Deliver Us from Evil (1973)

A group of men – certainly acquainted for quite some time, though nobody watching their interactions would call them “friends” exactly unless that watcher is very cynical indeed – are on a hiking and camping trip through rather spectacular mountainous terrain. There’s experienced professional guide Dixie (Jim Davis), a guy who really takes his nickname of “Cowboy” rather too seriously (George Kennedy) with his bullshit macho behaviour and the gun worn outside his pants for all the honest world to feel, Arnold Fleming (Charles Aidman) and his son Nick (Jan-Michael Vincent), the latter under a pall of the divorce blues, Al Zabrocki (Jack Weston) who is not built for this sort of thing, and accountant Steven Dennis (Bradford Dillman). No idea why these guys are spending so much time together, it’s not that they seem to like one another much, nor do they know a lot about each other’s lives.

Be that as it may, when they hear on the radio that a guy we’re not going to call D.B. Cooper/Loki has parachuted earthwards with his ill-gotten skyjacking money, and then witness someone indeed dropping down via parachute, they decide to go on the hunt for him. Cowboy takes that rather seriously indeed, shooting the unarmed man in the back while he’s trying to escape, killing him. Most of the group seem rather more interested in the guy’s monetary plunder than the fine points of murder and self defence, and decide to grab the money and carry it to civilisation. Or they could just keep it? Well, Dixie as well as the audience, know quite well where this is going to go.

This ABC Movie of the Week directed by Boris Sagal looks rather on the costlier side of 70s TV movies. Shot on location in Oregon, the wilderness survival parts of the narrative look really rather impressive, as if at least the people behind the camera were relishing the opportunity to shoot some visual treats for once. In front of the camera, you can find some rather authentically exhausted looking men (no women in this movie at all), the mostly middle-aged plus cast clearly going through a pretty exhausting time.

That’s rather useful for the performances, adding some authenticity to solid 70s TV style performances by most and softening the problems of a script that does tend to the verbally didactic when it comes to the lure of money, even though even an early 70s TV audience would not have been surprised by the whole greed and barbarity angle and certainly needn’t be told quite this bluntly. There are, however, also quiet character moments which also help make up for the too loud moments and provide the actors with some room to do their thing more subtly.

The survival adventure moments don’t just look impressive for a TV movie (or really any low budget film) but are also staged with quite a bit of flair, adding a quality of actual physical danger that makes the very quick mental breakdown of the characters more plausible, and really turns Deliver Us from Evil into a film well worth watching, even if it feels the need to hit you over the head with its message.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

Somewhere in the US Midwest. A cucumber-cool criminal we’ll call Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood), a nom de plume bestowed on him by the newspapers in lieu of his actual name, has to leave his hideout position as a preacher rather hastily when two former associates (Geoffrey Lewis and George Kennedy) find him and try to murder him. We will later learn it is all on account of a misunderstanding, as well as the George Kennedy character being one of those “shoot first, ask questions never” guys, but right now, Thunderbolt is lucky to stumble into the arms, well, freshly stolen car of a young gentleman who goes by the name of Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges).

Lightfoot, apart from being a bit of a smartass, is also perfectly willing to help a guy out, so he and Thunderbolt go on a bit of a road trip together. Their of course ensuing misadventures lead to a friendship between the two despite their differences in age – Thunderbolt’s a Korea vet, Lightfoot most certainly not – and temperament. Eventually, Thunderbolt manages to convince his – by now their – pursuers that there’s really no reason to murder one another, and everybody teams up to rob the same bank whose first robbery got Thunderbolt his name.

Apart from Quentin Tarantino, I can hardly imagine many directors living today trying to make something comparable to this comedic road movie/serious bank heist film by Michael Cimino. Current scriptwriting dogma (which is, as dogmas tend to be, wrong) would never accept a film giving itself so much time and its characters so much room to breathe before an actual plot sets in, for one, and where’s the hero’s journey in here!?

Of course, the film’s relaxed pacing, its loose yet thematically coherent structure and Cimino’s willingness to let the audience learn what his characters are about by simply letting us watch them in various interactions with one another and the slightly eccentric or crazy characters peopling this America are not exactly en vogue today either. Instead of that one inciting incident that explains everything about a character, this is a film about guys – alas in classic New Hollywood style there’s little room for female characters here – whose characters and personality have accrued over time in a way that makes flashbacks superfluous. You simply wouldn’t get at the cores of these people that way.

Which can also be a bit frustrating to a viewer in the 2020s, of course, when we get no actual background about Lightfoot at all, simply because he’s a bit of an innocent who hasn’t accrued all the damage and lifetime of the other men, and we are watching him in the process of doing so.

Cimino’s great at this phase of the film, too, providing ample space for Eastwood and Bridges to do their things, yet also filling the space around them with things and people of interest, as well as many beautiful location shots (cinematography is by Frank Stanley) for everyone to be dwarfed by. People being dwarfed by landscape seems to be rather important for the film’s, perhaps Cimino’s, worldview also, fitting a sensibility that’s not quite nihilist yet certainly contains the sort of absurdist view of peoples’ place in the world it very well might end up there later (spoiler alert: it does), even though right now, it treats its own view of the world still as a bit of a joke. Particularly the ending, when a very good turn of fate comes with a very unfair price, points rather obviously in that direction.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot isn’t exclusively a loose road movie, though, and once the bank heist plot starts in earnest, it and its director show they can do tight as well as loose, presenting a grubby, often funny but also focussed and actually exciting heist that packs everything what I want from a good heist movie into about half of its running time, until things become very 70s indeed.


All of this combines into a film that stands in many ways in marked contrast to the structure and rules obsessed style of filmmaking en vogue today (which also produces many a great movie, don’t get me wrong), suggesting exactly the kind of maverick outlaw spirit New Hollywood mythology so loves to praise this era of filmmaking for, through a willingness to simply let its hair down.

Just Before Dawn (1981)

A quintet of friends (including characters played by Gregg Henry, Barbara Benson and Jamie Rose) go on a merry camping trip to a heavily wooded mountain for camping and a bit of climbing. As always (or we’d have a particularly boring film to get through), things don’t go well right from the start. First, the local forest ranger Roy McLean (George Kennedy) attempts to warn our protagonists off completely and annoys them – city folk that they are - so much they lie to him about the location they are going to camp out at, a decision that’ll certainly not bite them in the ass, no sir. Then, on their way up the mountain, they encounter an older guy who is clearly in shock.

The audience knows the man’s nephew has been murdered by a large man with a peculiarly creepy giggle, but when our protagonists hear him talking about his cousin having been murdered by a demon, they decide to leave a man who is clearly in distress, with a visible head wound, out on a mountain road to fend for himself because taking him back down the mountain to the ranger would inconvenience them.

Consequently, when said large giggler starts stalking our protagonists’ campsite and killing them off, one can’t help but think they rather get what they had coming.

Backwoods slasher Just Before Dawn is probably the highpoint of director Jeff Lieberman’s small but interesting filmography. It is pretty much the perfect backwoods slasher, full of scenes that sell the area the plot takes place in as an actual wilderness, and once it has gotten going also going from one highly effective suspense scene to the next. Even the film’s sillier moments work surprisingly well, for Lieberman stages them in the most serious manner. These scenes in particular also manage to be creepy in a way only things which are in tune with very basic human fears can be: what if that blurry shadow you see coming isn’t your friend? What if the hand grabbing you from under water doesn’t belong to whom you think it belongs to? The way the film plays these scenes, there’s surprisingly little silly about them.

Additionally Just Before Dawn is making clever little changes to the – by 1981 already codified – rules of slasher and backwoods horror. Character types, for example, are generally in keeping with the tradition but Lieberman is adding something to everyone that goes against the usual grain, leaving us with a cast of victims we don’t necessarily want to see die, even though the whole business with the poor old guy doesn’t exactly make them more likeable. And when it comes to the rules of backwoods horror and its ideas about survival instincts and what they do to people, I have never seen them turned into action quite the way Just Before Dawn’s astonishing final scene does (after the film has already vigorously defecated on the concept of machismo a bit earlier), and I have certainly never seen a killer dispatched by the final girl in any to comparable way to what happens here

Add to all this George Kennedy grumbling through the scenery from time to time – when he isn’t talking to his plants – some of the worst backwoods people dialogue I’ve heard in my life, and you have yourself the sort of film whose weaknesses are just as winning as its copious strengths.

Nightmare at Noon (1988)

aka Death Street USA

The picturesque US small town of Canyonland (not to be confused with population centres like Deserttown or Dustcounty) has a bit of a problem: an evil foreign – this being the jingoistic 80s, after all and the CIA as the film informs us preferring Central America for mad science experiments – scientist the ending titles only call The Albino (Brion James, making up for the complete lack of dialogue of the bad guys by mugging as heavily as he can, which is pretty darn heavy) has poisoned the town’s water supply. For science, one supposes, though the film never makes us privy to why exactly any foreign power would want to make this sort of experiment on the home turf of an enemy country, nor what exactly it is supposed to achieve. Don’t they have rats in Not-The-Soviet-Union-stan?

Anyway, thanks to whatever it is dear Brion James has cooked up, some of the townspeople turn into raving, lunatic killers with increasingly green faces and green, acidic blood as well as mild super strength. The whole acid blood thing is in the film for no good reason, really, for it’s not as if this would be important to anything that’ll happen later. To be fair, what is happening is that the local sheriff (George Kennedy), a wandering would-be Dirty Harry named Reilly (Bo Hopkins), entertainment industry lawyer (boo-hiss) Ken Griffiths (Wings Hauser), and the Sheriff’s daughter and deputy Julia (Kimberly Ross) team up to shoot people and make stuff explode, so acid blood isn’t going to change anything.

If you’re into the more historical and sociological interpretation and critique of cinema, Nico Mastorakis’s film could be quite the mother load of deeply disturbing information about the US subconscious in the late 80s as seen by a Greek expat exploitation director. I’m not going to go into that here beyond mentioning that there’s a really Reagan/Bush (I and II)-America style disconnect between the acts seen as unethical when “the Enemy” is committing them and those seen as unethical when “our Boys” do that could make a boy despair of humanity.

Fortunately, Nightmare is just too dumb for me to go for a serious analysis of its political content, what with this being a film where the characters think it’s a good idea to let a doctor go into a cell with a not-restrained superhumanly strong crazy person on his own, cars basically already explode when you just look at them (unless the script demands otherwise, of course), and Wings Hauser has a law degree.

In other words, Mastorakis serves such a huge platter of bullet-riddled cheese I just can’t bring myself to go all clever on him. He’s just doing what everyone else is doing too, and there’s certainly no danger anything in the film is contaminated by thoughts or actual personal opinions and feelings. As an example of 80s low budget cheese, the film is pretty good at filling its quota of bullets, explosions, and general idiocy, with some truly absurd performances once it’s time to go green in the face as an added bonus. Mastorakis’s preferred acting approach is easily described as “Sunday morning cartoon but bloody”, and the actors are truly giving their all here.

At least for the first hour or so, I found myself rather taken with the all-around stupidity filtered through Mastorakis’s general technical competence (competence at least for the sort of thing this is, I’m not suggesting he’s Stanley Kubrick, or John McTiernan, for that matter). For my tastes, Nightmare’s final third or so, once we have lost George Kennedy to his old enemy, fire, and left Canyonland (a name that still causes me to giggle) for actual canyons, drags quite a bit. Mastorakis never has the same grip on his obvious ambitions to suggest the Western genre as on the simple action trash he did before. Plus, there’s a basically never-ending or at the very least pretty damn pointless – as we know nobody in any of the helicopters - helicopter chase right in the end, so that things go out on a somewhat sour note.

But hey, sixty minutes of fun is something.

SyFy vs The Mynd: Sands of Oblivion (2007)

Professor of archaeology Alice Carter (Morena Baccarin) is attempting to dig out and rescue the Egyptian sets for Cecil B. DeMille's (Dan Castellaneta) The Ten Commandments at the Guadalupe Dunes, before they will be washed away in an oil industry related high tide.

Alice finds the sets only thanks to John Tevis (George Kennedy in what amounts to a very fun cameo role) and his ex-soldier son Mark (Victor Webster) who are looking for a time capsule John buried when he was at the set as the child of one of DeMille's more adventurous location scouts, for she and her students have been digging at the wrong place all the time. Alas, John and Mark also awaken a powerful jackal mummy thing (whose identity is for no good reason at all explained in an absolutely useless and ugly pre-credits sequence by a different director) that kills John. That's the sort of thing that happens when you use real Egyptian artefacts in your movie sets.

Mark - who has been exchanging flirty looks with Alice all this time - hires on to the dig as logistics expert. Alice's ex-husband Jesse (Adam Baldwin), also an archaeologist, comes in too - to help, massage his own ego, and to have a preening competition with Mark.

Of course, now that it has been awakened, the Anubis-shaped creature starts terrorizing the dig, killing people in various creative ways. It's up to Alice, Mark and Jesse to get rid of the monster they freed.

Now, if you've made a movie whose basic idea is as wonderful as Sands of Oblivion's - seriously, a jackal mummy thing and biblical-style phenomena haunting the set of DeMille's Ten Commandments!? - that also happens to feature two Firefly alumni in form of the always charming Morena Baccarin and the always charming in a somewhat different way Adam Baldwin, you really have to take incredibly large missteps to get on my bad side; you have after all just produced R'lyeh-nip. The whole haunted movie set idea, and the cleverness to use Guadalupe as Egypt stand-in for a mummy curse movie alone are enough to keep David Flores's movie from being a standard SyFy (well, at that point in time still Sci-Fi, but hey) monster bash, particularly since the film's first acts actually get quite a bit of mileage out of these ideas.

Unless you expect the film to be a deeper study of old Hollywood as a place that made myths of its own just as durable and magical as that of old Egyptian culture; as it stands, Sands of Oblivion is not that kind of film, but rather one that uses haunted Hollywood as a way to develop a more personal and individual feel than is typical of TV monster mashes. I'm perfectly alright with this - not every movie needs to dig deep (sorry), and the way the film treats its core concept as a way to charm its audience for most of its running time is more than enough for me.

Much more problematic is that the film - up until that point not exactly subtle but clearly sane - devolves into a very typical SyFy cheese fest for its final act, with a dune buggy chase, Adam Baldwin doing a pizza-faced Renfield, a comic relief gun nut redneck, and Mark fighting living wall paintings. The change from the bloodier version of classic horror the film's earlier stages indulge in to that sort of thing is a bit grating. I would certainly have preferred if the film had kept to that earlier style. On the other hand, the cheese at hand is very tasty, so it's not as if Sand of Oblivion's final act weren't entertaining.

The other surprise beside the film's curious change in tone is that our chief monster isn't a digital concoction, but - in its jackal mummy form - rather what looks like a mix of suitmation and mechanical puppetry to me. It's a pretty great monster design, even though fans of naturalistic special effects will be just as unhappy with it as if it were a digital creature, for realism - whatever the word means when describing jackal headed mummies - does live elsewhere. The digital effects for their part are really rather good, and are, like the sets of the remnants of the old movie sets, made with an eye for the moody detail, something that's generally much more important to me than the effects looking believable.

So, despite my misgivings about Sands of Oblivion's final act, and that unnecessary pre-credit sequence taking place in Ancient Egypt I can really recommend fast-forwarding through, it turned out to be a particular favourite of mine among SyFy/Sci-Fi Original movies. The power of Cecil B. DeMille compels me.

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In short: Demonwarp (1988)

Deep inside the 80s, Jack (David Michael O'Neill) takes a bunch of his friends to the cabin of his uncle Clem located in the Deep Dark Woods for a bit of vacation time. Because he's afraid they won't accompany him, Jack fails to mention to them that Clem disappeared from the cabin one day, and Jack plans to find out what happened. Does the disappearance have something to do with the Bigfoot supposedly roaming the area?

Jack and friends find that out soon enough, for Bigfoot just leaves them enough time for a bit of gratuitous nudity and a bad practical joke before he attacks, and pretty effectively kills off half of the gang in short order. Fortunately, this is one of those lonely patches of wood that's as populated as a main street, so Biggie also has the opportunity to have his way with a random photographer, two city girls (also there to drive the boob quota up), and Bill Crafton (George Kennedy, slumming).

Bill has come to the woods to take revenge for the death of his daughter, who was killed and kidnapped by Biggie some time ago while she and Bill were playing Trivial Pursuit. Now, Bill has returned with bear traps, dynamite, and a big yellow hat he's wearing so that the monster can see him better.

But Bigfoot isn't the only thing roaming these woods. The living dead and a cultist preacher also make an appearance - and everyone's working for an alien that wants to phone home a bit more aggressively than is polite, misusing the lack of a zombie union and a preacher's love for human sacrifice for its nefarious plans.

Yes, Emmett Alston's Demonwarp is another one of those films trying to make up for a stupid script, low production values, and not very good acting with the holy trinity of crap horror movies: tits (four out of five actresses with speaking roles poke their breasts in the direction of the camera one time or another), gore (watch Biggie rip off a head, eviscerate a guy with a stick, and have other types of good clean fun for the whole family, if your family is like mine), and as many monsters as the budget can allow (there's Biggie, a bunch of zombies - some rubber-masked, some not, the alien). It may not be up to the standards of artistry and entertainment that give major film prizes to self-important exercises in nostalgia like The Artist, but Demonwarp sure is a film feeling at ease with what it is; and if that is only cheap exploitation, that doesn't matter.

What puts the film into the upper tier of its type of 80s horror - the unembarrassed type - is how strong and enthusiastic the power of awesome stupidity is in it. Just to take one example among many, Biggie the Bigfoot, it turns out, (SPOILER) isn't just any old ratty looking monster costume with a surprisingly expressive face, but in fact a were-bigfoot somehow created by the alien injecting (with the help of one of its scorpion stinger tentacle thingies, of course) alien goo into poor uncle Clem. This, brethren, is a film that isn't just gratuitous when it comes to female nudity.

One of the zombies is even wearing a Residents t-shirt, for Cthulhu's sake, and if that's not enough to recommend a movie, I don't know what is.

 

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Uninvited (1988)

Some things can only happen in Florida. A poisonous killer kitty escapes from the lab that created it, killing a handful of people with its powerful cat fu on the way out.

Through a peculiar set of unbelievable circumstances Killer Cat will land on the yacht of the especially evil Wall Street shark Walter Graham (Alex Cord). Right now, Graham is trying to keep up his appearance of being a suave slime bag, but is living in desperate fear of the SEC. He's desperate enough to let his henchalcoholic Albert (Clu Gulager) drown a potential whistleblower in the yacht's Jacuzzi, while Walter and his partner Mike (George "I was in Towering Inferno, so what's this dignity you speak of!?" Kennedy) watch gleefully.

They could have spared themselves the murder rap and the audience two scenes of little import, because the next day news come in that tell Wally and Mickey they'd better grab their traditional silver suitcases full of money and make off to that equally traditional safe haven of scumbags with money, the Cayman Islands. How impractical that Walter has scared off his boat's crew and only the captain, Rachel (Toni Hudson) is left! The film explains her staying with a long and tragic story about the yacht once belonging to her father and her wanting to buy it back to start a charter business. Captain Rachel is also too morally upright to sleep with Walter, which is a definite plus.

The crewless bastards are in luck. Two bimbettes (Clare Carey and Shari Shattuck) Walter has invited to a party that will never happen arrive with three male bimbos who look quite ideal to become the new crew in tow. The blonder bimbette has also brought an adorable little cat she found in a garbage can in port…

Of course, kitty will start killing again soon, the boat's motor will strike, the cat will poison the food supply and everyone will go batty, except for Captain Rachel and Martin (Eric Larson), who turns out not to be a bimbo at all, but a student of biology. Instant smittenness ensues. Of course.

Whoever might survive the adventure on the high seas?

Thanks to his much earlier work on films like Wacko and Satan's Cheerleaders, I possess a certain amount of respect for Uninvited's director and writer Greydon Clark. The man has talent and a skewed sense of humour I appreciate. Unfortunately, this film about an adorable killer kitten seems to be meant to be taken seriously, how improbable that may sound.

Clark might be surprised (or not) to hear that a single, normal looking cat is not all that believable as a threat for a boat full of people, even people as dumb as the intolerably stupid characters this film is filled with. Strangely enough, the script doesn't even use the opportunity to make one of the characters an ailurophobe. Walter certainly doesn't like cats, but that is only another instance of the bastard being a man of dubious character (who will, after the rules of bad horror movies, have to pay for his bastardness in the end, don't worry).

What seems to have been on Clark's mind isn't making something as unthreatening as a cat look dangerous and sinister on film anyway. In fact, his thoughts seem to have moved in quite a different direction: how to make his unimpressive killer beast even less impressive. And man, he realized the dream with the help of true special effects magic. Turns out that the one thing that looks less dangerous than a cat is a large (hand?-) puppet standing in for a cat, and what looks even less dangerous than that is when that first cat puppet vomits up another, slightly blackish and mangy looking cat puppet, which then does most of the killing (and changes rapidly in shape and size throughout the film). It's like a matryoshka doll of high monster hilarity.

Obviously, Uninvited is at its best whenever the kitten of doom is on screen, either in its adorable animal form or in one of the excellent kitten muppet attack sequences.

Alas, a bad movie does not live from monster attacks alone (although they all should). The rest of the film doesn't always reach the heights of these core moments or the sheer attractiveness of its feline star, yet you can't say it doesn't do its best with the help of some excitingly bad work in front and behind the camera.

First and foremost (and therefore dead way too soon) there are Gulager hamming it up (or just being really drunk, I'm not sure about that) like a cowboy John Carradine and George Kennedy kicking butt in an ineptly choreographed action sequence while wearing the same pained facial expression he always wears.

At first it seems as if the rest of the cast is just no fun at all. But they're just keeping their full non-powers in check for the first parts of the film. In the last half hour or so, everybody goes into screeching hysteria mode (excellent whining there, Miss Shattuck!), which always has its charms and additionally keeps one's ear drums well trained.

For the connoisseur of the ugly, there's some 80s bikini fashion so eye-gouging even I noticed it and a short aerobic sequence. The latter scene is of course filmed with a leering eye. The film as a whole does - to my great disappointment - not venture deep into the realm of the truly sleazy. There may be one-and-a-half sex scene(s), but Greydon does all in his (in this case considerable) power to let them look as unexciting as possible. At least the half one ends in a stealth hand-nibble scene right out of "Metal Gear Feline" or "Kitten - The Dark Project".

Further highpoints are a great sinking ship model - as known from my bathtub - and an inane "man and woman versus cat puppet on a life boat" fight that just repeats itself for a second time, and which words fail me to describe correctly.

There is much to love about Uninvited.

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