Death Warmed Up (1984)

DEATH WARMED UP (1984)
Article 4420 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-12-2014
Directed by David Blyth
Featuring Michael Hurst, Margaret Umbers, William Upjohn
Country: Australia / New Zealand
What it is: A bloody mess

A deranged scientist uses a drug to hypnotize the son of a rival, who is then sent to kill his parents. Seven years later, the son, released from a mental institution, seeks out the scientist to take revenge.

There’s a point in this movie where a bunch of ugly homicidal maniacs are released from a hospital to wreak havoc. I suspect their first act was to write the script for this movie. The above plot description seems fairly clear on the surface, but about a quarter of the way into the movie, the revenge-seeking son crosses swords with one of the scientist’s experimental subjects, and the latter swears revenge on the son. This subplot, rather than serving as a counterpoint to the main plot, ends up spiraling out of control, and the movie descends into a bloody, confusing mess. I’m not surprised that the movie ends on a nihilistic note. Now, I’m not a big fan of nihilism, but it can be an effective point of view if you’ve got the script to support it. However, when the script and story is as badly confused as this one is, that point of view comes off as convenience rather than as anything organic. Gorehounds will probably like this one best; for me, once the script went out of control, I got bored with the whole thing.

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The Uncanny (1977)

THE UNCANNY (1977)
Article 4419 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-11-2014
Directed by Denis Heroux
Featuring Peter Cushing, Ray Milland, Joan Greenwood
Country: Canada / UK
What it is: Horror anthology

A writer tries to convince a publisher that his collection of cat horror stories are all true and proof of the evil intent of the animals. In the first, an old woman wills her fortune to her cats, but two prospective heirs hatch a plan to get the money themselves. In the second, a young orphan girl whose only friend is her cat is terrorized by an older girl who is jealous of her cat. In the third, a horror star who has engineered the death of his cat-loving former wife finds himself a target for the revenge of the pet.

Given that cats have often been used as instruments of horror, I supposed I’m not really surprised that a movie anthology exists that consists entirely of horror stories involving cats; I am, however, a bit surprised that there are two of them, the latter being CAT’S EYE from 1985. The first story is probably the most effective; it’s also the most straightforward and the goriest. The second one is a bit off the theme; despite the fact that it mines scares from a cat in the same way that THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN does, the cat is certainly not the primary force of evil here. The third one features Donald Pleasence in a rare comic role as a somewhat foppish horror actor, and though he does a good job, the segment isn’t very funny and there’s some historical inaccuracy here as well; it takes place in Hollywood in 1936, and given that the Hays office was in place at that time, there’s no way the horror movie we see being shot would have approved, and a reference to Tweety Bird is at least a decade too early. Furthermore, there seem to be key scenes missing as well; we never learn how the cat escapes in the second story, for example. The framing story is fairly obvious, but at least it features the talents of Peter Cushing and Ray Milland to spice them up. All in all, it has the feel of a weak Amicus anthology, and though it’s not from Amicus, the presence of producer Milton Subotsky may explain why it feels that way.

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The Apple (1980)

THE APPLE (1980)
Article 4418 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-10-2014
Directed by Menahem Golan
Featuring Catherine Mary Stuart, George Gilmour, Grace Kennedy
Country: USA / West Germany
What it is: Bizarre rock musical

In 1994, a naive musical duo falls into the hands of a demonic agent and his corrupting power, and the two are separated from each other.

Over the years I’d heard about how bad this one was supposed to be, so I kept my expectations quite low going into it. Amazingly enough, I found myself rather enjoying it; sure, it was overdone and campy, but I found it entertainingly so, and I actually found the music to be fairly decent. I did, however, notice that the music wasn’t as nearly as futuristic as it was making itself out to be; basically, it’s just glam rock with some Las Vegas-style glitz added, a type of music that was already a bit dated by the time that this was made. It wasn’t until about halfway through the movie that I was startled by a revelation that coincided with my discovery that the future in which this was taking place was a dystopia in which the demonic agent seemed to be the primary political power; I suddenly realized that the movie was actually taking itself seriously. Once this happened, I began to see how obvious and how stupid the whole thing was. For one thing, if you’re going to make a movie about good vs evil, you’re probably not doing a wise thing by making your hero a tiresome bore. You also shouldn’t be having the forces of evil having ALL of the fun. The funny thing is that the movie seems blissfully unaware of its split personality and blind to its own hypocrisy. Maybe that’s why it never quite became the “ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW” of its day, which in some ways it resembles.

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Rats: Night of Terror (1984)

RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR (1984)
aka Rats – Notte di terrore
Article 4417 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-9-2014
Directed by Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso
Featuring Ottaviano Dell’Acqua, Geretta Geretta, Massimo Vanni
Country: Italy / France
What it is: Killer animals

After the apocalypse, a gang of land-dwelling humans is trapped and terrorized by killer rats.

So, is it a “nature gone wild” horror movie with an unusual setting? Or is it a ROAD WARRIOR variation with a totally different plot? Actually, I prefer to see it in a slightly different way – it’s a version of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD with rats instead of zombies and taking place in the future rather than the present, full of badly-dubbed laugh-inducing dialogue and lots of gross-out effects. This, combined with idiotic behavior on the part of the most of the characters, make it very hard to take the movie seriously, but at least it makes the jump to entertainingly awful rather than excruciatingly awful (except for the scenes where people go into screaming fits, which are annoying). As tempted as I am to dismiss it with a shake of my head, I have to admit that it’s demented movies like this one that help make this cinematic journey I’m taking so interesting.

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My Science Project (1985)

MY SCIENCE PROJECT (1985)
Article 4416 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-8-2014
Directed by Jonathan R. Betuel
Featuring John Stockwell, Danielle von Zerneck, Fisher Stevens
Country: USA
What it is: Offbeat science fiction comedy

In order to complete a school science project, a teenager discovers an artifact from an alien aircraft that was destroyed when it landed on earth in the fifties – an engine that can warp space and time.

I’m going to have say at the outset that I don’t think this movie really works; it’s one of those movies where I often don’t get a sense of how I’m supposed to feel about the events going on, and this is especially true in the big special effects-laden climax to the movie. Yet, despite this problem, I found myself rather liking the movie. Why? For one thing, it doesn’t seem like it’s trying to imitate or emulate any other movie I’ve seen, and I do admire that. There’s also an odd but fetching nonchalant quality to the whole affair; the movie has a casual, tossed-off feeling. I genuinely like the love affair between the car-loving teen and his bookish girlfriend; there’s something genuine there. And even the wise-cracking comic relief character manages to keep (just barely) on the right side of annoying, though he’s hardly as funny as the movie would like to make him out to be. Yes, the movie leaves me scratching my head a bit, but at least it was something of a pleasant itch. Incidentally, Dennis Hopper plays a sixties radical turned science teacher in this one.

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The Invisible Man (1975)

THE INVISIBLE MAN (1975)
Article 4415 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-7-2014
Directed by Robert Michael Lewis
Featuring David McCallum, Melinda O. Fee, Jackie Cooper
Country: USA
What it is: Successful TV pilot

A scientist develops a method of making things invisible, and experiments on himself, only to discover that the change eventually becomes permanent.

Well, it may credit its source as the H.G. Wells novel, but it really only borrows the title and the concept. The story isn’t much; it really does little more than set up the premise for the TV series. That being said, the movie is well acted, the special effects are acceptable, and it must have gone over well enough in order for it to actual spawn a series, albeit a short-lived one. If there’s anything I particularly like about the movie, it is that it addresses with some thought an element of the premise that could have been taken for granted; the mask. I’ve seen too many movies where people wear masks (usually to look like someone else) that are supposed to be so convincing that they fool people; this one at least addresses that the mask would have to be made by a very special process, and that the game could be given away by someone actually touching it. I’m surprised that the movie chose to dwell on this aspect of the story, and I like the attention paid to this detail. Still, that doesn’t mean that everything was well thought out; when the title character removes the mask at one point to make himself totally invisible, I had to wonder where he kept the mask in those cases.

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The Day It Came to Earth (1979)

THE DAY IT CAME TO EARTH (1979)
Article 4414 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-6-2014
Directed by Harry Thomason
Featuring Wink Roberts, Roger Manning, Robert Ginnaven
Country: USA
What it is: Bad movie parody

A meteorite lands in a lake and resurrects the body of a murdered mob informer, which then wreaks havoc in the area.

Given the fact that the only recognizable name in the cast is comedian George Gobel, as well as a few other hints, I’m assuming that the movie is intended as a parody of a really bad fifties monster movie. However, there’s a problem; a parody is supposed to be funny, and not only do large chunks of this movie give no hint that they’re trying for laughs, but when it is noticeably doing so (which isn’t always apparent), it falls flat. Which means that it ends up becoming, in effect, a very bad movie itself. This might be fun if the movie wasn’t as annoying as it was, but between the bottom-of-the-barrel musical score, the tiresome yelling and screaming, and its targeting of some of the most tiresome cliches of all time (the car that won’t start, the drunk who sees the monster), this one really started to grate on me. It does have a cult following, I have no doubt, but when it comes down to it, I’ve seen parodies like this one that are actually funny, as well as movies that are targets of this parody that are more entertaining.

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Brother John (1971)

BROTHER JOHN (1971)
Article 4413 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-5-2014
Directed by James Goldstone
Featuring Sidney Poitier, Will Geer, Bradford Dillman
Country: USA
What it is: The unfolding of destiny.
A man, gone for years and impossible to contact, comes to a small southern town to be on hand for the death of his sister. The police believe he’s an agitator sent to cause trouble with a local strike. However, the local doctor who brought the man into this world has a different belief, as he’s noticed that the man only shows up when someone is about to die…

Here’s another one of those movies where most of the plot descriptions give away key discoveries that only happen near the end of the movie, and I went into the movie knowing them. Yet, I have to say that I don’t feel knowing these things ahead of time necessarily ruined the movie for me; in fact, if anything, I found myself perhaps more on the edge of my seat waiting for the inevitable shoe to drop. It’s not really the revelations that make the movie work for me, anyway; in this case, it’s the authority of the acting, in particular from both Sidney Poitier and Will Geer. They do through acting what many other movies do through special effects; when Poitier’s character delivers a soliloquy that opens with the phrase “There is now no time left… for anything.”, I felt a real chill run down my spine, and quite frankly, I found watching a jailer closing and latching storm windows as the wind rises to be tenser than a stock footage shot of an atom bomb going off. Don’t be fooled by the obvious themes of racism and labor problems; these are only the convenient examples of events from a much greater canvas, and the movie isn’t really about these specifically. If I’ve been a bit vague about the fantastic content, let me just say without giving away too much that Poitier’s character is not strictly human. All in all, I found this one very effective, though it works more in the mode of a straight drama than a genre piece.

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Brainstorm (1983)

BRAINSTORM (1983)
Article 4412 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-4-2014
Directed by Douglas Trumbull
Featuring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher
Country: USA
What it is: Science fiction drama

A team of scientists develops the technology to record human experiences and play them back to others. It’s only after a while they begin to see the darker sides of this creation. Then, one of the scientists does a recording of her own death…

I will say this much; I like this movie a lot more than I do Trumbull’s first feature film directorial effort, SILENT RUNNING. I admire that it seeks to really explore the possibilities of this technological development, and some of the imagery is quite breathtaking. The movie had a troubled history, though; Natalie Wood died before the movie had been completed, and the studio wanted to dump the project, but Trumbull insisted on continuing, and though he did get the movie completed, he was not allowed to make another feature film for a major studio. These problems might explain why, despite the movie’s ambitions, it feels curiously incomplete, jagged and not quite satisfying. Also, I’m not quite sure I like the way the movie veers into the metaphysical; the ending looks like it was trying to outdo the star gate sequence in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in terms of visual pizzazz, and though it’s quite slick and pretty to look at, it’s also rather empty. The movie tries so hard at times to be a visual feast that the characters get lost in the mix. Still, I am impressed at the ambition on display here.

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Desperate Moments (1971)

DESPERATE MOMENTS (1971)
aka Gli occhi freddi della paura, Cold Eyes of Fear
Article 4411 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-3-2014
Directed by Enzo G. Castellari
Featuring Giovanna Rolli, Frank Wolff, Fernando Rey
Country: Italy / Spain
What it is: Thriller

A lawyer picks up a prostitute and brings her to his uncle’s house, only to discover an armed stranger who holds them captive. When the stranger’s boss shows up, it becomes apparent that the motive is revenge…

Is an Italian crime thriller from the seventies necessarily a giallo? I’m not sure what the exact definition of a giallo is, but I’d say this one doesn’t quite fit the mold. The first few minutes make it seem like one, but it’s a fake-out, as you’ll soon discover if you see it. Though there is a bit of mystery, it’s not a mystery in the giallo sense; we’re mostly curious as to the details surrounding the main villain’s desire for revenge. I’d say it’s more of a film noir than a giallo, one that’s attempting to say something about class and corruption in England. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t; the story is a little too vague in some of its details, and it comes across as very silly when it tries to be psychological; the surreal scene where everyone’s pointing at the villain and yelling “Guilty!” is the worst moment. In fact, I find it hard to say this one is fantastically themed at all. I’m afraid this one is a false alarm.

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