It Ain't Easy Being Green

[EN: Check out my collected writings on Wes Craven's works in the new "Wes Craven" page on the top bar or right here.]

Year: 1982

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau, Ray Wise

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The early 80’s were a tough time for Wes Craven. A decade or so out from his terrifying debut The Last House on the Left, and half that from his grisly but mediocre sophomore effort The Hills Have Eyes, he just wasn’t finding purchase in Hollywood. In 1982 he was only two years off from altering the face of world cinema with A Nightmare on Elm Street, but for now his CV boasted the meager one-two punch of Deadly Blessing and Stranger in Our House, a TV movie with Linda Blair (yeah, we’re gonna get to that one).

So when he was offered the opportunity to direct a high profile superhero movie based on the DC Comics character Swamp Thing, do you think he would say no? Of course not. Superhero movies didn’t have quite the caché that they do today, but Superman had crushed box office coal into diamonds, so who was Wes Craven to tempt fate? Now, was the grindhouse horror director remotely equipped to handle an action-oriented blockbuster with a studio breathing down his neck and slashing the budget to ribbons so savagely they probably inspired Freddy Krueger?

Of course not.

In Swamp Thing, government scientist Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau) is sent to a remote research lab in the swamp to replace an injured worker during the last week of the operation. There she meets and becomes enamored with Dr. Alec Holland (Ray Wise), who is working with his sister to create a recombinant cell with both animal and plant DNA for… reasons. Science reasons. When the wicked Dr. Arcane (Louis Jordan) storms the lab to steal the formula, Holland is accidentally coated in it and falls into the swamp. This transforms him into the monstrous Swamp Thing (Dick Durock), and he sets out to save Cable from Arcane’s clutches, while he attempts to recreate the formula and use it on himself.

I mean, wouldn’t YOU want to look like this?

Swamp Thing represents a lot of firsts for Wes Craven. His first superhero movie. His first action movie. His first Wilhelm Scream. Of course, it also represents a lot of lasts because he would never do any of those things again. And while I’m delighted that he got a shot at operating outside of his horror wheelhouse before his single true departure from the genre in 1999’s Music of the Heart, it’s for the best that his action career didn’t go anywhere.

The sequences in the first act that develop character and build the world are pretty solid, but Craven’s script flails once the actual Swamp Thing is introduced. And yes, Craven himself got to write the script on this thing, because literally nobody gave a rat’s ass about overseeing comic book movies in the 80’s. But I digress. Swamp Thing’s powers are ill-defined (we don’t find out a key strength of his until the final 20 minutes, in which Cable sedately repeats it to him as if we should’ve known this the whole time) and his heroism is poorly staged, as Adrienne Barbeau wanders vacantly through the swamp, gets captured, and twiddles her thumbs until he leaps from the reeds to her rescue over and over and over again. It’s like Groundhog Day if Bill Murray were a damsel in distress.

The action sequences are spectacularly hammy, too. There’s a decent boat chase at one point, but every fistfight is as lumbering and slow as an old Godzilla movie, using that 40’s cinema standby of people falling down even though their opponent’s fist is clearly a foot and a half away from them. What makes this even more embarrassing is that most of the fight scenes involve David Hess, a participant in Craven’s most luridly brutal and realistic depiction of violence, in 1972’s The Last House on the Left. It’s a major stumble for a director who had found his voice, but hadn’t quite locked down his visual mastery yet.

Watching Swamp Thing, it’s almost impossible to believe this was only two years later.

The second and third acts range from boring to dreadful, but when Swamp Thing is good, it’s at least amusingly campy comic book fun. Wise and Barbeau have enough chemistry that I’m willing to go along with their preposterous love story, and though Cable is hardly an empowered female character, she gets a couple opportunities to kick an appropriate amount of ass. Then the comic-y flair comes in with the absurd squiggly wipes Craven uses to transition between scenes. And it’s impossible to completely hate a movie that has a scene where a character grabs the corner of their face and removes their impeccably lifelike Mission: Impossible mask.

Probably the single best element of the film is Jude, a ten-year-old comic relief gas station attendant who accompanies Cable on her Act Two journey. This is almost certainly damning Swamp Thing with faint praise, because he’d probably be the worst thing in any other movie, but the characters (played by Reggie Batts) exemplifies the best of Craven’s occasionally lever, quippy, and warm screenplay. Too bad he’s shunted to the side for a grand finale featuring this masterpiece. 

And I didn’t think any Craven effect could be worse than the werewolf in Cursed.

As you can see, Swamp Thing is no charmer. It’s a parade of shoddy special effects and circuitous narrative, plodding endlessly through a flat, tedious swamp. And the cherry on top is the score by Harry Manfredini, who – as he has with every other film he’s composed since 1980 – liberally slathers the film with shrill outtakes from his Friday the 13th score, smothering it with blunt strings that completely ignore the tone of whatever scene they’re in, blasting it into sub-slasher oblivion. Swamp Thing is a disappointment, but so were most comic movies of that era (Hell, DC is still churning them out). I’m not shifting the blame entirely from Craven, whose hands were all over this project, but the director took a shot at material he was wholly incompatible with. It’s an admirable venture but an unsuccessful one.

TL;DR: Swamp Thing is an admirable failure from a director ill-equipped to handle the genre.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1049

Census Bloodbath: Dash Away, All

Year: 1980

Director: David Hess

Cast: Jennifer Runyon, Forrest Swanson, Linda Gentile
Run Time: 1 hour 23 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Holiday themed slasher films are always a huge draw. Centering the murders around a single unifying element helps the filmmakers find some great puns and kills that otherwise couldn't have existed. I'm just saying, nobody is gonna get their head shoved into a turkey or an American flag down their throat on a campground in the middle of August.

Christmas is a particular favorite because of the innocence and joy usually associated with the holiday. And nobody can resist the idea of a killer Santa. I mean, the man is omniscient. He sees you when you're sleeping. He sneaks into your house in the middle of the night. And he knows when you've been bad. The whole thing is pretty creepy without the help of a carving knife and minor key synth music.

Because of the sheer profusion of films of this stock, I hold an annual Christmas Slasher Movie Marathon at my house in the winter. We've seen gems like Psycho Santa, Satan Claus, Silent Night, Deadly Night and way way more. So when I began Census Bloodbath way back when last summer, I decided to skip over To All A Goodnight at first because I wanted to save it to watch with my friends during the holidays. I'm really glad I didn't.

Because they would have killed me for showing them another crappy-ass Christmas film just because the title sounded promising.

I'll never learn.

The film opens two years ago at the Calvin Finishing School For Girls, utilizing the hoary trope of "transgression in the past" to provide a motive for the murders, this time the accidental killing of a sorority sister (Maybe. It's never made explicitly clear that this is a sorority, but they look and act like one and the DNA of Black Christmas is too apparent to avoid drawing connections.) during a prank. This entire scene is alarmingly perfunctory, only lasting less than a minute.

It's astoundingly odd that this should be the case. A lot of later slasher films spent only a brief amount of time on this kind of thing, because they knew that audiences had already picked up on the patterns from watching so many similar movies and it was only necessary to provide a sort of summary of the transgression. The audience could do the rest of the heavy lifting.

But To All A Goodnight (I hate the grammar of that title more and more every time I type it) was the first slasher film of 1980, certainly too early in the game to be participating in any sort of self-assured truncation like that. Perhaps its just an indicator of the ubiquitous poor quality of the film, shepherded to ever more rancid degrees by director David Hess aka the rapist in The Last House on the Left, and quite obviously not a huge proponent of good taste.

Delicious.

So here we are in present day. It's Christmas break and many of the girls have decided to stick around. The most prominent character is Nancy (Jennifer Runyon), a meek, mild, quiet, demure, snoozefest of a human being with a voice that hardly raises above a squeak. She is the Final Girliest Final Girl to ever exist, and not the last to bear that name. She's the only one who objects when the other girls decide to slip sleeping pills to their housekeeper, Mrs. Jensen (Katherine Harrington) and hold a party while she's sedated.

The sorority party offers us a heaping platter of Meat including Trisha (Angela Bath), the slutty British girl; Melody (Linda Gentile), the slutty American girl; Cynthia (Lisa Labowskie), the slutty blonde; and Leia (Judith Bridges), the slutty dancer. As you can see, the characters have an unparalleled level of nuance second only to some of Shakespeare's greater tragedies.

Cynthia's boyfriend is Paul (mysteriously, there is no actor listed under this name), who gets about three seconds of screentime before he is summarily dispatched; Trisha's boyfriend is T.J. (William Lauer), a lunkish jock and ringleader of the boys; Melody has grown attached to Alex (Forrest Swanson), a nerdy kid who is inexplicably obsessed with medical technology and is rather fond of Nancy despite the fact that a wet mop would be more fun to hang out with than Nancy; also there's assorted men and women who blend together too much for my poor fevered brain to focus.

Not a single one of these actors has ever been in anything else even remotely interesting for their entire careers (except, oddly enough, for the fact that several of them appeared in episodes of Diff'rent Strokes). In fact, a large portion of them would never act again. I hope they all had day jobs, because it's easy to see why they wouldn't be hired back. Every bit of dialogue plays off like they're fumbling to read off of cue cards printed in off-white ink on white paper.

Not exactly my Fantasy Dinner Party roster.

The partiers proceed to drink and screw and die and wake up and screw some more and die. In between all the boning, they are bumped off one by one by a homicidal maniac in a Santa suit. This is less interesting than it sounds, because absolutely nothing clever is done with the conceit. If it's Christmas and you're a slasher movie, at the very least I expect somebody to be strangled with tinsel. But no, our Saint Nick with his belly like a bowlful of helly makes do with a garden variety kitchen knife.

I am so done with 1980.

So, about the sex. I'm all for sleaze in my exploitation movies (in more of a hilarious historical interest way, not a lecherous one), but the entire film is essentially one long, ill-lit sex scene. It's like the seventh circle of hell with randy co-eds doffing their tops into eternity.  It's so relentlessly sleazy that it's boring, squandering its shock value and losing any ability to titillate,  merely becoming an incessant grinding gear of agony for everybody but the most perverse, tormented shadows of human beings. Also, the music rips off Jaws.

I wish the rest of the movie had ripped off Jaws. It would have been far more interesting.

The kills are uninspired and either to dark to be discernible or framed too far from the camera to have any sort of power. The only captivating moments of the scarcely 80 minute film are in the final scene, and that's only because that's the moment when the film shifts from being a tedious grind to powerfully strange.

I'm going to throw in a SPOILERS tag here just out of courtesy, but please read on. I actively desire to spoil the ending, hopefully preventing any bad movie buffs with piqued interest from becoming yet another of the film's victims.

So, it turns out that the killer is Mrs. Jensen, who was apparently the mother of the girl who was killed two years ago. So that's interesting. Female killers always give me a thrill, even though the genre is still too misogynistic to allow them to be anything but hysteria-driven monsters. And the fact that her nature and motive predicted Mrs. Voorhees in Friday the 13th is quite intriguing.

But we haven't even gotten to the strange part. This is all presented very plainly and the killer is shoved unceremoniously off a balcony with little effort on Nancy's part. The editing starts to get a little wacky here, and the movie loses its grip over what time of day it is and/or whether we're in a flashback and/or whether she fell off a balcony onto the lawn or into the living room. Just to spice up this little bit of manic editing dross, another Santa steps in, revealing himself to be the police inspector/husband of the killer!

And he attacks! And! ...is subsequently killed without a moment's hesitation.

Why introduce two killers in your final five minutes, only to have them both amount to nothing? Who actually killed all those teens at the party? Were they working together? Or was it just Mrs. Jensen and her husband stepped in to avenge her death? Why are they both dressed as Santa? It's not like the holiday played any big part in the film, except for some twinkle lights in the set design and sleigh bells on the soundtrack (which is ear-splittingly awful, by the way).

By now I have grown accustomed to nonsensical slasher endings, having been inoculated by watching the entire Friday the 13th franchise twice over, but what in Sam Hill is this movie even about?

You know what? It doesn't matter. I watched the entire thing, so I'll never have to sit through it again or waste another second of my time thinking about it. And neither should you. Don't watch this movie. There are a few scattered fun 80's moments, but they're just not worth all the digging it takes to reach them.

Tragically, this isn't the last disappointing Santa movie that will be featured on Census Bloodbath. Steel your loins.

Killer: You tell me. I'm just gonna split the difference and say Santa.
Final Girl: Nancy (Jennifer Runyon)
Best Kill: Santa kills two escaping partiers with an airplane propeller in a scene that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.
Sign of the Times: The awkward moaning that ensues during simple acts like kissing is a uniquely 80's phenomenon.
Scariest Moment: The creepy groundskeeper and obvious red herring Ralph takes an odd liking to Nancy, crawling into her window and demanding that she pray for forgiveness.
Weirdest Moment: Leah does pirouettes with a cheese platter in a pre-coital moment.
Champion Dialogue: "I was just on my way to drink some milk."
Body Count: There seems to be some contention around this, but I feel comfortable sticking with around 15; including the 2(?) killers and their daughter. Also, I apologize for the lack of names in the body count but I just couldn't bring myself to rewatch the film to make sure I got them all right, even just skimming it.

1. Mrs. Jensen's Daughter falls to her death from a balcony.
2. A boy is stabbed to death.
3. A girl is stabbed in the chest.
4. A girl has her throat slit. 
5. A boy has his head split open with a rock.
6. A boy is shot through the head with a crossbow.
7. A girl is decapitated with an axe.
8. A man is killed in the head offscreen.
9. A man has his head split open with an axe.
10. A man is stabbed in the back.
11. A boy is garroted with wire.
12. A boy is dismembered with helicopter blades.
13. A girl is dismembered with helicopter blades.
14. Mrs. Jensen falls to her death from the balcony.
15. A man is shot with a crossbow. 

TL;DR: To All A Goodnight is a worthless, sleazy trifle of a slasher film that wastes what should at the very least be a corny and entertaining premise.
Rating: 2/10
Word Count: 1852

A Grindhouse Is Not A Home

Year: 1972

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Sandra Cassell, Lucy Grantham, David Hess

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R*

We're here. Wes Craven's first film! Fresh off of English teaching, the young (well, younger) Mr. Craven set out in the industry the way most New York-based filmmakers tended to do at the time - editing porn. It was there he met Sean S. Cunningham, producer of The Last House on the Left and future director of Friday the 13th. 

So when these two set out to make a horror film, it should come as no surprise that the end result was perhaps a tad depraved. LHotL was decried by critics left and right, and has still only tentatively received popular acceptance as a horror staple. And, in truth, it is a deliriously sinful half-cocked shock picture filled with obscene sexual violence.

It's a film with little to no moral compass that captivated viewers with its willingness to go where no other film had ever gone before. This resonated with the young nihilistic audiences in the 70's and the film became a hit in the disreputable grindhouse theaters, turning in a huge profit on its relatively meager $90,000 budget.

One must always remember though that one Wes Craven is at the helm. Although he hadn't yet developed his directorial style to the levels of his later slasher masterworks A Nightmare on Elm Street or Scream, his background (a steady religious upbringing and years studying English literature) would indicate that he is more or less incapable of producing a film that is of such utter garbage as all that.

Not that it doesn't come close, but Craven's intellect betrays itself. You see, this film has a lofty pedigree, functioning essentially as a bloodied remake of a film by renowned Swedish director Ingmar Bergman called The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan). That alone would put it firmly in the "maybe not so terrible" camp, but the film also (buried deep but unearthable) carries somewhat of a moral theme.

Stick with me on this.

Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassell) is 17. She lives in a rural idyll with her parents, Dr. John Collingwood (Gaylord St. James and before you ask, yes it is a stage name. Makes you wonder why he picked it though.) and his wife Estelle (Cynthia Carr). They live a typical All-American family life, but Mari wants more. 

For her birthday, she has decided to go with her friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) to a Bloodlust concert, much to the outrage of her parents. Against their better judgment, they let her go. She is growing up, after all, and they're planning her surprise party anyway so this will get her out of the way.

She'll never make it to that concert. On the way, she and Phyllis try to score some grass from a shady teen named Junior (Marc Sheffler) on a street corner. He brings them back to his motel, to which his roommates do not react kindly. His roommates being his father Krug (David Hess), an escaped convict, Krug's buddy Weasel (Fred Lincoln, who considers this the worst film he ever worked on, which is a lot coming from a man whose IMDb credits include just upwards of 300 porn videos), and their beastly girlfriend Sadie (Jeramie Rain - and not a single one of these people went on to appear in anything of note; most stopped acting by the end of the 70's.).

They can't exactly have a couple of pretty young witnesses running around, so they do the only sensible thing and take the girls out to the woods, torturing, raping, and killing them in what is only the first of the film's two hyperviolent setpieces.

The 70's were a rough time for everyone.

Through a series of plot contrivances, the villains end up holing up in the Collingwood household after their car breaks down and during the night, Mari's worried parents discover her body and realize to their dismay that they have been harboring the culprits. With the phone lines down and the hopelessly inept police bumbling around town like Keystone Cops (in a hopelessly depressing stab at comic relief), they take matters into their own hands and murder the hell out of Krug and his cronies.

In the interest of avoiding spoilers (a sad but true fact - spoilers in these types of movies more often than not involve how people die as opposed to who dies), anyone who wishes to remain in the dark on a 40-year-old grindhouse movie should skip to picture of the cute bunny and read on from there.

Last House on the Left is a brutal film, there's no skirting around that. With vivid 70's blood (what is it about that creamy concoction that makes me writhe every time?) and an unwavering dedication to extreme violence (although, as always, the more vicious moments take place offscreen - people can invent much greater horrors in their own heads than could ever be shown onscreen, Tobe Hooper can tell you that), it can be extremely hard to watch.

As can any dentist.

There's a lot in here to disdain Craven for, but I like to keep in mind that people go to horror films to be scared, and this film does that. It just does. The scariest parts take place in the smallest moments (another hallmark of Craven's work - he doesn't have to be bombastic to get the job done), like Krug's line of viscous drool that runs down Phyllis' face or him forcing Mari to wet her pants at gunpoint.

These little moments get under your skin and paint the picture of an animal of a man who has absolutely no inhibitions. This is a man who gets his own son hooked on heroin so he could control him, then talked him into blowing his own brains out. He is callous, cruel, mean-spirited, awful, despicable, disgusting, morally bankrupt, depraved, and just plain evil.

But is this really necessary?

And is that makeup really necessary?

My answer is yes. At least within the confines of the film. The orgy of blood that occurs at his hand (and in response to his crimes) is accompanied by a song. At first listen, it just seems like a cheesy, misplaced 70's song (which it is), but there's something deeper there. The recurring motif involves this lyric: "And the road leads to nowhere."

And here is the nugget of good buried deep in the center of the movie. For all its violence and indecency, The Last House on the Left has a clear message. Although audiences are meant to hate the violence inflicted by the villains and adore the violence inflicted by the heroes in that schizophrenic way that makes horror and action films possible, at the end the Collingwoods are left with nothing.

Their innocent lifestyle of the past is lying dead on the living room floor, as is their daughter. They have to forever live with the knowledge of their slaughter without their daughter to comfort them. It's not their fault she was murdered, but their response has rent their world apart in a way that can never be suitably pieced together for the rest of their lives.

Violence begets violence and... the road leads to nowhere.

And that's what horror is about! The consequences of our actions and witnessing the dangers of invoking them vicariously through fictional characters. Even though The Last House on the Left is a slipshod effort at best, it has a kind of brutal purity about it that, along with Romero's Night of the Living Dead, launched horror into a new and improved age.

Also, I didn't know where to mention this, but Mari's mom bites off Weasel's dick and I really don't support that kind of behavior but it's the best and most cathartic scene in the movie.

Welcome back, guys!

Basically, the film is a solid beginning for an illustrious career in the genre. Its flaws nearly outweigh the merits, but Craven was using the grindhouse genre to build a portfolio and slowly prove his viability as a director with something to say. And if it took a Last House on the Left to make that happen, so be it.

A quick word on the poster: Aren't grindhouse posters the best, though? That hyperbolic tagline. The slowly receding "It's only a movie... It's only a movie..." These people really knew how to sell a schlocky gore picture, I'll tell you what.

*Interesting story. The MPAA refused to release the film with anything less than an X rating even after Craven cut out ten minutes, so he just shoved 'em back in, had his friend steal an official "R-Rated" seal of approval, slapped it on the distribution copy, and went on his merry way.

TL;DR: The Last House on the Left is messy in more ways than one, but it's a good foothold for a rising master director.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1495

Reviews In This Series

The Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972)

The Last House on the Left (Iliadis, 2009)