Census Bloodbath: Cheese!

Year: 1983
Director: William Byron Hillman
Cast: Michael Callan, Joanna Pettet, James Stacy
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

I'm really trying not to open every slasher review by talking about the poster, because I don't want to rely on this as a crutch to dump out an easy intro. But Double Exposure not only has a fun poster, it uses the white color scheme that hasn't ever been common in horror except for the brief time that the Saw movies were in vogue. We'll just have to see if the movie runs as against the grain as the poster does!

So far so bad!

Double Exposure follows Adrian Wilde (Michael Callan, who probably wouldn't be pleased to learn that I recognized him from Leprechaun 3, although he was also in former Cardboard Science offering Mysterious Island, so I think he's the first person to appear in both my 80's slasher marathon and Hunter's 50's sci-fi flicks which is neat) a photographer for a men's magazine. He is dealing with the emotional ups and downs of his divorced stunt driver brother B.J. (James Stacy), who is missing an arm after a terrible accident. He has been having his own ups and downs, what with those terrifying dreams of murdering people, including cops, prostitutes, and even his own models. When these people keep winding up dead (typically murdered with what is either an awl or a very sharp douche), he begins to suspect he may be having a psychotic break.

This could not have come at a worse time, because he is in the middle of a passionate love affair with Mindy Jordache (Joanna Pettet), a senior home caretaker who he met in the elevator coming out of his shrink's office, followed into the parking lot, and wouldn't allow to leave until she agreed to go on a date with him. 

You know, a normal meet-cute! 

I suppose since we're already talking about it, let's call it out: Double Exposure is dripping in misogyny. It's not like the slasher genre's habit of having films where strippers and prostitutes are murdered is giving us a solid foundation to start from. But not only does every single female character take her top off with almost every one of them summarily being murdered afterward, every frame of the film is packed to the edges with toxic masculinity as well, just as an added bonus.

The treatment of the lead character as some kind of bizarre middle-aged lothario who women find irresistible actually made me pause the movie to look up if the writer-director also starred, because it seems like the kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy that a lot of these wannabe auteur filmmakers imbue within their movies. 

Let's put aside the scenes where Mindy gazes longingly at Adrian while he mansplains football to her, or the scenes of B.J. feeling up every woman who comes within four hectares of him, which ends up leading him to the love of his life. Just listen to this scenario: Adrian boxes Mindy's car in until she agrees to go on a date, which he then shows up late to, invites her to enter his motorhome, and takes her to a deserted parking lot to drink. Which she gleefully does, and leads her to falling head over heels with him. This is not a normal human woman, folks. 

Weirdly, Double Exposure has a gay character who is fully self-actualized, good at his job, doesn't have AIDS, and is neither murdered nor revealed to be the killer. So that's nice. Though of course he is on the receiving end of constant verbal abuse. 

80's gotta 80's.

All that aside (and it's a lot to put aside, I acknowledge), Double Exposure is actually pretty well made. There are a few honking technical missteps (like the fascinatingly ugly blur effect put on Adrian's entire first scene that makes everything look like it's taking place in the "Take On Me" music video, which I am desperately happy does not get used at any other point), but it's generally slick to look at and sometimes even pretty. OK, once: the discovering of a dumped body, which is elegantly arranged on a hillock like a centerfold model.

And the score is certainly interesting, more layered than the typical Halloween riff we get in movies like this. Between lush strings and bombastic brass speckled with peppy blasts from a tuba, we get a kind of anti-instrument that sounds like metal blocks crashing into each other. It's propulsive and exciting, and way better than any scene in the film deserves.

Although it's not like the kills here are lacking. There's not a lot of blood to speak of, but they're packed with surprisingly brutal detail (in particular the gurgling breath drawn from a slit throat is not something I'm likely to forget anytime soon), and sometimes provide a burst of wacky fun (the one where a lady has her head shoved into a garbage bag with a rattlesnake in it, which is more reminiscent of The Office than anything).

All in all, Double Exposure is far less than the sum of its parts, because each part has to be slathered in some of the worst gender politics of a genre that doesn't ever traffic in good ones. And also the scenes where we're really supposed to dig our teeth into Adrian's psyche are just scattered and confusing, over-edited into utter oblivion. But if you want a sleazy movie that sometimes tips into the most undeservedly saccharine romantic montages this side of Silent Rage, this one is not entirely a miss.

Killer: B.J. Wilde (James Stacy)
Final Girl: Mindy Jordache (Joanna Pettet), I guess
Best Kill: The opening kill, which has shades of Friday the 13th, with the awl piercing through the back of an undercover cop's neck.
Sign of the Times: The movie is literally named after a photography process involving film.
Scariest Moment: Literally any time the Wilde brothers interact with a woman.
Weirdest Moment: At the end of a scene that has very little to do with the bartender, a random lady shows up to demand an alimony check from him before it cuts away.
Champion Dialogue: "I find carrying equipment to be very sensual."
Body Count: 7

1. Charlie is stabbed through the back of the neck.
2. Model #1 is drowned with a pool skimmer.
3. Prostitute is strangled.
4. Model #2 has her face shoved into a trash bag with a rattlesnake in it.
5. Cowboy is stabbed in the armpit.
6. April has her throat slashed and is split down the middle.
7. BJ is stabbed in the neck.

TL;DR: Double Exposure is a fairly decent entry in a slasher subgenre I really want nothing to do with.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1127

Cardboard Science: Prisoners Of The Wind

It's October, which means it's time for our annual crossover event between Popcorn Culture's Census Bloodbath and Kinemalogue's Cardboard Science! My good internet friend Hunter Allen has assigned me three more 50's sci-fi flicks and you should head over there later this month to catch his thoughts on my three 80's slasher picks!

Year: 1961

Director: Cy Endfield

Cast: Michael Craig, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

Evidently, the constraints of Cardboard Science are less strict than Census Bloodbath (I'd love to thoroughly break down more slashers outside of the 80's, but 400 titles don't need to be added to), because this month we're briefly slipping out of the 50's to tackle a movie that, one year after Psycho, just doesn't really feel "genre" anymore: It's Mysterious Island (the lack of a "the" is continuously confounding to me), based on the Jules Verne story that also gave us 2012 Dwayne Johnson vehicle Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. 

Perhaps I'd have been better off watching that one. Who can say?

In Mysterious Island, which is set midway through the Civil War, four Union prisoners - dashing Capt. Cyrus Harding (Michael Craig), loyal Cpl. Neb Nugent (Dan Jackson), cowardly Herbert Brown (Michael Callan), and newly captured war correspondent Gideon Spilitt (Gary Merrill) - escape in a hot air balloon with kidnapped Confederate soldier Sgt. Pencroft (Percy Herbert). When a storm blows them off course, they crash land on a lonely island in the Pacific, where they must work together to survive.

Of course, eventually two shipwrecked women - Lady Mary Fairchild (Joan Greenwood) and her niece Elena (Beth Rogan) - wash up, and of course the male servant they had with them died in the process. I can't think of a worse place for two women to be in the 60's than stranded with a bunch of male soldiers, but they seem to make it work and the ladies both find themselves suitable partners in Spilitt and Brown respectively. Oh, and eventually they discover another denizen of the island, a mysterious Captain Nemo (Herbert Lom). This isn't a spoiler because the opening credits proudly announce his presence, a good fifty minutes before he shows his face onscreen.

Oh, and also there's some giant monsters prowling around the island.

More on that later.

So, the opening credits. (Yes, this review is gonna get really granular.) You know credits, right? The part where the names of the people who worked on the film slide across the screen? Well, this movie doesn't seem to have ever seen a credits sequence before, because instead of politely arranging the names atop a crashing ocean backdrop like any other 60's island movie might have, we get a relentless cacophony of color. The ocean background is filtered into oblivion in a half dozen Day-Glo colors, with the credits in alternating stripes of different, equally obnoxious hues. When green over purple is the easiest combination to read, you know there's a problem. It's a hideous display that actively reduces the amount of information the audience is able to receive, which one would think would be the opposite of any movie's intention.

Nothing in the film is worse than this (how could it be?), but I think the credits speak to a deep problem with the entire project. Not a single ounce of forethought was put into the way they could make this appear as a coherent whole. If Mysterious Island is a Lego set, it was assembled by a blindfolded child with no instructions. Random plot points jut out from the center while others are elliptically rushed by without a passing glance, to the point that the monstrous contributions by Ray Freaking Harryhausen feel even less than an afterthought.

It's really obvious when Mysterious Island remembers that there are giant monsters roaming about, because about once every 25 minutes they chuck one in, to the shock of all the characters who have also forgotten there are giant monsters in the middle of their island survival adventure. We spend 75% of the film watching them fashion sexy Gilligan's Island cosplay and spruce up a cave, but not prepare to deal with the horde of monstrous and violent creatures they periodically have to defend themselves from. It's implied that the women have lived there for months and none of the men have even mentioned fighting a giant crab at one point. Plus, the monsters are provided by Ray Harryhausen, and while they're not his best, they're certainly a delight. Which makes their sidelining even more infuriating. And then, later on, the movie has the gall to assume we will be afraid of pirates showing up when there are literally giant bees like eight yards from their house.

Side note: for a supposedly deserted island, it certainly gets a lot of tourist traffic.

Mysterious Island is very concerned with the process of survival, so we get a lot of hunting for food, fashioning huts and primitive weapons, and exploring the terrain. This would probably be interesting if it was an adventure movie from the 40's before we'd already seen 8 million similar narratives. This movie has elements that make it stand out from the generic Robinson Crusoe model, but the fact that it seems to actively want to ignore them means it relies on a lot of truly boring material instead.

But that said, I will not complain about a bunch of shirtless men being friends on an island. Before (and even after) the women show up, it's an alluringly homoerotic tale of men being stubbly and barrel chested, struggling for dominance via gravelly voice-offs and intense stares. I'm not sweating, you're sweating. Unfortunately, neither monsters nor men are enough to unsink this film from the choppy waters of insipidity. I didn't hate watching it, but I wouldn't be so bold as to recommend it to anyone else.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• Instead of just telling the group his plan to raise a sunken ship, Captain Nemo has a whole diorama fashioned with a fish tank, because there's nothing a Cardboard Science flick loves more than explaining its bullshit science in excruciating detail.
• Literature from this period was really drawn to hot air balloons, but that is no excuse to setting a full 20 minutes of this movie about an island on a balloon.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• Elena decides to marry Herbert, who is clearly the least interesting or useful of the soldiers, because he is the only one who is young and white, and that's how these things are supposed to go.

Sensawunda: 

• There's a part where the men discover the skeleton of a man who hung himself, which is the closest to horror this film ever gets.
• In a very serious moment, Captain Nemo activates a very silly-looking Wonka-esque water pump that flaps wildly behind his head. It's hilarious.
• Captain Nemo also plays the "Phantom of the Opera" theme on an organ in his submarine. You know what, he may actually be the best comic character of the 60's.

TL;DR: Mysterious Island is a waste of Harryhausen, instead choosing to focus on a bunch of boring men doing "cool" survivalist stuff.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1201
Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)