now, to some, this might not sound like a bad thing, but when I'm waiting to see a crazed transvestite stabbing a girl while yelling "I HATE YOU! I HATE ALL WOMEN!", badly performed sex is the last thing I want keeping me from such a sight.

I haven't even watched most of the Something Weird Video DVDs that I own. I'm afraid actually watching the films will ruin the illusion of quality that the amazing, colorful cover art conjures up. I think the covers are the biggest reason I'm so smitten with this company. I mean, check out these works of art:

Now most, if not all, of these covers are taken from the films' original posters, but the way they have arranged the lurid images in such a creative, welcoming way is what appeals to me. That, combined with the fact that the majority of their DVDs are now about ten bucks at fine Internet retailers, makes this company's output a no-brainer for collectibility. A lot of the DVDs are now out of print, so I've been scrambling to pick up the ones I never got around to buying. It was recently announced that SWV have resumed their partnership with Image Entertainment, so I imagine those titles will go back in print. The Harry Novak-produced films, however, will not be reprinted, because their contract with him has ended. I advise everyone reading this who is interested in these films to buy as many of the Novak titles as you can get your hands on. SWV is perhaps the only company in existence who is willing to release these films, and the likelihood that they'll be re-released in the future by another label is close to zero.

Something Weird Video will also branch out into the Blu-Ray industry, with Blood Feast and Basket Case getting the hi-def treatment. I, for one, can't wait!

100 Underrated Horror Films Everyone Should See

2010-10-31T23:18:00.000-07:00

I like to make lists. A lot. So, even though Halloween is officially over (at least for most people), I have decided to make a list of 100 underrated horror films that you should check out if you haven't. They may not be the most scary, nor the best filmed, nor the best acted. Some of them aren't actually any good, and some of them aren't even horror films! They are simply weird films that I have enjoyed and that I feel are very overlooked by the majority of people.

1. Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)
2. All the Colors of the Dark (1972)
3. Anguish (1987)
4. Asylum (1972)
5. The Attic (1980)
6. Baba Yaga (1973)
7. The Baby (1973)
8. Bad Dreams (1988)
9. A Bay of Blood (1971)
10. The Beast Within (1982)
11. Beyond the Darkness (1979)
12. Blood Rage (1983)
13. Bloody Birthday (1981)
14. Blue Sunshine (1976)
15. The Body Snatcher (1945)
16. The Burning (1981)
17. The Candy Snatchers (1973)
18. Cannibal Apocalypse (1980)
19. Cannibal Man (1974)
20. The Centerfold Girls (1974)
21. Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972)
22. The Confessional (1976)
23. Criminally Insane (1975)
24. Cruising (1980)
25. Daddy's Deadly Darling (1972)
26. Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)
27. Dead & Buried (1981)
28. Deathdream (1974)
29. Dolls (1987)
30. Don't Look in the Basement (1973)
31. Don't Torture a Duckling (1972)
32. Dracula (Spanish Version) (1931)
33. The Driller Killer (1979)
34. Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
35. Eyes of a Stranger (1981)
36. Fade to Black (1980)
37. Fascination (1979)
38. Final Exam (1981)
39. Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
40. Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)
41. Frankenstein: The True Story (1973)
42. Frightmare (1974)
43. Ganja & Hess (1972)
44. The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
45. The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963)
46. Graduation Day (1981)
47. The Grapes of Death (1978)
48. Halloween II (2009)
49. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
50. Headless Eyes (1971)
51. He Knows You're Alone (1980)
52. Hitch-Hike (1977)
53. Hospital Massacre (1982)
54. The House on Straw Hill (1976)
55. Lady in a Cage (1964)
56. The Leopard Man (1943)
57. Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)
58. Lisa and the Devil (1972)
59. The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974)
60. The Living Dead Girl (1982)
61. The Manitou (1978)
62. Messiah of Evil (1973)
63. Mother of Tears (2007)
64. Mother's Day (1980)
65. Ms. 45 (1981)
66. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
67. Nightmare City (1980)
68. Night of the Living Dead (1990)
69. Night of the Seagulls (1975)
70. Night School (1981)
71. Night Train Murders (1975)
72. Night Warning (1983)
73. Obsession (1976)
74. The Penalty (1920)
75. The Phantom of the Opera (1989)
76. Phenomena (1985)
77. Pieces (1982)
78. The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972)
79. The Premonition (1976)
80. The Psychic (1977)
81. Raising Cain (1992)
82. The Redeemer (1978)
83. Road Games (1981)
84. Season of the Witch (1972)
85. The Sentinel (1977)
86. Shock (1977)
87. The Silent Scream (1980)
88. Simon, King of the Witches (1971)
89. Snuff (1976)
90. Son of Dracula (1943)
91. StageFright (1987)
92. Survival of the Dead (2009)
93. Tourist Trap (1979)
94. Trauma (1993)
95. The Unknown (1927)
96. A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1971)
97. Visiting Hours (1982)
98. What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969)
99. What Have You Done to Solange? (1972)
100. Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)