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.

Number Seventeen (1932)

 

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville and Rodney Ackland

Based on the play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon

Cast: Leon M. Lion as Ben, Anne Grey as Nora, John Stuart as Barton, Donald Calthrop as Brant, Barry Jones as Henry Doyle, Ann Casson as Rose Ackroyd, Henry Caine as Mr. Ackroyd, Garry Marsh as Sheldrake

Canon Fodder

 

Sausage. Hit him over the head with.

Number Seventeen promises a lot as an early Alfred Hitchcock film immediately, of expressionist shadows as a homeless sailor enters a house for sale, only to find another man and also a corpse there. Already you have awesome compositions, almost like a supernatural drama, of looming shadow hands alongside jump cut editing to a train to show shock. It is however, just in its title too, a weird film for Hitchcock, the kind of “weird” in terms of not a positively delirious title but something that is absolutely curious in his career. It is an oddity with virtues but a lot of issues behind its creation.

Hitchcock had to make this film, part of his career with British International Pictures¹. Despite the fact he had already made The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) and Blackmail (1929), and was becoming an acclaimed filmmaker, his career up to sailing to Hollywood and the United States for Rebecca (1940) includes films which stand out in premise (his personal project, the drama Rich and Strange (1931)), only to not become films which stand out the highest in his career, and titles which he made as a studio director whether he wanted to make them or not, such as the operetta film with Jessie Matthews, Waltzes from Vienna (1934). Number Seventeen, based on a thriller play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, has a suspense plot including one of the earliest McGuffins, if not for the first, for Hitchcock’s career in that it is a piece about jewel thieves swarming around this house alongside a detective, his daughter, a cop in disguise and the homeless man Ben (Leon M. Lion). Hitchcock however, in adapting this, decided to turn it into a farce on purpose tonally, which affects the final result.

The final film because of this is a really broad farce which does not really work. Hitchcock films can be legitimately funny, without becoming comedies but being suspense films which have incredibly dour winks at the banal mixing with the morbid – the cop in Frenzy (1972), one of his grimmest tales, whose wife is trying experimental cooking to his horror, or a key scene of Strangers on a Train (1951), whilst not played for laughs, being based on whether the lead can complete a game of tennis as quickly as he can – or incredible one-liners, such as the many Cary Grant has in North by Northwest (1959). This does eventually have charm, with Leon M. Lion as Ben, once you get past his initial gurning klutz performance, becoming lovable as a genial homeless man caught in the middle of this against his will, but a lot of the humour, being the slapstick to speed up fight scenes, goes over the head in actually landing. A lot of it being a pastiche of the suspense drama completely falls flat when it eventually gives up and becomes a more heightened crime film by the finale. Instead a lot of this feels like a stage play with Hitchcock managing to make it visually vibrant and soaked in shadows, entirely set at night, of a group of people ending up in this house all at once. The sense of this comes when one of its parodies, the female lead on the villains’ side who is so mysterious she is a deaf-mute, being jettisoned. When this character Nora (Anne Grey) just starts speaking, completely kneecapping one of its more idiosyncratic touches as quickly as it is introduced in a film only an hour long, you get the feeling Hitchcock made a legitimate mistake with his collaborators which effects the final quality.

Seventeen, by way of its finale with model trains, gets a really thrilling ending of escaping by train and the commandeering of a public bus to catch up with it, which shows how the film could have been cultivated into an ambitious and grander work by its director. The film had the potential to be a great production, full of McGuffins and plot points for the sake of getting to the next scene – corpses not quite dead, cops posing as lackeys, heroines secretly hiding in the villains’ side – as people fight over an expensive necklace. Even a scene of falling over a broken wooden railing does show how the comedic tone of the film could have mixed with suspense. What this feels like is a germ of a bigger work, and instead it is Hitchcock the master craftsman who sticks out than a successful result, still early in his career showing the mind which planned out his films carefully before they were filmed, compositions even here of the images which stand out incredibly. If it is a failure in Hitchcock’s career, but that does not mean you cannot appreciate the skills he shows here that would grow in his filmography.

 

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1) Alfred Hitchcock Collectors’ Guide: Number Seventeen (1932), written by Brent Reid for Brenton on Film and published on August 16th 2019.

Mindkiller (1987)

 

Director: Michael Krueger

Screenplay: Dave Sipos, Curtis Hannum and Michael Krueger

Cast: Joe McDonald as Warren; Wade Kelley as Larry; Shirley Ross as Sandy; Kevin Hart as Brad; Tom Henry as Vivac Chandra; Diana Calhoun as Mrs. Chandra; George Flynn as Mr. Townsend; Crystel Niedle as Connie

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

The way things are going, I should try to screw a turtle!

Among the many horror films made in the eighties, Mindkiller definitely exists because of the whole issue of how, in society, the concept of falling in love and romance exist, but if you are a socially awkward person, the ways of yore to go about intimacy are far more difficult. This is unfortunately where incels came into being, the negative downward spiral in this position, which Mindkiller shows a prototypical example of in Warren (Joe McDonald). The set-up emphasises the horrific nature under its surface, a strange (i.e. perfect) atmosphere of fog machine, gel lighting over cold purplish-blue lights, jump cuts, and a mother angry about her adult son killing hamsters again. Yes, it is absurd in tone but aesthetically, before you get to the main story and Warren himself, it stands out. The son is non-human in look, but once he was a man who believing psychic ability could be honed and improved, the manuscript from his work finding itself in Warren's hands at his work as a library clerk.

Warren is the kind of guy without self-esteem, who is trying to watch The Art of Seduction starring Rex Hunter to get dating tips, without much luck with women in the same way a blind squirrel attempts to get nuts in a live mind field. Warren unfortunately has a temper, and shows the worse aspects of how people just struggle with the interaction presumed to be needed in human society, and in needing to interact and date, which even a cheesier horror film like this can depict well. This is an issue when a new employee at the library, a woman named Sandy (Shirley Ross), comes into Warren's world and he falls in love with her. Naturally, he finds in the archive this manuscript which involves mind control. A silly concept, but with the insidious nature of the seduction artist, it gets into how, in the struggle with socialising with others, the lure of controlling others for love and sex fantasies becomes the immediate downfall of Warren.

Films dealing with these types of archetypes, the male character who is weak and crawls towards violent power with horrible consequences, does become a metaphor for how many exist in horror cinema of how society makes a mistake of not designing itself to help the lonely and desperate, to prevent real life examples of Warren coming into be or preventing them from being drawn to have control in violent ways, here a research text which offers a key to greatness and mind expansion, that however ends in tears. At first, Warren is actually nice, as it has nothing to do with mind control, but to expand the mind, improving in his work and confidence, cook awesome food, and psychically cause vending machines to spit out candy bars at a whim. When he gets to women as a possession to have, including Sandy, is when absolute power corrupts, fixation and rage corrupting him. More so here if you attempt to brainwash the woman, Sandy, you have a crush on, and if something is going wrong with your newly acquired powers.

Mindkillers is a more silly genre film despite the more serious themes I can reach for in its plot, personality to be found in the film, a goofy streak of humour despite aspects of its content being far more uncomfortable in the future after due to how these themes of men reaching for more extreme ways to be with women have become a subject of greater concern, such as the incel concept itself. It follows the expected plot life of many films like this, as his experiments in mind expansion lead to Warren becoming colder and meaner, mind controlling a paper cutter blade in his friend's hand to go onto his other fingers the first signs he will lash out. The film returns to the tone its prologue has, when molecular manipulation by a machine is the final stage of the manuscript, which has unforeseen body horror consequences. A film like this does not really reinvent the wheel, but without any context for this, Mindkiller was very entertaining, a goofy tone which does not stop these more serious ideas to come into play. Even when it escalates with this plot turn, usually a film plot like this suggests one should not tamper with powers beyond what we should access; instead, truthfully, it is more the morality which fascinates me with this theme from even before cinema came into being for the horror genre. If mental expansion was possible, would we have Warrens brainwashing women to love them and hurting people, which is unfortunately the likely scenario. There are also the unforeseen health risks, such as deformation of the head with the brain trying to adapt to the ability to hear all thoughts.

The turn into body horror and the unnatural helps a slow burn and silly film, where his friend's use of the manuscript just causes him to start baying at imaginary moons between his growing confidence, like he is a pretending to be a werewolf, a film with personality which does bring some practical effects and mind bending content into the finale to escalate the tone. It gets into phantastical layers, as people are terrorized in their dreams, even monster tooth phones being brought in, and Warren's transformation fully embraces the spectacle of this era. By the end, someone looks like a Dick Tracy villain named Big Head, or people can be possessed by giant heart blobs that transfer the original person's mind. It is sad that director/co-writer Michael Krueger did not do a lot more than two films in the directorial role, and a few scripts, but sadly, the reason was that he passed in 1990¹, not long into the beginning of his career in genre cinema. This is an obscure film I tracked down in itself, one which I came to appreciate due to an absolute lack of expectations.

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1) The British Film Institute's page on Michael Krueger.

Games of the Abstract: Klonoa - Door to Phantomile (1997)

 

Developer: Namco

Publisher: Namco

One Player

Sony Playstation

 

Klonoa, in mind of the attempts to revive the series from a 2008 remake to a 2022 remaster with its sequel called the Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series, was clearly a franchise and a titular character that was loved by its creators at Namco. Created by Hideo Yoshizawa, it would have been a real shift from a man who bring to be the original Ninja Gaiden games trilogy between 1988-1991, but alongside helping create Mr. Driller, another Namco cult favorite, his career is full of idiosyncratic games and characters, to which Klonoa the cat person with winged ears he can float with stands out among Namco’s catalogue. Humorously, this was originally meant to be a tie-in game to Spriggan, the manga written by Hiroshi Takashige and illustrated by Ryōji Minagawa¹. The license fell through, and alongside the production deciding to deliberately create a lighter and cuter work in tone in contrast to a large proportion of the Playstation software catalogue¹, they had probably dodged a bullet too; alongside licensed games not being easy to preserve due to the license needing to be renewed, the 1998 animated film adaptation of Spriggan, absolutely distancing the adaptation to the original long running source material, was a mess that would have tied to the game like an albatross even if they were very different takes on the source material.

As the original plan after this was also ditched, to be a grittier science fiction game with a robotic protagonist², we instead got this beautifully lyrical work that, to my utter surprise gets bittersweet and sad as it is also is a truly creative and whimsical 2D.5 platformer depicting the world of dreams. Klonoa with his friend Huepow, a sentient blue orb creative, find themselves accidentally brought into a world threatening story which I came to know the game for from an Official UK Playstation Magazine demo disc, one of the many demos from my childhood which left a mark but I never got to when the full games were not ridiculously expensive on the second hand market. The set up from that demo, the first “Visions” (i.e. the first level), has the pair encountering an evil figure named Ghadius, who has kidnapped the maiden from the moon kingdom who sings the song to reinvigorate the dream world, Klonoa and Huepow the ones to stop him and his minions. Huepow himself is a prominent gameplay mechanic as, set in a linear gameplay route per level which yet exploits three dimensions, Klonoa uses his magical ring containing his friend to inflate and use enemies as weapons to throw at others (or breakable objects) or to double jump with.

The game’s virtue, even when it gets harder among the visions, is how crisp mechanically this all is, using this simple and idiosyncratic mechanic to figure out how to get forwards or access the unlockables, namely a certain number of imprisoned victims of Ghadius who, six per stage, unlock a bonus “Vision” when all found. This review covers the original 1997 videogame, where as much as the emphasis is on polygons being a new factor for the fifth generation of videogame consoles. It was, bluntly, a huge flaw in hindsight as it ostracised sprite and 2D games, regardless of their virtuesw, with the irony those games will have aged better. Klonoa is a delicious irony as it is a polygonal game but is “2D.5” in how this is locked on linear levels where you cannot wander in open space, but there is an inspired use of level layouts in and out of the fore and backgrounds.

Levels literally weave into each other, as alternative routes (to complete levels, like finding four seals, or to find bonuses) can go in the screen over and under the path you are on, whilst certain challenges mean lobbing minions directly at the camera or into it off your platform. It still stands out decades on, especially as the aesthetic is beautiful. It is cute, even to the point this was criticized back in the day for the voice acting being so overtly cute, high pitched noises, it was dubbed too much³, but the entire presentation is a standout. Literally taking the dream logic as its premise, the world has no overt high lights in terms of levels, but the aesthetic nature of them all is spectacular. Barring the level where their evil shadow versions can appear, even the enemies are cute, like a cat creature in a spiked ball contraption zooming about or giant minions you can inflate and use as platforms.

It is then, with surprise, how sad and macabre the game gets as for anyone who only played the demo as I did, you still get this sweet and vibrant story, where the leads are matched by goofy side characters, only with sudden shifts into tragedy. You do not expect a character to tragically die, or the bitter sweet ending of Klonoa and Huepow’s story, but that it pulls these moments off is a testament to Hideo Yoshizawa and Namco for achieving a fun platformer which pulls the heart strings. It is a well made game, which helps so much as even the fiddliness of some of the later challenges thankfully are contrasted by a) there being a save system, b) the chance for many lives to be acquired, and c) the mechanics being so solid the game itself is stretching them in inspired ways without the gameplay itself, enough that you could have had a bonus set of levels which could be about using these techniques. The sequel Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil came, for the Playstation 2 in 2001, and whilst there were spin-off titles over multiple systems at this time, it seemed sadly Klonoa would not be continued after this as a franchise. Clearly it is with love that this character however was brought back, as this first game got the 2008 remake for the Nintendo Wii, then was compiled with the sequel in the 2022 collection, through that version. This is a beautiful epilogue even if the original game, not the remake, is worth preserving by itself.

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1) INTERVIEW: Hideo Yoshizawa and Keiji Yamagishi, written by Heidi Kemps for Gaming Moe on March 27th 2018.

2) "今回のエッセイスト グラフィックデザイナー・荒井 佳彦： OUTER VISION 1：前身を考えよう". written by Yoshihiko Arai for Bandai Namco on March 6th 1998. Archived from the original on September 3, 2018. Retrieved September 3, 2018. [Japanese Only]

3) Klonoa: Nothing a little penicillin won’t fix! Review, written by the GR Staff for Game Revolution on June 4th 2004. A review where the criticism for the cute tone, especially the voices is brought up: "All of the conversation in Klonoa is comprised of annoying-as-hell squeaks and distorted human voices. Huepow’s voice is especially nerve-wrenching: it’s almost exactly like Beaker’s voice from the Muppet Labs (i.e. “Meep-meep-meep! Meep!?”). This is something you definitely want to skip while playing."

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.

Psycho Pike (1992)

 

Director: Chris Poschun

Screenplay: Chris Poschun

Cast: Douglas Kidd as Reg; Wayne McNamara as Tim; Sarah Campbell as Dara; Dawn Kelly as Rhonda; Cliff Makinson as Willy T; Red Fisher as Himself; Michael K. Panton as Sheriff of Shippagew; John Alexis as Uncle Slats

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You want a picture of my shithouse?

Just when you thought it was safe to go fishing, there is a psycho pike in the water. Credit to director-writer Chris Poschun's sole film however, mostly a melodrama about environmental pollution conspiracy, former lovers stuck together on vacation and a rubber pike monster attacking people occasionally, this is the kind of film I can get behind, falling onto plot tropes but with punches of charisma.

Certainly of the nineties, as its now alternative rock than hair metal on the soundtrack, over images of cows baffled as to why they are being filmed, the film takes its time to get more personality, set up as students out on vacation in the countryside, including Rhonda (Dawn Kelly), concerned about her student work, and the uncomfortable relationship she has with one of her male friends who, dating the other people on the vacation, used to be in a relationship themselves but decided to stay friends. There is unintentional humour - do pikes eat ducks as the male lead suggests - but where Psycho Pike gets interesting is when its eccentricities are deliberate and the plot strands are bolstered by the characters. Melodrama is apt, with our leads' conflicted relationship, and the additional issue that his friend/her boyfriend is part of his uncle's local business behind the pollution in the region's water, causing the psycho pike and killing fish, which they will try to cover up. It is hard to make a horror film where your cast (including extras) spend their time sat down fishin', but the resulting movie has a deadpan sense of humour to its advantage.

There are the line of women sat by the one telephone booth in the area after using it for multiple scenes, to two Hong Kong businessmen - one practicing Tai Chi at one point on a pier whilst the other, still in suit, reflects the sun on his head and neck for a suntan - which leads to a martial arts fight between man and fish. Then there is the best character, Willy the one eyed gas station attendant (Cliff Makinson) who, alongside the unexpected and progressive touch for a nineties film of being romantically involved with another man, is played with a wit even when revealing he lost the eye through a pike in his introduction, fitting the tone. Even a broad joke, like the Austrian photographer who takes photos of bathrooms around the world, stays the right side of goofy, that joke funnier as, reflecting on how people keep reading material in the John and wanting to create a coffee table book on Johns themselves, I would not be surprised if it exists.

An obscure film, it is also not micro-budget with some production value behind it, even able to blow up an entire building for a set piece when the evil corporation will kill to hide their pollution track record. Psycho Pike is still a silly film, but as it took its time, it caught me off-guard by its charm. Plus this does live up to actors being threatened, with gore effects, by a rubber pike monster, so everyone wins by watching this.

Alabama’s Ghost (1973)

 

Director: Fredric Hobbs

Screenplay: Fredric Hobbs

Cast: Christopher Brooks as Alabama - King Of The Cosmos; Peggy Browne as Zoerae; E. Kerrigan Prescott as Carter's Ghost; Steven Kent Browne as Otto Max; Grantham as Granny / Moxie / Gault; Karen Ingenthron as Dr. Caligula; Ann Weldon as Mama-bama; Ann Wagner Ward as Marilyn Midnight; Joel Nobel as Doc

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

I'm not afraid of no white racist ghost!

The narrative exposition out of the gate of Alabama's Ghost befits its charm, like a parody of a genre film or a fever dream - Nazis attempted to get a substance, made using a form of hashish, from the magician Carter the Great (E. Kerrigan Prescott), one that can turn people into drones when introduced into the body. Carter seemingly died in the past taking this secret with him. It is however befitting this wonderfully eccentric film made entirely by Fredric Hobbs. Serving in the military as an Air Force officer from 1953 to 1955¹, Hobbs became also an artist, pioneering the "Parade Sculpture", where he transformed automobiles into travelling ritualistic artworks he could drive around the United States², one of which makes a prominent appearance in Alabama's Ghost, among the four films he had a hand in directing and writing. Contrasting his legacy with his art sculptures and other media, even having his work in permanent collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco¹, emphasising a legacy of great legitimacy by his 2018 passing, there is delightfully however as well his psychotronic genre cult films which make up his career.

The most famous of his tetralogy, least the most well known, will likely be Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973), which got a Something Weird Video release. It befits as a sibling of Alabama's Ghost; alongside the titular Godmonster being a lovably sad creature I legitimately wish you could get a plastic action figure of like horror icons of bigger franchises. These two films, Roseland (1971) and Troika (1969) sadly much more obscure, part of a huge trend of American independent genre films made by people with their own resources, where the idea of a sculptural artist getting involved in the filmmaking medium makes sense among the many who came to the medium and only managed to make one genre film in their time next to Hobbs' four. His decision to make genre films though, unlike more overtly experimental cinema, is something distinct, and the results of deliciously idiosyncratic, Alabama's Ghost the oddest of the most easily available pair.

Letting his imagination run wild, he takes tropes and genre ideas into his own idiosyncrasies, cutting from the exposition of this film's start to the Turk Murphy Jazz Band to introduce the film proper with an out-of-time jazz swing song. Alabama (Christopher Brooks) himself is a bar staff member at this opening location, who wishing to become a musician, will become an acclaimed magician instead when he drives a forklift by accident through a wall whilst cleaning up, finding Carter's real tomb or at least his possessions and secrets. Contacting his elderly sister - who is actually a male leader of evil vampires that wants to use Alabama - our hero will inherit and be trained in the skills to be a huge draw, if in the danger he is to be the tool in the vampires' plans. Alabama found the hashish Carter had found too, which the leader of the vampires wishes to use for mass brainwashing of the world through a television broadcast of Alabama making an elephant disappear and reveal the secret to the trick. Written, produced and directed by Fredric Hobbs, this is a hangover of the sixties, where the manager who takes him, with an English accent, is a throwback to the late Sixties hippy movement, part of the aesthetic tropes now knee deep in the seventies and surreal due to the juxtaposition. Sixties psych rock now is now performed at one of Alabama's performances, which evoke seventies variety shows, and if there is artistic concepts behind this from the artist directing and writing it, I cannot help but see a cynicism explicitly there with a figure of a business being a legitimately evil vampire who wants to control people. It is obvious, but like Godmonster of Indian Flats having a corrupt mayor as its antagonist, framing visitors and conning the townspeople for his own gains, natural suspicion of authority in some form is here even as a pair of wacky genre flicks.

It is both an insanely languid film, drifting through its plot like many independent genre films from the US at the time, and also delirious like many from then too. The dinosaur bone car alone is a personal touch never explained, one of the creator's Parade Sculptures, but becomes also one of the more conventional aspects than a plot which lunges sincerely into its strange turns. It is technically a horror film, but also its own strange thing, barely factoring this in barring moments of supernatural images, such as the scene where the horrors of these Nazis vampires, whose evil female scientist is even called Dr. Caligula for emphasis, is fully shown when they have a blood gathering conveyor belt. Nothing is more sinister when vampires bite hippies moved along as they pass like the conveyor belts at a sushi restaurant.

Strengthen by Christopher Brooks as Alabama, a figure so full of charisma it is annoying he is not someone I know of beyond the Fredric Hobbs' films he was in - sadly an actor with a small filmography baring with Hobbs, the Sun Ra project Space is the Place (1974), and playing Jesus Christ in The Mack (1973) - Alabama's Ghost is a film of its time for the better for me. The plotting and tone is entirely filtered through its own desires and whims, and this does produce some results that are unexpected, such as the fact, whilst still exaggerated, this is a rare case of a positive depiction of voodoo. The priest here is to help Alabama when he is spooked by the people he is with and finds himself literally cowering in his mother's arms, needing an exorcism and still there in the finale to save the day with Alabama's mother. Even if with mechanical doppelgangers of Alabama inspired by Disney World's Abraham Lincoln automaton is involved in the plot, which might distract from this one character and passage of the plot. Just having this figure is a positive in showing a depiction of the religion that unfortunately has not been done in many films at all, let alone in horror, very well or in a progressive way.

The ending is undeniably bombastic, Fredric Hobbs choreographing together a mass concert involving a sea of hippies at an open end festival, a real elephant, whose species clearly hate vampires, and like Godmonster of the Indian Flats, a taste for endings where everyone goes mad, run about and chaos transpires. The film will not be everyone, and it would be hilarious to know what fans of Hobbs the artist would have thought of this, but this shows just how rich and peculiar that independent era of genre cinema was in its own distinct way from examples in the later decades.

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1) In Memory of Fredric Hobbs, an obituary from Ever Loved.com.

2) From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Alabama’s Ghost, written by Pat Padua for Spectrum Culture, published January 12th 2022.