Night of the Demon (1980)

 

Director: James C. Wasson

Screenplay: Mike Williams and Jim L. Ball

Cast: Michael Cutt as Professor Bill Nugent; Melanie Graham as Wanda McGinty; Shannon Cooper as Carla Thomas; Bob Collings as Roy; Jodi Lazarus as Linda; Michael Lang as Pete; Ray Jarris as Gary; William F. Nugent as Lou Carlson; Barrett Cooper as Reverend Emmet McGinty

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Let your seeds of evil grow within her!

Among the Video Nasties of the 1984 Video Recordings Act, all of them present their own fascinating history and with Night of the Demon, we find ourselves following the trends of "cryptid" culture, including the legendary 1967 Patterson–Gimlin film footage which was said to capture onscreen images of an ape-like humanoid and feed interest in this legendary figure in cinema. With Night of the Demon, there is obviously the dichotomy that this is also a splatter film in tone, where films which helped pave an interest in making them were more family friendly; films like The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), a huge independent success, and when Monsters! Mysteries or Myths? (1974), a TV documentary with Rod Serling as the narrator, was expanded into a feature film with new footage (and actor Peter Graves taking over narration) for The Mysterious Monsters (1975) for another hit. This is not even the first gorier Bigfoot film as, whilst its plot involves a fake one, Shriek of the Mutilated (1974) exists, but Night of the Demon among some pretty strong competition in the Video Nasties list still stands toe-to-toe with a level of extremity.

With Night of the Demon, the explanation for how it came to be explains everything about the tone and content - originally this was a suspense film, in which Professor Nugent (Michael Cutt), in a bookend disfigured and recovering in a hospital bed, recounts to doctors and the police about his trip with students to a forest region which is said to be terrorised by a bigfoot creature, only for the production to struggle to be sold and producer Jim L. Ball to film additional gore footage which gained its infamy. This is immediately established when a man has his arm ripped off, both the gore intercut to and showing this is not a friendly Bigfoot. Even without this initial context, where after a first version played off mood and tension from director James C. Wasson, you had the gore added which gained a lot of notoriety for those who had seen the film, Night of the Demon from the first time I saw it, and did not appreciate it, to a growing one for it now, is curious in its pacing and tone. Immediately after that arm is pulled off a man like a doll's, it cuts to seventies flute music over an ordinary school, a reminder the early eighties in horror reflects the previous decade in style until the hairspray came in during the mid-eighties. With the daughter of one of the male victims of this creature in tow, what this becomes is a mystery as the team of Bigfoot finders go to the woods in Northern California, where the sightings are, and first ask around before going further into the woodlands.

The gore scenes are mostly linked to flashbacks from tales recounted by Nugent, filtered throughout, be it a man swung in a sleeping bag by Bigfoot and impaled, to the infamous scene of a motor biker having his penis ripped off, which is more for the sake of spectacle splatter than cohesive in their presentation, more a series of scenes to get reaction from than a cohesive series of attacks by a cryptid. It becomes more of a series of exposition scenes, getting to the culprit, until the later half where "Crazy" Wanda (Melanie Graham), a woman living in the deepest woods, is introduced, someone traumatised by a religious zealot father and a significant encounter with Bigfoot. Alongside its tangents, like the moment involving the Bigfoot cult in the woods, there is material with Night of the Demon with hindsight which is out-there even among the Nasties, particularly as this has as a key plot point a child conceived between cryptid and human being. It is a transgressive and uncomfortable scene in presentation, and meant to be to its credit, and it is another story if one of a few of a cryptid creature in a scenario like this, if one here which attempts to be much more serious and a disturbing take on the matter than, say, The Geek (1971), a porn film which exists and was released by Something Weird Video. It is strange how many films, even as far back as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) with the Gill Man obsessed with Julie Adams, fixate on the monstrous having desires with human women, and in mind that there is a world of cryptid erotic novels, many actually written by women¹, this is a concept for an entirely different piece but is important to keep in mind with human beings fascinated by the monstrous as something to fear but also having a physicality to them that can even be sexual. In some cases it is erotic, but as Wanda's story becomes central to this film, whilst it can be viewed as tasteless in this context, one of the stronger (credibly) aspects to the production as a drama is that it is meant to be a horrifying story. Of religious zealotry distorting and hurting a young girl, and especially with what happened to the conceived child, which can be lost in the film's tone and included splatter scenes, but should be pointed to as the real attempt at a narrative within this.

There is an absurdity that cannot be denied due to how the film was put together, where you are watching in one scene Bigfoot literally forcing two Girl Scouts to stab each other, which is as ridiculous as that sounds, and the languid tone of what was supposed to be a suspense picture from director James C. Wasson is felt and does make it a slower paced experience. It is to be admired nonetheless for a regional production, knowing how hard film production is, and the figures behind this are fascinating, making this an even weirder and rewarding Video Nasty in its context. Producer Jim L. Ball, coming to this business from an obsession with Maria Montez and films she starred in like Cobra Woman (1944) as a kid², even working at American International Pictures alongside Roger Corman in the sound department. He would end up creating a trilogy of these horror films with Night of the Demon sandwiched between Fraternity of Horror (1964), a 16mm production never released until the 2022 Severin Films/88 Films Blu Ray release, and Prophecy of Blood, a video shoot mummy film that is insanely obscure. Director James C. Wasson's career is even more idiosyncratic as he was a singer before this production, a writer of songs and a musical manager, even writing the musical composition for a song written by one of the men behind the legendary Patterson–Gimlin film, which was an influence on him taking this film as a director³. Night of the Demon on screen and off-screen does gain a lot from this. As much as the production onscreen is a lurid and bizarre bigfoot film which is idiosyncratic to witness, this background context adds to the cherry on the cake for appreciating the work behind it, and its infamy as a Video Nasty has more meaning knowing the first proper release this had in distribution was in the British VHS market², and we know how that went.

Only the knowledge of Tab Hunter being offered a role, and declining, suggests an alternative version of the film I admit I wish I could have seen².

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1) Figures like author Virginia Wade, who even became controversial that Amazon was clamping down on their ebook "cryptid erotica", are a fascinating reminder that unconventional (and eyebrow raising) depictions of sexuality have no gender bias, as is documented in MONSTER PORN: Amazon Cracks Down On America’s Latest Sex Fantasy, written by Eric Spitznagel for Business Insider.

2) Just a Little Green Kid Outta Waco, Texas, a Blu Ray interview short with Ball included for the 2022 USA Severin Films Blu-Ray release, and transferred over to the 88 Films 2022 release in the United Kingdom.

3) The Demon Made Me Do It, the Blu Ray interview short with Wasson included for the 2022 USA Severin Films Blu-Ray release, and transferred over to the 88 Films 2022 release in the United Kingdom.

The Ghastly Ones (1968)

 

Director: Andy Milligan

Screenplay: Hal Sherwood and Andy Milligan

Cast: Veronica Radburn as Martha; Maggie Rogers as Hattie; Hal Borske as Colin Trask; Anne Linden as Vicky; Fib LaBlaque as Rich; Carol Vogel as Liz; Richard Romanus as Don; Eileen Hayes as Veronica; Don Williams as Bill; Hal Sherwood as Pastor Walter; Neil Flanagan as Dobbs; Ada McAllister as Ada; Robert Adsit as Robert

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Andy Milligan got on the Video Nasties list, and whilst with gore to be found here, you do watch The Ghastly Ones, and I find myself thinking of people who were disappointed by this, hated it, or came to this because of a cult surf-garage band named the Ghastly Ones, and see how much a farce the Video Nasties panic was. Yes, there were some extreme films in that list - the Nazisploitation genre, Cannibal Holocaust (1980) - and people not used to horror films being gory would have been shocked, but with how this is matched by how more extreme Hammer films got by the seventies in their own way to match the trends, it would be like they were living in a cave. I am coming to this too with admiration for the production too, but with prior knowledge of Andy Milligan cinema as being about lengthy monologues and dialogue scenes, usually full of misanthropy, from a producer/writer/director that started in independent theatre and found that horror cinema was the best way to get to make films. Acquired taste is the appropriate word here.

Milligan has been reassessed - it helps as well a cult filmmaker, Nicolas Winding Refn, is obsessed with buying seemingly lost films and helping get them preserved - but Milligan himself is as idiosyncratic as you can get in terms of actually watching the films, low budget dramas with misanthropic views of humanity and low budgets, The Ghastly Ones set in the late 1800s where an inheritance of a deceased father naturally leads to someone picking people off. The tone is set up fully in its presentation - extreme low budget independent cinema, using what period appropriate costumes could be found, sets which masked the real world of the time, in this case filming at a home from the appropriate era on Staten Island in New York City, and a cast mainly of people who, if not prolific in small roles, only have a few usually in exploitation cinema or even in Milligan's own filmography. Milligan would attempt this in a Civil War period, only for the film never to be properly finished if thankfully made available, in House of Seven Belles (1979), and here as there he does manage to create a period horror film which is not going to be as immaculate as a higher budget period film, but let's one enter the time period with suspension of disbelief.

A will is to be confirmed at a late father's mansion, isolated on an island, where his three daughters, who had to be married first before the will could be opened, will have to stay there to complete the requests of the document and claim their rights, within three days of "sexual harmony". A threat with a dead animal left on someone's white linen offers the first warning signs harmony will not last, and for those uninitiated with Andy Milligan, as stated he really liked dialogue and to have it spoken, characters emoting their anxieties and grievances for large passages of the film. Watching said lengthy dialogue scenes, whilst enjoying them myself, does with hindsight make police prosecutors in the period when this got on the Video Nasties list look bad, the sense no one bothered to actually watch the film. It takes a long time from its opening, where a man and a woman are butchered by the titular ones, to when our leads start to be picked off themselves. Slanted camera shots and close-ups make up the look of the film, and neurosis is filtered throughout until it explodes out into actual bloodshed.

The will is how it is because the father, reflecting on his own issues with his wife, felt there was no love in their marriage; this is something which in mind to who turns out the killer, [Huge Spoiler] a daughter from another relationship who was treated like dirt and as a servant [Spoilers End], proves to be his fault as much as his wife's, for creating a literal monster who serves a human head at the dining table on a silver platter. Disabled characters are a subject in his work, whether they are dealt with well or not with hindsight; here the figure with a mind of a child among the servants on the island, Colin (Hal Borske), is definitely a sympathetic figure who is as manipulated, that despite the broadness of his performances is someone who is a real casualty among the figures who probably did deserve their fates in contrast. Among Milligan films, this becomes one of the more focused in terms of genre tropes, as a figure starts bumping people off, wearing black hooded robes and aiming pitchforks into necks, but you have a slower paced proto-slasher in many ways here where the dialogue is its central prerogative. Considering one of Milligan's visual trademarks has been to swing the camera around erratically in a violent scene, as seen here, we are dealing with a director in the fringes, pulled into the light with this film when the British video watchdogs came a knocking.

It is, for those able to pick up its vibes, the slasher/murder mystery of his career which for a pure pulp title is deliciously camp. His career can be summed up well with one of the films he made in his brief stint in my home of Britain, The Body Beneath (1970). For a prominent moment, the low budget vampire story takes a back seat to scenes of the vampires, debating whether to leave the country for bloodier pastures, factor in how drugs has made the blood supply worse and how difficult it is to get anything done due to the police out at night. The Ghastly Ones is a Ten Little Indians scenario in his career, one of his most prominently known due to its Video Nasties credits, which is just as idiosyncratic for where it tangents off into.

Eaten Alive (1976)

 

Director: Tobe Hooper

Screenplay: Kim Henkel, Alvin L. Fast and Mardi Rustam

Cast: Neville Brand as Judd; Mel Ferrer as Harvey Wood; Carolyn Jones as Miss Hattie; Marilyn Burns as Faye; William Finley as Roy; Stuart Whitman as Sheriff Martin; Roberta Collins as Clara; Kyle Richards as Angie; Robert Englund as Buck; Crystin Sinclaire as Libby Wood; Janus Blythe as Lynette

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

As with many Tobe Hooper films, there is an unhinged air to Eaten Alive, and it's weird and legitimately scary electronic score from the get-go, over a shoot of the moon at the beginning, is Wayne Bell and Tobe Hooper himself composing instant nightmare fuel. It is a very simple story, and honestly, there is not much to Eaten Alive plot wise in general barring a set-up: Neville Brand is Judd, a man out of his mind running a hotel, with an alligator in the nearby water he claims is from the Egyptian Nile. The narrative is supposedly inspired by a real case - of bar-owner Joe Ball, who lived in the small Texan town of Elemendorf in the Thirties, and was convicted of murder and said to have disposed more women then presumed with the help of all the alligators he kept, something which has been challenged as being exaggerated over time from his more simpler crimes of murder¹. For Judd here, any woman (and frankly any man or child) is not safe from him killing them or letting the pet reptile after them. Even family dogs are not safe.

As a Video Nasty, the extremity is entirely felt in the evil intensity in Hooper's films, as much likely the reason it ended up on the list as the problem was when The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) became an enemy of the British censors. Artificially bright coloured lights cover the few locations, an artificial fetid Texas of cat houses and rundown hotels, entirely at night and shot on stages, which presents an unnatural reality to the production. Almost everyone here too is unhinged and wandered out of an entirely different world as well, where your bordello mistress (including her old age makeup) is a strange caricature in suit slacks and shirt, including a money tending cap, to William Finley (Phantom of the Paradise (1974)) and Robert Englund (the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise) adding to the weird aura.

A lot of the film is disturbed in general, the same manic energy of the original Chain Saw Massacre (and some fo the 1986 sequel) felt here. The setting and the character of Judd in the little we get is as vivid as the Leatherface family - that he has a caged monkey, the plot points about his wooden leg (and losing it to the pet), even a Nazi flag in the background in one scene, scarred and marked like an acquired from being a soldier and getting hold of it in combat. Without a lot of dialogue and drama to work with here, as a horror film, these details add to the production, but there is already from the get-go a sense most of the cast in unhinged. Before Judd is chasing a young girl under his hotel's foundations with a giant scythe, she is likely traumatised by her family's complete lack of stability, a returning Marilyn Burns from Chain Saw and William Finley having a scene, after the dog is eaten, which is just as disturbing for how he acts out a mental breakdown between parents. That there is stability, with an adult daughter and a father trying to find her sister, adds the sense of ordinary reality in its brief snippets as a contrast but how thin the veneer is. The bar is still full of guys like Buck (Englund), a stud whose bravado is with being a trouble starter, and even if he is harmless, he just has to drive his girlfriend of the night down the right country road and find himself in Judd's nightmare hotel.

The fact the crocodile is cheesy, a giant floating prop, is not going to detract from how alarmingly effective the rest of the film is. It has, as a result, a more visceral sense of peril even if not that violent, able to work around its slighter plot between legitimately disturbing aspects (such as Burns, again put through the wringer, being tied to a bed for a large portion of the film) against an absurd tone close to a very sick sense of humour. Credibly, Hooper would channel this into later films when the eighties came about, and whilst Crocodile (2000) tragically felt more of a sedate TV movie in tone, when it nodded to this film briefly it was still a nice wink at one of Hooper's underrated films.  

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1) Eaten Alive: the bizarre true story behind Tobe Hooper's alligator horror movie, written by Rebecca Hawkes for The Telegraph, published May 4th 2015.

The Funhouse (1981)

 

Director: Tobe Hooper

Screenplay: Larry Block

Cast: Elizabeth Berridge as Amy Harper; Cooper Huckabee as Buzz; Largo Woodruff as Liz Duncan; Miles Chapin as Richie; Kevin Conway as Freak Show Barker / Strip Show Barker / Conrad Straker (The Funhouse Barker); Wayne Doba as Gunther Twibunt (The Monster); Sylvia Miles as Madame Zena; William Finley as Marco the Magnificent

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

When you're stoned, Charles Manson is a terrific guy.

Tobe Hooper plus Universal Pictures equals a Video Nasty, and this is a higher budget and prestige title among the Nasties, normally independent productions or non-American studio films, and evidence that no one was particularly safe. In the case of The Funhouse, far from the nastiest of the slasher movies from this era entirely, I entirely suspect the infamy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) filters through this, the film which Tobe Hooper as a director immediately gained a reputation and notoriety for. (There is also another theory that this was mistaken for The Last House on Dead End Street (1977), which was titled The Fun House on British VHS¹, a film which for another day has to be seen to be believed as well as being legitimately gruesome in content). This presents an important part of Tobe Hooper's career, as it was the one made after Salem's Lot (1979), Hooper's seminal and (large scale) TV mini-series/film, his first steps into mainstream filmmaking. This as a result is a change of pace, with Hooper clearly interested with the carnival setting itself, enticed by the chance to film at a real one, an east coast production shot in Miami, Florida in reality¹, and with real rides and numerous extras onscreen to bring out the atmosphere.

I have a bias for carnival/circus films, so naturally I like The Funhouse even without factoring in it being a solid slow burn horror film, where even marginalized titles like Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), which people thought stole the 25th Best Picture Oscar from High Noon (1952), is a favourite for depicting historically this fascinating area of popular entertainment. Carnivals and circuses I realise are very different things, but they form a connection in my mind, as travelling entertainments which feel marginalised in the modern world, of spectacle and the reality of them, alongside the graft and in the case of carnivals, the ways they exist entirely on selling spectacle whilst even only providing the illusion. With their own worlds of aesthetic and figures that have to travel in the shows, they are all enticing, and in terms of the carnival by itself, The Funhouse is the same even if it plays to the stereotypes of them being places of the marginalised and the dangerous. Carnivals, more so than circuses, have had a legacy in cinema which is not just the infamous Tod Browning film Freaks (1932), but even film noir in Nightmare Alley, the 1947 and 2021 versions, of places ran by outsiders and with their own rules. Their posters displaying the now politically incorrect freak shows to their faded colours on the rides have a palpable energy to them which The Funhouse fully succeeds in bringing in.

Opening with a fake out twist combining Psycho (1960) and Halloween (1978) in one, if with the creepiness of a little brother inappropriately terrorising his older sister in the shower, we are also already seeing the time when slashers were prolific for this one to be commissioned, and could also nod to their lineage. The set up is simple. Four people - our female lead Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), on a date with her boyfriend Buzz (Cooper Huckabee), with their male and female friend - are at a carnival haunted with rumours of two kids killed there in another town. The film is methodical, where a large portion of the film is entirely feeding off the mood of the location, a world that makes the film compelling to witness if of another age. No carnival would be allowed to be like this one nowadays - we could probably get the exotic sexy dancing tent for an adult show, but the idea of an erotic female strip show near the rides kids are on reveals the layers of this culture from the past. The same goes to the carnival freak show, where alongside the prop things in jars here involves real animals born with physical deformities brought into the film, sad cows you wish to pet, with twin heads melding together or missing part of their face, immortalised onscreen. Even details you may miss add to this world, such as the fact one of the leads, actor Kevin Conway, is playing all three of the carnival barkers, not just the fun house's who is a central figure, adding layers in whether they are separate people or related.

As a slasher, it barely qualifies due to this lengthy set-up, where the terror comes in very late as, deciding to stay in the funhouse overnight, this ill-advised decision leads to the central quartet to witness a murder. This is not a bad thing as, alongside the fact it allows William Finley to cameo as a drunk Dracula magician, it gives the film so much more emphasis on the characters within pure pulp, not a lot of deaths transpiring for the genre but a lot more atmosphere produced as a result, drawing the viewer in to engage. Sometimes the style and presentation is enough, and being able to soak in a natural fairground environment for a large portion was worth it in sacrifice of the tropes of the slasher genre expected from the time. It helps this is the best funhouse you wish did exist; even if Humpty Dumpty is inexplicably there in the foreground at one point next to stereotypical cannibalistic tribesmen, the production design is exceptional when the film is mostly confined to this location in the finale, a vivid place especially with the creepy but exceptionally made animatronics, made by people who specialised in this in real life. Helping as well is that this is Hooper's first film in widescreen, the unrelenting and unnerving energy he had in his films before transitioning into a new style for him, with the cinematographer for Walter Hill's The Warriors (1979), Andrew Laszlo, and production designer Mort Rabinowitz in tow to give this ill-reputed Video Nasty a credible style.

The intensity of Hooper's films before, when the chaos starts, is still here, and it is apt that by the end, this wonderland of lights and rides ends with traumatised figures of various ages, even if the body count would be considered pitiful for many. How this managed to get on the Video Nasties list is curious, as speculated in the first half, but I am glad with hindsight it did, as this underappreciated film in its director's filmography, about to enter a period of vibrant and even weird films in the eighties, was allowed to grab attention even among the more notorious movies form the list.

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1) Slashback! Something Not Quite Human is Waiting in THE FUNHOUSE (1981), written by Gregory Burkart for Blumhouse.com, published on February 16th 2016 and preserved on web.archive.org.

Don't Go in the Woods...Alone (1981)

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Director: James Bryan

Screenplay: Garth Eliassen

Cast: Jack McClelland (as Peter); Mary Gail Artz (as Ingrid); James P. Hayden (as Craig); Angie Brown (as Joanne); Ken Carter (as Sheriff); David Barth (as Deputy Benson); Larry Roupe (as Store Owner)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #99

Another day, another infamous slasher but one that's difficult for me to defend even if I'm happy it has its fans By now, it's a film-by-film basis whether I actually like the slasher sub-genre or not; here the tone of grungy synth and wooden post-synch dubbing, as a deranged mountain man picks off anyone who steps into his vast track of land in the Utah woodland, should appeal to me for its catastrophic weirdness, another to sit next to The Nail Gun Massacre (1985) in slashers I inexplicably like more than the Friday the 13th films and other popular entries I've seen due to their ramshackle natures. Sadly I can't because, whilst Nail Gun is a constant and prolonged series of madness, Don't Go into the Woods was a slog, a similar series of random murders as the other film but feeling like being actually stuck in the middle of the Utah woods without any guidance to follow. Fair credit due, the woodland setting does stand out, a sense of scale from how vast and isolated it is. Brief snippets of homebrew regional filmmaking is found, mainly anything involving the sheriff department, a sense of character valuable in spite of wooden acting due to verisimilitude, but it was ultimately a bad decision to concentrate on the countless, desensitising number of deaths, where barring four central campers everyone else just pops up to be disposed of immediately.

It worked for Nail Gun only because everything in each scene is illogical and in its own alien world, where even a simple piece of dialogue about finding a body had a bucket load of weirdness to it, whilst here you can see the glue trying to stick it all together and not succeeding. There's a fine line eventually to finding "virtues" in a film like this with their haphazard, unintentional moments of humour, and having to wait for them over a couple of minutes or even over ten. I could find the wheelchair bound man's endless journey up a hill, only to be cut short, sickly hilarious. Cherry and Dick are, understandable, the most well known aspect of the film , despite being characters for one scene, memorable not only for the dialogue and its pronunciation, by just for Dick's ridiculous kimono dressing gown. The score ends with an end credit joke, originally meant for humour but liked well enough to be put in the credits, from the composer that's actually funny in a legitimately way. But a lot of the film is literally a random bystander who looks the same as other random bystander being offered, without tension or shock to it, and there's a period in the middle where the film drags to the point of agony.

A lot of slashers obsess about their body country over characters, but perversely its only where there's a personality to the films that they're actually of any interest to me. It's not just the justifiably well made, or even great, ones that can succeed in this, but those who manage even through clang worthy dialogue and random, unexplained events to have a charm as a result. As much as I'm happy with Don't Go in the Woods...Alone having its own fan base, it was a miserable experience to revisit, not enough humour and fan to sustain it. Moments of actual grit, nastiness with a bear trap or some of the deaths, gives it some weight but a lot of it is difficult for me to gauge with. 

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Halloween 31 For 31: Don't Go In The House (1979)

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Director: Joseph Ellison

Screenplay: Ellen Hammill, Joe Masefield and Joseph Ellison

Cast: Dan Grimaldi (as Donald Kohler); Colin Mclnness (as Young Donald Kohler); Robert Osth (as Bobby Tuttle); Ruth Dardick (as Mrs. Kohler); Ralph D. Bowman (as Father Gerritty)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #53

As a perfect example of the golden age of American independent genre movies Don't Go In The House does emphasis that, warts and all, they can be compelling in their attempts to tackle incredibly difficult subjects like abuse and serial killings in the tone of incredibly gritty, low-fi exploitation films. Very much in the lineage of films following Psycho (1960), about men with traumatised histories with their mothers, Donald Kohler (Dan Grimaldi) is one such man visible disconnected from reality, in the opening scene witnessing a co-worker accidentally get set on fire and merely standing in the spot watching them blankly scream in pain burning. Having been constantly burnt on the arms as a child, his punishment according to his mother to get rid of his sins (likely conceived out of wedlock from her obsession with the sin of desire and how the father is never mentioned at all), Donald has developed into an isolated human being with deeply problematic views of women. These views become dangerous the moment his elderly mother dies in a chair in their family home, developing a desire to create a steel plated, fire resistant room in the basement and kidnap women he picks up to touch them within using a flamethrower, collecting their remains afterwards as company to talk to.

While an exceptionally lurid film in premise, synonymous as a Video Nasty especially for its disturbingly realistic first death by fire done with optical trickery, this is however easy to categorise alongside a brand of other low budget, run down and incredibly serious films from this period in the seventies and early eighties usually about damaged individuals and/or grimy urban locals, such as Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer (1979), films which even when they are blackly comedic or even splatstock had a nasty sense of reality to them difficult to shake off from mind. Don't Go In The House has moment so levity, the cheesy music and an extended sequence in a disco club time stamping it, but it's an incredibly dark film in tone. It also shows its rawness as a production as well, particularly in the acting as it was post dubbed and has a strange disconnect to the performances, but it has a deeply unsettling presentation in the midst of this.

Grimaldi in the lead certainly helps give the film a greater sense of thought. Whilst his post-dubbing can lead to moments of odd line pronunciation, his manner as a visibly disturbed man forces you to have to deal with its subtext about cruelty against children, eventually culminating by the end of the film in a final scene of the camera passing its eye onto another young boy who could develop the voices in his head Donald does. When his own mother dies, after the initial grief, said voices in Donald's head encourages him to act like a liberated and mischievous young boy, turning the music on his record player up as loudly as possible and jump up and down on the seat of one of the chairs, moments which suggest a strange levity in the bleakness of the moment until the voices turn and decide he should burn his mother's corpse as revenge. The character and Grimaldi's performance creates a compelling figure, a mix of a grown up man child, gestures suggesting psychotic glee as he has to prepare himself to kill an innocent woman, including ritually dressing up in a fire retardant full body suit, and sympathy especially as his demons take on literal form in the growing number of dead women start to move around in the house tormenting him.

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Don't Go In The House is also helped by a common thread amongst independent genre films from this era that they as much compelling dramas, regardless of whether the acting is perfect or not, as they are genre films and the fact that, as low budget productions, the results usually mean an entire world of interesting faces and locations you rarely find in higher budgeted Hollywood movies even in this time period where interesting faces and sights were possible to see in large scale movies, a home grown quality that adds to the grit to the material. Baring one strangely dubbed priest Father Gerritty, this adds a lot of emotional connection alongside Grimaldi's performance. This can be the amusing and thoughtful, from the amusing scene inside a fashion store where the clerk gets Donald the perfect threads for a disco club to his only friend Bobby Tuttle (Robert Osth) who cares for Donald incredibly, but especially helps with generating a horrible discomfort with what Donald commits, with all the actresses who play the women victimised looking and acting like women who would've lived next door to the audience of this film at the time, emphasising a greater sense of agony when it gets to their eventual demises. The music by Richard Einhorn, who'd go on to have a healthy career in genre cinema and acclaim for his tangents into artistically high minded scores and those for cult films alike, injects the film with a further sense of dread with his use of atonal drones, the electronic noises adding to the ill-ease Donald lives through.

Not surprisingly, Don't Go In The House was seen as too grim and disturbing to be immensely popular, a chilling effect felt when witnessing it now with its stark tone and incredibly bleak out view of life. However because of this reason, the film has a greater reputation and I for one can absolutely see why in terms of its virtues.

From https://pic.yify-torrent.org/20150305/36368/
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Halloween 31 For 31: Axe (1977)

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Dir. Frederick R. Friedel

Somehow this Halloween season has become a Video Nasties series by accident. Covering Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) was just a coincidence, the others a result of how the choices for films to cover has panned out. So far, my belief from one of the reviews of the nasties I've done, that they have a higher quality to them then their reputation suggests they have, have been true. Maybe I defended something like Frozen Scream (1975) too much, but in comparison to what a Video Nasties list would look like if it was collected films from now onto it, the real list has a lot more variability and quality for all the films on it that are poor. Call it dismissive of today's horror and cult cinema, but it's also baring in mind that the ability now for anyone to make a film, a great thing, comes with a bad side that the technology and distribution allows anyone to make a film. With the older films that populated the video nasties list, only the determined seemed to be willing to make a movie because of the resources and time needed. Axe is one such example, a low American exploitation film which for the most part is the one film that feels inappropriate to have covered for this season. Three criminals, (Jack Canon, Ray Green and director Frederick R. Friedel himself), run from the law, two of them committing brutality for fun against anyone they encounter. They eventually get to a house in the country where the quiet, introverted Lisa (Leslie Lee) lives with her disabled grandfather (Douglas Powers). As they become more forceful, she eventually snaps, leading to incidents that do make Axe appropriate for the season in its gruesomeness.

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_YCh4JuTyHYc/S9Ax53KCq8I/
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Like Whispering Corridors (1998), these two drastically different films, of different themes and countries of origins, are nonetheless genre films that are drama heavy, with emphasis on the dialogue and the acting rather than horror, and like the other film, Axe is a lot more compelling than most award worthy dramas because there is no pretence to the material. The dialogue at times is rudimentary, and the story to its end is slight, but there is enough detail and texture to both to make the drama interesting. It's an incredibly short feature film, only sixty six minutes long, and to its benefit, with vibe comparable to fellow Nasty The Last House on the Left (1972), it's many scenes of drama before the titular axe comes into play never become tiresome, and the film is unable to have an flab to it, so everything onscreen and heard is of importance for the drama or the plot. For the most part, the film is a sombre, slower paced work that is very realistic and downbeat in tone. When it gets closer to the breaking point for Lisa, the transition to the final act, the film uses a few moments of unreal imagery, such as an edit showing a bathroom mirror broken with blood, to represent the psychological effect the events are having on the Lisa character. As a film with a minimal cast, and in one environment after the first quarter with the criminals, including a pretty nasty sequence in a grocery store with a female employee, it works as an entertaining, grimy feature that feels like a chamber piece. It never drags its feet along, procrastinating, yet neither does it become paper thin to the point its vacuous. There is enough in each character that they stand out, including one of the criminals being sympathetic, stuck with the others, adding to the conflict as the film reaches its conclusion.

From http://stigmatophiliablog.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/axe-mirror.jpg

As a nasty it's not shocking in terms of an offensive work. It is pretty grim though instead. The opening scene in a hotel as the criminals terrorise someone, the reasons why never explained, merely establishes their characters as reprehensible killers that sets up the character dynamics. As is the grocery store sequence which is probably the most horrifying moment, still shocking today, as it involves humiliation and an improvised game of William Tell. The actual axe brutalisation is slight, as the film is much more casual and moody in tone, removing any potential bad taste from the material. It takes itself seriously, so the violent never becomes lurid, instead effective when required. That doesn't stop it from being creepy, but through tension, as some inexplicable drops of red are seen on the stairs in a lengthy dramatic moment. The closest to full blown horror is in the final scene, involving dinner and a fireplace, which does have an impact and really freaked me as a viewer, despite the obvious of it but because the concept evoked so much in little actually seen. Altogether Axe works as a subtle, quiet work; a lot of the films on the nasties list, along with the ultraviolent schlock, were surprisingly subtle like Axe when you see many of them, suggesting that horror and genre cinema was as capable between the eras covered in the list, the sixties to early eighties, of subtlety as they were shock and revulsion. I confess that the last time I saw Axe, the first time many years ago, I found it unbelievably dull, but that was in response to a slow, muted style to the work - little gore, emphasis more on the drama, low budget and raw around the edges - that I was not capable of "getting" into from a diet of more lavish or ultraviolent films I was on as a younger adult. I was not able to appreciate films like it through their original contexts, but if seeing these video nasties again here, or the first time, has taught me anything in this season, they have developed characters which shine out, virtues that have been ignored when even covering the nasties decades later when most were unbanned and available.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YCh4JuTyHYc/S9Ax6x-Ya-I/
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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Axe has moments that take advantage of feeling nightmarish, or part of Lisa's mental collapse, but the whole film is more of a rough toned, slightly mean spirited genre film with more realism and heavy drama.

From http://residualechoes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Picture-23.png

A Cinema of the Abstract movie?

Instead it belongs in the camp of fascinating American films that shifted the line between genres and tone from the seventies, those that could be incredibly idiosyncratic in their styles and unique. Axe is a film for the blog, though stuff like this that never intended to be surreal or peculiar would be better served if discussed in another way. Something which might be worth looking into for myself.

Halloween 31 For 31: Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)

Had to use the poster iconic to Brits like me
(http://grandguignolexperience.com/zombi2/zombieflesheatersuk.jpg)

(Aka. Zombi 2)

Dir. Lucio Fulci

The "Godfather of Gore" tag that Lucio Fulci has had over him, which has yet stuck him in the back as Dario Argento or Mario Bava were acclaimed, has never been the thing that led me to view his films. Irritating circumstances mean that a huge amount of his filmography is not available or limited in availability - comedies, westerns, giallos and even a few of his horror films from after his famous period between 1979 and 1982. Three years in a career that started in 1959 is tiny in a filmography that, even if the consistency was variable, might have well been made available in some fashion so a fuller picture of the man was possible. The irony is that Fulci is viewed highly for his horror films, a genre he wasn't that fond of, much more proud of material like his giallos. Yet to scratch through their characters, I've yet seen how vast and more varying the careers of the Italian genre directors of the golden period between the sixties and eighties were. From Sergio Martino to Enzo G. Castellari, Umberto Lenzi to Fulci himself, most of them were proliferate, with the only real exception in Argento, working directors who jumped through genres like studio system directors-for-hire. Far from an insulting term, a director-for-hire as long as they gave the producers what they wanted could sneak or blatantly put in their obsessions and interests into their work. With the Italian cult directors too, they were as obsessed with the spectacle of shooting action sequences or being craftsmen. With Fulci, the gore is part of his trademarks, but not the drawing card contrary to his reputation for me like it would for teenagers and splatter fans. Instead it has always been the atmosphere and mood of his work which transferred over any genre from the movies I've seen of his. Even in a "special" film like A Cat In The Brain (1990).

From http://monsterminions.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/fat-boat-zombie1.jpg

Many people will know of Zombie Flesh Eaters. Originally called Zombi 2 to cash-in on George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) in Italy, called Zombie Flesh Eaters in the UK where it would become a video nasty, with a prolonged history of just being able to get an uncut release. A woman looking for her father (Tisa Farrow) and a reporter (Ian McCulloch) follow the lead of her father's disappearance after a freak incident with an abandoned boat in the New York harbour. Their lead goes to a tropical island in the Caribbean, Matul Island, the potential zombie apocalypse about to take place, a doctor (Richard Johnson) trying to explain the cause scientifically but finding himself with a potentially supernatural phenomenon as the zombies spread on the island. Without spoiling the film for those who haven't seen it, there are many things from the film that have become part of cult cinema history. The music, especially the melancholic and languid main theme, from Giorgio Cascio and Fabio Frizzi. The infamous eye trauma sequence involving a door. A zombie fighting a shark, which really doesn't prepare you for actually seeing the sequence, which everyone should have on their cinematic bucket list to see. Even the gore, though I found it uninteresting on its own, because of how it's used in context with everything else. The film is one of the most well known of the Italian horror films, spawning a tiny boom of Italian zombie films for a year or so, and being financially successful internationally. It's a film that can reach so far in cult pop culture that, while most people in my town may not know of, there is a t-shirt based on the film in a music store there amongst those for bands and Adventure Times, managing to puncture into the mainstream if just through a few quotable images.

From http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/437/2975/1600/5.jpg

Zombies are everywhere. In films. Comic books and manga. Board games. TV. Maybe a breakfast cereal. Definitely zombie erotica, but I've yet to dare explore that area. They are the most peculiar of pop culture fads in that they involve a fandom over a type of monster of folklore, but unlike vampires became popular when the original folklore was abandoned in favour of that created in films. Fulci, who would kick-start his most known period of ultraviolent horror films by how well Zombie Flesh Eaters did, actually crosses the original folklore of Voodoo and almost somnambulist drones with the zombies brought through George Romero's films. The obsession with death, the decay and excessive headshots to zombies is here, but it's through Fulci's trademark of the fluctuation of the body common throughout his films. Even the obvious rubber prosthetic effects add to this mutability of the body he concerned himself over - from life to death, and how the flesh can be remade and moulded through destruction or rot. His take on zombies is vastly different from what zombie films are seen as: fast paced, ADD, getting a shotgun or chainsaw and carving up the living dead on mass to a heavy metal soundtrack. Fulci's film is deliberately paced, an eerie work that, for its gore, is as much about mood. Wide expansive shots of a deserted tropical village, of the New York harbour, images of rotten corpses of conquistadors slowly rising from the grave. It is a film that takes it's time, is not necessarily narrative driven and even the violence is depicted in a sombre mood.

From http://monsterminions.files.wordpress.com/2011
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Rather than the adrenaline many zombie based works now, of a genre for a young audience despite the violent content of much of the pop culture, Zombie Flesh Eaters comes from a director whose work is viewed through a nihilistic, misanthropic view of the world. An underrated director of composition and creating mood, it is a film I am becoming more admiring of not from the perspective of the violence, which many become interested in his work for, but for this atmosphere and the illogical tone of his films that caught my interest watching his films for the first time. There are films I hold up as superior to this - The Beyond (1981) which is also one of his most well regarded films, City of the Living Dead (1980) which is my personal favourite, even a film as maligned as Manhattan Baby (1982). But Zombie Flesh Eaters gets stronger as I view it more. Most of the film, once it gets to the island, is of the characters wandering it until they are trapped by the hordes of the dead, as minimalistic as you could get as a narrative, Fulci not someone, though he has made story heavy works, who is concerned with plot as he is with tone. Even in a weak film, his attitude to an unpredictable, free flowing style of narrative is compelling. Here, what eventually makes it a great film, when it reaches the survivors trapped in a church surrounded by zombies, or the final image, breathlessly memorable, back in New York, is that you have a great director taking the material seriously with a tone that lingers in the mind.

From http://www.dvdactive.com/images/editorial/screenshot/2006/7/zombi4.jpg

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

There will be a Lucio Fulci film that will get on the list, maybe a few. This is one of the more conventional films in his filmography so it doesn't fit the requirements.

From http://whatisthiszombieapocalypse.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/41-586x236.jpg

A Cinema of the Abstract movie?

Personally it's a film that I'm appreciating far more when I see it repeatedly. As for the appropriate film from the director? There's City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, even A Cat In The Brain and plenty of others to cover. The lack of availability of the other genre related works is problematic, knowing full well they might not be as marketable, just for the fact that we miss out the chance to see how Fulci eventually got to the position of a cult horror director many see him as. The chance as well to see how he became as interested in the abstract that would make the films I have seen utterly memorable. 

Halloween 31 For 31: Dead & Buried (1981)

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdx7qXoMzDgzJ7A6dOnOMNGSVJp31ZlaSyFFRFfbvlwCjQnL1kmn7X3MGL-FlwP7H0h-UWXBoZqVDu67J1NxhPQqT5ftI4rIwA91r1hCWUf-A_YeHLSHWQ6Xglf5h3CYC314GJTyR5_hpf/s1600/dead+and+buried+movie+poster.jpg

Dir. Gary A. Sherman

Returning to the Video Nasties well again for a review, there is a big question to ask myself since I've seen a lot of them by now: how many of them are any good? Common perception is that many are terrible. The highest tier, The Evil Dead (1981) to Dario Argento's inclusions, are seen as great films. Lucio Fulci's entries are held in high regard as well as Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and a few other works. Most of the films are seen as rubbish. Personally, barring one or two, the quality of the films are far and away better than their reputation are. This is bearing in mind that some of them are technically terrible, but even a film like Mardi Gras Massacre (1978) is amusing and memorable, always having something of worth in hindsight to like. For example, I can include a film I reviewed on my old blog, Frozen Scream (1975), which I originally hated but in the year or more from viewing it has retained a mad quality in its failures in my memory. (Only a film like Forest of Fear (1980), for anyone interested, is unable to be entertaining even in this context for me). The second and third tier films of quality, in the middle, are for debate depending on your individual tastes, the hidden gems that shine out for each person. The Witch Who Came From The Sea (1976) is one of the best of the Video Nasties for me, but it would also be a hidden gem for others. Dead & Buried is another example. In a small quaint costal town, Potter's Bluff, where everyone knows everyone and everyone is seemingly happy, strangers to the town are starting to be killed, becoming obvious to the viewer than to Sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino) that something is amiss, the later investigating the murders but with the foreboding sense of sinister machinations hidden in the community.

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_qeg1OcClj7U/S71u1ztF7AI/
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Dead & Buried becomes the equivalent of a horror comic or a short story which builds and builds up to a ghoulish plot twist for the finale. It is established before the protagonist is introduced that something very wrong is taking place in Potter's Bluff, but it is added upon with a greater, macabre addition and details befitting a comic book like narrative. Logically, a lot of the narrative itself, as Gillis juggles suspicions of his wife (Melody Anderson), the odd behaviour of resident mortician William G. Dobbs (Jack Albertson) and the murders themselves, makes no realistic sense especially as new information is made available and when it gets to its final plot twist. What it becomes instead is a film that firmly sits itself in the dreamlike, though its kept in the tone of a Tales from The Crypt narrative, little touches for most of its length that push it towards this unexpected combination of moods. Out of most of the nasties, this is one of them that has the visibly higher production values, one of the closest to being a 'mainstream' film. Interestingly I've encountered the director  Gary A. Sherman before with Raw Meat (aka. Death Line) (1972), and while I wasn't necessarily the biggest fan of his debut, the transition almost ten years later to this, his second, does show someone with a considerable skill in creating solid, atmospheric horror cinema. Dan O'Bannon is in the credits as one of the scriptwriters, someone of considerable legacy, though the other man credited Ronald Shusett has as much of an interesting pedigree, writing for both Alien (1979) and Total Recall (1990). The film itself in terms of its story feels like it's been  influenced by pulpy genre mediums like sci-fi and horror comics that come from the decades long before rather than the slasher films and b-movies of the early eighties or the exploitation cinema of the seventies. With a serene jazz and classical theme by Joe Renzetti, Dead & Buried has an elegance to the work, set in a tiny, close-knit town that drastically contrasts the gruesome (and noticeably latex effect heavy) deaths that take place, far more inclined to a lyrical, moody horror film from another generation than this period. The one thing, already mentioned, that puts it into the eighties is the death scenes and acts of violence, that were more than likely why it was on the Nasties list; even today thirty years later, a man being set on fire for the opening sequence is still vicious for a modern viewer to see and does become a message, despite feeling like a fifties or sixties horror movie in tone, that it's still not appropriate family viewing as a horror film.

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The luridness contrasts against the grace as the narrative quickly elevates into the fantastical for the story, the supernatural quickly introduced and adding to the comic-like nature of the narrative. Sufferance to say it involves human hearts and occultism, and I won't reveal any more barring that an already creepy premise, as presences gather around unsuspecting victims, grows more so with the gristly suggestions of what has taken place in Potter's Bluff before what we see in the film. It's advantage as a film is that, as much as I enjoyed say, Mardi Gras Massacre or Don't Go Into The Woods...Alone! (1981), Dead & Buried's technical advantages, in terms of being a Video Nasty,  give it an immense advantage that it thankfully uses to full effect. A melancholic tone to the proceedings added by many scenes that are inherently eerie, especially when it comes to scenes set at night, one of which involves an abandoned house with an innocence group of people who, in context to what has happened to others previously in the plot, you instantly feel tension upon viewing as you do not want them to befall the same way others have. Were it not for the gristly death scenes, this would be something like I Bury The Living (1958) in style, but having the deaths, including one nasty instance with a rock, another with acid, all with added creepiness in that cameras are involved, firmly pushes it into being much more macabre. There is a slow, lingering pace to the film that, despite how ridiculous the content is when thought about, packages it together with a cohesive elegance mixed with these shocking moments. That the film is set in a quiet American town with a small population, including Robert Englund in a small role, where almost everyone knows each other, must tap into a fear for at least American viewers of the isolation that could take place in what should be an idyllic place to live, where Sherriff Gillis is completely at a loss of each discovery he finds and even his wife's behaviour, despite being the kind hearted, loving wife who is a school teacher, is up to question when the paranoia and stranger sights ramp up. It has a quality to its creation that makes it possible to take it serious in vast contrast to many a Video Nasty that one would merely find hilarious. In particularly for actor James Farentino, he has to bear the brunt of a plot around his character that spirals out of control into more gruesome, strange and twist heavy content. The film in general managed to balance itself out into the subdued and the content that takes place, able to take you into the reality being depicted as well as be cartoonish in premise. It's great virtue is that, while its the finale that knocked me for six, when it becomes its most outlandish, that film before it has plenty of moments just as memorable and good.

From http://besthorrordecades.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/DeadBuried_2.jpg

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

No, it doesn't qualify for the Abstract list for the simple reason is that it's not abstract enough. While it does get ridiculous as it goes along, it's more of a pulpy spine tingling tale than something from an odder state of mind.

A Cinema of the Abstract movie?

Not necessarily, though it qualifies as the kind of film I am always to happy to discover - an underseen or underrated film, here particularly from the Video Nasties list, that is both a good film and also leaves a lasting effect for me. I like films that this, with no potential for sequels, very individual and different from a lot of films, which balance in a dicey position of being good and ludicrous and succeed in the end in their sprawling, unconventional tones. What Dead & Buried doesn't do in terms of being "abstract" it makes up for by being a good cult film and catching me by surprise in its quality. 

From http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image09/deadburied2.jpg