From a Whisper to a Scream (1987)

aka The Offspring

Librarian and Southern small town historian Julian White (Vincent Price) gets a surprise visit by a journalist (Susan Tyrrell) who wants to interview him about his niece Katherine (Martine Bestwick). Katherine has just been executed for a string of murders she committed, and since she grew up under Julian’s care, he’s rather expected to have some insight into her state of mind.

What the old gent actually does is start onto a series of short tales to explain that the town of Oldfield where all of this takes place is and has been home to a cornucopia of murders and depravity, so Katherine’s case should come as no surprise.

Of course, this being a horror anthology, these tales are its segments.

The first tale, “Stanley” concerns the misadventures of mild-mannered and repressed grocer Stanley (Clu Gulager). At home, he is taking care if his ailing sister Eileen (Miriam Byrd-Nethery) who radiates incestuous intensity – at least she seems to be really into passive-aggressively dominating her brother. On his grocer job, Stanley is pining after his boss lady, Grace (Megan McFarland). He even manages to go on a date with her, but when she rebukes him, he murders her and later does the necrophiliac thing. Which really will have some rather unexpected results nine months later.

The second segment, “On the Run”, follows ne'er-do-well Jesse Hardwick (Terry Kiser), who has incensed a couple of rather brutal gangsters, as well as his girlfriend. Chased into a swamp and shot, Jesse regains consciousness in the care of an older black man named Felder Evans (Harry Caesar), a hoodoo practitioner. Sniffing around Felder’s cabin, Jesse finds out that his host must be at least two-hundred years old. He presses Felder to teach him the trick to this sort of longevity. The old man does agree at first, yet Jesse’s generally shitty disposition does sour their relationship rather violently. Which, obviously, isn’t a great idea.

Tale number three, “Lovecraft’s Traveling Amusements” (disappointingly enough not featuring any Lovecraftian content) concerns the tragic romance of the titular carnival’s glass eater, Steven (Ron Brooks) and local beauty Amaryllis (Didi Lanier). Unfortunately, this is no normal travelling carnival but one belonging to a witch (Rosalind Cash) – only going by Snakewoman – who grants her various carnies (all with a problematic past) carny super powers and shelter in return for her dominance over them, and perhaps a bit of mutilation. As you can imagine, her glass eater attempting to run off with a girl does rather displease the woman.

Finally, we have “Four Soldiers”, wherein a group of Union soldiers under the brutal, drunken leadership of Sgt. Gallen (Cameron Mitchell), encounter a group of war orphans – most of them demonstrating scars of war themselves – dwelling in a dilapidated mansion. The children manage to take the men prisoner, as per the rules set by the mysterious “Magistrate” they say they serve. Children being children, they do like to play games with their captives.

As directed by Jeff Burr (who would of course later go on to Charles Band’s Full Moon Pictures as well as specialize in horror sequels of dubious renown yet not always dubious quality) and written by Burr, Darin Scott (whom you might know as writer and producer of the brilliant Tales from the Hood among other things), Mike Malone, and C. Courtney Joyner (another future Band alumni), From a Whisper to a Scream is a pretty wild and gruesome bit of US Southern horror.

In mood and style and it marries EC horror – nearly a given in US horror anthologies – with Southern Gothic, leaning on the pulp gruesomeness of the former instead of the somewhat more subtle and elegant ways of Southern Gothic, where terrible fucked-up shit happens, but usually does so with a pretence of civility. This one rather feels mad like a wild dog, aggressively leaning into the most gruesome elements of the material, cutting away the politeness and ambiguity that to me seems as much part of your typical Southern Gothic piece as are incest, necrophilia and the horrors of slavery and what came after. As an approach this makes perfect sense for a horror movie from the 80s, of course, and not just commercially. While this never feels like a movie seeing it as its main goal to hammer home a political point, it really does put a lot of effort into portraying its American South as a place with a history literally drenched in blood, and suggests this as the worst possible influence on the people living there.

Helping in this effort is some really rather great low budget filmmaking by Burr, who drenches nearly every frame in fecundity and sweat, and lingers on the decaying locations with a lot of wicked enthusiasm and quite a bit of style.

I also can’t help but admire From a Whisper’s absolute willingness to go into creepy, gruesome and pleasantly uncomfortable places and really go there. Even though this isn’t a gore fest – I suspect mostly because it couldn’t afford to be – this is not a film cutting to black politely. There’s a real, admirable, pulp energy and ruthlessness running through all of the film’s segments, as well as a wonderful, and wonderfully gruesome, sense of imagination.

Thanks to the curious economics of anthology horror – where getting a great actor for five affordable days can be enough to shoot a segment – and some great casting choices, there’s also at least one really great performance in every segment. Price is of course the international treasure we know and love, but there’s also Gulager’s go-for-broke outing as Stanley, Harry Caesar’s calm and off-handed warlock, Rosalind Cash’s grand, horrible, villainess. Hell, even Cameron Mitchell puts obvious effort into creating a man of very specific vileness here, instead of coasting by on drinks and general professionalism.

So, to me, this is one of the great underrated anthology films.

Death Spa (1989)

Terrible things are happening at the health spa of hunky – so says the script, at least - Michael Evans (William Bumiller): first his girlfriend Laura (Brenda Bakke) suffers burns and temporary blindness from a steam room accident (or was it?). Then all hell really breaks loose, with health spa goers not only tortured by aerobics but also hit by levitating tiles, murdered by fitness apertures running amok despite (or because of) the spa’s automated control systems, stabbed by stabby things and later on exploded and mutilated in many different ways when things come to a head on the place’s annual Mardi Gras bash.

Has the spa’s computer turned evil? Is the ghost of Michael’s dead wife (Sharri Shattuck) responsible? Or is her computer nerd brother out for vengeance? All of it? Something different?

Well, there’s only one way to find out, and that’s inflicting Michael Fischa’s mind-boggling Death Spa (the spa that kills?) on your unsuspecting brains. It’s candy-coloured like the 80s themselves! It’s sleazy with many a scene of female nudity that would be absolutely gratuitous if it weren’t the point of the film apart from the gore! It has a plot way too complicated for anyone involved to keep under control that tries its hardest to pull a Carnacki on the audience with a “natural” and a supernatural threat theoretically kinda-sorta happening at the same time (but don’t ask me which parts of the wild happenings are the responsibility of the ghost and which ones that of the other threat?)!

If that’s not enough to set the eyes of the kind of person (for example me) this thing was probably made for all a-glow, there’s much more to add, for this one is probably the most successful attempt (conscious or unconscious or through sheer incompetence) of a US horror film at becoming exactly like an 80s Italian horror film. So the plot makes no sense whatsoever: try the plan of the human bad guy that consists of making the spa so horrible Michael will lose it, so that bad guy and his partners then can easily acquire a spa nobody in his or her right mind would ever want to visit. Characters like psychic investigator (with a noir private eye sort of office) Dr. (of psychometry, I assume) Lido Moray are introduced with great fanfare, to then have nothing to do but to die. The dialogue sounds exactly like the sort of thing Italian dubbing studios would have come up with, full of non-sequiturs, bizarre phrasings and absurd declarations.

There’s also a case of possession that leads to in turns transvestism and bodily transformation into the other gender (twins, the film “explains”), smallish roles for Ken Foree, Rosalind Cash and Chelsea Field, and so much of treacly, sometimes rubbery gore I can only assume the influence of Fulci. However, to make that clear, Death Spa has little in common with the nightmarish atmosphere of the maestro’s best films – it’s much more like a hallucination induced by a bad combination of different kinds of alcohol and indigestion.


Not to put to fine a point on it, but Death Spa’s a horrible film by the standards of most sane people (though even they’d probably admit that some of the lighting is pretty rad in its way). By my standards, on the other hand, it is pretty darn awesome, mixing awkwardness, stupidity, and overambition with an increasingly hysterical tone that reaches the point of glorious absurdity once the Mardi Gras bash full of blind and deaf people who have their troubles seeing and hearing horrible deaths happening right next to them (which means they miss out on the undead fish that kill one of the cop characters, among many other things). I am convinced Death Spa is a major achievement; I’m just not sure what it achieves beyond blowing minds.