Census Bloodbath: Sibling Rivalry

Year: 1982

Director: Richard Lang

Cast: Dennis Weaver, Valerie Harper, Robin Ignico

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

TV movie slashers aren't all bad. In fact there are a few I like a considerable amount, like 1981's Dark Night of the Scarecrow and Fantasies, which we covered late last year. But for every one of those, there's an insipid affair like Hotline. It's a mixed bag, but the horror collective group mind seems to have minted 1982's Don't Go to Sleep as a classic of the form. Unfortunately, that group in question is of the generation where they might have stumbled upon this movie on TV when they were actually a child, and the potency they remember might have something to do with those soft, malleable childhood brain tissues.

Malleable and oh-so breakable.

Don't Go to Sleep starts with a pretty generic setup. It's just not the setup for a slasher movie. It's the beginning of every haunted house tale you've ever seen. A young family is moving into a new house: mother Laura (Valerie Harper, because there's always a classic TV veteran on hand for one of these), who I can't even come up with a single character trait to describe; father Philip (Dennis Weaver, of Duel, the ur-TV movie), who is nervous about starting his new job and has a tendency to drink too much; daughter Mary (Robin Ignico), who has bad dreams; youngest sibling Kevin (Oliver Robins of Poltergeist, so 1982 was quite a banner year for him), who is a pernicious little brat with an iguana; and elderly grandmother Bernice (Ruth Gordon, who needs no introduction), a chain-smoking, blowsy firebrand whom Philip resents.

There's a member of the family I didn't mention because she's dead. Eldest daughter Jennifer (Kristin Cumming) died in a car wreck earlier that year and the family is still reeling. When her ghost appears to Mary, she starts convincing her to take out the rest of her family one by one so they can finally be together like they were meant to be. 

And I breathe a sigh of relief because this haunted house movie eventually gives way to a slasher so I'm not wasting my time watching it.

Don't Go to Sleep, which earns its title in exactly zero ways, isn't a bad TV movie. In fact in many ways it's quite effective. It's just hampered by the stilted, low budget nature of what it is. Especially in any scene where the family is conversing together as a group, there's not an ounce of naturalism, with each member clearly waiting their turn to say what they're supposed to say. And on the other end of the timing spectrum, there's the fact that Laura keeps demanding "answer me!" to her children, even though they were already speaking and her outburst in fact interrupts them so they can no longer answer.

But when things get spooky, like when the dolls' heads start being twisted around, or that scene that provides the indelible fiery bed image you surely noticed above, Don't Go to Sleep at least piques the interest, even if it fails to chill the bones of a seasoned horror veteran. 

And there is an absolutely unique scene involving a pizza cutter that is lightly iconic, for good reason. Richard Lang, who as far as I can tell was a fairly anonymous TV director, really saw this genre movie as a chance to flex his muscles and he crams it full of unique angles and sinewy, flowing camera moves. Combine the aesthetic effort with Robin Ignicio's adorably enormous eyes that become simmering pools of pure black night when she scowls, and you've got yourself a lightly spooky tale that at least avoids being intolerably goofy despite the script's best efforts.

The effect her eyes produce is also helped by the fact that the VHS dub quality isn't GREAT.

But we need to talk about Kevin. Kevin SUCKS. This is not a critique of Oliver Robins, but the character himself. He's a shitty little brat who jealously guards his toys even though Mary clearly has no desire to play with them, torments his grief-ridden sister with pranks in the middle of the night, demands his dad buy him a motorcycle, steals cookies off the counter, and just plays with random loose Bunsen burners like an absolute psychopath. At least in the first half of the movie, we spend far more time with him than either of his sisters, and this is a huge liability, at least for my own personal interest in wanting to sit through the rest of the film.

And if we're being honest, anyone who isn't a little girl or Ruth Gordon isn't really worth spending time with. Any time they're alone together, Weaver and Harper have to volley back and forth some of the plummiest dialogue this side of the icebox. And while she in particular is giving a pretty solid performance, her sheer intensity brings down the mood. By combining this goofy body count thriller (with deaths involving an iguana and a Frisbee, you can't tell me I was meant to take this seriously) with the cracked psyche of a grieving mother, you just get a tonal hash that never fully comes together.

And that's before the ending that takes waaaay too long to explain a scene that is extremely easy to piece together from context clues like an hour earlier. It wasn't an unpleasant watch, but the good entirely fails to outweigh the mediocre. 

Killer: Mary (Robin Ignico)

Final Girl: Laura (Valerie Harper)

Best Kill: I mean I can't say I expected to be writing the phrase "Ruth Gordon dies of an inguana-induced heart attack," so I guess it must be that one.

Sign of the Times: That stigma against therapy is veeeeeeeeeeeeeery present. Phil thinks it will reflect poorly on his parenting if his daughter goes to therapy after two of her family members have died in the same year.

Scariest Moment: Mary's bed catches fire in the middle of the night.

Weirdest Moment: There's a scene that mimics the POV shot from the opening of Halloween, except the kid is holding an iguana instead of a knife.

Champion Dialogue: "She smells like cigarettes and it smells like yuck."

Body Count: 4

Bernice has a heart attack.

Kevin is pushed off the roof.

Phil is electrocuted in the bath.

Jennifer dies in a car explosion in flashback.

TL;DR: Don't Go to Sleep is passable TV movie fare, but it could have embraced its identity as a slasher with more keeness.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1097

Popcorn Kernels: There's A First Time For Everything

In this collection of mini-reviews, we cover two films discussed during the month of October on Scream 101 season 2: First films from famous directors that happen to be horror films.

Duel (For our Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1971

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Dennis Weaver, Jacqueline Scott, Eddie Firestone

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A businessman on a road trip is pursued by a mysterious tanker truck that wants to kill him.

If there’s anybody who should be retroactively expected to deliver a killer first film, it’s blockbuster titan Steven Spielberg. But, unfortunately, he was shackled with a TV movie budget and an impossibly short time frame, so the result is… spectacular. Yeah, Spielberg delivers big on Duel, a debut so preternaturally good that it would take a couple of years before he it that level again (with f**king Jaws. This guy doesn’t mess around.)

Duel, based on a short story by horror master Richard Matheson, does fall into some of the pitfalls of 70’s filmmaking and especially TV moviemaking, like a certain languid pace in its few offroad scenes and a kind of despicable voiceover that rudely intrudes on too few occasions to not be vexing every time. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Duel is maybe the most perfect adaptation of a short story ever filmed.

I’m not saying it’s the best movie based on a short story (Candyman, Brokeback Mountain, The Birds, and From Beyond are certainly in the competition). Though it’s probably still in the Top 10, what I’m saying is that, as a direct conversion from page to screen, Duel best captures the spirit of reading a short story. The characters and plot are simple, driven by a single instinct: survival. The story isn’t beefed up with elaborate backstories or random diversions; it’s just a taut, pared-down thriller that crackles at the base of your spine.

As the kind of faceless evil that would frequently haunt screens in the 70’s and 80’s, the truck is superb. Cutting a jagged shape across the dusty horizon of the American highway, it belches smoke and grins with jagged, license plate teeth (an excellently subtle bit of production design – suggesting the truck has kept trophies from its previous victims). And there’s a reason I say “truck” and not “man.” The faceless driver might as well not exist. He’s a tool bent to the will of Pure Evil, something that is never explained or revealed, merely understood as a force of crushing death.

Spielberg captures this chase in a pounding staccato rhythm with his endless coverage flashing between mirrors, dials, gauges, and the road to keep the tension buzzing. Star Dennis Weaver also contributes tremendously, hamming just enough that we believe in the heightened reality of his character. It’s a terrible challenge as an actor to deliver a legible performance with nobody to play off of, especially when they’re mostly confined to a single location, but he pulls it off with aplomb.

Duel is an auspicious beginning for an auspicious director, and it’s a miracle that Spielberg managed to stay this hungry and passionate about his film projects as he did. Duel is a winner, no contest.

Rating: 8/10

Piranha II: The Spawning (For our Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1981

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Tricia O'Neil, Steve Marachuk, Lance Henriksen

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A scuba instructor and a policeman must save a seaside resort from a swam of genetically enhanced flying piranha.

If there’s anybody who should be retroactively expected to deliver a killer first film, it’s box office demigod James Cameron. But unfortunately he was saddled with a microscopic budget and a troubled production, so the results are… pretty deplorable.

To be fair, James Cameron was kicked off Piranha II: The Spawning after about a week or so and silentyl replaced by Italian schlock-meister Ovidio G. Assonitis (maybe he wasn’t credited because he didn’t want people to make fun of his last name). So we can’t blame him for everything we’re seeing, but there’s no denying he had his hands on parts of this film, and 100 percent of it sucks, so statistically speaking, he probably didn’t do a great job in his first go-round. But he followed this up with The Terminator, so I don’t care if his debut was Ass Munchers from Planet X, it was worth it.

And Piranha II: The Spawning isn’t, like, the worst thing that has ever happened. It’s a dunderheaded B-movie with a truly bananas monster (flying piranhas that can survive on land and burst out of people’s rotting corpses, but mostly just look like puppets tossed by some P.A. from offscreen), which is right up my alley, even if it doesn’t capture the sublime campiness and rip-roaring pace that marks the best of them.

In the first and third acts, there are a handful of scenes and character that belong in the bad Movie Hall of Fame (a sunbathing cougar and two topless female pirates are particular standouts), but the movie utterly fails to make anything of them. Most of the characters we meet in Act One don’t even die! We’re left with a second act slog tough plodding military intrigue before things pick up again with a fatal grunion run and the film’s single best scene: Lance Henriksen, who has been searching for his stranded son’s boat via helicopter, finds him and leaps out of the aircraft, letting it hit the water and explode behind him. You know, Coast Guard standard operating procedure.

But too much of the film is too dull to recommend watching it as anything other than as series of two minute YouTube clips. Piranha II’s complete lack of atmosphere smothers it in its sleep. It’s very Italian: A Jaws rip-off that tries vigorously hard not to be exciting except for its random leaps into absurdity. Endless stock footage, repeating effects shots, and buckets of dire conversation weight this unworthy sequel down and it quickly drowns.

A truly dazzling concept does not a good movie make, or even a bad-good movie make. I wish Piranha II did more to earn its best moments, but alas. This fish is fried.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1051