Popcorn Kernels: Chokes And Daggers

A set of mini-reviews from movie explored in month 3 of the Scream 101 podcast, all 70’s proto-slashers.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1976

Director: Charles B. Pierce

Cast: Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, Dawn Wells 

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A hooded maniac known as the Phantom Killer murders couples in various lovers’ lanes of Texarkana while a Texas Ranger and an assortment of kooky cops attempt to track him down.

I was excited to check out The Town That Dreaded Sundown, if only because it was name-dropped in Scream. I should learn to have stricter criteria for my movie-watching, because this inept slasher tested my endurance even more than the previous week’s late 70’s trash fire When a Stranger Calls. Although, I will give it one thing: Much like Golden Era slasher A Day of Judgment, The Town That Dreaded Sundown’s best quality is that it’s a weirdly convincing period piece, this time set in the post-World War II 1940’s.

Other than that, TTTDS (the weirdest acronym I’ve ever had to type) is a plain-jane riff on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. A killer strikes in a rural Southern town, accompanied by foreboding narration that gravely insists this was all based on a true story (although John Larroquette’s gravelly Chain Saw intro easily outpaces Vern Stierman’s jaunty monologue, which carries through the entire film and makes the whole affair sound like a documentary you’d screen in a second grade classroom). There’s also a severe hesitance toward showing any onscreen gore.

However, where Tobe Hooper’s kinetic, gritty direction gave Chain Saw a brutal tang in spite of its chaste gore, The Town That Dreaded Sundown got Charles B. Pierce, an inept at best amateur who was more keen to capture B-roll of his beloved town that actually tell a satisfying story. In his hands, the tone flies wildly out of control, tilting into slapstick comedy both unintentionally (the Phantom Killer tiptoes and pratfalls his way through his own murder scenes like he just stepped out of a Pink Panther movie) and with deadly seriousness.

You see, The Town That Dreaded Sundown has the yuk-yukkiest goofy cops this side of The Last House on the Left. I’m talking characters that would be shunned in the cop movie cafeteria by folks from Police Academy or Keystone Cops. Their staggering ineptitude weighs heavily on this movie, especially the drag-dressing, car-key-forgetting, crash-car-into-the-swamping Sparkplug, played with tooth-gnashing, Barney-Fife-ish glee by Pierce himself.

These characters, who we’re forced to spend the entire movie with, tear the atmosphere to shreds. The killer’s vague positive qualities (i.e. the creepy way his mask moves with every breath he takes, at one point he murders a girl with a trombone, etc.) are hardly strong enough to pull this wacky, boring slasher experiment back from the brink.

Rating: 3/10

Alice, Sweet Alice (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1976

Director: Alfred Sole

Cast: Linda Miller, Mildred Clinton, Paula E. Sheppard

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

After her sister is brutally murdered at her first communion, Alice is blamed for it and the killings that follow.

Alice, Sweet Alice is definitely an oddity. Not quite a drama, not quite a horror film, and not quite a slasher, it’s sort of a primordial ooze of mood and sleaze that made it essential viewing for this month. It’s basically a 100-minute riff on Catholic iconography and ideology, twisting holy imagery into something devilish and unclean. Considering I’m about as far from Catholic as it’s possible to be without being actively Satanic, this didn’t really do much for me. But I nevertheless respect its gusto.

Alice, Sweet Alice’s focus on image and mood is unfortunate, considering that its director isn’t especially talented, but there are some prop designs that just plain work. The mask worn by the killer is a particular triumph, an opaque plastic, face-obliterating monstrosity with garish make-up that maps perfectly onto the eyes to create a chilling expressiveness despite its blank features. There’s also a three-headed doll that’s straight-up nightmare fuel, though it’s easy enough to make a doll creepy.

And the plot itself isn’t all bad. The reveal of the killer only ever feels arbitrary (especially considering that the plot unspools for a good 20 minutes or so after that no-so-pivotal moment), and the movie doesn’t provide enough red herrings to make it a truly satisfying mystery (we’re meant to believe Alice is the killer, but it’s so transparently desperate to convince us of this that it’s obvious she’s not). But many early sequences feel like an Italian melodrama, reveling in tear-stained close-ups of women on the brink, and you won’t catch me complaining about over-the-top drama. Hell, I was a fan of Empire.

That’s really about it for Alice, Sweet Alice. The gore is slight, although their retractable knife provides some stunning shots, and there’s plenty of Tobe Hooper-esque sleaze filling in the gaps of the story. I’m looking at you, Mr. Alphonso, the cat-owning perverted landlord who is by far the most interesting character in the entire movie. Alice, Sweet Alice isn’t the best proto-slasher, but it was enough to renew my faith in the form after the ignominious one-two punch of When a Stranger Calls and The Town That Dreaded Sundown.

Rating: 6/10

Tourist Trap (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1979

Director: David Schmoeller

Cast: Chuck Connors, Jocelyn Jones, Jon Van Ness

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Five young vacationers get a flat tire and find themselves trapped in a creepy roadside museum stocked with evil mannequins and a telekinetic killer.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if the kids from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre made a pit stop at the Psycho motel, only instead of Norman Bates behind the counter, it was some sort of twisted Pinocchio man? If you aren’t at least a little curious, then maybe Tourist Trap isn’t for you.

However, I’m a devotee of weird cinema, and if there’s one thing that Tourist Trap has in spades, it’s weirdness. It’s not so much a functional narrative, but its deranged nightmare logic is captivating. The use of mannequins as a source of terror is a logical step forward from the classic trope of creepy dolls (one that would likewise be put to good use in the next year’s Maniac), but Tourist Trap does more than just a lazily effective gimmick. These mannequins are a buck wild special effects spectacle that more than makes up for the 70’s-esque lack of gore in the kill scenes.

Tourist Trap throws all logic out the window in favor of pure, off-kilter energy, having its mannequins twist their heads to reveal gaping mouths, motionlessly vocalize in a screaming chorus, and occasionally spring to life for a spot of soup and crackers. It’s unpredictable, it’s incomprehensible, and a truly pure experience unlike any other, all underscored by the unadulterated lunacy of Pino Donaggio’s score, which seems to have been written for a children’s cartoon and is spliced in here at the most inopportune moments.

If you’re not into films that have the singular purpose of knocking you on your butt with pure strangeness, then don’t seek out Tourist Trap, because it doesn’t have much else to offer. The characters are thinner than Donald Trump’s skin, the Final Girl is kind of an asshole, and the killer has an incredible mask but ruins it by flapping his gums a bit too much. There’s a slight feint toward the political potency of Texas Chain Saw with a dropped line about the highway driving away business, but despite having plenty of time to do so in the interminable third act, it never goes anywhere.

But that mannequin material really is some great stuff. And Tourist Trap knows it, hauling them out as often as the meager budget can allow. Which is quite a lot. Turns out mannequins ain’t expensive. Where it’s not a great movie, it’s a delightfully twisted experience, and I’m glad I took the time to sit through it.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1366

So Chic, C'est Freak

Year: 1995

Director: Stuart Gordon

Cast: Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Jonathan Fuller

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Producer Charles Band, composer Richard Band, director Stuart Gordon, and stars Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton are the team behind two of my favorite 80’s horror films: Re-Animator and From Beyond. That entire team would band together just once more, on 1995’s Castle Freak, likewise loosely based on an H. P. Lovecraft story (this time “The Outsider”). It’s a recipe for success, but the kitchen it was prepared in wasn’t quite the same.

You see, in the nine long years between 1986’s From Beyond and Castel Freak, Charles Band’s Empire Pictures folded, giving way to his new company, Full Moon Productions. Now, Empire wasn’t exactly a gleaming, state-of-the-art facility (Ghoulies and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama aren’t exactly the products of a four star enterprise), but it produced a string of solid horror features like Crawlspace and Intruder. Full Moon on the other hand, is notable almost entirely for grimy swill with the budget of a handful of croutons. The company behind the endlessly sprawling Puppet Master and Gingerdead Man franchises, it’s pretty much the only studio that could actually make Empire seem prestigious.

How does this affect the success of Castle Freak? Well, we’re about to find out.

Spoiler: There’s a reason you haven’t heard of Castle Freak.

In Castle Freak, John Reilly (Jeffrey Combs) discovers that he has inherited an Italian castle from a long-lost aunt. He takes his wife Susan (Barbara Crampton) and their blind daughter Rebecca (Jessica Dollarhide) along while he inventories the contents. He and Susan have been on bad terms since he killed their five-year-old son and blinded their daughter in a drunk driving accident. He has since gotten his “#1 Dad” mug revoked, but it does not help in the slightest that a Freak (Jonathan Fuller) who has been chained up in the basement has gotten loose and is committing foul murders that John is being blamed for.

It’s your classic Hitchcock setup.

Alright, no more beating around the bush. The drop in quality between Gordon’s Empire work and Castle Freak is so steep it’s not even fair. The budget severely curtails the director’s signature gooey grossness (although the gore that remains is anything but chaste) and the movie reeks of cheapness like a Big Lots perfume department. The cast is small, the props are ratty (especially noteworthy is a silver platter with a dull plastic sheen that would feel more at home in a Barbie playset), and the locations feel very stagebound. That last factor is very odd, considering that the film was shot in an actual castle owned by Charles Band because of course he owns a castle, but the plain walls, low ceilings, and general lack of grandeur (we only see about 6 of what are purportedly 150 rooms) make the whole thing feel like it could have been shot in a trailer park.

However, despite its blatant inferiority, Castle Freak has a few very unique compensations. Because Gordon’s gore is cut off at the knees, so to speak, the film blossoms in other areas. You see, Castle Freak is actually a pretty solid little family drama. Three-dimensional characters aren’t exactly a hallmark of the Re-Animator franchise, so the taut but effective relationships that are trotted out here are quite a lovely surprise. The finale is a little reductive and diminishes the two strong female characters into babbling damsels in distress, but the way the drama is developed is very organic and raw.

It’s not introduced all at once, but in slow dollops that turn up the heat on the pressure cooker. The family seems perfectly happy and normal until, drop by drop, a series of subtle revelations taint the water. The film doesn’t spell everything out, allowing the audience to make connections and really engage with the storyline. And the characters are sufficiently fleshed-out to the degree that every single one of them is identifiable and worth rooting for. It’s nothing complex, but it is solid and satisfying storytelling.

The beauty of Popcorn Culture is that this heavy structural analysis is bestowed upon a film where a Castle Freak bites off a hooker’s boob.

The true benefit of this meatier drama is that Barbara Crampton gives her best performance of her time with Stuart Gordon, possibly of her career. Thanks to her, and Fuller’s menacing, lumbering presence as the titular Freak, there’s an added layer of suspense and fear that likewise aren’t present in Gordon’s superior but not quite abjectly terrifying works.

So there really is a lot going for Castle Freak as a cheapie horror picture. It’s certainly a masterpiece among its unimpressive Full Moon brethren. But where the other films triumphed with goofy, enormous gore gags, Castle Freak is limited to a handful of vaguely realized kills that are creatively naughty (ie. the aforementioned boobectomy) but far from satisfying to hardcore gorehounds. If the drama had a less desultory ending I could forgive the film more, but as it stands it’s a cheap, visually uninteresting motion picture without a deep end. Just when you think it’ll go further, it remains shallow all the way to the other side.

TL;DR: Castle Freak doesn't hold a candle to Stuart Gordon's other H. P. love craft adaptations, but it has some meaty drama and solid tension.

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 902

The Killsbury Doughboy

Every December, while visions of sugarplums dance through your head, grotesque visages and blood-curdling screams dance through mine. For the third year in a row, I hosted my Annual Christmas Slasher Marathon, an attempt to plumb the most vile depths of holiday horror. Although I have forced my friends to sit through at least fifteen of the seasonal psychopaths, we have barely scratched the surface.

Today and tomorrow I will be posting the results of our most recent venture.

The Gingerdead Man

Year: 2005

Director: Charles Band

Cast: Gary Busey, Robin Sydney, Ryan Locke

Run Time: 1 hour 10 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A (like the movie ever saw a true release)

Did any of your jaws drop when you saw that this film was but a brief 70 minutes? Well I have news for you. Of that fateful hour and ten, roughly 14 of those minutes were credits. And with the way the plodding narrative pukes along, it could stand to be even shorter.

I'm embarrassed to admit that this film is the product of several of my favorite horror craftsmen. The director Charles Band is the producer behind some of my favorite 80's B-horror works, From Beyond and Re-Animator. It would seem that his dedication to throwaway low budget horror has brought him to a dark place.

And special effects designer John Carl Buechler has worked with some of the best and the brightest on films such as Halloween 4, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and... From Beyond and Re-Animator. He also directed one of my favorite Friday the 13th films: Part VII, where Jason fights a telekinetic teen.

My, how the mighty have fallen.

The Gingerdead Man opens in a diner as the terrifyingly named Millard Findlemeyer (played by the ewually terrifying Gary Busey) robs a diner and shoots the patrons without blood or intrigue. Cut to two years later as the sole survivor of his bloodbath, Sarah Leigh -geddit?- (Robin Sydney, who has the dubious pleasure of being the only woman who can brag to have been in three Gingerdead films and every Evil Bong film) celebrates the murderer's recent execution by electric chair.

She works at a Texan bakery owned by her mother (Margaret Blye) and staffed by Brick Fields - Do you think his mother is the famous Mrs.? - (Jonathan Chase), an amateur wrestler known as the Butcher Baker and Julia (Daniela Melgoza), a Latina sterotype who defies expectations by surviving the entirety of the film.

When a mysterious package of gingerbread seasoning is dropped off at the door by a cloaked stranger, Sarah doesn't think twice about mixing it into a batch of dough and letting Brick bleed all over the bowl. It's a long story, but it turns out that they've baked Millard's ashes and now he's a vicious cookie puppet with a psychopathic bent.

To make things worse, a visit by competitor's daughter Lorna Dean -geddit?- (Alexia Aleman) and her studly boyfriend Amos Cadbury -the puns, they burn- (Ryan Locke) leads to a catfight that releases him from the oven, free to wreak havoc among the buns and frosted delights.

And to be mysteriously adorable from behind.

He's not really successful, killing a pitiful two people in largely bloodless ways, shouting at a rat, and making puns so weak they couldn't even hold up the wafer-thin plot.

The characters are only in danger because they stupidly refuse to just get the hell out of the bakery, the one set is barren and empty, people are rarely killed and mostly just bonked on the head and knocked out for a bit, and the blood is thin on the ground. For all the gore this movie has to offer, it might as well be Santa and the Enchanted Cookie.

It's not campy enough to justify the butt stupid premise and despite the promise of a seriously deranged Gary Busey, managed to almost put me to sleep on several occasions despite its perfunctory 56 minute net run time.

I'm not entirely sure how much acting he's doing here.

Killer: Millard Findlemeyer aka The Gingerdead Man (Gary Busey)
Final Girl: Sarah Leigh (Robin Sydney) and like three other people
Best Kill: Um... No?
Scariest Moment: Amos has an eyebrow ring.
Weirdest Moment: Sarah decorates the cookie before she even puts it in the oven. Laura: This is what happens when you predecorate your cookies."
Champion Dialogue: "Wherever you are up there, I hope they have strippers."
Body Count: 6; including the killer and the 3 in the diner opening sequence.

1. Diner Patron is shot to death.
2. Jeremy Leigh is shot to death.
3. James Leigh is shot to death. 
4. Jimmy Dean is crushed by his own car.
5. Lorna is stabbed in the forehead with a knife.
6. Gingerdead Man-Possessed Brick is baked to death. 

TL;DR: The Gingerdead Man does not make good on the title's promise of low budget camp.
Rating: 2/10
Word Count: 817