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.

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

Her psychiatrist Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser) and her mother Amanda (Susan Blu) bring Tina Shepard (Lar Park-Lincoln) to Crystal Lake (now called Crystal Lake again after the unfortunate Pleasant Green episode, it seems) help her get over the psychological consequences of a tragic event of ten years ago. When she was a girl, Tina killed her father with her uncontrolled telekinetic powers; his body must still be down under the lake somewhere. It is pretty obvious to anyone but Tina’s mum though that Crews isn’t all that interested in helping Tina as much as he is in invoking her telekinetic powers again and again and again. And since her telekinetic powers mostly work when she’s under strong emotional pressure, Crews is more or less concerned with the exact opposite of helping his charge.

When Crews provokes a particularly big telekinetic sulk, Tina goes to the lake and mentally drags a body to the surface she believes to be her dead father. It is – surprise? - instead Jason (now embodied by fan favourite – and for once the fans are right, because he really gives Jason a personality, not just a body - Kane Hodder), who must have been gnawed at by fishes for a few years since last we saw him, and looks a bit over-ripe by now. Obviously, Jason is quickly back to his old ways again, and in an incredible stroke of luck, there’s a cabin full of teenagers right next to Tina’s!

Not surprisingly, neither Crews nor her mother believe Tina when she tells them what happened, and they don’t exactly become less sceptic once the young woman begins having visions of Jason’s murders. It is only a matter of time until our telekinetic heroine and Jason will face off, and this time, being an undead killing machine might actually make one the underdog in a fight.

The New Blood continues the attempts to provide the increasingly rotten corpse of the Friday series with some fresh new meat, or ideas if you’re less food obsessed, and not making the same damn movie again and again. For my tastes, John Carl Buechler’s entry into the series is one of the strongest and most enjoyable ones, seemingly born out of the idea that, seeing as how the Friday the 13th films take place in a horror comic book version of reality, you might just add other pieces from comic books too, so what about a mutant? “Jason versus Carrie” has a certain ring to it, too, doesn’t it?

Well, at least that’s how I imagine the thought process behind the film’s main concept to have gone. There might also have been something about the sweet, sweet scent of money involved, but no matter, because Buechler’s film is – and that’s the first time I would say that about a Friday movie since part 2 – not just good for a Friday the 13th film but actually a good horror film. A film with an actual plot that mostly (as long as you don’t think about Dr Crews’s motivations and behaviour for too long, or at all) makes sense if you buy into its basic concepts of undead serial killers and emotional telekinetic. Also a film graced with a director who actually knows how to stage a stalk and slash sequence in a suspenseful, though not necessarily a logical, manner, and who actually manages the melodramatics surrounding Tina quite well too. As I’ve said before, melodrama and horror, like melodrama and action, are genres that work very well together if the right people are involved in front of and behind the camera, the genres of heightened emotional and physical states being so obvious siblings I’m always surprised when films don’t use the opportunity to cross these genres.

I’m a big admirer of Park-Lincoln’s performance here too, the way she just throws herself into the sulking, the screeching hysterics and the determined braveness of the final girl sequence. It’s probably not great acting from a perspective more interested in technique than mine, but it is one that turns Tina into the first Final Girl of the Friday films since Part II’s Chris I found myself really rooting for. Turns out, rooting for a slasher film’s actual heroine instead of the killer makes a film much more effective and suspenseful. Who’d have thunk? (Not the directors and writers of many other slashers, that’s for sure).

And again, like with the – inferior yet still fun – Part VI, New Blood can really delight through a lot of minor details, like Hodder’s initial “what the fuck!?” body language when Tina first attacks him telekinetically, or the way Jason becomes increasingly angry the more often Tina thwarts him, or the inspired final dispatch of our beloved killer that doesn’t make much logical sense but really closes the story in its melodramatic guise nicely, and pretty much comes out of nowhere too. But then, I’m a sucker for a happy ending.

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