October Edition #31: THE EXORCIST

Director: William Friedkin
Screenplay: William Peter Blatty, based on his novel
Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Jason Miller, Linda Blair, Max von Sydow
Release Date: 1973


In December of 1973 William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s THE EXORCIST was unleashed on a movie going public that would have no idea what had just hit them. Seeming to break every taboo that existed in film’s up to that time, it incited such terror in its’ audience that it has been reported that patrons would literally run screaming from the theater in the middle of the movie, some of them passing out or vomiting in the lobby, and in one instance it allegedly caused a woman to go into labor. With that kind of word of mouth it’s no wonder that lines for the movie wrapped around the block and it eventually went on to become one of the highest grossing movies of all time, and is still considered by most to be the scariest. So why in God’s name have I never given this flick the time of day?

Let me start off by saying that this is not going to be a review. Countless tracts have been written about THE EXORCIST since its release, highlighting its’ thematic resonance, cultural impact, and undeniable ability to scare the shit out of generations of film-goers. There is nothing I can add to that conversation that hasn’t probably been said a thousand times before. Instead I’ve opted to discuss why it has taken a rabid horror junkie like such as myself so long to see this flick.

 I really oughta put an asterisk on this entry, because technically speaking, I have seen THE EXORCIST. Well, in bits and pieces, that is. I must have seen the climactic exorcism a solid dozen times during its’ numerous airings on TNT when I was a kid, and every now and then I’d catch snippets of the very beginning. I know the entire story of the possession of innocent young Regan MacNeil beat for beat, and I’ve even seen all of the sequels, but I have never before today sat down and watched this movie from beginning to end. So, given the immense amount of over saturation THE EXORCIST has received since its’ release nearly forty years ago and the undeniably iconic status it has achieved, how does the film stack up?

The answer is, remarkably well. I was worried going into this that the movie would fall flat for me because, as I’ve stated, everyone knows the plot, the imagery and the music so much so that any impact it might have had was going to be lost. But good film-making knows no boundaries, and if a film is truly impactive it will work its’ magic regardless of  an audience’s prior knowledge of all of its tricks.

Let me be clear, though: THE EXORCIST did not scare me. I remember being frightened by the mere mention of the movie as a kid. It was that one movie I felt I was not supposed to see, otherwise I might suffer in burning torment for all of eternity. I think it might have been residuals of these feelings from childhood that kept me from THE EXORCIST for so long. I remember when it was re-released to theaters back in 2000 I had planned on going to see it with a group of my friends, but I ended up grounded and couldn’t go and then when it came out on DVD later that year I talked myself out of  giving it a watch. I rationalized that it was because the movie was too old-fashioned and would bore me to tears, but on a deeper level I know it was because of an deep-seated religious terror that anyone who has ever had a problem with this movie can understand. I wasn’t so much afraid of THE EXORCIST as much as I was made uncomfortable by it.

But I got over all of that years ago, so for the last half decade or so I can only chalk up my resistance to finally watching THE EXORCIST to pure laziness. Now that I’ve finally gotten it out of the way, I’m sorta sad I never watched it sooner. Mainstream Hollywood films were a different beast in the early 70’s, as directors were given free reign to take enormous risks with their films, bringing to life stories of stark realism that usually didn’t have happy endings but almost always had something important to say. It was a grimly pessimistic time, and it was the last time a film could be made without worries of screen testing for audience approval, product placement, and the general micromanaging that occurs on nearly every flick released nowadays that renders every project as bland and lifeless as the last.

Every frame, every performance, every single sound in THE EXORCIST is produced with genuine feeling. You can see it from the very first frame, a hellish close-up of the sun rising in the Iraqi desert, the camera lingering on each speck of dust and every bead of sweat clinging to Max von Sydow’s Father Merrin as he wanders through an Iraqi town experiencing an oppressive sense of foreboding doom that rubs right off onto the audience. Once the action moves to the MacNeil residence in Georgetown the Oscar-winning sound design takes over for the visuals in creating a sense that every single object is possessed of an otherworldly evil. Ordinary objects like door hinges, telephones, even x-ray machines are imbued with an almost sentient malevolence through the use of sound effects to overwhelm the viewer. Even if you have no religious beliefs, the world as presented in THE EXORCIST is a terrifying place where everything seems out to get you.

In creating a relentlessly oppressive mood that keeps drawing you in, THE EXORCIST is a resounding success. Even though I knew every last detail of the story going in the film was still able to sink its’ hooks into me until the final bitter frame. While I may never be able to identify with anyone who passed out while watching it, I cannot deny its sheer visual and sonic power to assault the senses. How much of the films’ power can be attributed to its iconic status is up for debate. Would I have reacted the same way if I weren’t aware of the importance of the sights and sounds I was seeing on our popular culture? Who knows? What matters is the movie still works as a solid story, and still has the power to disturb. With the exception of PSYCHO, how many other nearly forty year old films can make that claim? None that I know of.

I’m glad I finally watched THE EXORCIST, and I feel that in time I’ll have more to say about it. But today is Halloween, and I don’t want to spend all of my favorite day of the year writing. So, while I apologize for the hasty wrap-up, let me end by saying that if you for some reason haven’t checked out THE EXORCIST, give it a shot. It is not the personification of pure evil so many have claimed it to be. In fact, though it does end on a somber note, it leaves you with just enough hope that maybe there is some good in this world worth saving. You just have to stare long into the darkness to find it.

My Rating:
10/10

October Edition #30: LAKE MUNGO

Director: Joel Anderson
Screenplay: Joel Anderson
Starring: Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe, Talia Zucker
Release Date: 2008


LAKE MUNGO is a fictional documentary consisting of interviews and home video footage that follows the plight of the Palmer family who, in December of 2005, is hit by tragedy when their 16 year old daughter Alice (Zucker) drowns in a nearby dam. In the months that follow the terrible loss the family, including Alice’s father Russell (Pledger), mother June (Traynor), and brother Matthew (Sharpe) begin to experience strange occurrences in their home, unexplained noises in the night, unsettling nightmares and what appears to be irrefutable visual proof that Alice’s spirit is lingers on in this world, as she begins to appear in the backgrounds of various photographs taken by Matthew. Eventually the Palmer’s uncover a series of clues that lead them to the titular lake and a chilling revelation about Alice’s final days.





LAKE MUNGO is a frustrating film, as it deals with a series of events which, while certainly eerie in their own right, are totally undercut by the knowledge that none of what we are watching has any basis in reality. It is presented as a documentary, and if I didn’t know otherwise beforehand I would have thought it was totally legit as the performances, from the Palmer family on down to the minor players such as the local authorities, are across-the-board fantastic. It really does feel like we are watching real people recount a truly traumatic tragedy that has befallen them, so much so that at times it is easy to forget that this is just a movie. My problem is that they take the realism to extremes, as the ghostly phenomenon, when it does occur, is relegated merely to a series of still photographs and grainy home video footage capturing a figure that MIGHT kinda look like Alice looming in the background.

While the initial presentation of this footage did actually raise a few hairs on the back of my neck, the effect is eventually kneecapped by the revelation that all of the aforementioned images were faked by Alice’s brother for reasons too far-fetched to take seriously. The first half of the flick is a solidly eerie affair that slowly builds up to the big reveal of these images, and for the filmmakers to suddenly pull back and basically say that all of that was bullshit seemed like a major betrayal, and a huge waste of my time. In all fairness, this flick is not served well by being marketed as a horror film, at which it is ultimately a failure. LAKE MUNGO functions best as a family drama that just happens to feature a few debatable supernatural elements. The entire crux of the drama leads to the Palmers’ discovering a few unseemly aspects of their daughter’s personality that reveal she wasn’t the perfectly innocent angel they believed her to be, and then the movie just kinda ends. I will say that the final revelation of what happened to Alice at Lake Mungo features a truly startling image that, were this based in fact, would have left a massive shit-stain in my pants, but as it is was still incredibly unsettling. However by the time the movie ends all of the participants’ actions are so untrustworthy that all you can do is shake your head and wonder what the point of all of it is.

For what it is, LAKE MUNGO is exceptionally well-made, and tells a compelling enough story of the heartbreaking lengths some people will go to when dealing with grief and denying their loved ones have indeed passed on. As a drama it is very effective, but as a ghost story, while quite spooky in spots,  it flounders due to the unreliability of the characters involved.

My Rating:
6.5/10

October Edition #29: BLACK SABBATH

Director: Mario Bava
Screenplay: Mario Bava, Alberto Bevilacqua, Marcello Fondato
Starring: Boris Karloff, Jacqueline Pierreux, Michele Mercier, Mark Damon
Release Date: 1963


Today’s SIHS entry is another film by Italian genre maestro Mario Bava. The horror anthology BLACK SABBATH collects a trio of terrifying tales introduced by horror icon Boris Karloff, dealing with such nefarious subjects as vengeful spirits, murderous exes, and undead fiends. Just like in PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES these gothic nightmares are brought to life via ultra-stylized lighting, oppressive atmosphere and various other means of low-budget trickery.

Careful! She's not quite dead yet!

The first story, titled “A Drop Of Water”, tells a very simple tale of greed and ghostly vengeance. It concerns a young nurse named Helen who is called to the apartment of a medium who has just died to prepare the body for burial. While dressing the corpse, whose face is frozen in a snarling rictus of horror she spots a large ring on the deceased woman’s finger and snatches it up for herself. However she very quickly discovers that nothing comes without a price as when she returns to her apartment she is taunted by a pesky fly buzzing around her head and the persistent sound of dripping water, not unlike the water heard dripping from the dead psychic’s bedpan. Bava builds tension wonderfully in this sequence using inventive lighting techniques and deep silences punctuated by sudden outbursts of demonic sonic assaults, and draws the viewer into Helen’s increasingly unbalanced psyche through the use of a rhythmically pulsating neon sign constantly blinking outside of her window, leaving you constantly on edge waiting for something to jump out and grab her as the lights blink back on. This is an excellently creepy sequence that showcases all of Bava’s skills behind the camera at their peak. I also suspect that director Sam Raimi was secretly influenced by this story when helming his most recent horror film, DRAG ME TO HELL, which featured similar story beats including a fly that torments that film’s heroine as well as the ungodly disturbing corpse of  a curse-happy gypsy woman that shows up in the damnedest places.

Incredible scenes of woman-on-phone action, boring you like never before!

The next sequence, “The Telephone” is an unfortunately mundane, blasé affair in which a call girl named Rosie returns to her apartment one night and is tormented by a voyeuristic night caller who can see her every move and promises to cause her great bodily harm. Though brief, this story is a true endurance test, featuring none of the eerie mood or suspenseful turns of the knife as the previous segment. The caller quickly reveals himself to be Rosie’s deceased former lover, Frank, whom she turned in to the police for an undisclosed crime. After doing some research I discovered that this segment was heavily edited by the film’s stateside distributor, American International Pictures, drastically altering the thematic content of the material. Swaths of dialogue and the very backbone of the plot were thrown out and hastily cobbled together in order to change what was the story of an angry exes’ revenge plot into an angry ghosts’ revenge plot. While I have been told that the Italian cut of this story is a thousand times better, as it stands in the version I’ve seen this segment is a total clunker.

If you play your cards right, ladies, he'll show you his rape-cave.

The third and final segment, “The Wurdalak”, follows the young Count Vladimir Durfe (Damon) as he witnesses the tragic plight of a Russian family whose beloved father Gorca (Karloff) has been transformed into the dreadful Wurdalak, which is basically the Russian version of a vampire. While traveling the countryside Vladimir discovers a corpse that has been beheaded and stabbed through the heart with a dagger. He brings the corpse with him to a rural cottage, where he meets Gorca’s family, who explain to Vladimir that their patriarch went into the wilderness several days prior with the intention of slaying the bloodthirsty Wurdalak. However, that was five days ago, and they now fear that their father has become the very thing he set out to destroy. These fears turn out to be well-founded as Gorca returns and, playing off of their doubts as to his true nature, methodically picks them off one by one, starting with his young grandson, engaging in a horrific game of emotional vampirism in order to ensure he claims his entire family for the night. This segment is much stronger both visually and thematically than “The Telephone”, going a long way towards rectifying the massive misstep of that storyline by returning to the amazing visuals and production design Bava showed a knack for in “A Drop Of Water”. The story is fairly predictable, but the atmosphere is palpably eerie, helped along by some truly hair-raising visuals of the newly undead beckoning to their intended victims, and of course the gravelly-voiced Karloff delivering a ghoulishly grim performance.

Each story is preceded by a visually frivolous introduction from Karloff who hams his way through some truly corny dialogue, but does so in a winking and fun-loving way that only he could pull of. All in all I thought this was a neat little movie that, aside from the muddled nature of the second segment,  was a fun little diversion with enough scenes of skin-crawling tension and creepy atmosphere to garner a recommendation.

My Rating:
7/10

October Edition #28: DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE

Director: Freddie Francis
Screenplay: Anthony Hinds, based on characters created by Bram Stoker
Starring: Christopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barry Andrews
Release Date: 1968


On a routine checkup of a monastery in the village of Kleinberg, Monsignor Ernst Mueller (Davies) is appalled to discover a priest who has succumbed to alcoholism and villagers too frightened to attend Sunday service in a church that is falls beneath the shadow of Castle Dracula during the twilight hours. He drags the cowardly priest up the mountain to Dracula’s castle to perform the rite of exorcism on the evil landmark, placing a gigantic silver cross over the entrance to the castle in the hopes of assuaging the fears of the locals and finally putting an end to the vampire lords’ pestilence. Caught in the middle of a nasty storm in the wake of the exorcism, the priest falls and hits his head on some rocks, drawing a significant amount of blood which drips into a frozen stream containing the body of Dracula (Lee), who is instantly revived by the holy man’s plasma, and apparently woke up on the wrong side of the coffin. Unable to enter his homestead on account of the Monsignor’s actions, the enraged vampire enslaves the priest via hypnosis and follows the Monsignor to his hometown seeking unholy vengeance. Caught in the middle of all of this is the Monsignor’s beloved niece Maria (Carlson) and her boyfriend Paul (Andrews), a baker at a local café, as Dracula sets his sights on Maria in an attempt to utterly ruin the holy man who desecrated his home.

You're gonna need a bigger cross.

Well, I fucked up, because I thought I was watching this series of Dracula movies from Hammer Films in order, but apparently there is a movie that came between this and the last one I saw, THE BRIDES OF DRACULA, that I missed. I have no goddamn clue how Dracula wound up encased in ice at the bottom of a ravine, though I do find it funny that this is the second old-school horror flick I’ve watched this month that features this ludicrous plot point, the other example being the icy tomb of Frankenstein’s monster in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN. Like that film, this one also has to invent a new rule in order to resurrect its title monster. In theory blood droplets resurrecting a deceased vampire makes about as much sense as moon rays having the same effect on a werewolf, but both explanations reek of desperation on the part of the screenwriters. Whatever the case, once DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE gets past the confusing setup it is actually a fun, if highly predictable little fright flick, dutifully running down a check list of vampire lore and clichés that were already old hat even when this was released.

The first twenty minutes in the village of Kleinberg quickly re-establish all of the gothic mood and iconography of the previous entries in the Hammer Dracula series. My only real beef with this scenes is that director Freddie Francis spends far too much time setting up Dracula’s resurrection due to the stuffy Monsignor Ernst’s interfering ways, only to quickly shuffle that character into the background about forty minutes in and focus on the stories’ actual protagonists, Maria and Paul. After all of that, we are then introduced to even more characters, and while it did begin to grow a bit tiresome, I actually found the character of Paul to be a rather likeable enough bloke, which helped sustain my interest for the rest of the running time.

Professor Sternface McHugechops does not approve.

Christopher Lee is his usual badass self, conveying equal parts feral intensity and swoon-worthy charisma. His Dracula strikes a hellishly intimidating presence with his impeccably slick-back hair and fiery bloodshot gaze, but he still does a good job of sexing the place up, especially in his scenes with a slutty barmaid named Zena and his encounters with a quivering Maria in her bedroom. In both instances he seduces the women without saying a word, oozing cool, cocky confidence from every pore, effectively neck-fucking them with no objections. Though he has far more screen time here than he did in HORROR OF DRACULA, he is still fairly absent most of the time, making his few major appearances that much more effective.

Let the sexing commence!

Be honest. Does my face smell like bacon?

What really hurts this movie is the absence of Peter Cushing, whose Professor Van Helsing proved to be Dracula’s most worthy foil. The obsessive determination of Cushing’s character is replaced with Davies’ Monsignor Ernst, and instantly unlikable, insufferably stuffy and closed-minded ass. His bull-headedness is what brings about the return of Dracula in the first place, and his conflict with Paul over the latter’s professed atheism paints the holy man as the worst kind of intolerant dickhead who, thank the screenwriting heavens, does not turn out to be our hero. There are also a few really stupid scenes, like when the enslaved priest is forced to dispose of a woman’s body by shoving it into the tiniest fireplace in Britain. The film cuts to another scene as the burning begins, only to return a few minutes later to show the priest openly weeping, the body entirely gone, leaving not a trace of ash or even bone.

Minor nitpicks aside, every other aspect of the production falls directly in line with what I have come to expect from a Hammer horror title. Though filmed on a very low budget, the period production design is appropriately ornate, if obviously entirely stage-bound. I particularly appreciated the intricate rooftop set used several times throughout the film, most effectively in a chase scene towards the end. The photography does a good job of setting an appropriately gothic mood. There is a very particular effect director Francis employs any time Dracula is present involving some kind of color filter which produces a surreal orange-ish tint that rings the frame that is very visually off-putting and eerie. And the blood, though seldom seen, is a bright, vivacious tint of red that almost bursts off the screen in all of its Technicolor glory.

Quick! Someone get this man some Visine!

Too late.

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE is kinda corny and ultimately very predictable, but there’s something oddly comforting to be found in its old-fashioned chills and thrills. If there’s one complaint I can lodge against modern horror movies, it is that most of them are soul-crushingly gruesome affairs devoid of imagination or wit, whose sole focus is on the degradation  and utter ruination of its characters. This flick might be a retread of themes and imagery I’ve seen a thousand times over, but it was still able to take me back to a time when horror movies could be fun.

My Rating:
6.5/10

October Edition #27: TROLL HUNTER

Director: Andre Ovredal
Screenplay: Andre Ovredal, Havard S. Johansen
Starring: Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland Tosterud, Johanna Morck, Tomas Alf Larsen
Release Date: 2010


TROLL HUNTER begins, in true BLAIR WITCH fashion, with a  block of text explaining that what we are about to see is an authentic documentary cobbled together from 200 hours of footage found after the filmmakers mysteriously disappeared. It follows a group of Norwegian students from Volda College, director Thomas (Tosterud), sound operator Johanna (Morck) and cameraman Kalle (Larsen), as they track a mysterious man thought by locals to be the poacher responsible for a series of bear killings. The man’s name is Hans (Jespersen), and he travels the countryside in a terribly battered Land Rover that is covered in alarming claw marks, camping out in various trailer parks and disappearing into the forest for much of the night. After several attempts to secure an interview in which Hans runs them off, they eventually track him deep into the wilderness one night just in time to catch him in the middle of a battle with an enormous three-headed troll. After their vehicle is trashed by the beast, Hans agrees to let the students ride along with him as he tracks these monsters across the thick forests and icy tundra of Norway, educating them on the very real science of troll hunting and the Norwegian governments’ part I keeping the existence of the mythic creatures out of public knowledge.

TROLL HUNTER is not only another solid entry in the ever-expanding “found footage” subgenre kicked off by THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, but also one of the most creative, exhilarating and technically efficient monster movies I have seen in the last half decade. Director/screenwriter Andre Ovredal and co-writer Havard S. Johansen do a fine job of piquing our interest in the first half hour as the students quickly uncover the mystery of Hans nocturnal wanderings. Hans is a very quiet, stern man whose eyes betray an infinite sadness and tragic back story that is never made fully clear, but we enough is suggested throughout the picture’s running time to fill in the gaps and keep us engaged in his story. His bitter nonchalance and workmanlike attitude in the face of these Grimm’s fairy tale-inspired monstrosities adds a much-welcome humorous edge to the proceedings. He has only agreed to let the students film him because, in his words, "I'm tired of this shitty job", and feels the world should be allowed to know what he has devoted his life to keeping under wraps.

But what I enjoyed most about TROLL HUNTER was the immense complexity and thought put into building the world of this movie. There is a vast history of troll lore laid at our feet as Hans explains the numerous species and sub-groups of trolls, including the Ringlefinches, Mountain Kings, and the enormous, mountain-dwelling Jotnars. We learn how the Norwegian government has set up the Troll Security Service, or TSS for short, to keep the mythical beasts restricted to certain territories far-removed from civilization using ingenious ruses like massive circles of power lines which seem normal enough, but are actually being used as electrical fencing to keep the Jotnar at bay. Hans infiltrates the troll’s territories by covering himself and the documentary crew in concentrated troll stench to cover their human odor. One odor the troll stench cannot cover up, however, is the smell of Christian blood, which sends any troll into an enraged feeding frenzy. Hans asks the filmmakers before they embark on the hunt if any of them believe in Jesus, and while they all claim they don’t, one of them of course reveals they are a believer at the worst time, when they are trapped in the den of  sleeping Ringlefinches, leading into one of the only truly creepy scenes in the movie as we witness the trolls chasing Hans and the film crew out of the cave through the eerie green glow of night vision. Later on, when asked if the trolls can tell the difference between Christian and Muslim blood, Hans humorously muses, “I honestly don’t know. We’ll see what happens.”

Strong aversion to Christianity aside, there is very little supernatural about the creatures. Hans goes into battle with the beasts with enormous UV ray emitting flash bulbs that replicate the effects of sunlight, causing the younger trolls to explode and the oldest ones to turn to stone. This is attributed by a veterinarian friend of Hans to an inability of the trolls to convert vitamin D from the sun into calcium, resulting in incredibly rapid calcification. In another scene we witness Hans attempt to draw blood from a Ringlefinch, under orders from the TSS, using, you guessed it, three billy goats as bait. In many other scenes, we get to see the bureaucracy of the TSS at work as Hans is forced to fill out a tedious “Troll Slay Form” after each successful hunt. It is the stubborn attention to little details like these that I admire most about this film, as  the plausibility of the scenario aids the filmmakers in drawing the viewer into this crazy world.

Special mention must be made of the visual effects work utilized to create the various species of trolls. We only ever see them sparingly, usually shrouded in darkness and briefly illuminated by the strobe-like flash of the UV lights. I’m fairly positive the creatures were created via CGI, but there may very well have been some creative puppetry at play as well. The monsters initially look as ridiculous as the premise would suggest, until they give chase, and then they turn into truly terrifying behemoths, not to be laughed at. Particularly effective use is made by the blinding light of the flash bulbs, which light up the entire forest and lend a truly epic atmosphere to the battles without actually showing us anything. All of these effects were pulled off on a shoestring budget, but they did an amazing job and it is a testament to the immense talent of the filmmakers to squeeze every penny of production value that they could out of limited means.

I figured I would like TROLL HUNTER, but I never expected to be as entranced by it as I was, and the richly detailed back story and incredible character work by Jespersen went a long way towards cementing this a permanent space on my DVD shelf. The only negative thing I can say about the film is that the ending is rather abrupt and not entirely satisfying, but that is a trait that is inevitable with these found footage films. We may already know the outcome of the story, but what matters is how much fun we have reaching that conclusion. TROLL HUNTER is a total blast, a real breath of fresh air and creativity that is sorely lacking in mainstream movies. Give it a shot. Even if you don’t enjoy it on the same level that I did, I guarantee it will at least keep you thoroughly entertained. Word is that Summit Entertainemnt is planning on remaking this for US audiences soon, but I say screw that and check out this movie as soon as you get the chance.

My Rating:
9/10

October Edition #26: DEAD HEAT

Director: Mark Goldblatt
Screenplay: Terry Black
Starring: Treat Williams, Joe Piscopo, Lindsay Frost, Darren McGavin, Vincent Price
Release Date: 1988


Los Angeles Detectives Roger Mortis (Williams) and Doug Bigelow (Piscopo) are hot on the case of  a series of robberies committed in broad daylight by criminals who are unusually hard to kill. You can keep pumping bullets into them all day long, but blowing them up seems to be the only thing that takes them down. Once the remains are taken to the city morgue, the coroner makes a gruesome discovery -  these guys have already been through the morgue before, and have got the autopsy scars to prove it. After detecting a chemical called sulfathiazole in the criminals’ blood, the detectives are able to trace the drug to the nearby Dante Pharmaceuticals, where Bigelow is attacked by an obese triple-faced mutant biker demon. In the ensuing battle Mortis is accidentally locked in the company’s “Asphyxiation Room” effectively rendering him dead as disco. Fortunately Bigelow discovers a hidden room containing a machine that can reanimate dead flesh and before you know it Mortis is back in business and feeling better than ever. There’s just one small catch. He has no heartbeat, and has only twelve hours to solve the mystery of who murdered him before his entire body decomposes into a puddle of protoplasmic ooze.

Detectives Bigelow and Mortis examine the remains of Joe Piscopo's film career.

The combination of the jacket, the mullet, the "Whole Piscopo", threatens to make this zombie hurl.

And so they spend the rest of the movie on the trail of Mortis' killers, running down a checklist of every buddy cop movie cliché along the way. Mortis and Bigelow are of course your typical loose-cannon insubordinates, who begin the film getting a proper dressing down from the chief of police, even though they did just save everybody’s ass during a massive shoot-out outside of a jewelry store. Written by Terry Black, the brother of LETHAL WEAPON scribe Shane Black, DEAD HEAT seems to take more than a few pages from that film’s playbook, with a nice dash of gruesome horror thrown into the mix. Here Treat Williams assumes the straight-man “Murtaugh” role, and Joe Piscopo is …. well, just Joe Piscopo, unfortunately, a setback that effectively knee-caps any  chance this movie had of ever working as a horror/comedy. Piscopo, clad in a tacky leather jacket with way too small shirt, sweating steroids from every meaty pore and sporting the worst mullet this side Kevin Dillon in THE BLOB (1988), his character is a total miscalculation on every level. There isn’t a single second he’s onscreen that isn’t spent mugging for the camera, and every word he utters is the worst kind of groan-inducing one-liner. He isn’t funny, likeable, or at all pleasant to look at, resembling some kind of ‘roided out ape who was somehow allowed onto a movie set.

...and that's how Zordon was created, children.

But other than that, the movie has a few good things going for it, namely the absolutely awesome special make-up effects by Steve Johnson. By this point in the 80’s Johnson had worked on some of the biggest effects pictures of the decade, including AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, GHOSTBUSTERS, FRIGHT NIGHT, and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 4, so with the experience of those classics under his belt he totally brought his A-game to this picture, delivering a slew of desiccated corpses, full-body meltdowns, and gratuitous head trauma. The movie’s biggest set piece takes place in a Chinese butcher shop in which all of the dead animal parts are reanimated and attack the two detectives, including various chicken parts, ducks, a stuffed pig and, most impressive of all, a hollowed-out bull carcass that rears up on its hind quarters and attempts to engulf Mortis. I have definitely never seen anything like that in a movie before, so I’ve gotta credit the filmmakers for creativity.

Dana Carvey has really let himself go!

The director is first-timer Mark Goldblatt, a seasoned editor of some of the decades biggest action blockbusters, including THE TERMINATOR and FIRST BLOOD, and who would later go on to direct the first PUNISHER movie starring Dolph Lundren. He does a decent enough job here, staging an impressive gun battle in the opening scene, but it’s pretty apparent that when it came to the performances he pretty much let the actors do whatever they wanted, which is fine for a pro like Treat Williams, but someone needed to rein Piscopo in and let him know when to shut the fuck up. Better yet, someone needed to just not cast him in the first place.

Fortunately for Vincent Price, he got to be in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS after this. No one wants to end their career with a Joe Piscopo vehicle.

Terry Black’s screenplay probably seemed like a great idea on paper, but in practice the tone is wildly uneven. It’s no good at being a comedy, and the horror aspects are so horrific as to render the film a depressing mess. The sole bright spot comes in the form of two cameo appearances from veteran genre stars Darren McGavin and Vincent Price. McGavin brings the same “aw, shucks” likeability he did to Carl Kolchak in THE NIGHT STALKER, and Vincent Price, well, all he needs to do is be Vincent Price and I’m a happy customer.

Now if the guy on the right would just point his gun at himself, then we'd have ourselves a pretty good movie.

I don’t know about this one. It wasn’t nearly as awful as I’d always heard, with a neat premise, some badass practical make-up effects and a few decent action scenes. Unfortunately someone dropped a putrid pile of pig shit named Joe Piscopo onto the production, which is too bad because this could have been a fun little cult movie. As it is, I’ve gotta give it a solid meh.

My Rating:
5/10

Or

Which mullet is the greater atrocity? You decide.

October Edition #25: THE TOMB OF LIGEIA

Director: Roger Corman
Screenplay: Robert Towne, from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe
Starring: Vincent Price, Elizabeth Shepherd, John Westbrook, Derek Francis
Release Date: 1964


Today I turned to Netflix to check out a movie that has been sitting in my queue since last October,  THE TOMB OF LIGEIA, another Edgar Allan Poe adaptation directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. Corman and Price collaborated on a series of these films in the 1960s, producing such classics as HOUSE OF USHER, THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, and TALES OF TERROR, all of which took full advantage of Technicolor’s rich color palette to create stunningly gothic visual poems of madness and the macabre. I fucking love it when these two work together, so you can understand how excited I was to check this flick out.

THE TOMB OF LIGEIA begins as Verden Fell (Price) lays to rest the body of his beloved wife Ligeia (Shepherd) beneath a large stone monument in the ruins of an abbey on their estate. A priest warns Fell that his wife was an unholy creature, and thus should not be buried in God’s earth. Fell tells the preacher to take a hike and that he’ll bury her wherever he damn well pleases, but not before a stray black cat jumps onto the coffin, which has a glass opening over the corpses’ face, causing the eyes to eerily pop open. Fell quickly closes his dead wife’s eyes and buries her against the priests’ warnings. After an undisclosed period of time, we pick up the story with Lady Rowena ( Shepherd, again) who goes exploring what looks like an abandoned abbey and is startled when she bumps into Verden, who is keeping watch over his wife’s grave. Fell is obsessed with Ligeia, convinced that her will to live was so strong that it will surpass death itself, allowing to return to him someday. He spends all of his time wandering the dark passages of the abbey alone, surrounded by sculptures of Egyptian iconography, and during the day wears a pair of odd-looking sunglasses to shield his eyes against a severe aversion to sunlight.

Despite his devotion to Ligeia, Rowena and Verden develop an infatuation with one another and are quickly married, with plans to sell the abbey and move on with their lives. Once they return home from their honeymoon, however, Verden once again dons the sunglasses and begins to behave strangely, disappearing at odd hours of the night with no explanation as to where he has been. The next day their lawyer Christopher (Westbrook) confides in them that Ligeia was never legally declared dead, meaning the deed to the abbey remains in her name, negating any plans to sell it, and also making Rowena and Verden’s marriage involuntarily bigamous. It soon becomes apparent that some force is trying to keep Verden at the abbey, and Rowena out of his life, as various strange goings-on begin to take place throughout the castle, most involving the black cat who seems to guard the tomb of Ligeia and whom is always present during moments of distress. Is Ligeia really attempting to return to her husband from beyond the grave? Or is this all some contagious form of madness that is taking hold of Rowena just as it already has Verden?

THE TOMB OF LIGEIA is a rich, atmospheric, lushly photographed piece of old-fashioned movie making, full of moments of genuinely beautiful horror, and it absolutely bored me to fucking tears. Even at a slim running time of an hour and twenty one minutes, after the first half hour I quickly began to tire of  this film’s dry dialogue and languorous pacing. Now, to be fair, the other Poe adaptations could be fairly slow-paced as well, but at least in a movie like HOUSE OF USHER, which also deals with phantoms that might exist only in the mind of its antagonist, there was a very real sense of urgency to the proceedings, as the audience is immediately made aware of the full extent of Roderick Usher’s madness and the danger that he poses to the protagonists. THE TOMB OF LIGEIA instead is composed of scene after scene of endless dialogue, with Price constantly slipping into reveries about the power of his love for his wife and her desire to outlive death that just go on and on. There are no real scares or any kind of action until the last ten minutes or so, which of course involve the abbey being consumed in a massive inferno. But the entirety of the movie before that consists mainly of scenes of people roaming around spooky art-directed corridors, calling out each others names, and waiting for something, for God’s sake anything, to happen.

I greatly appreciated the production design on display, as the immense sets and outdoor locations amped up the atmosphere to a much-needed level. The ruins of the abbey are obviously a very real, possibly ancient location and they are a breathtaking sight to behold. But all of the pretty visuals in the world don’t mean anything if nothing of interest happens in them. The screenplay by Robert Towne, who would eventually go on to write CHINATOWN, while quite ornate and literate, meanders far too much to add up to a cohesive whole. I will admit that I know nothing of the short story on which this is based, so I can’t say how much of that can be blamed on a lack of substantial plot to spread out to feature length. However, MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH was based on a short poem that had absolutely no real plot or main characters, and Richard Matheson was able to construct a fantastic thematic tribute that retained all of the apocalyptic atmosphere of the source material while simultaneously telling its own twisted story.

This film, which was the last of the Poe films made by Corman, falls back into a formula established in HOUSE OF USHER and continued on through THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM that by this point had grown quite tired. As the formula goes, "Vincent Price is a recluse who lives in a castle/abbey/mansion who is obsessed with some dead bitch and is stubbornly hiding a ghoulish secret that isn’t revealed until the final ten minutes, oh and also he may or may not be crazy, but we’ll just leave that up to your imagination!" That formula, which worked amazingly well in the prior Poe films, simply didn’t do anything for me this go-round, probably because I’ve already seen it too many times before.

Another thing missing from this film is the impeccable sense of style Corman exhibited in the previous films. Again, the photography is beautiful, but it completely lacks the hallucinogenic color palette of THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH and HOUSE OF USHER. The eye-popping red, blue, and green hues that crowded the frames of those movies created an awe-inspiring mood of gothic terror that is sorely lacking here. This movie even has the requisite distorted camera lens acid trip dream sequence that appeared in all of these movies, but this one shares none of the colorful nightmarishness of the same scenes in the other movies.

While I have many complaints against THE TOMB OF LIGEIA, I still don’t think it is a bad movie. It’s just dull, is all. Incredibly well-made, impeccably acted, gorgeous to look at, and boring, boring, boring. I wanted to like this, and found quite a bit to appreciate, but there was simply not enough of substance to make me ever want to revisit it.

My Rating:

5.5/10