Da Doo Meow Meow

Okay yes, I know that technically today should be Chilling Classics Cthursday but Your Honor, circumstances compelled me to move in a different direction. Those circumstances, you see, began with a text message from a pal asking if I'd seen a little 1991 made for TV horror movie called Strays. I had not--in fact, I wasn't even aware of its existence, lawd have mercy--but I was immediately sold on it and wantonly cast aside the movie I was about to watch, which was indeed a Chilling Classic. 

The fact that I was not all that enthusiastic about said Chilling Classic mattered little, such was the powers of the premise, poster, and (p)credits of Strays:

The premise: Feral cats want to fuck shit up! And hello, as I mentioned, it's made for TV. 

Then, there is the cast: Kathleen Quinlan (she's always terrif!), Timothy Busfield (my mom loved him on Trapper John, MD!), and Claudia Christian (she voices a shitton of characters in Skyrim!)

Then, there is the fact that it was written by 70s teen heartthrob pop star/Hardy Boy Shaun Cassidy. I know he's created and/or produced more television series than you could shake a feathered hairdo at, but still!

And finally the poster, which I guess is supposed to be terrifying but if a cat coming at me like that was the last thing I ever saw, I would die so happy.

To that tagline, I say: I sure hope so!

So you see, Your Honor, how could a Chilling Classic stand a chance against this sure-to-be titan of television cinema? I rest my case.

If I were the family in a made for TV horror film, I would definitely not move from the city to country in order to "get away from it all." This is the impetus in many of these movies and it never works out well for the family. After reiterating their hopes (and one spouse's doubts), they spend a day moving and settling in. Then it's a couple of weeks later, and stuff starts happening. Before you know it, the newly-transplanted family runs afoul of witches/Satanists/fertility cults/ghosts/robots/possessed floor lamps/bad children/whatever flavor of evil happens to permeate the bucolic locale. Then, a random handyperson/worker shows up and gets killed by the evil; This is either chalked up to an accident or the death isn't discovered until much later. Later, a tertiary character will be killed by the evil; This is a member of the extended family or a dear friend. Stuff comes to a head, the family makes it out alive. But they must abandon the property, and would likely be financially ruined for years to come. Yay!

It is practically a blueprint for these pictures and I love it. So I was not at all mad when Kathleen Quinlan, Timothy Busfield, and their little kid went chugging down a dirt road in their station wagon. Wife: Excited for the move, ready to get away from that big city living! Husband: Dubious!

Side note, the child was one of those rare child actors who was clearly not actually a child actor. I don't mean this in an Esther kind of way, but rather the kid was barely understandable and just kind of blurbed out her "lines." So it would be like:

Child: Brbbashmleh

Kathleen Quinlan: That's right, honey! It's a blue car.

The house looks so nice and the realtor, Kathleen Quinlan's sister Claudia Christian (I didn't learn any names okay!!) gives them a good deal because the previous owner died. Timothy Busfield is acting as her divorce attorney, so clearly this family likes to keep it (business) in the family.

What none of them seem to know, however, is that the previous owner died 1) by cat attack and 2) wearing a terrible wig. WE SHOULD ALL BE SO LUCKY.

So these things go as these things go. The people we expect to die, die. The people we know will live, live. As always, though, no matter how predictable it may be, it's about the journey--and Strays is a predictable journey! Filled with angry cats.

There is a lot of (absolutely delightful) nonsense involving water and trying to stop the cats with pillows. I don't want to spoil all this absolutely delightful nonsense because it's dumb fun to watch and if you want to watch it for yourself, it's all on the YouTube.

I would have been happy if this movie was ten hours long. It's literally just pissed off feral cats yelling and running and jumping and scratching, aka it was HEAVEN. Strays featured a lot of cat POV shots and also one of my favorite film conceits, which is actors flailing around holding a stuffed animal that's "attacking" them.

Side note, the leader of the cats really did look mean! And I will bet my life savings (almost $7) that the role was played by one (or more) of the cats who played Church in the original Pet Sematary, which released a couple of years earlier.

I wouldn't go near that cat but oh, how I'd want to.

What's that, Your Honor? I'm acquitted and being given the key to the city because of my decision to watch Strays instead of whatever it was that bubbled up from Mill Creek? I knew it! Brbbashmleh.

That's right, honey! If there's one thing we can always believe in, it's the fairness of the US justice system.

Chilling Classics Cthursday: THE DEMON (1981)

Whether it's because yes, I'm still in the grip of this grippe or whether it's because it is simply his nature, RNGesus did me a kindness this week by selecting The Demon, a South African slasher curio that stars 50-pack King Cameron Mitchell as a psychic ex-Marine. It is the pleasures of life such as this that will see me through this time of plague.

Dig a little and you'll see that The Demon has a plethora of dates attached to it: 1979, 1981, 1982, 1985...for simplicity's sake I'd call The Demon a relic from The Age of Macramé, but a few in situ pop culture cameos put its filming squarely in 1979: namely a marquee showing The Amityville Horror and disco dancers getting TF down to the Lipps Inc tune "Funkytown" (which, incidentally, still slaps). The rest is a matter of release dates and the such, and I leave those kinds of decisions up to the courts, thank you very much.

By the way, those disco dancers are getting TF down at a place called Boobs Disco and I don't know...things weren't perfect but surely society was a little better when your average white folk got TF down regularly, sublimating their troubles by stepping all over a light-up floor instead of all over the lives of everyone else? 

Anyway. A heavy-breathing, hulking maniac breaks into a suburban home, ties up the mother and puts a plastic bag over her head, then absconds with the teenage daughter. The mother survives, but when police have no leads on the daughter after two months, the parents do the only thing they can: they call for the services of retired Marine Colonel Bill Carson, psychic. 

Move over, Sylvia Browne

Carson humbly explains his ESP powers ("Sometimes I get feelings--vibes, as the kids would call them") and gets to work touching objects in the daughter's bedroom. He sketches a few of his related visions and the dad somehow decides they are a good enough lead to go searching for the maniac, whom Carson super helpfully describes as "less than a man, and more than a man."

Most movies would follow this main plotline that features their main star, but not The Demon! Writer/director Percival Rubens dedicates the bulk of the film to a B-plot concerning a teacher I christened 1979 Amy Poehler (Jennifer Holmes) and her cousin as they navigate their love lives while sort-of being stalked by our resident Less-n-More Than a Man. 

Yes indeed, The Demon likes to show off both its Black Christmas influences and its Halloween influences. I'm not really complaining.

Nor am I really complaining about that bulk of the film that many a viewer would likely call "boring." I'm not saying I'm not calling it that, necessarily, but I didn't hate it. In fact, I was rather curious to see how the two plotlines would converge.

Spoiler: they do not! The only thing linking them together is our resident Less-n-More Than a Man, who seems to choose his victims at random. Of course, the majority of his victims are women and his motivations seem to come down to "woman-hating." 

While this and the random excuses for nudity put The Demon squarely into the realm of typical slasher stuff, the film does manage to hide a few surprises up its billowy sleeves. Rubens wisely employs a restrained hand when it comes to showing our Less-n-More Than a Man, but unfortunately this is your standard Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection transfer; The glimpses we do get of the killer are often too dark to really enjoy. It's a shame because he sports some bitchin' gloves that are like Giallo Freddy Krueger specials and I wanted to see 'em in action.

I don't think The Demon rises even to the level of Great Value Slasher, but its surprises and left turns and last ten minutes push it to the level of Hey Maybe Slasher Aficionados Should Check It Out. That's something, right? I mean, a psychic Cameron Mitchell! Boobs Disco! Not even the mighty Halloween can boast that stuff.

Just what the doctor ordered

There has been something "going around" my li'l city and reader, I have caught it! It is some version of A Cold, but I have not been sick in years (nail polish emoji) and this Cold on Steroids is whipping my ass something good. I am vaccinated (and masked) to the high heavens (or the high hells, depending on which news channels you watch) and I know this does not make me impervious like John Travolta as the boy in the plastic bubble in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, but it does add insult to this injury. The same goes for my "treatment plan," which includes mainlining my late gramma's patented home remedy: onion sandwiches. (Great at driving away germs and paramours alike!) They ain't done shit except inflate my onion budget more than is reasonable!

(Edited to add: I tested negative on Friday but after noticing an actual fever I tried again a bit ago for funsies and sure enough, at long last I have finally been caught in Miss Covid's evil web. Fuck this shit! I'm so annoyed. Perhaps this--and only this, surely!--is the reason those onion sandwiches are failing in their duty.)

Last night, I sat upon my couch all wrapped up and a-wondering what to do with my time. I've been too tired to stay awake, too messed up to sleep; freezing cold and burning up simultaneously; trying to think with a head full of cotton wool and prone to bouts of vertigo. And then, in this time of trouble, Mother Tubi came to me, speaking words of wisdom:

Howzabout an early-aughties made-for-cable horror film that reunites LA Law alums Harry Hamlin and Susan Dey?

So I said sign me the eff UP and gave Disappearance (2002) a whirl and you know what? Mother Tubi never misses. 

I fully cop to the fact that all the onion fumes floating around my apartment may have influenced my already illness-addled brain, but I was so into this movie. Then again, it was written and directed by Walter Klenhard, who also wrote an directed another of my favorite made-for-TV thrillers (Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear starring Josie Bissett of television's Melrose Place) so chances are it literally is just that good.

Pater Harry Hamlin and step-mater Susan Dey are hauling the kids through the Nevada desert for a little family bonding time. They make a stop at a time-honored horror movie location: the dusty gas station with a vaguely menacing attendant, then have some lunch at another time-honored horror movie location: the dusty diner full of flies and sun-burnt weirdos. They are in search of a town called Weaver, a long-abandoned mining village that is no longer shown on maps. In an unexpected twist, the sun-burnt weirdos deny they've ever heard of this "Weaver," never mind that it used to exist.

But this doesn't stop our family, who fires up their brand-new Ford Excursion™ (this shit must have been sponsored by Ford, I swear, it feels like a commercial for the Excursion™ at times) and head down a long, dusty road deep into the desert--despite being warned to "stick to the roads, lads pavement." 

Why stick to the pavement when the Ford Excursion™ can handle any tough terrain

Sure enough, they eventually find Weaver, which indeed seems to be a tiny ghost town. They explore a bit, taking photos of musty, dusty buildings while noting that it's like all the people who live there...wait for it...disappeared. You know, food left on the tables, calendars from the 1940s, etc. They also find some footage that gives us a wee found footage moment of previous visitors to Weaver being pursued by someone...or something, dun dun dunnn.

Spooked, they go to leave but their Ford Excursion™ won't start. They stay the night in one of the buildings and I will admit: It was my turn to be spooked. In the middle of the night, Harry Hamlin grabs a flashlight and heads upstairs to investigate a noise down a dark hallway and it was a surprisingly effective sequence. I've said it time and time again, noises in the dark are all I really need for a horror movie to scare me and dagummit this worked. 

The next morning, the Ford Excursion™ is missing altogether. Was it stolen by a someone...or something? The group splits up, and Harry Hamlin and A Boy take off across the desert, hoping to find help back at the dusty diner. Things get a little weird from here with more and more added to the mystery. Susan Dey falls down into a mineshaft and is pursued by someone...or something: We get a lot of heavy breathing and POV shots, but we never see what exactly it is. A Boy disappears after cresting a sand dune. There's a rundown cemetery that looks like the one outside Goodsprings in Fallout: New Vegas but there are fresh graves. The dusty town clearly has a secret, so I just kept falling deeper and deeper under Disappearance's spell.

Ultimately there are a bunch of theories as to what is what. 

Is the mutated offspring of neutron bomb testing site victims living under Weaver like some kind of southwestern CHUDs? (Side note, in the pits of this grippe I can totally hear a commercial now, boasting that we should "Come try our brand-new southwestern CHUD sauce, only during 2-for-1 Fiesta Days at Applebee's!") 

Is it the ol' "haunted ancient Indian burial ground" gag? (That is literally what they call it, so don't @ me!)

Is it aliens?

In the end, I don't think it makes a lick of sense. But 1) Maybe my soft-n-silky smooth sickness brain simply couldn't parse what was going on, and 2) Whether it made any sense or not, I do not care.

Because I had a great time! The tropes at work, as well as a passing nod to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, mean it hits many a-beat you've heard before but you know what? That's okay In fact, that's more than okay when you are feeling like CHUD crud. Tropes? Susan Dey? Harry Hamlin? A Town with a Secret? That is pure comfort, a better balm than even onion sandwiches sorry, gramma) or the freedom and safety you feel while driving a Ford Excursion™. As always, Mother Tubi knows best.

Chilling Classics Cthursday: SLASHED DREAMS (1975)

Given its title and the fact that the DVD's cardboard sleeve boasts "Starring: Robert Englund," I was surprised that I'd never given Slashed Dreams a go. However, now that it's in my rearview mirror I see that skipping it was my past self doing me a kindness. Thanks, me!

I came down with a big case of the uh-ohs right away, with the title card looking like something added hastily in iMovie when production realized they'd forgotten to include an opening credits sequence.

Turns out, I wasn't so far off the mark. The film was released in '75 as Sunburst, but Englund's Elm Street fame and the rise of the home video market gave an enterprising distributor a bright idea circa 1985: Give it a quasi nightmare-slasher title and slap some salacious artwork on the VHS box. With this cover, one wonders how many horror fans nabbed it at the video store with, you know, expectations.

Would those same horror fans have rented it if the cover still bore the art from the film's original poster?

At least their expectations might have aligned with what they got: a holdover hippie flick about finding yourself, feeling feelings, and, uh, learning how to simply be mind over matter about things, even if one of those things is rape. Yes folks, we've got another Chilling Classics outlier (à la Death Rage and Medusa), a not-horror movie that's been dumped in yon Creek de Mill. 

Mind you, even if you were to watch Sunb--uh, Slashed Dreams knowing what it actually is, there's a good chance you'd still end up disappointed. It is a slog-and-a-half, padded beyond belief with full five-minute scenes of people walking, or driving, or sitting. It's not so much "poorly paced" as it is "not paced." Like, somehow it completely defies everything we know about time as it moves ever-forward. It's kind of admirable, in its own way.

We begin at A College, where Jenny receives a letter from her old friend Michael, who has ditched the trappings of The Man to go live in the woods as many a headstrong young fellow has done throughout the ages. Unlike those headstrong (and ultimately doomed) young fellows you read about in non-fiction, Michael seems to be thriving. After breaking up with her boorish, wealthy boyfriend Marshall, Jenny goes on a trip to find Michael along with Robert, another childhood friend who might turn out to be her One True Love. 

During their journey, they make a pit stop at a small town general store, where they find The Proprietor (that's his name in the credits!) performing for an audience of no one in his back room. He then sings them a song, which is because The Proprietor is portrayed by the legendary 1920s crooner Rudy Vallée, and if you're going to get a Rudy Vallée cameo in your film you'd might as well let him sing.

Jenny and Robert continue on their way and we get so many scenes of them hiking and walking. SO MANY. There is a brief brown bear encounter, and then more walking and hiking. All of these types of scenes are set to ENTIRE tunes...warbled...by Roberta Van Dere. These songs sound like something that didn't make the cut on any volume of the Time-Life Singers and Songwriters series, but you might find them on, say, a "Songwriters and Singers" compilation CD sold for $5.99 at a truck stop. You know, they're like the musical equivalent of the Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection. When they do feature a singer you know by name, the song is a z-side of the absolute shittiest quality imaginable. No I would never buy one or more of those CDs why do you ask!!!

The point is, these songs will make or--oh hell, they're just gonna break you.

Also I love that the picture quality is so bad, this screencap looks like an impressionist painting.

They arrive at Michael's cabin, but Michael is nowhere to be found. Also, calling it a "cabin" feels generous, as this place is literally made of sticks and it's got giant, gaping holes in the roof. It kind of makes Jason's lean-to in Friday the 13th Part 2 look positively luxurious. 

As Robert and Jenny are engaging in a little platonic skinny-dipping (they are truly an iconic will they-or-won't they couple!!!) when they're happened upon by two local Cletuses, Danker and Levon, played by Sunburst co-writers David Pritchard and James "not Stacy" Keach. (Fun fact: James "not Stacy" Keach was once married to Holly "not Judy" Collins!)

They're cartoonish and vaguely menacing in the way all post-Deliverance local Cletuses are, making threats to Robert and weird, leering threats to Jenny ("I'd like to dive for her sponge!"). Sure enough, they show up at the cabin later that night and slap around and rape Jenny. Then we get lengthy scenes of Jenny crying and traumatized while Robert goes outside to be sad that he couldn't/didn't do anything to help her.

Finally, Michael comes home to his cabin and hey, it's the actor everyone who rented Slashed Dreams was waiting for: Robert Englund!

He comforts Jenny by offering her some homemade herbal tea and drawing an analogy between her sexual assault and his poison oak: The best way for him to not go crazy because of the itching is to move beyond it and ignore it. Or hey, maybe this traumatic ordeal was just her fate and she can learn something from it! Errrr, he gets points for actually talking to her and trying to help, I suppose, which is more than we can say for Robert. But it's sure something to watch him dole out this "advice." It's even worse to see Jenny say "I feel so--" and get interrupted by Michael with "LET IT GO."

Robert then decides he's going to go after the Cletuses, and I bet all those video renters were expecting the "revenge" part that horror movies of this ilk deliver. Well, he finds the Cletuses arguing whether or not they should head back to the cabin, he gets in a tussle with Levon...Michael and Jenny show up (seems like a great idea for her to be there), the Cletuses run off, and Robert is like "Well, that was dumb." 

We get another song, another skinny dip (by all three pals this time), Jenny reading a bit of Khalil Gibran to perk herself up, and then she and Robert merrily walk off into the...you know, the sunburst.

Do I recommend Slashed Dreams? Fuck no! And yet...

And yet I find it to be a fascinating little curio. As I mentioned, it's some holdover hippie shit--I mean, the director's end credit is "Created by James Polakof" for fuck's sake--but it's decidedly a 1975 take on those remnant late-60s peace and love ideals, rendering them all about loving yourself. The self-help movement emerged into the mainstream and was a bonafide boom in the 70s, and if nothing else, Sunburst comes off as an earnest (if severely misguided) attempt at joining the conversation. 

In terms of actual cinema, it's difficult to parse what, exactly, the filmmakers (that is, the creators) were trying to do. By '75, Deliverance, Straw Dogs, and The Last House on the Left were all a couple of years old--was this feeble effort meant to be a self-help rebuttal to those? That the way to resolve these kinds of terrible events is not through violence and revenge, but through self-reflection? Is it simply a cash-in mash-up? Is it an outta left field bridge between those films and 1978's I Spit on Your Grave? 

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the way it predicts some tropes of the slasher boom that would arrive before long, but it does so in a sort of negative-image light. There's a scene in the small, sorta run-down country grocery store, but it's a wholesome place instead of a decrepit place you're wary of, à la The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. We get a Crazy Ralph-type doomsayer in The Proprietor, who warns Robert and Jenny to beware of "strange things" in the woods and advises them not to go...but he's also wholesome and nice, and he sings for them and offers them licorice candy. Early on, there's a classroom scene that predicts what themes the movie will touch on, reminiscent of the "FATE!" classroom scene in Halloween and others. Robert and Jenny are literally headed to a cabin in the woods--not to drink and screw (though they do consummate their relationship eventually!!!!) like proper horror youths, but rather to be closer to nature and "find themselves." There's even a tiny handful of first-person POV shots as the local Cletuses spy on our skinny-dipping heroes that would have been at home in Friday the 13th.

Again, it's impossible to decide whether or not any of the slight (and I do mean SLA-HIGHT) whiff of horror in this thing was even intentional beyond the awful plot device that leads to Jenny being immediately healed by the power of positive thinking. If nothing else, against all odds Slashed Dreams is the worst movie I'll be contemplating for some time to come.

Chilling Classics Cthursday: THE REVENGE OF DR. X (1967)

The last thing I expected to happen whilst watching the 1967 film The Revenge of Dr. X is that I'd quickly begin asking myself some of life's deepest, most philosophical questions. You know, stuff like "Would it be better to be dead than to have to watch this movie?" and that sort of thing.

Mind you, it didn't start that way. In fact, when I read the synopsis on the cardboard Chilling Classics sleeve, I was immediately looking forward to it as it sounded like it might be "fun."

A NASA scientist is ordered to take a vacation due to showing signs of stress whiule working on his latest missile project. Traveling to Japan, the scientist decides to indulge in his botany hobby and begins experimenting on a Venus Flytrap he brought along on the trip. Using radical techniques and falling into madness, the scientist eventually creates a plant creature that feeds on flesh and blood, which then sets off to find food in the form of the people of a nearby community.

See? "Fun," right? And technically, the description is totally accurate. But descriptions and descriptions realized can often be leagues apart, and in the case of The Revenge of Dr. X, there are leagues and leagues and leagues separating the two. I think I knew this the moment the title screen appeared, when I immediately had what was a decidedly sinking feeling:

On the bright side (???) of things, the opening credits are actually for another film entirely: a 1969 Philippine film called The Mad Doctor of Blood Island. None of the actors in the credits are in the movie that follows. In fact, the film I watched has such a convoluted shit-show of a history that it took a while to figure out exactly which film I watched. It's sometimes called Venus Flytrap, it's sometimes called Body of the Prey, sometimes The Devil's Garden. The release year might be 1967 or perhaps 1970. It's purported to be based on a lost Ed Wood story, and whether that's true or not the very idea that it might be ought to give you a clue about the nature of this thing.

Of course, none of that would matter a lick if this movie was enjoyable to watch and not a turgid plod. I could easily get over the lack of any revenge or any doctors X if it wasn't about 3 minutes of good stuff trapped within 94 minutes of dullness so dull that again, left me wondering if I'd be better off dead than trying to get through it.

The soundtrack, if such a term even applies, is library stock music trash. One moment it's Bach's Toccata and Fugue (you know, the classic Dracula's castle organ shit), then we get ten minutes of xylophone madness followed by some of the worst stereotypical "Japanese" music imaginable followed by a toddler day care marching band. It's all over the place, and the place is hell.

But the stock footage isn't restricted to your ear holes! There is plenty for your eyes to feast on, including NASA mission control and the same footage of a rocket blasting off that MTV started with and used forever. Hey man, don't get me wrong--stock footage can be cheeky fun! And this is, for about five seconds.

I was rather surprised to find that our leading man James Craig had a lengthy career and massive filmography (dating back to the 1930s) because as Dr. X Bragan he delivers one of the worst performances I can recall. He's boorish, shouting virtually every line and often facing away from the camera completely. The "madness" he supposedly descends into doesn't feel any different than his days in the office at NASA. Maybe I'm missing the point and it's a brilliant performance showing that stress is stress and it's all the same, no matter if you're talking about rockets in Florida or plants in Japan. Yeah, that must be it! At any rate, the most positive things I can say about him are 1) he kind of looks like the guy at the office you think looks like a Silly Putty Clark Gable, and 2) his voice sorta reminded me of Charles Napier, whom I love.

A fucking hour into this padded-as-no one's-business crap we get the world's saddest attempt at a Frankenstein lab scene,  complete with a "lightning" storm, an open roof, a body-hoisting, and the best thing about it, a couple of bzzt bzzt machines.

Bragan has been trying to prove that all human life originated with plants, and to do this he splices a Venus Flytrap with some deep sea plant that is only a deep sea plant so the movie can work in a scene with some topless ladydivers. Say what you will about Bragan's ideas/methods/everything, he does create a plant creature that we finally get to see after the hour mark comes and goes, taking all of our joy and hopes and dreams with it. The plant monster has giant Venus Flytraps for hands and feet, and it kind of waves its arms around sometimes and makes weird noises. 

This movie, whatever it's called, was distributed by Japan's Toei Company, so a dude standing there in a bad costume waving his arms around sometimes isn't completely unexpected. But even so, it's bottom of the bottomest-barrel stuff. I will say that the plant creature accounts for about two minutes and fifty seconds' worth of the three minutes of fun in this disaster. The other ten seconds belongs to one of the shots near the very end, which is a goat standing on what is supposed to be the edge of a volcano.

As you can tell from all the screencaps, especially the color of the sky in that last one, this movie lingers in the depths of public domain heck, which is how it ended up one of the worst offerings in the Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection. (Honestly, typing out her full name gives me more happiness than this film did.) I'd say it's theeeee worst offering in there, but hey, I've still got like 15 movies to go. Chin up, kids, this could very well just be the worst Chilling Classics Cthursday so far!

Chilling Classics Cthursday: SCREAM BLOODY MURDER (1973)

I hesitate to call the 1973 exploitation flick Scream Bloody Murder a gem, but surely it qualifies as at least gem-adjacent. After all, this is a movie in which a young boy runs over and kills his father with a piece of farm equipment, only to promptly fall and lose his hand after being run over by the very same farm equipment...all in the first minute of the movie, before the title pops up.

Okay, yeah, by the end of this post I might just be calling Scream Bloody Murder a straight-up gem.

The young boy in question, Matthew, is promptly sent to an institution run by strict-looking nuns of the Silent Night, Deadly Night variety (as opposed to the fun-having nuns of the Sister Act variety, or the hot nuns of the Whichever Annabelle Movie That Was That Had the Nun In It variety). They replace his missing hand with a hook and eventually send him back home. Everyone in the movie continues to call Matthew a "boy," and he certainly speaks like a boy, but actor Fred Holbert was 28 at the time and looks every year of it. So who's to say what's going on with Matthew? Maybe it's none of my business.

One thing you can say about Matthew with total certainty, however, is that he was and continues to be a stone-cold hater. He hates that while he was away in the institution, his mother met an married a nice man and they sometimes touch each other in their private no-no parts, so he promptly kills his new stepfather and then accidentally kills his mother...all in the first ten minutes of the movie.

Matthew goes on the lam and is picked up by some kind newlyweds. They all stop to frolic in a stream (as you do) and when the newlyweds hug...well, you might figure out where this is going. That's right, Matthew is not just any hater, he is a sex hater who has tasked himself with "saving" women from the gross advances of men, whether the women enjoy said advances or not. He kills the men and he's plagued by weird visions of his dead mother Daisy, so then he kills the women, too. A Hater and a Killer: The Matthew Story.

Matthew goes on the lam 2.0 and ends up in Venice, where he meets a cool artist-prostitute named Vera, and well, you might figure out where this is going.

Vera is super chill, meeting johns in her house to pay the bills so she can spend the rest of her time painting. Matthew immediately becomes attached, and Vera is okay with being friends with him, but she's not interested in being saved: "You stay a nice little boy and I'll stay Vera who throws it down for a couple of bucks." 

Again I say: "little boy"? Whatever you say, Scream Bloody Murder! 

Matthew isn't happy taking "I'm happy" for an answer, however. He's concocted a wild tale, that he's from a wealthy family and lives near a mansion nearby, where Vera--whom he now calls 'Daisy' after his mother--can live out her artistic dreams without having to do all that gross sex stuff. He murders one of her johns and then sets out to make his wild tale a reality.

There is nobody Matthew won't kill to make this happen: innocents, old women, dogs...anyone that stands in the way of this dream will end up dead. After he clears the house of its rightful owner, Matthew brings Vera over for a visit, one he demands will be permanent. Vera, of course, says no thank you, so as you might expect, Matthew kidnaps her.

She continues to be ungrateful, even when Matthew points out the lengths he goes to to make her happy: "See what I do for you? I get groceries and clothes and art stuff and kill people."

This is the point when Scream Bloody Murder peters out a bit. Vera's tied up, and we get all the standard someone's being held captive sequences: the foiled escape attempts, the missed phone call, the missed visiting neighbor, and so on. One of these sequences features a pre-Tall Man Angus Scrimm, but I'll have to take imdb's word on that one because I didn't recognize him at all. 

Then again, I also didn't recognize that the same actress plays Vera and Daisy! In my defense, the print for this film is terrible and at times, faces (and end credits) aren't much more than a smear.

It all picks up again during the climax, which finds Matthew on the lam 3.0, literally running from his demons. It's got a somewhat bonkers end that sorta predicts the end of the 1980 Maniac, though Scream Bloody Murder's finale features 100% more cackling and a score that can only be called "church organ madness." 

Like Maniac, Scream Bloody Murder is not as exploitative as you might anticipate. More often than not it's having fun with its premise, which is remarkable because in a parallel universe this movie about a man who murders sex-enjoyers and takes a sex worker captive could be an uncomfortable watch to say the least. Instead, it's got some truly humorous sequences (a montage of one of Matthew's crime sprees is a delight) and Vera is really the rad hero of the hour-and-a-half. 

Like I said from the very start, Scream Bloody Murder is a straight-up gem!

Chilling Classics Cthursday: LADY FRANKENSTEIN (1971)

Let me spoil this review by saying right up front that I really loved Lady Frankenstein and I'm glad I did...because I finally saw The Substance recently and it was so good--like, "the best thing I've seen since...maybe Suspiria?? and I'll be digesting it and thinking about it forever" good--that it would have been extra excruciating if I'd pulled something terrible from the Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection. Know what I mean? So I guess bless Lady Frankenstein extra hard for being such a delight. 

I was in it to win it pretty much from the jump, when the title card popped up. I mean, just look at her!

Those fonts told me everything I needed to know, and what I needed to know was that this movie was going to be a drive-in dream. And was it, ever! It's the off-Hammer monster movie I never knew I wanted or needed, but it immediately earned its place in the ongoing spooky season rotation here at Stately Final Girl Manor.

By the early 70s, the iconic Joseph Cotten was in the "I love to work, gimme work!" phase of his career, where he'd class up joints left and right, often alongside his storied contemporaries. He featured in Airport flicks, Italian Airport knock-off flicks, made for TV horror films (including The Devil's Daughter and The Screaming Woman, where he reunited with his Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte co-star (and perennial Final Girl fave) Olivia de Havilland)...you name it, Joseph Cotten would appear in it. Here he steps into the lab coat of one Baron Frankenstein--perhaps the most genial Baron Frankenstein you'll ever meet. He makes paying for corpses and experimenting with dead bodies seem like stuff you just do, a passion as normie as woodworking or latch hook rug-making. 

Soon his daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri, appearing here as "Sara Bey") returns home, having completed her medical studies. Yes, her medical studies. Tania was studying to be a surgeon, like her father, and her father is very proud of her for it and they're both like "fuck yeah, we're Frankensteins and we are both surgeons and it's hard being taken seriously as a woman, never mind as a woman in medicine, never mind as a woman lady Frankenstein in medicine."

When I tell you that I fell off of my couch when I got a whiff of the feminism in Lady Frankenstein! To not have to go looking for it, even...for it to be right there in the text because director Mel Welles deliberately wanted to have feminist themes at play...honestly. I was told that politics in horror was a new thing because woke...? And here I must hear Lady Frankenstein roar? You can keep it!

Keep it in my eyeballs and earholes, that is, Lady Frankenstein rules.

But hey, you can still enjoy this movie even if you hate women because it's just that much fun.

The Frankenstein family lab is full of all the sorts of lab equipment you'd expect, from the bzzt bzzt machine to the bubbling bottles to a...clock. 

Frankenstein's assistant Charles (Paul Muller) warns the Baron that the brain they're trying to reanimate is too damaged to be good--something about the hypothalamus and science-sounding jargon and look, I have never claimed to be a Lady Frankenstein, okay? I will take Charles's word for it. The Baron, however, is tired of waiting and forges ahead with his experiment. One lightning strike (and two flaming eyeballs) (it was so good) later, and you know how it goes: It's alive.

The Monster promptly kills Baron Frankenstein and fucks off into the night, where he clomp-clomps around the countryside and kills a bunch of people. 

Charles professes his love for Tania, and she's like...yeah, I love you too, but you're old and unattractive, and so what if your brain was in the hot young body of our simpleton groundskeeper Thomas? 

She makes a compelling argument and Charles agrees. But let's face it, Tania is a babe and so Charles probably would have agreed regardless. And so Tania fires up the bzzt bzzt machine, not only to see to her """womanly needs""" but also to launch her mad scientist pyramid scheme. After all, the best way to kill The Monster is to create a better Monster. 

I will leave it to you to see how things suss out, though yes, rest assured there is some Monster vs Monster action before the abrupt-as-hell-but-kinda-nuts ending. Lady Frankenstein is so much fun--more fun for me, honestly, than most of its Hammer ilk. It's taken me a while to admit that I love the Hammer aesthetic and the idea of many a Hammer flick more than I love actually watching them. So sue me! But this Italian drive-in cheapie has the atmosphere (the soundtrack in particular adds a great mood), the right amount of light-sleaze (besides all of her other crimes, Tania's only real crime was being horny!), and a better-than-it-should-be cast (including Mickey Hargitay as the dashing police captain) that hits all the right notes. If you've never seen it, the time is right. If you have seen it, the time is right to see it again. Bzzt bzzt!

Chilling Classics Cthursday: A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959)

If you're still wigged out over the black-n-white beatnik-n-bongos stylings of previous Chilling Classic The Bloody Brood, well you're about to blow your jets, daddy-o, because today we're heading back to the café and diving into A Bucket of Blood. 

There ain't much to this li'l black comedy, to be honest, what, with its scant 64-minute runtime. But hey, those 64 minutes come courtesy of Roger Corman in the director's seat and feature Dick Miller in the leading role--so what kind of John Joe Jim Jerk wouldn't want to check it out? I don't want to know!

Miller stars as Walter Paisley, a simple and affable busboy in a beatnik café. He soaks up every saxophone toot and line of poetry, parroting their beat ethos and trying his darndest to become an artist himself so's to earn a little respect and, hopefully, win the heart of pretty patron Carla (Barboura Morris). Unfortunately for Walter, his artistic abilities add up to precisely zilch.

But all is not lost! When he accidentally kills his landlady's cat, inspiration strikes and soon Paisley presents café patrons with his first successful sculpture, simply called "Dead Cat."

As you probably anticipated, it's a hit and there's more demand for Paisley's "genius." When a wacky heroin mixup with an undercover cop sees Walter lashing out in self-defense, he's got a new sculpture to unveil: "Murdered Man."

Side note, it always trips me up when heroin is mentioned in films from anytime before...oh, let's say 1992. Heroin just feels like a 90s invention to me, even if I know it ain't.

And on and on. Walter must go to more and more extremes to keep up the charade, even as he basks in his newfound elevation from busboy to king of the café. I wonder if he had the duds, a beret, and a cigarette holder already, anticipating the day he'd become a "real artist," or if he went and purchased them with his "Dead Cat" earnings. Either way, I delight in it.

Look, are you going to be "sick, sick, sick from LAUGHING" as the film's poster claims? Personally I was not, but even my dour ass found A Bucket of Blood smile-worthy. Anything that takes the piss out of snooty artist types (especially those who don't simply own their snootiness) is fine by moi, and Corman and Co have a good time doing it. The implied violence is actually a wee bit brutal, the cast is winsome, and the beatnik vibes are an undeniable gas. Miller--already a Corman mainstay by 1959--is terrific as Walter Paisley, a nebbish you can't help but root for even with his misplaced ideals and flashes of serious creepiness. 

Yet again, I got my kicks with a real cookin' Chilling Classic. Thinking about covering this one in clay and calling it "Fun Movie."

Chilling Classics Cthursday: THE COLD (1984)

Aw yeah baby, I've been waiting for this movie's number to come up: It's The Cold, another "$50,000 wonder" from Wisconsin's own Bill Rebane. You might remember him from an earlier Chilling Classique, the train station-space virus-quarantine flick The Alpha Incident. This won't be the last we see of his work on Chilling Classics Cthursday--he truly is the multi-pack maestro--but it's quite possibly my favorite.

My love of The Cold starts right at the start (go figure), when we are treated to the credit sequence, which features some jaunty bargain bin Scott Joplin tunes and static shots of printed cards on tableaus of various recognizable board games, including Clue, Monopoly, and the Mad Magazine Board Game, which you'd best believe I played the ever-loving shit out of when I was a wee bonny lass. 

The shadows of the center card and playing pieces are one thing, but it's the random shadow on the left that gets me. And the way the credit for the director is off-center. Remember the not-so-long-ago trend of having opening credits sequences (usually from Blur, usually for David Fincher films) be all fancy and made of computer and like five minutes long? That fad was all fine and well I suppose (though exhausting, really. I don't need five minute opening credits!), but the janky-ass verité of this Rebane production is where it's at.

Now if you are unfamiliar with this particular movie, you might be wondering what's up with the game boards. Again, this is a Rebane production so you wouldn't be out of line to think that those games boards have nothing to do with anything. But! This film is also known as The Game, which explains not only the credits but also the fact that it's all about a game called...The Game, which is pronounced THE GAME.

"Okay, so is there cold in The Cold at all?" you might ask. Yes, there is! We'll get to it. But first, THE GAME. 

THE GAME comes courtesy of three "millionaire eccentrics," George, Horace, and Maude, who grew tired of Cribbage ages ago and had to really up their personal entertainment stakes. You can tell Maude is rich, especially, because she uses a cigarette holder.

They make things exciting for themselves by inviting a bunch of random people to The Northernaire, a Wisconsin island resort, where they will be tasked with...enduring some...stuff...for a while? Survivors who don't leave the island will win a million dollars. On the surface this sounds like a most dangerous kinda game, and I suppose it is. But it's all vague and nonsensical, and even the participants are confused, like they don't even know why they're there. If only they knew that this was all simply ~*~REBANE MAGIC~*~ at work, amirite?

So. How does THE GAME play out exactly? First and foremost, there is a dance party. No, I am not lying. The millionaire eccentrics get down with all the participants, to a tune that is obviously not played by the band, who are also participants in THE GAME. This movie weaves a complex web, I tells ya.

Things begin proper and random shit happens...and I do mean random. There is a shark in a swimming pool. There is an Alien homage of a type that only Bill Rebane could deliver.

Participants disappear mysteriously, sometimes leaving behind clues: "That's Ronnie's bandanna! What's happened? He never goes anywhere without it!" Sometimes a tarantula will appear, sometimes there are rats, or maybe a snake. And yes, sometimes, there is...THE COLD, which rolls out of vents or doorways or wherever and is clearly dry ice. But the actors sell it, man, from their shivering to their delivery of dialogue such as "There was the smell of death in that room. And the cold. Like a December grave."

Meanwhile, the millionaire eccentrics are having the time of their lives engaging in their Spirit Halloween foolery, often dancing and skipping down hallways, singing hits like "Jimmy Crack Corn," or going "mwa ha ha" over the intercom. I love them.

This guy is also randomly wandering around. No one sees him, but someone knows he's there and tells us he used to be in a mental asylum, but now he's the gardener, but only when THE GAME isn't happening.

Exactly who is involved in THE GAME, who ends up dead, what is really happening? If you don't really know the answers to those questions at the end of this thing, that's okay. A voiceover bookends the film, and before the final credits roll, said voiceover is basically like..."Exactly who is involved in THE GAME, who ends up dead, what is really happening? Fuck if I know."

Even Bill Rebane himself calls this semi-scripted story a "brain fart." The Cold is the quintessential cheapie quickie: one location, 3-4 crew, actors straight outta Milwaukee central casting, and a shoot lasting maybe a week, all done simply so Rebane could make another movie and maybe get his friends some publicity for their Northernaire Resort.

And as far as I'm concerned, like all of the director's other films, it's a weirdo bonkers delight. It's got all the Rebane hallmarks: the occasional out-of-focus shot, the copious (terrible) foley work, the floozy-music nudie shots, the odd clothed T-n-A shots that are filmed in such close-up that it takes a moment to register exactly what body part you're looking at, and so on.

As I mentioned in my review of The Alpha Incident, and on Evolution of Horror, when Mike Muncer and I briefly discussed Rebane's Giant Spider Invasion (which actually makes a cameo in The Cold!), these films are a decidedly acquired taste. Their journeys and their destinations are inscrutable to be sure. But I'm also sure that it's a taste I've definitely acquired, so I'm telling you now: when it's time for the next Rebane-helmed Chilling Classique 'round these parts, I will be dancing and skipping down all the hallways. Jimmy Crack Corn and I do care!