CTHULHU MANSION

If you're expecting anything remotely Lovecraftian in Juan Piquer Simon's CTHULHU MANSION, forget it. This film has nothing – absolutely shitting nothing – to do with the Cthulhu Mythos. The only reason this movie was titled CTHULHU MANSION was to trick Lovecraft fans into renting it at their local Blockbuster. Simon's slice of low budget excrement was released in 1992, right in the middle of the direct-to-video Lovecraft boom, and it sits nicely alongside THE CURSE, THE UNNAMABLE and THE RESURRECTED as movies that make the bold artistic decision to adapt Lovecraft by not really adapting Lovecraft at all. To be fair, even RE-ANIMATOR has as much to do with Lovecraft as, say, any given episode of Animaniacs, but at least Stuart Gordon's film had a whiff of inspiration from the grand old master. Your typical Lovecraft adaptation from the 80s and 90s was just a bottom of the barrel, low budget clunker masquerading as an adaptation, usually only worth watching if the movie you really wanted to see was out of stock.

How low budget is CTHULHU MANSION? The opening credits play over the exact same “haunted house sounds” cassette tape my mom bought for me at a Woolworth's when I was a kid. When we finally get music, it's just Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the go-to choice for generic horror films the world over. The opening scene sets the tone for the bullshit to follow. Frank Finley (a damn fine British actor who must have had one hell of a rough patch in 1992 if he signed up for this garbage) plays a stage magician named Chandu. Chandu's opening act requires the assistance of his wife, Lenore. Their performance hits an unexpected snag when Lenore suddenly bursts into flames.

Decades later, Chandu is still at it, performing with his daughter Lisa (oddly enough, Lisa and Lenore are played by the same actress, Marcia Layton). A bunch of hoodlums rip off a drug dealer, get into a scuffle with some cops and then run off when their getaway driver, Chris, gets shot in the leg. These two story lines intersect when the thugs take up residence in Chandu's creepy old mansion, terrorizing Lisa, her father and their mute servant. And by “terrorize” I mean “force Chandu to patch up Chris, eat some of their food and periodically act a bit rude towards them”. There isn't much tension here and things only pick up when one of the thugs accidentally opens a door in the basement, unleashing a deadly evil force that bumps them off one by one.

Sounds like it could be fun, right?

Well, no. No, it isn't. Not even a little bit. The demonic shenanigans are exactly what you would expect from a dark and evil power so unbelievably strong it can be contained by a rickety old basement door. Vines entangle and drag one of the thugs (played by William Shatner's daughter) through a second story window. A man is drowned in the shower. Muppet hands emerge from a refrigerator. Slices of bread fly across the kitchen. Spooky sound effects from that cheap-o cassette tape drives one of our leads into a hyperbolic fit of panic. Wind machines come roaring to life off camera. Just when you think this couldn't get any more generic, all the dead thugs come back to life and Chris begins melting into goop. With their bag of haunted house tricks empty, Simon and his co-writer Linda Moore just start ripping off other films. The main antagonist gets Piper Laurie's death from CARRIE and the film ends with a scene lifted directly from THE EXORCIST.

Thanks for reminding me of the better films I could be watching!

But really, what do you expect from Juan Piquer Simon, a man whose chief claim to fame is that his film POD PEOPLE was skewered by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 gang? Personally, I was hoping for a bit more PIECES-styled insanity. That's a film where Simon really did manage to not just live up to his outlandish premise but dance wild, gonzo circles around it too. PIECES has a real energy and willingness to say fuck you to anything resembling logic. CTHULHU MANSION on the other hand feels like it was made to be “scary” or “serious”, like Simon and Co. actually thought they were making a respectable film.

But they didn't. What they made is a film that is overlong, completely devoid of any momentum thanks to poor utilization of characters (Lisa spends nearly the entire movie “locked” in a room with the unconscious Chris and I say “unlocked” because no one ever locks the damn door. She just never tries opening it.) and is lacking any kind of self awareness. Look, this is silly shit. When you write a movie where a woman is literally dragged into a fucking refrigerator by Wampa hands, any semblance of seriousness goes right out the window. So why not have fun with it? Why not chop out the ten unnecessary pages of characters sitting around and use that bit of production money to build a few exploding heads? Why not reward the audience with something clever rather than trying to make art out of dog shit? What this movie needed was a little more fun and a lot less tired, boring fuckery.

Oh and a change of name. Seriously. If your movie contains the word Cthulhu in the title and you can't even be bothered to, at the very least, include a single scene of tentacle molestation, you have no business making movies in the first place.

CEMETERY HIGH

I sat through the opening credits, my eyes scanning each line intently. I felt a slight disappointment when they finished and the film began, but still I sat, waiting and hoping. As the movie reached the halfway point, the crushing reality set in. I realized that my slight disappointment had reached critical mass. I was not going to get what I wanted.

Roddy McDowall was not in this movie.

Worse, Rhonda Shear wasn't going to appear every ten to fifteen minutes to make some lighthearted innuendo before dousing my eyes with a wild barrage of raunchy phone sex ads.

In other words, watching CEMETERY HIGH made me long for the Friday and Saturday nights I spent up all night watching Up All Night, a late night movie marathon on the USA network that aired back in the 90s. For a perpetually horny teen, this blast of low budget exploitation was a welcome change of pace from ruining every JC Penney's catalog that came my way. Friday nights were usually hosted by Shear, a buxom blonde comedienne, and featured mostly b-movie action and horror flicks. Saturday nights were, more or less, dedicated to skin flicks (if a film had either Bikini or Carwash in the title, chances are it showed up here) and hosted by Gilbert Gottfried, a man who sounds like he's in constant pain. While the movies were always censored, my young, hormonal brain could not have cared less. The kinds of movies being shown on Up All Night were the kinds of movies I was into. It turned every Friday and Saturday night into a party.

I know I saw CEMETERY HIGH on Up All Night. I remembered the visual gags, the Gore Gong (which would appear on screen whenever someone was about to die) and the Hooter Honk (do I even need to explain this one?). Everything else had faded from memory. But hey, I loved this movie 20 years ago sooooo… how bad could it be?

CEMETERY HIGH could probably be best described as Roger Corman's NATURAL BORN KILLERS. It's about a group of high school graduate girls, all of whom were raped and abused by some meathead football players before graduation. They team up and go on a massive man hatin' killing spree, shooting every lecherous sleazeball they can find, and while this earns them the ire of the town's religiously conservative “get back in the kitchen” Mayor, the local press absolutely adores them, nicknaming them the Scum Busters. To make matters worse for asshole men everywhere, the popularity of the Scum Busters has led to an increase in female vigilantism, effectively creating open season on anyone packing a penis.

Now that sounds pretty grim and salacious, right? Well, the biggest problem with CEMETERY HIGH (aside from its title) is the fact that it is a comedy. Or at least it tries to be. This is the single biggest criticism I hear about this film. “It isn't funny”. Well, no, it isn't. At least not in the “laugh out loud” kind of way, but I think the film has merits to go along with its failings. See above where I called this film (basically) a low rent version of NATURAL BORN KILLERS? It is. In fact, if you combine this film and director Gorman Bechard's earlier trash opus PSYCHOS IN LOVE into one big flick, you would have all the essential components of Tarantino and Stone's over-indulgent, completely pretentious comic book of a film (a movie so glaringly obvious that it literally superimposes its message on the flesh of its characters). But what CEMETERY HIGH lacks (thanks largely to production fiddling by Charles Band) is a consistent tone and a clear line of vision. And professionalism. And a whole lot of other things BUT

The film does attempt a meta-commentary on not just violent exploitation flicks but the treatment of women within them. We've had a multitude of exploitation films featuring men murdering women for their social and sexual transgressions (chief among them, wanting to be treated with respect and wanting to enjoy sex) so why not a movie that flips the script a bit? Why not allow women their exploitation film due? Free from the kind of self-importance of MS .45, the killers in CEMETERY HIGH are Riot grrrls gone wild, avenging angels knocking off pornographers, pedophiles and aggressive alpha males. The portrayal of men in the film barely rises to the level of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE with every man portrayed as either a sleazy douche or a barely competent fuckhead. If the bumbling cops of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT put you off, good luck getting through any scene featuring the town's forensic pathologist or sheriff. The men in this film are invariably dumb, narcissistic, sexually obsessed, easily manipulated and/or useless. 

Kinda like the women in most of these films. 

But apart from merely switching around the traditional exploitation film gender roles, CEMETERY HIGH plays a very self aware game. There's a running gag among the characters all about whose turn it is to show their tits on camera. The film stops in its tracks to give us a fake commercial for an imaginary product, a bulletproof jock strap. The characters talk to the camera at regular intervals, telling us all about how they plan to sell their story rights to a Hollywood company, rake in some cash and buy a brownstone in Greenwich Village, the pinnacle of faux-artistic self-importance. They start very early on to pick out the costumes they'll be wearing at the films end, knowing they'll need to look cool for the inevitable dramatic bullet-filled finale. When they finally make their stand against the Mayor and his gang of gun-toting dudes, Morricone plays on the soundtrack.

Sure, most of the jokes along the way fall flat and the acting is sometimes somnambulistic, but the self-aware qualities of CEMETERY HIGH are refreshing in their own low budget way. Make no mistake, this is not high art. This is not Fellini's 8 ½. This is a b-movie with all the trappings of a b-movie, but the film has attitude, lovely actresses and a brisk pacing that whips the film forward through its barely 90 minute running time. Lots and lots of people hate this film. I am not one of those people. I genuinely enjoy CEMETERY HIGH, so much in fact that I watched the film twice in row before writing this. Why do I enjoy it so much? Honestly, a lot of it has to do with the fact that it is in many ways emblematic of the kind of film I used to devour on a regular basis. Some of it has to do with the fact that, obvious problems aside, it's just a fun little film. I like it. 

Bet you didn't see that coming.