I Always Feel Like (Someone’s Watching Me!, 1978)

The same year Carpenter unleashed Halloween, he wrote and directed this television thriller. Lauren Hutton is Leigh Michaels, a television producer, new to Los Angeles. She moves into a high-rise apartment and then starts to receive ominous calls from a creepy voiced stranger who seems to know a lot about her. She has an ex who won’t give up and is trying to start a relationship up with a new man.

As the calls escalate (even after changing her number) and she is receiving mystery gifts, the Police let her know there is nothing they can do. Leigh retorts “Well, if he kills me, you will be the first to know!” As plots go, Someone is Watching Me is pretty pedestrian. And considering there are many true crime shows dedicated to stalking now, well, this probably seemed a bit freakier in a time when people were not really talking about stalking. It also becomes a bit like a reverse Rear Window.

It has a strong core cast with Hutton, Adrienne Barbeau and David Birney. Barbeau plays Hutton’s lesbian co-worker. I only note this because the film plays it off as merely another aspect of who she is. It is neither played as a joke or a sign of her being a suspicious individual.

Not unlike Halloween, Carpenter spends much of his time establishing the characters and building tension until the final twenty minutes or so when her stalker gets murderous and she struggles to convince her boyfriend and the authorities she is not making this all up.

Overall, you can see the spark of Carpenter’s film-making gifts. He takes a standard TV movie plot and manages to give his characters personality and build tension, throughout the film.

October 7, 2016 0

It’s Only a Severed Hand (Return of the Living Dead Part 2, 1988)

The thing about horror movies, they do not have to be smashing successes to get a sequel. The first film gained a cult following long after this sequel. Return of the Living Dead 2 had no

involvement from Dan O’Bannon, and instead was written and directed by Ken Wiederhorn. Wiederhorn wrote and directed a Nazi Zombie movie starring Peter Cushing called Shockwaves eleven years prior. The last film he directed before Return of the Living Dead Part 2 was 1984’s Meatballs 2 (first of three sequels without Bill Murray).

The only link to the first film is the cannisters of zombies. This time one falls from a truck and lands in the sewer near a new housing development. Jesse is a kid bullied by Billy and Johnny. They discover the canister and release the gas. Elsewhere we meet Ed, Joey and Brenda. Ed and Joey are bumbling grave robbers and Brenda was tagging along because she is Joey’s best girl. Ed and Joey are exposed to the gas while in a mausoleum. They are terrified as they see the dead arise around them.

The fun conceit of Ed and Joey is they are played by James Karen and Thom Mathews…Frank and Freddy. Their performances are just as fun this time around. In this film, they are the side story. The central story follows Jesse, his sister, her boyfriend and an older neighbor trying to get out of the housing development alive.

Although it follows a lot of the same beats of the previous film, the ending has a decidedly different tone. The humor sticks pretty close to the first film, and they find a new way to use one of the best gags in the first film. The end result is a decently entertaining follow up. It is not quite as good as it’s predecessor, but it is a pretty admirable attempt to recapture the fun.

October 6, 2016 0

Closing Time (Assault on Precinct 13, 1976)

After Dark Star, Carpenter made one of his few films outside his standard horror and Sci-Fi genres. Assault on Precinct 13 is a gritty action film about a group of cops holed up in a Precinct that is about to be closed. A gang has attacks with the express purpose of killing someone that is locked in the precinct. Cops and criminals must unite to survive the night.

The odds are against them, but they are not willing to give in either.

The cast, led by Austin Stoker (Battle for the Planet of the Apes) is a quality combination of both solid character actors and unknowns. These are good performances and Stoker’s Ethan Bishop is instantly likeable. He is a strong and determined officer who lays his life on the line to protect the people trapped with him.

The tale is unrelenting with an uneasy resolution. Unlike a lot of Carpenter’s other works, the threat comes from within humanity, rather than outside of it. That is part of what makes the heroes of the tale so compelling. They are forced to work together to deal with the brutal attacker bent on their complete destruction. Carpenter makes a successful action thriller worth watching.

October 6, 2016 0

I Try To Not Think About Death Much (Return of the Living Dead, 1985)

In 1986, Alien Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon made a deal to direct (he had directed a short film seventeen years earlier) a film. He was to make an unofficial sequel of sorts to Night of the Living Dead.

An effects heavy zombie film, the big twist of the Return of the Living Dead is it is a comedy. A gory one, but a comedy none the less. We are quickly introduced to Frank and Freddy, employees of a medical supply company. After Burt (the boss) leaves for the weekend, Frank starts to show Freddy around, skeletons, half dogs and cadavers and the like. He also tells Freddy that they have some canisters with real zombies (and proceeds to proclaim the Night of the Living Dead was a real thing, just altered for the film). They look at the canisters and accidentally release an ominous gas. When they wake up, they find all the dead things seeming to be alive. This leads to some hilarity as they call Burt in and the three try and fix the problem.

Meanwhile, Freddy’s girlfriend Tina is hanging out with her friends (a bunch of punks) in a graveyard waiting for Freddy to get done with work. This includes a bizarre moment Trash (Scream Queen Linnea Quigley), obsessed with death starts expressing a fantasy of being eaten alive (foreshadowing, folks)…she then strips and dances upon a tombstone. Burt, Frank and Freddy go across the street with a cut up cadaver and check in with mortician Ernie. They ask to use the crematorium to dispose of rabid weasels. But as the body burns, it creates more ominous smoke which causes a storm and in turn the rain soaks the ground, re-animating the graveyard.

What follows is the characters trying to survive the hoards of zombies. Everyone gets trapped in the mortuary or the medical supply warehouse. The film finds a lot of humor in it’s gruesome subject. Thom Mathews (Freddy) and James Karen (Frank) have a great rapport and are very entertaining as the two discover they are slowly turning into zombies. Really, the entire cast is entertaining. Along with Mathews and Karen, Clu Gulager (Burt) and Don Calfa (Ernie…get it?) are very funny. It helps that everyone seems to be in on the joke, leading to fun performances.

The effects are terrific, still holding up for the most part. There is one especially well done zombie effect with a “half” zombie. Another memorable character is the Tar Man…a slimy decomposing zombie. The actor in the outfit moves with a creepy fluidity. The film actually pays little attention to traditional film zombie lore. They cannot be killed by damaging the brain, even cutting them up, the zombie parts all act independently. The zombies can also talk. This is one of the first incidents of zombies being focused on eating brains (In Romero’s films, they just want to eat flesh). And they constantly announce “Brains!” But they can form sentences. One zombie even explains why they desire to eat brains.

Oh, there are some question to ask…for example, why, after being eaten alive, is Zombie Linnea Quigley have not a single bite…instead she has perfect porcelain skin. How can the zombies with no lips (some zombies do, some don’t) say stuff like “Brains” and “More Brains”?

Shout!Factory released a Blu-Ray special edition through their Scream!Factory imprint. It is loaded with special features. There are four audio commentaries (two are brand new), zombie subtitles (which is an amusing feature for a short time, featuring subtitles like “Arggh” whenever zombies speak), an extensive documentary “More Brains: Return to the Living Dead”, a final interview with the late O’Bannon and many more features.

The picture (from a 2K scan) is clean and looks good. The two disc set is worthy of any fan’s collection.

October 5, 2016 0

In the Beginning (Dark Star, 1974)

John Carpenter’s feature length debut was an odd comedy about four astronauts doing space work or something. They blow up planets as prep for colonization of other planets in that solar system. Aside from Carpenter, probably the most notable thing about Dark Star is that it was written by Dan O’Bannon, who went on to write Alien, as well as Return of the Living Dead and the Arnold version of Total Recall. O’Bannon also plays a character named Pinback in the film.

It is a very low budget film, even by the standards of Carpenter. He has always been a guy who can stretch a buck…but this film reeeeaaaally Stretches the dollar. The film feels like a student film, and the cast outside of Carpenter and O’Bannon have slight to no film resumes beyond Dark Star. The alien in the film looks like a beach ball. Because it is.

You can see hints of O’Bannon’s future work, such as having the female voiced computer called Mother or trying to stop a self destruct countdown. But to be honest, it is hard to see the talent at work. I mean, I know what both became. Carpenter has directed some of my favorites. The music, by Carpenter does not hint at all of his future classic soundtracks, such as Halloween or Escape From New York. Instead there is a bizarre country song that plays over the credits.

This is most definitely not the place to start with Carpenter, and is more of an odd footnote.

October 5, 2016 2

Starting Over (The Stepfather, 2009)

This is a pretty slick and glossy remake. It begins much like the original, right down to the Stepfather clearing a fogged up mirror and shaving off a bushy beard. It is a little extended, but the idea is the same. Admittedly, it was a pretty iconic moment, and I get wanting to use it again.

In his new town he meets Sela Ward’s Susan. She has three children, one of whom is in military school (Michael, played by Penn Badgley). He returns six months after his mom and David (the Stepfather) met and they are already engaged. Michael instantly does not trust David. David tries to get him to trust him with a private conversation about they will heal the family together (over shots).

The film establishes that his back story is that his wife and daughter were killed in an accident by a drunk driver. And quickly, he starts to slip up, confusing names of his dead daughter while talking to Michael.

Unlike the first film, David needs to fix his problems very quickly. A little old lady in the neighborhood told everyone about how this police sketch of the family killer she saw on a TV show looked just like David. So, of course he has to kill her. Susan’s ex-husband gets inquisitive. So, He has to die. The film tends to take it’s kill count from the third Stepfather films, going for big numbers, rather than a nuanced exploration of the Stepfather’s psychosis.

The Stepfather of this remake is kind of confusing. The original films he was a very strict traditionalist. He believed in hardcore moral values. He did not believe in sex before marriage or living together before marriage. His rigid morality was a code he lived by and refused to falter on. When he did falter, that is when he started to crack. This version sees a guy who is accused of being to old fashioned, but he seems to have pretty modern attitudes. He lives with Susan and her kids, they are having sex. In a scene reminiscent of the original, Michael puts on headphones to drown out the sounds of sex. In the 1987 version, part of what makes the scene work is when we see O’Quinn and Hack together, O’Quinn has an expression of wanting to be anywhere but there having sex.

Anytime Amber Heard is on the screen, it feels like the director forgot he was making a movie…the film lingers on Heard in a bikini a lot…I mean, it is necessary I am sure…because Michael is a swimmer, so they spend a ton of by the pool. I get it, Heard is attractive…but it is just s obvious that it distracts from the film. It seems to have been distracting enough that we meet some detectives at the beginning working the case. And we never see them again.

Sure, this film is far more action picked, with a big fight, but everything that is no really does not add to the story, everything that links back to the original just feels like a pale imitation. While it is certainly better that Stepfather 3, this remake does nothing to improve on the original.

October 4, 2016 0

Carving a Niche

As part of my October Horror Movie Madness, I am going to explore the films of John Carpenter. I will start at the beginning with Carpenter’s Student Film and work my way up.

Noticeably absent will be Halloween, as I covered the entire Franchise last year. Also, I am leaving the TV movie Elvis aside for another time. Although, at the same time, though not horror films, I will be covering Assault on Precinct 13 and Memoirs of an Invisible Man. I have long admired Carpenter’s work. Not just as a director, but also as a writer and songwriter. He has recently released two fabulous albums of music called Lost Themes and Lost Themes II.

Carpenter has written and directed more than one classic film, and I look forward to exploring his work in the days to come.

October 4, 2016 0

We Need More Kills (The Stepfather III, 1992)

While planning to make a third film, the filmmakers ran into a little snag. Terry O’Quinn turned them down. To be fair, he had a pretty television and film schedule going in 1992, so it may have been a scheduling issue. They ended up casting Robert Wightman (John Boy on the Waltons). To explain why he looks so different (and still living after the second film) he visits an underground plastic surgeon and gets his face changed.

He joins a church and starts working at a local landscaping/nursery business. He meets and captures the heart of Christine (Three’s Company’s Priscilla Barnes) and her wheelchair bound son Andy. Andy is into computers and especially enjoys a murder mystery game. Andy just never trusts Keith, even after he marries Christine. As people start getting in the way, the killing begins. He also starts to plant the seeds of a new relationship with Jennifer and her son Nicky. But when the two worlds collide, he finds himself trying to salvage one of the relationships, everything goes sideways.

This film is far more focused on killings and most easily is more of a slasher film than the previous entries. Characters are constantly giving the Stepfather reason to kill them. The film is also shot in a way that makes this film seem like a cheap imitation of the previous entries. Wight does do a decent impression of Quinn’s inflections as the Stepfather, but the film never captures the menace and quite often feels like it is on the verge of parody. Early in the film, it is suggested that while Andy is in a wheelchair, the condition is psychosomatic and he could walk if he could get emotionally past it. This leads to a moment with “inspirational” music playing as he forces himself to stand and fight to save his mom.

This is the bloodiest of the series, and it suffers for that. It also appears that this film was meant to put the series to rest, as the Stepfather cannot really come back from the end of this film…unless you makes him an evil spirit. It is easily the least enjoyable film in the franchise, and not recommended. It has a pretty good poster though.

October 3, 2016 0

It’s a Disaster (Murder Party, 2007)

Murder Party takes what could could be a very serious horror movie concept and instead opts to go the road of comedy. Christopher is a loner who lives a quiet life of habit. He receives a mysterious invite to a Halloween party. He makes a knight costume out of cardboard and duct tape and heads off. Finding the remote warehouse location, he finds a odd group. It turns out they are throwing a special party. He is quickly thrown into a room, as it turns out that Halloween party is for serial killers. And Christopher is meant to be one of their victims.

As I said, it is a straight up horror concept. But director Jeremy Saulnier goes for the dark humor. The film is full of little moments (such as Christopher riding the subway while a guy fires off a rap in his face) or when one of the killers acts all badass and when he thinks he has hurt Christopher and like kid, freaks out and starts apologizing. The film takes a turn when Christopher musters the courage to fight back and try and escape. The chases that ensue are comical.

The visual queues are a lot of fun. All the serial killers are dressed like characters from other films. For example, one kid is dressed like a member of the Baseball Furies from the Warriors, another as Daryl Hannah’s character from Blade Runner.

It is kind of interesting to compare this with his later works, the brutal and intense Blue Ruin and Green Room. This is, by comparison, a light-hearted film. It is also a lower budget (according to someone on the IMDB, it was made for no money at all). But Saulnier was skilled enough even in his debut to make a film that looks like he had more money than he did.

Murder Party is a weird and funny film, good for some laughs this Halloween.

October 3, 2016 0

Try, Try Again (The Stepfather 2: Make Room For Daddy, 1989)

Terry O’Quinn returns in this sequel that finds a healed Jerry in a high security mental institution. He eventually breaks out and assumes the role of psychologist Gene Clifford (which will turn out to be a poor choice later in the film for a pretty obvious reason). While leading a therapy group for divorced women, he finds Carol Grayland (Meg Foster) and her son Todd (the late Jonathan Brandis). He starts building a relationship with them while her friend Matty (genre veteran Caroline Williams) starts to look into Gene’s background.

While Todd seems to like Gene, Carol is more prone to question things. Though she is good at pushing those concerns aside, even when Matty is pressing buttons.

Like the first film, the primary focus is the state of mind of the Stepfather. It is simple mistakes that interfere with his family, and his attempts to fix it only make it worse. Carol trusts him less and less, and the moment when she realizes that Gene is a killer is very well done. It involves the running theme of the films where the Stepfather whistles Camptown Ladies.

Director Jeff Burr had the film chopped up against his desire. The Weinstein Brothers felt that it tested poorly and needed more blood. The re-shoots were done without Burr or O’Quinn as both refused to participate. In spite of this, Stepfather 2 is still a pretty fine follow-up focused overall less on bloodiness and more the characters. It is a decent follow up to the original and still an enjoyable thriller.

October 2, 2016 0