DEAD & BURIED

Gary Sherman followed up his socio-political cannibal thriller debut RAW MEAT with another genre-bending shocker, 1981's DEAD & BURIED. It's a strange film, a mix of Twilight Zone morality tale and full blooded horror. It begins with your typical horror movie shock opening, all bared breasts and bloody violence, before moving into mystery territory. The opening murder is but one of many that have been occurring in the small, idyllic town of Potter's Bluff. Unknown to the police, these murders are being committed by a group of locals, many of whom bring cameras along with them to the scene of the crime. As the clueless town sheriff continues his investigation, he quickly discovers that his neighbors are not who they appear to be and neither, so it seems, is reality.

After all, there is no rational explanation for why the murder victims are suddenly being spotted all over town, quite alive and quite happy. That sort of thing doesn't happen in real world, does it? So what is the explanation for the ever-escalating madness in Potter's Bluff? Is it terrible science or is it devilry?

I won't spoil the ending of the film for those of you who haven't seen it, though chances are you'll figure it all out well before the final half hour rolls around. That final half hour, by the way, is where Sherman's otherwise excellent thriller starts to fall apart. DEAD & BURIED has a twist ending and that ending really only works the first time through the film. A properly executed twist ending should clarify narrative events. It should elicit cries of “a ha! Now it all makes sense!”. With knowledge of the twist in mind, a repeat viewing should reveal hidden depths. You should be able to see the strings. It's like knowing how a magician pulled off his trick. While the ending of DEAD & BURIED carries an emotional wallop, it unfortunately brings up more questions than the film actually answers, revealing the otherwise carefully constructed plot to be little more than a shaky house of cards.

So whenever I watch DEAD & BURIED I try my damnedest to put that ending out of my mind. I do my best to overlook how none of this shit really makes sense. I focus instead on all the fantastic things Sherman crammed into his film, like the excellent atmosphere of its setting. I have quite the fondness for horror movies set in small, isolated towns where everything seems to be just a touch off from the norm. I focus on the great performances from its great cast of character actors like Robert Englund, Jack Albertson and Lisa Blount. I pay extra close attention to the fine make-up effects work of Stan Winston. Yes, sir, there is a lot to love about DEAD & BURIED.

In a lot of ways, this is a kitchen sink kind of film. The isolated town full of crazies, the zombies, the face melting body horror, the talk of voodoo and witchcraft, the strange snuff films, the random bits of nudity… Were it not for that damn ending, I think DEAD & BURIED would be some kind of forgotten mini-masterpiece of strange horror, one whose chief claim to fame was landing on the dreaded DPP Video Nasty list back in the 1980s. But I just can't deny it. That ending hurts. Sherman created his own little Icarus here. So close to greatness. If only those wings didn't fall apart.

MUTILATIONS

Larry Thomas' 1986 sci-fi horror flick MUTILATIONS exists somewhere between THE GALAXY INVADER and EQUINOX. It begins with a 3 minute credit sequence of stock space photography and Casio music before introducing us to our characters, all of whom played by actors clearly reading their lines off of cue cards. The dialogue is forced and unnatural. It sounds like someone reading from a Wikipedia article. For example, after one of his students remarks that people look at him funny when he mentions aliens, Professor McFarland, our brave and learned hero, opines: 

PROFESSOR: “Roger, people react that way one, because they're ignorant and two, because many are frightened of the possibility that intelligent life may exist.” 

That leads to the following exchange. 

FEMALE STUDENT: “But NASA has made it more acceptable in popular thinking by sending out space probes to prove or disprove the existence of life on other planets in our own solar system.”

PROFESSOR: “And there is a group in Washington known as SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence that's conducting all sorts of reports into and investigations of UFO incidents and the possible communication of radio telescopes.” 

MALE STUDENT: “But didn't the US Air Force just begins receiving UF reports in 1947?”

*** NOTE: And yes, that is a 100% accurate transcription. I didn't fuck up. They did. ***

And on and on it goes for several minutes, offering up all the exposition it deems necessary in an attempt to make its slim plot seem credible. It soon becomes apparent that even though we are inside an astronomy classroom, scientific rigor isn't the Professor's strong suit. We hear all about ancient aliens, weird luminous lights in the night skies and cattle mutilations. All this talk of little green men prompts the Professor and his class to take a field trip to a place called Berry Hill, a farming town beset by alleged extra terrestrial hooligans.

Once our crew arrives in Berry Hill, MUTILATIONS stops being a slow and disastrous mess of a sci-fi flick and becomes… well, it never stops being disastrous, but it does become a hell of a lot of fun. Even more surprisingly, it becomes quite impressive. Unlike the Galaxy Invaders of Don Dohler, the aliens in MUTILATIONS are largely presented as giant stop motion animated beasties (with the occasional use of puppetry). It's DIY Harryhausen stuff and while it certainly isn't convincing, I was impressed by how much effort Thomas and Co. put into the man vs. alien battle scenes. Most filmmakers on a micro budget would have just thrown together a cheap costume for their creatures and called it a day.

I'm of the opinion that a bad practical effect will always be infinitely better than a bad digital effect, if only because that bad practical effect existed in reality. Someone had to make the appliance, glue it down, put paint all over it, etc. Someone had to build the spacecraft, design the model, manipulate it on camera, etc. There's a charm to practical special effects, especially the less than stellar kind. I love 1950s sci-fi B movies with their obvious plastic flying saucers and rubber suit aliens. I love it when I can see the zipper, although I love it even more when I can't. Digital effects will never have that charm. These days, you can create massive space battles or epic war scenes with thousands and thousands of ships, planes, orcs, humans, aliens, whatever the hell you want with computers. The only limiting factor it seems is the imagination of the filmmakers and the patience of the people doing the programming. But while digital effects can be stunning, transformative and even transcendent bits of movie magic… there's nothing really there.

That's why watching a rubber suit monster feels different than watching a CGI creation. One is actually on screen, actually walking through sets, actually existing. The other is just polygons and meshes and textures. So when MUTILATIONS starts throwing plastic spacecraft at the house our heroes are currently hiding in, I smiled like an idiot. When Professor McFarland faced off against a stop motion alien monster (in poorly composited fashion, no less), I was giddy with nerdy joy. There's a terrific scene where an alien punches through a woman's back, it's scaly claw like hand erupting from her stomach. Instead of pulling the woman free, the Professor proceeds to cut the alien's arm off at the elbow. THEN they pull the appendage from the woman's stomach. It's corny, not very well executed and all around fucking great.

The final act of the film happens in tunnels that resemble, probably not coincidentally, the sets from PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. All the lighting becomes gelled, just blues, pinks and reds. The camera work become hyperactive, real Raimi-esque with sharp whips and pans punctuated by unexpected close-ups. I stopped caring about the crappy dialogue and crappier performances. I didn't care that they didn't just buy a mouse from a pet shop and instead used an oversized stuffed rat from a toy store. I didn't care anymore that the film was cheap and sloppy.

More effort went into making MUTILATIONS than probably went into making half of all slasher films. You can tell that the people making this film gave a shit about it and were actually trying to produce something worthy of an audience. This film would never win any awards. It won't be mentioned in the same breath as ALIEN or THE THING. Well, fuck accolades. This movie has heart and a mountain of low budget charm. The effects work might not be Hollywood caliber, but it is certainly far more ambitious than what you would normally see in a super low budget sci-fi B flick from the 1980s. It's a shame that Larry Thomas never made another film (hell, most people involved with MUTILATIONS never worked again on a film). This was a damn good start. He could have been a cult favorite by now.

THE BLOB (1958) & THE BLOB (1988)

Something has crash landed in the woods outside a small Pennsylvania town. It isn't a space ship or some interplanetary probe. It's a meteorite, a small chunk of stone that just so happens to be filled with a sentient, viscous nightmare. In other words, a Blob. Its reign of terror begins simple enough, slowly devouring an old hermit. It then sloppily eats a nurse, then a doctor, then a mechanic before finally gobbling down a dozen or so late night moviegoers at the town cinema. Its ravenous appetite is limitless. Unfortunately, the only people aware of its presence are Steve and Jane, two teenage lovebirds unable to convince the townsfolk that their lives are in danger. 

THE BLOB fits nicely into the Red Scare sci-fi b-movie trend of the 1950s. The setting is small town America where the coppers are all stand-up guys and the kids are viewed as delinquents in need of stricter parental supervision. Everything looks like a Norman Rockwell painting. Introduced into this environment is the “outsider”, the Blob, an entity that doesn't just kill the hapless denizens of Bumblefuck, PA, but assimilates them. Every body it absorbs makes it larger, more indestructible and, to fit the “fear the Russians” allegory, every ounce of flesh consumed makes it more and more Red. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS played a more sophisticated game with its Red Scare paranoia, with alien pods that replace everyday Americans with mindless (Communist) clones, but the underlying threat in THE BLOB isn't that much different. The more it consumes, the more it grows. Each flag waving individual it devours only makes it a more dangerous, more complicated threat to handle.

Like other 1950s sci-fi flicks, THE BLOB isn't just a great bit of sociopolitical commentary, it's also a great bit of fun. It had a smaller budget than most films of its kind and one would imagine that budget would have constrained the imagination of its director, Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr. The fact that the film is as impressive as it is visually is a minor miracle. The Blob of THE BLOB is not your typical 1950s sci-fi monster. It isn't humanoid in design. It couldn't be faked through miniatures or puppets. Today, the effects are as expected, not mind blowing or even very convincing, but the sheer level of ingenuity on display in the film is definitely worthy of respect. By choosing not to use your average, ordinary alien beastie in their film, Yeaworth, Jr. and Co. created a schlocky shocker that feels unique within the pantheon of Alien Invasion flicks.

Of course, THE BLOB is also well known for being the feature film debut of Steve McQueen. He delivers a fine performance in the film (though no one would ever confuse the 28 year old actor for a teenager), understated and immediately likeable. In fact, the entire film is well acted, well scored, well filmed and well directed. It's a thoroughly enjoyable flick, one completely deserving of its cult status. But I think the most remarkable thing about THE BLOB is how refreshing it feels to watch. 

There are no military men in THE BLOB. Not a single Army vehicle rolls into town to stop the menace. There's no cornball humor either, relying instead on subtle (and not so subtle) reversals of popular sci-fi tropes for its humor. It's also remarkably playful at times. I can imagine what it must have been like to sit in the glorious Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, PA, and watch the film play out. After all, the Colonial was the theater used for the famous scene of the Blob, massive and blood red, pouring from the projectionist booth into the auditorium, hungrily devouring every person it touches. It's a gag William Castle would have been envious of and it must have been quite the fright for the filmgoers catching a light night showing of the film.

At the climax, it isn't the military or a team of scientists that save the town from the great Red Scare. It's a collection of teenagers, cops, firefighters and other ordinary citizens. The only thing missing is a shot of Old Glory blowing in the breeze.

In 1988, Chuck Russell was brought aboard to helm a remake of THE BLOB by studio execs at TriStar. Russell had proven himself capable of helming large scale, effects driven films, even though he was still a newcomer to the director's chair. His previous film was his first, the mega money making A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS. He was a good choice and he turned in good work, but just like John Carpenter's re-imagining of Christian Nyby and Howard Hawk's THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, success was not in the cards for 1988's THE BLOB.

The remake begins by feeling an awful lot like the original. In fact, were it not for the hair styles sported by the cast, you might think this film was set in the 1950s. The boys all walk around in their varsity jackets with “gee golly” expressions on their faces. They're embarrassed to buy condoms in front of a priest and awkwardly meet their girlfriend's parents before going out on dates. They even go up to lookout point to neck and fool around. The film feels odd, especially for a sci-fi horror flick from the late 1980s. For the first third of the film, it feels drenched in the same quaint, quiet atmosphere of its forebear.

But the 1980s doesn't stay off the screen for long. While the film does follow the original almost beat for beat, the graphic violence that was the hallmark of 1980s horror shows up in full force once the Blob takes its first victim. And it doesn't let up. Thanks to advancements in special effects (and a nearly 19 million dollar budget, a massive increase from 110,000 spent on the original), the Blob of this THE BLOB is a much more terrifying beast. Yeaworth, Jr. was happy to give us a few glimpses of a man covered in slime from time to time, but Russell and his effects crew really put on a nasty show here. A man is pulled headfirst into a sink drain. A woman is crushed inside a telephone booth. A child is dissolved before our eyes. It's a wonderfully grotesque film with a monster that is far more proactive in its rampage, slinging tendrils through the air, slamming itself down on people running through the streets and even, in a scene that makes no logical sense, exploding out of the corpse of a young Erika Eleniak.

The graphic violence isn't the only bit of 1980s horror to worm its way inside the film. The cynicism that ran rampant through the decade is here in full force as well. Unlike the original, the Blob of this film isn't a space entity that accidentally crashed on Earth. It's a government experiment, a nasty bit of biological warfare that was shot into space because it was too dangerous to be kept on Earth. When it finally makes its return, the organism has been mutated by its time orbiting the planet. A group of military and government scientists show up, quarantine the town and go about trying to capture the Blob. Not for humanitarian reasons, of course. No, they want to use it again as a weapon. As a result, this small town with its small people is to be considered expendable.

Russell's THE BLOB feels a bit too angry at times, or at the very least, a bit too bitter. The inclusion of government conspiracies and military men willing to let men, women and children die horrible deaths to secure the Blob… I would be lying if I said that the 1988 version of the film is far less enjoyable than the original, at least on a narrative level. There was a charming simplicity to the original film and that simplicity is gone here. The government boys and military men show up too late in the film to ever feel like more than just another plot complication. 1980s horror was rife with anti-authoritarian sentiment, but I'm not sure I can ever fully equate government men with a sloppy ball of acidic slime. That's what the film wants me to do. It wants to me to think that there are not two monsters in the film, the government and the Blob. There's just one. Anything government related is monstrous.

The film even ends with a psychotic preacher holding a bit of the Blob hostage in a glass container, waiting for the moment when God instructs him to unleash it once again on the world. All authorities are corrupt, all institutions evil. This is par for the course with many 80s horror films and really, by turning the Blob into just another man-made monstrosity, that's ultimately what Russell's film becomes. Just a horror movie. The sci-fi elements go by the wayside and the humor largely goes with it. I do enjoy the 1988 version of THE BLOB. I think it's a gross, gooey, great time. I just don't think the underlying cynicism is earned. It feels forced and predictable, slapped on as an extra bit of edgy social commentary. The Red Scare allegory of the original worked because it felt organic. The remake is just angry for the sake of being angry.

While the original film went on to make a lot of money, Russell's film sank at the box office. Both films have since become cult classics and the reason for that lies squarely with their antagonists. The Blob of THE BLOB is a unique, semi-Lovecraftian nightmare, one of the most unique hostile lifeforms ever seen on screen. It wasn't just an oversized bug or a humanoid creature. It's something different, something not easily categorized. A giant, blood red, acidic amoeba with a bad case of the munchies, the Blob has lived on in popular culture for a damn good reason. It's too cool of a creature, too hideous and repulsive, to easily ignore. It sticks in your memory as easily as it sticks to tender flesh. And once it grabs hold, it's nigh impossible to remove. It sticks to your brain. Once seen, it isn't easily forgotten.

THE STRANGENESS

David Michael Hillman's 1985 snoozefest THE STRANGENESS begins with two idiots attempting to surreptitiously blast open a sealed over entrance to the Golden Spike Mine, a long abandoned gold mine located, well, somewhere in America. The fact that they've been instructed to do this in the middle of the night by some mysterious, unnamed individual is our first clue that something not quite kosher is going on here. Our second clue is that a few minutes after achieving their goal, some snarling, unseen beastie drags our two idiots into the darkness, silencing their horrible line delivery once and for all.

An unspecified amount of time later, Myron Hemmings, a seemingly well off corporate type, leads a small group into the mine on a bit of an expedition. Along for the ride is Dan, a writer interested in the supernatural tales of monsters and death that have sprung up around the mine since its closing years back, and his hot blonde photographer wife, Cindy. There's also Angela, a geologist whose work equipment consists of nothing but a magnifying glass and a ball-peen hammer, and Morgan, a heavy drinking prospector with an ever-changing accent. Rounding out the group are two spelunkers, Tony and Geoff, the latter being a bit of a creeper who takes a shining to Dan's hot wife.

So why was the mine closed all those years back? Was it a labor dispute? Was it ghosts? Was it a giant penis-headed vagina monster that spews acid?

If you guessed it was because the mine is indeed home to a giant penis-headed vagina monster, pat yourself on the back because you guessed right. After a cave in traps them deep inside the mine, our cast of do-nothings find themselves wandering in the dark tunnels while the pecker-faced pussy beast bumps them off one by one. Oh, and the person that paid our two pre-credit sequence idiots to open up the mine? Yeah, that was Hemmings, adding one more threat to the mix. Will anyone survive the night in the mines, or will they all end up dead, either at the business end of a pickaxe or in a puddle of corrosive vaginal mucus spermy stuff?

Let me get this out of the way first. This movie is horribly paced. Not counting the pre-credit fodder, we have to wait approximately 60 minutes before a single person kicks the bucket. That's 60 minutes of characters wandering in the dark doing absolutely nothing. We get to see Angela knock a rock off the wall and sniff it. We get to watch Geoff throw multiple passes at Cindy. We get some terrible moments of humor from both Dan and Morgan, and that's really about it. Sure, there are some attempts at building atmosphere by having characters talk about Native American legends surrounding the mine or about how dozens of people have died in the tunnels they're now walking through, but that doesn't really add much to the film. In fact, it makes the long wait worse. It fills your head with all these great possibilities.

Ghosts! Monsters! Evil Native American gods! Wow! 

And then nothing. Just people walking and talking, shining flashlights, periodically lighting flares. It becomes clear as the film goes on where Hillman and Co. took their inspirations from. There's quite a bit of ALIEN here. There's more than a little John Carpenter's THE THING here. But the slow start of Ridley Scott's film is justified by the atmosphere of LV-426 and the mystery of the crashed alien space ship. THE THING gives us the destroyed Norwegian camp full of charred corpses. There's nothing like that in THE STRANGENESS. It's just rocks and darkness. No attempt at building a mythology. No finding a room full of bones or weird, alien-like constructs. Just nothing piled on top of nothing.

When the monster stuff finally kicks in at the 60 minute mark of this 90 minute movie, things perk up a bit, if only because the stop motion monster is absolutely, awesomely hilarious to behold. It's a mess of tentacles with a body that looks like it's made of brains. It's phallic head has a vagina shaped mouth that spits goo everywhere. Unfortunately, most of the kills occur off screen, robbing us of any kind of gruesome pleasures. There is however one showstopper of a death that actually made me cheer out loud. It's a scene this film desperately needed (actually, it needed about four more scenes like it) and when that moment happened, I felt genuine love swell in my cold, dead heart. But that scene had the unfortunate side effect of also amplifying my disappointment with the film. THE STRANGENESS could have been a great time. It could have been so much better.

I suppose it was a mix of budgetary constraints and lack of resources that killed the film. The pieces are all there. As evidenced by MY BLOODY VALENTINE, a mine is a great setting for a horror film. I loved the way the film was primarily lit using nothing but diegetic light sources like flares and flash lights. I love the absurdity of the monster. I even love the obvious Carpenter inspired soundtrack. But the film doesn't do much with those elements. The Hemmings subplot (another clear nod to ALIEN) goes nowhere, the monster is never explained, the setting is never properly utilized, and the lack of on screen violence feels like a cop out. It is just a bland, forgettable experience from start to finish. 

Wait. Make that “from start to 60 minutes”, because even though the final 30 minutes are not particularly great, they at least contain a glimpse of just how entertaining this film could have been had the filmmakers had a few more bucks in the bank. If you just skip to the one hour mark and ignore everything that came before, THE STRANGENESS might just do the job for you. But even that sounds like the faintest of praise. Because let's face it, if you have to throw out two thirds of a film just to enjoy it, maybe it isn't even worth consideration in the first place.

THE AFTERMATH

At the 20 minute mark, my mind began to wander. I thought about alphabetizing the stacks of VHS tapes sitting beside my desk. I noticed a wispy, torn cobweb in the corner of the room and decided that I need to clean this week. I thought about hitting up Amazon real quick to buy an Edgar Wallace compilation. Or maybe I could get one from the local used book store? Do I have any clean socks left or will I have to do laundry? I thought about making toast.

I finally settled on clipping my toe nails, a quick bit of personal hygiene that could be done with one eye on my tootsers and the other on my computer monitor. Once I finished, I checked the remaining time on the movie. Only ten minutes had passed since I first lost interest. I sighed and sat closer, leaning into the monitor, focusing as hard as I could on the film. Before I knew it, I had reorganized my desk, filing away the odds and ends of paperwork, putting all the doodads and trinkets in the Transformers lunch box I could never bring myself to throw away over the years. No matter how hard I tried, I could not pay attention to the film for more than 10 minutes. When the movie ended, I couldn't even remember the lead character's name. So I decided to watch it again, this time paying strict, concentrated attention to my monitor. But first, I needed coffee.

Three hours later, I sat down to watch the film a second time. It was difficult but I managed. I fought a mighty fight against the urge to click the Firefox icon in my task bar. I resisted the temptation to flip through books I had no interest in three hours ago, but now seemed like the most interesting thing in the world. I committed myself, body and soul, to watching THE AFTERMATH all the way through. So what did I think of it? 

Languid. That's the best word to describe this film. It's boring. So very, very boring. So maybe boring is actually the best word. Maybe there is no best word. Maybe I need to think about it for a little 

NO. I will not allow myself to procrastinate in writing a review of this film. The longer I go without thinking about it, the faster it will fade from memory. Even now, I can feel it slipping away. I need to get this out now, boredom be damned.

THE AFTERMATH tells the story of Newman, played by the film's writer/director Steve Barkett, and Matthews, two astronauts who return to Earth to find the place devastated by nuclear and biological warfare. After surviving an attack by mutants, Newman takes off into the city, Geiger counter in hand, to look for survivors. When a laser light show breaks out over the city, Newman seeks shelter in an old museum. There he meets an old man dying from radiation poisoning (played by the great Forrest Ackerman) and a young boy named Something or Another who is curiously NOT dying of radiation poisoning. Leaving the old man to die, Newman and the boy wander around a bit before being attacked by Sarah, a character who might as well have been named Nipples as her only real purpose in the film is to wander around in a barely there t-shirt with her high beams on. Nipples, I mean Sarah, tells Newman about Cutter, a rapist/slaver/murderer who has taken her friends captive. The three of them decide to free Sarah's friends, attacking Cutter and Co. in the dead of night. Though they manage to get away, this action has unpleasant consequences, leading Newman to go all Rambo on Cutter and his men in an overlong and wholly ridiculous bullet-filled finale.

THE AFTERMATH really only has three things working in its favor. One, the score by John Morgan. It's fantastic. Really energetic, memorable stuff. Two, the visual effects. The film is full of really great matte effects and some gooey gore, including a decapitation by shotgun blast. Three, Sid Haig. More on him in a second. Unfortunately, everything else is a total bore. An unmitigated, abysmal bore. I don't know if it was budgetary restrictions or just plain laziness, but this film is rife with scenes of Newman walking here, walking there, standing around, doing nothing much. Worse, the film employs voice-over, the ultimate indication that the producers thought their material was much more interesting than it actually turned out to be in the final edit. There are at least a dozen instances of Newman's voice-over just elaborating on the on-screen action. Newman sees a dead man in the street and the voice-over pontificates on finding a dead man in the street. Even more worse, every line of this voice-over sounds like it was ripped out of an old point and click adventure game. It's lifeless, unnecessary and completely off putting. But if it wasn't there, the film would have just been silent. It's like it never occurred to Barkett that he should just edit all the boring shit out of his movie.

Then there's Sid Haig as Cutter, the big bad of this film. Whenever Haig in on screen, THE AFTERMATH comes to life. He's an engaging actor, appropriately sleazy in the role, but the film does literally nothing with him. He shows up periodically, usually trying to rape one of the female characters, and then disappears from the film. Even when Newman – an ASTRONAUT – goes ballistic during the finale, killing everyone like he's Chow Yun-Fat, the film just leaves Cutter out of it. Instead, the big fist fight atop a building in the city is between Newman and some nameless sidekick character (who Newman shoots three goddamn times in the legs with a shotgun yet he can still manage to run around unfazed). Again, Barkett simply didn't understand what worked in his film and what didn't.  

We didn't need mutants, long passages of voice-over pontification, and a glacial pace leading to a 20 minute shootout. We needed more Cutter, more confrontations between the big bads and the heroes. That alone would have elevated this film to something entertaining. But instead THE AFTERMATH is a film that leaves its inciting incident (the murder of Sarah and her friends) off screen and then ruins its action movie catharsis by never letting Cutter get his appropriate comeuppance at the hands of the man whose entire world he just destroyed. I honestly don't think Barkett understood what makes an action-revenge film good. He was trying to make something subversive and deep, but he failed miserably. THE AFTERMATH is just a boring turd of a film.

SHIVERS

SHIVERS contains a great deal of foreshadowing for the rest of the Cronenberg filmography. The direction isn’t there yet, though, as a first feature, you wouldn’t expect it to be. But it’s never been the look of Cronenberg’s films that gave them their distinctive feel. It’s always been the writing. More to the point, it’s always been the themes and metaphors. They’re all present here. The distrust of science, the twinned revulsion and attraction towards the human body (specifically towards the sexual organs), the dangers of repression, the allure of mutation… All of the myriad, almost obsessive, themes and metaphors that dotted the landscape of Cronenberg’s sci-fi/horror output, some of which leaked into his more mainstream films like CRASH and SPIDER, are here in full force. That makes SHIVERS an integral film for the Cronenberg faithful.

The film begins with a media presentation, a commercial of sorts, for the Starliner Towers, a large apartment complex, complete with shops and medical facilities, on the outskirts of Montreal. A self-contained, upper-class suburban city, if you will. As the commercial ends, we are shown a young man and woman being given a tour of the Towers. Intercut with this, an older man strangles a young girl to death. As the guide gleefully sells the young couple on the quality of life afforded by the Towers, the older man slices open the body of the young woman and pours a bottle of acid into her abdomen. The sales pitch concludes and the couple walks away impressed. The older man slits his own throat.

The film takes its time telling us why we witnessed this murder-suicide. The older man was a scientist, a rather brilliant but philosophically inept researcher, who had been trying to find an alternative to standard organ transplantation. He had devised a plan to use special parasites, biological organisms that could be bred for the purpose of mimicking the behavior of ordinary, functioning organs. Or at least that’s what his colleagues and financial backers thought he was working on. What he was really doing with his time was creating what could best be described as parasitic MDMA, an organism which could rewire the impulse control system of its host. The murder of the young woman wasn’t an act of brutality. It was an attempt to contain the parasite that he knowingly infected her with. Unfortunately, the young woman had been making her way around the Towers, having sex with numerous men, and the infection has already begun to spread.

As the film goes on, many of the inhabitants fall prey to the parasitic infection. As a result, they begin to rape (and sometimes murder) the people they come across. The parasite is usually seen being transmitted through physical contact though there are numerous instances of the parasites being vomited out and at least one instance of it bursting from someone’s chest. Free of the host, they go about their business of crawling along the floors and, in one memorable scene, through a drain pipe into a bathtub. The parasites, in typical Cronenberg fashion, appear both fecal and phallic in design, just long, slithering brown masses. Not really frightening stuff but SHIVERS makes up for the look of the parasites in its use of bladder effects, one of the first movies to use that kind of practical effect. Seeing the parasites move around in the stomachs of the infected never fails to unnerve.

Despite its somewhat heady material, SHIVERS isn’t as serious a film as RABID, Cronenberg’s follow-up feature. The two films are thematically similar, both concerned with sexual revulsion, scientific mishaps and the overthrow of 1970s excess by the remnants of the 1960s free love movement. In every way, they are sister films and are best watched back-to-back. They inform and complete each other, and although RABID is undeniably the better film, SHIVERS is easily the more enjoyable of the two to watch. “Enjoyable to watch” is not something one normally says about a Cronenberg film but SHIVERS, an under budgeted first feature shot in about two weeks, has all the energy of a good B-movie with the benefit of actually being about something.

The finale of SHIVERS looks remarkably like your average zombie film. I’m not aware of how much of an influence (if any) George Romero had on Cronenberg when he made this film but I would be surprised if he did not have NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in mind when he scripted and directed the finale. Having recently watched LAND OF THE DEAD, Romero’s much maligned but ultimately great zombie epic, I was reminded of SHIVERS. Both films are about revolutions of sorts. In SHIVERS, it’s a sexual revolution. In LAND OF THE DEAD, it’s a revolution of the “have none”s against the “have plenty”s. Both films feature hermetically sealed, suburban utopias. In SHIVERS, it’s the Starliner Towers. In LAND OF THE DEAD, it’s the commercial complex called Fiddler’s Green. In both films, we’re introduced to these utopias through painfully sappy commercials highlighting the static, almost naïve existence that these upper middle class fortresses have to offer. Both films end with the repressed aggressors laying claim to the buildings.

 

This may all be coincidence. I have no idea. I do know that SHIVERS was an acknowledged influence on Dan O’Bannon when he was writing ALIEN and it shows. But more interesting is how all the seeds planted in SHIVERS grew as Cronenberg continued making films. You may need to be one of the Cronenberg faithful to really appreciate SHIVERS. It may be the reason I enjoy the film so much. But even if you’ve never seen THE FLY or NAKED LUNCH, never heard of DEAD RINGERS or SCANNERS, you will still be able to enjoy the B-movie freakshow Cronenberg puts on here. It’s an ambitious, flawed, deeply troubling and ultimately exhilarating piece of film.