In short: Deadly Illusion (1987)

Private detective Hamberger (Billy Dee Williams) may not have a licence, but he’s got a sexy taxi-driving girlfriend and partner (Vanity), and half of New York’s working class loves him to bits, for reasons he doesn’t understand himself. He, as it turns out, is also the kind of guy who exclusively identifies women by their hair-do; at least that’s what the film implies, for otherwise, most of the plot would make even less sense than it actually does.

“What plot is this?”, you might ask, and the most honest answer would be “hell if I know”. It’s not that the elements of the plot are all that confusing – there’s the usual stuff about the bad guys trying to frame our protagonist for murder and a large scale drug operation – but the way writer/director Larry Cohen fits them together really doesn’t make a lick of sense. It’s not just that the film only works when our hero can’t understand that Morgan Fairchild in a frizzy wig and Morgan Fairchild with her usual blonde hairspray thing are the same person, there’s really little else about this mystery that fits together in a sensible way, be it the plans of the villains (whatever they might be exactly), the actions of our hero or the police. Half of the time, I didn’t even know why any given scene followed the next, and not in a noirish expression of existential confusion, but simple confusion.

Unless, of course, scenes follow each other because Cohen, one of the most New York of all directors, simply thought showing Billy Dee Williams running through this part of New York would be pretty cool at any given moment. After all, Cohen, despite his experience as a screenwriter, often shows a very leisurely idea of plotting, giving his actors a lot of room to improvise. Williams isn’t terribly great at improvisation here, alas, so most of the obviously improvised scenes end up as the sort of goof comedy that should have ended up on the editing room floor.

The film’s not a complete write-off, however, for there are couple of worthwhile moments, at least if you like Larry Cohen’s New York, with some pretty funny moments and lines coming from the various character actors involved. Two of the New York action set pieces are rather fun, too, seeing as they do involve some running and shooting through Shea Stadium and Billy Dee having a chase down a certain rather large Christmas tree.

Which certainly doesn’t turn Deadly Illusion into a film for the casual viewer but keeps it of interest to the Cohen die-hards like me.

Three Films Make A Post: Money, Madness, Murder.

The Haunting of Sarah Hardy (1989): If you’re in the right mood, this thriller by Jerry London produced for the USA Network featuring Sela Ward, Morgan Fairchild and Polly Bergen recommends itself by a particularly preposterous plot construction. At first, it’s very much gaslighting business by the numbers, but soon enough, the film spends time in James M. Cain land and even does some reverse gaslighting (something too few films do) eventually. If only London’s direction had more of a zing to it, this would probably be either a perfect example of the virtues overwriting can sometimes achieve or a camp masterpiece (if only I liked camp). As it stands, it’s at least less boring a film than it at first appears.

Mortal aka Torden (2020): I’m a big admirer of the films of André Øvredal, but this mix of superhero tropes, vague attempts at religious parable, myth and Brightburn just doesn’t work at all, its different elements never really coming together into a whole once the film starts giving answers to the questions it has come up with in the first act. On the plot level, there’s simply too little of interest happening, Øvredal going through motions of high budget thrill rides instead of actually making a thrilling film, while the film’s more thoughtful elements never really go anywhere. It’s rather poignant that the characters read up on Thor in a children’s book.

Visually, it’s very pretty indeed, but the pacing is much too ponderous for a film with so few actual thoughts, the characters have little to grab one – there’s just a feeling of something important that would make this into an actual film having gone missing somewhere during the production. Worst is an ending that attempts to be a classic 70s downer, but only feels deeply dissatisfying on a narrative level as well as  disconnected to any of the thematic questions the film might have had.

Local Hero (1983): I’ve taken a decade or two of coming around to the charms and qualities of Bill Forsyth’s much loved comedy. It’s not an obvious film to gather as much love as it has, with its nearly complete abandonment of the fish out of water plot after its first act or so, an approach to characters that can feel distant when you haven’t quite understood how subtle and empathetic it rather is, and a sense of humour that’s often plain peculiar.
The picture postcard beautiful shots of Scotland are an obvious attraction, but what really makes this for me is the willingness to meet characters on their own terms, understanding that the good and the bad in people are inextricably intertwined and even (not a thing anyone seems to be willing in the here and now) suggests that you might get along with people who aren’t perfect embodiments of what you want them to be, quietly praising individuality and finding it in everyone.


It’s also a film willing to present and accept a non-perfect solution to character arcs, as well as its so-called plot. And life, one assumes.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: American Horror House (2012)

The new house of the Kappa Whatever sorority is not the best house the sisterhood could have rented after their old building burned down. Not only does the building have quite a bad backstory, and not only is the live-in landlady, Miss Margot (Morgan Fairchild), supremely creepy, there's also the little problem of the house being full of murderous ghosts with various plot-appropriate reality-deforming powers. At first, the ghosts' handful of murders aren't really all that conspicuous, particularly because these undead like to clean up the bodies they leave behind very quickly. Cleanliness is next to godliness, after all.

However, this more subtle approach to carnage changes on the day and night of the Kappas' big Halloween party. The ghosts start working overtime, each of their victims filling the ranks of the undead menace. It falls to the only person in the house who isn't a total twat, new pledge Daria (the perfectly likeable Alessandra Torresani), to find out why the ghosts and their house are doing what they are doing and try and stop it.

It is frighteningly official: now that I've seen the third SyFy Channel movie in a row I actually enjoyed, I'm not allowed to use "SyFy Channel Original" as short-hand for "exactly the kind of lazy low budget movie that gives low budget films a bad reputation" anymore. Well, at least there's still The Asylum to look down on.

Anyway, as the above synopsis should make clear, Darin Scott's American Horror House isn't much of a narrative, and that's even before you spend a single second thinking about the utter silliness of what's going on in it. It's the horror movie as haunted house ride, lacking all subtlety, subtext (unless the traditional "sororities are deeply problematic" counts, which it doesn't), and often enough logical coherence, so if you just need a bit of substance or depth in your horror movies, this will be less than satisfying.

However, Scott never sets out to provide that kind of depth, and consequently, it seems rather unfair to blame the movie for its lack. Particularly when American Horror House achieves what it actually sets out to do perfectly: it's to be the sort of horror movie in which at least every second scene contains either some spooky manifestation or a gory murder. The film dives into this mission with relish, turning most of the spooking into supremely grotesque and/or surreal tableaux, like a fast-paced best of from the strangest scenes of US and Italian horror from the late 80s and the 90s. It's in the same generous spirit of the bizarre that gave us the Demoni films and the Night of the Demon movies, and I for my part am quite happy with this.

Speaking of the gore - which is frequent and awesome -, Scott doesn't go for any sort of realism there either, preferring the grotesque to the anatomically probable, as is only right and proper for a film in this spirit. So you'll learn some valuable lessons about tongues, how to extract someone's guts through his mouth, and get other helpful tips that'll be no help at all in your future serial killer career.

American Horror House keeps its level of fun horror nonsense up for the largest part of its running time, only faltering in its final ten minutes or so when it becomes clear that Scott (or script writer Anthony C. Ferrante) don't have the slightest idea how to end this one properly (hint: exploding house), and so go for the kind of lame, pseudo-dark, non-ending that has plagued horror films forever. Fortunately, there's way too much fun to be had with the film before this happens, so American Horror House still comes highly recommended to my sisters and brothers in being easily amused by surreal violence and non-stop running around in their movies.

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