“I Spit On Your Grave” (2010) — The Remake All Of Us Sickos Have Been Waiting For

"I Spit on Your Grave" (2010) Movie Poster

Well, here it is. The remake of the mother of all rape-revenge films, and one your host had been looking forward to, sure, bu I don’t mind admitting that my eagerness was mixed with more than a little trepidation. Turns out I needn’t have worried — at least not that much.

Our story’s essentially the same — young up-and-coming New York City novelist Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler — don’t ask me why the added an S to the end of the character’s last name here)  heads to a quiet cabin in the country in order to find the peace and solitude she needs to write her next book. Along the way, she draws the unwanted attention of some local redneck yokels at a gas station and these guys find out where she’s staying and use the excuse of trying to pop their mentally retarded buddy’s cherry as the pretense for a night (and day) of brutal gang rape. Things get ugly. Damn ugly. They toss her in the river and figure she’s dead (a solid plot derivation from the original wherein they just sent their slow-witted friend in there to finish her off and he, of course, can’t do it, but tells the fellas he did). She’s not, though, and spends te next month or so surviving on her wits in the forest and plotting her revenge.

And what a revenge it is. Frankly, the way remake director Steven R. Monroe (who’s got a very solid knack for visuals and pacing, by the way, and brings out some strong performances in his central cast, particularly on the part of Ms. Butler, who delivers and extraordinary turn in the lead role, and Jeff Branson, who plays leader of the pack Johnny) and screenwriter Stuart Morse structure this new version makes a hell of a lot more sense than Meir Zarchi’s original — the gang-rape sequence is not nearly as drawn out, yet it’s (perhaps paradoxically) even more psychologically disturbing than it was the first time around. And the emphasis is squarely on the revenge aspect of the story, which, while certainly creative, always felt a bit slapped-together in the original (she didn’t even bother to save the ringleader of the gang for her last victim in it, for instance — although admittedly he did suffer the most gruesome fate).

Some of the more visceral horror of the first, though, is frankly missing. Sitting through the entire extended gang-rape in the original is admittedly a very tough proposition, but you really do feel like the bastards had it coming (and then some) when they get theirs. Here, it feels like she’s paying them all back with more than sufficient interest because the (admittedly quite expected, given the day and age we’re living in) Saw-style torture-porn scenarios she concocts to exact her pound of flesh upon her perpetrators (especially the last one) are seriously depraved and feel more thought-out (because they obviously were). This isn’t bad, per se, but the end result is to make Jenny Hill(s) feel more like your standard cinematic calculatingly revenge-obsessed  killer and less like an unpredictable force of naturally righteous anger.

On the whole, though, it works, so I’m not complaining, and the decision to add the local sheriff (Andrew Howard in yet another of this film’s terrific performances) into the mix as well adds an extra layer of horror to the proceedings, as does the time the filmmakers spend showing said sheriff’s apparently happy domestic life. It shows that monsters may indeed lurk amongst us and these evil bastards are, in fact, good to other people — something only vaguely hinted at by Zarchi.

The end result is a more mature and sophisticated work of horror cinema, and a more violent one to be sure, but one that lacks a little bit of the sheer visceral energy and power of the original. It’s both more creatively realized and more horrifying in many respects, but lacks some of it’s predecessor’s harrowing, soul-shattering fury. For fans of the original I certainly recommend it without reservation, and it’s a damn site better than almost all of the other horror remakes out there, but dues to the (entirely understandable) shift in emphasis to be weighted more heavily on the revenge side of the equation, and its (again entirely understandable) nod to modern horror conventions, it’s a different viewing experience. Just as shocking, to be sure, maybe even moreso, but on the whole maybe just a touch less powerful than that which came before it.

Given that this flick never made it to my native Twin Cities during its extremely truncated theatrical run, I snapped it up off Netflix the second it became available on DVD, and Anchor Bay has done a really nice job on that front. The wide-screen picture and 5.1 sound mix are great, and the extras include a making-of featurette, the full theatrical trailer as well as a “teaser” trailer, a radio spot that evidently ran in the San Francisco area, and a full-length commentary from director Monroe and producer Lisa Hansen that gets a little bit pretentious at times but on the whole is very involving and well worth a listen.

I Spit On Your Grave (2010) , while taking the story in some directions I approve of and others I’m not so hot on, is a more than worthy heir to its groundbreaking source material and is a gut-wrenching and important entry into the annals of horror cinema. If this kind of thing is, in fact, your kind of thing, you’d be doing yourself a massive disservice if you don’t check it out.

 

The Shtick That Wouldn’t Die, Part 1 : “Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark”

"Elvira, Mistress of the Dark" Movie Poster

You really gotta hand it to Cassandra Peterson, creator (sort of, as I’ll explain in due course) of the world’s most famous horror movie hostess role : she’s been at this gig for getting on 30 years (!) now, and there’s definitely something sort of iconic about her whole shtick. And it’s not just down to her most obvious — ahem! — attributes, ‘cuz let’s face it, there are younger, better-looking ladies with bigger boobs who could’ve supplanted her from her throne years ago if they’d wanted to, and no one’s really even tried. I understand that they even came up with a “Find the Next Elvira” reality show and that no one won — it was just decided that nobody else could bring to the role what Peterson does.

Or something like that. I never saw the show so if I’ve got that wrong maybe someone can correct me. But the fact that Peterson’s still going strong in the part is all the evidence you need that even if they did find a “winner,” she never assumed the mantle of  Mistress of the Dark.

And do you want to know why I think the part will remain hers forever? It’s simple, really — underneath all that vampish corny OTT glam beats the heart of a genuinely talented comedic performer. Sure, the whole Elvira act is as groaningly lame and obvious as the movies she hosts (she starts this flick by sowing It Conquered the World on her late-night TV show) — you can count on her trotting out every heard-it-a-thousand-times boob joke in the world, plenty of gratuitous cleavage shots, campy-as-hell costumes and props — you know the drill. Yet she somehow takes two of the biggest taboos out there — sex and death — and makes them palatable. Safe. Even dully obvious.It’s one thing to de-mystify these two subjects, it’s another altogether to make them damn near family-friendly, which is exactly what she does.

Back in 1988, her whole tits, ass ‘n horror routine was even deemed palatable enough for NBC to green-light an Elvira sitcom. Along the way things got muddled up as they so often do in Hollywood, the show was canceled before the pilot was ever completed, and the pilot was picked up by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures and transformed into (almost) a 90-minute feature film titled, unsurprisingly enough Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

You want surprises? You want a plot with twists and turns? You want the unexpected? Go elsewhere. The whole idea here is to serve up exactly what you would expect, and that’s kinda the beauty of it.

Elvira wants to ditch her movie-hosting job in LA and host her own Vegas revue. She’s got an offer she’s hot to take, but she needs to cough up $350,000 in production costs for the show from her own pocket. Lucky for her, a great-aunt that she’s never met has just passed away and she’s summoned to the town of Falwell, Massachusetts for the reading of said great-aunt’s will. The timing couldn’t be better as she’s just rebuffed the slimy and pathetic sexual advances of the Texas cattle magnate who just bought the TV station she worked at, and finds herself out of a job. Next thing you know she’s packing up her skull-festooned vintage Cadillac convertible and heading on a cross-country road trip to New England.

Once there, she finds she hasn’t inherited a pile of cash, after all, but instead has been left with a creaky old fixer-upper of a house, a yippie little dog, and an ancient recipe book. And from here I bet you can predict everything else on offer : this being New England the town is a puritanical backwater, and Elvira invokes the ire of her prudish neighbors, particularly one Ms. Chastity Pariah (played by Edie McClurg, who made a career out of playing nosy, overbearing neighbors). The recipe book is actually a tome full of powerful spells because her deceased great-aunt was a witch, just like Elvira. The horny teenage boys in town will do anything to try to catch a glimpse of our star’s hooters, and when spying through her bedroom window doesn’t work, they settle for remodeling her house in order to try to curry her — ummmm — favor, and maybe get paid in trade, if you catch my drift. Elvira gets the hots for a local thick-headed stud who owns a movie theater but doesn’t seem to catch on that our lady in black has the hots for him. The local PTA-type group doesn’t take kindly to all the boys in town going ga-ga for the new tramp —- err, vamp — in town. Her great-aunt’s devious brother knows the truth about the spellbook and will do anything to get it. Elvira hosts a midnight screening of “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” at the aforementioned local stud’s theater to try to scare up some cash. The enraged townsfolk follow in the footsteps of their witch-burning ancestors and try to burn Elvira at the stake. Everyone wakes up and sees the error of their ways just in time and she leaves town having ended up making friends with everyone and heads for Vegas where her show opens to a packed house. The end.

Throw in all the tired tit-jokes we talked about earlier, lots of gratuitous cleavage shots as we talked about earlier as well, one obvious double-entendre after another, some very-near-but-of-course-not-quite nudity (this is strictly a PG-13 affair), a couple cheap special effects,   and a raucous, crowd-pleasing Vegas show number at the end that features a real special effects sequence that you absolutely gotta see to believe (I’ll say no more, apart from the fact that she gives her tassles one hell of a workout), and you’ve got what you could safely call an Elvira-story-by-the-numbers.

Director James Signorelli, a TV veteran who had been hired to helm the scuttled pilot, ended up sticking around to finish the feature film version, and he’s got a pretty basic, point-and-shoot style. You’re really just in this to see her, and any stylistic flourishes would just get in the way. He’s there to do a workmanlike job of showing off his leading lady, and that’s exactly what he does.

So, like I said at the outset, nothing original here. Nothing unexpected. Nothing even remotely surprising. But hell, it’s fun. Stupid fun, to be sure, but fun nonetheless. Peterson had her whole routine down to a science by this point (she was hired to be a horror movie hostess based more on her theatrical comedy work than her looks, and basically “created” the Elvira character on her own from a very brief outline provided by the TV station — while 1950s horror host Maila Nurmi, a.k.a. Vampira, might disagree, the fact that Peterson won a lawsuit for stealing her shtick that Nurmi filed against her tells you that she basically came up with this whole persona herself), and while you can safely predict pretty much every cue in this film, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it just says that our gal Cassandra really knows what she’s doing.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is available on DVD from Anchor Bay either as a stand-alone release or on a double-feature disc with Transylvania 6-5000. The technical specs are the same for each — it’s a nice-looking widescreen anamorphic transfer with perfectly serviceable 2.0-channel stereo sound and no extras apart from the theatrical trailer and a text bio of Cassandra Peterson that’s pretty interesting reading.

Sometimes you’re just in the mood to get exactly what you’re bargaining for  from a movie. Next time you find yourself in one of those moods, you could do a lot worse than giving Elvira, Mistress of the Dark a go. Expect —- well, the expected. That’s not always such a bad thing.

2010 Halloween 12-Pack : John Carpenter’s “Halloween”

Original "Halloween" Movie Poster

Well, hey, why not?

Okay, I admit, reviewing John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher classic Halloween might be the most obvious thing in the world to do at this time of year, but maybe it was so obvious you didn’t see it coming. Whatever the case may be, my point here is not to either surprise or bore you with this selection for the 2010 Halloween 12-pack, but to convince you to watch this movie again if it’s been awhile. It shouldn’t prove too difficult a task, seeing as how it’s showing on half the cable channels in the universe these days, but if you want the full, unedited, un-bleeped-out version, it’s also available on demand on most cable systems this month, and of course it’s been released on DVD several times over (this reviewer humbly suggests that you go for the Anchor Bay “Divimax” 25th Anniversary 2-disc edition — the widescreen anamorphic transfer is superb, it features either a 2.0 stereo track or a terrific 5.1 surround mix for the audio, the commentary from Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis, and co-producer/co-writer Debra Hill is downright enthralling, and the second disc contains the highly informative 87-minute original documentary Halloween : A Cut Above the Rest that’s probably the most thoroughgoing look at the genesis and production of this iconic horror staple ever made, and  an awesome selection of trailers, TV spots, radio spots, and promotional and advertising artwork, to boot).

In short, there’ simply no excuse for you not to watch this masterpiece in the month of October, so if you haven’t done so yet — why not?

I’m assuming no plot recap is even remotely necessary here, the story is elegant in its simplicity and has been copied by ever slasher franchise and one-off in the thirty-plus years since its arrival on the scene. This is the earliest, and purest, distillation of the slasher-flick formula you’re ever going to find, precisely because there was no formula prior to Halloween, and this ended up being the template that everybody else has followed because, well, it’s downright flawless.

It all started here, folks — the “final girl” (Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, in this case); the “Captain Ahab” figure (Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Samuel Loomis); the silent killer (Michael Myers, of course, portrayed in this first outing by Tony Moran); the teenage cast of victims; the indestructible madman who can’t be killed; the sexually active girls getting killed (usually pretty soon after taking their shirts, at least, off) while the innocent one who maintains (we assume) her virginity survives — everything you know and love (or got sick of) vis-a-vis the slasher genre started right here.

Oh, sure, Bob Clark’s superb Black Christmas beat it into theaters by a few years, but that didn’t really set the mold that would follow and remains more a slasher precursor than an actual prototype, in my view. It may have blazed the trail for  Halloween, but this is the movie that mapped out the territory in no uncertain terms.

And what’s even more impressive than how thoroughly this film masters the big picture, so to speak, is how it hits the ball out of the park on all the smaller counts, as well — whether we’re talking about the pitch-perfect-from-start-to-finish musical score authored by Carpenter himself (the theme tune is the best in movie history with the possible exception of Ennio Morricone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), or the chillingly basic titles sequence , or Dean Cundey’s amazingly evocative cinematography, Halloween gets all the details right.

This is the movie horror fans in the years prior to 1978 had been waiting their whole lives for, they just didn’t know it yet, and frankly we’re still waiting for anyone to come along and do it better. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you  — my bet is that it won’t be happening anytime soon. The original is still the best, as the old saying goes, and it always will be.

2010 Halloween 12-Pack : “Visiting Hours”

"Visiting Hours" Movie Poster

Ahh, memories. I remember watching the 1982 Canadian horror quickie Visiting Hours in the early days of cable and being scared out of my wits by it. It was tense, frightening, taut, and atmospheric — or so I thought at age 10 (well, okay, I was probably 12 or so by the time it was broadcast on HBO or Showtime or wherever the hell I caught it). But you know what they say — the memory cheats. Or does it?

Truth be told, in the case of Visiting Hours I just wasn’t sure. I’d never actually gone back and seen it again for whatever reason, so maybe it really didn’t leave as strong and indelible an impression as I thought. Or maybe I was just too busy leading a life (a life that, admittedly, involved watching a shitload of movies, especially horror flicks).

In any case, when I saw that Anchor Bay put this out on DVD a few years back, I thought about picking it up, but decided against it when I read that it contained essentially no extras, not even the trailer, so I decided against buying it (in its defense(sort of), now that I’ve seen the DVD I can say that while the trailer is indeed absent, it does contain three different TV spots, a radio spot, it features a generally crisp and clear (given its age) widescreen anamorphic transfer, and the mono audio track is perfectly fine, if unspectacular — but there’s nothing else included apart from a selection of trailers for other second-(at best) tier Anchor Bay releases, so I was indeed wise (for once) in bypassing this as a purchase), but recently, while re-populating (God how I hate that term, but I just used it anyway) my Netflix list, I decided to give it a go.

So, was it anywhere near as thrilling and harrowing and gut-wrenching and spine-tingling as I remembered? Or was I destined to be disappointed in learning that yet another childhood favorite is, in actuality, a pretty stupid piece of shit?

The answer, dear reader, lies somewhere in between. It certainly and most emphatically isn’t the horror masterpiece my young mind perceived it to be — but it’s hardly a waste of time and celluloid, either.

Truthfully, Visiting Hours is nothing so much as a product of its time, like so much else. It has its moments, but they’re few and far between, and you’ve seen it all done better elsewhere. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, just that it’s wholly unremarkable. There are worse moviemaking sins than that, to be sure, and I’ve enjoyed the hell out of plenty of less-than-remarkable horror films over the years, and many of the reviews on this very blog can certainly attest to that fact.

And let’s be clear — Visiting Hours definitely has some things going for it. For one thing, the setup is simple but solid — crusading TV reporter Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) has taken up the cause of a woman on convicted  of murdering her abusive husband. Deborah believes it was a case of justifiable homicide, and takes to the airwaves to try to get the woman in question a new trial. Unfortunately, this brave stance doesn’t sit well with one Colt Hawker (how’s that for a name?), a closet, deeply misogynistic psycho played by the always- awesome Michael Ironside who developed his deep-seated hatred for the female gender when, as a young boy, he witnessed his mother throw boiling oil into the face of his abusive father, and just so happens to be a member of the cleaning staff at the TV studio where our gal Deborah works.

Colt’s got a nasty habit of going around town, brutally killing women, and photographing them as they expire, and he becomes so incensed by Deborah’s on-air crusading that he goes over to her house, kills her incompetent and alocoholic maid, waits for our intrepid reporter to come home, and then brutally rapes and (he thinks) murders her, as well.

Unfortunately for ol’ Colt, Deborah survives the attack, and is admitted to the county general hospital, where between  the always- watchful eye of a regular Florence Nightingale of a nurse (Linda Purl), and occasional visits from her producer-love interest Gary (William Shatner — this movie was shot in Shatner’s hometown of Montreal), she proves to be a difficult patient to — uhhhmmm — gain access to. He’s gotta try, though, because he’s afraid she might recognize him if she sees him around the TV station and finger him out as her attacker. I guess he figures that sneaking into the hospital and killing her is easier than just quitting his job and finding a new one. Or maybe he just decides on this course of action for fun. Or something.

And that’s where Visiting Hours really gets bogged down. The first third or so of the film moves along at a pretty breakneck pace, but once Deborah’s in the hospital, it almost becomes a near-slapstick series of failed attempts by Colt to get at her and finish what he started, sort of like a cross between a slasher movie and a Three Stooges flick.

Most of the principle cast is excellent. Grant, as usual, gives a strong, believable, and 100% committed performance. The same can be said or Purl, albeit in a much smaller role. Ironside is, as you’d expect, first-class as the psycho and never anything less than chillingly authentic.  Even Shatner keeps his overacting to a reasonable minimum, although his character frankly isn’t given much to do and is basically a beefed-up and over-written version of what should be, at best, a pretty inconsequential part.

And therein lies the problem — this movie is just way too damn padded out. It clocks in at 105 minutes, but there’s only about 80 minutes’ (at best) worth of story to be told here.  Screenwriter Brian Taggert simply pads out the runtime with unnecessary appearances by minor characters and too much character development for them given their levels of overall plot significance. Director Jean-Claude Lord takes care of the rest by dragging out scenes that probably only run a page, at best, on the script for several minutes. As a kid, I’m sure that made things seem a lot more tense and foreboding to me, but as a fully-fledged (at least physically, if not mentally) adult, it has just the opposite effect, killing any suspense that might be achieved by simply stretching things out way past their breaking point. Sure, you can make a rubber band more tense by pulling it further and further, but at some point the damn thing just gives up and breaks. The same rule applies to scenes in what’s supposed to be a “suspense” film.

So in that key respect, Visiting Hours certainly misses the mark. It’s got some stuff going for it, as detailed above, but not enough to make it stand out from the pack. And the pack, it has to be said, was a pretty crowded one at the time.

In 1982, hot on the heels of the success of films like Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and (arguably) the progenitor of them all, Black Christmas, Hollywood studios were always on the lookout for cheap psycho-slasher flicks that were already in the can and wouldn’t cost them anymore than whatever the price tag was for distribution rights. Having chosen to take a pass on Black Christmas, 2oth Century Fox probably didn’t want to be beaten out a second time when it came to snagging the rights to a Canadian horror flick, especially not one with a pedigreed cast like this, so they picked this one up for distribution and gave it a pretty decent little promotional campaign (just check out that poster!), but ultimately it didn’t catch on much with audiences, and didn’t even make much of a splash in the early days of the home video market, when people would rent pretty much fucking anything.

Still, as time has proven over and over, more or less every single horror flick has its fans, and there are sorrier flicks than Visiting Hours that have legions of adoring admirers, so even though it languished around for a hell of a long time before being picked up by Anchor Bay for DVD release, and even though there wasn’t exactly an outcry (or even much of a murmur) from the horror-loving public demanding it, I imagine it’s sold okay for them. It’s fairly representative of its time, and there are plenty of people who are determined to have every 80s psycho-slasher flick in their library — and since the psycho himself is one of the strongest elements in this film’s favor, you could do a hell of a lot worse.

But damn, I sure remember it being a hell of a lot better.

2010 Halloween 12-Pack : “Hatchet”

"Hatchet" Movie Poster

“Old School American Horror.”

Shit, that sounds good, doesn’t it? That’s what writer-director  Adam Green’s 2006 indie-horror mini-sensation Hatchet (which has now spawned a sequel that came and went in ultra-limited theatrical release pretty fast, but should be available on DVD in the hopefully-not-too-distant future) promises, and I’m pleased to say that it delivers.

Need some evidence? How about cameos from cult horror icons Robert Englund (as a backwoods redneck), Tony Todd (as a French Quarter witch doctor/tour guide), and Richard Riehle (as a loudmouth tourist/soon-to-be-victim)?

Not enough for ya? How about most people’s favorite Jason, Kane Hodder, as the slasher (or hatcheter) himself, Victor Crowley?

Shit, how about that name — Victor Crowley, that’s got “iconic horror character” written all of it, doesn’t it?

Shit, I can see you’re still not convinced.

How about a healthy serving of bare boobs (not all of which are that great)? How about a simple-ass plot about a dumped-and-heartbroken college schmuck name Ben (Joel Moore) who goes down to Mardi Gras to forget his troubles but can’t get his mind off his ex so he heads out on a guided “haunted bayou” tour with a buddy and ends up hearing about the Crowley legend — the story of a horribly deformed young boy who was protected by his father until the locals came to kill him and Victor’s dad, while trying to save him, accidentally puts a hatchet through his skull — only to find that the legend is real, Victor survived, and now he’s hunting down and killing anybody who comes into his neck of the woods (or, in this case, swamp)?

Still not enough? Dear God you people are tough to please.

Okay, how about awesome effects by none other than John Carl Buechler himself, who also puts in a cameo in the film?

How about a huge body count and gruesome-as-hell deaths?

How about a totally insane non-ending of an ending that rips off both the original Friday the 13th and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the same time?

How about I shut the fuck and you see Hatchet for yourself and come back here later and tell me about how right I was?

Now that sounds like a plan! Hatchet is available in an unrated director’s cut on DVD from Anchor Bay and features a flawless anamorphic widescreen transfer, a terrific 5.1 surround audio mix, and a great commentary by writer-director Green and co-producer Scott Altomare that’s well worth a listen, among assorted other extras. It clocks in at right around 90 minutes just like you’d expect, and while it does nothing — and I do mean nothing — new, that’s sorta the point.

Hatchet isn’t about breaking new ground, defying convention, subverting audience expectations, redefining the slasher genre for a new generation of fans, or any of that shit. Hell, it’s not even trying to be particularly scary, and its tongue is planted firmly in its cheek pretty much the whole way through. It’s more funny than it is frightening, but it never loses sight of what it’s trying to achieve and retains an attitude of playful respect toward all the horror conventions it’s aping throughout.

Simply put,  this flick  is about one thing, and one thing only — delivering the goods. And damn if it doesn’t do that in spades.

Hatchet is the kind of movie that could only be made by hard-core 70s and 80s horror fans, and it’s only made for hard-core 70s and 80s horror fans. If you love Michael, Jason, Leatherface, and Freddy, rest assured you’re gonna love Victor Crowley and Hatchet — and it’s gonna love you right back.

Grindhouse Classics : “The Stuff”

"The Stuff" Movie Poster

B-movie veteran Larry Cohen (God Tole Me To, It’s Alive) could always pull a project together, it seems. The guy was just plain never out of work for long — and still isn’t, although he seems confined primarily to scriptwriting duties these days with projects such as Phone Booth and Captivity. In 1985 he was still a genuine low-budget auteur, though, writing as well as directing projects for the smallest-scale indie distributors, mid-size outfits like New World (who handled the financing for the subject of our — ahem! — “analysis” today), and occasionally even the big Hollywood studios. Working primarily out of New York, Cohen was usually able to put together a pretty decent cast to handle his uniformly well-written and well-executed, if a bit “old-school” horror in terms of their occasional less-than-complete originality, flicks.

Simply put, you generally knew what you’d be getting from a Larry Cohen film — nothing groundbreakingly awesome, but always better-done-than-it-felt-like-they-probably-should-be, some decent budget effects work, a fe laughs, and generally a pretty solid little story. And so it is with The Stuff, in many ways probably the quintessential Cohen flick.

It’s probably a bit ironic that ol’ Larry became best known for his horror (more precisely his horror-comedy hybrid) work, given that he got his start with blaxploitationers like Bone and the truly classic Black Caesar, but if there’s one thing Cohen has proven over the years it’s that he’s a movie industry survivor — when times and tastes change, he’s smart enough to change with them and go with the new flow enough to keep getting work. When blaxploitation started to slow down, it’s only natural that a guy with his keen survival instincts would gravitate toward horror, but one thing he didn’t lose along the way was his nose for making his stories stick with an audience by injecting just enough contemporary social commentary to give his films relevance. It’s never an overpowering element of his M.O., so to speak, but it’s always in there somewhere. Sometimes that makes his projects feel pretty dated, as the issues he’s addressing are no longer of front-burner importance in today’s world. At other times, though, it makes him look downright prescient, as the issues he’s tackling actually grow in importance from the time of the movie’s initial release.

That’s certainly the case with The Stuff, a movie about gelatinous goo oozing out of the center of the Earth and packaged as an ice cream-type dessert that eventually takes over and expels itself from the “host bodies” who are consuming it.

Just can't get enough of The Stuff!

Okay, so the parallels to the horror classic The Blob are pretty painfully obvious here, but like I said, sparkling originality has never been a Larry Cohen signature. What’s remarkable is that the issues he’s tackling in this story — fake foodstuffs, slick marketing (the fake TV commercials for the The Stuff, with their scarily-catchy “Just can’t get enough of The Stuff” jingle are one of this movie’s highlights), and environmental disaster oozing from the ground are more pressing than ever in in 2010, when our grocery store shelves are full of genetically-modified “frankenfoods,” our airwaves (and the internet) are bombarded with with ever-more-aggressive ad campaigns for shit we don’t need, and oil is spilling out of an underwater hole into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 200,oo0 barrels (or something) a day with no end in sight.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a true Larry Cohen film without a plethora of fairly-well-realized characters. Our main protagonist is a corporate espionage specialist named David “Mo” Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) , who;s been hired by a consortium of ice cream manufacturers to find out the secret of The Stuff and why it’s eating up their market share (and, quite literally, their customers). In his quest to find out what The Stuff is, where it comes from, and why people just can’t resist its appeal, he teams up with a wide variety of crackpots, independent sleuths, and various hangers-on, including PR-exec-turned-gal Friday (and sorta-love interest) Nicole (Andrea Marcovicci), down-on-his-luck cookie magnate (and obvious Famous Amos stand-in) “Chocolate Chip” Charlie (SNL alum Garrett Morris, who meets and awesomely spectacular stuff-induced demise that you have to see to believe), and right-wing militia commander Colonel Malcolm Grommett Spears (Paul Sorvino), who basically functions as a cross between Rush Limbaugh and Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay (needless to say, he’s convinced The Stuff is a commie plot to destroy America and he’s determined to wipe every trace of it from the face of our fair land).

If all this sounds like a weird amalgamation of The Blob, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Soylent Green, well — that’s because it is. But goddamn if it doesn’t all work.

Here comes The Stuff!

The effects, as mentioned, are terrific fun. The huge masses of stop-motion Stuff are well-realized and frankly look a hell of a lot better than most of today’s CGI garbage, and for smaller-quantity servings, they just used gobs of yogurt and soft-serve ice cream. Again, damned if it doesn’t work just fine. There are several impressive death-by-Stuff scenes, the just-mentioned one with Morris being the best, but truth be told they all look good, and I’ve watched plenty of flicks with ten, a hundred, or even a thousand times the budget of this one not pull off their supposedly “shocking” death sequences with anywhere near this much effectiveness and aplomb. All told, it’s a genuine visual delight.

And finally, on the trivia front, be on the lookout for appearances from Danny Aiello, the Brothers Bloom, Eric Bogosian, and a very young Mira Sorvino.

"The Stuff" DVD from Anchor Bay

The Stuff is available on DVD from Anchor Bay. It features a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that’s been digitally remastered and looks great, the sound likewise has been remastered and is presented in a crisp, clear 5.1 mix, and as far as the extras go, while the overall selection is pretty light, there’s a feature-length commentary track from Larry Cohen himself that’s flat-out awesome to listen to.

Is The Stuff a classic? Nah. But it’s plenty good, about 50 times better than your first impression of it would lead you to believe, and a downright professional piece of work. It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s incisive, it’s smart, and it’s well-acted, well-directed, and amazingly well-realized visually. It’s one of those movies that, if you own it, you find yourself watching it again three or four times a year just because — well, it’s so damn solidly done.

And with that, I’m off to the Dairy Queen for a heaping pile of soft-serve Stu —- errr, ice cream.

Grindhouse Classics : “Vice Squad”

"Vice Squad" DVD from Anchor Bay

Mean, my friends.  Mean is the word we’re looking for.Director Gary (Dead And Buried, Poltergeist III)  Sherman’s 1982 crime thriller Vice Squad is one brutal bastard of a movie, and it’s largely down to one reason : the sensationally unhinged performance of future-direct-to-VHS mainstay Wings Hauser as Ramrod, an insanely over-the-top Country-and-Western/cowboy-style pimp with no conscience, no remorse, and absolutely no morals whatsoever. Truth be told, Hauser’s Ramrod is one of the great villains not just in exploitation film history, but in all of movie history in general. The guy should’ve won a fucking Oscar, but too many members of the Academy would literally puke their minds out of their heads if they saw this flick. The Hollywood establishment doesn’t much like to acknowledge the seedy underbelly of the city their industry calls home, you see, and that seedy underbelly is exactly   where Vice Squad lives .

The plot’s almost elegant in its simplicity : a single mom maintaining a carefully-sculpted middle class facade (Hardcore‘s Season Hubley)is, in reality, a streetwise hooker who goes by the name of Princess. One evening while she’s working the streets of that aforementioned seedy Hollywood underbelly, one her good friends in “the life,” whose street handle is  Ginger (future original MTV veejay Nina Blackwood), is brutally — and folks, I do mean brutally — if you’re at all squeamish, avoid this flick like the plague — beaten and murdered by her psychotic pimp, that Ramrod fella I was just talking about (and incidentally, our guy Ramrod doesn’t seem too concerned about the cops knowing who he is and what he’s up to, since the custom paint-and-decal job on his Ford Bronco says “RAMROD” in bold capital letters right on the side). Princess knows who did it, of course . Furthermore, the cops investigating the case, led by only-semi-grizzled veteran detective Tom Walsh (Gary Swanson) know damn well who did it, too. To that end, figuring that Ramrod will be needing a new breadwinner soon, they set up Princess to lure him back to his own apartment, wearing a wire, and get a confession out of him on tape. All goes according to plan — Ramrod ‘fesses up, the cops bust him, and his swears his revenge on Princess as the boys in blue haul his ass off to jail.

And then, naturally enough, a cuffed-up Ramrod escapes his public servant captors, and spends the rest of the movie trying to track an unsuspecting Princess down.  The audience is brought along for the action — and once it gets going, it’s genuinely non-stop — from three different vantage points : we separately follow the (again, unsuspecting) Princess as she turns tricks looking to earn bread to feed her kid, Ramrod as he does anything and everything to try to find her before the evening is out, and detective Walsh as he does anything and everything to try to find her first.

Sherman is a master of pacing as he intercuts from one point of reference to the next, displaying a seriously deft touch and always seeming to know exactly when to break from one character’s story arc (sorry for the pretentiousness) to the next. We should probably give screenwriters Sandy Howard and Kenneth Peters some credit for that, as well, but it’s Sherman who’s capturing all the deranged “ambiance,” for lack of a better word, along the way. And as for one of a director’s other primary responsibilities, namely getting great performances out of his cast — well, he really hits it out of the park there.

I don’t know what stroke of genius possessed him to cast Hauser in the role of lunatic-Joe-Buck-as-pimp-rather-than-hustler, but in lesser hands the idea of a fucking cowboy “player,” of all things, would have been comical, at best. As it is, however, much as I hate to give a guy named (by himself, no doubt) “Wings” credit for anything, all you can do it sit back in awe and watch him do his thing. Trust me when I say he’ll scare the living shit out of even the most jaded viewer.

Hubley  turns in an extremely believable portrayal as the damsel in distress, exuding a kind of cool confidence up until the downright frightening conclusion, where she pulls out all the fucking stops.  According to the commentary track on the Anchor Bay DVD (featuring Sherman’s sharp recollections  and moderated by exploitation film historian, as well as filmmaker himself, David Gregory), she was going through a bitter and exceptionally painful divorce from actor Kurt Russell (see, there was another woman before Goldie) at the time that centered around a custody battle over their daughter, and Sherman told her to channel all of her anguish into this climactic scene (about which I’ll refrain from divulging any pertinent details) and just “let it all out,” so to speak.

And damn, does she ever.

Lastly as far as the acting goes,  Swanson hits just the right notes in his portrayal of Walsh as a detective who’s seen it all but still, improbably, gives a shit — in a general sense, but also in a specific sense when it comes to protecting the woman who he blames himself for putting in harm’s way.

It all adds up to an expertly-paced, more-than-expertly acted frantic pursuit story that will keep you on the edge of your seat and holding on for dear fucking life just to see what happens next.

Plenty of critics at the time took issue with Vice Squad‘s unrestrained sadism, brutal violence, and overall supremely sleazy tone, but the film had its defenders too, including Mr. Mean Streets himself, Martin Scorsese, who recognized it for the powerful gut-punch of reality that it was.  Needless to say, the fact this this movie has stood the test of time and is just as shockingly immediate and unreservedly in-your-face today as it was at the time proves which side was right in that particular argument.

Wings fucking Hauser, man!

As I alluded to (well, okay, downright said) earlier, Vice Squad was released on DVD by Anchor Bay in 2007. The anamorphic wide-screen transfer has been brilliantly digitally restored and looks sensational, the remastered soundtrack is superb (the cult favorite theme tune “Neon Slime” has never sounded better), and the extras package features the theatrical trailer, a selection of radio spots for the film, a comprehensive poster and stills gallery, the fantastic commentary track I also made reference to a minute ago, and a superb liner-notes essay by  Richard Harland Smith.

Simply put, Vice Squad is the most agonizingly nasty crime flick you’ll ever see that didn’t come from a country shaped like a boot, and in truth it even puts most of the Italian stuff to shame. It features superb performances all around, with Hauser putting in an absolutely historically psychopathic turn, and it’s got more adrenaline pumping through its veins than a guy trying to lift a car off his trapped child. It’s raw, it’s devastating, and it’s just plain bad-ass stuff all the way around. And if that’s not enough, there’s even a cameo from “Rerun” himself, What’s Happening?‘s Fred Berry, as a wimpy-ass pushover of a pimp.

Some movies show you the ugly underside of human life. Vice Squad sticks you right the fuck in the middle of it and dares you to look away. There are times you’ll surely want to look away — I haven’t described in detail any of the seriously sick shit in this movie for a reason —but the story itself, and the performances — especially Hauser’s — just won’t let you.

I guarantee, if you’ve never seen this flick before, that you won’t be able to take your eyes off it, no matter how loudly your brain screams at you to do just that . But it’s gonna burn, baby — it’s gonna burn.

Great Halloween Movie Countdown #4 : “Grace”

"Grace" Movie Poster

We promised — or threatened, depending on how you look at it — to take a look at first-time writer-director Paul Solet’s rather disturbing little indie horror “Grace” in a previous entry in our not-really-a-countdown,  and now seems as good a time as any to engage in a critical overview of this film that’s got a pretty solid little “buzz” going for itself thanks to a largely well-received run on the horror convention and indie festival circuit last year being that it’s just been a couple of weeks since Anchor Bay released it in the form of a very nicely-done DVD that includes (just to get the specs out of the way) a great 5.1 sound mix, stellar 16:9 picture, and extras galore including a nice little “making-of” featurette and an exhaustive feature-length commentary track from Solet and company detailing just about everything you’d want to know about the movie’s origins and its various production stages. Clearly Anchor Bay have pulled out all the stops in providing a first-class package to showcase this film, something of a rarity for a flick that barely saw any theatrical play and marks an untested filmmaker’s debut effort. In short, they clearly believe they have a winner on their hands with “Grace,” but the question is — do they?

The answer, I’m pleased to say, is “yes” — although it’s a “yes” with a few reservations, which we’ll get to in due course.

Madeline and Michael Matheson (Jordan Ladd and Stephen Park, respectively), are a very well-to-do yuppie couple (he’s a lawyer — I think, and she’s essentially a bored rich housewife — again, I think) who have been trying desperately to conceive after Madeline’s last pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage. She’s now happily eight months pregnant again, and despite the reservations of stereotypical mother-in-law-from-hell Vivian (Gabrielle Rose), a judge who seems to have connections in the medical as well as legal professions, they’re forgoing the typical hospital-birth route and employing the services of a very pricey midwife, one Patricia Lang (Samantha Ferris), a woman who Madeline was friends (at least, perhaps more than that) with in college who’s steered them in the direction of one of those water-births that are all the rage among the holistic/natural set these days. This is rather more in keeping with the couple’s vegan/health-conscious lifestyle, and despite humoring Vivian by paying a visit to her personal physician, Dr. Richard Sohn (Malcolm Stewart), their minds are made up.

And then, tragedy strikes. On the way home from an appointment at Patricia’s office, they’re involved in a horrible car crash that Madeline survives, but Michael and their unborn child do not.

In a move that Sarah Palin would no doubt approve of, Madeline decides to carry the baby to full term and give birth to a stillborn child. She even goes ahead with the whole water-birth scenario just as planned. And that’s when things start to get pretty damn nuts, because within moments after delivering the supposedly dead baby, Madeline puts the little girl right up to her breast and wouldn’t you know, it start feeding—and feeding—and feeding—and the little tyke’s not after her mother’s milk, it’s after her blood.

I don’t know what you’d do in a situation like that, but our girl Madeline names the baby Grace and brings her home.

The rather gorgeous Jordan Ladd as Madeline with her monster-baby, Grace

And you know? I can sort of understand this admittedly warped decision. Imagine you’ve been trying for years to have a baby and nothing’s worked out. Then, when things are finally looking up, both the baby and your husband are lost to you in an instant. You have the kid anyway, and damn if it isn’t — at least seemingly — alive. Bloodthirsty little shit or not, you’d probably think it’s very existence was a miracle, which Madeline clearly does.

Sure, there are signs something’s not quite right almost immediately. Flies buzz around the infant’s crib like crazy.  The child has a foul odor. And then there’s all that blood-drinking.

But this baby is not only the answer to all Madeline’s prayers, it’s also a living connection to her now-dead husband. And of course, for Vivian, that also means it’s a living connection to her son.

There’s a problem, though — Madeline knows something’s wrong and she won’t let Vivian — or anyone else, for that matter — inside the house to see little Grace. After all,  how do you explain hanging roll after roll of fly paper from the ceiling in the baby’s room? Okay, maybe she just plain doesn’t want the old bitch-on-wheels anywhere near her kid, but in truth, practically speaking, she can’t let her see Grace because it would take a completely blinded fool — which Madeline surely knows she’s become but frankly doesn’t care — not to see that there’s a serious problem with the kid.

As Madeline’s mental health deteriorates, her physical health does, as well. The little tyke’s draining way too much of her blood and she’s become badly anemic as a result, so in order to satiate the six-pound bundle of evil (and by the way, is Grace more a zombie or a vampire? I’m going with vampire given the whole blood-drinking thing, but you could make an argument for her being a zombie-baby, as well, given that she is, quite literally, the living dead, as opposed to the “undead” status vampires “enjoy” — but I digress, the kid’s a monster any way you slice it, which camp it belongs to is a purely academic question) she turns to killing others since she can’t keep up with its constant demand for the red stuff and stay alive herself — and who doesn’t want the privilege of being around to watch a demon-child grow up?

There’s some seriously authentic drama between Madeline and Vivian as the elder, sensing something is seriously wrong, hatches a plot with the previously-mentioned Dr. Sohn to get Grace away from her mother. Hell, she even dusts off her old breast pump, not knowing that the baby will have other plans for her mammaries if she ever does manage to wrest it away from Madeline.

Our erstwhile blinded-by-motherly-love heroine, however, has an ally, too, in the form of Patricia, who evidently still harbors some feelings for her, much to the chagrin of her current lady-love who works as her clinical assistant.

Now, from what I’m told, this kind of shit is pretty common when a husband dies during his wife’s pregnancy. The mother-in-law become seriously unhealthily attached to the infant — but in this case, whoever ends up with the kid is the real loser, so by the time Madeline and Vivian do have their inevitable confrontation, you’re not quite sure who to root for, since neither of them seem particularly great candidates for raising a child by this point, both consumed as they are more with the need to be needed by the baby  than anything resembling love any longer, yet whoever does end up with the kiddo is essentially as good as dead.

I’ve probably given away more than enough at this point, but hopefully not too much. Suffice to say, “Grace” works as both a horror and slice of realistic (well, as realistic as can be given the circumstances) fucked-up psychodrama. It take an unbelievable-on-its-face situation and makes it believable, thus succeeding in being a truly domestic horror.

As I said earlier, though, there are some flaws. A scene where Dr. Sohn pays Madeline an unexpected visit, diagnoses her anemic condition, and then gives her a thoroughly sadistic tutorial on the proper use of a breast pump despite her weakened state is so over-the-top sadistic that it borders on being darkly humorous in a film that, frankly, has no sense of humor whatsoever. It’s jarring and incongruous and thoroughly disrupts the flow of the film. Then we’ve got the whole rather disturbing subtext of female breast mutilation that runs throughout the film. I mean, for a movie where you never see any boob at all (unusual enough for a horror flick), this is the most creepily breast-obsessed movie you could imagine. Whether it’s Grace getting at her mom’s blood through her bosom, or Vivian getting out her dusty old pump, or the doc giving Madeline an altogether inappropriate, very hands-on lesson in pump use, or the really warped and cringeworthy scene at the very end that I won’t say anything about, this is the most mammary-fixated non-porno movie you’re ever likely to see, and after awhile it stops feeling integral to the plot and starts feeling downright prurient. Suffice to say, the abused-boob theme gets taken way too far.

On the technical side,  my only gripe is that the camerawork of Zoran Popovic (“War, Inc.”), along with the lighting and set design, while very professionally executed in all respects, is seriously clinical and antiseptic, in much the same way “Deadgirl” is. The overly-orchestrated visual aesthetic works a lot better in “Deadgirl,” though, since it’s so incongruous to absolutely repulsively dingy subject matter that the dichotomy really strikes a chord. Here, though, I’d have to say that “Grace” would benefit from a little more chaos and dischord in terms of its overall aesthetics, especially in later scenes, as it would really serve to drive home the trainwreck that Madeline’s life has become thanks to her little hellspawn.

That’s pretty much it as far as the complaint department goes, though. On the whole, “Grace” explores territory few other films can, let alone should. Paul Solet has proven himself to be a new, and rather daring, voice to be reckoned with in the horror genre, even if he does sometimes let his own unhealthy fixations get in the way of telling a good story. He knows how to bring horror down to a human level we can all understand and all be both frightened and sickened by in equal measure, and he creates characters that are both hopelessly fucked up and all too real at the same time.  And regardless of whether or not you can forgive its flaws or stomach its morbid obsessions, “Grace”  is undoubtedly a film you have a very hard time shaking out of your head, because at its core is a dark truth that we can all relate to — our children need us for a time, but ultimately, they’re here to take our place after we’re gone. Every parent that has ever told their kid “you’re going to be the death of me” wasn’t just tossing out a throwaway guilt-trip line, they were giving voice, whether conscious of it or not, to a primal fear that lies at the heart of parenthood.

Fortunately for most of us, however, we won’t actually meet our end at our son’s and/ or daughter’s  hands. Or their mouths.