31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 22: HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982)

 Masks in a horror movie. Yeah, that's undoubtedly gonna work out well...

The week leading up to Halloween, 1982: In the wake of a bizarre murder followed by the immolation suicide of the killer, Dr. Daniel Challis (Tom Atkins) embarks on his own investigation with the victim's daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin, late of GET CRAZY), providing transportation. The trail of clues leads to the remote, all-Irish Californian town of Santa Mira, home of the Silver Shamrock Novelties company, which this year is mass-producing children's Halloween masks — a skull, a witch, and a Jack O'lantern — bolstered by a saturation marketing campaign with commercials featuring a jingle that is an earworm of Godzilla-like proportions.

Seriously, do not play this unless you want the Silver Shamrock jingle stuck in your brain for a week.

Masterminded by Irish expat Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy), a renowned master of the practical joke, the marketing blitz is itself a mask for a twisted plot involving the old school Gaelic festival of Samhain, chips harvested from one of the Stonehenge monoliths, and the playing of the ultimate evil trick (rather than a treat) on all children who wear the Silver Shamrock mask while watching a TV special at a certain time on Halloween night...

Long kept at arm's length like some sort of bastard child of the franchise, HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH was released to universal disdain from both professional critics and horror movie fans alike. Intended as the first in an annual horror anthology series in the wake of HALLOWEEN II's seeming coda to the Michael Myers "boogeyman" thing, HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH tried something different and genuinely inspired in its weirdness, but its era's slasher-hungry audience wanted its thrills as undemanding and brain-dead as the same crap they'd been repeatedly spoon fed since the release of FRIDAY THE 13th (1980), and that wave rode out the decade to increasingly diminishing returns. And though all of the films bearing the HALLOWEEN franchise brand that followed in its swiftly-dismissed wake brought back Michael Myers as their unstoppable antagonist, none of them were any good and not one of them displayed even one-tenth of the imagination and creativity to be had with SEASON OF THE WITCH. Though sparse on gore/violence (though what there is is quite memorable) and low on actual scares, it's completely loony and rich in atmosphere. What most compels about HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH is its concept and the eventual knowledge that its threat is a dire anti-child practical joke on a truly diabolical and insane scale, which only serves to counterpoint Cochran's techno-sorcerous genius.

Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy). Who says dark magicians can't have a sense of humor?

SEASON OF THE WITCH's focus on ancient pagan magic was a good way to shift from Michael Myers's silent "Boo!-and-stab" schtick but while Celtic magic and alignment of the stars for evil ritual purposes would be touched upon again in later HALLOWEEN installments, that perhaps noble attempt at not totally sweeping SEASON OF THE WITCH's contributions to the franchise under the rug brought nothing to the proceedings and only served to make the stories make even less sense.

To be 100% honest, I was among the disgusted naysayers who experienced HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH when it first hit, and none of my peers at the time had anything kind to say about it. But, unlike the creatively-bankrupt Michael Myers followups, the years have been very kind to the misbegotten SEASON OF THE WITCH and it is finally being re-assessed on its own low-key merits. If you're one of the legion of haters, do yourself the favor and give it a second look. It's a hell of a lot better than you may think.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 21: CURSE OF BIGFOOT (1976)

In the glorious days of pre-cable TV wherein one could find any number of local movie shows, cash-strapped regional stations would occasionally fill out their film schedules with bottom-of-the-barrel and most likely public domain flicks that would be broadcast at Jesus o’clock in the morning and be viewed mostly by insomniacs or the heavily self-medicated. These celluloid stink bombs would mostly come and go, being run only once, but every now and then there would be one that stood above the pack and would be remembered for all time as a movie so mind-bendingly terrible that it was literally unbelievable. In the days of my misspent East Coast youth, no film exemplified this misbegotten breed like 1976’s CURSE OF BIGFOOT, a movie that ran with surprising frequency on New York’s WOR-TV (aka Channel 9) and became a minor cult classic to myself and several of my like-minded friends. We first witnessed its anti-spectacle in the late 1970’s and we’ve been devoted to it ever since, it being the first film I ever saw that led me to describe it as being so boring, worthless and bad that it somehow manages to transcend its own awfulness and become a thing of perverse fascination.

It’s probably impossible these days to convey to those who weren’t there for it just how much of the 1970’s seemed like everybody was stoned, including the president, and this perceived pot haze clouded pop culture with many strange fads and manias, among which could be counted “weird phenomena” stories of shit like the Bermuda Triangle, U.F.O.’s and other assorted strangeness that became mesmerizing after a few bowls of Indica. But the heavy-hitter of the genre had to be the nation’s fascination with Sasquatch, more commonly known as “Bigfoot,” a shaggy forest-dwelling specimen of cryptozoology who memorably teamed up with the Six-Million Dollar Man. I don’t recall exactly when the Bigfoot craze caught on but I do remember the country being inundated, seemingly overnight, with books, cheapjack horror movies, TV specials and pseudo-documentaries about the hairy bastard, and while I dig the idea of the missing link/nature spirit or whatever the fuck Bigfoot was supposed to be, I must admit that I never really got exactly why the creature was so popular. There was never much by way of concrete proof of its existence, the most famous example of which is the short out-of-focus 1967 film purported to be of an actual Bigfoot crossing a road that looks to me like some Amazonian woman in a rented gorilla costume; I say “woman” because in the famous out-of-focus still shot of Bigfoot taken from the film it looks like Bigfoot’s rockin’ a decent rack.

The alleged real-life Bigfoot from the famous 1967 film. Is it just me, or does it look like Bigfoot's sportin' titties?

But whatever the case, Bigfoot became an indelible part of the Seventies zeitgeist and low-budget filmmakers were only too willing to crank out shitty flicks to cash in on the craze and rook moviegoers out of their hard-earned greenbacks. None of the Bigfoot movies were any good, in fact most of them were downright terrible, but not one of them even begin to approach the nadir of quality that is CURSE OF BIGFOOT, a work that appears to have been cobbled together from a poorly-made and totally-unrelated-to-Bigfoot attempt at a horror film, a scene taking place in a classroom that looks worse than one of the educational flicks they used to run in health class, a staggering amount of seemingly random stock footage and, last but certainly least, what meager footage was available from an apparently unfinished 1958 would-be monster movie entitled TEENAGERS BATTLE THE THING. A true oddity, the film was not inaccurately described on the Internet Movie Database’s “user comments” section with the headline “A Sasquatch could make a better movie,” a sentiment I share after having sat many times, slack-jawed in disbelief, through this sole effort of director Don Fields.

NOTE: as of this point, this review becomes an in-depth examination of CURSE OF BIGFOOT's anti-grandeur, so if you want to see it for yourself and save the threadbare surprises I advise you to stop reading right now and get your hands on the DVD or check it out in chapters on YouTube.

The legs of Bigfoot as seen during the pre-credits sequence. Note the stunning cinematography.

The film opens with a glimpse of the distant past that wouldn’t have passed muster on IT'S ABOUT TIME as a narrator “ominously” fills us in on a strange creature that would kill cavemen for no apparent reason. That creature was known as…(Wait for it!)…Bigfoot!!!

Oh, shit! It's Bigfoot!!!

Suddenly, in what is unquestionably the film’s only almost-exciting moment, a monster meant to be Bigfoot runs face-first and full-tilt into the camera and mauls an unseen caveman to death (unseen save for an arm with crepe hair crudely glued to it, that is), causing chocolate syrup to run down a boulder in a poor substitution for stage blood. The titles then roll and list a cast of non-stars (such as Ken Kleopfer, Ruth Ann Manella, and Bill Simonsen as Dr. Bill Wyman) as the camera for some reason delights our eyes with what appears to be elementary school documentary footage of Native American cliff-dwellings and caves which has squat to do with Bigfoot.

The film then shifts to a nigh-interminable sequence featuring a nighttime scene in which a woman scolds her dog for barking at what she assumes is some wild animal but is in actuality the slowest-moving, most nondescript and bogus-looking monster in recent memory.

Exactly what the fuck is this monster supposed to be? Anybody?

The monster lurks in the bushes or aimlessly shambles along while the camera can’t make up its mind as to whether it wants to show us the monster, the dog, the woman or random shots of the house or the dripping spigot to which one would attach a garden hose. After what feels like a short suspense-free eternity, the monster finally makes it to within arm’s length of the woman and makes his move, but we don’t get to see what happens because the footage abruptly comes to a halt when it’s revealed that we’ve been watching a movie along with a classroom full of teenagers who have themselves been watching the pitiful horror movie; the film has been shut off by the class’ professor who states something to the effect of “Well, I think you all get the idea,” thus simultaneously leaving his students and the audience feeling distinctly gypped.

This teacher’s acting is smarmy to the nth degree and comes off just as vile and unctuous as any seventies-era gameshow host, only minus any shred of charm. Of far more interest (?) is the classroom full of students, comprised of a bunch of young actors whose faces betray the unmistakable look of being both bored and stoned, providing a screen image that in more artful hands would have been intentionally meant to comment on what was likely the mindset being experienced by the viewing audience.

The stoned and bored-looking students: an ironic comment on the audience?

Alas, the film does not give us time to consider such an artistic possibility and instead allows the teacher of what is apparently a myths & legends course to whip out a placard with an illustration of Bigfoot emblazoned upon it and expound upon the existence of the hairy bastard.

"And for those students who speak Ebonics, this here nigga is Bigfoot, muthafukkas!!!"

So begins a veritable Cannes Film Festival of stock footage meant to convey the search for Bigfoot, footage including incongruous shots of assorted radar arrays,

maps and shit,

light aircraft flying at an altitude guaranteed not to allow a clear look at anything other than miles of tree cover, let alone a Sasquatch,

and copious footage depicting the logging industry.

I shit you not; the fucking logging industry!!!

To further drive home his point — nebulous though it may be — the professor then regales us with the "true encounter" had by two gurk-gurks out driving aimlessly through the backwoods. After about three solid minutes of shots of their truck slooooooowly meandering over small hills and around trees, the yokels spot...Bigfoot!

The Hairy One casually saunters across the road and vanishes into the brush, causing the stunned (stoned?) drivers (about whom we know absolutely nothing) to stop the truck and get out to investigate. The pair consists of a dude who looks like a long-lost member of SCTV's MacKenzie Brothers

and a mulleted wonder who's pretty much the living embodiment of the mid-1970's burnout who hung around shopping malls, parking lots and fast food joints looking to score some weed or underage pussy.

The mid-1970's burnout, far removed from his natural habitat of shopping malls and parking lots.

These two veeeeeeeery sloooooooowly search the brush for any sign of Bigfoot, traipsing through brambles, random branches and such, wasting nearly ten suspense-free minutes during which time we get a brief glimpse of the monster's right foot that stiffly twitches.

The right foot of...Bigfoot!!!

Sadly, our intrepid explorers don't get to see that horrifying sight and instead continue to wander about aimlessly. Finally the burnout hears the sounds of his pal being horribly mauled — which is conveniently not depicted for the edification or entertainment of the audience — and runs to his friend's aid, but too late: the lost MacKenzie lays dead and the burnout reacts with less emotion than he would have expressed if he'd spilled his bong in the rear of his bitchin' customized van.

The lost Mackenzie Brother lays dead, viciously mauled by a rapacious Bigfoot...

...while his burnout pal reacts with a depth of emotion that fairly screams "Bummer, dude."

That sub-IN SEARCH OF re-enactment goes on for so long that you'll swear you'd felt your facial hair grow, an effect compounded by whatever intoxicants may be running rampant through your system. Which reminds me that I neglected to mention that CURSE OF BIGFOOT should not be attempted without beers, hard liquor or copious amounts of weed within easy reach.

Before we're given a chance to regain our composure following that exercise in flesh-crawling horror/boredom, class resumes with the bored/stoned students identifying old woodcuts of mythic beasts while turning in performances that would have embarrassed the cast of Mrs. Gage's fifth grade production of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? But then things take a turn for the worse when the professor's special guest shows up, a creepy bespectacled guy who claims to have firsthand experience with a vicious Bigfoot, an event from some fifteen years previous.

"Kids, I had an encounter in the woods with Bigfoot, and...Hey! Stop laughing! This shit's serious!!!"

Following what's supposed to be an ominous lead-in (that isn't the least bit ominous) to the tale he's about to tell, the movie suddenly turns into footage from an unreleased no-budget horror flick from the 1950's, TEENAGERS BATTLE THE THE THING (1958). Complete with obviously different film stock and another opening narration, it's a jarring effect that not only makes the viewer think they've downed some off-date Piel's but also leads one to conclude they've been trapped in a cruel cinematic Moebius strip that will randomly re-start the film over and over again for all of eternity, with each new beginning helmed by a completely new director.

Of far less interest than the patchwork incoherence/boredom festival/endurance test of the film's earlier segments, the 1950's mini-movie is merely a deadly-dull account of a teacher and his students discovering a mummified Bigfoot in a hillside cave and what happens when said critter gets loose. There's a little bit of dimestore mayhem before Bigfoot meets an untimely and uninteresting death by immolation, but before we're finally granted the mercy of the familiar words "The End" we're forced to endure scene after scene of some boring Eisenhower-era white folks wandering around some nondescript hills for what you'd swear was the entire running time of the U.S. version of BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ.

Can your heart stand the excitement?

Even when the monster goes on the rampage, not one single thing of interest happens, and when "The End" does finally pop up the film just abruptly comes to a complete halt. No cutting back to the anguished Bigfoot massacre survivor, no summing up from the professor, no comments from the class, no twist ending, no anything. The shit just ends and the viewer is left to sit in silence for a few moments, reeling from the cumulative boredom and confusion, but thankful that they didn't spend the cash to see it in the theater. Yes, you read that right: CURSE OF BIGFOOT was apparently actually released onto the big screen, probably to the drive-in circuit, a wasteland where the attendees were more often than not too concerned with getting stoned or fucking to care if the movie being shown was the cinematic equivalent to an empty McDonald's Big Mac container.

But believe me when I say I'd have loved to have seen this monument to how not to make a movie if it had played theatrically during my youth. Films of this ilk are best enjoyed with an unwitting audience of liquored-up grindhouse regulars who enliven such flicks with their non-stop barrage of often vulgar commentary and impromptu insinuation of themselves into the movie's events with observations such as "If I was in this movie I'd've kicked that muthafukkin' Bigfoot muthafukka right in the fuckin' nuts!" which would probably have been answered back with "You wouldn'ta done shit 'cuz Bigfoot would be too busy bonin' you up the ass!" We may not have seen it projected, but my friends and I had a field day with CURSE OF BIGFOOT whenever it aired on Channel 9, and just the other night myself and my friend of twenty-six years, Chris, sat through it yet again and laughed ourselves silly. There are those who slag off Ed Wood and his films as being the worst ever made, but at least Wood had a unique vision all his own and legitimate desire to make viable movies; CURSE OF BIGFOOT appears to have been cobbled together from spare parts with naught on its mind save ripping-off the moviegoing public, and it certainly succeeds at that dubious goal, and what entertainment can be garnered from its towering ineptness was almost certainly not intentional.

Bottom line: CURSE OF BIGFOOT is exactly the kind of film that should be considered when trying to define "the worst movie of all time," a flick lacking any of the things that make a movie legitimately entertaining in the first place, such as characters you care about in any way, thrills, romance, a coherent plot, gratuitous titties, graphic violence, talking dogs, anything. Being wholly without merit, CURSE OF BIGFOOT is recommended only for those who have worked their way through the Thirty-Six Chambers of Bad Moviedom and attained the Zen-like mastery needed to weather its complete and utter inertia. That said, I would also recommend it to those who think they may be ready to handle it; if you newcomers can make it all the way through CURSE OF BIGFOOT's eighty-eight minute running time you may find yourself among the growing legion of moviegoers who love it for a number of indefensible reasons, and may even find yourself attempting to lure the innocent down the path of ruin that you yourself have trod upon, becoming sort of a bad movie "pusher," if you will. A pusher just like me. (He smiles evilly.)

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 20-I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (1957)

Tony Rivers (Michael Landon): Poster child for anger management.

High-schooler Tony Rivers (a pre-BONANZA Michael Landon) is plagued with a volatile temper that ignites at the slightest provocation, making him notorious in his school and landing him in trouble with the authorities. After an unwarranted violent confrontation with a classmate brings him a warning from an understanding police officer, followed by an equally un-called-for assault on a friend at a party, Tony takes the cop's suggestion and seeks therapy with hypnotherapist Dr. Alfred Brandon (Whit Bissell). Unfortunately for Tony, Dr. Brandon is the type of mad medical professional common to 1950's sci-fi and horror yarns, and the doc uses Tony as an unwitting guinea pig in drug and hypnotherapy treatments intended to regress the lad to his most primitive instincts. For no adequately explained reason, Dr. Brandon is convinced that his regression therapy technique will eventually save humanity from itself (???) and somehow he thinks it would be a good idea to suggest to the hypnotized, drugged-up Tony that he was a werewolf in one of his past lives. (How a werewolf fits into mankind’s evolutionary tree I won’t even begin to theorize.) Of course Tony turns into a slavering lycanthrope and savagely murders a couple of people before the police twig to the fact that they're on the trail of a creature straight out of legend, and it's only a matter of time until his fateful final encounter with Dr. Brandon and inevitable tragic demise.

A couple of lapses into hokey 1950's "teen" movie territory (where the teenagers are all played by people who are obviously in their twenties) notwithstanding, I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF offers up a fun and mildly creepy metaphor for the horrors and pains of adolescence and wouldn't be the last lycanthropy flick to tackle that theme. That said, the film is mostly remembered these days for its classic title, early performance by future TV royalty Michael Landon, and its overbite-sporting werewolf clad in a varsity jacket, but it does contain one of the most effective werewolf-on-the-hunt moments in film, a moment of primal terror that permanently burned this, the first werewolf movie I ever saw (I was six years old at the time), into my consciousness. Just after a meeting with his school's principal, in which he's told that Dr. Brandon has had some very good things to say about his improving attitude, Tony's curse is triggered by a ringing school bell.

At that time, Tony is in the school's gym, observing a toothsome girl (May 1957 Playboy Playmate Dawn Richard) practicing moves on the uneven parallel bars. As she executes a move that inverts her visual perspective, she comes face-to-face, upside-down, with the slavering monster.

One of the most memorable P.O.V. looks at approaching death in cinema history.

Terrified, she falls to the floor and attempts to flee, but there is no escape.

Physical fitness is no match for a werewolf on the hunt.

If you see this movie for no other reason, don't miss that sequence. It's the film's one true moment of outright horror and as such it's a doozy.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 19: THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959)

Hook-handed alcoholic Cajun versus newly-minted human/alligator hybrid. That's entertainment!

Under the psychiatrist-supervised influence of pentathol, nurse Jane Marvin falls into a trance and recounts the last events of her original life as Joyce Webster (Beverly Garland), a newlywed whose husband mysteriously disappears during their honeymoon. Over the following months Joyce follows clues and ends up at the Cypress Plantation, an estate deep in the Louisiana swamps that was her husband's most recent address as recorded on his college paperwork. Once there she meets a number of people who claim to know nothing of her husband or his whereabouts, so she digs deeper and things escalate along a trail of radioactive materials, a hazardous trek through the 'gator-infested swamp in the driving rain, violence leading to a close brush with rape by a drunken hook-handed Cajun handyman in a swamp shack, well-intended mad science gone horribly wrong, mutation, and the unthinkable truth about her husband's fate. When Joyce's story is captured on tape for posterity (and evidence of her "delusions"), her psychiatrist opts to never let her hear her own confession out of concern it will cause a relapse, and a cheerful "Jane Marvin" returns to her new existence.

The handyman (Lon Chaney Jr.) attempts to get his drunken rape on.

Long considered a disappointment by genre addicts, I'd like to suggest that THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE be reevaluated for what it is, rather than for what it is not. Instead of straight-up shocks, what the audience gets is an unexpected southern gothic fused with a mystery and a standard 1950's weird science yarn, sort of "Tennessee Williams writes an H.P. Lovecraft story." The swamp setting drips with hothouse atmosphere that's greatly enriched by the black & white photography, and imagery of live alligators swimming and strolling around the place lend a sense of foreboding to the proceedings. The fear of losing a loved one with no explanation is something that anyone could relate to, as is the frustration of being lied to by people whom one knows know full well what's really going on, and Chaney's hook-handed Cajun handyman is a movie creep of the first and most sleazy order. As for the story, it would have worked as an eerie piece even without the presence of its sole alligator-man (forget the title, there's only one full-on 'gator hybrid at hand), so his presence is gravy, even if he does look like a refugee from a Pertwee-era episode of DOCTOR WHO when finally seen.

Sometimes it's best for a lost hubby to stay missing.

And Beverly Garland's performance here is quite compelling. Joyce's dogged pursuit of her missing husband holds the audience's interest and embroils us in her curiosity and frustration, so when she finally discovers her beloved's fate and final loss of humanity, we understand why she went mad and we side with her shrink in his decision not to cure her of her trauma-induced amnesia.

Joyce's quest reaches its inevitable end.

THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE is not deep stuff by any means but it's a fun twist on southern-set melodramas. And how can you not love the visual of a cheesy shirtless alligator-man in slacks?

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 18: MONSTER A GO-GO (1965)

The horror...The horror...Or not...

Bad horror movies happen all the time. In fact, it's not a stretch to state that bad horror movies outnumber the worthwhile ones by an almost incalculable degree. But then there are bad horror movies that go above and beyond with their cinematic wretchedness to find themselves numbered among the very worst works that the entirety of cinema has to offer, films that offer nothing by way of scares, interest, or anything of note to prevent the audience falling into a boredom-induced torpor. Such a piece is MONSTER A GO-GO, an infamous, turgid stink bomb from director Bill Rebane (THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION) and an uncredited Herschell Gordon Lewis. Yes, Lewis, the "Godfather of Gore" himself, the man who opened the floodgates of cinematic visceral excess with such stomach-churners as BLOOD FEAST (1963) and TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964), was somehow involved in this dead cat of a movie, and while his own solo filmography is not stocked with any works to rival those of Cronenberg or Romero, even the most poorly-regarded flick in his rosters looks like PSYCHO when measured against this floater.

An astronaut returns to Earth as a hulking radioactive monster and embarks on an aimless non-rampage that's tracked by military investigators and scientists. There's much wandering around in barren fields, plus tons of un-involving, poorly-acted dialogue, and the end result could kindly be called an endurance test to try the patience of even the most die-hard of bad movie veterans. In short, the film is seventy minutes that subjectively feels like four hours and is practically guaranteed to serve as a cinematic soporific. So why I am I bothering to bring this complete and utter dog to your attention, you may ask? Simple. Because it possess an ending of such jaw-dropping content that it practically dares you to witness it for yourself. After making the hapless audience suffer through virtually nothing happening over its entire running time, the film ends by announcing that the astronaut had actually splashed down unharmed somewhere in the North Atlantic and that there was actually never a monster at all, so everything that we'd watched was just superfluous, time-wasting bullshit. Here's the actual narration from the film that outlines that "twist" and pretty much raises a huge, stiff middle finger to  moviegoers:

As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called "Douglas" to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness! With the telegram, one cloud lifts and another descends. Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some eight thousand miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled? Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?

Absorb that galloping horseshit for a moment. Things like that don't just spontaneously happen. That so-called ending was deliberately perpetrated and knowingly released with the intent that innocent people would shell out their hard-earned cash to see it. It was downright criminal and I would have given a lot to be there to see how audiences reacted upon finding out they'd just been so frustratingly ripped off while simultaneously being bored nigh unto death. If MONSTER A G-GO had played at my home county's most notorious grindhouse, the late, lamented Norwalk Theater, I can tell you with a certain amount of authority that the irate audience would have stormed out of the auditorium and killed and spit-roasted the theater's staff right there in the lobby, not a stone's throw away from the popcorn machine.

Poster for the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 17: PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965)

Fetish wear...IN SPAAAAACE!!!

In a nutshell: Travelers in deep space intercept a distress call from a remote, uncharted planet and land there to investigate. Once they arrive, very bad shit happens. If that sounds somewhat familiar, it should, because if you take the Italian/Spanish-made PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965) and threw it into a blender with the American-made IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958) and hit purée, you'd pretty much end up with Ridley Scott's ALIEN (1979), the ne plus ultra of horror movies set in outer space. While IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE provides the archetypal DNA for the whole "trapped in a spaceship with a malevolent xenomorph" thing, but what PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES brings to the mix is an unrelenting air of dread and a visual sensibility that transplants the haunted house/spookshow ethos into the cosmos.

The dead rise.

As a movie, PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES has not aged particularly well. It's glacially-paced (a common problem for Italian sci-fi films of its era), has a distracting dubbed English soundtrack voiced by actors familiar from SPEED RACER cartoons (the unmistakable voices of Peter Fernandez and Jack Curtis being prominent), and there are no vampires per se (the threat is actually disembodied alien presences that reanimate the dead). But what remains is a work that somehow manages to be colorful while simultaneously manifesting an ambiance of spookiness straight out of childhood fears. If anything, it brings to mind an episode of LOST IN SPACE as directed by H.P. Lovecraft, only minus any tentacled wigglies (unfortunately). Several of the building blocks of ALIEN are present, including a foreboding, fog-shrouded planet, a giant skeleton of another hapless space-traveler who crashed there (in this case the remains indicate that another life form attempted to investigate the distress call and also met a grim fate),

Not quite the "space jockey" from ALIEN but close enough for rock & roll.

and the and-then-there-were-none whittling down of the cast.

Bottom line: I include PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES in this year's roundup solely to alert ALIEN fans who were not in the know about its existence. It's totally worth seeing to absorb legendary director/cinematographer Mario Bava's evocative visuals, though if you really want to see the ALIEN precursor that offers up actual shocks, I strongly recommend schlamping IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE into your DVD player.

Poster for the original American theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 16: WILLARD (1971)

Willard (Bruce Davison) and Socrates.

Once one has made it past the toddler years, one begins to notice the world outside of the house in a number of ways, one of which is noticing what the parents are watching on TV. During my earliest pre-Connecticut years I was fascinated by the TV and all of the interesting shows it brought into the living room but what I was most enthralled by were the era's ads for upcoming movie releases. It was the early 1970's and I remember seeing tons of commercials for assorted sci-fi and horror movies that I was too young to be allowed to see, but those brief come-ons stuck in my head until I was able to see the movies in question years later. Thanks to the Bay Area's CREATURE FEATURES movie showcase, hosted by the legendary Bob Wilkins, I was a "horror kid" from Day 1 and my hunger for new, non-black-and-white scary flicks was strong, so I paid close attention to what was coming down the pipeline and of all the horror offerings from those formative years, I most remember the ads for 1971's WILLARD. They didn't really reveal the particulars of the story but it made perfectly clear that the protagonist was a guy whose pet rats did his bidding, apparently with horrifyingly lethal results.

One of the TV spots for WILLARD's original theatrical release.

Kids love stories about people and their loyal pets, so how could I not be drawn to a  tale about a twitchy weirdo who used his animal friends to murder people by eating them alive? Needless to say, I appealed to my parents to take me to see WILLARD but their response was a resounding — and in retrospect understandable — "no," so it wouldn't be until perhaps four years later that I saw the film when it aired on THE CBS LATE MOVIE.. At age nine, I totally ate it up and went on to enjoy it several times before leaving for college, after which it became a fond memory from childhood. Over the years, WILLARD achieved something of a cult rep among those of my generation, often looked back upon as a "starter" horror film that offered stronger meat than what we kids were used to from local TV horror movie showcases, but how much if that fondness was clouded by nostalgia and not actual remembrance of the film's details? While watching the film again for the first time in perhaps 35 years, I was confronted with a few hard truths about the film when not seen through the filter of faulty reminiscence. 

While its marketing campaign and legend have painted it as "the rat movie," WILLARD is less of a straight-up horror movie and more of a sad character study of the twenty-something titular character (Bruce Davison), a put-upon friendless loser whose stifling world consists solely of his dead-end clerical job and caring for his ailing, overbearing mother (Elsa Lanchester). His job is at a company founded by his father but that was taken over by uber-bastard Martin  (Ernest Borgnine), whose awfulness as a human being may have led to Willard's father's untimely demise. Martin despises the meek Willard and takes every opportunity to demean and humiliate him while also plotting to buy Willard's house out from under the young man and his mother so he can demolish it and turn a massive profit. Meanwhile, on the home front, Willard's mother nags him and treats him like a child while being his sole non-work interaction. (He's also surrounded by his mother's gaggle of annoying oldster friend, a group he cannot stand.) But Willard's world is brightened when he befriends the rats that run rampant in the backyard. He feeds them, gives them shelter and a breeding ground in the basement, and endeavors to teach them simple words and commands. He even adopts an adorable and smart white rat that he names Socrates, and the pair become inseparable. Over the months, Willard strongly bonds with the rats, including a rebellious black one that he dubs Ben, and a mild romance blossoms with a tempo worker (Sondra Locke) but when his mother dies, leaving him with $1500 of inheritance and the house that he did not know was mortgaged to the point where it must be sold to pay back taxes, Willard's world is once more shrouded in woe. And when his boss kills Socrates (whom Willard has been smuggling in to the office for company) and follows that act by firing Willard, which finally causes the young man to snap. Arriving at Martin's office after regular business hours, an empowered Willard does a full-tilt "worm turns" speech before sicking dozens of rats on Martin, memorably ordering them to "Tear 'im up." With Martin horribly killed, Willard's new self-confidence spurs him to up the romantic ante and get a new job, but his plans are immediately halted when Ben, who has been abandoned at the scene of Martin's murder along with the rest of the rat army, returns with vengeance in mind...

Ben returns with a mind full of hate.

This time around, I saw WILLARD for what it actually is, a drama about one milquetoast's misery that's brightened by an unlikely friendship, and the rat stuff is actually pretty much only incidental to the proceedings. It's well-acted and one cannot help but root for Willard to get out from under the obstacles that mar his existence, but if one arrives at the picture with a yen to be scared, WILLARD proves to be rather a damp squib. It possesses only one real scene of horror — Willard's worm turn and subsequent murder of martin — and it's certainly a memorable one, but the overall movie is really a straight drama with only the most minor of horror elements. In fact, the rat angle could even be dropped and the film would still work as a mundane drama.

Martin (Ernest Borginine), about to take a header through his office window while being gnawed alive by dozens of rats.

Though the much-ballyhooed rat murder sequence is indeed a classic, the movie really could have done with a lot more in that department. Sure, the rat material plays into many viewers' fear and loathing of the creatures but the movie screws itself by allowing us to get to know Willard and his rats and find their relationship charming and heartwarming. Yes, being chewed up alive by hundreds of sharp, tiny teeth would be one of the worst deaths imaginable, but it's not as effective as it could have been when perpetrated by rodents that we've seen being fed and cared for and happily playing with their human master as he showers them with all the surplus of love that had been laying fallow in his lonely heart.

The bottom line here is that WILLARD is a solid little film whose shock reputation has been greatly inflated thanks to nostalgia. It's engrossing but there are few scares to be had from it and, despite the "tear 'im up" moment, there's no gore whatsoever. Watch it for the sake of completism and bear in mind that its immediate sequel, BEN (1972), has none of its charm or interest. The only thing of real note about it is its Oscar-nominated #1 hit theme song sung by Michael Jackson (when he was still a negro), a touching tune that amounts to a love song to a homicidal specimen of vermin.

My autographed photo of Bruce Davison as Willard.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 15: THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

And how.

Those of you who are regular readers of my blogs know that I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, which granted me a certain skewed and bleak viewpoint when it comes to Connecticut in general and its southern portion in particular. To outsiders, much of the area appears to be an affluent haven where everything is idyllic and sitcom-perfect but to those of us who grew up there and were forced by certain circumstances to look beyond that rose-colored facade, Connecticut could reveal itself as an ideal locale for horror scenarios. Its quaint and homey atmosphere, old New England architecture (which is now slowly dying out in favor of hideous "McMansions" for those who can afford them), desolate and remote roadways shrouded by carefully-landscaped foliage, and its sometimes deafening quiet all contribute to an undeniable atmosphere that's rife with creep factor. A number of horror films have latched onto that potential and run with it — with wildly varying results — including THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH (1964),  LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971), THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975), FRIDAY THE 13th (1980), and even BEETLEJUICE (1988, it being a comedy notwithstanding), but perhaps no other film nails that specific Yankee sense of dread like Wes Craven's shattering THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. Especially for those of us who grew up in Westport, where much of it was shot.

Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassel) has just turned seventeen and is in the full flower of young womanhood. As her parents (Gaylord St. James and Cynthia Carr) prepare a birthday party for her, Mari sets off to Manhattan to attend a rock concert with her best friend, Phyllis (Lucy Grantham). All is right in Mari's world and the perfect accent for the day's fun would be some marijuana scored on the street. Things turn jet black when the girls make the mistake of trying to buy weed from Junior (Mark Sheffler), a pathetic junkie who's part of a gang of vicious escaped criminals, including the "animal-like" Sadie (Jeramie Rain), ultra-sleazy "Weasel" (Fred Lincoln), and the unspeakable Krug (David Hess). This vile quartet's crimes include serial murder, rape, child molestation, and voyeurism, so the kidnapping and subsequent horrific abuse of two innocent girls amounts to just another day's diversion for them.

Faces of death: Krug (David Hess), Sadie (Jeramie Rain), and "Weasel" (Fred Lincoln).

Once the criminals flee NYC with their captives stashed in the trunk of their car, the girls are put through a living hell of beatings, torture, rape, dismemberment, disembowelment, and eventually murder, and the tragic irony is that the end game happens in the woods directly across the street from Mari's home. The degradation of Mari and Phyllis is so physically and psychologically inhumane that even the pack of stone-cold killers is given pause by their own actions, but that moment of all-too-human clarity swiftly passes as they clean themselves up and seek shelter at Mari's house, telling her parents that they're traveling salesmen in need of overnight lodging. Having noted that Mari did not return from her night out and also not being dumb as a sack full of doorknobs, Mari's folks soon figure out what's up and even discover their daughter's ravaged body in the woods. After that, it is ON, and the parents' vengeance is indeed merciless and terrible...

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is one of the most uncomfortable works in the annals of cinema and it is absolutely not for the weak, squeamish, or easily offended. Drawing inspiration from Ingmar Bergman's THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960), the film starts off with a frivolous and flippant hippie-era sensibility that gets utterly sideswiped by the outright savagery that ensues once all of the characters are introduced. Though some would classify it as a thriller and it is undeniably riveting, there are no thrills to be had here. Instead the audience bears witness to a shabby tapestry of misogynistic atrocities on an intimate scale, all-too-relateable horrors wrought by monsters who don't even have the excuse of being the undead, lycanthropes, Lovecraftian wigglies, or seemingly-indestructible slashers in hockey masks. Krug and his companions exude a vileness that fairly oozes off the screen and while moviegoers have been exposed to countless rapists and murderers before their advent, this batch of human beasts are truly something special that will never be forgotten once encountered. The ugliness of their abuses offers no titillation for those who may be into that sort of thing and instead is presented with an honesty and sense of helplessness that puts the audience right there with Mari and Phyllis, and that is a place where no one wants to be. It's bad enough that the girls are tormented and raped, but the film reaches new depths in questionable taste when Krug takes the time to sign his cruel handiwork by carving his name into the still-living Mari's chest.

Seriously, do NOT rent this film as a date movie.

As Mari's birthday goes horribly awry, we never lose sight of the fact that she is on the cusp of an adulthood that she — and by association, Phyllis — will not live to experience, and it's a downer of epic proportions. And as her parents sink to the level of their daughter's tormentors, there are no winners here. It's the death of the hopeful peace-and-love hippie era writ in wretched microcosm and as such it's an incredibly powerful work of dreadful art. But with that said, the film does have one major flaw and that's its tonally-jarring attempts to shoehorn comic relief into material of the blackest order. There's a running thread involving  two hapless local cops — one of whom is played by a young Martin Kove, who would later gain screen immortality as the assholish sensei of the Cobra Kai dojo in THE KARATE KID (1984) — bumbling their way through the investigation of Mari's disappearance, and the so-called comedy simply does not work. In a film of this sort of unrelenting nature, staying true to its nastiness is in its best interests and all forms of humor are best eschewed. It's like going for yucks in the midst of the Sand Creek Massacre.

Director Wes Craven enriched the horror genre with a number of subsequent efforts, most notably  THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977), A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984), and SCREAM (1996), but none of his other films dared to return to the utter darkness brought by THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and perhaps that's a good thing. Such nastiness is hard to get out of one's head once it's in there. God knows I can't drive around while visiting my mom and not recognize several of the Westport locations where the despoilment of Mari and Phyllis took place...

I'm not sure which release this poster accompanied but it's certainly appropriately bleak.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 14: DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1932)

The 1932 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE: A rare example of the most famous version of a film being inferior to one of its remakes.

Unexpectedly, this looks like it will be the shortest of this year's 31 DAYS OF HORROR entries.

Last year I watched the 1941 Spencer Tracy version of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE for the first time since I was a child and was amazed by how good and adult it was, especially for a film from its era, so I figured this year I would revisit the 1932 version of the story, which features Frederic March's iconic look as the kindly doctor's horrific alter-ego. So indelible is that iteration that when most folks think of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde movie they usually immediately think of March as the werewolf/apeman-like Hyde, even if they have not actually seen the film. Admittedly that visual for Hyde is truly memorable and quite disturbing, so I was looking forward to seeing the film again for the first time since I was in the single digits.

Upon sitting through the 1932 version again, I noted that it was one of those features that bore the just-post-silent feel to its acting and visual storytelling, and it tended to play like a dull drawing room stage drama when Hyde wasn't onscreen abusing women, engaging in felonious assault, and just being an all-around vicious asshole. In fact, if I'm being perfectly honest, I found myself watching the clock until the film finally reached its conclusion. It's not that the film was bad by any means but, pre-Hays Code content notwithstanding, everything that it has to offer is achieved to far greater effect in the Spencer Tracy version, which is an almost beat-for-beat remake of the 1932 classic. Trust me when I urge you to see the 1941 version instead. Click here to read my in-depth look at that one, which gets my vote as the definitive telling of this particular classic horror scenario.

Poster for the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2015-Day 13: THE WOLF MAN (1941)

"Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and autumn moon is bright." Poor Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) finds this out in no uncertain terms.

There are very few horror films that could be considered as perfect in every way and 1941's THE WOLF MAN can be counted among them. Though the classic Universal horror entries that preceded it are seminal works that defined the genre for a couple of decades, all of them — with the notable exceptions of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and WEREWOLF OF LONDON (both from1935) — bore the earmarks of cinema that was only just finding its way after the advent of sound and the demise of the silent era. They tended to possess the feel of stage plays, often featured exaggerated/over-the-top acting and melodrama common to the era, and also suffered from issues of slow pacing (or at least slow when compared to what we're used to from the 1940's onward). THE WOLF MAN benefits from coming a decade after DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN in that it's a more modern and sophisticated piece. Though lacking that dark fairytale quality that flavored its antecedents, THE WOLF MAN more than makes up for that with moody atmosphere to spare, a pervasive air of impending dread, and a terrific and grownup script by Curt Siodmak that brings the audience characters whose actions and motivations are quite realistic, especially when seen within a horror movie context. 

I won't go into the full details  but all one needs to know is that THE WOLF MAN tells the story of a hapless innocent, Lawrence "Larry" Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who becomes afflicted with the homicidal curse of lycanthropy and how that condition inevitably leads to his tragic destruction. Siodmak's much-imitated script set in stone many of the werewolf tropes that we now consider the very DNA of the sub-genre, elements such as:

• A protagonist that we cannot help but like and genuinely care about
• Ye olde superstitions and pagan magic colliding head-on with disbelief wrought by modern science and psychology
• Doomed romance
• The involvement of wise/creepy gypsies (Yeah, I know that "gypsy" is now considered an ethnic slur, but I use it here rather than "Romani" because most folks who know the stock type in stories of this nature may be unfamiliar with the accurate ethnic/cultural designation)
• Charms to ward off the curse that serve little or no purpose
• Ill omens that all point to werewolf-related awfulness
• Silver being the surefire way to kill a werewolf
• All of the "modern" characters firmly believing that the afflicted's claims of being cursed with werwolfism are indicators of grievous mental illness
• The protagonist's tragedy being compounded by his death inevitably being facilitated by a loved one

Larry stalks the moors.

THE WOLF MAN is arguably the most influential werewolf film ever made and its impact continues to reverberate some seventy-four years after its debut. Though Jack Pierce's pioneering makeup effects have long since been eclipsed by superior techniques in prosthetic effects, animatronics, and digital wizardry, it says a lot that THE WOLF MAN would still be an effective film if the wolfed-out version of Larry had been achieved with naught but some glued-on barbershop floor sweepings and creative lighting. The film's true strength lies in its script and soul, so if you have not yet experienced this Rosetta Stone of lycanthropic pop cultural lore, I strongly urge you to see it for yourself as soon as possible. In its sequels, Larry proved to be immortal and THE WOLF MAN itself also endures.

Poster from the original theatrical release.