The Psychotronic Kinematograph
Thursday 31 October 2024
Doctor Terror: The Horror Films of Leon Klimovsky (Part One)
Tuesday 15 October 2024
Vampire (E. W. Swackhamer, 1979)
1979's TV movie Vampire is as an odd a creature as its titular undead bloodsucker. A strange hybrid of horror movie and police procedural (in fact, co-written and executive produced by the late Steve Bochko of later Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue fame - in the period before these shows and when he had definite SF/fantasy cred for penning the screenplay for Douglas Trumbull's 1972 Silent Running and creating the 1975 David McCallum-starring The Invisible Man and its Ben Murphy sequel-cum-remake Gemini Man), it dwells in a twilit world betwixt genres.
As the film opens, we see the inauguration of construction on a new San Francisco church, marked by the unveiling of a gaudy gigantic metallic cross on the site - one suspects that the eventual church will be one of those hideous modern monstrosities of glass and concrete; call me old-fashioned, but I believe (in that I don't, not actually being a believer, but you know what I mean) that these sorts of buildings should be terrifying Gothic edifices. If you're not going to do something properly, why bother? Anyway, this parish's particular Reverend Lovejoy (played by Scott Paulin, who fans of genre flicks will probably recognise as Kirk Lolley from 1985's Teen Wolf and the original Red Skull in the 1990 Albert Pyun Captain America [oh, yeah, here) is making his speech watched by husband and wife architectural design power couple John and Leslie Rawlins (The Exorcist's more junior exorcist Jason Miller, and Nightwing's Kathryn Harrold) as well as mysteriously lurking ex-cop Harry Kilcoyne (E.G. Marshall of Superman II, Creepshow and many others), who remains loitering around the premises after the ceremony is over, noticing that the ground where the shadow of the cross was cast has slightly scorched.
That night when the moon has risen, the badly reacting earth finally spits out its unwelcome contents as the vampiric Anton Voyteck (Richard Lynch, who in common with fellow 1979 TV screen vampire villain Reggie Nalder gained his distinctive appearance through scarring from burn injuries - in Lynch's case self-inflicted from setting himself ablaze whilst off his face [history fails to record whether or not he was shouting about being "real gone" at the time like a freebasing Richard Pryor]) crawls out of the soil of his resting place of many years. You don't get all that many blond-maned male vampires, do you? Apart from Geordie Johnson in Dracula: the Series, Julian Sands in Tale of a Vampire and Christopher Atkins in Dracula Rising of course. But they do seem a comparatively rare breed.
Skipping ahead some weeks, we move to a house party given by the Rawlins where some guests are gossiping about the recent spate of homeless people being found dead with their throats torn out (in a vampire film? Unconnected, I feel sure) and lawyer Nicole DeCamp (Jessica Walter, probably best known these days from Arrested Development and lending her distinctive tones to Archer) introduces first Leslie and then John to her new beau Anton who has a business proposal that they might be interested in. Now dapperly dressed in a sharp '70s suit and taking to wearing his overcoat draped over his shoulders to create a classic cloaked Dracula-style silhouette, Voyteck presents as a mysterious, charming and urbane wealthy aristo who has family interests in the Heidecker estate where the new church is going to be built. He claims that the grounds of the property contain a great many priceless works of art that were removed from Europe during World War II for safekeeping that might be lost forever when construction begins in earnest, and he wants to commission a survey to retrieve them. John expresses scepticism over the endeavour, but agrees and to his surprise soon locates a underground vault containing not only countless lost masterpieces but also skeletal human remains. Calling in his friend on the force Chris Bell (Michael Tucker, who would go on to star in Bochko's L.A. Law alongside his wife Jill Eikenberry) it's established that not only were the artworks looted from their rightful owners during WWII but that the remains are those of an ex-cop who also disappeared in the 1940s; Voyteck is arrested by Bell and his men and before being taken away threatens Rawlins for grassing him up to the filth, saying that he will soon "repay him in kind".
Bailed out by Nicole just as he is attempting to escape by wrenching the cell bars asunder at sunrise, Voyteck dashes home to the secret coffin stashed in his swanky apartment without a minute to spare before rising at nightfall to pay a visit to the Rawlins household. Persuading the home alone Leslie to invite him in, he swiftly takes his vowed vengeance by sinking his teeth into her lovely neck and leaving her exsanguinated corpse for her husband to find and we are faced with the prospect of John going rogue after his wife's brutal death: we all know what architects can do when they take the law into their hands after the murder of a loved one - have the SFPD not heard about the Paul Kersey case?
The distraught designer is contacted by Kilcoyne, who has been mooching around the sidelines investigating - back in the '30s and '40s he was the partner (in a cop rather than romantic sense) of Maurice Bernier, the previous one non-careful owner of the skull and other remnants that were found in Voyteck's vault of stashed artworks. Bernier had become convinced of the existence of evil and creatures such as vampires and left the force join a seminary (a place for trainee priests rather than semen, but there may be a lot of that too) whilst Harry was off fighting in the war; upon Kilcoyne's return home Bernier had vanished mysteriously whilst playing amateur occult detective and sniffing around. Which is a shame, because a noirish 1940's-set series about a detective-priest investigating the paranormal would have been pretty cool, but we'll just have to make do with this tale of a bereaved architect and an aged hard-boiled cop teaming up to take out their mutual vengeance upon a centuries-old vampire. Which is good enough, honestly. Rawlins and Kilcoyne (Vampire Slayers) become like Van Helsing's "God's madmen" from Stoker's tome, diligently tracking down Voyteck across all of the property interests where his multifarious coffins lie. It's an entertaining and breezy hour and a half of safely TV movie horror fun with an ending screaming 'pilot that was never picked up for a continuing weekly series' and it's available to watch free on Youtube as of the time of writing.
Sunday 13 October 2024
Night of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis, 1971)
Having already covered the first instalment of Dan Curtis' Dark Shadows cinematic universe (the DCDSCU?) - 1970's House of Dark Shadows - here, the series' second silver screen escapade came but a year later in 1971. Filmed as the show was coming to its conclusion - and so unburdened by the first film's logistical juggling to free up actors from an ongoing televisual storyline - and initially titled Curse of Dark Shadows, Curtis' initial (and rather obvious) idea to do a direct follow-up with Frid returning as Barnabas was swiftly thrown out by the actor's refusal to reprise his role; for the final storyline of Dark Shadows' run Frid had only agreed to stay on as another character (the Heathcliff surrogate Bramwell Collins [a reference that any true Bronte-saurus should surely get] opposite Lara Parker's Catherine Harridge in an obviously Wuthering Heights-inspired saga) such was his boredom with Barnabas and legitimate fear of typecasting in the role. Curtis instead turned to the show's second most popular character: Quentin Collins, as played by David Selby.
Now, Night of Dark Shadows was the first piece of the Shadowsverse I ever saw when it was shown on British TV late one night when I was young and I was rather excited. I knew of the programme - as mentioned previously in my HoDS review - from the couple of novels that my grandmother inexplicably owned, and the the thing I knew about Quentin Collins was the fact that he was a werewolf. Lycanthropes being my favourite movie monster I was as intensely excited as I was intrigued to finally see live action Dark Shadows. Picture my confused li'l face, then, as I sat up late and watched this completely loup-garou free film transpire.
That's the fault of Li'l Glen and his assumptions, of course, and I did enjoy what transpired to be a very interesting horror movie - albeit not one free of bigger problems than my erroneous expectations of carnivorous lunar activities: the film's production was fraught with behind the scenes struggles, the biggest one being MGM's eleventh hour commandment that that Curtis cut the finished picture down from a runtime of 129 minutes to 95 minutes at only 24 hours' notice. This of course led to an edit that could be charitably described as authentically oneiric, capturing the real feel of a nightmarish dreamscape of witchcraft and possession, but could also be pointed to as a last-minute hack job that has a lot less coherence than the original cut. The good news is that the majority of the cut footage was rediscovered in the late 1990s; the bad news is that it was silent. Dan Curtis never did get to assemble the director's cut during his own lifetime, and with many of the actors also having departed this mortal realm, the chance to re-record the lost dialogue has passed. Unless they do it using soundalikes, of course, but the studio sadly doesn't seem motivated enough to actually embark on the endeavour.
The dream unfolds with the very much human aspiring artist Quentin Collins (Selby) and his wife Tracy (why, it's only Kate Jackson - soon to become one of Charlie's Angels - who had played Daphne Harridge in the Dark Shadows series; including the earlier part of the aforementioned Wuthering Heights storyline) arriving at Quentin's newly-inherited property of Collinwood, presumably as the last remaining Collins he has inherited the family manse after the mass deaths of the family members in House of Dark Shadows, though that of course presumes that both films occupy the same universe / dimension / time-band - though some of the casting may... uh... cast doubt upon any certainty of that.
Greeted by the cold and decidedly Mrs Danvers-esque housekeeper - presumably Mrs Johnson's replacement, if we are going with the same time-band theory - Carlotta Drake (Grayson Hall), our cute new Collins couple begin to settle in to their swanky new digs only for Quentin to be plagued by strange dreams. He is being visited by dreams of Angelique Collins (Lara Parker), an ancestor with whom he has a burgeoning obsession after becoming entranced with her portrait (like Josette's painting in the previous film an all-new prop rather than simply re-using one from the series, a worthwhile expense rather than cost-cutting from Curtis). Carlotta continues to be very much the Mrs Danvers to the late Angelique's Rebecca (a storyline that Hall and Parker had played out in the show's '1970 Parallel Time' sequence, when Kathryn Leigh Scott had essayed the role of the endangered heroine here being portrayed by Jackson), suggesting that Quentin set up his own easel in the house's Tower Room - once the boudoir used by the bewitching Angelique and Quentin's identical ancestor Charles Collins (a dual role for Selby) for their extra-marital trysts - increasing his fixation and recurring visions.
Tracy tries in vain to get help from neighbouring husband and wife author team Alex and Claire Jennings (John Karlen and Nancy Barrett - either proof that this is in fact a different timestream, or Willie Loomis and Carolyn Stoddard has doppelgangers living just down the road) but Angelique's vengeance reaches out from beyond the grave to prevent the couple rendering aid. When Quentin, coming ever more dangerously under the ghost-witch's domination, assaults his wife and almost drowns her in the estate's disused swimming pool he even begins taking on the physical traits of Charles (gaining a limp and a facial scar) as well as his personality. Through dreams / flashbacks we are given the backstory that Angelique's wanton and free-spirited ways aroused the ire of her husband Gabriel Collins (Christopher Pennock, reprising here in 1810 his television character of 1840, who was the brother of Selby's Quentin Collins the First: namesake ancestor of the better known immortal Victorian wolfman rendition of the character... I swear it makes sense if you have the time and dedication to watch over a thousand episodes) and sister-in-law Laura (Diana Millay) whose accusations of witchcraft and devil worship invoke the wrath of Matthew Hopkins wannabe Reverend Strack (Thayer David again); Angelique is hanged from the branch f the large tree outside the Tower Room before Quentin is inhumed alive with her in the family vault. All of this is watched by young servant girl Sarah Castle (Monica Rich), an acolyte of Angelique's and of whom Carlotta Drake is the present day reincarnation ready to resurrect the woman with whom she was obsessed.
Accompanied once again by an evocative score by Robert Cobert, Night of Dark Shadows is if anything even more nihilistic than its predecessor (remembering that almost all the main cast, including the young boy, wound up dead in that one). Its troubled post-production may not have been the product of a vengeful sorceress's curse, but it leaves us with a disjointed but dreamy reverie of a film as haunting as the terrifying but beautiful conjuress at it's dark core.
And so there we leave the denizens of the cinematic Collinwood, left in a state of stasis never to return for a third instalment and the TV show existing only in the netherworld of reruns and nostalgia. The spin-off novels would continue until the February of 1972 - and eventually be revived by Lara Parker herself some sixteen years later with her rather wonderful Angelique's Descent - while the Gold Key comic books would continue into February 1976. But, of course, legends - just like vampires - are very hard to kill.
Sunday 6 October 2024
House of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis, 1970)
Friday 4 October 2024
Texas Chainsaw 3-D (John Luessenhop, 2013)
Perhaps it's true that any attempt to follow-up or replicate the visceral grue of Tobe Hooper's seminal cinematic charnel house offering The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is doomed to fail. Each and every attempt to sequelise, prequelise or plagiarise Hooper and Kim Henkel's grim and gritty grindhouse gore has come a Crop Top cropper, whether it be Hooper's own The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (1986) which adopted a satirical approach so as to not directly ape its original and therefore left some fans slightly baffled and disappointed, 1990's Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III which was New Line Cinema's Great White (well, ol' Leather-mush is a Texan after all) Hope to revive their fortunes after the Nightmare on Elm Street saga saw Freddy fans flagging rather than flocking to the cinemas (and which must have raised serious doubts among horror fans even before its release when it was announced that it would be helmed by Jeff Burr, synonymous with the sub-par sequel due to being the man behind such unalloyed 'joys' as Stepfather II [1989], Pumpkinhead II [1993] and the fourth and fifth installments of the unstoppable Puppet Master series).
This loose and ill-fitting trilogy was followed, unasked like a stalker, by original co-writer Kim Henkel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Next Generation (aka Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1994]) which far from being a return to form I recall seeing - just the once - at college in the late '90s and thinking what an unpretty pass the franchise had come to. Still probably the best film on both Renee Zellweger's and Matthew McConaughey's resumes, though, despite being utterly dire - and I still think that 'McConaughey's Robot Leg' would have made a great name for a band if anyone had listened to me at the time but wisdom doubtless prevailed.
Then, of course, we had the 2003 Michael Bay-produced remake of the original by Marcus Nispel who would later go on to wreck ruin remake Friday the 13th as well. My main memory of this movie is that it gave the world Jessica Biel in hotpants, which was enjoyable to an extent but couldn't really excuse the "what the fuck is the point of this" of the whole endeavour. I don't even think the original was still banned in the UK at the time; I know I'd definitely watched it by then rendering the thing Gus Van Sant's Psycho levels of pointlessness. Then of course was the prequel to the remake: 2006's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning was directed by Jonathan Liebesman, who directed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: before that gets taken as a recommendation, though, he did (or perhaps 'perpetrated' is a better word) the Razzie-winning 2014 version rather than the 1990 classic. It did, however, boast a well-credited co-writer in David J. Schow whose list of credits include Alex Proyas's 1994 The Crow - itself ruined by a needless remake recently - as well as the aforementioned 1990 third entry in the TCM saga and is living proof that one can't always write good things.
All of which brings us to 2013's Texas Chainsaw 3-D, though when I saw it it was merely titled Texas Chainsaw which lacks the retro fun feel of likening it to Jaws 3-D and Amityville 3-D (both released, probably coincidentally, in 1983 [1983-D more like, amirite?]) and I might offer as proof that a franchise has truly jumped the shark not when it goes into outer space like Jason, the Critters and the Leprechaun, but when it expands into the third dimension.
Beginning with a title sequence recap of the events of the original movie, we swiftly move on to new footage that - in continuity-busting style - appear to take place shortly afterwards, with the forces of law and order led by Sheriff Hooper (Thom Barry) surrounding the Sawyer house, and the under siege (oh God, that conjures images of Seagal) family led by Drayton 'The Cook' Sawyer (a brief cameo by Chop Top himself, Bill Moseley, replacing the late Jim Siedow who essayed the role in the first two instalments) playing the part of a kind of cannibalistic Branch Davidians as the modern for the '70s iteration of the classic Universal horror peasants with pitchforks and flaming torches turn up. The homestead is swiftly set ablaze by the whooping yee-haws, led by Burt Hartman (Paul Rae), and the clan including Boss Sawyer (the original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen) and Grandpa Sawyer (John Dugan also reprising his role from the first film) fire back at the mob but are soon consumed by the flames; only one family member - a young baby - survives the inferno, being surreptitiously taken by Gavin Miller (David Born) and his wife Arlene (Sue Rock) and raised as their own like some kind of Kryptonian refugee.
Years later, the child is all grown up in the form of the lovely Heather Miller (the smoky-eyed Alexandra Daddario, whose image I used as a profile pic years ago on various internet chatrooms and forums ["'Fora', you ungrammatical dunce!" - The Voice In My Head] and got a great deal of unwanted attention from desperate web-bound guys whom obviously didn't know who she was and thought it was a selfie or something) who is unwittingly, due to some kind of genetic predestination perhaps, following in her slaughterhouse family footsteps by working on the deli counter of some supermarket. This puts me in mind of Steve Coogan's John from The Day Today's mockumentary 'The Office' (far superior to Ricky Gervais' later title and format thieving vehicle): "I like meat. I like working with meat. In some ways I respect meat more than people". Here Heather works with her friend Nikki (Tania Raymonde, no relation to the "No One Can Hold A Candle To You" crooners but had essayed the role of real-life murderer Jodi Arias in the same year as this movie) with whom she plans to travel to Texas - along with her boyfriend Ryan (Tremaine 'Trey Songz' Neverson - I may be in my mid forties now and hopelessly out of touch, but I was paying attention to the music scene back then and I swear this guy completely passed me by) and Nikki's current beau Kenny (Keram Malicki-Sanchez) - to inspect the property she has inherited from her birth grandmother Verna Sawyer (another nice cameo from Sally Hardesty herself, Marilyn Burns).
I may as well address one of the big problems with the film right now: according to the timeline, Heather should be at least 40 years old and she clearly isn't. Now, I'm 45 myself these days and mostly in good shape (most of the time) and there are certainly some well-preserved people in their forties who can pass for a decade younger - but Daddario was around 27 at the time of filming and that seems to be pushing credulity a little far. This could be solved by the film being set earlier than the year of release, say the late '90s. But the technology on display (mostly the phones) as well as the music scream year of release or at most a year earlier. This makes the Doctor Who UNIT era timeline look simple. Maybe Heather really is a well fit 40 year old with a washboard stomach to die for who hangs around with people more than a decade younger. Bit sad, but okay.
Obviously, gory fun is to be had by all, and it's certainly not the worst entry in the series by a long chalk (could do with more remote-control leg, though) but I should probably address the other chainsaw in the room: the bit where Heather - her friends having been massacred - is kidnapped by a still vengeful Burt Hartman and his cop son Carl (Scott Eastwood, son of Clint; one wonders if Eastwood Snr ever has a go at his son for being in a film like this. If so, I hope he ripostes by pointing out that pappy started out in stuff like Revenge of the Creature and Tarantula) and taken to the old abattoir to be slaughtered, before being rescued by Leatherface in a scene that casts the killer as a heroic figure, righteously butchering the bad guys in response to Heather's cry of "Do your thing, Cuz!"
After all, you know, the saw is family.
You know what I miss? Public service graffiti. The sort that gave out public info, like a pamphlet or moral kiosk or something. There was a wall round these here parts that used to carry that sort of thing, often in blue spray paint. I assume the author used to boff the rest of the contents. Stuff like "DIRTY LISA JOHNSON GAVE ME AIDS" or "ROBIN FRENCH SHAGGED JULIE RUTTER UP THE ARSE AND NOW THEY CALL HIM CHOCK COCK" or "EBANKS NASH SPY SUST".
That last one probably requires translation: it refers to a gentleman on the estate named Ebanks who had been 'sussed', as in found out, to be a grass. I can also confirm the middle one, as Julie Rutter was the only girl at school that I'm aware of who got her A-Levels before we did our GCSEs, if you know what I mean.
Apologies for the seemingly nonsensical segue: it's not noon yet and I'm on the Staropramen. Czech yo'self before you wreck yo'self is what I say. Probably. But there should be public service warnings about this film in the above manner. Maybe a series of billboards - outside of Ebbing, Missouri as well as everywhere else on the planet - emblazoned with "Do your thing, Cuz!"
Thursday 3 October 2024
Island of the Blind Dead (Emma Dark and Merlyn Roberts, 2015)
The Iberian peninsula spawned an eldritch monster in the terrifying form of director Amando de Ossorio's vampiric mummified revenant warrior monks the muertos sin ojos, better known up here in the Anglosphere as the Blind Knights Templar. First appearing in all their sepulchral glory in 1972's Tombs of the Blind Dead, they would rise again to shamble and slaughter their sightless way through Ossorio's sequence of sequels Return of the Evil Dead (1973), The Ghost Galleon (1974) and Night of the Seagulls (1975) before making additional - possibly non-canonical - appearances in the 1975 Cross of the Devil (directed by Hammer Horror stalwart John Gilling, and scripted by El Hombre Lobo himself Jacinto Molina), Mansion of the Living Dead (helmed by low budget Spanish genre legend Jess Franco, 1982) and Graveyard of the Dead (Vick Campbell, released in either 2007 or 2009 - facts seem a little hazy on that one).
After just six (or eight?) years the 7th of March 2015 saw Island of the Blind Dead, Emma Dark's faux trailer for an imaginary movie (aren't they all?). Dark, an actress and director with a penchant for horror - I'm sure most of us can relate - who would go on to win multiple awards at Northern Ireland's Yellow Fever indy film fest and the Stormy Weather horror festival, devised the concept of a 'lost' fifth instalment of the series; presumably ignoring / decanonising / retconning Cross, Mansion and Graveyard. Which is perhaps understandable in the case of the latter two, but a bit harsh on the former. Ossorio purists I guess. So we get not a feature film, but a 'rediscovered' trailer for a non-extant movie - co-conceived, written, and directed by Dark and frequent collaborator Merlyn Roberts whilst on a trip to Corfu's St George South (which Mr Bond fans may know best from my fourth favourite Bond movie*, 1981's For Your Eyes Only). Originally meant only as a recce trip wherein they'd get some test shots on the very beach where Charles Dance ran over Pierce Brosnan's wife (in the Bond film, not a real life murder), being trapped in a hotel room for days by inclement stormy weather meant that Dark and Roberts had ample time for brainstorming sessions that germinated the idea of recruiting local Greek actors from the amateur dramatics society for their impromptu "couple of days" shoot.
Opening with a caption dedication to Amando de Ossorio which stresses the unofficial fan made nature of the piece and that it "is in no way affiliated with the Tombs of the Blind Dead official works (because I guess you've got to cover your arses even when it comes to relatively obscure Euro horror I.P.s), we are treated to a nostalgic feast complete with film scratches and grain and an evocatively '70s title caption font. It being presented in the form of a trailer - or since we're evoking the 1970s cinema experience, perhaps 'coming attraction' would be a more apposite epithet - in which we get the bikini-clad Jeannie (Dark) frolicking on the beach and interacting with Professor Theopolis (Elias Loumakis), whose wife (Sharon Loumakis) and daughter (Athena Loumakis) - isn't it nice that the local talent involved seems to be a family affair - are being menaced in and outside their home by a pitchfork wielding Blind Dead (Roberts) whilst a drunk (Victor Kavadias) dances upon some stairs t the strains of a choral 'O Fortuna' cantata and a blacksmith (George Catavatis) finds himself confronted by another Templarios sin ojos. Specifically the monster with the ginger beard. There's a Tom Cruise / Nicole Kidman joke there, I feel sure, but it's decades out of date.
Conveying a strong sense of the period and an authentic feel for the material, it certainly - for me at least - does its job of making me wish there were an actual extant film I could watch. Available to watch on Ms Dark's YT channel here.
(*Oh alright - if inquiring minds simply must know, my top five: OHMSS, Casino Royale [2006 obviously, not 1967!], The Living Daylights, For Your Eyes Only, From Russia with Love)