Census Bloodbath: The (Last) Days Of Our Lives

Year: 1982

Director: William Wiard

Cast: Suzanne Pleshette, Barry Newman, Robert Vaughn

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

There are certain mini-trends I've noticed in my Census Bloodbath project, and as we dive deeper into our reflection on the slasher movies of 1982, we've encountered two of them. Last time, the sub-subgenre we unearthed was a personal favorite: a one-off entry from a foreign country trying to cash in on the boom. This time, it's an even more delicious discovery: one more fruit from the tree of the made-for-TV slasher. This entry in particular is Fantasies, AKA The Studio Murders, made for ABC in the early 80's to cash in on the craze that seemed like it would never die.

Unlike the characters that populated it.

Fantasies tells the story of Carla Webber (Suzanne Pleshette of The Birds and The Bob Newhart Show), the creator of a massively popular nighttime soap opera called Middleton, U.S.A. She receives a professional challenge in the form of a deranged madman murdering the actors on her show one by one, but she faces it with headstrong courage. She also must navigate a new potential love affair with Detective Flynn (Barry Newman), who's investigating the mruders, her teenage daughter Sandy (Lenora May) becoming independent and starting to date, and her ex-husband John (Patrick O'Neal) suddenly showing up to cause drama.

Also all that chalk dust is hell on the lungs. Somebody needs to invent laptops, stat!

Whenever I'm digging these trenches through the backwaters of the 80's and unearth a movie made for television, I get a teensy bit nervous. The TV restrictions on gore and sexual content, especially in  the 80's, would seem to strip slashers of every possible reason they have to exist. But maybe that existential challenge is exactly what filmmakers need to craft something unique, because between this one and the previous year's Dark Night of the Scarecrow, they've turned out to be pretty excellent so far.

Or rather, they excel at certain strengths that most slashers lack. As a horror-slasher film, Fantasies is a pretty abysmal failure. Not only are the killings bloodless, offscreen, or in silhouette, they barely scrape up enough screentime and consequence to be considered a B-plot. Because of the amount of time we spend with Carla, we don't get a lot of one-on-one moments with the victims themselves so it's hard to care what happens to them. And even though Carla is our anchor, we often don't even get her reaction to the killings, but rather cut to a point down the road where she's already learned of the death and processed it. There's no sense of mounting dread or progression to the murders: at one point we learn there's been a lull in the killings after the show was put on hiatus, but we literally haven't learned yet that either of these things have happened.

It's a good thing then that Fantasies has no aspirations to be a true blue slasher. Instead it works very hard at being a Lifetime-y "women's picture" thriller, a course of action which plays to its strengths extremely well. Its depiction of a woman in charge of a TV writer's room is decades ahead of its time, and it's fascinating to observe Carla's decisions behind every narrative beat and how it will affect the audience's perceptions of sexuality, gender, and morality. It's a story that really drills down into the ways that television informs the culture, for better or for worse, in a way that's specifically and thrillingly female-forward.

Fantasies has an iron grip on what makes Carla tick, and her every emotional beat is electric (the scene where her ex-husband laments that she wasn't destroyed but rather reborn when he left her is powerful), and it's all thanks to Suzanne Pleshette. She has bucketfuls of charisma, whether she's leading a saucy Q&A on a college campus, bonding with her impossibly lovely daughter, or lamenting the potential loss of the show that she is so proud of. Pleshette portrays a certain down-to-earth optimism with conviction, and it's impossible not to be drawn into her storyline. The horror she plays a little less well (as does the movie), but she's a magnetic lead character that redeems all of this film's quite severe flaws.

Here's more of her at a chalkboard, because apparently this movie didn't make enough of an impression on the zeitgeist for Google to give me a lot of options.

Carla stands head to head with most of my favorite adult final girls, including Lauren Bacall from The Fan and Lauren Tewes from Eyes of a Stranger. Interestingly, all three of them play public figures. Maybe that just does something for me. Anyway, she and her drama are fascinating enough to watch that you almost forget you're watching a slasher film. And it's a good thing too, because as bad as the horror elements are in progress, the way the end is almost worse.

After the disposal of a red herring using a clue that's deeply hilarious ("He couldn't have strangled her because there's literally no tendons in his left hand so he can't close it!"), we get a showdown in the surf on a moonlit beach that would be cool if there were any lights on it. It's a dark, fumbling, foamy pit of nonsense and it's not the best choice with which to end a movie that up until now hasn't really given a shit about its own tension. Plus, as much as this film is about female empowerment, the filmmakers were very skittish about having their lead character commit violence, so she's not real active about defending herself. I won't even mention the final gag that is not only cliché but actively undermines the entire 85 minutes that came before it. 

As it shakes out, Fantasies is at least still a fun time. But only if you approach it as something more Steel Magnolias than Friday the 13th.

Killer: [Arthur (Ben Marley)]

Final Girl: Carla Webber (Suzanne Pleshette)

Best Kill: There's not a lot of excitement going around in this section, but before Quentin Mallory is killed, he is thrown through a glass table which is kinda fun.

Sign of the Times: There is so much business about having to hand out different telephone numbers for every distinct place the characters are going to be at any given time.

Scariest Moment: I know the movie wants me to think it's the POV shots where the killer stalks Carla while whistling "Pop Goes the Weasel," but it's actually the scene where a woman approaches an actress in the grocery store and begins to talk to her like she's her character from Middleton.

Weirdest Moment: The killer breaks into Carla's house to strangle her, which she reacts to afterward like she just saw a mouse and is vaguely grossed out.

Champion Dialogue: "Those cozy little meals evoke too many memories, all of them unpleasant."

Body Count: 4; not including the husband of one of the victims, who is presumably killed alongside her but we don't see or hear about it.

1. Quentin Mallory is beaten to death with a baseball bat.
2. Larry Malden is pushed through a window.
3. April is stabbed to death.
4. Roy Hanson is shot.

TL;DR: Fantasies is not a solid slasher movie, but a rather fun Lifetime-esque movie instead.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1225

A Flock of Seagulls

Year: 1963

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Suzanne Pleshette

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The second part of my horror class' Hitchcock Halloween Double Feature was his highly divisive second horror feature The Birds. In my experience, The Birds is a pea soup horror movie - you either love it or you hate it. There's no in between. As evidenced by my inclusion of the film in my Five Scariest Movies article, I am firmly in the "love it" camp.

For most pre-1970's horror movies, viewers are advised to view them from the perspective of the audiences of the time. "If you think about what movie effects were like in the 30's, you'd be totally terrified of Frankenstein/Psycho/The Creature From the Black Lagoon too, man!" Well that's all fine and dandy, but sometimes I don't want to watch horror as an academic. I came to be scared, not to imagine somebody else being scared.

The Birds is one of the few films between cinema's inception and, let's say Night of the Living Dead in 1968 that still holds up tremendously under the scrutiny of the jaded eye of the modern horror fan. Some of the effects do show their age, but this film is a showcase of some of the best composite cinematography available at the time. It's not modern perhaps, but it's still great workmanship and consistently exciting.

No, those birds weren't there. No, I don't care. I'd still run.

The trick of The Birds lies in its plotting. Melanie Daniels (beautiful newcomer Tippi Hedren) is a young and mischievous San Francisco socialite who meets handsome swain Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) by chance in a bird shop. She pretends to be an employee for sh*ts and gigs, but her ability to aid him in procuring a pair of lovebirds for his kid sister is impeded by her utter lack of knowledge about bird species.

The two quarrel good humoredly and Mitch leaves empty handed. Because her schedule was free that weekend, Melanie decided to purchase a set of birds and deliver them personally to the man with a note admonishing his rudeness. When she discovers he's on vacation she follows him up the coast to the beautiful town of Bodega Bay. Through a series of misunderstandings and good-natured lies, her prank goes too far as she ends up chartering a rowboat, traveling across the bay, and sneaking into his mother's house to deliver the birdcage.

Basically, for the first half hour or so, The Birds is a zany romantic comedy until... a lone seagull swoops down from the sky and claws Melanie's forehead. What follows is a series of increasingly vicious attacks by different flocks of birds that continues throughout the movie. The delightful and charming opening of the film was but a sham to suck you in, get you involved with the characters, and then run them through a conveyor belt of never-ending terror.

But thanks to the amount of time we get to spend with the actual people in the plot as opposed to just the horrors, the film is also successful as a character study of the interactions of a broken family [Mitch is supporting his widowed mother (Jessica Tandy) and his little sister (Veronica Cartwright) on his own] and a woman who's trying to find her way in life.

So we have this opening act of stellar old-fashioned romantic comedy followed terrifying bird attacks combined with a hearty family drama. And the biggest surprise? The gore effects are good too! Evidently the deterioration of film censorship came a long way in the wake of Psycho leading to grisly scenes like the neighbor with his eyes pecked out.

Lazy bum didn't even change out of his pajamas.

The success of The Birds with its abrupt tonal shifts and delicate juggling act of themes lies entirely on the backs of three people: Alfred Hitchcock (obviously), sound designer Bernard Hermann, and Tippi Hedren.

Alfred Hitchcock's talent at manufacturing suspense is a given, of course, but it is commendable that after having so thoroughly proven himself with previous films, he still sought out ways to make his next movie even bigger and better. The lengthy attack scenes in The Birds are like Hitchcock wrapping his hands around your neck, pausing for a minute, and then slowly squeezing until you're gasping for air.

One sequence in particular in which a murder of crows attacks a schoolhouse is terrifying, not necessarily because of the fact that murderous (ha) birds are attacking young children, but rather because of the fact that we see them slowly gathering behind Tippi Hedren as she obliviously smokes a cigarette.

We know what's going to happen. And there's nothing we can do to stop it. The pressure builds and builds until it finally explodes into a cacophony of squawks, beaks, and wings. The slow boil approach that Hitchcock uses here more or less erases the inherent silliness of the film's premise, allowing us time to ponder just how many uses a sharp bird's beak might be put to. Or just how many birds there are in the world. Or the fact that random acts of nature similar to (but perhaps slightly less preposterous than) this happen all the time.

This slow easing into the more absurd elements is handled so masterfully that even when the birds blow up a gas station, it is still closer to Psycho than Birdemic.

Believe you me, you see this and you're not gonna be thinking "This is a ridiculous plot point." You'll be sprinting away as fast as you can.

But enough about Hitchcock. Everybody know's he's great. Bernard Hermann, sound designer and composer of the score for Psycho, plays an equally important role in the overall impact of the film. He was originally hired to write a score, but he thought it would be best to keep the film absolutely devoid of music (save for a hauntingly creepy moment set during the children's choir class).

Instead the audience's ears are buffeted with a hurricane of squawks and flaps that underly and occasionally overtake the action in most every scene. This attack on the eardrums is unsettling in the highest degree and keeps one firmly planted in the universe of the movie no matter how much they might want to get away.

And you do want to get away.

Which brings us to Tippi Hedren. The star of the show. Sure, Hermann and Hitchcock did the grunt work, providing a magnificent framework for this woman to thrive, but without her star turn as Melanie, the film would have been rudderless and careening wildly.

Melanie Daniels is a human Barbie doll. She's gorgeous and fabulous. She's rich, playful, and irresponsible. She grew up toying without people, paying no mind to the consequences. But after a media snafu in Rome (and through the cavalcade of bird attacks), she has become unmoored, searching for her place on the shelf of life.

Melanie is a wounded woman. She was once free as a bird (geddit) but she needs to find a place to land on her feet.

She supports charities. She's putting a poor Third World child through school. But to what ends should she dedicate her characteristic passion? With an uncaring father and an absentee mother, she has never known the unconditional love of another person, which during the course of her adventure she finds not in Mitch but in his initially untrusting mother.

Melanie's complicated personality layers and deep hurt are handled with great care by Ms. Hedren who puts in one of the single best performances in a horror film that I've ever seen. Equal parts blasé, fabulous, vulnerable, and tenacious, this woman is a masterpiece of character, both in writing and performance. Without her, The Birds is nothing.

Such fabulous. Much appreciate.

It's true that The Birds is much less monumental and groundbreaking than Psycho, but in my opinion, it is the better movie in terms of tension, thrills, and character development.

I have opinions, so sue me.

One last thing before I go (I'm about to lay down some Film Theory 101 on y'all so the uninterested can feel free to skip to the end): The nature of the bird attacks is a mystery. Is it because we're polluting the Earth? Is it because Melanie is a classless ho (as some of my classmates seem to think - they are not very nice people)? Is it because of the two lovebirds who remain in their cage in the Brenner house?

Who know?

That's the nature of nature - to be unfathomable and illogical. Things happen. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad. Some of them will peck out your eyes. And that is infinitely more terrifying than some half-baked environmental treatise.

I would like to think that my theory is supported in the scene where Melanie is trapped in a phone booth outside the diner. Around her she sees representations of fire (the gas station explosion), water (a stray fire hose is mucking up the works), air (the birds, naturally), and earth (an overturned cart of cabbages). These four natural elements present in the same scene imply that the bird attacks are merely a force of nature - elemental and inescapable.

And that's why I'm afraid.

TL;DR: The Birds is Hitchcock's best horror film, hands down.
Rating: 9/10
Word Count: 1573