Galaxy of Terror (1981)

Directed by: Bruce Clark

Screenplay by: Marc Siegler and Bruce Clark

Starring: Eddie Albert Jr., Ray Walston, Erin Moran, Sid Haig, Grace Zabriskie, Robert Englund,Taaffe O’Connell

Running Time: 81 min.

Tagline: “Hell Has Just Been Relocated.”

 

On the desolate planet of Morganthus, the last surviving member of the starship Remus attempts to escape some unseen threat by sealing himself away in the ship’s morgue but whatever it is chasing after him, the crew member’s barricade does nothing to stop it and the man is violently killed by the seemingly invisible assailant. Back on the Remus’s homeworld of Xeres, the strange, god-like Planet Master, a robed figure whose face is obscured by an orange glow, is taking part in a strange game with an old crone named Mitiri (Mary Ellen O’Neil) when he receives word of the disappearance of the Remus on Morganthus. Surprisingly, Planet Master seems pleased by this news and is prompted by it to make a particularly daring move in whatever this game they’re playing is. Mitri is taken aback by his boldness but he sees what has happened on Morganthus as a sign to put a long gestating plan into motion and will not be deterred. A rescue mission by the starship Quest is quickly arranged, to be headed up by Commander Ilvar (Bernard Beherns) – a puzzling request since Ilvar seems to have been retired from active duty for a number of years – and manned by a crew personally selected by Planet Master himself. 

And what a crew it is! Captain Trantor (Grace Zabriskie) is an absolute lunatic suffering from severe PTSD as the result of being the lone survivor of something called The Hesperus Massacre, the mere mention of which triggers traumatic flashbacks in the woman. Officer Baelon (Zalman King) is, to not put too fine a point on it, a complete asshole, who is particularly hostile to fellow crew member Cabren (Eddie Albert Jr.), very likely due to Cabren’s relationship with Alluma (Erin Moran), who also joins the crew. Alluma is a psychic and you’ll be happy to know that in the grand tradition of movie psychics, her abilities end up being completely useless. Rounding out the crew are cook Kore (Ray Waltson!), Quuhod (Sid Haig!), a monastic warrior who eschews firearms for a pair of crystal throwing weapons and barely speaks (Haig agreed to do the movie on the condition that he could play character as a mute to get out of having to say some apparently horrendous dialogue.), rookie Cos (Jack Blessing) who’s so nervous about his first mission out he’s barely holding it together from the looks of things, and tech officers Dameia (Taaffe O’Connell) and Ranger. (Robert Englund!) To call the Planet Master’s choice of personnel a tad questionable is a bit of an understatement. 

Things go wrong as soon as The Quest reaches Morganthus. While in orbit, the ship is seized by some unknown force and pulled down to the planet’s surface, a rather inhospitable looking graveyard of wrecked ships, and while the crew comes out unscathed, the rough landing did the Quest no favors. Not that the ship being fully functional would be much help at the moment, as whatever snatched the Quest out of orbit won’t let go of it unless they can find its power source and shut it down. Fortunately, the Quest was put down in relatively close proximity to the wreck of the Remus and Ilvar dispatches a team to look for survivors. All they end up finding is corpses, which for reasons never remotely explained, Baelon immediately incinerates upon discovery. However, a thorough search of ship reveals there’s still several crew members unaccounted for and so it’s possible that some remnant of the Remus’s crew is still alive somewhere. Strangely enough, Alluma’s psychic radar does detect a lifeform of some sort, though it’s identifiably not human. Even more confusing, the presence she’s detecting seems to originate with Cos, who spent the better part of the search through the Remus jumping at shadows. Well, turns out that Cos had a very good reason to be afraid, because as soon as everyone else is off the Remus, he gets attacked and killed by a dog-sized creature that seems to be a mixture of insect and reptile. 

Dameia and Ranger, who are apparently also the ships surgical team as well as tech crew, perform an autopsy on Cos and the one corpse found in the Remus that Baelon didn’t reduce to charcoal briquettes but are unable to determine what killed them. That mystery will have to wait, because Commander Ilvar’s scans of the nearby area have turned up something interesting. Something nearby is putting out enough energy to scramble the Quest’s scanners and that’s enough to convince Ilvar that the source of whatever is trapping the Quest on Morganthus may lay in that direction. Another team is dispatched to investigate and this time Ilvar will join them. What they discover is a massive pyramid, which immediately spooks out Alluma, as she says she’s never encountered anything in her life that feels so empty when scanned by her psychic abilities. Despite her protests, heading inside that pyramid may be the only way for them to find answers to what is going on.  

It goes without saying that the discovery of the pyramid is the cue for whatever is behind all this to start picking off our cast in earnest. Ilvar is killed by another alien life form as he rappels down into a shaft on the side of the pyramid. Quuhod gets attacked by his own weapons before bizarrely being finished off by his own severed arm! Trantor, believing that they’re under attack by the same alien force responsible for the Hesperus Massacre, ends up burned alive and in the most infamous scene in all of GALAXY OF TERROR, Dameia is overwhelmed by a giant maggot that tears her clothing off and um, has its way with her before she dies. Ew. As their numbers are whittled down, the remaining survivors realize that something within the pyramid is tapping into their subconscious fears and siccing their own personalized id monster on each of them. They’ll also discover that their walking into this deathtrap was very much part of that mysterious plan of the Planet Master’s alluded to in the early scenes and if they want to get out this alive, they’ll have to figure out what his game is. 

In 1970, after spending the previous decade and change directing several dozen films for American International Pictures, Roger Corman parted ways with A.I.P. and with his brother Gene, founded New World Pictures Ltd. Corman’s intent was to take a brief sabbatical and work primarily on the production side of things for about a year or so before he hopped back into the director’s chair. Well, as it turns out, New World Pictures would keep Corman so busy on that end of things that he would never direct another movie but since production and supervisory roles were where Corman’s real talent lay, I think we can all agree that things worked out for the best there, right? Anyway, much like A.I.P. before it, the independent New World’s focus was to be on the creation and distribution of small scale, low budget exploitation films made to cater to popular tastes that could be made fast and recuperate their budgets quickly, while also bolstering their library by picking up the distribution rights for foreign films by the likes of Kurosawa, Fellini, and Bergman. And also STARCRASH, for which we are eternally greatful. Think of them as the 70’s and early 80’s counterpart to Cannon Films and hey, guess who Menaham Golan got his start with?

As I mentioned, where Corman’s excelled was on the production side of things, in particular his knack for spotting potential great talents and motivating them to learn and grow as filmmakers by doing. You were given an idea to develop into a script and you had so many days to shoot the movie for so much money. If you’re capable of working under those restrictions, then you can pretty much do whatever the hell you wanted on the movie. Corman would be relatively hands off most of the time but wasn’t afraid to pop in and suggest (often insistently so) changes or ideas that he felt would make the film more appealing to the markets he would be selling the films too. It was an approach that worked and if you need evidence thereof just look at the numerous heavyweight directors, writers, and others who inform so much of modern day filmmaking that got their start and proved themselves working for the man, a list that includes the likes of Joe Dante, Paul Bartel, John Sayles, James Horner, William Stout, Ron Howard, Jonathon Demme and Gale Anne Hurd, not to mention special effects experts who would work on everything from NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET to AVATAR.

However, this was also the time period where the arrival and massive success of films like JAWS and STAR WARS initiated a major shift in Hollywood filmmaking for better or worse. “What is JAWS,” Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote, “but a big budget Roger Corman picture?” The Hollywood studio machine was now catering to the exact same audiences that Corman was but were able to throw a ton more money into it. If he wanted to compete, the famously pennywise producer was going to have to risk opening up his pocket book a teensy bit more. Therefore, he needed to be certain that people would come out to see the movies he produced, and so got into the practice of making movies that mimicked whatever film was popular at the time just enough to grab the attention of fans looking for a something familiar. The difference between the best of these and say, the “mockbusters” shoveled out by the Asylum a couple of decades later is that for the most part they aimed for something different than simply recreating a more successful movie for (a whole lot) less money. Instead, they would look at the most basic, core concepts behind these movies as a jumping off point for something unique. Yes, Dante’s PIRANHA is about a resort town getting chewed up and spit out by an aquatic menace but the movie itself is a gleefully self-aware mixture of ‘50’s “science run amok” and black comedy. BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS pared down STAR WARS to “Kurosawa jideki film meets WWII dog fight movie” and gave us SEVEN SAMURAI in space, even bringing in Robert Vaughn to play a riff on his character from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.

GALAXY OF TERROR – submitted as PLANET OF HORRORS, produced under the title QUEST, and initially released under the truly god-awful title of MINDWARP: AN INFINITY OF TERROR to tepid response until, in true Corman fashion, they slapped a new title on it and re-released it -- is an ALIEN cash-in and isn’t afraid to admit it. But despite the repeated swipes from Ridley Scott’s film and of H.R. Giger’s design sensibility, I wouldn’t say that it’s wholly accurate to describe GALAXY OF TERROR as a complete ALIEN knock-off. Certainly, the film plants itself firmly in much of the same territory as its inspiration for a good chunk of its first act, what with a crew setting down on a hostile alien world to explore the wreckage of a derelict spacecraft. It even cribs the ominous alien pyramid structure from the original script of ALIEN. (Coincidently, back when ALIEN was known as STARBEAST, O’Bannon and Shusett had intended to sell the script to Corman to help pave the way for their dream project, an adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.”) But as GALAXY OF TERROR moves along, it reveals a movie that shares as much if not more in common with the likes of FORBIDDEN PLANET or Mario Bava’s PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES as it does Scott’s film. Furthermore, the fictional universe its set it couldn’t be further removed from ALIEN and is more like something you’d run across in the pages of HEAVY METAL or 2000 A.D. magazine. Certainly, off the top of my head, I couldn’t name any other ALIEN-like which featured a psychic as standard part of a spaceship crew, a warrior order that wields crystal shuriken, a ruling body led by an alien demigod who governs by playing what amounts to a gussied up Atari game with a freakin’ witch or a nebulous psychic threat that unleashes a whole menagerie of different beasties to dispatch our cast of characters. The result is something that feels like a grindhouse STAR TREK episode.

That sort of off-kilter, throw it at all wall strangeness grants GALAXY OF TERROR a considerable amount of charm and part of the allure of the movie is watching to see just how bizarre it’ll get. That’s certainly helped by the film’s cast, as you’d be hard pressed to find a movie of this type with such an eccentric mix of recognizable faces. We’ve got Freddie Krueger, Captain Spaulding, Laura Palmer’s mom, the guy from THE RED SHOE DIARIES, Joanie from HAPPY DAYS, and the star of MY FAVORITE MARTIAN all in one package. (And it could have been even screwier. Mark Hamill was apparently game for a role in this.) But if GALAXY does have one major stumbling block though, it all has to do with this cast of characters. If there’s one aspect of ALIEN that GALAXY OF TERROR could have benefited more from following, it’s the way in which ALIEN takes time establish the personalities, relationships and tensions of the Nostromo’s crew members before their nasty little stowaway shows up. GALAXY OF TERROR has an even larger cast and the fact that so much of what befalls the Quest’s crew hinges on their psychological make-up makes getting to know these people even more vital. As it stands, the characters are more memorable because of the disparate actors in the roles and their outlandishly gruesome death scenes and more often then not, you’ll be left scratching your head trying to figure out how exactly each person’s death translates to their “greatest fear.” Trantor’s PTSD, Alluma’s claustrophobia, and Cos’s paranoia aren’t too hard to figure out but how exactly does one character fearing that he’s too old and out of touch to be a competent leader lead to him getting killed by blood sucking worms? Or Quuhod’s weapons and eventually his own body turning against him? Sure, seeing Freddy Kruger getting menaced by his own evil doppelganger is fun, but why is he the only one that gets a human manifestation? And for the love of God, how does Dameia’s disgust at worms translate into her getting raped to death by what looks like friggin’ Mothra’s larval form!?

Well, I can actually answer that one: it was all Corman’s idea.  Corman had sold GALAXY OF TERROR to distributors due to the promise of a certain degree of sexual content, most of it involving Taaffe O’Connell. Apparently he even promised a sex scene between her and Eddie Albert without telling anyone involved in the actual making of the movie. So, to add in the sleaze he had sold the film on, Corman decided at the last minute to change what was originally supposed to be a straight forward monster attack scene into not only a monster rape scene but one where the victim seems to actually enjoy the experience! (Corman’s explanation would be that what Dameia truly feared was her own sexual desires. Sure thing, Rog.) The film’s director, screenwriters, and Taaffe O’Connell, who had taken the job because she was drawn the idea of getting to play a rare non-sexualized role, were not amused. According to the commentary on Shout Factory’s Corman Classics release, O’Connell even had to talk with her priest before she agreed to do it -- would I have liked have been a fly on the wall during that conversation -- while Clark refused to do it, forcing Corman to come in and handle it himself. Shooting the scene itself was also a trial, with O’Connell just narrowly avoiding getting crushed by the immense hydraulic puppet at one point, and it was subjected to numerous edits and cuts to keep the film from getting slapped with an X-rating. Thing is, Corman was right. This moment is so completely out of left field and thoroughly “what the hell?” that it sticks with you more than any other scene in the film. Being “that movie where a lady gets screwed to death by a giant slimy maggot” gave GALAXY OF TERROR the kind of sleazy infamy that translates to ticket sales, video rentals, and cult fascination years later.

Fortunately, the other major reason why GALAXY OF TERROR managed the longevity its had is considerably more pleasant than That Scene. Reports vary on how much GALAXY OF TERROR cost to make exactly – one apocryphal story has it that Corman was able to recoup the film’s budget by simply renting a couple sets out for an Italian watch commercial one weekend – but it couldn’t have been much. Therefore one can’t help but be impressed at what the film’s production team was able to accomplish on such a limited budget. You wouldn't believe that much of movie's sets a props were built out of spray-painted cardboard and discarded scraps as the production design on the ship and pyramid interiors, the effects of the ship’s take off, the matte paintings of Morganthus’s storm wracked surface, and the creature work are all of a surprisingly high standard. Of course, that means when the production design does slip up, such as how it doesn’t try to hide the fact the restraints used by the Quest’s crew to strap themselves down during hyper space jumps are just car seatbelts, complete with visible logos, it sticks out all that much more. But we really shouldn’t be too surprised that they were able to accomplish this much, as the teams in charge of these aspects of the movie were headed up by a hungry young filmmaker by the name of James Cameron, who Corman had hired on as a production assistant and effects technician for BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, wherein he was responsible for designing a number of the spaceships featured in that film.

 

GALAXY OF TERROR would be his second feature for Corman, (between the two films Cameron and his crew would also work on a little film called ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK) and you could make a fairly strong argument that GALAXY was more the James Cameron Show than it was Bruce Clark’s. The future TERMINATOR director not only had a hand in painting the concept art,  designed most of the creatures -- an exception would be the one that settles Baelon’s hash. That had been donated to the production by a former Corman  EFX artist and written into the movie at the last minute – acted as a second unit director, and by all accounts, served as Roger Corman's representative there on the set. It shows and with Cameron's fingerprints all over this movie, it wouldn't be too hard to view GALAXY OF TERROR as a warm-up for what he would eventually do with ALIENS. Some scenes even presage the later movie: try not to think of the Space Marine's initial sweep of Hadley's Hope when the Quest's crew investigate the wreckage of the Remus or how the alien pyramid paved the way for the xenomorph's hive. And Cameron wasn't the only GALAXY OF TERROR alumni to work on ALIENS either, the two films also share visual effects supervisor Robert Skotak and Hudson himself, Bill Paxton, worked on GALAXY as a carpenter.

By the way, if you ever get your hands on Shout Factory's disc, I recommend watching the behind-the-scenes documentary on it. There's a whole segment of it devoted to anecdotes  about what it was like working with the famously confrontational filmmaker and not all of them are positive ones.

Would I recommend GALAXY OF TERROR to just anyone? Probably not. The lack of characterization, sometimes odd performances from its eclectic cast, and moments of gratuitous sleaze and extreme gore would likely turn a quite a few people off to it. But, if you have a love for a bygone era of B-movie filmmaking, are interested in seeing a small if notable step in the career of one of the most influential popular filmmakers of the past thirty years, or are just hankering for something incredibly strange, give it a try.
 

Return of the Living Dead (1985)

 



Directed by: Dan O’Bannon

Screenplay by:  Dan O’Bannon
Starring: Clu Gulgar, James Karen, Don Calfa, Linnea Quigley, Thom Matthews, Beverly Randolph, Miguel Nunez
Running Time: 91 minutes
Tagline: “They’re back from the grave and ready to party!”

“The events portrayed in this film are all true. The names are real names of real people and real organizations.”

Back in 1968, an independent film production out of Pittsburgh made a low-budget fright flick that delivered such a wallop to popular culture that its fingerprints can still be found on popular media decades later and the director’s very name was transformed into descriptive shorthand. You might’ve heard of it; it was this stark, mean little bugaboo of a film called NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. To go into the exact whys and hows of what a shock to the system NIGHT was deserves a post all of its own, so we won’t go into that, but you can’t really discuss RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD without mentioning NIGHT because of how much the former film hangs over the latter. After all, RETURN was originally conceived as a direct sequel to NIGHT, based on a novel by NIGHT’s co-writer John Russo, who had won the legal right to create his own follow ups separate from Romero’s sequels. Russo had intended for the film adaptation of RETURN to kick off a franchise all of its own and well, that is what happened, it just did so without Russo.

This came about when ALIEN screenwriter Dan O’Bannon became attached to the project as both writer and eventually director, taking over from Tobe Hooper, and he was uncomfortable with how much the source material lifted wholesale from Romero. So, rather than proceed with what he perceived as a pale imitation he through out almost all of Russo’s material and refashioned the project into something of tongue-in-rotting-check tribute to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and DAWN OF DEAD . Now, when you hear the title RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, you don’t think of people caught between a crazed religious cult and a gang of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT-esque thugs with the dead rising to inconvenience everybody, do you? Heck no, what comes to mind is that poster up with the corpses sporting chains and mohawks, “The Surfin’ Dead” by the Cramps, and Linnea Quigley doing a striptease on top of a crypt. Much to Russo’s chagrin, I imagine, it would be O’Bannon’s version that would leave its mark – hungering for brains as a generally accepted Thing That Zombies Do originates here –and much like THE HOWLING, reduce the novel to little more than a footnote. (Amusingly enough, Russo would write the film’s novelization, which means there are two different books titled RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD by the same guy.) Give the film a watch and it’s easy to see why that is. Not only is it just a damn fine horror-comedy in its own right, like all good parodies, as much as it subverts and thumbs its nose at Romero’s blueprint, it understands the through line of his zombie fiction far better than any of his imitators.

We’re not even a few minutes in and RETURN is playing with our expectations. Yes, this is a sequel to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, just not the NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD we know. You see, Romero’s film was loosely based on actual events, where the test of a new chemical compound, 245-Trioxin, went awry, returning a morgue full of dead bodies to some semblance of life. The military hushed things up, threatening Romero with a lawsuit if he told what actually occurred, and sealed the reanimated corpses up tight in airtight tanks to be shipped off some undisclosed location. At least, that’s the story Uneeda medical supply warehouse manager Frank (James Karen) spins for Freddy (Thom Matthews), the new stockroom clerk, while closing up shop. How is it that Frank knows all this? Simple; due to what he describes as a “typical army fuck-up,” the tanks containing the corpses were shipped to the wrong address and for the past fourteen years have been sitting off in a corner in the basement of Uneeda Medical Supply. While Frank is showing off the tanks and their grisly contents to the rookie, Freddy asks if there’s any danger of the tanks leaking. Nothing to worry about, Frank assures him, these were made by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and gives the tank a good solid swat on the side. Cue leak.

Both Frank and Freddy get hit with a face full of 245-Trioxin and from there the gas makes its way into the ventilation system and out into the warehouse proper, where it reanimates anything dead it touches. This includes the butterflies pinned to boards, the split dog corpses used for veterinary schools, and of course, the human cadaver currently locked in the freezer. Realizing that things have going completely south on them, Freddy and Frank decide to call in their boss, Burt (Clu Gulager) for help. After reading Frank the profanity laden riot act for even going near those tanks, Burt decides the best course of action is to dispose everything and everyone keeps their mouths shut. Of course, to do that means letting that cadaver out of the freezer so they can kill it. That shouldn’t be too hard to do. Destroying the zombies’ brains worked in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, right? Well, as Freddy will astutely point out, the movie lied: the first attempt to kill the thing by bashing its skull in doesn’t take; the next results in the three of them having to chase a headless corpse around the warehouse. Whatever 245-Trioxin is, it creates a ghoul that is substantially more durable than anything that came after Ben and company in that farmhouse. Fortunately, Burt remembers that his friend Ernie Kaltenbrunner (Don Calfa) works in the mortuary at the nearby funeral parlor and has access to a crematorium, which, needless to say, is looking like it would come in pretty handy right about now.

As all of this hilarity is going on, Freddy’s friends find themselves faced with a Friday night with nothing to do. This little group includes punk rockers Spider (Miguel Nunez), Scuzz (Brian Peck), Casey (Jewel Shepard), death-obsessed Trash (Linnea Quigley), and “one spooky motherfucker” Suicide (Mark Venturini), as well as hanger-on Chuck (John Philbin), and Freddy’s girlfriend Tina, who is such a Wholesome Girl Next Door, the type that says “oh fudge!” when frustrated, that I can only assume that she and Freddy have a VALLEY GIRL thing going. Eventually, the group comes to agreement that if anybody knows where the good times are to be had, it’s Freddy. Thing is Freddy doesn’t get off work for a couple of hours and nobody is happy with the idea of sitting outside Uneeda Medical Supply in the summer heat for that long. Scuzz makes the suggestion that they could kill time by fooling around in the nearby cemetery, which unbeknownst to them, happens to be at the back of the same funeral parlor where Freddy, Burt, and Frank are smuggling in the cadaver, now hacked into convenient pieces and stuffed into garbage bags. Burt’s cover story about being saddled with a bunch of rabid weasels that he needs to dispose of doesn’t go over so well, so he has to show Ernie what really is in those bags. Well, nearly getting your foot wrenched off by a still moving severed arm makes a fairly convincing argument. Into the furnace the cadaver goes and for a moment, it looks like the problem is solved. Except Freddy and Frank have been getting progressively more ill since their exposure to the gas and not to spoil things, there’s a reason that when they let that cadaver out of the freezer, it ignored them and went straight for Burt. Second, Tina has wandered over to Uneeda so she can meet up with Freddy when he gets off work and is attacked by a zombie that escaped from the drum that started this whole mess, a particularly nasty revenant that looks like a walking pile of bones and sludge. Finally, yeah, they burned up the cadaver but that smoke, saturated with 245-Trioxin, had to go somewhere. Somewhere, like say, into those passing storm clouds, where it triggers a sudden thunderstorm and torrential downpour, dumping several gallons of instant zombie juice right on the graveyard. Whoops.

With apologies to Uncle George, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD may be my single favorite zombie movie. It’s just so much thoroughly twisted fun, filled to the brim with wonderfully sick jokes and sight gags, a fantastic punk rock soundtrack, and top-notch make up and effects. For my money, you’d have to look to something like AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON to find a movie that comes as close to working as effectively as both a comedy and a straight horror movie. And credit for much of what makes it work so magnificently has to go to Dan O’Bannon. Watching this film, you’d have a hard time believing that this was O’Bannon’s first rodeo as a director because he pulls it off with the skill and self-assurance that one expects from a seasoned professional. With help from William Stout’s excellent EC Comics influenced production design, O’Bannon manages the fairly difficult trick of giving the movie a visual look unique from other horror films being made at the time without actually calling attention to that. Furthermore, by giving his cast, a mix of veterans and talented newcomers, a longer than normal rehearsal period, the characters genuinely do come off as people who’ve known each other for years and are as much fun to watching simply hanging out together as they are being pursued by zombies. But as fantastic as his direction is – and it’s a crying shame that he would go on to only direct one more movie in his life: THE RESURRECTED, a fairly decent low budget adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s THE STRANGE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD – it’s his screenplay where he really shines. Not only is it quotable as all get out (“Ain’t you never been to a funeral?” “I never knew nobody that died!”) but it has all these great moments of the sort of bleak absurdity, horror, and humanity that comes from being trapped together in a situation where you are well and truly screwed. Sometimes all at once: take the scene where a zombified Freddy has Tina and Ernie trapped in an attic. A teenage girl hiding from her boyfriend who is calling to her to let him eat her brains is utterly ridiculous but you can’t deny that both Tina’s sheer terror and Ernie trying to work up the courage to deliver a mercy shot to the hysterical girl before Freddy breaks in comes across as completely believable.

 

It’s no wonder that O’Bannon “gets” Romero so well; the two men have such a similar world view. Like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD before it, being an alpha male type or having the best intentions behind your actions doesn’t guarantee that you’ll make it to RETURN’s final reel and sacrifice and attempts to fix things can easily make things worse. There’s also the fact that while wildly different in execution – RETURN’s ghouls can be every bit as agile, strong and intelligent as a human being, as opposed to Romero’s shambling hordes --  both  NIGHT and RETURN understand that what really makes the undead so terrifying is how pathetic they are. With Romero they’re recognizably human society slowly decaying into an identity-less mass while O’Bannon’s are amped up junkies – we learn from a captured one that ingesting brain endorphins is the only relief from the constant pain that comes with their existence as a rotting corpse – whose need for a fix is so all consuming it reduces them to animalistic savages. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Romero influenced zombie film if the whole notion of The Proper Authorities Are Not Your Friend didn’t rear its head at some point, as the military decides to let God sort ‘em out when finally implementing its contingency plan for dealing with a borderline indestructible zombie outbreak, a truly spectacular escalation of NIGHT’s own subversive ending. I mentioned Russo’s novelization of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD earlier and one of the truly baffling additions he made for the novelization was a framing story that casts the whole incident as the result of a conspiracy by Communist sympathizers to destabilize the United States. (!!)  Obviously, it’s generally agreed by anyone aware of this of what a wrongheaded decision that was because not only does it no damn sense from any logical standpoint – why exactly don’t these fifth columnists just unleash the gas themselves instead of leaving the tanks there in hopes that a couple of knuckleheads will one day accidentally do so – but also illustrates how Russo didn’t get what Romero was trying to say and O’Bannon did. In Romero’s movies, the reason that the system fails so badly in fixing the problem is because systems are inherently broken by design because people created them, people run them, and people can be some seriously dumb and narrow minded sumbitches when they put their mind to it. That’s part of the reason why leaving the domino that started it all a “typical army fuck up” works better; a horrible tragedy caused by the authorities’ incompetence and exacerbated by their willingness to implement blunt solutions while showing casual disregard to collateral damage and long term consequences to cover up their mistake is something I find a load more believable and terrifying than some elaborate conspiracy waiting in the shadows.

 

A Little Something Extra:

Oh come on...what else did you think I was going to throw in at the end of this review? This flick has got one of the best soundtracks in 80's horror and arguably, of all time:

 

 

Blood and Black Lace (1964)

 

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Directed by: Mario Bava

Screenplay by: Mario Bava, Giuseppe Barilla, and Marcello Fondato

Starring: Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner, Ariani Gorini, Luciano Pigozzi, Mary Arden, Calude Dantes

Running Time: 89 minutes

A masked killer in black clothing, fever dream colors run riot, brutal and elaborately staged murder set pieces, ineffective police detectives, and a mystery that isn’t actually solved so much as the movie just comes out and tells you whodunit. Yep, it sounds like Psychoplasmics is paying another visit  to our good friend the giallo this Halloween. The first time we did so, we dug into a movie that diverged rather dramatically from what we'd come to expect when we hear the term "giallo." Here we're shifting in reverse and taking a look at the movie that codified many of those elements in the first place and still manages to pack one hell of a punch despite decades of imitators ramping up the shocks. I give you Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE.

The backdrop for BLOOD AND BLACK LACE is the glamorous Christian Haute Couture fashion house in Rome, run by the widowed countess Christiana Como (Eva Bartok) and her current paramour Massimo. (Cameron Mitchell) It's the kind of place where every single one of its occupants has some dirty secret that they'd like very much to keep hidden, so when one of the models turns up strangled to death on the fashion house grounds, the police have their work cut out for them in narrowing down the possible suspects. Thing is, this is but the first in a series of murders, because our first victim, unknown to the police, kept a diary which detailed a lot of the shady goings on at Haute Couture and several people there would do anything to keep it out of their hands. As the diary ends up passed from person to person, our killer -- a figure in black wearing a featureless gauze mask -- hunts them down and dispatches each one of them in spectacularly brutal fashion. That the victims are all beautiful women and the vicious nature of each of the murders have the police mistakenly convinced that they're after a deranged sex maniac, which ends up indirectly giving the killer a perfect alibi to throw them off their trail. Now all they're going to need to get away scott free is someone to pin the blame on.

While discussing briefly the origins behind the term giallo in my post about Fulci's DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, I neglected to go into the importance of the German krimi film on the genre's development. Krimis or "Kriminalfilms" were a series of crime movies (produced mainly by Rialto Films) that primarily adapted the works of 20's pulp crime writer Edgar Wallace, beginning with 1959's THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE FROG and ending with 1972's PUZZLE OF THE SILVER HALF MOONS. Krimis had plots that were straight out of old fashioned murder mysteries, usually revolving around individuals or group thereof hiding a dark secret being menaced by a masked villain, stylishly shot and with added touches of more graphic violence and sexuality than one would come to expect. If that sounds familiar, it should. BLOOD AND BLACK LACE was a German-Italian co-production, intended to be a crime thriller in the Edgar Wallace tradition. (According to Tim Lucas's commentary on the Arrow Video release of BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, the film seems to have lifted rather liberally from a Wallace story titled WHITEFACE, to the point that apparently it ended up being more faithful to it than that story's actual adaptation.) You can find traces of the krimi throughout BLOOD AND BLACK LACE; the collection of suspects and their entangled sins, the bizarrely dressed killer (who looks a lot like comic book superhero The Question), the bossa nova theme music by Carlo Rustichelli, and police detective hero. (Thomas Reiner) Or, well, about as close as you're going to find in this movie.

However, for all their flourishes, krimi films were police procedurals at heart and Bava, bored with the cliches of whodunits, aimed for something a little different. So, the role of the police in BLOOD AND BLACK LACE is pared down considerably. Their investigation plays no role in the reveal of the killer's identity except in how it pays off a visual clue for the audience and they are not involved in the mystery's resolution. In fact, their one big move to capture the killer ultimately ends up giving that killer an opportunity to escape justice. You also won't be seeing any of the film's remaining cast members becoming amateur sleuths and taking it upon themselves to solve the mystery themselves. If anybody ends up being proactive in any fashion, it's usually to work up an alibi to cover their own ass than help anyone else. No one uncovers the killer’s identity; the movie just comes out and tells you. Instead, it’s the actions of our mysterious killer and the stalk-and-murder scenes become the real focus of our film. Therefore, by diverging from the krimis that formed its foundation and moving towards something much darker and harsher. BLOOD AND BLACK LACE becomes a missing link between film noir’s nihilism and horror’s viciousness. Obviously, our bizarre killer and the brutal methods he uses to dispatch his victims – strangulation, drowning, shoving them face first into a furnace, and stabbing them in the face with a barbed gauntlet – paved the way for the Michael Myers’ and Jason Voorhees’ to follow but when its revealed that the killings are driven by greed and the last act follows our killer as they try to clean up loose ends, BLOOD AND BLACK LACE doesn’t feel too far removed from the likes of DIABOLIQUE and DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Almost joyously misanthropic, BLOOD AND BLACK LACE presents a world that, underneath all the riches and glamour, is more corrupt, cynical and savage than anything else.

Of course, it wasn't just the shift in content that helped BLOOD AND BLACK LACE kick off a sub-genre of its own but also the presentation of it. It's important to note that early in life, Mario Bava had aspirations to be a painter. When that career went nowhere, Bava moved on to work with his father in the Italian film industry but that inclination stayed with him. After a number of years working as a cameraman and co-directing whatever movies Riccardo Freda didn't feel like finishing, Bava would graduate to helming films all by his lonesome, starting with his More-Hammer-Than-Hammer gothic BLACK SUNDAY. He would direct his first color feature with 1961's HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD, which would be the first to feature the hallucinatory color cinematography that would become synonymous with the phrase "a Mario Bava film." See, as a director, Bava was concerned more with the staging and lighting of a scene than whether or not it made complete logical sense. To him, the script was generally little more than a vague outline to follow, which considering the quality of the scripts that the man usually worked with, maybe was for the best. While this does lead us to wonder what he could have pulled off if he had an actual decent script to build on, it ultimately isn't as big of the drawback as it sounds because in Bava's films, it's the pictures that do the talking. While the writing in BLOOD AND BLACK LACE never manages to rise above adequate enough to not be intrusive, the images contained within the film are potent enough to pick up the slack.

It was Bava’s intent to make this film look like one of the lurid covers to an old Mondadori paperback brought to life and it goes without saying that he succeeded. Through the use of wildly varied and vivid color schemes and lighting and strange camera angles, Bava makes normal spaces take on surreal dimensions. A simple cellar gets warped into a gothic dungeon. An antique store becomes a phantasmagorical nightmare world that our killer, seeming to merge with the shadows, stalks his victims through. A furnace glows red with an unnatural intensity. Red is a very important color in BLOOD AND BLACK LACE. (Hey, considering the title it better be.) The film opens and closes with lingering shots on an object of that color and it reappears time and time again, most notably via a strange mannequin that is shown posing with some of the cast during the film’s marvelous opening credits and pops up again and again like some sort of impartial observer to the decadence on display. Most interestingly, though, is when Bava restrains himself from using his strange color schemes. Scenery that’s so delirious at night is rendered almost unrecognizable when shown in the light of day. It’s in these scenes that much of the police investigation takes place and well, no wonder they can’t solve it. It feels like they’re in a completely different world. This visual mastery is made even more impressive by the fact that Bava was working with a limited budget and could only get the shots he wanted by resorting to such methods as dragging the camera around in a child’s wagon or rigging up a see-saw-esque device in place of a crane.

The year previous to BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, Bava directed another film that’s often credited as the first giallo: THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH / THE EVIL EYE, starring John Saxon and Leticia Roman. There’s no argument that it created the template for much of what we westerners know as giallo – the outsider protagonist turning amateur sleuth after witnessing a murder, the travelogue like depictions of its European setting, and even a touch of supernatural weirdness that other giallos would run with – but it’s not quite there yet. It’s still nestled comfortably within the boundaries of your Hitchcockian thriller – in fact, it was originally intended as a comedic send-up of Hitch’s films, as the title suggests, until Bava concluded that the film’s absurdity would work better played completely straight. So, more of an evolutionary step then. BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, on the other hand, can’t be mistaken for anything else, not just for its cynicism and candy-colored visuals but simply just for how horrifically brutal it is. Even with the on-screen gore kept to a minimum and years of the likes of Argento, Sollima, and Fulci amping up the shocks, the violence in BLOOD AND BLACK LACE remains effective because Bava knows how to make the audience feel it in a way that many of his imitators never grasped. Stabbing someone in the face with spikes is bad enough but throw in a lingering shot from the victim’s point of view showing those barbs are at eye level before they plunge in? Yikes. While subsequent giallos and especially their bastard offspring, the slasher, would victimize scantily clad women for cheap titillation, the sexualization of the victims here just serves to make the violence against them all more disturbing. Thanks to Bava’s whole filmmakers-as-painter approach, shots like a pair of corpses posed as for a magazine spread or that of a drowned women, the briefest lingering on blood spreading over the water’s surface, come across like macabre art pieces about the destruction of something beautiful.

It’s strong stuff, to say the least, and so it should come as little surprise that audiences weren’t quite ready for it when it hit theaters. BLOOD AND BLACK LACE flopped in its native Italy and was dismissed by critics. AIP, who had distributed Bava’s films stateside in the past, deemed the film’s content too disturbing for the teen and drive-in audience they marketed to and passed on it, the film eventually getting released over here thanks to the Woolner brothers. A bit amusing that the movies that Bava is best known for are among his least successful. West Germany loved the movie though and you can see BLOOD AND BLACK LACE’s influence all over the krimis that followed in its wake, eventually leading to German-Italian co-productions that combined krimis with giallos even further. It would be years before it kicked off a similar trend in its home land though, brought about when Bava’s disciple Dario Argento would basically Brundefly THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and BLOOD AND BLACK LACE into THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and thereby open the floodgates.

But BLOOD AND BLACK LACE did it first and in my opinion, did it best. It’s a truly exceptional piece of filmmaking art and one of my all time favorite movies. If you haven’t seen it yet and are interested, may I recommend the recent release by Arrow Films, now available for us knuckleheads in the U.S.? Not only is the new picture transfer absolutely gorgeous but it comes with an absolute bounty of supplemental features. Included are an article / interview with Joe Dante about his love for Bava, a commentary by Tim Lucas – the man who literally wrote the book on Bava -- , a feature length documentary interviewing Italian screenwriters, directors, and critics about the history and influence of the giallo, YELLOW, a short film created as a tribute to the giallo, a fascinating video essay about distinct portrayals of gender throughout the genre, and an episode of The Sinister Image guest starring BLACK LACE star Cameron Mitchell. It’s probably my favorite feature of the bunch, as Mitchell discusses his entire career with a mix of good humor and professionalism. Mitchell regarded Bava as his favorite director to work with (and this is man who got his start under John Ford, remember) and you can hear the genuine affection he has for the man whenever he’s brought up. Seek it out, it’s worth the price.

The Super Inframan (1975)

Directed by:  Hua Shan

Screenplay by: Ni Kuang

Starring: Danny Lee, Wang Hsieh, Terry Liu, Bruce Le, Yuan Man-Tzu

Running Time: 90 min.

Tagline: “The Man Beyond Bionics!”

There must be something in the water because lo and behold, as soon as I decided that I’d be reviewing THE SUPER INFRAMAN for Psychoplasmics to mark its first year anniversary, both Teleport-City and 1000 Misspent Hours tossed up pieces of their own about Shaw Bros. Studios thoroughly loopy attempt to cash-in on Japan’s tokusatsu craze. Thankfully, rather than getting discouraged over somebody beating me to the punch, I took this as a pretty clear sign to do as the Romans instead. THE SUPER INFRAMAN is an infectiously joyous bit of B-movie obscura that deserves as much attention laid on it as it can get and my only slight regret in discussing it is that I don’t have an anecdote of my own to contribute along with the two aforementioned reviews of how they discovered this doozy of a movie when they were kids. Me? I just rented it off of Netflix a couple years back, give or take but I was fortunate enough to revisit the movie this year as the closer to the B-Fest film festival in Chicago this past January. It’s as much of a comment on how great it was to see this in a packed auditorium with a crowd of super-enthusiastic nerds as it is, unfortunately, a comment on the rather anemic offerings we’re having at the theater this year that I can say that nothing is going to top that as a movie going experience in 2016.

To swipe that line from Tim Lehnerer yet again because it’s too good not to, the first fifteen seconds of THE SUPER INFRAMAN are kind of slow but then a pterodactyl monster bellyflops onto a highway in front of a school bus full of children, an earthquake happens and Hong Kong explodes. Then things start to get weird. If nothing else, you have to admire this movie for not wasting time screwing around. This string of disasters – which dialogue indicates also includes monster attacks that they clearly didn’t have the budget to show but hey, take their word for it – culminates in the eruption of the long-dormant Mt. Devil, revealing a massive fortress topped off with a gigantic stone dragon head. Naturally, the Chinese government takes note of a supervillain lair popping up in their backyard, and enlists the help of Professor Liu Ying-de (Wang Hsieh), head of the Scientific Headquarters (of Somewhat Ambiguous Science) to figure out just what the blazing blue hell is going on. While scanning Mt. Devil, Professor Liu and his team intercept a transmission from the pterodactyl monster from before, who transforms into a blonde Chinese woman dressed up as some sort of draconic Brunhilda.

This would be Princess Dragon Mom (Terry Liu) – or Princess Elzebub if you’re going with the subtitles – which I can only assume was meant to be Princess Dragon Ma until somebody involved in INFRAMAN’s dubbing fell asleep at the wheel. She rattles off the usual evil overlord spiel about how she has come to conquer the Earth and it would be in all of our best interests to surrender to her and her forces right now. While I myself am completely okay with being ruled over by an evil sexpot who’s part dinosaur, the rest of the world isn’t so keen on that idea and therefore the authorities gather together for an intelligence briefing to determine what is to be done about this situation, which I quote, “is so serious it’s the worst in all of human history!” Profession Liu is present at this meeting and informs all assembled that he has determined that Prince Dragon Mom is a member of some prehistoric race which once ruled the Earth but was driven beneath the planet’s surface by the Ice Age and has spent the past few million years in suspended animation. Now revived, she’s declared war on the human race and has an army of mutants breed from prehistoric monsters to back her up. Seeing as Professor Liu has the best grasp of the situation, the Chinese government puts him and Science Headquarters in charge of the effort to combat this menace.

Now the name Science Headquarters seems to be something of a misnomer because as far as I can tell from the many times I’ve watched this movie, Professor Liu seems to be the only actual scientist employed at the place. (They do, however, have the requisite of every B-movie science lab: huge computer banks covered in blinking light that don’t seem to actually do anything.) The rest of Science Headquarters’ staff seems to be some sort of paramilitary disaster response team made up entirely of motorcycle riding martial artists, led by the heroic Lieutenant Rei Ma. (Danny Lee) Professor Liu realizes it’s going to take more than a bunch of guys in matching silver and blue jumpsuits to put a stop to the Princess’s evil schemes but fortunately, he has something up his. Taking Rei Ma to his personal laboratory, Professor Liu reveals his plans to transform a volunteer into The Inframan, an invincible, atomic powered cyborg superhero that can be more than a match for whatever Dragon Mom throws at them. Despite the very real risk of the operation killing him, Rei Ma agrees to undergo the transformation, which mostly involves him lying on a cruciform slab while Professor Liu glues computer parts to him.

Princess Dragon Mom, however, has no intention of waiting around for whatever Science Headquarters is cooking up. She recognizes what a threat the organization poses and assembles her legions of mutants to launch a pre-emptive strike and oh, what a collection of monstrosities it is. We’ve got her army of cannon fodder mooks, the explosive spear wielding Skeleton Ghosts. (Skeletons can have ghosts?) We’ve got her right hand henchwoman She-Demon (Dana Tsen Shu-Yi), a lady in silver booty-shorts who has eyes in the palms of her hands that can shoot lasers. There’s a pair of robots that seem to act as the princess’s elite guards and can extended and retract their heads and weaponized limbs  via wire coils. Then there are the mutants themselves: a lumpy toad man with a drill and shovel for hands, a tentacled plant monster, a humanoid dragon man, an onibaba-style demon with long hair, and a frankly adorable looking red bug monster. Toad Man and Plant Monster are dispatched first. Toady ambushes and kidnaps a member of Science Headquarters named Chu Ming (Lin Wen-Wei) – who, while every one else gets a cool motorcycle, is struck driving a beat-up Volkswagen – and takes him back to Mt. Devil to get brainwashed while Plant Monster attacks Science Headquarters’ um…headquarters itself by transforming into a cluster of massive vines and tearing the building apart. The damaged caused cuts off the power to the professor’s lab and nearly kills Rei Ma until somebody manages to switch on the back up generator. Being subjected to an invasive full body surgery and nearly dying does nothing to slow down Rei Ma, who promptly transforms into Inframan and gets to try out his new abilities by flipping around the professor’s lab and smashing some of his equipment. Professor Liu doesn’t seem to mind that much though, likely because that’s totally coming out of Rei Ma’s next paycheck.

Despite the Inframan being a top secret project not five minutes ago, everyone excitedly exclaims “It’s Inframan!” immediately upon seeing him spring into action. The plant monster puts up a good fight but in the end is no match for the super-powered Rei Ma. Good thing for Princess Dragon Mom that she already had a back up plan in place, as that poor sap that Toady captured, Chu Ming, has been brainwashed into turning traitor and is sent back to Science Headquarters to swipe Inframan’s blueprints so she can scan them for an exploitable weakness. Chu Ming gets caught in act but intervention from Toady, Red Bug and Onibaba help him get away, though not without the latter two monsters getting destroyed in the process. With the plans for Inframan in Dragon Mom’s hands, Professor Liu decides to upgrade Rei Ma with a number of new weapons to counter act whatever traps she may throw at him, leading to a favorite and off-quoted exchange among friends of mine: “To have success, it is necessary for you to have Thunderball Fists!” “I can have such a thing?” “That’s right. Thunderball Fists!” Well, those Thunderball Fists are going to come in really handy real soon because Princess Dragon Mom has Chu Ming and Toady kidnap Professor Liu’s daughter in order to force the Professor into building her an Inframan of her own. This leads to Rei Ma heading up an all-out assault on Mt. Devil with the other members of Science Headquarters and a massive battle royal as Inframan fights his way through a gauntlet of mooks, mutants, and deadly booby traps on his way to a final confrontation with Princess Dragon Mom.

Much like the term giallo, tokusatsu started as a general catch-all before transforming into a specific genre all of its own. Meaning “special filming,” it was coined in regards to the original GODZILLA, the first Japanese film to utilize special effects such as actors in suits and miniature sets on the scale that it did, and would later be used to refer to science fiction films in general. That shifted with the popularity of serialized television such as MOONLIGHT MASK, AMBASSADOR MAGMA, SUPER SENTAI, METAL HERO and the ULTRAMAN and KAMEN RIDER franchises, which resulted in the term becoming more associated with Japan’s equivalent of costumed superheroes. They never fully abandoned their roots in the kaiju genre, however, as many episodes of these shows would climax with the rubber monster of the week growing to gigantic size and wrecking havoc in a model city before being stopped by hero / heroes who themselves can undergo such a transformation or summon a gigantic robot that they can pilot into battle. In fitting bit of cross pop cultural pollination, the American superhero of the time, The Amazing Spider-Man, would get his own tokusatsu series, complete with big dang robot, and United Artists would pick up the popular ULTRAMAN for American audiences.

As is expected, something achieving that degree of international success means other studios out there start looking for ways to cash in and one studio in particular would be the Hong Kong based Shaw Bros. Studio. Founded in 1925 as the Tianyi Film Company by brothers Runje, Runme, Runde and Runrun Shaw, the Shaw Bros. Studio is known today mostly for their martial arts output, with movies like THE 36^TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN and THE FIVE DEADLY VENOMS needing no introduction, but released films in a number of genres, including horror, spy thrillers, and exploitation flicks and would even collaborate with western studios for international co-productions. (Did you know Shaw Bros. had a hand in making BLADE RUNNER? Well, you do now!) By the 1970’s, though, the studio had never done a science fiction film and Run Run Shaw, a long admirer of the Japanese film industry, figured doing their own spin on tokusatsu shows was the way to go.

THE SUPER INFRAMAN isn't exactly shy about the fact that it is, in fact, a literal made-in-Hong-Kong knock off of ULTRAMAN and KAMEN RIDER. Not only does INFRAMAN'S "Science Headquarters" scream "ULTRAMAN'S Science Patrol but with the serial numbers filed off" but INFRAMAN rather gleefully cribs a number of Ultraman's signature moves and abilities for its titular hero --  including the ability to spontaneous grow several stories tall, something that is neither eluded to beforehand or ever mentioned again afterward -- but it's no accident that Inframan's bug eyed helmet and biker jumpsuit get up invokes Kamen Rider's hero; Michio Makami, INFRAMAN's special effects director, created a number of monster suits for Toei's tokusatsu shows at Ekisu Productions. On top of that, the film's musical score mixed in a number of cues from ULTRA SEVEN and MIRROR MAN with Yung Yu-Chen's own contributions.

To direct the film Shaw enlisted Hua Shan, a cinematographer who had got his start as an assistant on COME DRINK WITH ME and lensed a number of films for the studio. Screenplay duties would be handed to Shaw Bros. regular Ni Kuang, who’s an interesting character. A former public security official for the CCP, Ni Kuang left China due to fears for his own life and set up shop Hong Kong where he found success as a writer / co-writer of serialized novels, including the Wisley series, Dr. Yuen, and the wuxia series Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils. He would also contribute a staggering number of screenplays for Shaw Bros. including THE 36^TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN, 8 DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER, THE ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN, and my personal favorite of the Venom Mob movies, CRIPPLED AVENGERS, as well as Bruce Lee’s international hit FIST OF FURY. A number of contract players would be tapped for key roles in the film, two of the most notable being Huang Jian Long and Danny Lee. Long, better known as Bruce Le, would be one of the myriad actors who would make a career in the seventies and eighties out of the fact that if he combed his hair just right and you squinted hard enough he could sort of pass for Bruce Lee, appearing in faux-sequels to The Little Dragon's films and truly weird Brucesploitation entries like THE CLONES OF BRUCE LEE. Here he plays Xiao-Long, Rei Ma's right hand man at Science Headquarters, and even gets to show off some of his martial arts skills during a couple of big battle scenes. Danny Lee is probably the most recognizable actor in the film, thanks to the international success of John Woo's bullets and male bonding epic THE KILLER, where he played the cop determined to capture Chow Yun Fat's reluctant assassin, and has definitely had one of the most bonkers careers of anyone I've heard of. Lee (born Li Hsiu-hsien) turned to acting after his original plan of becoming a police officer flamed out due to difficulty completing the training exams and spent a number of years primarily as a "hey, it's that guy" supporting actor in a number of Shaw's films until he landed the lead role in INFRAMAN, which seemed to cement his status as Shaw Bros. go to guy for the studios battier productions. His later credits with Shaw would include BRUCE LEE AND I, a softcore film based around Bruce Lee's final days and relationship with Betty Ting Pei; the King Kong rip-off THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN; the nutso kung fu fantasy film BATTLE WIZARD; and something called THE OILY MANIAC, which, according to the IMDB, is about a "cripple taking revenge on criminals by using a magic spell that transforms him into an oily monster/superhero." Co-starring his INFRAMAN cast mates Terry Liu and Wang Hsieh, by the way. Lee would eventually cut ties with Shaw Bros. and form his own production company where he would regularly cast himself in the same "tough but honorable" cop role he would eventually play in THE KILLER and in the nineties release a number of rather infamous CAT III films. (Short for "Category III" a designation comparable to the American NC-17 rating.) The most successful of these would be the rather innocuous sounding THE UNTOLD STORY, which featured Anthony Wong as a criminal who takes a Sweeney Todd approach to the disposal of his victims. As Tim put it when he introduced INFRAMAN at B-Fest, "that's one hell of a resume!"

Unfortunately, despite the major marketing push, which apparently included a hot air balloon being used to promote the film -- and let me tell you how disappointed I was that wasn't able to dig up a picture of that -- INFRAMAN underperformed at the Hong Kong box office, forever denying us any further adventures of Lieutenant Rei Ma and Science Headquarters. Of course, the fact that I found myself sitting in a crowded college auditorium full of like-minded nerds whooping it up as THE SUPER INFRAMAN played across the screen makes it pretty clear that the film developed something of a cult following in the -- holy crap -- forty years since its initial release. Believe it or not, we very likely have Rogert Ebert to thank for that, as not only did the famous critic give the film a glowing review upon it's initial American release, not only did he feature it on Siskel and Ebert's "Guilty Pleasures" episode -- which is likely how a number of people first heard of it -- but when reviewing the video release of THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN, he announced that as much as he enjoyed that movie, he couldn't with good conscience give it a higher score than INFRAMAN and went back and added an additional star to the earlier film's score. That's just beautiful.

It's easy to see why one could come to champion this movie. THE SUPER INFRAMAN is a thoroughly delightful film, one that aims at being a frenetic adventure through a bizarre comic book world and succeeds at doing so with considerable flair. It's very episodic feeling, almost as if someone took three or four episodes of a television series and spliced them together, trimming all but the minimum necessary scenes that didn't revolve around punching monsters. As a result, there's hardly a moment in this movie that makes one lick of sense but thanks to the film's enjoyably crazed sense of pacing, you won't care as the film throws yet another bit of pure insanity your way before you can question just what happened in the scene previous. The highlight of this would have to be the climatic confrontation between Inframan and Princess Dragon Mom's monstrous true form, where Inframan blasts her head off with one of his many laser weapons, only to discover that she can regenerate. At which point, Inframan just blasts her head off again. And again. And again and again, creating a modest sized pile of severed dragon heads, until Rei Ma finally remembers he brought Thunderball Fists to this fight and lets her have it. The film's budget doesn't always back up its ambitions -- a number of its monster suits have visible seams and zippers and more than one suit actor is clearly wearing shoes -- but it's creatures are just cheap looking enough to be charming and the rest of the production more than makes up for it with inventive sets and action set pieces that are on a much bigger scale than your standard Shaw Bros. martial arts film. (In fact, the action scenes were so elaborate and expensive, INFRAMAN became the first Shaw production to use pre-production storyboarding.) There's motorcycle stunts, a miniature power plant destroyed in a battle between a giant Inframan and the Red Bug, a final showdown in a lair fitted out with everything from volcanic pit traps and death rays, and so many explosions, all supported by the quality martial arts choreography and stunt work that were Shaw Bros. standards. And let's not forget the film's wonderfully absurd English dubbing which just ads to the entertainment value.

As I said, it's a movie that wants nothing more than for its audience to have a good time and that earnestness is another factor that makes this movie so appealing, especially in this day and age when superhero comics and superhero comic films have maybe become too serious for their own good. Even friggin' Superman is in the hands of people who balk at the idea of a hero who smiles and wears bright colors, Batman is grimmer and grittier than ever and every superhero film seems required to be a two and half hour plus epic. So it's refreshing then to be able to kick back and enjoy a fleet-footed movie clocking in at just under ninety minutes and starring a colorful hero who doesn't have time for things like existential angst about what his transformation means for his humanity because he's just too dang excited about being able to beat down alien invaders with his shiny new Thunderball Fists.


A Little Something Extra:

"Monster Man" by Devo, which also features an off-brand Ultraman.

Q, The Winged Serpent

Directed by: Larry Cohen
Screenplay by: Larry Cohen
Starring: Michael Moriarity, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree
Running Time: 93 min.
Tagline: "You'll just have time to scream "Q" before it tears you apart!"

Some directors out there just aren’t built to work within something as play it safe as the Hollywood studio system. Larry Cohen, an exploitation auteur whose output includes everything from blacksploitation films like BLACK CASEAR and ORIGINAL GANGSTERS to bizarre science fiction thrillers like the long lost relative of the X-FILES, GOD TOLD ME TO, would be one of them. This isn’t a criticism, mind you, and I think the world of B-movies is better off because of it. But I bring it up because it’s pertinent to the movie we’re talking about here. Because you see, back in the early 80’s, Cohen was taking a stab at his first major studio picture, I, THE JURY with Armand Assante, an adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, and wound up butting heads with the studio executives over the production not having enough money. Cohen worried that his reputation with the various New York businesses he had worked with on several other films before would be damaged by his inability to pay the production costs and called them up to warn them “Look, you better get paid now or you might not get paid at all.” Well, that resulted in Cohen getting the boot from I, THE JURY barely a week into filming.

But here’s the thing about Larry Cohen; he’s what you would call a resourceful type and has a knack for putting together a movie in less time than…um, insert your own overdone metaphor here. If the studios didn’t want him to make I, THE JURY, well then, he was just going to go make his own. And he did just that. Within a week, he had a script, a cast and had secured the necessary budget, in the neighborhood of a million dollars, from none other than Samuel Z. Arkoff himself. You couldn’t find a more fitting producer for the project, because Arkoff, along with his former partner-in-crime Roger Corman, had pretty much wrote the closest thing to the Ten Commandments for how to produce, film, and market low budget B-movies in the 50s through the 70s via American International Pictures. (Google “The Arkoff Formula.”) Furthermore, Arkoff had a hand in bringing movies such as THE SHE-CREATURE, IT CONQUERED THE WORLD, VIKING WOMEN AND THE SEA SERPENT, REPTILICUS and even a few selections from the GODZILLA franchise to American screens and despite the gritty Reagan-era New York setting and comparably higher level of gore, the film Cohen had in mind, a mix of police procedural and giant monster film, would fit in right at home with those movies.

I imagine that detectives Shepherd (David Carradine) and Powell (Richard Roundtree) have seen their share of weird shit as New York police in the early eighties but I don’t think anything they’ve run across so far prepared them for the two different corpses that drop into their laps on this day. The first was a window washer who, while using his job as an excuse to leer at a woman working in the same building, rather suddenly finds himself deprived of everything from the neck up. There doesn’t seem to be any clear sign of what decapitated the man and even more bizarre, his head is nowhere to be found! That’s one for the books by itself, but the second dead body Shepherd and Powell are called in to investigate manages to top that: a skinned corpse found in a hotel room. And the grisly strangeness of the crime doesn’t end there. When Shepherd consults an expert at the Museum of Natural History that our victim was in town to visit, he learns that the second crime is reminiscent of the manner in which the ancient Aztecs would offer up a human sacrifice by flaying them alive. The kicker? The one being sacrificed in this ritual has to offer themselves up willingly! Well, unfortunately for Shepherd and Powell, this is simply the start of it, because faster than you can say Johnny Gossamer (go watch Shane Black’s KISS, KISS, BANG, BANG if you don’t get that reference), it turns out the two cases are connected and what connects them just happens to be this big flying something that’s snatching up and devouring any New Yorker it can get its claws on.

This is where Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty) enters the picture. Who is Jimmy Quinn, you may ask? A “nobody” if we’re being honest. One gets the feeling calling Jimmy a two-bit crook would be a bit generous. To his credit, though, he wants to go straight and has dreams of a career as a jazz musician, working at the same bar as his girlfriend, Joan. (Candy Clark) -- Just like to add, that this was a touch added to the script after Cohen discovered that Moriarty was himself an aspiring piano player. The song he plays for the audition is one that the actor wrote. -- Well, the audition doesn’t go to well, leaving Jimmy with only one option to procure any money; going in with a gang of mob goons on a diamond store heist. Jimmy is the squeamish type and argues that he doesn’t like guns or taking part in the actual robbery itself and will serve only as the wheelman. Unfortunately for Jimmy, his argument isn’t nearly as convincing as the one Ryan Gosling would give a couple decades and change later so he ends up right smack dab in the middle of the robbery when it goes south, holding the case full of diamonds. He doesn’t hold onto it for long, mind you, losing it after getting clipped by a cab while fleeing the scene and I’m willing to bet that the mobsters aren’t going to be too happy about that, if they believe his story at all. When his lawyer up closes up shop following Jimmy’s panicked plea for help, needless to say, Jimmy is in deep shit.

One thing does go Jimmy’s way, though he doesn’t quite realize it yet. His lawyer’s offices happen to be in the Chrysler Building, you see, and Jimmy’s attempt to get into it gets him chased by security. It’s there in the maintenance area at the very, very top of the skyscraper, hiding from a guard, where Jimmy stumbles across the nest of whatever it is that’s been attacking people. The creature isn’t home when Jimmy finds it but a giant egg it laid is and the corpses of several people it’s been snacking on. That’s enough, though, to tell Jimmy that he’s better off any where but here and he amscrays. That nest comes in handy for Jimmy, however, when the mafia goons come calling at his girlfriend’s apartment later on. When they finally corner Jimmy, he gets the idea to lure them to the nest so that whatever has made itself at home can take care of his personal problem for him and that’s just what happens. It is also isn’t too long before Jimmy makes the connection between the attacks and the nest he discovered and he realizes that he’s in possession of information that the authorities would really like to get their hands on. From there all three separate plotlines join up, as Shepherd discovers that not only are the attacks being carried out by some sort of prehistoric monster, not only is there are an Aztec death cult running loose in New York that reveres this beastie as the god Quetzalcoatl – though you’d think they of all people would know that ole Quetzie was one of the Aztec gods who wasn’t big on human sacrifice – but he if wants to stop this insanity, he’s going to have to wrangle with a low life who’s willing to hold the city hostage if it means he’s can weasel some serious money and an official pardon out of it.

I know everyone says “they don’t make ‘em like this any more” about any old movie but seriously, they really don’t make ‘em like this any more. As I said earlier, even when released, (Guh, over thirty years ago!) Q was a bit of a throwback to an earlier era of monster movie making. The early eighties were the hey day of the slasher film and if monsters rampaged through anything back then, it was usually through spaceships or sewers, something of considerably smaller scale than the Big Apple, so a movie which featured a claymation beastie snatching sunbathers off of New York roofs was going to stick out somewhat. Then there’s New York itself. Like many of Cohen’s movies, such as the aforementioned GOD TOLD ME TO and the MANIAC COP trilogy he wrote and produced, Q is a snapshot of a city that doesn’t exist any more, the New York of the seventies and eighties; grimy, crowded, and covered in graffiti but feeling alive in a way that few places do. This is one of those movies where the city itself is as much a character as anyone in it. Part of the reason for this is that Cohen shot a lot of the film documentary style right there in the streets and alleyways of the city, often improvising scenes on the day and grabbing who or whatever was nearby that he could get some use out of. Those baskets hanging off the side of the Chrysler Building that the police use to shoot at Q during the film’s climax? They were already there, being used by electricians to install lights. Most of the “police” you see in that scene were the steeplejacks that were working up there when Cohen showed up. It’s movie-making without a net and unfortunately, I doubt you could get away with shooting a film this way in the New York of today. A production of a scale this small certainly wouldn’t be able to use the Chrysler building as its major set piece and that would be a shame. I mean, where else in New York would a giant bird-god want to make itself home at?

A fairly ridiculous premise, low budget and short shooting schedule, with a lot of scenes made up as they went along, starring actors that didn’t even know the sort of movie they were in until they showed up on set and were handed the script. – David Carradine was an army buddy of Cohen’s who agreed to do Q as a favor – and a special effects team that had to integrate their stop motion monster into footage that wasn’t shot to accommodate that. All in all, it sounds like a recipe for utter schlock and to be honest, Q, THE WINGED SERPENT is schlock but its schlock of a very entertaining and smartly written sort. Oh sure, it has some plot absurdities to it. Nobody thinks to call the military in, somehow our monster can snatch people up and there be no witnesses, and it’s never explained how Q can reproduce without a mate. (Though Tim has interesting take on that.) But it gets things right where it counts. Cohen knows how to make even minor characters feel distinctive, giving them their own little stories -- like a construction worker whose lunch keeps getting stolen -- so that they feel like actual people with lives instead of just cannon fodder there to get gobbled up by an airplane sized death-turkey. The movie also contains a number of witty little touches: whether it’s the monster coming to rest on a pyramid like building in its death throes or that whole requirement of the sacrifice having to be a willing one saving Jimmy’s bacon when the cult leader comes after him. There’s humor here and a lot of its pretty funny, occasionally dark (like some suggesting that the monster’s here because New York’s “known for its good eating”) but thankfully no matter how goofy it gets, with kite jump scares and scenes of a cop undercover as a mime, Cohen never plays things less than one-hundred percent straight. He knows not to talk down to his audience but invite them along.

It helps a lot that Cohen has the cast that he has to work with, and the stand out performance among all of them is unquestionably Michael Moriarty as Jimmy Quinn. Moriarty was an actor who had a few film credits under his belt, including co-starring in BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY with Robert DeNiro, but mostly thrived on television and stage, winning several Tony and Emmy Awards. (He would be one of the main cast in the early seasons of a little show called LAW & ORDER, too.) He was a largely improvisational actor, and since Cohen was a largely improvisational director, it’s no surprise that two enjoyed working together immensely. According to the commentary track, Cohen would come up with and shout lines for Moriarty to say while they were shooting scenes and Moriarty would slip them in without missing a beat. Q would be their first collaboration together and the two would work again on THE STUFF, IT’S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE, RETURN TO SALEM’S LOT and Cohen’s MASTERS OF HORROR episode “Pick Me Up.” There’s a rather infamous anecdote involving Rex Reed meeting Cohen after a screening and exclaiming “All that dreck…and right in the middle a great Method performance by Michael Moriarty!” Cohen responded with “That dreck was my idea.” It’s easy to see why Moriarty leaves such an impression though, with the way he manages to instill Jimmy Quinn with such nervous, fast talking, unable to sit still or slow down manic energy. (Anybody who’s been around drug addicts much will see a lot that’s familiar.) Let’s be honest here, Jimmy Quinn isn’t remotely what you’d call a decent person, especially once his negotiations with the city give him carte blanche to act like a real asshole, but dang if Moriarty doesn’t make him mesmerizing and even make you want to root for him a little. In a weird way, Jimmy Quinn is the heart of the movie and if you took out everything around him, leaving only his relationships with his girlfriend and Detective Shepherd, you’d still have a pretty good flick on your hands. I’m not exaggerating when I say the scene with him and Carradine in the coffee shop is the most entertaining “cop and crook have coffee” scene this side of HEAT. Quinn’s suggestion of how they should catch Q and Carradine’s disbelieving and sarcastic reaction to it crack me up every time. The rest of the cast acquits themselves well, though it is a shame that Richard Roundtree is given so little to do.

Fittingly, Q, THE WINGED SERPENT opened the same week and almost right up the block from where I, THE JURY finally opened and proceeded to outdo the much bigger budgeted movie in terms of both box office and critical reception. I’m not saying I believe in karma but if I did… And if you want my opinion, I feel pretty sorry for whatever dimension in the old multiverse where Cohen’s I, THE JURY went off without a hitch and were deprived of this little gem as a result.

Hey, speaking of how things could have been different, here’s a little bit of trivia that might blow your mind. When casting the film, Cohen had strongly considered two other people for the roles of Shepherd and Jimmy Quinn; one a struggling actor working as a bartender that had auditioned for I, THE JURY, the other a comedian who Cohen had caught at an improv-comedy show. However, Cohen was shot down because the distributors wanted actors that would be more recognizable, making it easier to sell the film to foreign markets. So, next time you settle down to watch Q, play a game of “what could have been” and try to image how this flick would have played starring Bruce Willis and Eddie Murphy!

This review is part of NATURE'S FURY, a blog-a-thon hosted by Cinematic Catharsis for the weekend of June 18th through the 20th and dedicated to those movies where Mother Nature really, really has it in for you. Click on the image below to see the what the other blogs taking part have to contribute...

The Death Wish Series (1974 -1994)



I’ve never read Brian Garfield’s novel DEATH WISH but everything I’ve heard about it makes it sound a world and a half away from the image of Charles Bronson stalking hellish urban landscapes. Published in 1972, “Death Wish” told the story of Paul Benjamin, a New York CPA, and his downward spiral following his wife’s murder and daughter’s brutalization during a home invasion. Inspiration for the novel came from incidents in Garfield’s own life, the theft of his wife’s purse and his car getting vandalized, leaving him so enraged he was ready to quote, “kill the son of bitch” should he ever get his hands on him, which left Garfield wondering what would happen to a person that fell into that way of thinking and couldn’t pull themselves out of it. Clocking in at a slim two hundred and nineteen pages, Paul doesn’t even get his hands on a firearm until the book is nearly three quarters over, with the bulk of its page count being devoted to detailing our protagonist’s unraveling mental state before he turns to violence as a way to retake the control he’s felt he’s lost. As Zack Handlen noted in own discussion of the book and original film on his much-missed site The Duck Speaks, the “death wish” of the title is Paul’s, his vigilante spree motivated as much by a desire to commit suicide by cop or crook than anything else, really.

With this in mind, I guess we can all understand why Garfield wasn’t too happy with the film series that sprung from his novel. Garfield had sold off the film rights to DEATH WISH with those of another of his books, RELENTLESS, to producers who eventually took the project to United Artists. Early drafts of the script were handled by Wendell Mayes, as Garfield had chosen the write the RELENTLESS adaptation himself. By all signs, Mayes work stuck relatively close to source material, and Sydney Lumet was slotted to direct the film with Jack Lemon and Henry Fonda in the lead roles of vigilante and pursuant cop respectively. However, a chance to direct a certain movie named SERPICO came up and Lumet jumped ship to that project instead. British director Michael Winner was chosen to step in for his experience in directing violent action films like THE MECHANIC and THE STONE KILLER, both of which starred Charles Bronson, who would be slotted into the role of Paul Benjamin, now re-christened Paul Kersey for the final film. The production would hit a few more speed bumps before it finally made its way to the screen though. Budgetary constraints would lead United Artists to drop the project and the original producers were forced to give up the film rights which would eventually find their way into the hands of infamous Italian film giant, Dino ‘When monkey die, everybody cry” DeLaurentis, who would take the project to Paramount Pictures. Paramount would eventually release the movie in 1974.

The Gate (1987)

Directed by: Tibor Takács
Screenplay by: Michael Nankin
Starring: Stephen Dorff, Christa Denton, Louis Tripp
Running Time: 85 minutes
Tagline: "...Pray It's Not To Late."

Kids are a lot tougher than most adults will give them credit for and stuff that parents are certain will scar ‘em for life may very well end up rolling off of them like water off a duck’s back. Personal example: when I was a wee little sprout, probably not too long after my family had purchased a VHS player, we ended up renting ALIEN to watch some weekend afternoon. Memory is a little fuzzy on whether or not somebody told me that the film would be too scary for me or I came to that conclusion myself but I had elected to sit out the movie and went to play in my room. However, curiosity would eventually get the better of me and so being a stealthy little ninja, I snuck out of my room and stood at the end of the hallway, peaking around the corner at the TV screen, my family unaware of my presence.

This, coincidently, happened to be right at the time in the film where that nasty little phallus monster announced itself by exploding out of John Hurt’s chest cavity. After taking a moment for the shocked crew of the Nostromo to take in what just happened, the wormy little critter let out a weird shriek and skittered across the dining hall table, scattering glasses and dishes as it exited stage left.

I laughed, which probably startled my parents and my sisters, and sat down to join them for the rest of the movie. No nightmares at all that night about H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph, though weirdly enough I do remember having bad dreams about another movie I watched right around the same time: THE LEGEND OF BILLIE JEAN. Go figure on that one.

What does this have to do with THE GATE? Well, for starters, I was struggling with the opening for this write up for a bit and even if it ultimately fit into things a bit clumsily at the very least it worked that little writer’s block loose for me. More importantly though, my reaction to ALIEN as a kid does make me wonder how I’d have taken to THE GATE if I had caught it back then, back before I had even heard of H.P. Lovecraft*, as opposed to how dumbfounded I was when I saw it a couple of years ago via Netflix. How, I asked myself, even in the days when movies that had monsters getting exploded in the microwaves and guys getting their hearts ripped out in cultic ceremonies could be marketed as tentpole family entertainment and even R-rated gorefests like ROBOCOP and PREDATOR had action figures kids could sit on their shelves next to Transformers and G.I. Joe, had the makers of this movie managed to get away with making what amounted to a kid oriented Cthulhu mythos tale?

OK, now that I think about it, maybe this isn’t too weird. It was the eighties, after all, a lucrative time to be an effects-driven horror movie. At the same time, Spielberg and Joe Dante had made a ridiculous amount of money with a movie about a swarm of tiny monsters laying waste to suburbia. It wouldn’t be too far of a reach to suggest that some producer looked at screenwriter Michael Nankin’s script about kids being menaced by vicious little creatures and saw a chance to get some of that sweet GREMLINS cash. Heck, this is probably the only time a movie like this could have gotten made at all.

We’re introduced to the first of our three main characters, Glen (Stephen Dorff, in his first role) as he awakens from a nightmare. In it, he was trapped in his tree house as a violent storm blows up and the tree is cut down by a sudden lightning strike. You can imagine Glenn’s surprise when he wakes up the next morning and discovers that there was a storm last night that did tear that tree down. As the crew Glen’s parents hired to clean up this mess chop up the tree to be hauled off, a strange stone gets dislodged from its roots, which Glen’s heavy metal fanatic friend Terry (Louis Tripp) identifies as a geode. With thoughts of all the money they could make by selling it on their minds, Glen and Terry grab a shovel and start digging to see what else they can unearth. Their attempts pay off, even if Glenn does end up gashing his hand on a splinter from the shovel handle, with discovery of another geode, this one roughly the size of a basketball. Weird thing about that hole, though, it seems to be considerably deeper than it at first appears to be and despite repeated attempts to do so, can’t seem to stay filled in.

Glen and Terry don’t have time to dwell on that or the rather unnatural number of moths that have been gathering around his house since Glen found the stone the day before. Mom and Dad are going on a trip for the weekend and for the first time, Glen and his older sister Alexandra (Christa Denton) will not be having a babysitter. A couple of things undercut Glen’s excitement at this prospect, though. He’s grounded, for one, punishment for the burn mark one of his toy rockets left on the roof of the house, and while he and “Al” were close once, she’s reached that age where things like high school and boys take precedent over whatever little brother had planned. Once mom and dad are out of the house, Al gives in to her friends’ insistence on having them over for a party. For Glen it looks like it’s a weekend of nothing but sitting in his room and hanging out with Terry.

Then strange stuff starts to happen. First, Glen and Terry crack open that large geode, from which strange glimmers of light spill forth, and the metal shavings in one of their magnetic drawing pads arrange themselves in the shape of words and arcane symbols. Never a good idea to read strange words that just appear out of nowhere aloud, especially if you’ve have just dripped into a little blood in a strange, creepy hole, but that’s exactly what Glen does. It’s then that everything really starts to come unhinged. Glen is nearly hurt when a party levitation trick ends up working too well and after both he and Terry suffer bizarre dreams during the night, Angus, the family dog is found dead. (Whether the dog died due to natural causes or was some killed by Terry while sleepwalking isn’t clear.)

Just what is going on here? As good an explanation as any comes from an unlikely source. I mentioned that Terry is a metal head, an image he seems to be using to cope with the recent death of his mother and already distant father becoming even moreso. Well, one of his most prized possessions is a gift from his father on return from a trip to Europe, the sole album put out by British band Sacrifyx, died in a plane crash after releasing the album. Terry believes that there might be some sort of connection between what’s going on with Glen’s house and the song’s subject matter, which speaks of prehistoric evil that was banished long ago but can re-enter our world through interdimensional gateways. It’s looking more and more like that hole in Glen’s backyard is one of those rifts and they’ve cracked it open only tiny sliver; who knows what kind of nastiness will come boiling out if it’s thrown open all the way. They need a way to shut it, and while i doubt their local library has copies of The Book of Eibon and The Necronomicon stashed in the back, Sacrifyx helpfully provides one via an incantation that will close the gate if recited aloud over it backmasked into one of their songs. Unfortunately, it seems that the incantation is rendered useless if a sacrifice is sent through the gate beforehand and what Glen and Terry don’t know is that Al passed the responsibility of burying Angus to one of her friends before they all went to the that afternoon. Antsy to head out with everyone, he concluded that that hole in the backyard is as good of a place to dispose of the dog as anywhere. Hey, nothing said it had to be a human sacrifice…

Getting back to what I discussed earlier, I can see myself having had a much more visceral reaction to THE GATE than I did ALIEN as a child. While yes, big scary thing hiding in the shadows is a fear for all ages, where ALIEN really got under your skin was by clawing at things that were much more adult oriented; twisted phallic and rape imagery, and more importantly, body horror that took every bloodcurdling nightmare a woman has had about pregnancy and inflicted them on a man. No wonder that ALIEN didn’t quite get it’s hooks into me until I caught it again on cable TV during high school and had the everlovin’ bejeezus scared out of me; at age six or seven, whenever I had seen it, such things would have flown right over my head. THE GATE, by comparison, is a film all about childhood fears and anxieties, whether real, such as Glen’s anger and frustration that the big sister he’s been so close to now no longer has time for him, or imagined, like the first monster attack coming from under Glen’s bed. Those would hit much closer to home to someone my age at that time. The fact that the film is told entirely from the children’s point-of-view and there’s no adult presence for most its running time emphasizes all this.

None of that would work as well as it does if Glen, Al, and Terry weren’t believable as actual children, of course, so kudos to THE GATE to pulling that off. Dorff, Denton, and Tripp successfully sell the characters they're playing and it's nice to see, in a day when horror movies were passing off people in their twenties and even thirties as teenagers (I swear I remember one of the "teenagers" in FRIDAY THE 13TH Part 3 having gray hairs), actors cast who are the appropriate age. Credit must also go to the ways in which Nankin and director Tibor Takacs manage to communicate a very complicated personal dynamic between and personalities of the three main characters while saying very little. Moments like Alexandra, dressed in kid's pajamas, giving herself a fairly self-conscious once over in a mirror, or how Terry, dressed in denim and his wall's covered with heavy metal posters, using his rainbow colored blanket like some sort of cloak while singing along with his music. 

Of course, this is a review round-table devoted to bizarre and surprisingly hardcore kids movies, (At least it was when we started, priorities seemed to have shifted.) and now that I've established what makes this a movie for children, allow me to now go into what makes it so unsual. The film has an appropriate title because, despite the suburban California setting and protagonist's age, it really does feel like an unofficial entry into one of Lucio Fulci's "Gates of Hell" movies. When THE GATE gets down to business it has no problem going for the same kind of surreal, doesn't-give-a-damn-if-it-makes-sense-or-not nightmare logic that marked that trilogy of films. You might even be reminded of THE BEYOND's cranky undead sorceror when the reality warping powers of this particular hellmouth makes Terry's ghost-story about a dead worker walled up in Glen's house come unpleasantly true. Jesus Christ, in fine Fulci fashion, THE GATE even contains multiple examples of horrific eye trauma! THE GATE ends up being such a perfect little primer for the kind of batshit insanity and repulsion that you can find in Italian horror films, I'm honestly amazed that nobody from Italian film industry was involved in making it!

I imagine a good bit of this is what's leftover from what writer Nankin originally intended the film to be. He had written the script at a low point in his career following the collapse of a film project and, drawing on what he called "the nastier impulses from childhood," had envisioned it as a hard-R horror film starring even younger protagonists. Obviously that wouldn't fly at all, so when the project was picked up it was refashioned into a more family-oriented PG-13 movie with some year's added to the protagonist's age. However, these changes I think may be a major cause for what ends up being one of THE GATE'S big missteps: the monsters themselves.

THE GATE, as a stated, is a horror film cut from the same cloth as H.P. Lovecraft, where mankind is constantly threatened from reality warping alien gods and their spawn. When it came to visualizing his creatures, though, Lovecraft had the benefit of being a prose writer, and so therefore he all needed to do is provide a few vague hints at whatever squidgy tentacled terror from beyond currently threatening his neurotic protagonists looked like with a few greater implications hanging on the fringes of the narratives and his audiences imagination could do the heavy lifting for him. Movies have had a much more difficult time selling whatever eldritch creatures they create as an apocalyptic terror. Just being able to see the thing undercuts some of that, after all. And the problem with THE GATE is that it never quite successfully sells its creatures as the world ending threat that it wants you to believe they are. These things seem to have a difficult time bringing down three kids no matter what form they take and the chief demon that appears in the final act, impressive looking as it is, doesn't seem to do that much. Which is disappointing because the techniques used to create these creatures are absolutely fantastic. The aforementioned boss demon is an amazingly well done piece of Harryhausen-esque stop motion animation and its imp-like minions are realized through a combination of men-in-suits and some of the most seamless forced perspective cinematography I've seen. It's no surprise that the film's FX supervisor would go on to work on Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS films.

THE GATE had a successful run at the box office but really took off once it hit home video and cable, which convinced the studio to green light at sequel, though behind-the-scenes troubles kept THE GATE II: TRESPASSERS from being released for nearly two years. The film is considerably different from the first and involved a teen aged Terry (Louis Tripp again) summoning up and binding one of the little imp creatures so that he can use its wish granting abilities to help his alcoholic dad. There's some interesting things going on in the sequel; Terry's increased interest in the occult is a logical enough step for the character, the finale features yet another impressive stop motion monster and the film takes some stabs at dealing with a home broken by the loss of a loved one in the same way the first dealt with childhood anxieties. However, it never quite comes together and later developments in the movie feel like the filmmaker's couldn't quite decide what they wanted the sequel to be about. There was talk of a remake not to long ago, directed by Bill S. Preston, Esq. himself, Alex Winter, that used Nankin's original screenplay and creature designs by ALIEN's H.R. Giger but nothing ever came of it and Giger's recent passing probably means nothing ever will. Oh well, what could have been.

This review is part of the "You Know, For The Kids" round table hosted by the Celluloid Zeroes blogging cabal, dedicated to both the weirdest movies aimed at kids and movies that serve as gateway drugs for future cinema junkies. If you're itching for more, click on the links: THE MAGIC SERPENT at Micro-Brew Reviews, THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T over at Web Of The Big Damn Spider, TIME BANDITS at Checkpoint Telstar, GAMERA Vs. VIRAS at The Terrible Claw Reviews, and SPIDER-MAN at Seeker of Schlock. 

A Little Something Extra:

Obviously, I couldn't write up a review about a movie where heavy metal music plays such a big role with out throwing in something at the end? So here's arguable one of the most metal tunes of all time: "Number of the Beast" by Iron Maiden.