Halloween Horror Marathon 2018

[Monterey Jack]

-The Hidden (1987): 8/10



Clever crossbreeding of hardcore 80’s buddy cop action thriller and sci-fi/horror features Michael Nouri as Los Angeles detective Thomas Beck, who finds himself baffled by a rash of extremely violent murder and crime sprees being enacted by an unassuming succession of L.A. citizens with no previous records of criminal activity…until an “FBI Agent”, Lloyd Gallagher (a pre-Twin Peaks Kyle MacLachlan), arrives and gradually reveals that all of these perpetrators are merely “vehicles” for a repulsive, slug-like alien being who gets off on conspicuous consumption, and that he is a different breed of alien committed to bringing him to justice. Written by Stakeout screenwriter Jim Kouf (under the pen name “Bob Hunt”) and confidently directed by Jack Sholder (A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: The Gay One), The Hidden is brisk, brutal (especially a terrific opening car chase with glimmers of William Friedkin sadism), wryly amusing in MacLachlan’s deadpan, Spock-esque reactions to common human interactions like dinner with Nouri’s family and even ends on a modestly affecting note. A B-movie with class. Look fast for a young Danny Trejo as a prisoner.

[Monterey Jack]

Pick up every stitch…

-Season Of The Witch (1972): 7/10



Early effort from director George A. Romero (in that post-Night Of The Living Dead/pre-Dawn Of The Dead period) is hard to categorize. In fact, it barely qualifies as a “horror” movie in the traditional sense, playing out as more of a domesticated drama about an unhappy, middle-aged housewife (Jan White), who – plagued by vivid nightmares about growing old and unneeded and of a mysterious, masked intruder forcing his way into her home and violently assaulting her – is driven to not only an affair with a much-younger man (Raymond Laine), but also a keen interest in Witchcraft. Anyone expecting the director’s trademark mixture of social satire and gruesome gore will likely be left wanting by this experimental film (which was also released under the titles Hungry Wives!, in an attempt to make it look like a porno movie!), which is well-acted and visually stylish but also slow-moving and very dated to the “Women’s Lib” era. Worth a view for fans of the director, but I’m glad I watched it before October kicked off my Halloween horror marathon in earnest. Adjust your expectations, and it has its rewards for followers of the late and gifted Romero.

[Monterey Jack]

-Assassination Nation (2018): 7.5/10



Blistering satire of #MeToo-era public opinion witch hunts (not for nothing is the movie set in Salem) features Odette Young, Suki Waterhouse, Hari Nef and Abra as a quartet of high school seniors caught up in a rash of online “outings” of numerous people of note in their little town (including the Mayor and the school principal), who are having their most intimate secrets getting spilled out onto every corner of the internet. When Young’s character is fingered as the source behind all of the leaks, suddenly she and her friends are targeted by an unruly mob looking to mete out some frontier justice. Basically The Purge were it not written by idiots and produced on a buck ninety-eight budget, Assassination Nation is best consumed as a slice of nasty pulp rather than as any kind of serious social critique (highlighted by its abrupt conclusion capped by a shaggy-dog joke of a final line). The attempts at a “Monsters Are Due On Maple Street”-style moral are muddled by an “outraged” populace who are apparently more concerned with shopping for conspicuously art-directed masks than hunting down those who have ruined their lives with their intrusive hacking skills (you can practically see the studio exec at the pitch meeting furrowing his brows and musing, “Can we Purge this up, a little…?”). That said, the film is incredibly stylish, with flamboyant directorial flourishes that recall Brian De Palma (including a brilliantly-staged long take outside a house in mid-invasion) and set to a pulsating soundtrack that keeps everything humming right along to its bloody, anarchic final half-hour. Definitely worth a view.

[Monterey Jack]

“I’m not like other guys…”

-Thriller (1983): 10/10

-The House With A Clock In Its Walls (2018): 8/10





A terrific twofer starts with a tasty appetizer, Michael Jackson’s groundbreaking 1983 music video (brilliantly remastered in 3D for special IMAX showings of the feature presentation, albeit with a matted “widescreen” presentation that cuts some of the actors’ foreheads at times), which stands as one of the King Of Pop’s crowning achievements. Hard to believe that MTV and the whole concept of music videos was only about a year old at the time, but “Thriller” remains one of the early pinnacles of the nascent art form, directed by John Landis (who co-wrote it with Jackson) and boasting super-duper makeup effects by Rick Baker (re-teaming with Landis after An American Werewolf In London). The song itself is irresistible, one of the best Halloween-time novelty songs this side of “The Monster Mash” (with incidental “scary music” by Elmer Bernstein), and Jackson’s dance choreography remains peerless, not to mention Vincent Price’s peerless narration, capped by one of the best sinister laughs ever recorded for the video’s great freeze-frame capper. I hadn’t seen this video since I was a kid (when it scared the CRAP out of me), and it’s a blast to see it again large and in charge, and looking so spiffy. It’d be nice to see this new restoration released on Blu-Ray, provided they offered the original 1.33:1 ratio as an option for viewing.

And as for that feature presentation, the awkwardly-titled The House With A Clock In Its Walls turns out to be an unexpected delight, a thoroughly winning throwback to the kinds of “80’s PG” flicks out my youth that weren’t afraid to offer authentic thrills and chills (the under-ten crowd will find the film a bit too intense at times) as opposed to today’s PG kids’ movies, which are all but indistinguishable from G-rated ones, with only a tad more “rude humor” or “thematic elements” thrown in. Owen Vaccaro stars as a young, recently-orphaned boy sent to live with his eccentric uncle (Jack Black) and his bickering neighbor (Cate Blanchett) in his cavernous mansion, only to discover that the pair practice magic (“So, you’re a boy witch”) and continuously search their house’s numerous nooks and crannies in search of the titular clock that keeps ominously counting down to a potential apocalypse set in motion a year earlier by Black’s former magician partner (Kyle MacLachlan). Incredibly the work of director Eli Roth (the torture-porn specialist who made the reprehensible Hostel movies, as well as turkeys like Knock Knock and this year’s lousy Death Wish remake), The House… is a film brimming with lavish sets, broad humor (the roly-poly Black and the swanlike, elegant Blanchett make for an ideal team, sporting excellent chemistry and terrific comic timing) and moments of genuine darkness that will make the littlest viewers shiver and will make their parents who grew up in the heyday of classic Amblin productions very nostalgic. It’s not a perfect film (young lead Vaccaro has some stilted moments, and the movie moves so briskly you wish it had time to breathe with more character-building), but it’s ideal family fare for the upcoming Halloween season, and boasts a terrific Nathan Barr score reminiscent of old-school James Horner efforts from the 80’s and 90’s.

[Monterey Jack]

Tomorrrow...it begins in earnest!

[Monterey Jack]

“A” is for Apple

“B” is for Bed

“C” is for Coed

“D” is for Dead

“F” is for Failing…to keep your HEAD!

-Night School (1981): 5/10



Tepid slasher about a killer (clad head-to-toe in black leather and wearing a motorcycle helmet) butchering his merry way through a succession of young students at a small Boston college, and how the detective assigned to the case (Leonard Mann) investigates the Professor (Drew Snyder) whose anthropology class the women all attended. The film debut of Rachel Ward (who plays the Prof’s live-in assistant/mistress), Night School – not to be confused with the Kevin Hart “comedy” currently playing in theaters – has a certain stylishness to it (photography by David Cronenberg and Wes Craven favorite Mark Irwin, music by a pre-Terminator Brad Fiedel), and native Bostonians will enjoy a lot of the dawn-of-the-80s Beantown location footage, but it’s all ultimately a bit rote, with too many obvious Red Herrings being dangled in the audience’s faces. Far from the worst of its ilk, but also not very distinguished. Ward's gratuitous nude scene is a definite highlight.

-Body Bags (1993): 7/10



Enjoyable – if uneven – Showtime television anthology feature (intended as a potential pilot for their own Tales From The Crypt-style series that never came to fruition) features director John Carpenter happily hamming it up as a desiccated mourge attendant telling a trio of gruesome tales about those waiting for their autopsies. In “The Gas Station” (directed by Carpenter), a newly-hired overnight gas station employee (Alex Datcher) finds herself terrorized by a madman in this briskly-paced piece, with solid suspense and good gore. In “Hair” (also by Carpenter), a vain middle-aged man (Stacy Keach) bemoans the state of his rapidly-thinning pate, but when he goes to a new doctor (David Warner) for a cure, he gets far more than he bargained for. It’s a pretty rote, Rod Serling-esque comeuppance tale. And in “The Eye” (directed by the late Tobe Hooper), a baseball player (Mark Hamill…!) loses an eye in a terrible car accident, and shortly thereafter receives a transplant from a recently-deceased donor…only to find himself tormented by horrible visions from the eye’s previous owner. Gruesome and compelling, with a great performance by Hamill. Only the middle segment of this decent anthology feature really disappoints, and Carpenter’s host segments are mordantly funny, as he swills formaldehyde cocktails and drops excruciating/amusing Crypt Keeper-style puns. No classic, but Carpenter fans out to enjoy it.

-Pumpkinhead (1988): 7.5/10



A group of young “city folk” (including Jeff East, teenage Clark Kent from Superman: The Movie), fooling around on their motorbikes at a rural produce stand, accidentally but mortally wound the son of the proprietor (genre fave Lance Henriksen), causing him, in his bereavement and anger, to seek out a local backwoods witch, who assists him in conjuring up a fearsome, ghastly monster that sets out to hunt down and kill all of those responsible for his son’s death. The directorial debut of the great creature and makeup designer Stan Winston (The Terminator, Aliens, Predator and numerous others), this is a modest yet impressive film, with an eerie, rustic setting and top-notch practical effects on the titular monster. Look fast for a young Mayim Bialik.

[Monterey Jack]

When Jenny cheated on her husband, he didn’t just leave…

…he SPLIT

-Raising Cain (1992): 8/10



-Split (2017): 8/10



A whole stadium full of fractured personalities fills today’s psychological double feature. In Raising Cain, John Lithgow plays Carter Nix, a well-to-do child psychologist who learns that his gorgeous doctor wife, Jenny (Lolita Davidovich), is carrying on with a former patient’s hunky husband (Scarface’s Steven Bauer) behind his back. Stressed and heartbroken, his “twin bother”, Cain (Lithgow again) abruptly shows up, and things rapidly progress from bad to worse, with several kidnappings, murders and twisted secrets from the past coming to light. One of veteran suspense filmmaker Brian De Palma’s most playful features, Raising Cain is best appreciated if you’re a fan of the director’s winking, self-aware brand of cinematic gamesmanship (I plead guilty). Cain is a film that starts off slow (especially if you’re watching the superior “director’s cut” edit assembled for the excellent Scream Factory Blu-Ray release, which hews closer to what De Palma originally intended before Universal ordered him to alter the film’s chronology to get to the thriller aspects of the plot right off the bat) and, about a half-hour in, skews off the road into a rat’s nest of absurd plot twists, overheated dream sequences (or…ARE they…?!) and a bonkers suspense climax that seems like it was choreographed by Rube Goldberg. No wonder mainstream audiences rejected the film…it’s a thriller that walks a tightrope between genuine shocks and outré comic elements that might be mistaken for just plain Bad Filmmaking unless you were aware that it’s all a put-on, an aging suspense master riffing on his own back catalogue with a postmodern cackle. I’ve always enjoyed the movie (particularly Lithgow’s peerless gift of switching between meek and sinister with the tiniest flicker of his facial muscles), and the director’s cut edit presents the film as it should have been from the start.

As for Split, it’s the work of another suspense vet, M. Night Shyamalan, making his first coherent and watchable thriller in over fifteen years. James MacAvoy is excellent as a man who kidnaps a trio of teenage girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson & Jessica Sula), locks them in a room in an anonymously industrial basement somewhere, and reveals that his body is host to a myriad of personalities, from a silky-smooth, patrician woman to a stuttering, shy nine-year-old boy (”I have red socks”), and that his various personae are battling to determine the fate of the girls while the man’s psychiatrist (Betty Buckley from Carrie) begins to suss out that her patient is hiding something dire from her in-between their increasingly-frequent sessions. Shyamalan – a gifted visualist – got his head inflated by all of the “New Spielberg” hype that swirled around him in the early 00’s thanks to the phenomenal success of his breakout smash The Sixth Sense and promptly disappeared up his own ass with increasingly self-indulgent and absurd fare like Lady In The Water, The Happening (the one where Mark Wahlberg asks forgiveness from a rubber plant) and his howlingly wrong-headed adaptation of The Last Airbender (one of the all-time worst movie versions of a classic television program I can think of). But Split seems like the work of a man who has actually listened to all of the criticisms and jokes that have been made at his expense, rolled up his sleeves, and got to work crafting the kind of tight, well-constructed thriller that made his a household name in the first place, and it’s bracing to see a movie by him that has actual suspense, good acting, and a bare minimum of his trademark awkward, almost autistic dialogue exchanges (the fact that he saves the weirdest exchange in the film – a florid description of his choice of reheated fast food -- for his own cameo makes it obvious he’s taking the piss out of himself). MacAvoy is tremendous in his variety of guises, and Taylor-Joy – whose giant, expressive eyes make her resemble a stop-motion Tim Burton puppet – is equally good as the most resourceful of his captives. Even if the last little sequence in the film might seems like it was tacked on in hindsight to connect this film to a larger “cinematic universe” Shyamalan is currently finishing up (and that will be baffling to anyone who doesn’t remember what it’s referring to), it’s a tiny flaw in an otherwise extremely well-made suspense piece.

[Monterey Jack]

-Eyes Of A Stranger (1981): 6/10



Not-bad little thriller about a reporter (Lauren Tewes) who becomes convinced that the man in the apartment building across the way from her (John DiSanti) is the one who has been sexually assaulting and killing a string of young women. Basically Rear Window-lite (DeSanti even resembles Raymond Burr in Hitchcock's classic, right down to the glasses) mixed with a standard early-80's slasher-movie template -- replete with sporadic gore effects by Tom Savini, most of which were trimmed from the theatrical cut but restored for the DVD -- Eyes Of A Stranger offers up mildly effective thrills, but is mainly noteworthy for being the film debut of a young Jennifer Jason Leigh as Tewes' younger sister, left blinded, mute and deaf(!) from a childhood abduction. You could do worse.

[AndyDursin]

Some of my quick thoughts:

-EYES OF A STRANGER is a weird, nasty little movie. It looks like a TV movie but has R-rated stuff all the way through it, even with Julie from the Love Boat and Jennifer Jason Leigh in FAST TIMES mode together -- a weird coupling in a strange, watchable film.

-I had the same reaction to NIGHT SCHOOL also. Unlike SCREAM FOR HELP it's not so bad it's good just competent enough to be dull.

-PUMPKINHEAD was a movie I was so excited about (I think it came out when I was in 8th or 9th grade), but it basically bypassed theaters and went right to tape. It was undeserving of that fate, but it's still for me a missed opportunity. The film looks good and the monster is cool, but the story isn't very appealing and the ending didn't work much for me. A creature that deserved a better vehicle -- or a director.

[Monterey Jack]

Hell Fest (2018): 7/10



Standard slasher with an irresistible premise...what if one of those cheesy horror theme parks that pop up every October had an actual killer wandering around amongst the employees paid to pop out and scare the bejeezus out of the patrons? It's a fantastic setup, and the film's costuming and production design are top-drawer (it would take much freeze-framing at home on Blu-Ray to savor every dank corner). Plus, it's the ultimate screw-off to people who use the tired complaint about "cheap jump scares" when dismissing horror movies...this is nothing BUT jump scares, only the kind where you don't know if the next knife slashing out at you from the darkness will be made of rubber or steel, if he next hanging corpse will be a dummy or your best friend. That said, the film's characters are beyond-generic "types" (the virginal heroine, the "sass-ay!" black friend, the punk girl, etc.), and they're given so little set-up or background it's hard to care for them beyond a basic, Pavlovian response to see the protagonists survive (leading actress Amy Forsyth kind of looks like a lost Olsen sister, BTW). Still, as far as machine-tooled Jack-in-the-box scare machines go, it's a well-oiled one, with director Gregory Plotkin (who edited last year's Best Picture nominee Get Out) meting out the suspense with crack efficiency. And it's nice to see the Candyman himself, Tony Todd, make a cameo as the park's top-hatted M.C.

[Monterey Jack]

...and I have no privacy.



-Someone's Watching Me! (1978): 7.5/10



Effective early television thriller from John Carpenter -- made just before he jumped into Halloween but aired about a month after it hit theaters -- stars Lauren Hutton as a young woman entering a career directing live television who ensconces herself in a swank new L.A. apartment...unaware that a sicko voyeur across the way is peering into her most intimate private moments. And he doesn't stop with just peeking, either...there are also the vaguely threating notes (not quite enough to have the police -- personified by Carpenter favorite Charles Cyphers -- actually do anything about it), the more-than-vaguely threatening phone calls at all times of the day and night, the disturbing "presents" like photos of dead bodies and an teeny bikini, and even the recording equipment she finds. Fed up with the constant harassment, Hutton, her new boyfriend (David Birney) and her new friend at the television studio (Carpenter's future spouse, Adrienne Barbeau) try to find out who's the creep behind it all. Yet another variation on Rear Window, Somebody's Watching Me! is more modest than Carpenter's big-screen work of the period, and yet certainly shows that his skill behind the camera was formidable even under the constraints of network television, with his trademark elegant camerawork and well-etched characterization. Hutton, with her Alfred E. Neuman teeth, is a strong heroine, and Barbeau makes for an ideal sidekick. One wishes for a little more closure on one character's ultimate fate, and it's odd to see a peak-era Carpenter flick he didn't do the music for (Salem's Lot composer Harry Sukman provides the urgent orchestral score), and yet Somebody's Watching Me! is still an obscure yet worthy entry in his filmography, given new life in Scream Factory's splendid new Blu-Ray.

[Monterey Jack]

-Misery (1990): 8.5/10



It's not often that a movie feels more contemporary almost three decades after it was released than it did at the time, but Misery (directed by Rob Reiner and adapted from the novel by Stephen King by screenwriter William Goldman) feels eerily prescient about the modern-day state of "toxic fandom". James Caan played Paul Sheldon, a gifted writer whose bread & butter over the last 15 or so years has been thanks to his literary heroine Misery Chastain, who has starred in a series of wildly popular bodice-ripper romance novels. Sheldon is sick of writing them, though, so he's offed her at the end of his latest opus, and as the film opens has finished a new, untitled book that he hopes will restore his standing as a "serious" novelist. But, driving home from the lodge where he put the last few chapters down on paper, he's caught in a blizzard, drives off the road, and is rescued from the wreck by Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates, in an Oscar-winning performance), his self-proclaimed "Number-One Fan", who sets him up in her remote Colorado home to heal from his terrible injuries (including a pair of shattered legs). At first, Annie's kooky, off-center colloquialisms ("Sorry for prattling away and making you feel all oogy…!") are sort of charming, but soon, it becomes evident that Annie is dangerously unstable, and it all comes out in an explosion of fury when she gets to the end of Paul's last novel to find that her beloved Misery is dead. She's not just disappointed, she's incensed, and she demands that Paul write a new book that brings Misery back from the dead, or else she's going to be very cross with him.

Both King's novel and Reiner's film pre-dated the era of celebrity stalking, and, in an era where Star Wars fans practically self-immolated after the "disappointment" of The Last Jedi, even going so far as to demand the movie be "struck from the record" so Disney could start over and remake it to fit their expectations and bullying the film's stars off of social media sites, it barely feels like exaggeration or satire. Bates is exceptional in the film, with Reiner and cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld framing her face in looming, wide-angle closeups that practically allow you to feel every spicule of saliva that flies out of her mouth during her frequent, alarming tantrums. She's alternately terrifying, pitiable and often darkly funny ("He didn't get out of the ****-a-doodie CARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"). And Caan, despite a far less showy role, is equally as good, selling Paul's sense of unease as Annie's psychological hang-ups become gradually evident as well as his determination to escape the tar pit become hopelessly mired in. Also great in a supporting capacity are Richard Farnsworth and Frances Sternhagen as a crotchety-yet-wily local sheriff and his feisty, amorous wife ("This is one deputy who's rather be at home between the sheets with the sheriff!"), who slowly begin to put the pieces together. Only the film's climax disappoints, a rote, violent confrontation replete with one of those "Seemingly dead killer lunging up for one final scare" boo-shocks. It's a well-staged and shot scene that does deliver some jolts, but, given the rich set-up, it deflates what came before just enough to keep the film from being an all-time classic. That said, it's still one of the better adaptations of a King novel.

[Monterey Jack]

-X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes (1963): 7/10



A doctor (Ray Milland) uses himself as a Guinea Pig in an experiment utilizing special eye drops that will allow him to see beyond the approximately 10% of the limits of human perception...only to find that what he glimpses out there, shimmering through a kaleidoscopic miasma of light, is more terrifying than can be tolerated by the human psyche. Nifty little exercise in the Mad Scientist genre (produced and directed by Roger Corman) boasts neat "Spectarama" visual effects when the camera takes Milland's viewpoint and a memorably shocking final image. Definitely one of Corman's better features.

-Body Parts (1991): 5/10



Grisly thriller about a police psychologist (Jeff Fahey) who loses his arm in a terrible roadside accident and has a donor limb grafted onto his shoulder...and who is soon tormented by frightening visions of murder. Investigating, he soon learns his new appendage belonged to a deceased death row inmate, and that two other men who have received transplants from what was left over are suffering similar side effects. We've seen the "transplanted body part possesses its new host" schtick before (hell, I saw it earlier this month in the Body Bags segment "Eye"), and it's given plodding treatment here by co-screenwriter and director Eric Red (who wrote 80's genre favorites like The Hitcher and Near Dark), who never gets a proper handle on the material, playing it too straight to be campy and too silly to be authentically gripping. Only a brief car chase -- with Fahey, in the passenger seat of a police cruiser, handcuffed to someone in the driver's seat of a car in the other lane -- offers any real innovation, and Loek Dikker's lush score (replete with what sounds like a keening Theremin) works hard to make it all feel more impactful than it is, but overall it's a bloody mess.

[Monterey Jack]

-Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2011): 8.5/10



Frequently riotous horror/comedy about a pair of backwoods “rednecks” (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine) who run afoul of a gaggle of popped-collar college-kid douchebags…but this isn’t Deliverance, and they’re totally innocent of the bad deeds the youngsters consistently think of them as the misinformation builds into a pile of bodies neither side truly intended. Despite the enthusiastic outbursts of gore (including the best use of a woodchipper since Fargo), Tucker & Dale shoots for comic timing, and it’s great fun seeing Tudyk and Labine play off of each other in their shared astonishment as they witness what they think is a “suicide pact” as the college kids inadvertently off themselves in hilariously gruesome ways. Terrific fun.

-Island Claws (1980): 2.5/10



Genetic modification of crabs results in one giant specimen “terrorizing” a small island community in this logy snoozer which plays like a 1955 drive-in cheapie that somehow got released a quarter-century too late. The King Crab doesn’t actually appear until the last ten minutes, leaving the rest of the film trying to build tension with swarms of regular-sized ones skittering around very…very…slowly. Some unintentional yuks to be had, sure, but not enough to stave off the sandman for very long.

-The Bride (1985): 7/10



Lavish, literate quasi-sequel to The Bride Of Frankenstein basically opens where that 1935 classic climaxed, with Baron Frankenstein (Sting…!) creating the titular Bride (a luminously beautiful Jennifer Beals, in her Flashdance prime) in order to appease his Monster (Clancy Brown), only to cast his creation out during a fierce lightning storm and subsequent fire in his castle laboratory. Thinking the Monster dead, Frankenstein gradually acclimates his Bride (he names “Eva”) to the scriptures and mores of polite society, as the Monster befriends a wandering midget (David Rappaport from Time Bandits) and works his way through a brief stint in the circus as he plans to make enough scratch to get back to his lady love. Director Franc Roddam has made an extremely handsome period production, here (with excellent photography by Brain De Palma favorite Stephen H. Burum and a superb symphonic score by Maurice Jarre), and the film works well as a somewhat slow-paced period romance, but the pulp horror elements get suffocated by all of the Merchant/Ivory finery on display, and Sting’s portrayal as the “mad” Dr. F is wholly ineffective, draining the classic story of its masochistic energy. It’s a good film that’s never less than watchable, but it could, and should, have been more, and those expecting the more familiar trappings of the Universal or Hammer takes on Mary Shelley’s text will likely be left wanting.

[Monterey Jack]

De Mented. De Ranged. De Ceptive. De Palma.

-Carrie (1976): 10/10

-The Fury (1978): 8/10





Director Brian De Palma’s back-to-back 70’s takes on psychic teens. In Carrie, his feverish adaptation of Stephen King’s first published novel (adapted by Salem’s Lot and It screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen), Sissy Spacek delivers a sensitive, Oscar-nominated turn as Carrie White, a poor, recessive, endlessly picked-upon high school student who gradually discovers she has the nascent yet powerful gift of telekinesis (the ability to move objects with the power of her mind), which her fervently religious kook of a mother (Piper Laurie, earning her own Oscar nom) takes as a sign that Satan himself is working his evil magic through her daughter. It all comes to a head at the senior prom, wherein King and De Palma craft an ingeniously twisted and dark variation on the Cinderella trope with a ghoulish prank enacted upon Carrie by the meanest of the film’s Mean Girls (a vividly nasty Nancy Allen) and her boorish lunk of a boyfriend (John Travolta in his first major film role) that sets off a lyrical cataclysm. One of the rare horror films that can make you weep even as your blood is frozen in fear, Carrie is a magnificent piece of cinema, one of De Palma’s very best and still arguably the best adaptation of King’s work (one laments that the two never worked together again. De Palma would have made a version of The Shining that would have been every bit as technically brilliant as Stanley Kubrick’s version while still retaining the novel’s aching human core that Kubrick was too icy and cerebral to give a damn about).

As for The Fury, it’s both messier and more ambitious than Carrie, the work of a filmmaker given his first big-studio assignment (for 20th Century Fox) and making a film that has a Kid-In-A-Candy-Store exuberance that – for the most part -- manages to paper over the narrative cracks with sheer auteurist verve. Lovely Amy Irving (who played Carrie’s “Good Girl”, Sue Snell) is here portrayed Gillian Bellaver, a teenage girl with a psychic gift of her own (which combines telepathy with the regrettable side effects of making those close to her bleed…sometimes a LOT). She’s gradually drawn into a chess match between a pair of estranged government agents (“We don’t spend a dime on public relations”), sleekly charismatic nogoodnik Childress (John Cassavetes) and Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas), who has his son Robin (Andrew Stevens) stolen away due to his psychic abilities. Peter needs Gillian’s gift to locate his son, while Childress wants to harness her abilities for nefarious purposes as he has with Robin (shades of “Eleven” in Stranger Things). Set to a sensational John Williams score and boasting excellent photography by the late Richard H. Kline (Body Heat), The Fury – adapted by John Farris from his novel – is a film that’s all over the map tone-wise, with odd comic digressions butted up against De Palma’s usual grand guignol excesses, but the sheer momentum of the storytelling keeps you constantly engaged, building from one Rube Goldberg setpiece to another, each one a marvel of logistical engineering. And it all climaxes with one of the most memorable kiss-off scenes in horror history. Not a great film, but there’s so much great STUFF in it I’m willing to forgive the bouts of expository clumsiness in-between the Good Parts. Look fast for early appearances by Daryl Hannah and Dennis Franz.

-Jennifer (1978): 5/10



Stop me if you’ve heard this one…a teenage girl (Lisa Pelikan…”’ey, Manny, look at the Pelikan! Fly, Pelikan, fly…!”) with an overbearing religious nut of a parent (Jeff Corey) is tormented by her snooty classmates at a luxe private school (where she has a well-earned scholarship the other girls resent), and eventually gets even via a psychic/paranormal ability (in this case, the ability to communicate with and control snakes). A shockingly bald-faced ripoff of Carrie, only shorn of even a hint of the touching humanity or dread-soaked atmosphere of Brian De Palma’s classic. It’s far from inept – it’s at least nicely-shot – but it takes forever to get anywhere, and when the punchline arrives, it’s a wan reward for the previous 80 minutes’ worth of tedium, with poor special effects and a lame denouement. Not terrible, but not very good.