Muir Book Wednesday: Horror Films of the 1990s

Very shortly now (in just days, I hope...), my book Horror Films of the 1990s will be published. If you've followed my work in print, you will realize that it is the long-awaited follow-up to my earlier texts, the award-winning Horror Films of the 1970s (2002) and Horror Films of the 1980s (2007).

Like its two predecessors, Horror Films of the 1990s is a seven-hundred-or-so page survey of a wide swath of scary (and not-so-scary) films. Over three-hundred films are reviewed in detail in the book, and I also contribute a lengthy history about the decade and the particular events that shaped the genre cinema from the years 1990 - 1999.

Basically, the thesis of all my "Horror Films of..." books is that art universally mirrors life, and that you can better understand the horror films of any particular epoch by learning more about what was occurring in the culture at the time. In other words, I write a great deal about context. Therefore, Horror Films of the 1990s gazes at quite a few historical trends, and how those trends found voice, sometimes surprisingly, in the horror films of the day.

Two important nineties "Zeitgeist" touchstones involved the Human Genome Project and the Internet, for instance. Many films in the decade looked at this scintillating notion of a new Pandora's Box being opened, either in terms of genetic science or computers. Films such as Jurassic Park, Mimic, The Island of Dr. Moreau and Deep Blue Sea focused on Frankenstein-like genetic horror, while films such as The Lawnmower Man, Brainscan, and Ghost in the Machine reflected fears involving new technology. Both trends were really expressions of our culture's long-standing fear about "science run amok."

Horror Films of the 1990s remembers other trends in 1990s horror films too. Another notable shift from the 1980s involved the "morphing" of the famous faceless slashers (like Jason) into "Interlopers," murderous and dynamic individuals who insinuated themselves into the lives of average Americans and American families. Films such as The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, The Guardian, The Temp, Single White Female and Cape Fear are notable examples of this particular trend.

This same decade was also very much about the "homogenization" of horror, as studios made genre films their A-products: beneficiaries of big budgets and more well-known casts. But with greater costs involved in production, horror films also had far less room to transgress, and that proved a problem for a genre based on the foundation of shattering moral decorum and tradition.

Another notable difference: In the 1970s, we saw films with titles such as I Spit on Your Grave and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the 1990s, we got films with generic-sounding titles such as Scream, Mimic or The Temp. So-called "brand name terrors were also produced with easy identification in mind, and for quick sale on the home video market.  The "Grim Fairy Tale" trend was one example of using famous historical myths or cultural icons (Leprechaun, Rumpelstiltskin, Uncle Sam, Jack Frost, etc...) to quickly and effectively capture audience attention.

In general, the 1990s aren't considered a particularly good time in horror film history. Many of the films produced in this era don't stand up well next to the films of the 1970s or 1980s, for instance.

And yet I came away from my experience writing the book appreciating the good horror films of the Clinton Era all the more, perhaps, since they were fewer and farther between than in the previous decades I'd investigated.

So if you're a fan or follower of this blog and my books, I hope you'll seek out Horror Films of the 1990s, and let me know what you think of the book.

You can order Horror Films of the 1990s at Amazon, or through the publisher, McFarland.  Also, if you get the chance, you can see me discussing Horror Films of the 1990s at my author's page on Mahalo, here.  

I appreciate all your support!

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Home Sweet Home (1980)

"A little craziness never hurt anyone..."

- Dialogue from Home Sweet Home (1980)

In honor of the approaching holiday, today I'm looking back at a really terrible horror film that I first encountered while writing Horror Films of the 1980s (2007).

Conveniently, it's both Thanksgiving-themed and a turkey.

Advertised with the ad-line "The Bradleys won't be leaving home. Ever," Home Sweet Home (1981) is the not-so-riveting story of a deranged serial killer and his holiday rampage.

Said serial killer is portrayed by Body by Jake's (1988) gleeful Jake Steinfeld. The enthusiastic exercise guru -- also known for his music label, "Don't Quit Music" -- plays this muscular madman as a cackling, bulging-eyed freak. This looney killer has the tattoo "home sweet home" emblazoned on his fist, and was incarcerated for eight years over the bludgeoning death of his parents.

In one of the film's first scenes, this hyperactive, super-fit killer takes PCP by injecting it into his tongue, guns his car engine rowdily, and then runs over a little old lady crossing the street.

Lots of maniacal, silent-movie-style, villlainous cackling over that. Unfortunately, Jake has no moustache to twirl.

Meanwhile, at a Southern California ranch, the unconventional Bradley family is preparing for a holiday that may or may not be Thanksgiving. Let's see: there's a turkey. There's a celebratory meal. There's a family gathering. And there are guests. But no one mentions Turkey Day by name. The VHS box does it for us.

Anyway -- for some reason -- the obnoxious Bradley son, charmingly named "Mistake," is dressed as a mime for the occasion. He's a practical joke-playing mime, no less. And did I mention, Mistake also dabbles in the electric guitar?

Unfortunately, the mime is one of the last characters to die in Home Sweet Home, meaning the audience must endure Mistake's lame antics for a very long time before the movie arrives at his fateful, and wholly-deserved electrocution.

The holiday meal with the Bradley family promises to be an unusual one too, not just because Mistake is a mime and because an uninvited serial killer is on his way, but because one of the invitees "won't drink anything," since "she hates to go to the bathroom." WTF? You know, I don't particularly like going to the bathroom either. I think I'll stop drinking too. I didn't realize it was that simple...

And did I mention that some crack cops are on the case, investigating the murders and pursuing the body-builder killer? The classy cops gawk at one character's overripe breasts after stopping her for speeding, and share this colloquy:

"Did you see that chick with the big bazooms?"

Since Home Sweet Home is incompetently shot, written and acted, one might hope that the violence Jake ultimately inflicts on the Bradley family would at least prove entertaining. But it isn't (well, except for the death of the mime, to be fair...). One character dies when she falls over and cracks her head against a rock. Can you really blame Ole Jack for that? Another character gets his head crushed under the hood of a car.

Home Sweet Home exhibits the familiar flaw of the worst slasher films, meaning that the killer is always positioned right where he should be in order to kill the one character who happens to be left alone at any given moment. You might accept that level of expertise from a Michael Myers or a Jason...but by Jake Steinfeld? I just can't ascribe supernatural abilities to this guy. Enthusiasm, gung-ho inspiration, yes. Boogeyman capabilities...no.

Mere words can't truly convey how irrevocably horrible this movie is. So Happy Thanksgiving, caveat emptor, and...gobble, gobble.

And The Worst Horror Film Remake So Far Is...?

...Wes Craven Presents Carnival of Souls.

The original Carnival of Souls (1962) was a one-of-a-kind experience. Forged on a tiny budget in the middle of nowhere Kansas, it was undeniably crude. Yet the film by Herk Harvey was surreal and creepy too; a mesmerizing, unsettling journey into a disturbing, black-and-white netherworld.

In my review of the film, I wrote:

"Performances in Carnival of Souls are truly variable, from the exquisite and sublime (the entrancing Hilligoss) to the terrible (there's a moment when a stranger by a water fountain addresses the camera directly), but there's an alchemy at work in Carnival of Souls, one impossible to dismiss.

The film's production deficits somehow manage to play into the overriding sense of the unreal and dream-like. There are no zombie attacks, no fierce action sequences, no bouts of blood-letting here. Instead, the venture methodically and memorably (and with unforgettable imagery) charts one woman's tragic plight as she slips slowly - piece by piece - from the world of the living to the world of the dead. In that half-detected twilight between life and death, she begins to regret that she never embraced life as meaningfully as she should have. Because now, death's cold embrace - a dance partner in the carnival of souls - is all she can look forward to.

The 1960s Carnival of Souls had budgetary drawbacks but viewers could easily overlook them because the film nonetheless expressed something powerful and resonant about mortality. That abandoned Saltair Carnival was a realm of terror, and our heroine was never going to escape it; no matter how hard she tried. Ultimately, we're all going to have our dance card punched by Death too; and thus something rings true about the stark, mysterious film and the hopeless, inevitable air that dominates it.

The same could not be said for the dreadful 1998 remake. It stars Bobbie Phillips as Alex Grant, a young woman who witnessed the murder of her mother twenty years ago by an abusive clown, Louis Seagram (Larry Miller). On the anniversary of her Mom's murder, Alex is accosted by Louis once more, and she drives her car into the waters of a California harbor rather than let the sadist endanger her younger sister, Sandra (Shawnee Smith). Following the accident in the harbor, Alex begins to move throughout different stages of her life, is terrorized by Louis repeatedly, and even sees gesticulating, spasming demons straight out of Jacob's Ladder (1990).

Technically-speaking, Wes Craven Presents Carnival of Souls is a much less-accomplished effort than the original film, an odd fact given that the remake undoubtedly cost far more than Herk Harvey's groundbreaking original. In fact, this 1998 film is staged so ineptly that sometimes reverse angles don't even match. And the characters are so often shot in in close-up and medium-shot that you can't tell where characters are positioned in relationship to each other. One scene that features Louis popping up in the back-seat of Alex's car is so badly composed and edited that you aren't even sure that Miller and Phillips were in the same car at the same time to shoot the scene. Additionally, the movie is over-lit and blandly shot in a style that makes your average Sci-Fi Original Movies look like Fellini.

The newer Carnival of Souls also boasts all the tell-tale marks of bad 1990s screen-writing. In the original film, we met a character who happened to be in a car wreck, but the audience knew little about her background. As the movie went on, we learned she was a bit of a cold fish, and that she had held a job as a church organist. But we came to sympathize with her through her experiences; through the strange events occurring all around her. We identified with her because something strange and terrible was happening to her; and because, we felt, it could happen to us too.

By contrast, the 1998 film layers on facile psychology and off-the-shelf characters (in much the style as Rob Zombie's Halloween remake, actually...). Alex is a "psychologically damaged" character with "a tragic past" she must overcome. The events of the film take place on the anniversary of her Mother's murder...the event she could never get past. How many times have we seen that kind of predictable set-up before?

The Boogeyman of Carnival of Souls this time around has changed too. He is not some wide-eyed, pale-faced personification of Death, but rather Alex's "personal" demon: the groping, gruesome and utterly obvious Louis. The focus on the inner life -- on mortality itself -- has been turned outward to the simple defeat of a two-dimensional "bad guy" the audience can hiss at. Certainly, a good film could be made from these concepts, but this isn't it. These changes only make Carnival of Souls much more two-dimensional, much more run-of-the-mill than the original film.

The 1998 film is also slathered with dopey New Age, touchy-feely dialogue about death. Alex shares a discussion with a man who might be an angel. He tells her, "It's time to let go." She replies "I can't. I haven't lived yet." At another point, during a discussion of closing down her bar (The Mermaid Bar), Alex tells her sister "I'm not ready to go." Sandra replies "I know, but you're closer than you think." Welcome to Foreshadowing 101. But once more, the whole concept of the original film is undercut because death is now a safe harbor, a peaceful zone...not a realm of the unknown and the terrifying. I suppose this change has occurred so that the film can end with a kind of happy ending: our heroine has beaten the bad guy, "achieved" the rescue of her sister, and moved on to a "good place."

This movie should have been titled Horrorway to Heaven.

Really, I could go on and on about what a lousy film this is. There's a gratuitous sex scene on a boat that pops up out of nowhere with bizarre urgency but then leads nowhere. And the movie constantly skips time frames -- back and forth between scenes -- thus negating even the most rudimentary sense of narrative momentum (and precluding the need for that pesky thing called "continuity.")

And rather ungraciously, Wes Craven Presents Carnival of Souls even fails to credit the original 1962 film as a source of inspiration. There's no "based on" opening credit here, despite the fact that the overall outline of the film is the same as the original (a woman dies and doesn't know it...) and despite the fact that certain shots are explicitly re-staged (the car pulled from the water...). The IMDB lists John Clifford, the writer of the original Carnival of Souls in the credits for this film, but I watched this film yesterday and his name is nowhere on the front of the film. The opening credit reads: written for the screen and directed by Adam Grossman.

Bottom line: Wes Craven Presents Carnival of Souls is a bad remake, and an arrogant one too. It has the audacity to adopt the title of a beloved older film but then substitutes weak ideas for the powerful ones of the original. A remake of Carnival of Souls need not have been slavishly imitative of the original, but it could have captured at least some of the ambiguity, some of the terror, some of the spikiness of the 1962 effort. This remake fails on all fronts.

I'm a big admirer of Wes Craven, but I sure as hell wish his name didn't appear before the title of this travesty, the lousiest of horror remakes.

What were my other contenders for that title? Next in line: the remake of The Hitcher (2007), and Jan De Bont's The Haunting (1999).

The Vault of Horror Presents: The Horror Canon

The amazing B-Sol at The Vault of Horror recently tasked the Horror Cyber-Elite -- a veritable "Justice League" of horror bloggers -- to assemble selections for a Horror Canon.

As B-Sol describes the mission:

"My plan was to create a list of absolutely indispensable horror films that every fan needs to have seen in order to consider themselves a proper horror geek. This is not to be confused with "The Greatest of All Time." For example, Plan 9 from Outer Space would not be on my list of the greatest of all time, but I might very well consider it "must-see" viewing for any wannabe horror fanatic!"

"Think of it this way: If someone came to you and said, "I want to get into this whole horror thing, what movies do I need to see?" Which movies would you give them to watch?"

Check out the post in its entirety to see the Cyber-Horror Elite's tally of 35 films for inclusion in the Horror Canon!

To my delight, eight of my ten recommendations/suggestions made the final catalogue. As always, you may quibble with a specific title, or wonder about a particular omission, but I love these lists because they get the debate started, evoke passion, and foster further blogging. For instance, given the success of recent first-person/P.O.V. horrors like REC (2007) and Cloverfield (2008), I would have liked to see The Blair Witch Project (1999) make the Horror Canon, perhaps in lieu of some 2008 - 2009 films that may -- or may not -- stand the test of time.

Regardless of the titles ultimately chosen, it was an honor to be included in the selection process for The Horror Canon, and one of these days, I plan to post in detail about the films in the canon and why, indeed, they remain so important to a deeper understanding of the genre...

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987)

More than the work of any major director since Howard Hawks, John Carpenter’s films have undergone a unique "second life" -- a period of intense re-evaluation…and new found appreciation.

Even the classic Halloween (1978) originally drew bad reviews and nearly faded into obscurity until a laudatory Village Voice review by Tom Allen, and a well-timed holiday release rescued the film's reputation. Today, Halloween is a fixed star in the horror firmament; even a companion piece for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

Likewise, Carpenter’s The Thing (1981) was ignored by audiences and vilified by critics in the summer of E.T. (1982). Carpenter was even termed a “pornographer of violence” by some short-sighted critics because of the film’s intensity and pioneering (though admittedly gruesome...) special effects.

Yet by the 1990s, The Thing was exerting enormous influence on the genre in Hollywood productions almost too numerous to list. From The X-Files (“Ice”) and the main adversary of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine -- the shape-shifting “Dominion” (detectable only by blood test…) -- to the T-1000 in Terminator 2 (1991), Thing imitations were practically ubiquitous.

In recent years, critical estimations of In the Mouth of Madness (1994), They Live (1988), The Fog (1980), Vampires (1998) and Ghosts of Mars (2001) have also trended positive. But it is the director’s 1987 Nigel Kneale homage, Prince of Darkness that has witnessed the most meteoric rise in appreciation. Once derided as "second rate" and "klutzy," the film is now beloved for its brawny narrative twists, not to mention Carpenter's crisp direction.

The second movement of Carpenter’s so-called “Apocalypse Trilogy” (a cycle including The Thing and In The Mouth of Madness…), Prince of Darkness is elegantly lensed, suffused with a gloomy, unsettling vibe of cerebral terror (the more you understand, the more afraid you feel…) and punctuated with periodic jolts or "stingers" of extreme intensity. It is, as L.A. Times critic Michael Wilmington opined, a film "filled with graceful, gliding tracking shots, and icily precise Hitchcockian setups of the bleak decor and scary effects." (October 23, 1987).

Prince of Darkness also features one of Carpenter’s most memorable, arresting and pulse-pounding soundtracks. The score’s “ominous intonations…grab you and take command of your heartbeat.” (Allen Malmquist, Cinefantastique Volume 13, # 2, March 1988, page 117).

In all, this Carpenter film fires on all cylinders, and holds up exceedingly well on repeated viewing. At the film's heart is a discussion of science as the new "faith;" and an examination of a population -- another alienated population -- searching for spiritual and emotional meaning in a world apparently devoid of it.

He Lives in the Smallest Part of It

Prince of Darkness features a number of John Carpenter touchstones, both visual and thematic. First and foremost, this is a siege picture (like Assault on Precinct 13 or Ghosts of Mars), meaning that the action focuses on a small group of protagonists inside fighting off superior forces outside.

The abandoned police precinct of Assault has become the abandoned Church -- Saint Godard's -- of Prince of Darkness. In both scenarios, the location of the battle is important. The buildings are relics; ones without contemporary meaning or importance. Society has passed them by in both cases; they are symbols, essentially, of impotent infrastructure or bureaucracy.

Writing for Monthly Film Bulletin in May of 1985, Philip Strick compared the two Carpenter films in a way that is illuminating for our discussion: "With Prince of Darkness, the siege of Assault on Precinct 13 is vividly reconstructed: the derelict fortress, the comfortless corridors, the silent army in the night outside, the collapse of logic and security."

You may recall that the oft-repeated "siege" element in Carpenter's films is an homage to the cinema of Howard Hawks, notably Rio Bravo (1959). But Prince of Darkness is also an homage to one of Carpenter's favorite writers : Nigel Kneale. Kneale was the prime talent behind the British Quatermass films of the 1950s and 1960s (The Creeping Unknown, Enemy from Space and Five Million Years to Earth). His films (as well as TV serials) popularized the notion that threats mistaken as being of supernatural origin are actually...extra-terrestrial. In Five Million Years to Earth (1968) it was a Martian psychic force, not the Devil, sweeping through London, and so on. Carpenter resurrected this concept for Ghosts of Mars in 2001, but first he employed it in Prince of Darkness.

In Prince of Darkness, Jesus is an ancient astronaut, and Satan and his Father (the Anti-God) are also extra-terrestrials. In a tip of his hat to Howard Hawks, Carpenter edited the film Rio Bravo under the name "John T. Chance," the name of John Wayne's character in that movie. Likewise, Carpenter penned Prince of Darkness under the name "Martin Quatermass." Quatermass, of course, is the protagonist of Kneale's most famous works.

Prince of Darkness also evidences Carpenter's distinctive anti-authoritarian voice. Here, the Catholic Church has hidden the truth about the nature of Evil for 2000 years. "We were salesmen," says Pleasence's priest with disgust. "We were selling our product." In various films -- as we've seen -- Carpenter also went after movie critics (They Live), religious fundamentalists (Escape from L.A.), and even used the Catholic Church as a target again in Vampires. There, another Catholic sect was hiding a different Devilish secret: a black crucifix that created the world's first vampires.

Where Prince of Darkness pinpoints so much new energy, however, is not in these commonly-found Carpenter homages or themes, but rather in the endless possibilities of Quantum Physics. It's a whole new playground for the director, and he makes the most of the territory. The film discusses every important concept from Schrodinger's Cat to "causality violation" (time travel), and it does so with a sort of breathless, fast-paced intelligence that challenges the audience to keep up.

Let’s Talk About Our Beliefs, and What We Can Learn From Them…

Prince of Darkness begins with the discovery of an ancient and secret Catholic sect known as "The Brotherhood of Sleep." The guardian priest of this mysterious sect dies while clutching a miniature box containing a key; a key to the basement of a rundown Church in poverty-stricken L.A. called Saint Godard's.

There, upon an altar in the basement...is a seven million year old canister of volatile, swirling fluid. The liquid is, in fact, Pure Evil: Satan himself.

In hopes of comprehending and defeating this unusual threat, a Catholic priest (Donald Pleasence) teams up with Professor Birack (Victor Wong), a teacher of quantum physics at the Doppler Institute of Physics. Along with a group of dedicated graduate students -- including lonely Catherine Danforth (Lisa Blount) and Brian Marsh (Jameson Parker) -- the man of science and the man of faith spend the weekend at the old church and undertake a study of the canister and the liquid, as well as the corrupted Latin palimpsest that details its history and secrets.

Over a long, horrifying night, as revelation follows revelation, the forces of darkness invade the Church. As the devilish, pre-biotic liquid "self-organizes," it assumes psychokinetic control over small organisms (such as insects) first, then L.A.'s wrteched homeless, and finally it makes zombie minions of many of the graduate students themselves. The evil liquid also selects a human host, Kelly (Susan Blanchard), and plots to bring its demonic father -- the Anti-God -- into our dimension. At the same time, all the graduate students experience a recurring nightmare: a tachyon S.O.S. warning from the year 1999...

Very much like 1982's The Thing, John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness concerns flawed, lonely, awkward human beings living in a world in which there is no real faith or human inter-connection. In fact, Prince of Darkness repeats verbatim a line uttered by R.J. McReady (Kurt Russell) in The Thing: "Faith is a hard thing to come by these days." As in that earlier film the line is spoken by Carpenter's unconventional protagonist and voice for the audience, here a graduate student in quantum physics named Brian Marsh.

The problem is that in a world of advancing science and human knowledge, the old platitudes of religious faith and belief seem antiquated and stale. At least until dressed up with such scientific candy-coating as "differential equations," "tachyons," "indeterminancy," and the like. Yet importantly, those "new" scientific concepts don't tell us who we are (or who we should be...) in the same authoritative sense that old-fashioned belief systems did.

Thus...a void.

Carpenter -- ever the visual artist -- finds an imaginative way of expressing this crisis in spirituality. As Pleasence's priest views St. Godard for the first time, the camera presents an establishing view of the church from behind an old iron gate, and a holy cross -- a Catholic Crucifix -- can be seen jutting heavenward from the church's roof. Yet above the church is another gate slat, this one horizontal in direction. In other words, the cross (representing religion or faith) is boxed in on all sides, from above and from left and right. Visually, it is trapped, confined and caged by its inability to answer the questions that so many people seek in today's world.

Professor Birack -- a wise elder and interpreter of the quantum runes -- seems aware of these problems in human connection, and he seeks amongst his studentsw -- again according to the dialogue, -- "philosophers" rather than "scientists." Philosophers, he understands, will understand how to place scientific knowledge within the context of man's spiritual or emotional world; whereas scientists, by implication, may not.

In Birack's students, we see disciples in waiting: lost souls who, for the most part, have forgotten the art of being human. Instead, they have come as boxed-in as the crucifix over the church. They have labeled themselves using the prevailing and simple lingo of their culture. "I'm a confirmed sexist," Brian tells Catherine proudly while trying to court her, unaware of how silly and bigoted he sounds. Later, Walter (Dennis Dun) tells a racist Jewish Mother joke ("I said rich doctor, not witch doctor!"), and also comments, condescendingly that Lisa, the team translater, could "pass for Asian."

This is a world in which it doesn't matter so much that a woman like Susan (the radiologist) is married, but rather the degree of her marriage ("how married?" a potential suitor asks). Thus communication between people, especially between people of opposite sexes is dominated in Prince of Darkness by what Catherine terms "miscues." These are wrong, defensive interpretations based on pre-conceived notions of others and even a pervasive non-understanding of self. In his essay, "John Carpenter: Cinema of Isolation" scholar John Thonen saw these graduate students as "selfish," and "lifeless" (Cinefantastique, Volume 30, Number 7/8, October 1998, page 71).

What these lost souls seem to lack is the very thing religion once provided for many: a sense of belonging, a sense of man's innate goodness. These young scientists, as the film notes, get romantic when discussing The New Faith (Quantum Physics) but "clam-up" when it comes to talking about emotions, feelings and humanity. Perhaps that's because science provides no guide-lines, no rules, no equations in such matters.

Catherine and Brian are seekers of truth and more than that, they are seekers of love...which is something more meaningful than just good sex (which ironically, is their first connection). Catherine desires to know "what the numbers mean," a search beyond scientific jargon, and Brian's obsession with card tricks represents a need for an understanding of life beyond mere probability tests; in something like...luck.

Each character has an idea of what specific path will lead them to personal enlightenment, but what they wish to make room for is the person -- the other -- who may bring them, by philosophies unknown and unexpected, to the missing piece of life's puzzle. To love. To real intimacy.

The tragic love story in Prince of Darkness plays out, interestingly enough, as a modern Christ analogy. Because of her burgeoning relationship with Brian, Catherine is finally open to love, to giving. Ultimately, she sacrifices herself to save mankind. She vanquishes the evil, but at the cost of her own life and future. "She died for us," Birack states succinctly, putting Catherine's sacrifice in decidely religious, Christian terms. Catherine knew what was at stake and made a conscious decision to consider others above her own well-being and survival. She saved, literally, a wicked world (one controlled by the Anti-God). She thus changed everything, preserving our future. Her Gospel, perhaps, is the mesage heretofore incomplete, the one beamed back through time (a causality violation) as an unconscious message. Will that message be different after her choice to save our world, or will it simply cease to exist all together?

No Prison Will Hold Him Now

Prince of Darkness debuted in the Age of AIDS, in 1987. This was the very year, in fact, that President Reagan made his first public statement on the epidemic. It was also the year that the formerly promiscuous James Bond 007 (Timothy Dalton) became a one-woman kind of guy in The Living Daylights.

The AIDS epidemic (as it was understood at the time) serves as an important backdrop to Carpenter’s film, since the “Evil” force depicted here is a fluid passed from person-to-person (usually mouth-to-mouth). Susan infects Calder by kissing him and forcing the evil fluid down his throat. Likewise, she contaminates Lisa in a sexually-charged sequence. As Lisa reclines on her bed, supine, Susan mounts her -- ascending into a dominant position -- straddling her. She then ejaculates the fluid into Lisa's protesting, open mouth. In the case of both AIDS and the Devil Liquid, transmission occurs through what appears to be sexual behavior; and the danger is carried in the equivalent of bodily fluids.

AIDS was largely seen originally (in the 1980s) as a "gay" disease, because it decimated that population first. If you look at the pattern of transmission in Prince of Darkness, you may note that same-sex transmission is highlighted. Susan infects Lisa. Susan and Lisa infect Kelly (all women). Professor Leahy (Peter Jason) and Calder (both men...) go after Brian. The one instance in which a woman does infect a man (Susan to Calder) could be read as representing another sexual taboo: interracial coupling. And come to think of it, Susan -- the first to be infected and spread the disease -- is married; thus acting out, essentially, an infidelity. What we're talking about here isn't just sexual behavior then but perhaps sexual misbehavior. Remember, The Thing too featured a single sex population in peril and posited Evil as an easily-transmitted disease; one "hidden" in the blood. In that film as well as in Prince of Darkness, Carpenter reflects American society's rampant fear of and paranoia about AIDs, about disease transmitted from person-to-person during promiscuous, impulsive acts.

Another important context underlining Prince of Darkness involves the 1980s epidemic of homelessness. By 1983, there were 35 million Americans living in poverty, some five million more than when Reagan had been inaugurated in January 1981. Reagan's economic policies involved what The Christian Science Monitor termed "deep budget cuts in the social service area" in order to lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans. The result was that more and more people lost their homes. Reagan once even audaciously stated that many of these unfortunates were “homeless by choice.”

In Prince of Darkness, it is the homeless who first become human minions to the Devil...an army of streetwalkers and hobos who -- ostensibly aimless -- have found malevolent purpose. Idle hands and all. Carpenter returned to the the theme of poverty and the homeless in his next film, They Live (1988), setting much of the action in a Shantytown called "Justiceville."

Say Goodbye to Classical Reality

Carpenter's Prince of Darkness screenplay asserts a "universal mind" or God if you will. However, because this is a Kneale-ean homage anchored in science, it also asserts the Laws of Physics. In particular, the film reminds us that every particle has an opposite or anti-particle. Therefore, if there is a universal mind or God, by inference there is also an anti-God.

In the film, a shorthand for this duality is quickly established via mirrors, via reflections. Accordingly, much of Prince of Darkness visually and contextually deals with doubling, opposites and mirror images. The mirror becomes the portal to the other world; where our "opposites" exist.

Birack and Pleasence's Priest are mirror images of sorts, possessing contrasting world views (science vs. religion) and Carpenter even uses mirror image compositions and mise-en-scene throughout the film, most notably during Brian's "test" leap into the alley beyond the church, and the subsequent attack of the homeless "antibodies." The film cuts to opposing reverse angles moving in on Brian from both sides. It's a visual mirror, with Brian as our point of reference in both shots, from both angles. Brian's prominent placement in the frame even presages Prince of Darkness's electric, portentous climax: a further "test" by Brian...this one staged as he reaches out for his own, possibly malicious anti-self in a mirror.

These final images resonate. They get under the skin. They promise so much yet explain so little. As Brian reaches for the mirror, gazing into his own reflection, the film's many themes converge. He is not only wondering if Catherine is watching him from the other side -- from the anti-verse -- but he is looking into his own face -- sweaty and pale -- and seeking answers. Brian is wondering, perhaps, if, the evil, the contamination could pass to him next. Only a moment earlier, he imagined himself in bed beside a rotting corpse...(the ultimate fear of the AIDS era...) and the uncertainty, the fear of infection, is palpable. It is this moment that Carpenter leaves us to ponder as the film concludes: a close shot of a groping hand reaching for (but not actually touching...) a mirror; the portal to darkness.

Prince of Darkness remains one of John Carpenter's most frightening films, not merely because of the superb soundtrack, the AIDS-subtext, or the clever use of Quantum Physics, but because the screenplay spotlights how much we take for granted in our daily lives. In Prince of Darkness we witness a world where logic is of no use (it collapses on the subatomic level...) and in which Evil is Real. There is indeed an order to the universe, John Carpenter reminds us...but it's not at all what we had in mind...

Ode to a Delta 88: The Classic Returns!

"He absolutely loved it (the Delta 88), and it kept on getting destroyed, and he would rebuild it. He had a very sentimental attachment to that car..."

-Robert Primes (director of photography, Crimewave).

Once upon a time, director Alfred Hitchcock was famous for making cameo appearances in his films. Today, Sam Raimi is almost as well-known for featuring his beloved car -- "The Classic" (a yellow Oldsmobile Delta 88 from 1973...) -- in his various Hollywood productions.

Ash (Bruce Campbell) piloted Raimi's treasured Delta in Evil Dead (1983), Evil Dead 2 (1987) and even time-tripped with it in Army of Darkness (1993). The director's car was also featured (and virtually destroyed...) in a nighttime car chase in the cult film, Crimewave (1985). More recently, it served as Cate Blanchett's clunker in The Gift (2000),and Uncle Ben's (Cliff Robertson's) car in Spider-man (2002). You can also see it in Spider-Man 3 (2007).

The cinematic love affair between Sam Raimi and his car continues to this very day, with this week's Drag Me to Hell (2009). The 36-year old Oldsmobile returns as the conveyance of diabolical old gypsy, Sylvia Ganush. The Classic even has a good supporting role this time around too: showing up (malevolently) in a darkened parking deck, and later seen quiescently parked in the gypsy's driveway.

When I wrote The Unseen Force : The Films of Sam Raimi in 2004 for Applause Theatre and Cinema Books (now available on Amazon's Kindle...) I had the honor of interviewing several cast and crew members from Raimi's productions, and we inevitably got around to the subject of The Classic. Sheree Wilson, star of Crimewave told me that the car was indeed Sam's "baby" and that she got a lot of special privileges with it, "hanging off...dangling off... "(page 83) of it.

After working on Spider-Man, the great Cliff Robertson told me that Raimi's Classic serves as the director's "signature." Roberson noted he was unaware of the car's deep significance until the "yellow Oldsmobile appeared on the scene" and his character died "in front of it at the Public Library."

Robertson added that it would be "interesting to see" how Raimi is going "to put it in a futuristic movie..." (page 304), but that he was sure that Raimi would "find a way, being the inventive, creative man that he is..."

Let's hope we next see The Classic battling Deadites again in Evil Dead IV...

13 Reasons I Love the Friday the 13th Films

Happy Friday the 13th!

Today sees the release of a re-imagined Friday the 13th movie franchise in cinemas across America. Given this milestone, II figured it was a good time to pay my respects to the original films; the ones I grew up with as a teenager in the 1980s.

So, without further introduction, here are 13 reasons I will always love the Friday the 13th movies:

1.) There's a consistent, Old Testament-style, conservative argument to be made in the interpretation of the old school Friday the 13th films (1980 - 1991). I describe this thesis a bit in my book, Horror Films of the 1980s, referring to it as "vice precedes slice and dice." That means, simply, that misbehaving teenagers (screwing, drinking, snorting coke and getting high...) are punished (violently...) for their moral transgressions. Jason, whose trusty machete might as well be the punishing Hand of God Himself, is the punisher. With this motif in place, I never understood the Moral Majority's dedicated opposition to the Friday the 13th films. The not-so-subtle subtext of these Reagan Age horrors is that if you play...you pay. But then, would-be censors aren't know for their penetrating film analysis, I suppose.

2.) There is an alternative interpretation of the Friday the 13th films too. Stated bluntly, it is implicit in the original films that Jason Voorhees - hockey mask, machete and all -- is the natural (or supernatural...) result of a modern world in which there are no more predators for man. Jason is therefore but a mechanism, a response from nature, to man's invasion of a natural terrain (in this case, Camp Crystal Lake). Screening the Friday the 13th film together, it's clear that the one factor in common is not Jason himself (who, technically, doesn't appear in Part V: A New Beginning), but rather...a storm. Yep, bad weather inevitably brings thunder, lightning...and evil, serial-killer predators (whether Mrs. Voorhees, Jason, or the Jason Impostor). The arrival of bad weather is important in the various Friday the 13th narratives for practical reasons, of course. Storms knock out power (and particularly lights...) plunging frightened teens into darkness, preventing telephone calls for aid, and making the youngsters ripe for the picking off. But it's more than that. It's as if nature is rising up and rebelling against these aimless, decadent humans and Jason is the mechanism to destroy them. If Jason didn't exist, Mother Nature would have to invent him. Consider also that Jason is tied to nature in an interesting fashion: he is believed dead for years when in fact he is alive and "incubating" at the bottom of Camp Crystal Lake.

3.) The Survivors. They were no longer little women...they were final girls. Horror-hating moralists and not a few feminists perpetually and blindly misinterpret the Friday the 13th films as misogynistic when nothing could be further from the truth. Virtually every Friday the 13th film provides the audience a laudable and heroic "final girl" who outsmarts, out-thinks and out-fights the powerful (and male) Jason Voorhees. While her friends are fucking, getting high, or getting drunk, the final girl alone is actually paying attention to what's happening, and able to sense -- and ultimately combat -- looming danger. Tell me that's not a positive message to send to teenage girls. Keep your wits about you, don't submit to peer pressure, and remember where you left the chainsaw...

4.) The sleeping bag kill. This is a murder featured in Friday the 13th: The New Blood (1988), and it's my all-time favorite sequence in the franchise. As you may recall, Jason zips up an unlucky camper in a sleeping bag and then -- like she's a sack of potatoes -- repeatedly slams the bag and camper into a tree trunk It's not the goriest kill; it's not the silliest kill; but in some ways this basic bludgeoning is the most brutal and -- oddly -- the funniest kill in the series. I get a kick out of it every time I see it.

5.) The Cassandra Complex. This character archetype appears in several Friday the 13th films (particularly the first, Part 2, Jason Lives and Jason Takes Manhattan). There's always a drunk stumbling around the perimeter of Crystal Lake warning oblivious teens that they're all "going to die." This Cassandra figure goes right back to Greek myth -- the tragic seer who is never believed by those in danger. Critics and moralists can accuse the Friday the 13th films of being pandering, stupid horror movies as much as they want...but many of the entries are actually constructed with an eye towards some classic literature. Both in Mother Love (the relationship between Jason and Mrs. Voorhees) and in the inclusion of the discredited seer.

6.) Tom McLoughlin's sense of humor. McLoughlin directed Part VI, Jason Lives! and once more found the fun in the aging Friday the 13th saga, injecting the series with fresh blood in a number of clever sequences. The film opens, for instance, with a nod to the James Bond gun barrel sequence, except this time Jason is on-screen armed with a machete. The humor permeates in the film in little ways too. A child camper at Crystal Lake is seen, briefly, reading No Exit. Again, the meme that these are just "stupid" horror movies is proven wrong.

7.) The Stars in Waiting. Kevin Bacon, Crispin Glover, Corey Feldman, and Martin Cummins are just a few of the young actors who showed up at Camp Crystal Lake, got horribly murdered by a Voorhees, and moved on to bigger things. Everybody's got to start somewhere...

8.) Harry Manfredini's trademark "chi-chi-ha-ha" riff. Okay, so it's not the Halloween theme by John Carpenter. But this creepy, classic composition defined the Friday the 13th sound for a generation of teenagers, entered the pop culture lexicon, and was widely imitated and mocked. And, if I'm not mistaken, the cue is resurrected for the remake.

9.) The trailer for Jason Takes Manhattan. I'm not certain how many of you are old enough to recall this TV advertisement...but it was bloody genius. To the chipper tune of "New York, New York," a camera crept up on a figure gazing at the iconic New York City skyline. As we moved in on the figure -- his back to us -- he whirled around and it was...Jason! This trailer was actually more inventive than the farmed out-to-Canada movie it was created for. I appreciated the tag-line too: "Now New York has a new problem." I also can't help but think of The Muppets Take Manhattan...

10.) High Concepts Gone Horribly Wrong. The makers of the Friday the 13th films attempted desperately to keep the long-in-the-tooth series going, infusing new and crazy ideas into the later sequels. For instance, A New Blood was sort of Carrie Versus Jason, an idea that sounds great on paper but doesn't play so well, especially when "Carrie's" psychic powers miss their target and wake up Jason Voorhees from his deathly slumber at the bottom of Crystal Lake. And who can forget Jason X -- which sent Jason into deep space and brought in Star Trek: The Next Generation's holodeck technology? And in the underwhelming Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason is overcome by toxic waste in Manhattan's sewers...because you know, in New York, toxic waste gets flushed through the sewers every night! The toxic sludge doesn't kill Jason though...it just transforms, him into a pre-pubescent kid wearing his bathing suit. Whatever...

11.) Amy Steel. Ginny from Friday the 13th Part II is my personal favorite "final girl" in the series. It's a personal thing, all right? Not every Final girl can adorn a bloody wool sweater, talk sternly to Jason, and get the killer to back down. If I can't have Jamie Lee Curtis...give me Amy Steel any day.

12.) The Motive That Makes No Sense. So let me get this straight. Mrs. Voorhees went on a killing spree in 1980 (in the first film) because her little boy, Jason, drowned at Camp Crystal Lake in 1958 thanks to neglectful counselors. But...as the end of Friday the 13th proves...Jason didn't drown. He's still alive. So if Jason isn't really dead, why is Mrs. Voorhees after Alice (Adrienne King) and her friends? It makes no sense at all. Then, Jason kills new teenagers because Alice killed his mother. But his Mother shows up alive in the lake at the end of Part III. What the hell? It kind of reminds me -- in a really bad way -- of Jaws IV: The Revenge (1987). There, the great white shark wants revenge against all Brodys because Chief Brody...killed it.

13.) The sting-in-the-tail/tale from Friday the 13th. Director Sean Cunningham crafts a perfect, mind-shattering coda for Friday the 13th, even if it makes no sense in terms of the specifics of the narrative. A spent Alice is alone in a row boat, in the middle of Camp Crystal Lake when a deformed Jason Boy leaps out of the water to attack her. This sting-in-the-tale/tail is second only to Brian De Palm's Carrie (1976) in terms of terrifying impact. Everything about this finale is pitch-perfect, from the placid, idyllic look of the lake, to the tranquil, misleading music, to the sudden attack itself. Indeed, the longevity of the Friday series may originate from this unforgettable denouement (which passed the serial killer torch from Mother to Son).

There you have it. Happy Friday the 13th. Here's to you, Jason...with an arrow in the eye!

Vault of Horror's Cyber-Elite Returns With the Top 20 Foreign Horror Movies of All-Time!

B-Sol at the great genre blog Vault of Horror has just gone live with another "Cyber-Elite" post.

This time, the dedicated cabal of horror film lovers has selected the top twenty foreign horror movies of all time.

And yes, It's another tally certain to spur controversy and debate (good things, in my book...). Especially because Italy's output is so lightly represented overall.

And, well, if I've learned anything in the last few years...don't mess with Italian horror movie fans. They'll never forgive you. Hell hath no fury like an Italian horror movie fan scorned.

A quick scan of the Cyber-Elite list reveals that six of my personal top ten foreign horrors made the group list, which is a pretty good number, I reckon.

Alas, two of my high-ranking choices, Don't Look Now (1973) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) didn't make the final cut. D'oh!

You can check out the entire list here. Below I include a snippet of the top five. I had three of these on my top ten (but I'll leave you to guess which ones. But yes, one of my top two choices was indeed Italian...):


1. Let the Right One In (2003) – Sweden
2. Suspiria (1977) – Italy
3. Cemetery Man (1994) – Italy
4. Nosferatu (1922) – Germany
5. Diaboliques (1955) – France

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Long Weekend (1979)

In the last month or so, the terrific movie blog Fantasmo Cult Cinema Explosion by Jim Blanton has surveyed a variety of Australian horror films and I've been joining in the fun from home.

So basically, I have Jim (who plays Arlo on The House Between...) to thank for leading me to the neo-classic crocodile horror movie, Rogue (2007), and also this rather remarkable 1970s effort, Long Weekend (1979).

Directed by Colin Eggleston (from a script by Everett De Roche of Patrick [1978] fame), Long Weekend is a compelling "revenge of nature" movie, all right, yet one very different from contemporaries of the disco decade such as Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), Frogs (1972), Day of the Animals (1977), Night of the Lepus (1972) or others.

Where those films determinedly depict an apocalypse hastened by mankind's irresponsible use of chemicals, hormones, the destruction of the ozone or other global-scaled issues, Long Weekend instead implies a very personal, very intimate sort of holocaust. Here, the crucible of a bad marriage -- and the struggle for dominance in that arena -- is the spark that ignites angry Mother Nature.

As Long Weekend opens, we are introduced to a bickering -- and I mean bickering -- married couple. Whisper-thin husband Peter (John Hargreaves) and shapely wife Marcia (Briony Behets) have some real bad blood between them, as the audience quickly sees. Marcia's recently had an abortion; which she blames Peter for. Even though the baby was by another man...whom Marcia was unfaithful with. And Peter didn't want her to have the abortion anyway.

Okay...

Anyway, in an attempt to reconcile (I guess...) this normal middle-class Australian couple decides to embark on a long weekend...camping. They pack up Cricket the dog in the car along with some supplies and a can of gasoline, and then head off for a remote rural beach, one that stands ominously close to an abattoir (just "six hundred yards on the right!") On the last leg of the journey, the couple gets lost in a patch of woods and it takes forever to escape a circular trail. While lost, the couple incessantly trades barbs and insults.

When Peter and Marcia finally arrive at the private beach, matters don't improve much. Ants swarm their food. An eagle swoops down from the sky and attacks Peter. And Marcia keeps hearing what she suspects is the sound of a baby in distress. Turns out it's an infant "sea cow," actually. When Mommy Sea Cow swims close to the beach, probably to help, Peter shoots it about a dozen times with his rifle.

You know folks, in horror movies, there's transgression and then there's TRANSGRESSION. This is an example of the latter.

Here's a short list of Peter and Marcia's anti-social, anti-nature behavior over their three-day holiday. Peter jokingly places his wife in the cross-hairs of his loaded rifle. Later, his harpoon gun misfires and nearly kill her (and yes, both of these incidents have the scent of foreboding about them...). While driving the car, Peter throws a cigarette butt out of the driver's side window and starts a fire in the brush on the side of the road. Later, he runs down and kills a kangaroo that happens innocently across the road.

Hold on, I'm still going.

Peter chops down a tree at the camp site (when asked why, he answers: "why not?"). Peter also kills the sea cow, after littering in the ocean. Then -- let me check my list -- Marcia wantonly smashes an eagle's egg (another reference to abortion and endangered babies...), and Peter gets bitten by a testy marsupial after cruelly taunting it. Their car rolls over a crab too, a flying duck splats bloodily against the car windshield, and the hits just keep on coming.

The amazing thing about these acts is that Peter and Marcia do not care at all. They do not shed tears or issue a single regret about the things they've done. It's an example of supreme human arrogance: Peter and Marcia treat the world like their personal property; and everything out there at the beach is for their use: their amusement and disposal. It's really...sickening.

Effectively shot, well-acted and carefully-scripted, Long Weekend leads us to an inevitable conclusion; that the hatred spewed by Peter and Marcia -- hatred for each other; hatred for nature; hatred for existence itself -- is so toxic, so destructive, so anti-life that nature actually rallies...and rises up to annihilate the couple. You've heard of The Lion King's Circle of Life, right?

Well, this is Long Weekend's Circle of Death.

Peter starts out the movie generating road kill, but by movie's end he's just road kill himself. Peter is the kangaroo. He just doesn't realize it.

In Long Weekend, the natural world and animal kingdom mirror the emotions and behavior of Peter and Marcia with increasing intensity. But despite everything the wayward vacationers do, you may still muster up some degree of compassion for them. They're jerks, they're idiots, and they certainly can't interpret incipient signs of danger, but in the end, they're still human. Groping, awkward, testy, emotionally fragile humans who, for all their flaws and foibles, just want to be loved. Even if they have absolutely no idea how to give love to others, or even nature itself.

And that's ultimately why the horror works so effectively. As Long Weekend nears its heart-pounding climax, you may start to feel your throat tighten up as the "great outdoors" is reduced to an ever diminishing, endless loop for a sprinting, desperate, out-of-breath Peter. Watching him attempt to escape the circular forest but return again and again to the same spot where he violated the laws of nature and of man is surreal, nightmarish and indicative of a hell all its own.

There are some startling and resonant images in Long Weekend too. A barnacled, corroded Barbie doll washes up on the beach (an avatar for Marcia I suggest: her seeming beauty "stained" by a burgeoning interior ugliness). And then there's the dead sea cow: a corpse which mysteriously appears to keep inching up the shore towards Peter and Marcia's camp site.

The ultimate environmental horror film, Long Weekend reminds us that if we treat the environment badly, the environment is ready and able to reciprocate.

Or, to put it another way: It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Phase IV (1974)

"The name of the game today is king of the hill..."

-Computer scientist James Lesko (Michael Murphy) contemplates war with the "goddamned" ants in Phase IV (1974).

Saul Bass (1920 - 1996) was one of the cinema's greatest graphic designers, a revered film artist who contributed the memorable title sequences of such films as The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), North by Northwest (1959), Spartacus (1960), Psycho (1960), Good Fellas and others.

Bass also storyboarded for Hitchcock the famous shower scene with Janet Leigh in the aforementioned Psycho. Bass's only contribution as a director, however, is the little-seen (but highly entrancing...) science-fiction horror film of the early disco decade, Phase IV (1974).

Phase IV follows a strange phenomenon in outer space, one that changes variables in "magnetic fields." The mystics on Earth predict earthquakes; others predict "the end of life as we know it." But when the cosmic effect reaches our planet, the change it causes goes unnoticed, at least for a time. Because it effects only the smallest of us...the ants.

Specifically, ordinary ants of different species soon begin communicating with one another, "making decisions," according to the on-going voice-over narration from Michael Murphy, who plays investigator James Lesko. In one isolated Arizona desert (no, not peaceful Verde Valley...), the ants begin to construct tall monoliths...a series of very advanced, human-proportioned towers. The ants have also mysteriously begun to attack livestock: burrowing inside animals and leaving a distinctive mark of three small circles. They've even begun crafting huge crop circles...perhaps paving the way for an alien invasion? Signalling the vanguard. Or is it something else?

An obsessed, egomaniacal scientist named Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) and a computer scientist/linguist named Lesko (Murphy) take up residence in a small high-tech dome adjacent to the ant towers, in hopes of understanding what the ants are up to.

When the ants go stealthy; refusing to show their hand, Hubbs decides on a pre-emptive strike to draw them out. He launches grenades at the ant towers and brings them all down in a destructive flurry, reducing them to rubble. By moonlight that very night, the ants retaliate: first attacking a local farm, and then establishing a ring of reflective towers around Hubb's dome; towers that will burn the humans out (after first rendering their computers inoperable).

Meanwhile, a farmer's beautiful daughter, Kendra Eldridge (Lynne Frederick) survives the ant strike on her family ranch and joins the scientists as they attempt to solve the riddle of these highly-advanced insects. Hubbs wants to launch a decapitation strike; to pinpoint the Queen Ant and kill her, thus nullifying the ant threat. "You must show them that man will not give in," he believes.

By contrast, Murphy (with the help of his computers) learns the ant language and starts to transmit geometric shapes and mathematical figures to them, hoping that there can be some "rational accommodation of interests; some agreement" between species.

All throughout the film -- as the ants grow more intelligent...and remain one step ahead of the perplexed human scientists -- titles appear on-screen indicating different "phases" of this odd and increasingly apocalyptic crisis. The final phase -- Phase IV --arrives with a new dawn, a new sunrise, as the ants use Kendra to draw out Lesko.

What occurs in the film's final sequence -- as Kendra and Lesko meet (and mate...) inside a sandy ant hill -- represents some weird sort of species apotheosis (for man and the ants...). This trippy climax renders Phase IV the 2001: A Space Odyssey of attacking-ant movies. It intimates that the ants -- experts in specialization and self-sacrifice -- have begun to teach humans the very same qualities. And that, with the ants help, humans are now evolving into...something.

The film's final line indicates a weird ambiguity. "We were being changed and made a part of their world," says Lesko. This description could easily portend a new beginning for humanity, one of true freedom and cooperation. Or it could represent slavery...under the domination of the ants (or aliens who have utilized the ants?).

Phase IV makes splendid and pervasive use of close-up natural photography of ants and other insects (conducted by Ken Middleham). There is no Hollywood fakery involved in these amazing, lengthy sequences: no models; no digital creations...just real ants going about their business with frightening dedication.

There's an almost awe-inspiring (and again, totally real...) sequence in which one ant attempts to carry back to the Queen a piece of the pesticide that has killed his brethren. Exposure to this pesticide chunk is fatal to the ant, but he marches along, as far as he can. When he expires, another soldier ant arrives and continues the journey. When that ant dies, another ant arrives and continues the journey. This goes on and on - uninterrupted by human interaction or comment - until the last ant gets the chunk of poison to the queen, and she very quickly is able to create an immunity to the weakened poison in future generations, as she lays eggs.

Another scene of incredible visuals involves the ants lining up their dead (after one of Hubbs' attacks). They lay the corpses out in rows, belly (or thorax...) up...and then stand at a form of attention; as if honoring their dead at a funeral.

Another of Phase IV's most tense and fascinating scenes involves a showdown (inside the coils of an air-conditioning unit...) between a predatory preying mantis and an industrious ant attempting sabotage.

It seems odd (to say the least), but Bass determinedly grants the ants (and their side) as much screen time as the human stars, and the effect is startling and .interesting. You start to wonder which species is altruistic and which is warlike; which species understands love and which species doesn't. Hubbs insists that the ants aren't individuals, but rather merely "individual cells." The ants do understand self-sacrifice -- to protect their queen -- because she is at the center of their lives. Yet Hubbs doesn't see that this urge to protect the queen is, in some form, an act of love. He can only see the ants as an enemy; as an inferior enemy, actually. In his smug blindness, he doesn't see how he is outmaneuvered.

By balancing the ant storyline against the human one, Bass crafts a strange but powerful sense of equivalence. Who are we -- in these circumstances anyway -- to judge ourselves superiors? Who are we to -- as Hubbs suggests -- to teach the ants "limits?" To "educate them?" Indeed, Hubbs is hardly praise-worthy or a paragon of virtue. He treats even his fellow man with cold stoicism. "People die sometimes," he says at one point, without any expression of true feeling. What makes him the better creature?

Phase IV is an unsettling, spooky film. It's not just about a war between man and insect. Rather it depicts a war between the ideals of individuality and the community. Bass shows us the ant world on a scale we've never seen before, and even though these smart ants oppose us and our culture, you can't leave this film without some sense of admiration for them.

Hubbs would have done well to remember that old proverb: "Be thine enemy an ant, see in him an elephant."

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: And Soon The Darkness (1970)

I first saw it over ten years ago, but Robert Fuest's And Soon The Darkness (1970) remains one of my all-time favorite horror films.

This nearly-forty-year old genre thriller written by Terry Nation and Brian Clemens holds up remarkably well on repeat viewings, is unbearably tense in all the right places (and in all the best ways), and is so icily, so glacially precise in the clever application of horror movie techniques, that it deserves some pretty serious admiration.

Yet the movie only rarely garners the devotion of horror movie aficionados, perhaps because there are so many other great, landmark horror films of the 1970s.

Or perhaps because this production is short on gore and -- even in its wildest moments -- And Soon The Darkness maintains a high-degree of cold-blooded restraint.

And Soon The Darkness is a film of the "road-trip gone wrong" variety, but with some unique twists on that sturdy template. Specifically, the film concerns two British nurses, Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice), on vacation, taking a bicycle tour of rural France. Before long, the beautiful young women find themselves on an isolated country road "miles from anywhere."

Although this was part of their plan -- to "keep off the main roads...to see the real France" -- Jane and Cathy soon regret their selection of routes. They happen across a wooded patch of lonely road, one where three years earlier a brutal murder occurred "about this time of year."

Worse, according to a British ex-patriot, a teacher of French literature (and perhaps a lesbian?), who has moved to these parts, "it was more than murder...if you know what I mean." What she suggests ever so subtly, actually, is that the homicide was preceded by violent sexual assault...

Before long, Cathy and Jane are separated (they have a row about a man), and Jane heads on down the road by herself. She thinks better of it after a while, and returns for her friend. But Cathy...has disappeared. Jane finds only a wrecked bicycle -- and Cathy's under garments -- scattered across the woods.

At first, a desperate Jane is in denial ("she's hiding from me...just trying to scare me."), but before long, she realizes that something sinister has occurred to her friend and riding partner. But Jane is forever a stranger in a strange land; she knows neither the local language nor the local terrain. And Jane clearly doesn't know whom to trust.

The local gendarme, who lives in the station house with his senile old father?

The lady at the cafe who warns that this is "a bad road" and seems to be locked in a strange feud with a neighbor?

The mysterious, sun-glasses-wearing man on the moped who playfully follows Jane and Cathy down the road and claims to be a government investigator?

The Gendarme's senile father, who stands in the nearby field -- watching everything like an immobile scarecrow -- and, who, at a critical moment, wields a scythe?
For easy shorthand, just think of And Soon The Darkness as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) set in rural France. Only without the delirium.

Some important visual touches distinguish And Soon The Darkness. The first is that the film's harrowing events occur entirely in daylight, so the movie can't rely on the impenetrable blackness of night either to scare you or to successfully obscure what you see. Rather, quite inventively, the filmmakers erect a constant but entirely unspoken tension: Jane is racing against sundown too; not just the locals. Soon night will fall, and then there will be real terror on that lonely country road.

Secondly, And Soon The Darkness is set almost entirely outdoors, with only a few forays to interiors (most notably to the gendarme's house; and to the interior of an old RV in a French trailer park...).

Director Fuest generates considerable suspense by maintaining near-obsessive focus on that damnable country road, which stretches endlessly behind and ahead of the tourists, and which features no safe harbors...only mysterious woods, distant fields, and inscrutable strangers. Before the film is over, Jane navigates this section of road perhaps a dozen times (ever more hysterical...) yet every turn and every double-back represents a dead end of sorts...and night is still pending. The road, which seemed so wide open at first, soon becomes suffocating in its smallness.

Given the focus on the landscape, And Soon The Darkness features many beautiful long shots, which successfully highlight the isolation of the British nurses as they stray into dangerous foreign territory. A number of shots also find the camera perched relatively low to the ground (with the road and the woods taking up a significant percentage of the frame), so that when an "alien" object -- like the front wheel of an unknown vehicle -- looms suddenly into the foreground, it has an ominous, frightening effect.

A masterpiece of understated horror -- and one which makes do with very little dialogue -- And Soon The Darkness puts us in Jane's place on that country road of the damned, heightening a powerful sense of identification. Fuest occasionally deploys P.O.V. shots from the bicycle to land us there right beside his imperiled protagonist, but more trenchantly, he utilizes obstacles such as the language barrier to build our frustration and anxiety. Much of the film's hair-raising third act involves Jane's absolute inability to distinguish friend from foe, as her world grows smaller and smaller.

Finally, from that deceptively wide-open road, Jane's universe shrinks down to the size of a claustrophobic trailer closet...where a deadly, macabre surprise awaits. We're symbolically beside her in that shrinking domain the entire time, watching with anxiety as Jane's options narrow further and further, one at a time. By film's denouement Fuest has successfully limited our view (and experience) to extreme close-ups of Jane's crazy, furtive, desperate eyes (a technique Tobe Hooper would also use to great effect with Marilyn Burns in the third act of Chainsaw.)

By the climax of And Soon The Darkness, you'll feel as though you've endured an agorophobic's nightmare too, because the film so powerfully engenders a fear of wide-open spaces and a fear of foreign travel. The movie triggers palpable terror by depositing our heroine (Jane) and viewers far outside our comfort zones. In And Soon The Darkness, the world is an indecipherable nightmare, we have no allies, and that road is a setting from which there is no easy escape.

When the film ends, and the worst fate is avoided, Fuest makes a final, devastating artistic choice. Instead of providing us the darkness we expected in the form of the coming nightfall, he shows us something poetic and unexpected: a brief catharsis. A cleansing rain falls across the road, washing the horror -- the blood -- away.

But even there, Fuest isn't done throttling us. A high-angle shot tracks away from a weeping Jane and another bloodied survivor, and we unexpectedly find ourselves looking down through a trailer's transparent sun roof, down upon a corpse. Then, we cut away to that ubiquitous road once more, as two "new" girls ride by on bicycles.

Perhaps the horror isn't over after all...perhaps that stretch of rural road is actually a Mobius Strip, a strange, monstrous loop, taking us right back to the point where the terror originated.

The curtain falls. And soon the darkness comes. Again.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

Okay. So perhaps this movie is a guilty pleasure.

Or perhaps I simply harbor deep-seated feelings of nostalgia for this "revenge of nature" flick from the year 1977.

Whatever the reasons, I love Kingdom of the Spiders. With irrational exuberance. God, I love it...

Listen, I've seen how bad spider invasion movies can turn out (The Giant Spider Invasion [1975.] And I've also seen how big-budget, mainstreamed spider movies turn out (Arachnophobia [1990]). So I can declare with some confidence that Kingdom of the Spiders remains the best of the eight-legged arac-pack.

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) stars William Shatner (yes!) as veterinarian Rack Hansen, a cowboy doctor who lives in peaceful but poor Verde Valley in Arizona. Rack's brother John died his second day in 'Nam, and now Rack takes care of his brother's widow, Terry (Marcy Lafferty) and little daughter, Linda (Natasha Ryan) during his off-hours.

One day -- while out in the desert lasso-ing cattle and sister-in-law, Rack receives an emergency call from a local, Colby (the great Woody Strode!), whose prized cow has been felled by what appears to be a mysterious illness. The cow dies, and Rack sends blood samples to a lab in Flagstaff to help find answers.

Those answers arrive in town with the fetching Dr. Diane Ashley (a yowza Tiffany Bolling). She's an expert in venomous animals and concludes that Colby's cow died from dozens of extremely poisonous spider bites. A closer investigation reveals a giant tarantula hill on Colby's property. This is an unusual development because the spiders are working together in harmony, not attacking each other.

"Why would spiders suddenly turn aggressive?" Rack asks.

Diane's answer -- in the tried-and-true tradition of environmental/when-animal-attack/1970s revenge-of-nature movies like Frogs (1972), Night of the Lepus (1972), Empire of the Ants (1977) and others -- is a chilling one: human interference.

Specifically, "through excessive use of pesticide" man has killed off all the local insects -- the spiders' primary "source of food." Now desperate, the spiders are turning on livestock and casting hungry eyes towards mankind, particularly the souls populating scenic Camp Verde.

Spiders gotta eat!

Rack and Diane recommend a quarantine to destroy the aggressive spiders. Unfortunately for the denizens of Camp Verde, however, Kingdom of the Spiders was produced post-Watergate (and post-Jaws [1975]), which means that the town mayor is a craven politician who steadfastly refuses to take effective action against the enemy in their midst. See there's a big town fair scheduled in two weeks with a lot of money at stake. So the beaches have to stay open, if you get my drift. The result? Carnage candy. Spiders rampage through Verde, cocooning their prey in webs and causing all manner of chaos.

Rack, Diane, Linda and a dopey tourist couple -- the Johnsons-- hold up at Emma Washburn's remote lodge, but the spiders lay siege.

And when I write "lay siege," I'm not kidding. Spiders drop out of ceiling air vents like mad sky divers, crack open windows, jump down chimneys into open fireplaces, short out the power box in the basement, and generally go blood simple. The film's protagonists retaliate with murderous force, and I can tell you without doubt...real spiders were harmed during the making of this film. Yep. They were stomped, crushed, rolled over by cars, pelted with chemical fire-extinguisher spray and burned.

Ah, the good old days before digital technology.

Really, you must see this movie to believe it. There's no CGI trickery or phoniness, and the actors -- not stuntmen for the most part -- wage real, intense close-quarters battle with thousands of crawling, skittering tarantulas. In one harrowing sequence, William Shatner crawls up a basement staircase with probably two-dozen spiders on his torso, legs, head and even his famous toupee. The Shat obligingly points his flashlight at his own face during the scene so we can get the full impact of the stunt in the dim light.

Tiffany Bolling is pretty damn courageous too, casually (and expertly..) plucking up spiders and petting them like she really loves them. The only giveaway: in the tighter shots you can see her hands shake.

I can't blame her.

This movie's final half hour is so intense, so non-stop spidery that a lot more than your hands will shake. It's a Night of the Living Dead-style siege on a single, remote location, but think of spiders pressing at the boarded-up doors and windows instead of zombies. There's a great moment wherein little Natasha Ryan is endangered...standing trapped and surrounded on a bed filled with a good dozen or so live spiders. Shatner bursts into the room to save her, admonishing the child to jump over the spiders on the bed sheets into his ready arms. He's about five or six feet away. Well, without hesitation this kid leaps blindly for him -- over the teeming beasties and - shit! - your adrenalin races.

What makes all this action hang together, however, is the fact that Kingdom of the Spiders has devoted the time and energy to develop its characters in more than rudimentary fashion. Old Emma Washburn still loves the town sheriff even though their romance died years ago; Rack and Diane share a fun romantic rivalry (though by film's end, the "liberated" Bolling character is subserviently fetching Shatner his beer...), and -- as surprised as you may be how they get under your skin -- you actually come to care about what happens to these people.

It's a lesson that today's horror spectaculars could stand to learn: you can't drive at 100 miles an hour for 90 minutes, and expect viewers to remain involved, much less scared. If you're always driving fast...you're never driving fast; there's no opportunity to breathe, relax...or let your guard down. Sometimes, for the big moments to pay off, they have to arrive after slow ones; after quiet character moments. For all its inherent silliness, Kingdom of the Spiders understands that fact. Sure, It owes a lot of its gonzo life blood from Hitchcock's The Birds and from Spielberg's Jaws yet it consistently pleases because it is consistently and thoroughly scary.

Not to mention absolutely brilliantly-staged at points. There's a plane crash stunt at about the one-hour mark that is achieved so deftly, so realistically, you actually believe the film's actors (including Shatner and Bolling) are in real danger. There's a sustained spider attack on the town of Verde that cuts no corners and pulls no punches, depicting citizens running in panic, and even young children overcome by spiders. It's gruesome, nasty and entirely effective. And I love how sound is used in one sequence preceding a scare, when all the crickets mysteriously go quiet.

John "Bud" Cardos direction and John Morrill's cinematography are also much finer, much more clever than you might expect of such a low budget effort. The camera in Kingdom of the Spiders has a funny but confident way of tilting down from a scene in progress, then gliding away from the action to pinpoint a crawling spider somewhere on the floor. And how can you not love the opening "stealth" attack on a grazing cow? One that features the spider's point of view (through tall grass...) and ends with a freeze-frame of the beleaguered cow's shocked eyeball (while the soundtrack plays a cow "mooing" in anxiety and pain)?

Sure, some of the dialogue here is really, really funny. I particularly enjoyed Altovise Davis's reading of the line "This is our home and no damn spiders are going to run us out." She doesn't do it badly; don't get me wrong. On the contrary, the actress commits to it so sincerely, so fully, so guilelessly, it takes practically your breath away. The gung-ho, go-for-broke style of performances is really affecting. No one's playing anything for laughs or for camp.

And Shatner? My God, the man upstages 5,000 spiders. He doesn't just lasso cattle in this film, he lassos the spotlight. His performance is 100% ham bone, but fine, delicious ham bone. Say what you will about the Shat, but the man's got presence, and more pertinently, the right presence for this movie. His trademark quirks and idiosyncrasies as a performer keep us firmly anchored in the "human" sub-plots and so the movie never descends to level of simple geek show.

Yes, yes, yes, Kingdom of the Spiders is an old, cheap B-movie, but it's a wondrous, terrifying, and wholly charming one. The film's coda (featuring an atrocious matte-painting) packs a gut-punch wallop too, despite the weak visual presentation because -- again -- you've honestly come to care about Rack and the others.

I know it's probably just me, but I cannot help but to fall in love (and stay in love...) with a horror movie about killer spiders that has the audacity to open with a yearning country ballad called "Peaceful Verde Valley." Composed and performed by Dorsey Burnette, this song asks us (in the lyrics) "What will tomorrow bring?" and then provides a multiple choice answer.

A.) Will it (tomorrow) "bring the love we need to last forever more?"

or

B.) Will it bring "the unknown that we've never seen before?"
Since this is a horror movie, you'd be tempted to choose "B," of course.

But the amazing thing about Kingdom of the Spiders is that because it focuses so much on its characters and their humanity in a crisis, the right answer is actually: C.) this movie brings the love and the unknown.

How unexpected, and how wonderful is that?