The Carpenter (1988)

Alice (Lynne Adams) has just been released from psychiatric care following a break-down that saw her doing stuff like cutting her husband Martin’s (Pierre Lenoir) suits to pieces with scissors. Though, given that he cheats on her, doesn’t trust or believe anything she says and is the quiet version of a total prick in any other regard, too, one can have some doubts about her mental illness being anything more than her unwillingness to conform.

Well, in the beginning of the film at least. Later on, we’ll find Alice having difficulty discerning between dreams and reality, and having quite a few hallucinations as well, so she’s clearly not the most stable woman you’ll find even if you’re not a prick. Of course, given that everyone she meets during the course of the film apart from her sister is some kind of weirdo or horrible person, her mental state seems to be the world’s least problem.

To make her return to so-called normality easier (or to get her out of the way) her husband has decided to buy a small town house (it’s pretty cheap, too, for good reasons), and leave her there alone for most days and many nights, while a bunch of cheap hired hands are still busy finishing renovations. Most of them are obviously goons, would-be rapists and general assholes, which could become something of a problem for Alice, if not for the titular Carpenter. Said Carpenter (Wings Hauser) only comes out at night, only ever renovates when nobody but Alice is around, carrying a creepy smile and many a protestant work ethics speech on his lips. And he’s really handy when the casual rapist or robber comes around, just as casually cutting off body parts with a smile. Something which Alice witnesses with a shrug, a nod, and a smile.

At first, the Carpenter is a pleasant influence on Alice’s life, fighting off low-lives and strengthening her confidence. And really, he’s rather dreamy, too, isn’t he? Of course, he’s also the kind of guy who doesn’t take kindly to anything or anyone going against his ideas about propriety and correct human behaviour, so he might very well be just another asshole guy in Alice’s life. Though perhaps not exactly a living one, as will turn out.

So yes, quite obviously, there’s really no way not to read David Wellington’s The Carpenter as anything but an unequivocally feminist movie about a woman bedraggled by all kinds of shitty men finding the inner strength to become her own person. At first, one might believe the Carpenter to be an expression of her inner strengths expressed in a pretty socially conservative way. Give Alice’s difficulty with understanding the difference between dreams and reality and the general surreal air of her surroundings, I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised if the film had gone the route of turning the rogue handyman in a pure hallucination, with Alice herself committing or just imagining all the very brutal acts of self-defence.

Instead, the film goes for something all-out supernatural, turning the Carpenter into murderous ghost (revenant) who is just another shitty man for Alice to get away from. Well, okay, she does commit one little murder herself, but what’s a girl to do?

All of this does sound like a somewhat strange yet generally serious film, but Wellington’s execution is just plain weird, with actors chewing the scenery in ways reaching from the amateurish to the consciously, somewhat cleverly, surreal, while Alice, played with a wonderful mixture of strangeness and bright-eyed acceptance of the most horrible happenings by Adams, sleepwalks through a world that feels like a caricature of our own where every interaction is overblown in some way. weird or consciously awkward. From time to time, carpentry tools are used as weapons; blood spatters; Wings Hauser’s face does…things.

And while I’m all for a good feminist fable with a bit of light mutilation, it’s really the continuous mood of the strange I find remarkable about the film, as if all of it could just be a hallucination or a dream, or the sort of Americana fantasy one gets after digesting bad apple pie. Even better that Wellington and the script by Doug Taylor never actually go the “it was all a dream” route.

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.

In short: Night Shadows (1984)

aka Mutant

After a road encounter with the least pleasant human inhabitants of a small rural community, city-slicker brothers Josh (Wings Hauser) and Mike (Lee Montgomery) find themselves a bit stranded there, at least for a night and a day or so. Alas, they’ve picked quite the wrong time for their inadvertent stay, for the toxic waste an Evil Corporation has been dumping in the area is causing a peculiar sickness in many people around. Mike disappears quite early, and soon Josh finds himself teaming up with the local doctor (Jennifer Warren), the alcoholic sheriff (eternal sheriff Bo Hopkins), and romance-ready school teacher Holly (Jody Medford) against a whole bunch of blue-faced zombies with acid-bleeding, blood-sucking hands.

On a good day, Night Shadows’ director John ‘Bud’ Cardos was a perfectly decent man of his profession, filming straightforward plots in a straightforward manner, the unflinching professional of cinema. He had one of those days when he shot the film at hand, and while the result won’t win any originality prizes, it is an entertaining little variation on the eternal Night of the Living Dead shape.

Not surprisingly, this doesn’t have much – if any at all – of the political resonance of Romero’s film, but it goes through most of the expected zombie movie plot beats with a neat sense of pacing, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and generally knows how to be a fun time. Additionally, it features a lot of silly yet pleasing blue-faced zombie make-up, and does from time to time manage a fright scene or two archetypal enough to make the long-suffering horror fan look up with interest. There’s a really surprisingly ruthless mass child zombie scene in here, as well as a neat little monster under the bed variation early on – as long as you don’t stop to think about the practicalities of both of them, of course. But when has the stuff nightmares are made of ever cared about practicality?

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