Census Bloodbath: Funky Tut

Year:
1982
Director:
Tom Kennedy
Cast:
Ben Murphy, Nina Axelrod, Kevin Brophy
Run Time:
1 hour 23 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

Plot: Time Walker is set at the California Institute of the Sciences, where Prof. Douglas McCadden's (Ben Murphy) class is studying a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus that he recently stole from the tomb of King Tut. Rambunctious X-Ray tech Peter Sharpe (Kevin Brophy of The Seduction and Hell Night) discovers a hidden cache of crystals that he sells off to various classmates. When the mummy, Ankh-Venharis (Jack Olson), inevitably starts wandering around campus, it seeks out the jewels, often killing their possessors either via brute strength or the mysterious flesh-eating fungus that covers it.

Even though this is mostly a sci-fi B-picture (to the point that it was even riffed on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000), it is also a college slasher movie (or at least enough of one that I opted to review it, despite waffling for the majority of its run time). So we must Meet the Meat, to some degree. This mostly involves couples, as the thrust of Sharpe's scam is getting his male classmates to make ugly jewelry out of the crystals and give it to their girlfriends.

So here we have Michael (Gary Dubin of Jaws 2), the teacher's pet whose pastimes include touching the flesh-eating mummy mold as many times as possible; Sherri (Greta Blackburn of Party Line), Sharpe's giggly girlfriend who only gets a little mad when she catches him peeping on her roommate in the shower; Jack Parker (Robert Random), the chief engineer who looks like a drifter and is dating student Jennie (Melissa Prophet of Fatal Games); Susie (Nina Axelrod of Motel Hell), who didn't want to be left out of the eventual misconduct lawsuit and is thus dating Prof. McCadden; Dr. Wendell J. Rossmore (James Karen of Poltergeist and The Return of the Living Dead), the university president who wants to Jaws mayor his way out of any scandal involving the missing mummy; Greg (Gerard Prendergast) who is blond and dating babysitter Ellen (Greta Stapf); and Stanley (slasher legend Warrington Gillette, who played the unmasked Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part 2), who has the hots for Susie.

If you've never seen a more robust lineup of dimensional characters, I recommend watching a second movie.

Analysis: Time Walker is ultimately a huge waste of its titular resource. It's a cheap, aggravatingly slow movie that looks awful, boasts mediocre acting, and couldn't scare the pants off a nudist colony. And yet...

OK, let me address those complaints line by line. 

It's true that I have very few good things to say about the aesthetic. Time Walker has exactly one good shot, and the version of it that's replicated on the poster is leagues better than what we get onscreen. 

While the acting is underwhelming (and Axelrod is actively awful; her monotonous, sleepy performance sucks so hard that I won't need to vacuum in here until Christmas), the movie's ostentatious credit "Introducing Shari Belafonte-Harper as Linda Flores" actually earns every letter of that overlong fanfare. The actress now known as just Shari Belafonte is the daughter of Harry Belafonte and she proves why we shouldn't dismiss all nepo babies wholecloth. She has buckets and buckets of charisma that are wasted in her tertiary role as a journalist at the college radio station. It was a delight getting to watch her breeze her way through scenes that don't ever, not even once, need her to be there.

As for the movie not being scary... Well, that's true, too. We mostly follow the mummy listlessly milling around the college's nuclear reactor (don't ask) or gliding slowly towards its victims. It's less "predator sinuously approaching its prey" and more "mannequin on roller blades that a PA pushed from offscreen." It's so boring that they throw in a nightmare fakeout to spice things up... twenty minutes before the end of the movie. 

Time Walker is also pretty useless as a slasher, parsimoniously doling out its bloodless, infrequent kills after looooong intervals. The only useful moment of gore comes when Michael gets to show off the gloriously gnarly prosthetic the team has cooked up in the scene where his hand is partially eaten by the fungus.

All that said, the movie makes up for at least some of its flaws by being so charmingly weird. I'm gonna throw a big ol' SPOILER ALERT over the rest of this review, because in addition to the mummy and the fungus and the nuclear reactor of it all, it turns out that this is an alien movie. 

Yes, the mummy is actually an alien who was buried alive in King Tut's tomb after his fungal infection spread to King Tut and his courtiers, killing them (never mind that the actual Tutankhamun most likely died of a malarial infection or complications from a bone fracture). Once this reveal drops, the movie basically turns into a more deadly version of E.T., just six months after the Spielberg classic debuted.

It's still not a particularly good E.T. ripoff, but at least it's trying something. I much prefer that to the bland slasher porridge of a movie like Sledgehammer.

Killer: Ankh-Venharis (Jack Olson)

Final Girl: Susie Fuller (Nina Axelrod)

Best Kill: Honestly none of them, but I made up the rules so I should follow them. Therefore I pick Ellen, who is punched by a weird tentacle that surely must be the mummy's arm, though she doesn't die until the fungus gets her a day or so later.

Sign of the Times: Parker checks on the nuclear reactor using a computer that loads graphics one line at a time.

Scariest Moment: Susie tries to escape the mummy in an elevator, which breaks down, at which point the mummy starts to pound its way from beneath the floor.

Weirdest Moment: The mummy reveals its true form, which is honestly kinda cute.

Champion Dialogue: “Here's why I'm so concerned. The structure is just crazy."

Body Count: 3; a paltry number even if we were including Dr. Rossmore's right-hand man, who presumably dies shortly after the credits roll, having been infected with the alien fungus.

1. Janitor (Hugo L. Stanger of Psycho III) is killed offscreen.
2. Ellen is mummy-punched and later dies of flesh-eating fungus.
3. Bill is backhanded into a wall.

TL;DR: Time Walker is a threadbare, tedious movie, but it at least has the decency to be incredibly goddamn weird.

Rating: 4/10

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