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From what I remember, I think his motivation is basically the same. He wants to isolate his baser tendencies (for all vice, not necessarily just sex). But it's a bit murkier since the story is told from an outsider's point of view who is not privy to all of Jekyll's thoughts and desires. That's one reason why the original story is actually not that interesting to me. It reads almost like a blueprint for playwrights and screenwriters (and the readers, I suppose) to fill in the details that are left out.

Though there is a very strong indication that the two vices he is primarily thinking of are alcoholism and homosexuality which I'm pretty sure only Alan Moore's played with.

Funnily enough, there's a throwaway line in the 1941 version where some classy ladies break a tense dinner table convo by asking, "Have you read that new poem by Oscar Wilde?"

Feego wrote: I don't know if there has ever been a film that took this approach rather than showing the audience that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same from the get-go.

Amicus' I, Monster uses the structure of the book, with Peter Cushing playing Utterson to Christopher Lee's Jekyll/Hyde. It's rather good.

I share your affection for The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll. One of Hammer's best.

I actually love the novella (one of my favorite works of literature, period), and I encourage you to read it, domino. Though Utterson is the primary narrator, the text also includes, towards the end, a letter from Dr. Lanyon describing Jekyll’s development and use of the serum and another letter from Jekyll, a sort of “final confession.” I think it’s quite thrilling, interestingly structured, and actually somewhat sad at the end.

The use of the serum is intended both to disguise Jekyll so that he may indulge in vice without detection and to liberate/suppress his conscience so that he can indulge without guilt. It’s intended to make physical and separate the “dual nature of man.”

The original stage adaptation (and there were actually a few different stage adaptations around the turn of the century) was engineered to provide a vehicle for a bravura physical performance by the stage star Richard Mansfield. It jettisoned almost everything that makes the book interesting and sensationalized the rest. This has been the standard for just about every adaptation since, though I really like the 1920 Barrymore film and think it’s faithful to the feeling of the book if not to the letter. I wrote a paper in grad school (almost 20 years ago!) about the early stage and film versions. I’ll have to see if I can find it.

I'd love to read that if you found it Matt!

knives wrote: Sun Oct 14, 2018 8:59 pm Though there is a very strong indication that the two vices he is primarily thinking of are alcoholism and homosexuality which I'm pretty sure only Alan Moore's played with.

Serendipitously I revisited the film adaptation of Alan Moore's From Hell over the weekend, which features the same kind of takes on the frisson of Victorian sexuality, drug use (That Nine Inch Nails music video The Perfect Drug, kind of ventures into the same territory, given that its all about absinthe use!) and hypocrisy, which feels like it is one of Moore's favourite themes with the setting of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which was the subject of one of my favourite ever throwaway Simpsons jokes, with an adult cinema being shown to be screening "The League of Extraordinarily Horny Gentlemen"!), or the legacy of that era with the figures from classic children's literature Alice, Dorothy and Wendy having a fictionalised meet up and telling naughty stories about their previously indescribable antics in Lost Girls.

From Hell also features that Jekyll and Hyde-like duality within almost all of the characters, but especially the Jack The Ripper figure, where they all inhabit certain 'normal' worlds but get regularly forced by the circumstances demanded of them by their work to have to face extreme behaviour, the viscerality of bodily functions and urges that are driven by the body and the aftermath of such acts straight on rather than being able to remain somewhat detached from the gruesome truths of the society. Its fascinating less as a mystery about 'who' Jack The Ripper was, but for the way the material is equating prostitute, police inspector and the Ripper together as characters both defined and exploited by their environment and working conditions.

Spoiler

As the identity of Jack The Ripper in this version is the Queen's chief surgeon who has been tasked with murdering those who might be able to reveal a Royal sex scandal and illegitimate child. With this character, working in the highest echelons of society, steadily going more deranged as he has to kill and kill again, until the final complete atrocity of the almost complete dismemberment into unrecognisability of Mary Kelly. It is kind of a masterstroke that Ian Holm plays that character in the film (according to the commentary he was a last minute replacement for Nigel Hawthorne when Hawthorne became ill), as one of the most distinctively recognisable character actors of the time simply could not be able to portray a character behind such actions!

By the way the interview with Stephen Knight, the author of the juicily controversial Jack The Ripper identity theory used for the film (and for 1978's Murder By Decree) Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution is available here. It is available on the Fox DVD but missing the introduction, gets cut up into parts and is intercut with other footage to make it into an 'interactive feature'.

Matt wrote: Sun Oct 14, 2018 11:20 pmI wrote a paper in grad school (almost 20 years ago!) about the early stage and film versions. I’ll have to see if I can find it.

colinr0380 wrote: Mon Oct 15, 2018 7:58 am I'd love to read that if you found it Matt!

Found it! It's not a bad paper, just stiff and academic and aimless: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the Early Cinema: Serial Adaptation from Book to Theatre to Cinema

I'll only leave this link active for 30 days, so grab your thrills now.

Cool, thanks Matt! Wow, it's been so long since I've looked at a 12 pt font double-spaced paper

++++++

Interesting history of how Will Smith né the Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff made an unauthorized Nightmare on Elm Street song and the fallout from its release

A Day of Judgment (CDH Reynolds 1981)
What happens when the producers of a Christian witnessing film decide they could make more money if it were a slasher and add in maybe a minute’s worth of killings into a clean, church youth group-ready Depression-era Christmas Carol-type story about small town sinners going to Hell for their misdeeds? Well, this, obviously— why else would I bring it up? A strange Frankenstein creature as a result, the film puts God into the role of slasher villain, an affront that presumably no actual Christian audience member would find inoffensive. And slasher fans would surely be disappointed by the notable lack of nudity, violence (beyond two brief inserts near the end), and even swearing. The result is a film for nobody, and it seemingly has disappeared even more rapidly than its immediate slasher brethren as a result. Not really worth seeing, but watching it was an unusual experience, and a good reference point when thinking about the extremes of the genre.

Down a Dark Hall (Rodrigo Cortés 2018)
A quintet of teen girls are admitted to an exclusive boardinghouse for troubled youth that promises to unlock their hidden artistic potential. Headmistress Uma Thurman, vamping it up with a bad French accent, neglects to tell the girls that she’s a medium and they’ll be vessels for the spirits of great artists eager to complete their works through these new bodies. A decent premise, I guess, but I think the film settles for a pretty mediocre YA plot right out of a Goosebumps book when it misses what could be a more compelling story: four of the five girls find clear “inspiration,” but the fifth remains on the outside and the film really falters by not having her be the protagonist. Not because this character as presented is interesting— she’s an underwritten collection of cliches, like all the others— but because then we could at least have some more interesting dramatic stakes than what we get here. Eventually the outsider amongst outsiders comes around and things get even less interesting, as the movie (and presumably the source novel) has no curiosity in anything but cheap, dumb ghost story thrills.

Edge of the Axe (Joseph Braunstein 1988)
Two computer-loving teens fall in love, but the girl is worried about her cousin whom she injured as a kid and who has since grown up and escaped the mental institution. Their romance must also compete with all those pesky axe murders happening in the background. This movie admirably tries to set-up a decent twist, only the red herring is so obvious that anyone who’s ever seen a movie before will be able to figure out who really dunnit long before the “reveal.” The film gives its supporting players character motivations that don’t factor into the story at all, but as the meme goes, an attempt was made. Minor points also awarded for anticipating current text trends by having the two teens chat back and forth on their computers, with all of their conversations not so helpfully spoken out-loud by a dude imitating an automated computer voice.

555 (Wally Koz 1988)
While the horrors of trying to call Klondike-5 on your phone will have to be told in another film, this cheapie policier sets itself apart from the other shot-on-video slashers of the era by having a strong script and enthusiastic (if not quite ready for prime time) actors. I could easily see this screenplay being a major Hollywood movie with Charles Bronson as the hothead police sergeant hellbent on finding the serial killer with a bad habit of killing and raping topless women. However, I don’t think I’d much like that movie either. I can recognize that this film tries really hard, but the movie it’s trying to be wouldn’t be good no matter how it was made. In the pantheons of slasher villains, though, a long-haired hippie in a floral print shirt and giant bushy beard is up there.

Mad Love (Karl Freund 1935)
Peter Lorre’s brilliant surgeon lashes out at the unobtainable object of his affection via various weird ways in this unusual studio film. The plot of the transplanted hands of a killer is absurd, but the film rises all of the other action up to its level of grandiose excess, so it works. I enjoyed this, but even with all the strangeness there wasn’t a single plot beat I couldn’t see coming a mile away, and I don’t think it merits the vaunted status some here and elsewhere grant it. It is, nevertheless, better than anything else I watched this round!

Månguden / the Moon God (Jonas Cornell 1988)
A serial killer wearing a tribal mask is slaughtering entire families gone camping in this Swedish TV movie that apparently scarred a generation of kids who tuned in. As a slasher variation focused more on the detective work to catch the killer, it is mildly entertaining, and the night vision footage the murderer sends the cops of one of the mass killings anticipates the more contemporary found footage trend in horror films— it’s an effectively creepy scene. Like any mystery movie, there are red herrings galore, but the twist ending did manage to surprise me. Not much better or worse than any other TV movie from any country, but watchable.

Mark of the Vampire (Tod Browning 1935)
A hoary horror programmer about a hott vampire girl who just stares at her victims turns into a hoary mystery movie programmer in the last ten minutes, a lateral move in terms of quality. Lionel Barrymore at least has some fun hamming it up as a professor brought in to verify the vampiric actions, and Bela Lugosi is also on hand to be Not Dracula. The ending is beyond a cheat and into the realm of “Fuck you, audience,” and not in a way that I found particularly worthwhile. The length of the Wikipedia entry for this tells me it has some kind of fanbase, but if you are a booster of this movie, I will never understand you or your kind. And I'm sure it goes both ways!

Memorial Valley Massacre (Robert C Hughes 1989)
Rich industrialist Cameron Mitchell (here looking very much like late-period Rip Taylor) entrusts his new campgrounds to the watchful eyes of his son, much to the chagrin of the crusty ranger in charge. Before too long, people are dying, and it becomes clear the culprit is… a feral caveman living on the campgrounds… who is also the long-lost son of the ranger. Suspension of disbelief gets the equivalent of pumping the brakes in this one, folks. Originally titled Memorial Day (which shows up in the end credits), this is an unlikely and little seen holiday slasher, and I doubt a revival is forthcoming anytime soon. Everything here is so close to PG-13 anyways that I imagine it was made with USA Up All Night in mind.

Night Warning AKA Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (William Asher 1983)
Susan Tyrrell’s overprotective aunt doesn’t want her seventeen year old nephew to leave for college, so people have to die in this astonishingly unpleasant slasher. I am stunned to learn this is held in some degree of esteem, as it is so actively awful. Case in point: Tyrrell kills a repairman and accuses him of rape. Bo Svenson’s stubborn police detective thinks the boy killed him and when it turns out the victim was gay, we are treated to the word “fag” thrown around at least a hundred times (“You think a fag raped your aunt?” &c). Svenson soon becomes convinced the "buttboy" killed the repairman because he was his "fag" lover. This charming discourse is of course only matched by Tyrrell addressing Julia Duffy (a long way from Newhart, though pretty close to nude art), here the boy’s girlfriend, as “slut” over and over and over. I hated this film. I hated how even for a genre far removed from reality, Svenson’s behavior is beyond insulting to any audience not because it’s so abhorrent but because it is so clearly only awful on such a cartoonish level to score a cheap payoff once the asshole finally gets his. And dear lord how I hated Tyrrell’s grotesque Oedipal schtick and how it was used to justify the film’s excesses.

Offerings (Christopher Reynolds 1989)
Some foolish rich dude saw Prom Night, said “I can do that here in Norman, Oklahoma,” and this is the result. Kid falls down well, becomes crazy after hitting his head at the bottom, escapes ten years later to kill all the kids as teenagers and also send some of their body parts as the titular offerings to the one girl who never made fun of him (though this doesn’t stop him from trying to kill her over and over before being shot seven times, once with a shotgun, and uttering “Love” before dying— spoiler alert). Literally the only point of interest was specific to me watching this and going, “Wait, is that OU?” before it became clear this was indeed filmed in Oklahoma. [P]

Shadows Run Black (Howard Heard 1984)
Someone is killing nude college women in this slasher that forgoes most of the gore in favor of lingering softcore shots of the soon to be victims. Completely useless, bottom-tier slasher garbage, though I did chuckle when the protagonist is told her brother killed her boyfriend and she responds with all the weighty emotion of being told by a cashier that you can’t use a coupon. This film has some mild notability for being the first film of Kevin Costner, so we can all look forward to Vinegar Syndrome’s deluxe two disc edition with twelve different slipcovers, one for each letter of Costner’s name.

Spine (John Howard and Justin Simmonds 1986)
A mental patient serial killer attacks nurses by calling them Linda, torturing them, and then removing their spines in this dumb and mostly incoherent shot-on-video slasher that often resembles home movies and is as narratively exciting as same. For those curious what the bottom of the barrel looks like for a bottom of the barrel genre, here you are.

Deadly Games (Scott Mansfield 1982)
Someone is killing women. He wears a mask. He plays a board game. I don’t care. Jo Ann Harris may be the single most annoying protagonist in film history. She’s certainly the most loquacious.

Death by Dialogue (Thomas Dewler 1988)
Vacationing teens visit an old movie set and uncover a haunted screenplay for Victim that updates its blank pages with murders just as they’re about to occur. Amusingly, the title updates with every kill (Victim 68, Victim 69, &c). That’s a fun idea, but this is a Troma film, so no one bothers to do anything with it. The cast at least looks like they’re having fun. Wish I was.

the Devil-Doll (Tod Browning 1936)
Lionel Barrymore escapes from prison with a mad scientist who, decades before Alexander Payne, envisions a world in which overpopulation and consumption could be solved by shrinking people, here forcibly. The minds of the resultant “dolls” are then wiped clean and can do the bidding of Barrymore, who picks up his pal’s mantle and dresses in drag in order to get revenge on the men who sent him to prison. I’m not sure how the film got away with not punishing Barrymore at the end given that he kills and/or cripples multiple people in the film, even if he was innocent of the initial charge. Did the Hays Office consider it time served? This movie is obviously very silly, but it has a charm none of the other movies in the Warner box seemed to capture. A reminder that even ridiculous stories like this could receive a sheen of respectability due to the studio heads casting A-level talent like Barrymore and Maureen O’Sullivan.

Doctor X (Michael Curtiz 1932)
Someone is killing and eating innocents during the full moon, and Lionel Atwell deduces it is a member of his scientific staff. So he secludes all the guilty-looking weirdo docs in order to use (mad) science to figure out the killer. This movie is filmed in gross two-strip Technicolor, and for much of the film it doesn’t seem like a product merited such cost. But then we get a completely nuts finale, with one of the strangest fucking things I’ve ever seen

Spoiler

I’m not sure I’ll soon forget the sight of Preston Foster slathering fake flesh all over his face while chanting “synthetic skin, synthetic skin”!

It’s not enough to make the film worth recommending, and it really doesn’t work outside of the last ten minutes, but seriously, what the fuck was that?!

Don’t Go To Sleep (Richard Lang 1982)
Dennis Weaver and Valerie Harper move their family to a new house with the ominous street address of 13666, but all is not well. Still in mourning after the loss of her oldest sister in a car accident, the youngest daughter begins to see her again, and her sister’s spirit convinces the girl to start offing the rest of the family one by one to prevent the two from being kept apart. This is an impressively creepy and disturbing made for TV film that delivers some legit unease in the moments between the living sister and the dead one as they blasély discuss killing their kid brother and grandmother and so on. In a cast with well-known actors like Weaver, Harper, and Ruth Gordon as the grandmother, it’s child actor Robin Ignico who shines brightest here in the challenging role of the little sister. This makes my disgust with the awful child perf in the Bad Seed even more deserved: now here’s a messed up little girl, and one who manages to avoid going big and instead simmer in a consistent tone of unease, aggressively glaring in between fake smiles and reassurances. Fundamentally, this is one of the most depressing horror movies I can think of, a joyless tragedy that stops to wallow in the sadness of the girl’s actions, and then reveals their cause is yet one more depressing act. Why is Warners sitting on this? I can only assume/hope/pray Shout is planning a release, because here’s an underseen horror movie that truly does deserve the deluxe home video editions they routinely offer to complete garbage. Highly Recommended. [P]

Fatal Games (Michael Elliot 1984)
A bunch of teen athletes are excited for nationals, only there’s a pesky masked assailant running around and spearing them with javelins. Slashers are already not the most progressive of film genres, but the villain reveal in this is easily the most needlessly offensive thing I’ve seen in some time

Spoiler

The discovery that Sally Kirkland’s nurse used to be a man is first seen as the sole reason the protagonist runs from her, and then Kirkland’s voice begins to modulate into “masculine” tones via after-effects. And of course the notion of female athletes being secretly men has already been used to undermine the real achievements of women for decades, this shit doesn’t need help from a movie like this. When a film like this trots out the old chestnut about the lesbian coach and her teen lover and it turns out to not be the most regressive thing here, well…

A film in which all coaches/adults are predatory or uncaring could potentially milk teen self-identification and provide some level of catharsis, but here it’s just obnoxious noise at best and repulsively reactionary at worst. On a different note, I’ve had the theme song to this goddamn movie stuck in my head for days now.

Moonstalker (Michael O’Rourke 1989)
Competent campgrounds slasher with your garden variety maniac on the loose. This one has a grudge against campers ever since his family was pushed out of their land by campground developers. So one night he gets sprung from the mental ward and dresses like a cowboy, complete with dark sunglasses even though the entire film takes place at night, and starts murdering everyone. This isn’t particularly good, but after a string of unbelievably inept slashers, I was happy for middling. Does contain one of the weirder “displaying the bodies” examples I’ve seen: the maniac ties all the corpses to a log that sways back and forth in front of the campfire while camp songs play from a boombox. How is the log swaying? Well, one of the not yet dead victims is hung from a tree and the other side of the rope is tied to the log, so her struggling is what completes the illusion. Sick, but inventive. Probably the only slasher in which the Final Girl protagonist accidentally kills not one but two friendly cops in separate incidents!

Nightmares (Joseph Sargent 1983)
This pilot for an anthology horror show never brought to series collects four spooky stories and used to air all the time on A&E when I was growing up, so I sort of remembered a couple of these segments. The first is a competent variation on my favorite urban legend, the High Beams. The second is a nonsensical but decent tale of Emilio Estevez’ video game-playing punk alienating everyone on his quest to reach a mythical thirteenth level of an arcade game. The third, which I had zero recollection of, is just Duel with unearned religious overtones. And finally there’s the one about the suburban family terrorized by a giant rat. Richard Masur, who was better served as the dad in License to Drive, is so obnoxiously pigheaded in this that it makes the moderately successful suspenseful moments for nought. So, overall, yet another argument about letting nostalgia, even when vaguely-recalled, stay fond in memories rather than confirm its mediocrity by revisiting.

Phobia (John Huston 1980)
A psychiatrist experimenting with a group of ex-cons’ fears finds his test subjects are dying one by one in this utterly predictable slasher variation by Huston. It no doubt sounds odd for Huston to make a slasher (albeit one with no slashing), but the bigger problem with everyone (correctly) categorizing this as a slasher is that it makes it painfully obvious what’s going on very, very early in the film. Since there’s only one explanation that would allow for the “slasher” tag, the audience is just stuck there as this bad drama plays out. Widely considered one of Huston’s worst films for a reason!

the Return of Doctor X (Vincent Sherman 1939)
Though it sounds like a sequel to Doctor X (and indeed shares the WB DVD with it), the titular Doctor X is actually the name for Humphrey Bogart’s resurrected child murder scientist. Bogart, in pasty(ier?) makeup and gray skunk-stripe, must trawl the streets for fresh blood donors to stay alive, and, well, I can understand why Bogart considered this a career nadir (though he was way, way worse in the Two Mrs Carrolls)

Scream (Byron Quisenberry 1981)
A camping group is stranded in a ghost town where they slowly start to lose member after member of their party to an unseen slayer. Also unseen: actual gore or violence or anything else lascivious. Not a deal-breaker for building suspense, but since that too is unseen, there is literally nothing here. That includes narrative coherence: this is so poorly made that it is often quite difficult to understand the specifics of what is happening on-screen. Pity the old Hollywood c-stringers caught in this mire: Alvy Moore, Hank Worden, and Woody Strode. Between Dr Pepper in this and Onitsuka Tigers in Fatal Games, I wonder which company regretted their paid sponsorship/product placement more?

Silent Madness (Simon Nuchtern 1984)
Originally filmed for 3-D distribution that never came, this is standard issue mentally ill psycho escapes the loony bin (though here he is is let out via clerical error) and gets right to work killing young women. There is no wit, no intelligence, nothing here. The film’s attempts to bring in the bureaucrats as secondary villains is ludicrous beyond measure: if you ever wanted to see the least-likely coverup in medical malpractice history, look no further.

I fully intended to reach the milestone of 150 80s Slashers this month, but the 1-2 punch of Silent Madness and Scream did me in a few shy of that. Prior to these recent rounds, I went two years without watching any new-to-me slashers, and that’s sounding pretty good right now…

Also, I’m working off a list of 80s Slashers to keep track, and it turns out there are two films called “Body Count” released in 1987, which is how I ended up sitting through a Canadian TV movie about a sniper on the loose while wondering the entire time how liberal one could get with their definition of “slasher.” It at least also had a pretty baller theme song, though

Murdoch in 2014 wrote: Sun Nov 09, 2014 2:38 am Fresh off a Halloween binge!
The Conjuring (2013) - After the largely favorable reaction to this from the board, this one I saved for Halloween night. While my companion was terrified by it I couldn't muster much more than a shrug to its theatrics. Ghost movies have never been my cup of tea, with the only ones I've found frightening being, and it pains me to admit this, Paranormal Activity, despite that franchise's flaws. The film does well in its early moments where the ghosts are unseen, but when it does reveal the ghouls as the same ghastly sights as just about every other horror movie on the subject whatever scares it had for me immediately went out the door.

Spoiler

The family dynamics between the demonologist couple also detracted from the film for me, especially in the moments the spirits suddenly started attacking their home whereby all of that stuff about the ghosts haunting the property went out the window.

Another problem I had with the film was the general religious angle. I admit this is my problem far more than the film's, especially when it's dealing with religion and the battle between heaven and hell and all that. Still, I can't help but generally dislike any horror movie that tries to use itself as a thesis for the existence of the devil, especially when it closes with a line like "The Devil is real" and throws all manner of subtlety out the window. Although I did like the not so thinly veiled criticism of organized religion it had at the end. Still, I can definitely see the merits in the film and am glad to find a mainstream horror movie that works effectively if only for a little while.

I'm very late to the party on this first film in the series and whilst I mostly agree with Murdoch's points on the film's 'theatrics' and its incessant use of jump scares, which I would often agree are the worst aspects of the horror genre, I ended up quite enjoying this. I think it may end up being my favourite of the seemingly endless run of possession movies that have appeared throughout the 2010s, and also I would like to think the film pokes fun at the way that most of the other entries are found footage-styled by having a few moments shown through an early video camera! Approached prepared for lots of in your face ghost sightings and of course the credulous approach to religion that Murdoch also notes, I think that it works really well. I do like the way that the film sort of grounds its religion as a sort of practical thing - there is no question about faith and so on, since there is no question that the supernatural exists in this universe as well. And religious exorcism feels woefully unpreprared to face demonic forces that have hurt so many people. Plus there is the kind of running joke that the events of the film are all about gathering evidence for the church to intervene, by which point it will be far too late for the people directly affected! It is kind of about the 'first line responders' feeling that they have a greater responsibility to help the family than the church, with the church officials themselves being slightly ambivalent about helping the family due to the children not being baptised and the family not being regular church goers. Perhaps making it a film less about the conflict between believers and those who do not believe (you cannot really have that in a film where people are floating about the room!), but is perhaps more themed around celebrating plucky start up enterpreneurs getting their hands dirty and doing the difficult but necessary jobs to help those in need that the complacent public bodies do not! (Making this the better GhostBusters remake of the decade?)

As with the Amityville Horror (which I had not realised that this is a kind of 'prequel investigation' to, and also raises similar ideas that you cannot just leave your house for economic reasons as much as simply being attached to the property), I do not believe the 'true story' angle for a minute and subtle about its horror it most definitely is not, but as a ghost story rooted in a particular period and told with earnest seriousness, I felt quite entertained by it!

Plus the 70s fashions and set design is great! I love all of the clunky analogue technology and anti-Brady Bunch feel to the large family being terrorised (It also feels weirdly close to Poltergeist in many ways). Filmically, I really liked the use of the slow zoom in going on throughout the film, as well as the way that scenes jumped back and forth between the family and the investigators as they move closer together and their worlds end up entwined (quite similar to the structure of James Wan's previous film Saw, with the two people trapped in the bathroom faced with a very direct form of horror, whilst Danny Glover's policeman is at a bit more of a 'professional remove' from the horror, and might have the tools to combat it, at least for a little while). That gets replaced in the final section by the parallel action of the 'adult' characters trapped doing the exorcism in the basement, whilst the intern upstairs is trying to keep the children safe, before those two strands meet back up for the climax.

This might just be because Lili Taylor and Vera Farmiga are the key characters in the film, but it was interesting to see this as focused quite solidly on women and their daughters, with the men in their lives often powerless (aside from offering their love and support) and usually not prime targets for being menaced at all. And it was interesting that it interweaved the mother of the family and the investigator and her own daughter together, as the demonic presence is unfortunately able to 'jump' into terrorising the medium's daughter due to their shared amulet ending up lost in the haunted basement! (In that sense this is also for a brief moment amusingly tying in with the Amityville sequels, in which various objects become vessels for spreading the possession in their own right, beyond events being limited to just a specific act in a specific house. All leading up to that Annabelle doll, which I note has had a few spin off films in its own right!)

Spoiler

Even the demonic ghost turns out to have been of a mother who killed her own child and then herself whilst her ineffectual husband was powerless to stop her!

Plus this has finally shown me what many horror videogames have been taking their cues from in recent years. It, as well as Hideo Kojima's P.T. demo/trailer for a prospective Silent Hills game that was cancelled, feel as if they have probably had the greatest influence on horror games for the last five years. (Amazing to think that a demo for a cancelled game can have had such a major influence on the direction of an entire medium for such a long time! Perhaps the very inconclusiveness of P.T. itself was the reason why it inspired and left room for so many other creators to put their own spin on the material?). Floating sheets, creaky armoires that have to be opened, exploring impossibly large darkened basements full of junk, falling down dark shafts, parents killing their children and being thrown into a purgatorial cycle of guilt, following ghostly footprints via UV (or candles, or a camera flash and so on), animal attacks, spooky yet horribly corporeal and murderous ghost women bearing a grudge, endlessly repeating hallways and loud thumps on doors, light switches not working and so on are all present and correct in Layers of Fear, Visage, The Beast Inside and of course if the slightly too on the nose name had not already given it away, The Conjuring House!

I'm actually quite interested in seeing The Conjuring 2 now, especially having found out that it is based on the same 'true story' that inspired that notorious BBC Halloween show from the early 90s, Ghostwatch!

Critters (Stephen Herrick, 1986)
I caught bits of this on tv as a kid. For some reason I thought it was an R-rated sci-fi Gremlins, but it’s actually a PG-13 sci-fi horror comedy...just like Gremlins. It’s not bad if you can get through the first 30 minutes, which is a lot of dull family shenanigans on a farm intercut with a couple of po-faced alien bounty hunters in red leather trench coats looking for the gremlins, er, critters. But things pick up once the critters arrive. At least one character trips per chase, and there’s not enough spatial logic to get any real tension, but overall the critters besieging the farm house works as a sustained action scene.

Tremors (Ron Underwood, 1990)
A childhood tv staple. Amidst so many horror movies that try to create likeability among its cast by giving them endless forced banter, how refreshing to get one with a charming cast whose interactions are actually amusing and natural and arise out of character. An exemplary monster movie.

Curse of Chucky (Don Mancini, 2013)
Did you know they’d been making more Chucky films in the last five years? I had no idea. Having taken the series as far as they could go into parody and wackiness, it’s no surprise to see them roll it back to a traditional slasher. Chucky is mailed to the ancestral house of an invalid and her mother. The mother dies under mysterious circumstances, and the wheelchair-bound daughter’s extended family move in to help her. Chucky kills them one-by-one in classic slasher fashion. Nothing that you haven’t seen in, oh, five other films in the same series. Notable only for the return of Andy Barclay from the first three (and played by the same actor as 1 and 2).

Cult of Chucky (Don Mancini, 2017)
The final girl of the previous movie has been committed to a mental institution after coming to believe that Chucky was a manifestation of her psychosis. Horror films set in mental hospitals are almost never scary; mostly they use the setting as an excuse to indulge in nonsensical plots and imagery. That’s what you have here. Not a thing makes sense and no part of its setting or characters (sane or otherwise) corresponds to anything in the real world. Even Chucky’s motivations, usually crystal clear, are unaccountable. There are multiple Chuckys now, a nurse in a slutty-nurse Halloween outfit, a patient with Jesse-Eisenberg-as-Mark-Zuckerberg as one of his multiple personalities, and (ugh) a doctor that molests his patients. They’ve also upped the gore by a factor of 10, so the movie has that, I guess. I hear a remake is under way with Aubrey Plaza as the mother, so looks like this is the last in the original series. It’s also the last of the big slasher franchises to get a remake.

Evil Dead (Fede Alvarez, 2013)
I’m no great fan of the original, but it had its charms, and those charms are absent from a film whose main reason for being is to take the original’s basic plot and apply a generic modern horror style to it. It’s the precise style of the Friday and Nightmare remakes: the same dark, monochromatic colour scheme, the same excessively crisp and jacked-up sound design, the same bland pretty faces, and the same glinting harshness to the violence. The intended effect of this style, the feeling it wants to produce, is the oversensitivity of an exposed nerve: everything a bit too keen for comfort. What’s missing is any sense of the gleefulness and looniness that made the first one worth watching. This is a silly movie treated with an insistent, heavy seriousness. Also misses a good opportunity to blast Slayer during the climax.

Scream 4 (Wes Craven, 2011)
Scream for the internet age, written by someone who doesn’t much understand it. There’re webcams shoe-horned in, some mentions of twitter and facebook, and a rant at the end about internet fame, but it’s all inconsequential and, at seven years old, pretty quaint. I don’t know that the film finds any novel variations on its formula, but at least it’s better than 3.

Scre4m works better for me than it sounds like it did for you with regards to the motivation for the murders-- while the specifics may be sketchy, I think the impetus broadly still makes the most sense of any of the four films (and I'd rank this one second overall behind the second one)

I don’t know. The motivation is that to get famous in the internet age, you have to have something extreme happen to you, which isn’t at all how you get internet famous. Ingrid Goes West does a better job showing how scary the emptiness and callousness of internet celebrity can be, and how it acts as primer for mental illness—and it’s a comedy!

Getting famous by being a serial killer with his crimes plastered all over the 24 hour news cycle, ie. the first film’s motivation, seems more plausible.

domino harvey wrote: Wed Oct 24, 2018 2:42 amDoctor X (Michael Curtiz 1932)
Someone is killing and eating innocents during the full moon, and Lionel Atwell deduces it is a member of his scientific staff. So he secludes all the guilty-looking weirdo docs in order to use (mad) science to figure out the killer. This movie is filmed in gross two-strip Technicolor, and for much of the film it doesn’t seem like a product merited such cost. But then we get a completely nuts finale, with one of the strangest fucking things I’ve ever seen

Spoiler

I’m not sure I’ll soon forget the sight of Preston Foster slathering fake flesh all over his face while chanting “synthetic skin, synthetic skin”!

It’s not enough to make the film worth recommending, and it really doesn’t work outside of the last ten minutes, but seriously, what the fuck was that?!

That reveal of the identity of the killer (major plot spoiler in video) is perhaps the most disturbing sequence in 1930s cinema. I think it mostly comes down to that strangely detached quality that suddenly occurs, as we get "synthetic flesh" lovingly yet menacingly spoken in obvious voiceover across lapse dissolves inexorably pushing the sequence onwards, whilst all of the bubbling lab equipment bubbles and buzzes away like mad!

My New Year’s Resolution was to curb posting thumbnail write-ups in dormant List Project threads. But since I’ve actually posted my thoughts somewhere on the board on every 80s slasher movie I’ve ever seen, it feels wrong to deny future generation further insights earned via the iron price of actually sitting through these movies. Here’s the latest round-up:

Double Exposure (William Byron Hillman 1982)
Noticeably absent from discussions of Seymour Cassel’s recent passing, this is bottom of the barrel sleaze about a coked-out photographer who may or may not be killing his models… and undercover cops dressed in drag… and prostitutes… and some minor supporting characters… Above all its other faults, and they are many, this movie reinforces a laughable internal logic wherein two disgusting brothers, both played by gross dudes pushing 50, are able to land a string of willing and pliant babes, even though one of the brothers is missing an arm and a leg and the other is a misogynistic, yayed-out, Brad Dourif’s dad-looking piece of shit. I find it deeply depressing that every review of this on Letterboxd is positive.

Fatal Pulse (Anthony J Christopher 1988)
Someone is killing college girls on campus and helpfully removing their clothing for the camera in the process. Could it be crazy handyman Joe Estevez (who uses an assumed name in the credits, to give you some idea of how bad this movie is), or the stoner roomie who has his own cartoon sound effect every time he pops up, or the New Wave punk in love with the protagonist’s girlfriend, or the protagonist himself, who is so inept at acting that his dialog often sounds stilted like sixth graders sweating through iambic pentameter? Don’t worry, you won’t need to exert any energy figuring out the mystery since the identity of the murderer is immediately guessable the moment they show up on screen, though the motivation driving the acts is needlessly complicated.

Funeral Home (William Fruet 1980)
While this Canadian pic gets bunched in with the early slasher wave, this is really a 70s horror movie through and through, and is far more interested in ripping off Psycho than Halloween. When not speaking like Marjorie Main, the God-fearing tourist home proprietor of the converted titular building converses with her missing husband in a secret, padlocked cellar room while the bodycount rises. Forget zero guesses, is it possible to award negative guesses to solve who is behind the murders of several guests? This is a competently made mediocrity, which on the whole qualifies as a rave for this genre.

Hell High (Douglas Grossman 1989)
A gang of tough high schoolers torment their poor biology teacher, unaware that she accidentally killed several bikers as a child and will not respond well to being pushed now as an adult. Features an excruciating sequence wherein several of our protagonists try to rape the passed-out teacher, with the “good” one arguing against it solely because it’ll land them in jail, not because it’s wrong.

House of Screams AKA Death Screams (David Nelson 1982)
Proof that small town locales are always a few years behind on trends, everyone in this South-set slasher is dressed like it’s the mid-70s, and the film itself feels very scrappy in the Grindhouse fashion of the previous decade. This adds absolutely nothing to the film other than the novelty of having several scenes scored by twangy country music and the preponderance of wood paneling everywhere. The plot, what little there is of it, is typical “mystery” killer fare. At one point the film stops everything and lets a character sincerely tell a scary story (really an urban legend, the “Humans lick hands too” tale) and it is more interesting than the rest of the film multiplied by a hundred. The filmmakers could have saved themselves a lot of money by just filming her telling spooky campfire favorites for 90 minutes instead.

Iced (Jeff Kwitney 1988)
Years after a mentally unbalanced dude kills himself after getting mad at his friends and going skiing after dark, a mysterious killer tricks the same friend group into coming up to the woods for a timeshare presentation. Now, timeshares are plenty scary enough without slasher movie trappings, but this movie really highlighted a major problem of many of these films: complete indifference to characterization or giving an audience anything to latch onto other than one primary marker of differentiation (this one’s a doctor, this one is the doctor’s wife, this one has a mustache, &c).

Lunch Meat (Kirk Alex 1987)
Backwoods rednecks who all talk like Pappy Drewitt come across the perfect get-rich scheme: kill teenagers, chop up their bodies, and sell the meat (helpfully stored in large black trash bags) to the local burger stand. Considering almost anything else they could do with the bodies would net them more than the, what, $20 they must be getting for doing this, these villains are obviously not too smart. But they’re no match for the even dumber caravan of LA college jerks who fall prey to the white trash cannibal capitalists. One of these preppies literally talks in an affected voice like Marvin the Martian the entire time he’s alive. But it’s even worse once they start dying, because the kids who live just spend the rest of their time alive moaning and groaning nonstop during every second of their merciless screentime. Of course this is slightly better than earlier in the film when these “hip youth” were singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” multiple times. This movie is so bad that I can see how someone could not hate it: there is a remarkable idiocy to it that is never boring. But even better is a film that has a modicum of intelligence, skill, craft, novelty, and so on til you hit 250 words.

Nightmares AKA Stage Fright (John D Lamond 1980)
Not to be confused with the other 80s slasher movie called Nightmares or the other 80s slasher movie called Stage Fright. If you gave a preteen whose dad snuck him into Halloween and a few Argento movies the reins to a slasher movie, it would look like this. This remarkably incompetent Australian cash-in is filled with weird for the sake of being weird camera angles, missing narrative connective tissue from scene to scene, pointless Mystery Killer POV shots when the film literally tells us who the murderer is from the start, and gratuitous death scenes wherein more than one woman is forced out naked into the street to be bludgeoned to death very slowly on-camera while the camera leers all over the screaming actress’ undressed bloody body.

the Outing AKA the Lamp (Tom Daley 1987)
Rubbing a lamp results in annoying people getting rubbed out.

Shallow Grave (Richard Styles 1987)
It takes some degree of audacity to homage an homage, but this movie opens with a (not terrible) ripoff of Blow Out’s opening and Psycho tribute, which is like a Xerox of a Xerox in a genre that already embodies that as an ethos. The first act of this isn’t terrible either, actually, and does a good job of misdirecting us from the actual tone it will take. We start with a kind of bland 80s teen spring break romp, but then the gaggle of Catholic High School Girls in Trouble’s car breaks down in backwoods Georgia on their way to Florida and one of the girls witnesses the local sheriff killing his mistress. What proceeds from this point is infuriating in both its stupidity and its nihilism. This is just not an enjoyable movie, and the film proves what Anguish showed far more brilliantly in the same year: there’s nothing fun about a slasher where the primary weapon is guns. The hopelessness here never feels earned or suspenseful like it might in a Hitchcock movie or even a competent Cinemax 90s erotic thriller, but instead comes across as nasty solely to be nasty. That attitude coupled with characters consistently doing the dumbest thing possible makes for an agonizing watch, made all the worse by the awareness that there’s a modicum of talent involved but never fully utilized.

The VHS art is gorgeous though:



Are there any art books of just 80s horror movie VHS covers? Now that I would probably enjoy far more than actually watching these! Like the trailers on 42nd Street Forever comps, the reality of the film almost never matches the advertisement. But barely-remembered encounters with these forbidden VHS covers in video stores as a kid has driven a lot of my present curiosity in this genre, even though at this point I’m just watching these out of morbid interest and a desire to winnow down the long checklist of 80s slashers.

Silent Rage (Michael Miller 1982)
I don’t know who was asking for a Chuck Norris slasher movie, but Hollywood answered. Mad scientists inject a dying axe murderer with a magic serum that heals all wounds immediately, essentially making him immortal. At no point do any of the docs question the logic of inflicting this gift on a sociopathic axe murderer. Results of the experiment are mixed. On the one hand, all of the docs are killed by their creation. On the other hand, Chuck Norris gets to kick this undead-ish dude a few times. The film is weirdly well-shot. Miller favors needlessly long shots that stretch the acting abilities of his cast, but I was kind of digging these as evidence of the director keeping himself entertained in the midst of absolute dreck material like this. Slasher movie villains are already uninteresting due to their invincibility, but granting actual regeneration capabilities makes everything that happens pointless (see: most of the Friday the 13th movies). Then again, I guess Norris in the film isn’t much different considering the man takes about a hundred blows to his person and yet none of the copious shirtless shots indicate bruising.

Student Bodies (Mickey Rose 1981)
High from the success of Airplane, Paramount wantonly released this parody of slasher movies that is only really notable for coming so early in the 80s cycle— this is strong evidence of the self-awareness of all the other cash-ins if anything. The film has the same joke makeup as an episode of Family Guy, in that for every joke that lands, three don’t and two make you just feel bad. In fact, the only real laughs here come from gags unrelated to the basic premise, such as a shop teacher obsessed with making horsehead bookends, or one teacher’s response to a ringing phone that got a huge laugh out of me:

Spoiler

”I’m furthest away from the phone, so I’ll answer it”

But the slasher stuff falls flat, especially since this was obviously made to be PG (and then made “R” arbitrarily with a winking insert), so there’s no nudity or any real comic violence, things which I think a real parody of this genre can’t leave out. But there are a lot of fart jokes, so they definitely compensated for this deficiency. Films like Friday the 13th Part VI and Anguish will do a much better job of tweaking the conventions of the genre a few years later, and without the use of puns. One advantage here though is that this movie does have a list of product placements that runs as long as the cast list in the credits, including our old slasher-sponsoring friend Dr Pepper. [P]

Too Scared to Scream (Tony Lo Bianco 1984)
Someone is killing the residents of a fancypants high rise, and the police suspect erudite British doorman Ian McShane. McShane quotes Shakespeare a lot so you know he’s Cultured, and he also lovingly takes care of his invalid mom (played by Maureen O’Sullivan, believe it or not— yet another member of Hollywood royalty to add to the slasher shame list), but since he cuts a birthday cake with a butcher knife, the dumb pig cop knows he’s the killer!!! Like so many films of the 80s, slasher or otherwise, this one ends up being wildly homophobic in its reveal and killer motivations, but admittedly I still didn’t see the twist coming… probably because it doesn’t really make any sense… but that’s something, at least.

Well, when out of thirteen movies, the best one I saw starred Chuck Norris, what does that say about not just these films but my idea to watch and keep watching them? Take it away, unfunny chyron from Student Bodies:

Did you see Double Exposure off Vinegar syndrome’s blu ray? I did and the hardest thing for me to reconcile was how good It looked for a movie that was utter dreck.

You also forgot to mention death by snake in a bag over your head!

And the Joel Grey-looking gay character who seemingly exists solely to be called a faggot by the protagonist, but “endearingly” to show he’s a Great And Tolerant Guy. A myriad of “Uh, what?” qualities to this one. That stuff like this has labels falling over themselves to restore and release it while countless nearly forgotten French classics (or pick the preferred country of your choice) rot in a vault somewhere because consumers have voted with their dollars for garbage is also depressing

I do like the idea that Dr Pepper is as essential to a slasher film as the distinctive J&B bottle is to a giallo!

Outside of paid sponsorships, I think the other official drink of choice in slashers is a can of beer held with the hand at all times covering the label! But it is interesting that the two most noticeable product placements I’ve seen in these films, Dr Pepper and Onitsuka Tigers, are both brands that I already have brand loyalty to— it’s like a consumerist omen from the past

Here is a scary thought, how many of these are likely to show up on Arrow Video sooner or later (I mean, they did release Microwave Massacre)? ](*,)

I imagine in the coming years, as labels run out of more well-known movies like this, all of them (and all 80s slasher period, except SOV titles) will be available in deluxe Blu-ray editions from someone -- right now five of the above batch of thirteen are available on Blu-ray (the Outing from Shout, Student Bodies from Legend AND Olive, Silent Rage from Mill Creek, Double Exposure from Vinegar Syndrome, and Too Scared to Scream is forthcoming from Scorpion)

domino harvey wrote: Tue May 21, 2019 5:01 pm That stuff like this has labels falling over themselves to restore and release it while countless nearly forgotten French classics (or pick the preferred country of your choice) rot in a vault somewhere because consumers have voted with their dollars for garbage is also depressing

whilst I agree in part with your critiscism of "garbage" product getting pristine releases, I am also very happy that labels like Second Run exist and are bringing out a lot of forgotten European classics.

There's enough consumers out there buying stuff like this to enable these labels to continue. . .

Once somebody puts out a few Deville, Rozier, and Chabrol sets, domino will stop making this complaint (and rightfully so)

Mr Sausage wrote: Tue Oct 18, 2016 6:20 pm Another thought: latent in the narrative is probably the symbolic story of sexual force, with its power or destructiveness being the result of its lying outside the systems set up to organize people along healthy lines (the home, the school, religion, etc.); and therefore, when achieving a sufficient pitch in an individual, without an outlet established by convention, that sexual force immolates everything. But De Palma isn't much interested in this kind of symbolism...

Yet he can hardly avoid it. The film begins with the horror of the physical aspect of sexual awakening and concludes with Carrie performing a horrifying recreation of the male penetration on/to her mother with the flying knives/crucifixion scene (Piper Laurie clearly deriving pleasure from it). How is this not symbolism? Nothing here is realistic unless you buy the premise that telekenesis is real. Isn't Any Irving's dream of the bloody hand of Carrie pulling her into the hell of sexual repression and guilt symbolic? Funny that the actress who plays the mother of Irving also played a mother figure/principal of the blooming teenage daughter of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. I remember her defending Christina's sexual proclivities as natural and innocent after the overreacting, scene-stealing, headline looking Joan asked her, with much the same self-righteous hypocrisy as Carrie's mother, "Is this an institution of learning or a teenage brothel?!!"

What I've never understood is what in all the heavy handed symbolism (or real world consequence) triggers the roof to cave in sending the house ablaze. Granted, with easily a hundred lit candles going at once all it would have taken was a loose plank to suddenly come ajar; but what, specifically, in all the mythology accounts for a fiery collapse?