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.

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.

House of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis, 1970)

Welcome to Collinsport.  You'll never leave.

Where to begin?  My Gothic love affair with Dan Curtis' Dark Shadows - a five-days-a-week (theoretically, barring pre-empting by live sporting events, political resignations, etc) soap opera that began as a monochrome melodrama only to transform under the light of the moon into a full-blooded and full colour monster fest replete with vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, zombies, time travel and parallel dimensions - began when I was quite young.  Even though it was never shown on terrestrial British television, my grandmother had somehow accumulated amidst the mass of paperbacks that cluttered her house a number of the 1970s Marilyn Ross-penned (well actually Dan Ross-penned, utilising his wife's name as a pseudonym) tie-in books; I remember Barnabas, Quentin and the Mummy's Curse and Barnabas, Quentin and Dr Jekyll's Son were definitely two of them but the identity of the other (for there were three of course, everything comes in threes) is lost in the mists of time.  I don't know if she'd mistaken them for Mills & Boon romance novels or something, or if she'd actually read the back blurbs and decided that stories about a vampire and a werewolf teaming up to take on a mummy, the scion of Stevenson's schizophrenic scientist and sundry other super creeps seemed like a great idea.  Hard to tell with her, as her reading went from the aforesaid M&B romps (Harlequin romance for overseas readers) to the likes of Catherine Cookson and Barbara Cartland to the novelisations of films such as Dawn of the Dead and Blue Sunshine.  You helped warp my young mind, Nanna, and I miss you.  Thank you for the time you were babysitting me and let me stay up to watch Taste the Blood of Dracula.

Anyway, these books intrigued little me of course.  I was always mad for vampires and werewolves especially, so having the two main protagonists being an undead coffin-dwelling bloodsucker and a lycanthrope with carnivorous lunar proclivities respectively was right up my darkened moonlit fog-wreathed alley; the photographic covers and statement that these novels were based on the ABC-TV series blew my little mind entirely.  Books were one thing, but there was an actual programme on the telly with these sort of Universal / Hammer famous monsters of filmland having adventures?  Every weekday?  Satin-lined, velvet draped luxury!  It would, sadly, be decades and the acquiring of a multi-region DVD player and an Amazon account before I actually got to see the show (and soon after came the revelation that the discs were multi-region, so I could have actually got hold of them slightly earlier but nevermind), but those thin paperbacks and the idea of the show that they built up in my young mind - of the vampiric but heroic Barnabas Collins, his roguish and conflicted wolfman cousin Quentin and all the other benighted residents of the haunted halls of the Collinwood estate - lived long and lingered in the memory.

Created by producer Dan Curtis who had until 1966 worked primarily in sporting broadcasts such as golf until he saw what he deemed "stuff that would fly in from the coast on its own it was so bad... talk about turkeys!", and buoyed up by the idea that "if I couldn't do better than these dumb bastards I'd give up the business" pitched an idea that - lie Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson among others - had come to him in a dream: a young woman on a train heading towards a strange and dark destiny.  From this Bronte-esque nascence sprang a daily gourmet feast of horror, as Gothic melodrama gave way to bloodsucking revenants and carnivorous lunar activities across sundry timelines and dimensions; meanwhile back in the U.K. our idea of a soap opera remained steadfastly dull and stuck in the mud of day to day 'realism' - no ghouls or time travel ever bothered the cobbles of Coronation Street alas.

By the end of the '60s Curtis had moved from a pretty hands-off approach to the show - having left the drafting of the series Bible (then titled Shadows on the Wall) to Art Wallace, and the day-to-day scripting and directing duties to a regular roster of writers (such as Wallace, Ron Sproat, Malcolm Marmorstein and Sam Hall) and directors (series stalwart Lela Swift who helmed the first and last episodes and many in between, John Sedwick, Sean Dhu Sullivan and many others) - to a much more active role in the series, taking the directors' chair for twenty one episodes of Dark Shadows between March 1968 and August 1969.  Feeling sufficiently proficient directing the material by this point, when the opportunity came to transfer the series from the flickering set in people's living rooms to the silver screen Curtis himself would be in the driving seat.  Taking full advantage of the series' early 1970 Parallel Time plotline in which many of the major players were either absent or in diminished roles, Curtis and his core cast decamped to Tarrytown NY some twenty five miles north of their usual studio setting where the Lyndhurst estate would be playing the cinematic Collinwood (the television equivalent having been the Carey Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island) to work some macabre movie magick.

With House of Dark Shadows, Curtis and writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell decided to make the film's story a compressed, condensed and streamlined adaptation of the introductory storyline of the vampire Barnabas Collins, which originally ran from episode 210 to around 290 of the Monday to Friday show.  The original plan of introducing an explicitly supernatural character into what until that point had been a Gothic wherein the ghosts of Collinwood were as much the haunted pasts and concealed misdeeds of the characters as actual phantasms had been to bring in a blood-drinking villain to menace the show for around thirteen weeks, at which point he would be duly dispatched with the obligatory stake through the heart and the show would move on to another storyline.  However, the sheer amount of adoring fan mail that poured in for the character - as well as actor Jonathan Frid - prompted a quick rethink and change of plans that ended up with the genteel vampire becoming the central character of the series.  One wonders what Frid, a reserved gay man, made of the mail sacks full of hot 'n' horny housewives' fantasies that would arrive at the studio each week.  Anyway, they decided to write a screenplay that hew closer to the original vision before Barnabas became the dashing televisual hero defeating daemonic forces daily and protecting the town of Collinsport against heartbroken witches, hairy werewolves and headless warlocks - one where he remained the villain he was originally envisaged in a motion picture freed from the constraints of daytime television and more like the Kensington Gore-strewn antics of Hammer horror or nearest American equivalent.  Something along the lines of the same year's Count Yorga, Vampire from American International Pictures (memo to self: must rewatch the Yorga duology at some point, maybe for Halloween).

The film opens with the customary roar from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Leo the lion before Bob Cobert's eerie, ethereal theme from the series heralds the supernatural storm coming toward the house of Collinwood, where the never more camp and flustered Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds, or 'Big Lou' to his friends) is searching for his errant son David (David Henesy).  The youth, always a bit of a bad seed - especially in the early episodes of the TV series, wherein he engaged in such japes as extending wires across the staircase to trip his father into plummeting to his doom, and removing the bleeder valve from his car's brake cylinder to, again, send him plummeting to his doom - has on this day crossed the line; worse even than attempted patricide he has wronged his lovely nanny / governess Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott, known by Dark Shadows fandom as The Lovely And Talented Kathryn Leigh Scott).  As Roger scours the grounds to locate his spawn he comes across itinerant handyman and ne'er do well Willy Loomis (John Karlen, who will always be more than a decade older and heavier and rocking a 'stache with "as Harvey" captioned under him as he adjusts his tie as Tyne Daly's hubby in the title sequence of Cagney and Lacey) who is mooching about - a great skill to have, I honed it to fine art whilst at 'working' the Inland Revenue - and informs him that his unsatisfactory conduct means that his employment is at an end.  The now free Willy is a man with a plan, however, and is following the clues hidden in an old riddle that purportedly lead to the lost Collins family treasure.  Heading to the Collins crypt in the nearby Eagle Hill cemetery, Loomis locates a secret room within the tomb and pries open the chained-up coffin that resides within.  Never a good idea, as the hand that looms toward his throat teaches him.

Now liberated from his tomb with a view / home sweet prison after approximately 173 years, Mr Barnabas Collins (Frid) swiftly shrugs off the funk of the ages to  make a house call on his own descendants but not before attacking and feasting upon family secretary Daphne Budd (Lisa Richards, who played Sabrina Stuart in the show; Sabrina's main timeline boyfriend was werewolf Chris Jennings, whilst her alternate reality equivalent's beau was the Shadowsverse's equivalent of Jekyll and Hyde: Chris Pennock's Dr Cyrus Longworth / Mr John Yaeger.  I guess she just really digs guys with hirsute alter egos).  Presenting himself to the 1970s-vintage Collinses - the aforementioned Roger and David, Roger's sister the family matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (legend of old Hollywood Joan Bennett, also reprising her usual TV role), her daughter Carolyn (Nancy Barrett), Carolyn's fiance Todd Blake (Don Briscoe, who played the aforementioned lycanthropy-stricken Chris Jennings in the show and whose life seemed similarly cursed: he was forced to drop out of the show, disappearing suddenly during the 1970 Parallel Time storyline due to personal problems [probably exacerbated by "a little too much L.D.S.", as Admiral Kirk said to Gillian]), live-in physician Dr Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall), Professor Timothy Elliott Stokes (Thayer David, who would go on to menace Marvel's ol' webhead in the 1977 Spider-Man as Mr Byron), as well as Maggie and her boyfriend Jeff Clark (Roger Davis) - as his own descendant newly arrived from London, the vampire swiftly inveigles himself into their company and confidence. 

Entranced with the young governess due to her remarkable resemblance to his late 1700s love Josette - yes, Curtis is the one responsible for the whole "bewitched by the modern doppelganger of a past romance" thing that made its way from the original show via this movie and then Curtis' 1973 Bram Stoker's Dracula to eventually infect its 1992 Coppola namesake (actually, thinking back, the real culprit of originating this is most probably Nina Wilcox Putnam who wrote the unproduced Universal Pictures Boris Karloff vehicle Cagliostro, elements of which wound up in 1932's The Mummy with its millennia-spanning love story betwixt Imhotep and Ankhesenamun / Helen Grosvenor) - Barnabas arranges for an out of town job opportunity to arise for Jeff so that he can move in on Maggie.  What girl could hope to resist a man with his own silver wolfshead cane (ideal for killing loup garous, as Larry Talbot and Jack Whittier can attest), crumbling old mansion (Barnabas has moved into 'the Old House', his original 18th century home) and mad Renfield-like servant (the unfortunate Willy Loomis, now under Barnabas's spell and acting as his handyman-cum-gofer).  As Barnabas and Maggie enjoy romantic strolls in the countryside he is supplementing his dating with some nocturnal predating upon Carolyn, who becomes a very willing Lucy Westenra-style blood donor.  It's like Carolyn his side piece of ass or fucktoy so that he won't feel the need to pressure lovely innocent Maggie.

The curious Dr Hoffman, meanwhile, works out who and what Barnabas really is (with the help of Professor Stokes) and her utter fascination with a specimen of the undead leads her to make him a promise that she can cure his condition with a series of alchemical injections that make him able to go out in the daylight unharmed - handy for his and Ms Evans' bucolic walks - but when Barnabas makes it very clear that he is interested only in her medical help rather than indulging in her doctor-patient fantasies the scorned scientist gives him an overdose of the formula that leads to him aging rapidly to his true age of two centuries (very impressive make up from Dick Smith, improving upon the TV series and a blueprint for his work on Dustin Hoffman in the same year's Little Big Man).  Barnabas responds by slaying the doc before rejuvenating himself by completely draining Carolyn of her blood, giving us an atmospheric rain-lashed funeral sequence that Curtis would repeat almost shot for shot for Lucy in his version of Dracula three years later before Carolyn rises in vampiric Bloofer Lady form to prey upon her young cousin David and her boyfriend Todd; a reign of terror ended by her staking at the Van Helsing-style hands of Professor Stokes.

When Barnabas sweeps Maggie away to a desecrated church on an isolated island to complete her conversion into the reincarnation of Josette Dupre as his vampire bride, Jeff has to draw on the Professor's arcane knowledge to arm himself with cross and crossbow to turn amateur vampire slayer and rescue his betrothed from a fate worse than un-death.  The film ends with a sequel-baiting final shot dangling the promise of Barnabas Collins' return but although a sequel would arrive but a year later it would be a very different beast than the writer and director intended.  Which we shall get to anon. 

I recall (god, I wish I didn't) once having a drink with film academic Dr Laura Mayne - co-host of the Second Features podcast, which covers some wonderful obscure gems of cinema and would highly recommend to anyone who suffers through the rubbish I write here as well as having a suspiciously familiar blurb about the byways and back roads of film (no Laura, I'm not accusing you of plagiarism, I'm just sayin') - and, upon her mentioning that her partner has acquired an original cinema poster for House of Dark Shadows, I responded rather embarrassingly.  So bewitched, beguiled and bewildered by her pulchritude was I that in my semi-inebriated state I blurted out how jealous I was of him for having that poster as well as her.  I am facepalming as I type this.  Your scorn is accurate.  No, she doesn't talk to me anymore.  Yes, I came close to cringing myself to death afterwards.

Still wish I had that poster, though.

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.

Anyway, our gang head off on their fatal road trip, picking up a hitch-hiker (Shaun Sipos) along the way.  Don't these people know what franchise they're in?  Still, this one is less freaky self-cutting freakazoid like in the original and more an open-shirted male model looking douchebag that you used to get on awful TV shows like Big Brother or... that one where they were on Shark Island and Tiger Island and were all total Quentins and Felicias?  Used to be on Channel 4 on Sunday mornings?  Whatever the hell that was called.  I'd sooner pick up the original hitch-hiker to be honest.  So they make their way to Heather's new inherited manse after picking up the keys from family lawyer Farnsworth (Richard Riehle, who's been in tons of stuff but will always be Donald Sutherland's replacement as Merrick in Buffy the Vampire Slayer for me), unaware of the facts that hiker Daryl is a thieving robbing swine eager to loot the property the moment everyone else's head is turned and - as Daryl finds out when he ventures downstairs - Leatherface (Dan Yeager this time round) is still lurking behind his metal door and eager to cut up some fools and wear their faces.

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!"

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)

The Caller (Arthur Allan Seidelman, 1987)

Well now here's a little gem - a late '80s genre film that I, for some reason, had never heard of.  Big thanks to Daniel from Youtube's The Cobwebs Channel for flagging this one up on his list of ten underrated retro horror movies (link here), without which I may well have continued bimbling through existence completely unaware of this movie's existence.  Man, though, it makes me feel old that a flick that came out when I was eight years old - old enough to watch and remember this kind of thing - can be described as "vintage".  Wowsers.  I am an antique.

Perhaps inauspiciously directed by the man behind Arnie Schwarzenegger's 1970 debut (as 'Arnold Strong') Hercules in New York, 1987's The Caller is a two-hander that had me double check the credits to see if it was based on a stage play.  It wasn't, as it it turns out, be it so easily could have been such is the almost Pinteresque feel and mise-en-scene.  Opening with a rare expedition outside the main confined setting, we see Madolyn Smith's character - credited merely as 'The Girl' - stopping by a seemingly deserted rural  gas station to fill her car, calling to the 'off stage' (for we shall see no other characters other than she and the he who shall soon reveal himself) employees that she is leaving the payment for the petroleum upon the pump.  As she drives off, we see that she is being observed by a raincoat-clad fair-haired figure.  Is it John Constantine?  (No)

Whatever happened to Madolyn Smith, anyway?  Not Madeline Smith, of waifish Hammer Horror fame - the American one, with her name spelled in more of a Goblyn Queen kind of way (side note: for quite a long while I toyed with the idea of writing a Spenser-esque epic poem entitled The Goblyn Queene, an ode not to Elizabeth I but to everyone's favourite fetish wear-clad Jean Grey lookalike.  Well, my favourite, I can't speak for you.  Who are you, anyway?  What are you doing in my house?).  She seemed to be in lots of things in the '80s like 2010, Deadly Intentions and Funny Farm, hanging around just long enough for this impressionable child to form a monstrous crush on her before vanishing from our screens.  It's cruelty is what it is.  I hope she's happy, wherever she is.

So The Girl drives home through the forest - encountering a broken-down and abandoned vehicle upon the way, a car which worryingly has a dismembered child's doll stuffed in its glove compartment (and I don't think one needs to have seen Carlos Aured's 1973 Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll [though frankly any self-respecting genre fan probably should] for that to give off serious maniac vibes) - before arriving at her seemingly idyllic cabin in the woods.  Seriously, who buys or rents a cabin in the woods and doesn't expect to wind up in a horror movie?  Anyway, she goes about her routine including carrying a suspiciously-sized box which is leaking a red substance from the car to the kitchen before taking a shower - all the while watched by the mysterious observer who circles the property spying in at the windows.

This personage makes his presence known when he knocks at the cabin door; it is Mick Travis himself - a.k.a. Caius Caligula, a.k.a. Alex DeLarge - Malcolm McDowell, credited as the eponymous 'The Caller'.  The mystery man claims that his car has broken down and that he's had to walk for miles from another part of the forest, and could he possibly use the phone to call for help.  Reluctantly, she lets him in and the pair begin the dance - warily assessing each other through a smokescreen of polite smalltalk, all the while prodding verbally at one another for any sign of weakness, McDowell's Caller coming out with a catchphrase of  "point to you" whenever the Girl pokes a hole in his story.  He, likewise, begins to break down her own narrative of expecting the imminent arrival of a prospective suitor and her inconsistency in the mentions of her daughter and late husband: is the object in the box her dead former beau's severed head?  Did, perhaps, the daughter kill her father and was committed to a mental institution?  Is she, the mother, just as unstable, and is she the danger rather than the urbane stranger?

Spoilers ahead, obviously.  Normally I wouldn't give a spoiler warning for a decades-old movie, but it is one hell of a twist.

Still here?  Good, good.

The outcome is that this cosy little demesne is surrounded by a force field, and the Girl is - perhaps - one of the only surviving humans after an alien invasion.  The Caller is an android Terminator-style watchdog tasked with keeping an eye on her (and, like the aforesaid James Cameron joint, he does get some of his surface human flesh disguise removed revealing the robotics within).  I swear I'm not making this up.  A movie that's 98% Harold Pinter's No Man's Land meets something by David Mamet suddenly spins on its axis and becomes Claudio Fragasso's Shocking Dark.  Like the Spanish Inquisition, no-one sees that coming.  Honestly, it has to be seen to be believed.  Highly recommended.

Starve Acre (Daniel Kokotajlo, 2023)

'Tis the spooky season once again. dear fiends.  Let us gather 'round the cauldron and see how many horror films I can watch and review betwixt the 1st of October and Samhain itself.

2024 has been shaping up to be a pretty vintage year for the horror genre, all told.  We've had the Ghostwatch-writ-large Late Night With the Devil, the thieves versus vampiric child frolics of Abigail, a double dose of nunnery-based diabolism with the twin-spin of Immaculate and The First Omen, and at the time of writing your humble author is very much looking forward to seeing Coralie Fargeat's The Substance and E. L. Katz's Azrael.  After last year brought us Evil Dead Rise and the wonderfully idiosyncratic werewolf fable Blackout, it's been wonderfully refreshing after years of substandard Blumhouse efforts, paint by numbers slashers and the approximately four billionth entries in the creaking Paranormal Activity, Conjuring and Saw franchises.

Set like folk horror forebears such as Robin Hardy's seminal classic The Wicker Man in the 1970s, the film is redolent of the decade that fashion forgot; the opening shots including the title credits have the feel of some of Lawrence Gordon Clark's Seventies BBC A Ghost Story for Christmas shorts - especially the contemporary late '70s instalments like Stigma.  We are immediately introduced to our leading couple: college lecturer Richard (former titular Time Lord of Doctor Who and current Targaryen twat of House of the Dragon Matt Smith, playing with a Yorkshire accent so broad that I misheard one of his early lines about going for a "trek over the tarn" as "over the Tyne" - making me momentarily think that this was set further north than it is and worryingly close to home) and Juliette, Jules for short (Morfydd Clark, Galadriel herself from The Rings of Power and star of one of the horror films of recent years that I really need to get around to watching because I'm assured it's good: Saint Maud), 

The couple's seemingly pleasant idyll of sitting under a tree at a village fete is horribly interrupted by a hubbub and they discover to their - and everyone else there's - horror that their son Owen (Arthur Shaw) has done an Equus impersonation and stabbed out a horse's eye with a Pythonesque pointed stick.  This got my back up a bit, as animal cruelty - even feigned - can be a red line for me, which may be odd to some as I've always been fine watching people scream as they're killed and shriek as they're mutilated.  I suppose it's my innate misanthropy was is completely at ease with human beings being stabbed, shredded and torn asunder but not the animals.  Oh, and fuck you Ruggero Deodato and everyone else who ever had real animal cruelty in their films.  Anyway, I instantly hated Owen and was worried that we were going to have another Babadook situation here: that I was going to spend the rest of the movie actively wishing a child character dead and being disappointed and frustrated when he didn't.  This can also be called a Bob from The House by the Cemetery situation.

Happily, I turned out to be wrong in this assessment and the awful sprog departed both this realm of existence and the film fairly early on - but not before he tells his mother that he's disturbed by a whistling in the night from the spectral figure of 'Jack Grey', a folktale figure told to him by neighbour Gordon (Sean Gilder, who to my knowledge I've only seen in two other things: as the Sycorax Leader in Doctor Who's 'The Christmas Invasion' and Bosola opposite Gemma Arterton's magnificent Duchess of Malfi), and gone out in the farmlands with his father who is digging for the roots of Jack's legendary oak tree (Smith's Richard saying "It's a Crinoid" as he fishes out a fossilised shellfish from the bowels of the earth is almost impossible not to [mis-]hear as "Krynoid", conjuring the spectre of a lost story wherein the Eleventh Doctor battled the Seeds of Doom).  After the abominable child has perished via a fatal asthma attack - his mother arriving either tragically too late or timing at just rightly, depending (and that's not just my hatred of the kid talking, there's a nice ambiguity as to whether or not she was really in a rush to rescue the wretched rugrat) - the couple are plunged into depression and assorted coping strategies.  Richard plunges headlong into his obsession with excavating the roots of the mystical oak, whilst Jules is comforted by her sister Harrie (Erin Richards, of Gotham and Being Human and other stuff probably).  Morfydd Clark really is superb in this, by the way: her portrayal of raw grief is pretty palpable and as far as I'm concerned a vindication against her vilification by incel man-baby Youtubers who seem to think that making thumbnails of her with 'comedy' googly eyes is in some way amusing.  I suppose they need someone to castigate now that Jodie Whittaker isn't Doctor Who.

When Richard unearths the buried remains of a hare (serious Wicker Man vibes there) which goes on to - like Smith himself did in 2013 - regenerate, it's flesh and fur growing back over the mouldy old bones as it revivifies (shades of both The Blood on Satan's Claw and The Creeping Flesh), Jules becomes increasingly enamoured of the supernaturally resurrected beast.  Is it Owen returned, reincarnated in lepus form?  Is it Jack, the stuff of both Richard's and Owen's childhood nightmares, taking on a shape to walk (well, hop) amongst us?  Either way, sacrifices will be required.

All said, if you'd previously told me that I'd watch a film wherein the final scene saw Lady Galadriel suckling a hare at her teat (lucky Hartley) whilst Doctor Who smashed Barbara Gordon's head in with a hammer, I'd have thought you extraordinarily unwell.  But here we are, and you were right: I loved it.

Best film that Tigon never made, probably.