Someone’s Watching Me! (1978)

Following what appears to have been a very bad break-up, live TV director Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) moves from New York to LA, even before she has found a new job. She is clearly going to land on her feet, though, her obvious competence winning her a new position very quickly. Emotionally, her weird sense of humour and her tendency to speak to herself a lot seem to ground her considerably.

All could be well, if not for an ever increasing campaign of phone terror by someone who must actually have some sort of inside knowledge of her life. He’s also sending her objects – among them a telescope – supposedly as parts of some kind of contest to win a European vacation. The audience learns much sooner than Leigh that her caller is a pretty creative stalker who even bugs her living room, and manipulates the electronics in her apartment. The man may also very well be responsible for the death of other women, so our increasingly frightened and angry heroine is in actual physical danger apart from the damage caused by the emotional abuse. As always (at least in the movies), the police is of little help, but Leigh’s new boyfriend, the philosopher(!) Paul (David Birney) is of use, as is Leigh’s assistant Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau).

John Carpenter directed and wrote this NBC TV movie the same year as Halloween – and before that TV Elvis thing – and at times, one can indeed notice that, even though DP Robert Hauser is no Dean Cundey. But then, who is? There are quite a few shots that are set up in a manner very typical for Carpenter at this stage in his career, making some relatively standard suspense scenes rather more interesting than you’d expect without going overboard or blowing the technical possibilities of a TV production.

Apart from early Carpenter, the director predominantly does Hitchcock here. Some scenes, particularly the late business with Leigh breaking into the stalker’s apartment while being watched by Sophie through the telescope, are direct variations on scenes from Hitchcock, and there are so many nods in that direction here, poor Howard Hawks was probably getting jealous. It’s good, tense, suspenseful Hitchcock worship, so there’s no reason to complain.

Of course, no Hitchcock movie would have a heroine like Leigh, who is highly competent in her job without being snarled at by the film for it, a bit weird in a manner the film is clearly enamoured by, and tough even when she has reached her breaking point. So, while Paul is allowed to be somewhat helpful, it’s Leigh’s business to dispatch of the stalker/killer in the end, fighting her own fight because the men around her are pretty much useless in it.

The film consistently puts the stalker into the context of rather a lot of shitty men around our heroine, Leigh having to cope with a horn dog colleague who doesn’t understand the word no, and clearly having experienced enough crap of that kind in her life, she deals with these things with an exasperated toughness, pretending she’s not as angry about sexism as she has every right to be, but still shutting it down whenever she encounters it. Hutton does very well with the role (one can’t help but imagine her having some experience with quite a few of Leigh’s troubles herself), making our heroine very likeable and relatable even for guys like me who don’t have to run this particular kind of gauntlet. Carpenter’s script does a lot of little things in the background to build up a contrast between the way some men – worst among them obviously the stalker and killer – treat her, and the way Leigh actually is, not just showing her competence at her job, but also – without comment – showing her doing all kinds of manual things, working electronical equipment, putting together the telescope, and so on.

Today, some people would probably call Carpenter an “angry feminist”, when what he is actually doing is providing Someone’s Watching Me! with a verisimilitude that grounds the thriller business in lived experience, which makes the audience care more for our heroine and helps make an actual thematic argument to boot. Not bad for a little TV movie.

Past Misdeeds: Bram Stoker’s Burial of the Rats (1995)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The 19th Century. Young Bram Stoker (Kevin Alber – the less said about his performance the better) is travelling through France with his father (Eduard Plaxin), who isn’t too fond of his son’s plans of becoming a writer. We’re horrified to imagine what the old man would say if he knew Bram’ll actually make things worse and go to the theatre, possibly living a rather bohemian life (for his time and place). Things take a turn for the more exciting when their coach is attacked by three hooded figures. When Bram shoots one of his attackers, the remaining two pack him into a handy sack and take him to their headquarters.

There, it turns out our hero hasn’t been abducted by random robbers but by an all-female krypto-feminist thong wearing cult of women of varying craziness whose major goal in (cult) life is to make men pay for all the evils they committed. And then some. They are led by The Queen (an excellently scenery chewing Adrienne Barbeau), pipe player and commander of an absurdly tiny little horde of flesh-eating rats.

Things would look rather dire for Bram, if not for the fact that one of the Queen’s favourites, Madeleine (Maria Ford, to nobody’s surprise quite underdressed and as always at least passable as an actress), falls in love at first sight with him once his head loses the sack. Our hero’s situation further improves when a plan of Madeleine’s former girlfriend Hope (Olga Kabo, also doing a good bit of scenery chewing) to kill him during the raid on a monastery not just fails, but also quite accidentally finds the Queen learning of and appreciating his literary talents in the aftermath. Why, to have one’s own cult chronicler…

So all would be set for a very special kind of happy end, if not for the evil plans of Hope and the just as evil ways of the French police.

Roger Corman never was one to miss an opportunity for weird international cooperations, particularly when they could bring him more bang for his buck, so it’s not a complete surprise we find him here indulging in one of a handful of co-productions with Russia’s ailing Mosfilm. The project certainly was not a prestigious business for the Russian side, but for Corman - and Burial of the Rats – the Russian involvement brought quite a bit of production value with it. This includes an excellent and often very inappropriate – it’s sounding like it was made for some romantic high budget epic – music score by Tarkovsky regular Eduard Artemev as well as some real talent behind the camera, and much prettier locations than Corman usually could get his hands on at this point in his career.

Of course, Corman being Corman, he used the opportunity offered to have director Dan Golden create this sleazy weird-ass adventure movie with a bit of gothic horror, a smidgen of gore and some comparatively subtle moments of “so that’s how Stoker got his ideas!”. The last, we can probably ascribe to co-writer Somtow Sucharitkul (who had a bit more success as a horror writer than he did as a script writer, even though I’m not a fan). There’s more gratuitous nudity than you can shake a stick at (sorry, Siegmund) - some of it provided via the sort of naked jazz dance all strange female cults love so well be they satanist, feminist, or yuggothian –, moments of puzzling weirdness, and many a scene that I would be tempted to call “swashbuckling” if anyone involved in the film had only known how to actually do swashbuckling action scenes well. On the other hand, there’s a scene where a monk’s nether parts are eaten by rats, so there’s that.

This still being a Corman production before he completely jumped the shark(topus), the Burial of the Rats is silly, awkward, of dubious morals but also still trying to be an actual movie despite all the feminists with swords and thongs, so plot and characterization make a degree of sense – at least in a world where this whole rat women business is appropriate – and the film’s not as anti-feminist as most films of its type would be, though all the gratuitous nudity will still keep most fans of identity politics away.

Why, sleeping with Bram doesn’t seem to impede Madeleine’s ability to think or fence (much), and while every female character here dies the same lame death, and their revolution will not be televised (spoilers, I guess), the film does have way too much fun with showing nearly naked women kill deeply unpleasant men I’d think it pretty impossible to ever imagine it tries to convince you women fighting back is a bad thing, particularly not when these women are fighting authority figures as deeply unsympathetic as those shown here. Because seriously, what film would be sympathetic to rapist monks and purveyors of child prostitution? At worst, and I know some Internet feminists of a very specific type might be annoyed by this sort of thing, the film argues that acting against men as if they were a faceless mass not worthy of individual consideration isn’t any better than men oppressing women in various ways.


Of course, as luck will have it, this is also the ideal position from which to make an exploitation movie about thong-clad 19th century rat women fighting oppression. Go figure. And as luck will also have it, that’s a very enjoyable thing to watch.

In short: Big Legend (2018)

Former soldier and action hero name owner Tyler Laird (Kevin Makely) has the brilliant idea to propose to his long-suffering girlfriend Natalie (Summer Spiro) in a patch of the deep dark woods that’s completely off the grid. As it usually goes with such deep dark woods far from civilization in horror films, the place is home to a large shaggy hominid. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone but the characters in the film that the thing drags Natalie off, leaving Tyler to have a bit of a nervous breakdown.

A year later, Tyler is released from the mental institution he was apparently put in because he didn’t believe Natalie – whose corpse was never found – died in a bear attack. After a pep talk from his mum (Adrienne Barbeau), Tyler goes off to the woods again, trying to find out what really happened to Natalie.

Just because the SyFy Channel doesn’t pay for non-ironic monster movies anymore doesn’t mean people are going to stop making them. Case in point is Jason Lee’s Big Legend, a film that keeps perfectly in the spirit of SyFy by lacking any kind of originality, yet eventually shows enough of the right spirit to charm me at least a little.

The first half of the film is pretty rough, the plot taking its dear time to get to the fun stuff while not showing much aptitude for the serious parts of its plot on the way. I had a feeling of the film dragging its feet to get the Barbeau and Amanda Wyss cameos in instead of cutting from its hero’s trauma in the woods right to his return. Makely is neither terribly convincing as a man deeply in love nor as one traumatized by a horrible experience, but once the survivalist action starts, he turns into a fun presence, which is all I ask from the lead in this sort of thing.

Lee certainly makes good use of the patch of woods this was shot in, making our protagonist’s – and his sidekick’s played by Todd A. Robinson – isolation believable enough. The film is also rather convincing at presenting the survivalist aspects of the tale without feeling the need to detail every attempt at finding food, getting the feel of these sequences right instead of losing itself in details. Its treatment of its monster is fine too, showing just enough of the creature and what it gets up to, and certainly turning it into a very convincing threat to Tyler; their final fight – while limited in its dimension - certainly feels like a proper climax.


Being the kind of viewer that I am, perhaps a wee bit tired of sudden useless plot twists, I still found myself pleasantly surprised by the film’s very sudden decision to end on the set up for another movie (with more than a minute of Lance Henriksen, one hopes), doing the Marvel thing B-movie style.

Accidental TV Movie Week: Bridge Across Time (1985)

aka Terror at London Bridge

Accidental TV Movie Week is what happens when I read the excellent “Are You in the House Alone?” edited by blogger and podcaster Amanda Reyes and spend a week only watching the sort of US TV movie treated in the book. Don’t be afraid.

In the 60s, good old London Bridge was dismantled and parts of it shipped off to Arizona to become part of a partial reconstruction of the bridge using the original masonry crossing Lake Havasu. That’s the actual version of events; for the film at hand, the bridge was re-erected in Arizona stone for stone. Well, all but one stone that dropped into the Thames together with Jack the Ripper during a police chase, that is. Now, in 1985, this final stone has been found in London and is added to the Arizona version of the bridge with great fanfare. Alas, a female tourist bleeding on the stone revives old Jack who gets back to his old ways - except he’s not murdering prostitutes anymore but whatever woman he can find, has gone off the mutilation trip, even hides one of his victims, and well, honestly, doesn’t act like Jack the Ripper at all.

Anyway, the only criminological genius available in Lake Havasu’s Podunk tourist hellhole to solve the case is fresh Chicago import Don Gregory (David Hasselhoff). Don has the trauma obligatory to all cops after 1982 in his past, which in this case mean he shot a black kid he thought was holding a gun but who of course didn’t. For some reason (this is sarcasm, dear reader) Don didn’t land in prison but got a one month suspension for it. However, our protagonist turned out to actually have one of those conscience thingies police unions advise against, so he can’t cope with having to deal with guns anymore and left Chicago for supposedly more peaceful shores. Solving the pretty insane case and his trauma will of course not be Don’s only problem: the town fathers have a bad case of the Mayor of Amity, his boss (Clu Gulager) doesn’t like him (I can only assume he’s jealous of the Hoff Hair), and his new love interest (Stepfanie Kramer) is clearly only in the movie to be threatened by Jack in the end.

Given that this was written by well regarded horror writer William F. Nolan, it is a bit of a surprise that the weakest part Terror at London Bridge is indeed its writing. The script starts with a goofy idea, adds a barrel of clichés that were as ancient in 1985 as they are today, and can’t even get up to make its dialogue terribly amusing. The plot also suffers from having its protagonist stumbling around trying to find out things the audience knows from the beginning, resulting in quite a few moments where I mostly felt impatient for the Hoff to finally catch up. It’s not that this sort of structure cannot work, but it actually needs some element to keep an audience’s interest in the plot up, and there’s little of that to be found here.

That the film is still generally more entertaining than not is mostly thanks to its director E.W. Swackhammer. While Swackhammer may “only” have been a competent craftsman who shot whatever TV piece came his way, he’s an experienced hand at making decent entertainment out of the best parts of dubious material, so the handful of suspense scenes the script gives him are much more effective, at times even atmospheric, than they are goofy, and the obvious red herring character may be obvious, but is also presented as the sort of fun crazy person we all like to enliven movies of dubious intelligence.

Speaking of crazy, Hasselhoff does a pretty decent job throughout, clearly committing fully to the clichéd background of his character and laying his various emotional outbursts on so thick they are at least entertaining to watch throughout, be it when he makes the bug eyes of growing obsession, the bug eyes of Big Drama, or the bug eyes of love. His love interest as played by Kramer is alas pretty much a non-entity here (also thanks again to the script), while the more experienced actors – there are also Adrienne Barbeau as Kramer’s librarian-friend, and Lane Smith as the Mayor of Amity – do what they can to give their underwritten parts some punch.


And honestly, how couldn’t I be at least a little entertained by a film about the Knight Rider himself fighting Jack the Ripper in Arizona?

In short: Open House (1987)

Oh noes! Some crazy killer is slashing his way through the – preferably female – realtors of Los Angeles. But don’t worry, realtors of the world, the worst cop in town (Robert Miano), whose attitude is much further evolved than his competence, is on the case, doing diddly-squat but complain.

Things kinda-sorta start moving when radio psychologist David Kelley (Joseph Bottoms) gets involved in the investigation because one of his regular callers just might be the killer. Plus, Kelley’s girlfriend Lisa (Adrienne Barbeau) is a realtor, and whatever plot there is will get moving some time soon, right?

If you know Open House’s director Jag Mundhra at all, you probably know him as a purveyor of mildly up-market softcore smut (though he has some films in his filmography that aren’t), and even if I hadn’t known that before, watching this awkward attempt at mixing slasher and thriller tropes to mind-numbing effect would have suggested it. For this is very much a particularly lame softcore movie where many a scene is comparable to the pre-sex scenes of lame softcore with somewhat attractive, deeply untalented actors working their way up to a sex scene that then doesn’t arrive but is replaced by a bit of the old slasher violence. It kinda makes one miss breasts, particularly since the slashing and the stalking might be somewhat mean-spirited but are most definitely pretty damn boring. Turns out you need somewhat different talents for filming sex than for staging a thriller. My working theory is that Mundhra was initially planning to make a sex romp about realtors but had to change tacks half way through the production and just shoved half of a slasher script he found in a trashcan in.

Being a series of generally terrible scenes that end with the wrong kind of pay-off isn’t quite enough for Open House’s particular brand of dullness though. So, Mundhra fills the spaces between the sexless sex scenes with random scenes of Shapiro metaphorically scratching his ass (scenes of cops doing nothing while the audience has to watch being a special favourite of shitty horror films, as we all well know), various business about the Bottoms/Barbeau romance that is neither of import nor interesting to watch, a dire red herring plotline about Lisa’s evil low class (because of course this thing also has a nice line in being classist) competitor, and a lot of the usual stuff films include to avoid getting to their plot when they don’t have enough of it to fill a ninety minute slot. Some of this stuff may or may not be meant to be comical, but given the quality of the writing and the hackjob of the direction (what’s a transition?), it’s rather difficult to tell these things apart in this particular case.

It’s just as riveting as it sounds – not at all. While he’s at it, Mundhra also manages to get bad performances out of perfectly decent thespians like Barbeau and Bottoms, leaving this writer feeling rather shell-shocked by a film that combines all the issues of bad softcore and bad horror films without including any of their upsides; it’s not even bad in a way I could find myself amused by.

On ExB: Bram Stoker’s Burial of the Rats (1995)

My final column of the year over at the delightful Exploder Button concerns this little Roger Corman/Mosfilm production about Bram Stoker’s adventures with a cult of sorta feminist, thong and bikini (etc) clad rat women. It’s probably obvious why you might want to click on through.

It’s also my last utterance on here for the rest of this year. So, whatever holidays you may or may not celebrate, I’ll see you on the other side.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,russian movies,reviews,gothic,adventure,dan golden,adrienne barbeau,maria ford,kevin alber

In short: Unholy (2007)

Hope (Siri Baruc), a seemingly happy young woman, commits suicide on her birthday right in front of her mother Martha (Adrienne Barbeau!).

Martha can neither accept nor understand her daughter's death. With the help of her son (Nicholas Brendon!, also involved as a producer) she begins to ask seek answers to her many questions. It doesn't need much probing until they find themselves stepping into tinfoil hat world, where a dead Nazi occult scientist working secretly for the US government (or is he?) tries to find the (and I quote the film) "Unholy Trinity" of time travel, invisibility and mind control, using people like her daughter for his experiments.

But now that she knows too much, whom can Martha trust anymore? Her neighbor? Her son? Herself?

 

Many people seem to have their problems with this film, some of them related to not understanding the plot, to which I can only say that this is not a problem caused by the film, but rather by the lack of certain qualities in the viewer. Others seem to think the movie's not all that believable.

I can relate to the latter problem, though I have found the method of dragging my unbelief out of bed, shooting it and then burying it in the cellar of my brain to work quite wonderfully against it.

After doing that, one suddenly finds a fine little low budget film with ambitions, clever ideas and an entertaining amount of weirdness.

The acting is especially interesting (and for once in a film like this quite good): while Barbeau and Brendon are playing their roles in a straight realist mode, the rest of the actors practices conscious overacting which amplifies the weirdness factor beautifully.

Once you ignore the plausibility question, the film's plot leads to a neat and consequent conclusion. All questions are answered, everything makes sense inside the rules the film has established - what more can you ask for?

Recommended to everyone who is not afraid to suspend poor old battered disbelief for some time and/or who likes conspiracy theories for their sheer madness rather than their supposed truth.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,sf,adrienne barbeau,nicholas brendon,in short

Re-watching Escape From New York

John Carpenter's Escape From New York (1981) has been one of my favorite movies seen I first saw it on German cable TV about twenty years ago.

There wouldn't be much sense in reviewing it - me using six hundred words to squee "I love it, I love it" looks like a waste of perfectly good blog space to me.

So I'm just going to list some of the details that made me especially happy this time:

• Parts of the music sound like further reduced E.S.G.!
• The relative disinterest the film takes in Snake's little gladiatorial match, which fits its anti-hero's poise perfectly. (And is exactly the thing some of Carpenter's later macho-fests like Vampires are missing)!
• The pure joy of having just about every single role cast with a b-movie hero(ine)!
• An ending that still says "Fuck you!" as beautifully as a perfect punk single!

Darling of the Day: "Snake Plissken!? I heard you were dead!"

Technorati-Tags: american movies,gushing,thoughts,action,post-apocalypse,kurt russell,lee van cleef,donald pleasance,adrienne barbeau,ernest borgnine,harry dean stanton,isaac hayes,tom atkins,john carpenter