THE UNSEEN

Future FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART V: A NEW BEGINNING director Danny Steinmann’s 1980 pseudo-slasher THE UNSEEN begins in grand Hitchcockian style. Borrowing a page from REAR WINDOW, Steinmann begins his film with nothing more than pictures and set dressing. We see a photograph of a beautiful woman (that would be Jennifer, played by the always exquisite Barbara Bach). It’s a professional photograph, the kind that would be used in print ads. We see shelves lined with sports trophies. A few shots later, we see a man’s leg, a large scar on his knee. The man’s name is Tony. Jennifer appears in the room, in her hands is a large overnight bag. She storms out, leaving Tony to meander around the room alone. This relationship is clearly on the rocks.

Jennifer meets with her two friends, camerawoman Karen and Vicki, her little sister. The three women head to Solvang, a Danish community in Southern California (and yes, it is apparently a real place) to film a news feature on the town’s annual Danish parade. Jennifer is a news reporter and damn glad to be taking this trip. She needs to rethink her relationship with Tony, a professional football player sidelined (perhaps forever) with a bad knee injury. She’s also pregnant and wanting an abortion.

After arriving in Solvang, the gals discover their hotel reservations have gone missing. With no place to stay, they hit up another local hotel hoping to book a room. Alas, this old hotel is no longer a hotel, but a living history museum. They meet the owner, a meek and lightly strange man named Ernest. Just before the girls leave, Ernest decides to make them a friendly offer. They can stay with him at his home. Because this is a horror movie, the girls immediately accept the offer.

Upon arriving, they meet Ernest’s perpetually distraught wife, Virginia, and settle into their rooms. Vicki is tired and in need of a bath so she hangs back while Jennifer and Karen hit the town to get some footage of the parade. As she lounges in the tub, Ernest spies on her through a keyhole. Vicki’s day goes from bad to worse when she is dragged into a heating vent by someone – or something – with obvious anger management issues.

So far, so fine. It’s your standard horror set-up. Young, lovely lasses accept an offer of shelter from a kindly stranger only to meet sticky ends at the hands of a maniacal family. But something is definitely off here. First, the setting is clearly quite strange, set up in a way to simulate the typical ‘fish out of water’ horror trope without ever having to spend the dough on stock footage of a plane landing and maybe a few foreign sounding street signs to sell the illusion that we’re no longer in Kansas anymore. I'll freely admit, going for a California Danish town instead of simply pretending to be in an actual Danish town is ballsy and unexpected, but let's not mince words. A backwoods community would have sufficed. But that's only the tip of the strange iceberg that is THE UNSEEN.

What kind of news crew sends two women, one with a 16mm camera and the other with a microphone that’s very clearly not plugged into anything, to film a news report? That seems a bit odd. And if Solvang is a few hours car ride from home, why do these women even need a hotel room in the first place? Couldn’t they just drive home? Why do we cut to Virginia graphically decapitating a live chicken or to a shot of a cat licking a shoe? Is it just to accentuate the weirdness of the whole damn film? Maybe it’s best not to dwell on the particulars, but Steinmann is clearly up to something here. Jennifer divulges her pregnancy to Tony while puffing on a cigarette. Ernest’s past trauma is delivered completely through auditory flashback, his angry father’s voice pitched one notch below R. Lee Ermey’s Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Maybe this wasn’t ever meant to be a straight horror film at all? Maybe, just maybe, instead of screaming, I'm supposed to be laughing?

Ernest’s dirty little secret, in case you’re wondering, is that Virginia is not really his wife. She’s his sister. Ernest had raped Virginia many years ago, a terrible act which resulted in a pregnancy and the end result of said pregnancy was Junior, a gibbering slob they keep locked up in the basement. Junior mistakes our bubbly leads for playthings, resulting in Vicki and Karen’s deaths. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Ernest locks Jennifer in the basement, hoping Junior will snap her pretty neck. Unfortunately for Ernest, Virginia is getting awfully sick of his cruel games and Junior… well, Junior isn’t too fond of his dad either.

The final act of THE UNSEEN is one of the strangest final acts in all of horror. Practically wordless, much of the action focuses on a four way fight for survival. Not only is Jennifer fighting to survive, but Ernest, Virginia and Junior take their sweet time bashing, slapping, clubbing, pushing and punching their way through long standing family resentment issues. Although 99% of the finale occurs in a basement, Steinmann still finds a way to soak Barbara Bach’s ultra thin shirt with water, even offering up what could be seen as a dry run for Pam’s slow crawl away from Roy during the ending of FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART V: A NEW BEGINNING.

As the villain of the piece, Junior is, shall we say, problematic and not just because the make up effects for the character were purposefully designed to make Junior look as if he had down syndrome (it was the 1980s, people). Junior is meant (I think) to be sympathetic. He doesn’t attack Jennifer when he first meets her. He tries playing with her. He even gives her a teddy bear. He also gibbers and moans CONSTANTLY. Ceaselessly. Endlessly. Infinitely. And as we spend a good three or four minutes with Junior and Jennifer before all hell breaks loose, Junior stops being threatening and starts becoming insufferable. Worse, Steinmann and Co. have him bounce around the room like a gorilla, slapping himself in the chest, bellowing and grunting like Kong trying to impress Ann Darrow. It’s both laughably lame and yes, completely distasteful.

But again, I don’t really know what the fuck this movie is even trying to be. If it’s comedy, it’s bad comedy. If it’s horror, it’s bad horror. Once I reached the point in the film where Ernest placed clothes pins on his nose to threaten his sister/lover/punching bag, my brain just kind of shut off. I gave up, or gave in, or whichever. I sat there and allowed the film to take me wherever it wanted, and where it took me was so damn bizarre that I left somewhat impressed. It’s a minor miracle that a film like this was ever made within a studio system, let alone attracted talent like Bach, Sydney Lassick and Lelia Goldoni. It’s a Bizarro World rendition of TOURIST TRAP or THE FUNHOUSE. I mean, did Steinmann and Co. really give Jennifer an unwanted pregnancy in an attempt at arguing that it would be better to abort a child than have it born into a dysfunctional family, that giving birth to an unwanted child is to run the risk of giving birth to a drooling, unibrowed halfwit with murderous tendencies?

You know what? Maybe it really is best not to dwell on the particulars. At the end of the day, THE UNSEEN is odd enough to recommend, but too damn weird to truly love.

DEMONOID

The universe is full of mysteries, large and small. Is there anything beyond the material world? Was there anything before the Big Bang? The intricacies of quantum field theory, the explanation of abiogenesis, how Friends managed to stay on the air for 10 goddamn seasons… Some of the great mysteries of our time, maybe even unanswerable ones. I would like to add to that list of magnificent mysteries the following conundrum: why the hell are there so many horror movies about killer disembodied hands?

While I don't doubt that chirophobia is a real thing, I would imagine a great majority of people don't find themselves losing sleep over the idea that a disembodied hand might be lurking beneath their bed. It's a ludicrous idea. What could it possibly do to you besides poke you in the eye or clumsily fondle your genitals? Good luck strangling someone to death only using the muscles in your hand. Good luck tossing something heavy through the air without using your wrist. I can buy the idea of Thing being a useful addition to The Addams Family. He would pick up lightweight items like a phone receiver or a post card or two. He would even play chess with Gomez (and no, I don't know how a hand knows how to do any of that) from time to time. Easy enough, right? Small, lightweight game pieces? Well within the range of possibility. But when you ask me to believe that a disembodied hand can throttle a human being to death... Come on now. Even I have my limits.

But the disembodied killer hand of Alfredo Zacarias' DEMONOID isn't just a regular old hand. It's the Devil's Hand and as such, this bad boy can do all manner of things. It can shoot someone in the back. It can stow away on a train. It can crush heads and break bones, possess people's minds and bodies, honk car horns, and even seal and mail a package. And it does all of this while being not just the Devil's Hand, but the Devil's LEFT Hand. Now THAT is impressive.

So what about the movie this Devil's Hand stars in? How impressive is that? Welllllll

Meet Jennifer, a bubbling brook of unbridled optimism. And meet her husband Mark, a man who is one Tequila shot away from putting a gun in his mouth. Mark is having a hard time with his recently purchased Mexican oil mine. Not only has it been shut down for quite some time, Mark can't even find anyone willing to work there. It is, as these things always are in horror movies, considered “cursed” by the locals. In an effort to show the locals just how cursed this "cursed" mine is, Jennifer and Mark decide to do a bit of spelunking. They find ancient remnants of some mysterious cult and a metal relic, the same relic thought to contain the dreaded Devil's Hand.

Turns out, it does indeed contain a disembodied evil killer hand. Once unleashed, the Devil's Hand possesses Mark and Mark in turns forces every local he can find into the mine before blowing it up with a large amount of explosives. His job done, Mark flees Mexico and spends an unspecified amount of time gambling in Las Vegas. You can add “great at craps” to the list of things the Devil's Hand excels at. But being good at gambling in Las Vegas has a downside. Mark is kidnapped by two hustlers looking to learn the secrets of his success. Unfortunately, their threats anger Ol' Leftie so Mark murders the both of them. In a moment of clarity, Mark decides to end his relationship with the Devil's Hand. He douses himself with gasoline and POOF! up he goes in a ball of flames.

Jennifer finally manages to track Mark down only to find out that he's been burnt to a crisp. Fearing the Hand has made it's escape, Jennifer enlists the help of a priest, an old boxer named Father Cunningham. When they visit Mark's grave, they find it destroyed from within, as if the crispy corpse of Mark had dug it's way out. And yep, that's exactly what happened. The Devil's Hand clumsily walks Mark's corpse over to a cop car, severs itself from the body using the car door, and then waits patiently for a beat cop to return. When he does, the Devil's Hand goes into action, possessing the cop before driving off into the night.

And that is, more or less, how the entire film plays out. The Devil's Hand possesses someone then attacks Jennifer. Jennifer gives a modicum of resistance before giving up. The hand is severed, the cycle begins again. Apparently, the Devil's Hand is out for Jennifer specifically. No real reason for this plot development is given other than “she was the one who found it and brought it home” which is a great excuse for why a rescue dog won't stop licking your face, but not a great reason for why a disembodied hand won't stop trying to kill a woman.

But logical thought and narrative integrity is clearly not what DEMONOID is interested in. This is a movie in which a possessed cop storms a clinic, gun in hand, and matter-of-factly tells a doctor “you cut my hand off or I'll kill you”. The doctor, of course, complies, gets himself possessed by the Devil's Hand, and then goes on a rampage, leading to a long car chase with the police. Why exactly does any of this happen? Is the Devil's Hand, a body-hopping supernatural entity, really concerned with getting arrested? Does he have priors on his record? Maybe child support payments due? The Devil's Hand can clearly reanimate whole corpses so why is it suddenly concerned with not being shot by the cops? Given that this hand can seemingly do anything it damn well pleases, there really isn't a reason for any of this to be happening. This movie could have been 20 minutes long.

But if it were shorter, we wouldn't have time for the obvious and wholly annoying rip-off of THE EXORCIST. Father Cunningham, like Father Karras, likes to box. He has a struggle with his faith. The end scene involves someone pleading for the Devil's Hand to possess them instead of it's current victim. Of all the thousands upon thousands of movies DEMONOID could have chosen for rip-off material, it had to choose one of the most serious minded and realistically portrayed supernatural horror movies of all time. DEMONOID is neither of those two things.

So there is a tonal problem with this film. Hell, there are many problems with this film. Even at 80 minutes, it feels 20 minutes too long, primarily because it keeps going over the same ground again and again. The dialogue is laughably bad, the direction is lazy and the score is grating to say the least. Roy Jenson and Stuart Whitman are both bored to tears by the material and it shows in their performances. Thankfully, even though she's spewing horrible dialogue and having to act terrified of a plastic hand that's been taped to her hair, Samantha Eggar is on top of her game here, all bug eyes and histrionics. She at least gives the film a pulse.

And yeah, the Devil's Hand is great, even if the effects work is shoddy. I got a few laughs out of the film as a result. It isn't a painful experience to get through, but it isn't a great time either. It's mostly a bore, with precious little in the way of gore or nudity to help pass the time. It's the kind of movie that would benefit from commercial breaks. You could get up every five or six minutes, grab a bite to eat, take a piss, or throw a brick at a neighborhood kid. Maybe even have a shot or two of whiskey. And that's how I would recommend watching DEMONOID, piss faced drunk or in six minute chunks over the course of a few hours. Trust me, it won't hurt the experience. There's really nowhere to go but up.

FADE TO BLACK

Vernon Zimmerman's 1980 slasher-thriller FADE TO BLACK is a film I probably would not have enjoyed as much had I seen it as a teenager. On its surface, it's a slasher film like every other slasher film. We have a lead, a loner named Eric Binford, who develops a serious crush on a wannabe actress who bears a striking resemblance to Marilyn Monroe. After he is stood up on their first date, Eric's already tenuous grasp on reality slips, leading him to commit a series of murders.

That's the gist of the film. That right there comprises the majority of the films narrative, with the addition of a hippie psychologist and his cop girlfriend tossed in to help bring the film to its bloody conclusion. But FADE TO BLACK, like SCREAM, VIDEO VIOLENCE and PEEPING TOM, embraces the old canard that birthed, among other things, the Video Nasty scandal. Beneath the ordinary surface of slasher film cliches and tropes lies the old argument. The pathology of cinema, the idea that perhaps exposure to violent media can lead to violent behavior.

Eric's first violent encounter has him pushing his wheelchair-bound mother down a flight of stairs as scenes from KISS OF DEATH, Henry Hathaways's unnerving 1947 film noir, are inter-cut with his actions. He then changes his name (and his behavior) to Cody Jarrett, the murderous, morally corrupt lead from Raoul Walsh's WHITE HEAT, before assuming the identity of several film characters for a batch of killings that sees him punishing everyone who abuses him.

But truth be told, the argument at the core of FADE TO BLACK isn't so much one of “do violent movies cause violent behavior?” as it is “does escapism come with a cost?”. Eric doesn't really have much of a life. He lives with his mother, does a poor job working at a film distributor, and spends most of his time chain smoking, a behavior we assume comes from watching classic films where the handsome lead always had a cigarette dangling from his lips. Instead of people skills, Eric has a vast knowledge of movies. When he first meets the Marilyn lookalike in a diner (it doesn't help that her name actually is Marilyn), he attempts to woo her with his knowledge of Monroe films. There is no real normal small talk. When he attempts to win her over with movie trivia, he even addresses her as if she were Marilyn Monroe, asking her what movie Tom Ewell took her to see in THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH.

We quickly begin to learn that for Eric, reality is largely an inconvenience. It's just something he has to deal with from time to time. Eric feels more comfortable with movies than he does with the reality around him. When confronted by the sometimes harsh realities of ordinary day-to-day life, Eric prefers the realm of escapism because it provides him solace and answers. Eric might not know how to deal with being bullied, but Hopalong Cassidy certainly would. After being rejected by a prostitute, Eric takes on the persona of Dracula, because, after all, women don't say no to the Count. The finale finds Eric completely enveloped in the personality of Jame Cagney's Cody Jarrett. And why wouldn't he be? Jarrett, like Eric, was a man who felt he deserved more than he was worth, but unlike Eric, Jarrett didn't take no for an answer and wasn't above putting those he felt were beneath him in their rightful place.

FADE TO BLACK might not be the most successful at pulling off this kind of self-reflective ambition, but the film bristles with psychological intrigue. Buoyed by a fantastic lead performance by Dennis Christopher, Zimmerman's film teeters between gleeful self-parody and fierce self-analysis. It's free of any overburdening pretentiousness, largely because, as much as it is a straight-up meta-horror film, it is also structured and presented as your standard slasher film. It has a serious question at its core, one that deserves less dismissal among film fans, but it is presented in a way that allows you to ignore it. You don't need to engage with the film on any kind of intellectual level to enjoy it. As a pure slasher film, it works just as well.

But bear in mind that the film was meant for people in their 30s and above. It is drowning in references to the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. When I was teenager, I highly doubt I would have gotten much out of the references and homages (outside of the clever PSYCHO homage, that is). Part of the fun is watching some of these references get turned on their head, like watching a good guy like Hopalong Cassidy gun down a bully in the middle of a dirty alleyway. The film does assume its audience has some knowledge of classic cinema. I'm sure you can ignore much of it and still enjoy the film, but if you, like Eric Binford, have spent your days absorbing the classics and the not-so-classics of the Golden Age of cinema, FADE TO BLACK will truly blossom before your eyes into something expertly clever and ghoulishly surprising.

PROM NIGHT

PROM NIGHT begins with the Past Trauma. A quartet of kids are playing hide and seek in an abandoned school house. Their juvenile shenanigans end when their friend, a little girl named Robin, takes a tumble out a window, falling to her death. The remaining kids, well aware that their needlessly callous behavior was what caused poor Robin to fall out the window, swear to never tell anyone that they played some part in the accident. The police begin their investigation, eventually targeting a sexual predator named Leonard Merch. When Merch's arrest goes south, the felon ends up badly burned. But no matter, the police have their man and Merch is swiftly institutionalized.

Six years later, we play catch up with our now teenage leads. Our original quartet – Wendy, Nick, Jude and Kelly – have all left the past in the past. Well, not all of them. Nick is still struggling with his guilt, something that is made all the more difficult to deal with as he is currently dating Kim, Robin's sister, and is even friends with her brother, Alex. Kim and Nick's relationship grates on Wendy's jealous nerves so she schemes with Lou, the high school bad boy, to play a naughty trick on Kim during the prom.

If they live that long.

Seems someone has it out for our leads, threatening them over the phone and vandalizing their lockers. Could it be Kim and Alex's father, the school principle? Is it Sykes, the weirdo school handyman? Or maybe it's Leonard Merch, the wrongfully convicted man. After all, he has recently escaped the asylum, leaving a dead nurse in his wake. Whoever it is, he or she is connected to the accident from six years ago. Something awfully bloody is about to go down at Hamilton High on the night of the big senior prom.

Well, moderately bloody anyway.

Time is a gigantic sieve. In the 1980s, slasher films were a dime a dozen, flooding theaters month in, month out at a relentless pace. Plenty of good films were wrongfully derided solely because they too closely resembled films that were rightfully derided. I remember watching slasher films in the 1980s and rolling my eyes the entire time, all because I had finished watching a similar film just two hours before. It's difficult to have perspective when you're bored with formula. I had been rendered numb by overexposure. Too many movies telling too many similar stories released in too short a time frame can add up to a seemingly insurmountable mountain of monotony. But time, that glorious bastard, has a way of taking a mountain of shit and separating out the diamonds. Plenty of slasher films have rightfully faded into obscurity. The ones that haven't are still around for damn good reasons. They're either spectacular trash or gnarly little gems. 

PROM NIGHT is a definite gem of a slasher film. I remember seeing it on TV when I was a kid and thinking about how much it resembled HALLOWEEN and other films like it. But with a little hindsight, it's easy to see that PROM NIGHT is most definitely not like most slasher films. In fact, what really sets it apart is just how little “slasher film” this slasher film has in it.

By the time this 90 minute film hits the 60 minute mark, all of our characters are still breathing. There's a large amount of time given over to not just setting up the story, but purposefully misleading the audience into thinking the film will play out a specific way, only to change course a few scenes later, only to change course again. It relies on popular horror cliches to accomplish this. We have a sinister mystery man making phone calls to our guilty leads. Clearly, the killer will be Someone Who Knows What They Did Six Summers Ago. Then we move on to Merch, the escapee pursued by a cop and a psychologist, a la HALLOWEEN. Then we devolve into more personal thriller territory where our suspicions begin to be directed towards someone in our group of protagonists. While this is all going on, the film works in other bits of plot lifted from non-slasher horror films like CARRIE and more than a few moments lifted from non-horror teenage comedies or dramas.

In a way, PROM NIGHT reminds me of THE BURNING, another 1980s slasher film that spent more time developing the cast of characters than eviscerating them. Both films wait until the final third to really thin out the cast and both films are so much better for it. Simply put, suspense and horror work best when you actually care about the people trapped inside the celluloid, when the characters feel like people and not just bowling pins waiting to be knocked down. The characters on display in PROM NIGHT all have personality. They're all likeable. They might not look like teenagers, but they certainly act and talk like them. They have wants and needs and quirks and charm and the film goes so far out of its way to get you invested in their stupid little lives that when they finally shuffle off this mortal coil, it kinda sucks to see them go.

“But Dave”, you ask, “what about the horror in this horror movie?” Well, it exists. That much is for sure. PROM NIGHT features one or two well crafted stalking sequences, but for the most part, the violence is swift and never really lingered on. Of course, it was chopped to shit by the MPAA (worse, recent widescreen releases rob the film of its nudity thanks to cropping) so don't expect too much in the way of gore. However, there is a rather glorious scene of a disembodied head rolling across a dance floor, one of the all time great scenes in a 1980s slasher film.

But really, PROM NIGHT just is just as effective a slasher film as, say, FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER, just in a different way. It takes the giallo approach of being more character minded and steadily paced, leaving gory body count action for other films to indulge in. The attention to character gives immediacy to the set pieces and the finale is a diabolic downer. Far from being just another “me too” cash grab, PROM NIGHT is a genuinely good horror film, loaded with wit and charm. Depending on what you're looking for in a slasher film, it might come off as a bit long winded and anemic, but hey, it's not like you don't have 500 other 1980s slasher films to watch instead.