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.

NIGHTMARE CITY

In an attempt to make ALIEN: COVENANT seem like the smartest film I watched all day, I spent 90 minutes of my evening with Umberto Lenzi's 1980 cartoony trash epic NIGHTMARE CITY. And whaddya know? It worked. Suddenly, the sheer stupidity of Ridley Scott's second-in-a-row failure looked like the scribblings of a young Stephen Hawking. And maybe that's what Scott was going for, a movie that wouldn't look like a large clusterfuck of bad ideas if you just placed it next to a lower budgeted clusterfuck of bad ideas. 

Probably not. 

But to be fair, NIGHTMARE CITY does not, unlike ALIEN: COVENANT, pretend that it is a film full of grandiose ideas. Lenzi's shocker is just a full-throated scream of random syllables, like the sound a belligerent drunk makes when you play keep away with his last bottle of Wild Turkey. It doesn't make a lick of sense, but then again it doesn't want to. An intelligent story (hell, even an intelligible story) isn't what this film wants to tell. It just wants to indulge in a long parade of bloody atrocities and bared breasts. In other words, it just wants you to have a good time.

So what exactly is NIGHTMARE CITY all about, you ask? Well, it's about a zombie outbreak. Kind of. Not really. In the same way that Danny Boyle's 28 DAYS LATER took the all zombie movie tropes but left the zombies themselves behind, Lenzi's film gives us irradiated men and women, mostly dressed in cardigans and blazers, that cut a bloody swath across an unnamed European city. Our lead character is a reporter named Dean, a rather useless chap trying to keep his doctor wife, Anna, safe from harm. There's also a military commander named Murchison and his second in command, Warren. They get to do things as well. And there's some guy named Bob. Every movie needs a guy named Bob, right?

OK, look, there isn't much of a story here. The majority of the film follows Dean and Anna as they traverse several locations, first a TV station, then a hospital, then a gas station, then a church, then an amusement park… That's about it. We periodically check in on the military and science types who all ramble on about causes, effects, possible quarantine procedures, maybe a cure. This is all stuff that really should have been cut from the film. Every time a military man or scientist steps up to the mic, the film reaches new heights of stupidity. For example, when a scientist informs Murchison that the infected people all possess “tissue regeneration”, the decorated military man asks him to dumb it down, as if that isn't quite self explanatory enough. The scientist then goes on to explain that as a result of their ability to regenerate tissue, weapons cannot destroy the infected, even though he's standing in front of an examination table adorned with the body of a clearly dead infected individual. Then he says something along the lines of “shoot 'em in the head, that'll work” even though he just got done telling us...

Yeah, this movie is dumb.

I mean, we don't need a thorough explanation for this shit. “Radiation dunnit” works fine here. I've never understood why people even bother trying to explain just what it is that's causing a zombie outbreak. Zombies are fictional creatures. Zombie viruses are fictional constructs. Any attempt to explain them using real world science isn't going to work. Honestly, neither does “radiation dunnit” as we've understood the effects of radiation poisoning for decades. If you're completely ignorant of science (and if you are, you'll probably enjoy the last two entries in the ALIEN franchise), this might sound plausible. But let's face it, it isn't. It's just dumb.

But I like Godzilla movies, damn it, so who am I to judge?

If we leave aside the ahem academics of the film, what we're left with is a damn near non-stop barrage of clumsily charming action set pieces. At times, the film looks more like a riot simulator than a not-quite-zombie flick. The irradiated individuals in NIGHTMARE CITY might have lost their ability to speak, but they sure as shit didn't lose their ability to bludgeon, strangle, stab, ax, shoot, club, throttle and beat the ever living shit out of everyone they come across. They even drive cars, set up ambushes, cut telephone lines, purposefully and sadistically torture their victims. In other words, they're total dicks, gouging out eyes and ripping open blouses with gleeful abandon. It's during these moments that NIGHTMARE CITY shines in a 'so bad it's good' kind of way. There's a scene early on involving a group of ghouls massacring a bunch of spandex-clad TV workout models that ranks pretty high on my personal “dude, what the fuck am I watching?' list. TVs explode like bombs whenever they're thrown, heads pop like balloons left and right, breasts are chopped off, an eye is sloppily ripped out with a fireplace poker… It's just an awesome parade of slapsticky gore (emphasis on 'sticky').

But Jesus H. Christ on a Sybian saddle, does it drag at times. NIGHTMARE CITY is a long, hard slog of a film to get through, mostly because the film keeps stopping to get some military bullshit out of the way. That's the stuff we don't care about. I mean, we don't exactly care about Dean or Anna either, but the entire reason we're watching a movie called NIGHTMARE CITY is to stuff our faces full of sugary, gory goodness, not listen to people talk about pseudo-scientific jargon or wax philosophic about good and evil in a world full of irradiated pricks with no respect for the personal boundaries of others. We want people getting shot in the face. We want random titties for no good reason. We want chaos, not boner killing bullshit about molecular regeneration. And when chaos is on the menu, NIGHTMARE CITY is a hell of a good time.

But yeah, it's stupid. So very, very stupid. Though I can forgive it, because unlike the other movie I watched today, it didn't try to sell me a bottle full of piss by claiming it was fine champagne.

THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD

Trying to review THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD is a bit like trying to review silence. No matter how you approach it, you're just going to wind up talking more about absence than substance. Because what exactly can you say about silence? What exactly can you say about this movie? The phrase “nothing happens” is usually tossed out to describe how boring a movie is. Of course it isn't true. Things happen in every film. Hell, things happen in THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD. But just barely. Just enough for it to qualify as a movie. Nothing more, nothing less.

The movie is about four college kids spending time all alone in a soon-to-be renovated dormitory. They spend their days tossing out desks and cleaning the place up, and their nights being spooked by some weirdo with Art Garfunkel hair. Soon enough, a killer shows up to bump them off one by one. That's it. That's the plot of THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that those three sentences comprised the entirety of the films screenplay.

So yes, things happen in this film, but every action and plot point exists without explanation or clarity. For example, why are these four college kids tasked with doing a floor-by-floor clean-up, all alone, of an extremely large campus building? What's the story behind that large group of college kids we saw at the beginning of the film in the pick-up truck? Who was that guy that got killed just before the credits? We never saw him before and we certainly never hear of him again. What's the story with John, the creeper at the dorm? Is he an ex-student? Does he work there? He clearly isn't some random guy because everyone knows his name. So what's his story? Why does the film set up a love triangle between Joanne, our Final Girl, her boyfriend (a character so memorable I can't even remember his name) and bashful Brian if Joanne's boyfriend leaves the film around the 15 minute mark? 

Worse, the film introduces yet another love interest, but only in a single scene, then has that character disappear for nearly the entirety of the film, only showing back up for the final five minutes so the film can have an oh-so-ironic twist at the end. We have a killer whose motive revolves around being madly in love with Joanne even though the film never once hints at anything close to that when we spend time with the killer pre-final reel reveal. Everything here, everything the film throws at us during its last hour, feels made up on the spot. Nothing gels and nothing holds together, all because the film is missing vital connective strands of narrative. Without those bits and pieces, all the action feels disjointed, random and even pointless. Sitting here now, trying to review it, trying to think of a way to somehow connect those dots...

I'm reviewing silence. All I can focus on is what is missing. All I can think to do is to describe the absence.

Truth be told, the first 15 or so minutes of the film are decent. We meet our characters, get acquainted with the setting, and get our first taste of blood. The triple murder of the lovely Debbie (played by the always fetching Daphne Zuniga) and her parents is suitably nasty. It's a good set-up for a slasher film. After that, the film just meanders and the whole thing goes off the rails. I kept waiting for it all to gel, for the film to finally commit to doing something, ANYTHING, with its characters and its set-up, but it never did. Everything after those first 15 minutes is lazy, half hearted and utterly empty. Sure, there's some gnarly deaths from time to time and the film does manage to get its shit together for a longer than usual climatic chase, but all I could think about the entire time was how little actual story this film was telling.

I don't even need to mention the terrible acting, the lackluster direction or the score that desperately wants to be the score from FRIDAY THE 13TH. I don't need to mention the idiocy of some of the scenes, like the way the pre-reveal killer behaves as if there's a camera on him at all times, even pretending to knock himself out to throw us off, as if there was anyone else around to see it except the audience. I don't need to mention any of that, because that isn't really a problem with a z-grade slasher film. I can accept all of that to some degree. No, what truly sinks THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD is the utter lack of gravity and narrative cohesion.

There's no story here. There's no motivation. There's nothing to hold my interest, no real characters to give a shit about, just people on screen doing uninteresting things for reasons never clearly explained. The level of narrative reductionism present here is absolutely aggravating. There's a moment in the film where a character named Craig talks about how he sweet talked a professor into giving him a good grade. When his love interest tells him that she thinks students should earn their good grades through hard work, Craig scoffs at her. That is THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD in a nutshell. It does the bare minimum of work, tossing out a few nasty death scenes along the way, all in hope that the sight of a drill splitting open a skull will so utterly charm us that we will forget that what we're watching is just a lazy, incompetent do-nothing.

NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES

The premise is deliciously outlandish. A doctor attempts to cure his son's terminal leukemia through radical heart transplantation, replacing his son's heart with the heart of a gorilla. For a short time, the operation seems to have been successful. Unfortunately, there's a nasty side effect. The son soon transforms into an (wholly unconvincing) ape monster and goes rampaging through the city, leaving a trail of raped and mutilated bodies in his wake. Naturally, this bloody carnage attracts the attention of a stalwart police detective. Can the not-so-good doctor contain his son long enough for the side effects to go away or will the detective and his men continue to follow the trail of freshly torn bodies straight back to the doctor's secret laboratory?

I love love LOVE that premise. It's just the right mix of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Kurt Neumann's THE FLY and George Waggner's THE WOLF MAN. Alas, a premise alone is not enough to carry a film and it turns out, ironically I might add, that what sinks Rene Cardona's NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES is a total lack of heart.

The film begins at a wrestling match. It's here that we meet Lucy, a luchadora. During the match, Lucy tosses her opponent out of the ring, severely injuring her. For much of the first 20 or so minutes of the film, we think Lucy will be our main character. We see her visit the hospital, wracked with guilt. We see her lose her nerve in the ring after her opponent takes a nasty spill. We become invested in her. But Lucy's character development is little more than a bait and switch. Lucy is only featured in the film so we can meet her boyfriend, a police detective named Arturo. Compared to Lucy, Arturo is a personality vacuum. He's a necessary component, the copper chasing the criminal. Both his role and his characterization are perfunctory. His character exists because it has to exist. It's another one of the films great unintentional ironies. The character that needs to exist in the world of the film is dull and lifeless while the character that didn't need to be included in the film at all turns out to be the best character the film has to offer.

The film does earn a bit of sympathy though. Dr. Krallman may be responsible for creating an ape monster that loves to pluck out eyes and tear the clothes from nubile young women, but his plight is easy to sympathize with. He is a man willing to go though hell and back to save his son. It's laudable. Noble, even. But it becomes increasingly difficult to align yourself with the character as the film goes on. Not only does Krallman conceal the identity of the killer from the police, he even goes so far as to murder a young woman (the same woman Lucy injured at the start of the film), cutting out her heart and transplanting it into his son in an attempt to reverse his metamorphosis. At that point, all pathos goes straight out the window and we're back to having no one to care about.

Given that the film is largely patterned off the werewolf film (the son turns back into his human self several times as the film goes along), I wonder why no effort was put into giving the human son more of a presence in the narrative. Was he aware of what he was doing when he was in beast mode? The film never tells us. It never even gives us a scene of the son struggling to control himself. He just lays in bed the whole time. Plain and simple, Cardona was not interested in creating anything other than a monster flick.

And to be honest, that's perfectly fine. I love a good monster flick. I suppose my lukewarm reaction to NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES is a result of having seen simple monster flicks of this sort countless times in my life. I've seen this film done better. It's difficult to erase THE WOLF MAN from my memory. It's damn near impossible to watch this film and not hold it up against the dozens upon dozens of other films that play this exact same game. Overall, NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES simply doesn't compare well. It's missing the dramatic component that could have given the film some kind of weight. As it stands, it's just a gore fest.
And if a gore fest is all you're looking for, I would recommend giving this film a watch. It's surprisingly nasty at times (and laughably hokey at others), enough so that it earned a spot on the DPP Video Nasty list. Granted that probably had much more to do with the sexual violence and the inclusion of a few short minutes of authentic open heart surgery footage than it did the gooey scenes of the ape monster tearing off heads and scalps, but the fact remains that NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES scratches that itch for wanton violence and bared breasts just fine.

CANNIBAL MAN

There's no cannibalism to be found in CANNIBAL MAN. There's also very little plot to be had during its 94 minute running time. Eloy de la Iglesia's 1972 Spanish psychological melodrama ended up on the DPP Video Nasty list, primarily because of its use of actual slaughterhouse footage, but it isn't what anyone would consider a gratuitous exploitation film. It certainly isn't a horror film. If anything, it's more of a tone poem, a lightly plotted character study of a man who accidentally kills a taxi driver, then purposefully kills his girlfriend when she threatens to go to the police. That murder leads to another murder then another murder, etc. The main thrust of the narrative is in watching the increasingly unstable Marcos try to pull himself out of the hole he keeps digging for himself. It's a Sisyphean task, to say the least, but here the rock rolling back down hill has been replaced with shattered skulls and slit throats.

This is going to be a short review, not because of laziness, but because there really isn't much to say about the film. It's definitely an acquired taste kind of thing, probably too slow for many. The film has numerous bits of nudity and gore (people die messily in this film) and those moments are all the more effective by being surrounded by an otherwise very low key melodrama. This is a tale of madness, mind you, but it isn't histrionic or hyperbolic. There are no hallucinations. Marcos doesn't hear voices or see his victims following him around. He is most certainly losing his mind, but not as the result of a disconnect from reality. It's guilt that tearing Marcos apart.

One thing that definitely separates CANNIBAL MAN from your usual bit of Spanish exploitation from the 1970s is the use of a homosexual character, both as an audience surrogate of sorts and as a pseudo-love interest. Marcos' neighbor, Nestor, is perhaps the character most sympathetic towards Marcos, the most caring, the most welcoming. The women in the film are by turn domineering, leering and nosy. The men, like Marcos' brother, are brutish and hyper-masculine. The budding friendship between Marcos and Nestor feels natural and the film strongly suggests as it goes on that Marcos is not only aware that Nestor has a romantic interest in him, but that Marcos might very well be coming around to the idea of engaging Nestor in that romance.

This side of the narrative is actually the most interesting thing about the film. Nestor is the only one spared the knife (or hammer or rock or bolt cutter) and it's his actions that lead Marcos to turn himself over to the police. You could in fact see the entire film as the story of a closeted male struggling to maintain his secret. Homosexual relationships were not largely legal in Spain until well after the film premiered. Marcos' reluctance to deal with the police (he's poor so he is afraid of the inherent classism of the legal system), his buying of perfume to cover up the smell of the bodies, his disinterest in the lusty Rosa… this all makes sense when viewed through that lens.

The cynic in me, however, cannot escape the reality that in many Spanish (and Italian and German) films of this sort, homosexuality is often used as a cheap red herring. Homosexuality was viewed as a perversion so if you needed a suspect for a murder, just introduce a gay character. Many gialli went so far as tying homosexuality with child rape and pedophilia. Whether CANNIBAL MAN condemns homosexuality or not is largely up to how you choose to view it.

But no matter what choice you make, your time spent with CANNIBAL MAN will be time well spent indeed. It isn't quite Crime & Punishment, but it isn't quite MANIAC either. It walks the line between the two, marrying exploitation shocks with genuine dramatic interest, and comes out the other side as a strangely fascinating, sometimes troubling film.

THE BEYOND

Beneath a derelict hotel in Louisiana, a gateway to hell is opening.

That is the concept behind Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND. It's what it has instead of a plot.

Inspired by the French Surrealist Antonin Artaud and his writings on the theater (specifically his formulation of a new kind of theater, the confrontational Theater of Cruelty), Fulci devised THE BEYOND as an illustration of a single idea, that of death, the finality of it, the horribleness of it, the inescapable reality of it. Borrowing from Artaud's ideas, Fulci's film would be a low logic, low cohesion work where the narrative arcs would all revolve around images of violent death. Whether the film belongs to proper Surrealism or not is open for debate. I don't quite think it matters one way or another. Though I tend to classify THE BEYOND as an Absurd work rather than a Surrealist work, there is a whiff or two of UN CHIEN ANDALOU behind its construction. But all of that is just faux-intellectual posturing of one kind or another.

So what exactly is it about THE BEYOND that has made it such an enduring cult classic? Well, the strength of its imagery is perhaps the most common answer. While I personally find non-contextual cinematic violence (that is to say, violence for the sake of violence) to be much weaker than contextual violence (violence that grows naturally from a narrative, ie. the blood-soaked finale of THE WILD BUNCH), there is a definite effect to the violence on display here. Sure, it doesn't "mean" anything. Sure, it happens to random actors instead of characters, but Fulci's never-blinking camera and the gruesomeness of Giannetto De Rossi's make-up effects can deliver one hell of a gut punch to those with weaker stomachs. But that isn't the extent of the strong imagery here. The film contains a staggering number of interesting compositions and strong, instantly iconic moments, like the journey down a long, empty highway where Liza first encounters the blind woman Emily or the final closing moments which forever lock our characters in a Bosch-like hell from which there is no escape.

But impressive imagery can only get you so far. THE BEYOND was compromised by its German distributors who demanded that Fulci return to his trademark zombie violence. As a result, the final third of the film becomes a real endurance test. This is yet another Fulci zombie film where a character shoots the shuffling dead in the brain over and over, only to resort to ineffective body shots so that Fulci can pad out scenes. This is yet another Fulci zombie film where characters could just run right past the zombies and escape with absolutely no trouble. This is yet another Fulci zombie film where the pacing dies completely, stalling the film for what seems like forever just so we can get a few dozen close-ups of badly made-up zombies drooling and stumbling towards the camera. Leaving the confines of the Louisiana hotel might have been necessary for Fulci to get the money to make his film, but it comes very, very close to destroying the atmospheric success of the first hour.

Ultimately, when people discuss THE BEYOND, they tend to speak about it in visual terms (like I just did), but the major success of the film, in my opinion, comes down to the tone of it. It's a weird little film, the kind that moves from grotesque ocular violence to a laughable scene of a man having his obviously fake face devoured by obviously fake tarantulas. THE BEYOND completely refuses to be taken seriously, even if the violence on display is adult's only material. Fulci wanted to make a haunted house film here and the kind of gleeful, gawking geekshow material in this film fits that description to a T, even if the haunted house I'm referring to is of the amusement park variety. Even though the movie ends with a serious, almost depressing note of tragic finality, it exists in a fantasy-filled, darkly comedic universe where a child is in peril from a bubbling, frothing soup made from acid and the gooey sludge of her own mother's melted face. We go from a dog tearing out a woman's throat, the glut of blood reaching Las Vegas fountain proportions, to an inexplicably exploding window that shotguns glass into someone's face. The violence on display is driven to such ridiculous heights that the deaths become tantamount to funhouse attractions. It's this constant battle between a serious attitude and non-serious display of on-screen violence that makes THE BEYOND endlessly entertaining (barring the zombie-filled finale).

This is horror without purpose but it's also horror without agenda. It's a sometimes creepy, always gooey, nasty, gross, wonderful little film that might not have anything to say or even have logical ground to stand on, but succeeds through force of imagery, a maniacal tune of a tone and more than enough chuckles to make the flesh tearing fun, if still rather icky.

DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

The loss of his overbearing, abusive mother sends a young man on a

That’s what I thought. Even by 1980, the Momma’s Boy cycle of horror films was well established. Sprung from the rotten loins of Norma Bates, the PSYCHO inspired psycho movie about a troubled, usually abused, always doted over obsessively young man following the death of his mother was used, dissected, put back together and recycled more times than you could probably count on an AFRICA ADDIO sized pile of hands.

A gruesome twosome of Mommy’s Boy horror films came out in 1980. William Lustig’s MANIAC is the better known of the two, a cult classic about Joe Spinell wandering the streets of New York City, scalping women and attaching his memento moris to the plastic heads of department store mannequins. The second of those two films (though it was released first) was Joseph Ellison’s DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE. Like MANIAC, the film follows a broken, disturbed man, Donny, as he callously murders women as some form of retribution against his mother. Though MANIAC leaves much of its murderer’s history in the past, DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE begins with Donny finding his mother dead. Unable to process her passing, Donny keeps her body. In a nod to Polanski’s REPULSION with its dead rabbit, the mother’s constantly decaying corpse acts as a measuring stick of how far down the hole of madness Donny has tumbled.

At first, Donny reacts to his mother’s passing like a child would if their parents left for the evening to go to some social event. He smokes in the house, jumps up and down on a chair, and cranks his stereo up. But the memories of his abuse at her hands (she would hold his arms out above a lit burner on the stove, chiding him for being sinful) soon fuel a hateful, murderous vengeance. He constructs a crematorium of sorts in an upstairs room, lining the walls with sheet metal. He begins luring women back to his home, knocking them unconscious and chaining them to a hook dangling from the ceiling. Donny douses them with gasoline and immolates them with a flame thrower. Once they’ve expired, he dresses them in his mother’s clothing and places them in a sitting room like a collection of hunting trophies.

Both MANIAC and DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE achieve what they set out to do. They’re both grim, oppressive bits of cinema, but while MANIAC constantly tries to one-up its bloody set pieces, DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE is much more restrained. I’m not sure how MANIAC managed to avoid a place on the DPP Video Nasty list (it was banned by the BBFC but not included among the final list of 72 films) but it’s easy to see why Ellison’s film earned its slot. While the film only has one graphically violent murder (the first murder in the film at that), the image of a woman trashing about in flames is surprisingly well done and amazingly potent. You don’t need to see the execution repeated with every other victim. One was more than enough and its lingering memory turns this film into something much more violent than it actually is.

Though it’s low on the list of Video Nasties in terms of on-screen, graphic violence, it’s definitely near the top of the list when it comes to being a well made, reasonably well acted and quite effective film. There are certainly problems here. The acting is kinda wonky and everything slows to a crawl during the second act. There’s a voice over that occurs several times during the film that urges Donny on to more murders and in a twist ending those same voices are heard by a little boy being smacked around by his mom. Whether this was meant to suggest a shared experience or something a bit more supernatural, I don’t know, but I do know they come within about an inch of being campy. But despite all those flaws, watching DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE is an oftentimes entertaining, sometimes anxiety-inducing, and flat-out chilling little film that deserves a more respected place in the annals of 1980s horror.

THE DRILLER KILLER

Abel Ferrara's 1979 non-porn debut feature was one of the first titles targeted during the beginning of the Video Nasty scare, largely due to the box art pictured above. The gaudy exploitation title, seemingly a nod to the press moniker given to David Berkowitz during his Son of Sam killings (that would be "the .44 caliber killer", in case you were wondering) married with the declaration that "blood runs in rivers" would probably lead you to believe that this is a routine slasher film. It isn't at all. If anything, this is what TAXI DRIVER would have looked like had it been written and directed by Nick Zedd, a real gritty and depressing look into the mind of a low prospects New Yorker struggling to maintain normalcy in a society slowly crumbling into filth.

Ferrara takes up the starring role as Reno, a lower class painter living on borrowed economic time. Under constant threat of eviction, if not starvation, Reno struggles to finish up his masterwork so he can reap some financial rewards from Dalton, a local art gallery owner. Reno shares his rundown apartment with two women, his separated-from-her-husband kinda/sorta girlfriend Carol and her kinda/sorta lesbian lover Pam (the film is very vague about what the actual terms of their relationships are). Things take a turn for the worse when a No Wave garage band takes up residence in a downstairs apartment, practicing all day and all night. Unable to cope with the noise and under constant pressure to avoid becoming just another street bum like his father, Reno becomes increasing unstable. He buys a battery pack for his electric drill and begins slaughtering bums in the streets.

That's really all there is to THE DRILLER KILLER, just a threadbare narrative tied to a depressing, corrosive location. Alongside MANIAC, this film paints a picture of New York City in the late-70s/early-80s that stands in stark contrast to the postcard perfect image the city's tourism board often painted. Usually in films of this sort - highly claustrophobic psycho-thrillers about men or women in emotional isolation turning physically violent, ie. REPULSION - the locations are indoors, all the better to play around with close physical proximities and oppressive atmosphere. In this film, that atmosphere is provided just by taking the damn camera outside. Unlike in Polanski's film where Carol fears intrusion, Reno largely fears expulsion, abandonment to the outside world. The homeless he sees around him are the logical conclusion to his plight. Unless he makes this sale. Unless this painting is good enough. But as his safe spot, his home, begins turning on him (first a large phone bill he cannot pay, then his rent which has come due, then the ear-shattering noise that ruins his ability to work), Reno ventures out at night to kill the homeless as both therapy and protest.

Given all the handheld camera bits, probably improvised acting and shoestring cinematography, you would probably bet good money on THE DRILLER KILLER being a complete waste of time. I'm not quite sure I would agree. There's not a lot going on under the surface of the this film (Ferrara's usual preoccupations aside, like Catholic guilt and addiction), but this film offers up more than its fair share of visual and aural stimulation. It's isn't good looking by any means, but it is striking to watch, a real down home amateur-style piece of filmmaking that uses its limitations for vérité purposes. As a result, there is a sense of immediacy to the narrative. 

I've spoken quite a bit over the past couple of days about movies that achieve a cumulative effect, the result of wildly disparate elements that combine to make a whole that is infinitely more than the sum of its parts. THE DRILLER KILLER fits into that category. The scummy city, the histrionics of the acting, the violence of the murder scenes, the sense of economic despair, the longing to create something well beyond your capabilities, the subtextual suggestion that art is somehow the only thing that separates men from something less than men... All of this shit is poured into a audio-visual assault that threatens to collapse in on itself at any time. It's easy to get swept up in the energetic undercurrent of the film only to come out the other side feeling like a drunk after a particularly vigorous bender, stinking like hell and wondering what just happened.

BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER

Here we have the strangely titled BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER, a bizarre slice of reverse-Oedipal horror from 1982. The film follows Billy, a 17 year old high school basketball player who was adopted by his now-overbearing aunt Cheryl when his parents died in a car accident 14 years ago. Billy desperately wants to get out and live life on his own. He has a nice shot at a full athletic scholarship from the University of Colorado. His aunt, however, isn’t hearing any of it. She’s already threatened by Billy’s girlfriend Julia and as far as she’s concerned, any talk of leaving for college is off the table. It becomes apparent by the 15 minute mark that Cheryl has some unnatural feelings for young Billy, sneaking into his room to wake him up for school by caressing his body with her fingertips, purring like a cat. Billy, either unwilling or too stupid to notice her come-ons, just goes about his days, trying to live a normal life, even forging a friendship with his basketball coach.

When a repairman named Phil comes over to the house one evening to service their television, Cheryl throws herself at the clearly disinterested man. Infuriated by his rejection, Cheryl stabs him repeatedly. By the time Billy arrives home, Phil is dead and Cheryl is in hysterics, screaming that Phil had tried to rape her. Cheryl’s busy-body next door neighbor Margie arrives and calls the police. The detective that responds to the scene, the hyper-homophobic Joe Carlson, doesn’t buy the story. He thinks Billy killed the man. He believes that even more when he finds out that Phil was gay and in a relationship with Billy’s basketball coach. For Carlson, the motive is clear. Billy was having sex with his friend the coach and Phil found out about it. Billy then killed Phil during a confrontation.

One of Carlson’s fellow officers, Cook, doesn’t buy that bullshit. For Cook, Carlson’s hypothesis is born from bigotry, not evidence. As Carlson looks for any way possible to destroy Billy’s life, Cook begins digging deeper into the history of both Billy and Cheryl, discovering strange rumors and evidence that suggests that what happened to Billy’s parents wasn’t just an accident, that there may be much more to Cheryl than meets the eye.

That’s a pretty meaty set-up for a simple thriller, right? Well, that’s because BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER is far from simple. The film is fairly well plotted with a careful escalation of craziness that allows the film to really build properly to a balls-out conclusion. The entire film rests on the shoulders of Susan Tyrrell, a remarkably engaging actress that never quite achieved mainstream success despite being downright amazing in a string of films like FAT CITY, TO KILL THE KING, Burt Kennedy’s 1976 adaptation of Jim Thompson’s disturbing noir THE KILLER INSIDE ME and the fantastic should-be-a-double-bill of FORBIDDEN ZONE and BIG TOP PEE-WEE.

Her performance as Cheryl is just jaw-droppingly weird, swerving wildly between bumbling seductress and raging lunatic. She keeps pictures of a man named Craig in an upstairs room, regularly engaging in angry conversation with it. She drugs Billy’s milk so he’ll fail his scholarship try out. There’s very little Cheryl won’t do to keep Billy by her side, even if it means taking a meat tenderizer to his girlfriend’s pretty face. A good bit of Norma Bates lurks inside this character and honestly, I found myself really creeped out by Tyrrell’s performance. It’s just the right amount of over-the-top that it is always entertaining to watch, but also just the right amount of obviously damaged that I never quite lost sympathy for her.

BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER is not the campy horror film the title makes it out to be. Like AXE or UNHINGED, this is probably not the Video Nasty you want to check out for some quick and nasty thrills. Like those films, BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER, when reduced to individual elements like pacing, performances (aside from Tyrrell, only Bo Svenson shines here), special effects quality, direction, etc., doesn’t quite stand out as anything special. But like UNHINGED, the overall effect of the film is something else entirely. It does require patience to get through it and yes, you will have to turn a blind eye to some of the films obvious narrative plot holes (like the explanation of Billy’s parentage which makes no real sense), but I can’t really say that I was bothered by any of that. This is one of those films that tells a very specific story with no real goal other than weirding you out for 90 minutes. It ends up doing that wonderfully.

EVILSPEAK

Yeah, it was well acted and really well directed, but you know what CARRIE needed? More flesh-eating demon pigs.

Well, thank god EVILSPEAK is here to correct that little oversight. Here’s a movie so frightening its opening credits are in an Old English font, the true indication that you’re about to be scared shitless. This entire movie revolves around beefy soccer players with unkempt pubic hair at a military academy ruthlessly picking on Stanley Coopersmith, a nerdy orphan whose only crime is that he’s played by Clint Howard. Coopersmith, angry and desperate to get even when the bullies tie his clothing into knots and mutilate his puppy dog, begins messing around in black magic with the help of his trusty computer, the limited edition Apple iSatan. See, way back in the dark ages, a Satanic priest named Esteban was exiled from Spain. He somehow made it over to the United States and set up shop beneath a military academy.

Yeahhhh, the film never really explains how the hell any of that happened, let alone why there’s a painting of the Satanic Esteban hanging in the otherwise Christian chapel. Anyway, Coopersmith finds Esteban’s diary and begins translating it, eventually leading him to unleash Esteban from the spirit world. Possessed, Coopersmith spends ten solid minutes decapitating the shit out of everyone he can get his hands on while demonic pigs eat the ones smart enough to run away. Then the movie just ends. Literally. It just ends.

Did ya get all that? Good, because now I want to tell you how much ass this movie eats.

It eats a lot of ass.

The problem with this film is that it takes forever to get moving. It starts well enough, I must admit, with the always great Richard Moll as Esteban. Looking a bit like Lord Saddler from Resident Evil 4, Moll chews the scenery wonderfully, but then we’re stuck with 80+ minutes of the tragically unhip Clint Howard just getting humiliated over and over and over and over again. I know the purpose of making his fellow cadets into such insufferable assholes is so we’ll relish their inevitable deaths that much more but come on, man… They’re absolutely fucking evil little shits and the film makes you wait for-frickin’-ever before heads start to roll. Meanwhile, the iSatan is sitting there flashing “HUMAN BLOOD” over and over again but Coopersmith is too damn stupid to figure out what that means.

For that matter, why the hell does he even need to complete the ritual? When Coopersmith is accosted by the drunk caretaker (played with gusto by the always entertaining R.G. Armstrong), the iSatan telekinetically twists the old man’s head around 180 degrees. A little later, it spawns a small army of demon pigs to eat a naked woman alive in the shower (writer/director Eric Weston was clearly a big fan of Mark 5:1-13). There are moments when the computer just has a massive freak-out with Atari-level special effects just zipping all over the monitor screen. This usually happens when Coopersmith is just sitting there looking at it. It’s like the iSatan is so insanely frustrated with Coopersmith’s inability to grasp simple commands like “HUMAN BLOOD” that it’s throwing a temper tantrum.

Now I will admit that the final 10 minutes are absolute gold. Watching Clint Howard float through the air with a large prop sword is comedy perfection. The obviously fake demon pig heads that chomp down on obviously fake limbs are great as well. But you do end up feeling a bit robbed by the ending. This is a movie where Coopersmith has been beaten up, forcibly stripped, had his somewhat impressive engineering work destroyed and had his goddamn puppy sliced wide open but the majority of the carnage is carried out by those fake-as-fuck pig heads. Even the lead asshole of the group gets killed by the reanimated corpse of the caretaker, not the guy whose life he made a living hell for 85 minutes. It’s kind of a cheat, you know? I wanted more Flying Coopersmith of Death and less loudly grunting puppets.

In a way, that basically sums up my feelings on EVILSPEAK. I wanted more evil but all I got was more speak.

FROZEN SCREAM

I have no idea how to go about writing this review. Trying to review FROZEN SCREAM is like trying to review a nap. It was an hour or so and nothing at all happened. The end.

Should I leave it at that? I might as well. I honestly have no idea what the hell this movie was about. I even took notes while watching it but I can’t seem to make sense of it. From what I gathered, a man named Tom is kidnapped by a cult of some kind out to achieve immortality by way of a serum. This of course doesn’t quite work as intended, changing all the test subjects into zombie-like creatures. Tom’s wife, Anne, tries to locate him, only to be targeted by the cult. A cop named Kevin shows up and so does Renee Harmon. Oh goody. As talented an actress as the tree outside my house, Harmon’s line deliveries are unintelligible to say the least, her heavy German accent combined with shoddy sound work making her sound like a bit like Karin Baal gargling marbles.

I’m not sure I can even articulate the train wreck quality of this piece of shit. You can tell the filmmakers were certain that this film would be damn near impossible to follow. They insert voice over narration at times just so the editing makes some kind of rudimentary sense. Worse, this narration occurs OVER dialogue in the scenes so the attempt to create continuity is all for naught when the characters later reference talking points we never got a chance to hear because the movie was fucking talking over them. Character motivation is all over the place too. I was sure that Harmon and her accomplice Lee James were the bad guys, but Harmon not only saves Anne at one point but ends up shooting James for no discernible reason. I just…. I mean… I can’t. I can’t make sense of this movie and it isn’t helped when Harmon tries to explain things and it sounds like “zee dis zing iz a kind of gargle gargle gargle”.

This is yet another film on the DPP Video Nasty list that has absolutely no business being on there. I mean, there IS a scene of a character getting an axe to the face, a very common occurrence in many (if not most) of the Video Nasties but no one – and I mean NO ONE – will be at all disturbed, frightened, sickened or psychologically harmed by this film. They will instead be confused, bored, frustrated and angry. At the very, very least, the DPP strike against it made it so that no one would be able to actually view this abhorrent, godawful pile of puke. So there’s your silver lining, folks. I’m not one for censorship but by fucking god, I would not bat an eyelash if this movie was erased from the face of the planet.

AXE

Three bruisers wait in a hotel room for their mark to arrive. One of the men, a cigar-chomping ball of pudge named Lomax rifles through a closet, finding a wig and a dress. “He’s a fairy”, Lomax remarks about their yet-to-arrive prey. As the more timid Billy keeps watch at the window, Lomax burns the dress with his cigar, annoying the ringleader of the group, Steele. When the man finally arrives with his date for the evening, Lomax and Steele shove a lit cigar into his mouth before beating him to death. His frightened lover jumps to his death from the ninth floor window.

On their way out of town, Lomax and Steele take time to harass a woman at a convenience store. Billy is clearly bothered by the violent behavior of his two companions, expressing his disgust at the murder of the man in the hotel. Our threesome stops at a farmhouse, well outside of the city, and decide to take up residence when they realize the only two inhabitants are a wheelchair bound, semi-catatonic old man and his lovely, albeit clearly troubled granddaughter Lisa.

This is the set-up for AXE, a Video Nasty undeserving of its Video Nasty status. I will admit that when Harry Novak’s Boxoffice International Pictures logo popped up before the opening credits, I expected something a tad bit more, shall we say, sleazy. Anyone familiar with the kind of film BIP distributed in the 70s will know what I mean. This was the company responsible for the US distribution of films like THE TOY BOX, THE MAD BUTCHER, COUNTRY CUZZINS and STREET OF A THOUSAND PLEASURES. You expect a certain kind of film from BIP, one filled with nudity, softcore sex and brutality. Odd then that Novak even decided to distribute Frederick Friedel’s little film. Compared to the other films in BIP’s catalog, AXE is remarkably restrained, even a little bit arty.

AXE, which was originally called LISA, LISA before Novak branded it with a more appropriate drive-in title (and then re-titled it again into THE CALIFORNIA AXE MASSACRE once Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was released), plays many of the same games that other exploitations movies of its kind do, from the physical violence of the opening, to the attempted rapes in the middle, to the bloody retributions of the third act, but it has this strange, almost surreal attitude. We’re never told who the gay man from the beginning was or why they killed him. We’re never told why Lisa lives alone with her grandfather or what Lisa’s obvious mental problems are. We’re never given any kind of exposition for anything really. 

Of course, the film suggests quite a few things, particularly about Lisa. The grandfather reacts oddly to her touch. Her vacant stare and the ease with which she kills off our cast one by one suggests that this isn’t the first time she’s gotten rid of unwanted visitors. The ending scene even suggests maybe something a tad more supernatural, if not Satanic. There are no answers or reasons or motives to anything here. Just surface level representations left open for interpretation.

As a standard exploitation movie, AXE barely qualifies. The violence is far from graphic (hell, 90% of it happens off screen) while the rapes are unsuccessful and happen without any skin, male or female, being shown. But I don’t think Friedel was interested in making just another exploitation film. The surreal touches in AXE turn this otherwise brief but turgid tale into a kind of tone poem or a good murder ballad. There’s something about the editing, disjointed and sloppy at times, married with the gritty look and almost lackadaisical direction. When you pour on top of it the ethereal beauty of Leslie Lee as Lisa, with her angelic yet empty stare and her cold, calm demeanor, the entire film takes on this almost melancholic tone, like a softly hummed funeral dirge.  I don’t know how really to explain it, but AXE has a genuinely interesting feel to it, something I can’t quite articulate. At barely 70 minutes, I would recommend giving the film a watch for yourself, if only to see if you too can catch a beat or two from the song it’s singing.