Deadtime Stories (1986)

 

Director: Jeffrey Delman

Screenplay: Jeffrey Delman, J. Edward Kiernan and Charles F. Shelton

Cast: Scott Valentine as Peter, Nicole Picard as Rachel, Matt Mitler as Willie, Cathryn de Prume as Goldi Lox, Melissa Leo as Judith "MaMa" Baer, Kathy Fleig as Miranda, Phyllis Craig as Hanagohl, Michael Mesmer as Uncle Mike, Brian DePersia as Little Brian, Kevin Hannon as Beresford "Papa" Baer, Timothy Rule as Wilmont "Baby" Baer, Anne Redfern as Florinda

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You little vixens! A bit of bondage aye?

Returning to horror anthologies, Deadtime Stories stems from a father trying to get his son to sleep rather than jump up and down on his bed over the night, presenting a really eccentric trio of fairy tale reinterpretations. This is set up from just the opening credits. If you ever wanted to hear a metal guitar licked tale, from the mid eighties, of the three little pigs and other tales, these credits are for you as it also emphasises the absurd tone ahead, a literal song evoking Hitchcock and George Romero, and how our bedtime tales as kids induced terror and were violent. The first story is about a young man named Peter, Scott Valentine early in a career before he would star in the likes of Family Ties, between seasons 4 through 7, sold into servitude to two witches. A period story in medieval times, if full of eighties hair, none of these stories have anything really elaborate to them, as he is assigned to get a guy over to their lair, a randy priest no less, under the belief two lovely ladies are there in a cave randomly to sex him. Intoxicating the priest and taking a severed hand from him, the witches intend to use it as the beginning of their plan to locate their sister's grave, to resurrect her. It is a very simple tale, a maiden being prepared for a sacrifice, which plays to a sense of humour. It also shows one of the few moments of elaborate special effects which, when they appear, are a surprise in their elaborateness and willingness to be gory too.

From here on, the tales Uncle Mike tells to his nephew Brian become more unconventional, in contrast to a medieval Europe with access to hairspray, as he is missing the Miss Nude Vampire competition on TV. His take Little Red Riding Hood involves a sexy high school grad named Rachel coming home from cheerleading practice, played by Nicole Picard, having lustful thoughts imagining her reflection as her boyfriend when introduced, whose red cloak is a red hoodie for jogging. You would presume that this take on the wolf, played by Matt Mitler of the slasher The Mutilator (1984), in tight leather pants and a leather skinny tie, is a junkie who gets the wrong "medicine" from a shady drug store employee and our lead Rachel's grandmother getting what was intended for him. Then however he turns into an actual werewolf, and you get this anthology is wacky by this point.

Wacky is the word for Deadtime Stories in general, which I appreciate for the fact that it never becomes lazy and conventional even if the stories are absurd and pure cheese. It is a one-off as I never expected this to be as eccentric as this became, which you especially see with the final story. This is a weird take on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and the "Baer" family are a father and son, known for crimes, being bust out of an asylum by the mother, only topped by the fact that Goldilocks (Cathryn de Prume) is a serial killer, with various decaying male suitors around her current home, and also has psychic powers. Truthfully, Deadtime Stories never lives up to the potential of an anthology, in making the stories really stand out, and this story is less horror than a bizarre dark comedy. It is a premise that could have been enough as a weird cult eighties film you dig up decades later on a streaming service, but even that is a compliment for the third story, as ridiculous as it sounds and memorable in the slight form you can see it through here.

For those wanting to watch an eccentric horror film from the eighties, this segment is the one which lives up to that promise, if you want something which plays as a strange comedy segment rooting on murderers. A film like this would only be made in the lower budget straight to streaming/DVD world nowadays. That is not a detriment to those later films, but with the sheen of an independently made New York production, this definitely has a tone which is lost when the budget for a production like this would not be the same a decade on. It was a film I had no expectations for, never expected it to be this eccentric, and glad for this when I have sat through some generic work when randomly selecting a film to watch. Least with this, you find yourself reading these premises and, whilst not necessarily the best anthology segments in terms of elaborate stories, I can confirm they least had a personality.

Odd Noggins (2015)

 

Director: Joe Sherlock

Screenplay: Joe Sherlock

Cast: Melody Berg as Amanda; Juniper Bloodraven as Miss Garland; John Bowker as the Drunk Grandpa; Emily Howard as Shannon; Richard Johnson as Tom; Bryn Kristi as Liberty; Morgan Mayhem as Tammi; Rob Merickel as Uni; Roxxy Mountains as Tami; Bob Olin as John; Kirk Sardonis as Jeff; Connor Sherlock as Jeff

An Abstract Candidate

 

Half Gator

Half Man

Caught on security cam!!!

Aliens. Always the menace, abducting women and pulling out their intestines in nightmares, but in this context, Joe Sherlock's Odd Noggins comes with the knowledge that, whilst they are integral to the film, everything you would normally expect even from a micro budget film, and what to presume with one about said aliens, flies out the window. The woman we are introduced to have these nightmares, clearly believing she was abducted by aliens, is sympathetic and takes a stance. Where things abruptly turn is the moment she dissolves into yellow custard and all that remains is a skeleton...in a film watched by another woman.

I was aware, through a podcast named No-Budget Nightmares, Odd Noggins was going to be a perplexing experience even for a micro-budget film, and there is the additional context that the original version they covered was from 2000, whilst this is the 2015 remake I am covering, still a weird amalgamation of non-sequiturs, a UFO plot and going against expectations of conventional genre films. This was where I first learnt of pimento loaf, a food item I never heard of until learning of this film's existence, and this clearly shows that director-writer Joe Sherlock either has a thing for women drinking beer in the bath, or does but also enjoys doing so himself, with drinking beer in the hot tub the more decadent option to really enjoy life. For the version I saw, it is a film that, even if shot in many people's homes, has its own gleefully playful sense of logic you have to accept or you will hate this film. Expect to be befuddled on purpose, as this repeats and refers to small details in a noodle map of logic not following its plot in great elaboration. That film within a film for starters is referenced throughout, mostly following various women who end up watching the film and/or referencing it without greater context, but there is never context given for it, even if linked to the central plot, nor considered related to the aliens in that film proper.  In one scene a male bar keeper jokes about an art house film which just leads from one person than to another's path they cross with, than onwards. It is breaking the forth wall in talking of how that is the structure here, and inexplicably, I can reference a film like Max Ophüls' La Ronge (1950), a film literally about a circling narrative of interlinked romances, as a comparable example with Odd Noggins of all things. That is respect for Sherlock himself as, playing in its own logic, this toys with leading the viewer around the garden path deliberately, so any unexpected similarities to acclaimed art house cinema from French is entirely because this film itself is structured this unconventionally on purpose too.

This follows a string of characters in strange scenarios, including a "Bellygram" dance, a belly dancing strip-o-gram figure without the nudity, a sad female clown, and various women that are part of a UFO conspiracy with many drinking beer in the bathtub, even still wearing the clown makeup. I bring that up again, and I will probably get a weird look from the reader from across the internet for this, but this is a behaviour which happens a lot here to the point you have to address it, with many of these female characters doing this. And yes, the nudity as a result by the female cast is far more frequent than even some erotic films, surprisingly so. In mind to concerns about this, if one is going to have exploitative factors like this, Odd Noggins can also legitimately claim to be a standard bearer for body positivity even when it is doing this for titillation. It is amazingly positive as, something clearly through his career, Sherlock casts a diverse cast of actresses, of various ages and figures, larger women to smaller, and Odd Noggins at least bothers to have a wider view of women of all shapes and sizes being attractive. Even as a goofy free flowing piece, it is also about its female cast, frustrated workers in a variety of jobs, whilst the men are almost all weirdoes and doofuses on purpose. The exception is the man who needs special modification and dresses like a man in black. Clearly, in his case, he is connected to the aliens and really does not count, alongside the fact he also eats large jars of mayonnaise with a spoon.

All of this is part of this film's logic, to repeat little touches ad nauseum to befuddle the viewer. This feels unlike some films from this area of having improvised their plots with little, but a micro budget film with a fixation on deliberately repetition, Twin Peaks references, and finding concepts like a Renaissance fair and pimento loaf in the abstract inherently funny as concepts. Occasionally, as want of its alien premise, people melt into luminous lemon meringue filling barring the bones, the kind you get from even English cafes underneath Perspex covers. Most, if you cannot vibe with this, will hate Odd Noggins, a film which does the "it was all a dream" twist as a standard moment. [Huge Spoiler] The actual twist is that most of the female cast are working with the aliens, to take men's heads and take them up to the mother ship in cardboard boxes. [Spoilers End] How Odd Noggins plays, since we follow the female cast, means that its finale never comes off as misogynistic symbolism of female tempters that sadly comes into storytelling a lot, but more like the men are, as mentioned, patsies. Figures like "Sir Porkalot", as he is dubbed by his girlfriend, and the rest of the male cast, obsessed with these women, are always side characters that are clueless and/or horny until the film reveals its actual plot. [Another Spoiler] Always too late when their heads are ripped off by pure strength. [Spoilers End]

The end is a pimento loaf sandwich being made with an insane amount of sauce and slices, in close up as the plot is actually explained, used aptly to conclude how this strange film closes out. This is an acquired taste, probably like that sandwich itself, but I have to credit Joe Sherlock for making something idiosyncratic. He was also also editing and scoring this, with the score itself too a compellingly odd synth score meant to evoke Theremin, drones and an end credit piece where "Shake your booty" is repeated, playing with the mood of proto vaporwave or recorded on musty tape on purpose. Throughout the film, characters also read a magazine like Weekly World News, famous for its UFO sighting claims and the cult hero Bat Boy, and that really suggests a lot of the tone. It is a film about the eccentric and the strange on purpose, and it actually lives up to the attitude that made me want to cover such films like this as a fan, of the film seemingly of "no purpose" defying expectations over and over again.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Non-Narrative

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

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

 

Director: Dominique Othenin-Girard

Screenplay: Michael Jacobs, Dominique Othenin-Girard and Shem Bitterman

Cast: Donald Pleasence as Dr. Sam Loomis, Danielle Harris as Jamie Lloyd, Ellie Cornell as Rachel Carruthers, Don Shanks as Michael Myers, Wendy Kaplan as Tina Williams

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Around Part 5, and you begin to see the cracks start to appear in the Halloween franchise even if I found entertainment within this film over Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). By this point in a franchise, sequels are inherently a nightmare as a concept as producers would like to continue their franchises but logic is stretched as to why to continue with the same characters and tropes as before. With Halloween, whilst it should have done this after the first film immediately, there was the idea to make an anthology series in feature length form with Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) which could have made more sense.  Instead, as it stayed with Michael Myers, yes there is an iconic villain and so much iconic aspects of the original film that were already lingering in consciousness by this point, as they are returned to as audio and visual motifs, but you are also finding yourself in the shadow of the first film, a herculean task especially as this attempt to change the series, as this "Thorn" trilogy, would lead to the next film only appearing five years later and through Miramax. Before it even reaches this point, this franchise also fully embraced the slasher genre's cheesier side, not inherently an issue for me at now, but at the time when the original version of the slasher genre was petering out fully.

With fully spoilers, Michael Myers survived the last film, again terrorizing Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) again, but with the end of that film leading to a "curse" being transferred to his niece, leaving her traumatised and having to be kept in a special children's hospital with Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) watching on. By this point we have fully entered the supernatural, with Jamie having a psychic link to her uncle, but we have at least a credible new turn of a traumatised child having to live under the shadow of her uncle's acts, more so as, for all the cheese in this, Harris as a child actor here is good and the thing you can legitimately credit as a real virtue to the piece. Beyond her performance however, this is the kind of slasher that, fun, does lose the veneer of its original John Carpenter version fully, where to recuperate from the last film it seemingly suggests Myers slept in a cabin on the same bed for an entire year until the next Halloween.

For those who enjoy these types of films, even if the wheels are falling off the wagon, this definitely has more spark than The Return of Michael Myers, having a more absurd edge to enjoy. The idea of what was originally a realistic film about a killer with a knife becoming more and more supernatural - Season of the Witch (1982) notwithstanding - is exceptionally strange as this series of viewings have gone on, to think that to literalize the bogeyman the productions had to eventually reach this point, especially with the amount of injuries he took and managed to survive at this entry. Eventually you would need to pull back as in a harsh reverse to this progression when, as this Thorn trilogy, a metaphorical take of Myers as a psychological threat that Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) would go back to where the franchise started. It does not end up where Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (1993) went though, where you need a relative of Jason Voorhees with a magical fantasy sword now to kill him, the psychic link a simple McGuffin to a vicious movie, one which manages to get away with a young girl being terrorised by an adult, even trying to run her over in a car at one point, and depicting it with teeth even there is now a more unintentionally ridiculous edge to everything. You do also have cartoon sound effects over two bumbling comedy police characters, and this is where we are entirely dealing in pure gouda cheese. All the eighties suddenly ploughs in with the music alone throughout the film, and notwithstanding the opening, with heavy editing cuts and all those wasted pumpkins in the credits, this is fully removed from the style of the first three films baring the recreations of iconic sound and visual motifs.

Even if you have a prolonged and moody set piece in an barn at a Halloween party, one upping the cat jump scare from horror with a kitten, you see the tears with this franchise in that Michael Myers is such a simplistic fear, a single minded killer with a knife, that you are struggling to try to add more to him. Unlike A Nightmare on Elm Street where all possibilities are opened by the premise, having to retain a franchise this simple in premise means you strain at the restrictions and repeat the beats from the films before, leaving me with utter sympathy for someone like the director/co-writer Dominique Othenin-Girard, a Swiss-French filmmaker who before this made After Darkness (1985), a Swiss horror film starring John Hurt which was his sole feature beforehand and likely caught enough interest from Halloween's producer to hire him. The psychic subplot does feel unexpected, fully immerging as some form of symbol of Jamie's relation to her uncle, taking an extreme with the idea of inheriting his bloodline, the horrible reputation of his crimes like a real life family of a murderer, whilst giving an excuse for creepy POV shots. It does however feel underutilised and, even for an opening minded person with mysticism, they would suspend disbelief at how easily the police follow leads from a young girl's psychic visions when Myers does come to town again. Everything involving a faceless man in iron toed heels, so evil he punts a small dog to the side, is a bizarre decision to try to sustain the series when you have hindsight; that after it finishes with shocking the viewer with mayhem and a jailhouse on fire, this sequel did so bad at the box office it took six years for the next film in the series, with another company, to be made, dampening this intentional rug pull.

Then there is the most controversial aspect, Donald Pleasance's performance as Dr. Loomis as a man who fully loses his mind and spends most of his time screaming at a young girl to help him like a madman. It is either an apt depiction of him breaking down, desperate to end Myers, or the biggest slice of bowl of ham acting you will ever see. This time around watching the film, it is hammy but makes perfect sense, another of the virtues as by this point, half burnt, and physically and mentally scarred, I would imagine Dr. Loomis just on a frayed strand of sanity which would easily snap if more death transpired, the Ahab comparison from Herman Melville's Moby Dick apt as by this point, he looks like he would sacrifice people to finally sort of his foe.

The unintentional humour and decisions really start to make their way into this series by this point, which is a sign of the scars and struggle of keeping this series aloft really showing, and I admit right from the get-go, we have had sequences involving a piece of Stonehenge being stolen and a hot tub with a scalding temperature mode on the dials in the previous films, so I accept absurdity was here from earlier. Here though you see the series changing its aesthetic entirely and being entirely able to amplify these absurdist edges; the comedic cops are this, and the soundtrack betrays, whilst charmingly of its era like the Romeo Romeo song, that this has become like its brethren in the slasher genre than the one slasher film from 1976 which seemingly sat on a podium higher than most. You also cannot deny too that, with Myers suddenly having a Samhain tattoo on his wrist, the moment your franchise is crow barring a cultist back-story set-up into the franchise, you are in trajectory for it to fail, especially as even if we finally got the final of this trilogy in the franchise, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) notoriously came in a drastically butchered form.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers opened to $5.1 million, with a gross of $11.6 million off a $5 million budget which would prove to be the lowest for the series so far in the franchise¹. It would lead to Miramax and their Dimension Films label. Long before we realised Harvey Weinstein was a terrible human being, we only presumed our grievances with Miramax was how films were treated. The horrible truths learnt of his behaviour are too uncomfortably real to have as a tangent in a review of a goofy slasher sequel, so we will stick to the fact that Miramax, for all the acclaimed films in their back catalogue, were terrible for tampering with films, especially those they licensed in genres like martial arts cinema. Whilst from the Dimension Films label, we can also add The Revenge of Michael Myers, which infamously has a theatrical cut which is a legitimate mess to witness, and a Producer's Cut which finally surfaced which managed to salvage some good will from fans of the franchise. The later sadly only came long after the Thorn trilogy in the Halloween series ended, thus closing off this timeline broken and all it's set up in this film obliterated from whatever promise it had.

This leaves Part 5 too in a really peculiar place; it is absolutely a more interesting film to watch than Part 4, entirely just from a fun slasher side, but we are dealing with a series of films, truthfully, finding themselves drifting into a period after the Golden Age of Slasher films, no longer a trend setter for the genre but also not even in the era where they were huge. The nineties is an idiosyncratic time for horror films in general, but Scream in 1996, when it help usher the slasher film back, did so with a change in tone for the new decade, changing the tone and/or simply the aesthetic choices as per what was trendy at the time. It is funny for me that 1989, the year of my birth, signalled the time in horror, just as the nineties were to change the template for this cinema, where the slashers were to fade back, with the three big titles in this genre all showing up in that year. I came to be in the year the three heavy hitters of this genre came with some of their weakest efforts, even if they all have their fun virtues is you ignore the need for them to be "great". A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child is not the worse for me in the franchise, but certainly a law of diminishing returns, and Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was the last of the Paramount era of the franchise, infamous for promising to be set in New York City but mostly set on a boat and in Canada. They are a trilogy of entertaining films, but the strain of the need of a sequel is felt through them all, and The Revenge of Michael Myers is no different whatsoever.

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1) The 40-Year History of Halloween at the Box Office, written by Chris Eggertsen for Box Office Pro, published October 14th 2022.

Touch of Death (1988)

 

Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Brett Halsey as Lester Parson; Ria De Simone as Alice Shogun; Al Cliver as Randy; Sacha Darwin as Margie MacDonald; Zora Kerova as Virginia Field; Marco Di Stefano as the Tramp

A Night of a Thousand Horror Movies / An Abstract Candidate

[Warning: Spoilers Throughout]

The set-up to Touch of Death would win anyone over as long as they had a strong stomach, or cause him or her to turn the film off if they did not. An older man is shown, when not killing women, cooking pieces of her flesh for TV dinner, then disposing the corpse gorily with a chainsaw. This sounds like the worst nightmare for a moral campaigner, but my first introduction to Touch of Death was weirder, that it is one of the films of Lucio Fulci's own, with those of others, re-contextualised in A Cat in the Brain (1990), his deeply weird meta-commentary on his own work where he was the central character. The chainsaw and subsequent meat grinder dismemberment definitely raises the bar in feeling ill with Fulci gore, even if you know its fake. In itself it already sets off that we are if getting into the absurdity, reminding me in particular of when British band Carcass got to their album Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious (1991), which stills plays to the grotesque morbidness of the type of music they helped contribute to, but by that point even in imagining someone turning a victim into glue to huff, you are seeing them parodying the idea of gruesome horror imagery to offend and traumatise audiences. Touch of Death itself, starting from that initial scene, sets itself quickly as a sick hearted comedy with a deeply unconventional trajectory, in which older bachelor and gambler Lester Parson (Brett Halsey) constantly has to pay off debts for an illegal horse racing group, having found a novel way of acquiring the funds needed by skimming the lonely hearts pages for wealthy women. Where things get weird is that, seemingly, Lester has a copycat killer reported on TV claiming his victims and implicating him with each news report. Considering his radio is talking back to him in his own voice, it is not really a spoiler to know he is not a conventional state of mind, but the film takes it in an odder direction.

In general, there are strange entries at this point in Fulci's filmography by the mid eighties even for a director who invested into the nightmarish and dreamlike with his horror films – Conquest (1983) is a border line, the least conventional fantasy film you could ever watch, and Aenigma (1987) springs to mind too – whilst Touch of Death was one of the many films either directed by Fulci or had his brand naming upon it recycled as clips for his truly bizarre, quasi-autobiographical oddity A Cat in the Brain. Made the same year as the infamous Zombi 3 (1988) production where he only finished a large portion of it due to illness, and the team of Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei finished the final film, Touch of Death itself is a strange movie to my surprise in its own way. A perplexing mix of comedy, nasty splatter and his reoccurring obsession with reality slowly ebbing out of grasp as the film continues on, this does stick out among the films before and after. The premise has a dark reality, in that you have the likes of the Honeymoon Killers, couple Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck who targeted real women for money and killed them, but here as played by Brett Halsey, Lester is a foil who, despite getting away with a few murders, also gets a speeding ticket at one point when disposing of a corpse. Halsey is among many actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood and of fifties television productions who, as he got older, started appearing in Italian productions such as their spaghetti westerns, finding himself in his later career in a string of late eighties Fulci films at this time. Even in mind that Italian productions are post-dubbed, his character just in presence here. Whilst looking creepily like a real serial killer would in his conventional dress sense, he also has an absurd aura of a man constantly under strain, far from control. His cat Reginald, even if using human corpses, has better luck just from least having good meals.

The character being a putz really adds something here, the tonal shifts themselves effecting. Most of the narrative, until it builds to Lester's increasing paranoia and his fate being sealed, is the character interacting with a string of various female victims, and in spite of the stereotypical Fulci gore that became synonymous to his work at this point, it is played as a black humoured farce. John Waters springs to mind, for playing up bad taste deliberately. A strange quasi American environment, meant to be Florida but entirely in a nether realm of Italian cinema's interpretation of it, is where we find ourselves, one where Lester is an unapologetic sociopath but in a world which makes him look ridiculous. The illegal horse gambling organisation, ran by an older Caucasian man and a still older Asian man assisting him, who exist in their own world wary of the police, seem like a budget restriction expected from a micro budget horror film, in that they have no fixed office; in context however it adds a weird edge that, having to keep an ear for police helicopters, their lack of fixed location is ridiculous on purpose. Lester's female victims are exaggerations, and even a glamorous actress like Zora Kerova is given pronounced prosthetic disfigurements like a mere birth defect on the top lip or a vague moustache to undercut their appearance. It is not flattering in the slightest, and can be seen as sexist, but in general the film's tone is a peculiar ode to the tasteless in a weird way. The exaggeration of the women for broad comedic effect, the most extreme an opera singer with masochistic streak, is balanced out by Halsey playing a strange, pathetic man himself. Charming enough to woo these women, and played by Halsey with charisma even with the ghostliness of him having to dub himself, but slowly finding that he is even having to run over homeless men trying to blackmail him. Considering he is a man unable to keep hold of money, because he is actually terrible at gambling, it is clear he is about to slip off the deep end.

The realistic advice from the voice, similar to his, on the radio is a clear sign early on not all is what is expected, very early in the film and already showing its hand. That moment was enough to push Touch of Death into the abstract before it went further, becoming more unconventional with how this plays out with a streak of melancholia from this. It is clear the film is entirely from inside the mind of a man losing what sanity he had, the copycat himself in some form, but the dreamlike lack of clarity famous from Fulci taking this to an extreme. One where it can be as argued Lester is already dead or a literal doppelganger situation is actually involved. Everything is unexplained, the grotesque broadness of the female caricatures or the depopulated world of a low budget Italian genre flick, alongside the stranger details. Horse racing commentary constantly in the soundtrack is one of those many unique touches to this film I have not seen many "weird films" do, but it works, at first presumed to be on the radio constantly for Lester, but becomes apparent in being part of his psychosis at it continues.

That it is played for comedy is a surprise too. Fulci had made comedies early in his career, (fans proclaim that one, The Eroticist (1972), is actually a hidden gem from his filmography), but he was known at this point and still as a serious, nasty director of gore. Unintentional camp which appeared in the late eighties films was one thing, but deliberate humour catches you off guard. Obvious jokes stretched out at length such as Lester struggling to get a body in the boot of his car, due to rigor mortis, stand out when one has seen him direct some of the most gothic and notorious films from the eighties Italian cycle of cinema. One is legitimately a great moment, his attempt to add a Mickey Finn to a potential victim's drink only for it to continually switch which glass belongs to who, but even that scene is violently contrasted against the violent gore that happens afterwards, which adds a punch to this. The gore’s over-the-top actually fits in a sick way for this type of film too, more glaringly fake compared to his early work and with such exaggeration, as even when Fulci has someone hit in the head with a stick, an eye has to pop out. It becomes a heightened wreck of conflicting reactions as a viewer. That Fulci is credited as the sole screenwriter adds a fascinating touch to this film, that this is his interests unedited and leading to this concoction. 

Fulci, bless him, even when background material states the film was undercut by its low budget still managed to make a memorable film in Touch of Death. Its obscurity is not surprising as, compared to the stereotype of his career of lurid horror films, even the gore found here does not off-set that most of it is a melodrama black comedy of a sociopath. The film eventually gains more meat, whilst fascinating before, when you suspect the rug is going to be pulled from under Lester's feet at any moment, helped because Fulci's history of the unexpected always happening in his work adds to this, able to wrong foot the viewer even if it breaks the logic of before. Even the music, which is chintzy, works for the strange humour because it sounds like cartoon music. The tone eventually leads to an ending that can be interpreted in different ways, which is applaudable, Zora Kerova's femme fatale (who yet has that distinct lip disfigurement) a warning of Lester meeting his matched, followed by an emotional conversation with his own shadow for a very unique ending scene. It is kind of twist you would want from Italian genre cinema, and absolutely distinct from Lucio Fulci's filmography as its own quirky surprise.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird/Grotesque/Quirky

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

Human Highway (1982)

 

Director: Neil Young and Dean Stockwell

Screenplay: Neil Young, Jeanne Field, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn and James Beshears

Cast: Neil Young as Lionel Switch / Frankie Fontaine; Russ Tamblyn as Fred Kelly; Dean Stockwell as Otto Quartz; Dennis Hopper as Cracker, Charlotte Stewart as Charlotte Goodnight, Sally Kirkland as Kathryn Geraldine Baron as Irene; Gerald Casale as Nuclear Garbageperson; Mark Mothersbaugh as Nuclear Garbageperson / Booji Boy; Bob Casale as Nuclear Garbageperson; Robert Mothersbaugh as Nuclear Garbageperson (as Bob Mothersbaugh); Alan Myers as Nuclear Garbageperson

An Abstract Candidate

 

Among idiosyncratic trends, one was a small amount of times musicians directed films. A few happened in the seventies – Bob Dylan’s Renaldo and Clara (1978) in its original four plus hour form, outside of fragments, was withdrawn, and Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels (1971) is a divisive and weird experiment I need to get to again before given a proper comment on. Even Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit gets into this line up with The Fanatic (2019), a genre film with John Travolta, and he did manage to get into a murder’s row of figures, as in the eighties especially, you get a set of really distinct ones from big figures of music. Prince directed Under the Cherry Moon (1986), and David Byrne of the Talking Heads made True Stories (1986), a film which got lost beyond being a known cult film, only to get a huge critical reevaluation and a Criterion approved re-release for physical media. There is also the subject for today, which has to be one of the weirdest, in that I can now talk today about a film Canadian born musician Neil Young, legendary for the likes of the After the Gold Rush (1970) album, in which he managed to get together with the likes of Dean Stockwell, a bugged out Dennis Hooper, older actor Russ Tamblyn, and the band DEVO just before their mainstream success with the song Whip It, and make a film were Stockwell taking salt in his coffee is the least peculiar thing on the table.

Young, to be blunt, is an incredibly talented figure but, like Lou Reed, his impulses over the decades are entirely his decisions whether his fans agree with them or not. His eighties period, before 1989’s Freedom album and Rockin’ in the Free World, is bizarre in general. Trans (1983) I will look to with sympathy as, with the tragedy that his son was born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak, the sudden shift as a rock musician to synthpop was as much dealing with trying to communicate to him as an experiment. It is however after this when David Geffen, the owner of his then-label of choice, demanded a "rock and roll album" from him, only for Young to make a rockabilly album as a response and Geffen to sue him for not making albums uncharacteristic of him. The eighties albums after are not well regarded, and even his return to Cosby, Stills and Nash for American Dream (1988), their last album from 1970 as a quartet, was not held in good regard. Human Highway, which has songs from Trans, predates that album, and was shot over four years with Dean Stockwell as a co-director¹, and likewise this is one of those films that, with Young's name as a selling point, which would divide people as much.

Young himself plays Lionel Switch, an idiot savant of a car mechanic who also dreams of being a rock star, someone who thinks that working on a car radiator is the same as the dangers of radiation poisoning, and openly admits to having drunk water from these radiators in the same dialogue. Stockwell is Otto Jr., who also plays his late father in an old man fake beard who died of said radiation poisoning, Otto the second having inherited the family gas station and diner, which is in close proximity to a nuclear power station, and was running into the red in bills when the son inherited it in the will. Hopper is among the diner staff, the chef with a loose hygiene plan and friend of neighboring raccoons, and Russ Tamblyn is the new employee Fred, a friend of Lionel‘s, taken in to work in the garage. DEVO, glowing bright red due to the radiation, work with the nuclear waste from the plant they casually dispose of, and both provide the most musical numbers and has member Mark Mothersbaugh, in the early era version of the band where he wore a baby mask, taking on the Dadaist Greek chorus by himself. Experiencing Human Highway, it is a vibrant plastic Americana in design to the production team’s credit, with throwbacks to fifties culture set against the new eighties era. Stockwell comes prepared with a pea green shirt and red tie, but for a film which has been difficult to see at times in a proper version, even a muddier version shows Neil Young already had a distinct eye even with help, creating a vibrant place even with minimal production design in idiosyncratic touches, like occasional back projection or the issue of nearby radiation from the plant causing flies to also grow bright red by a onscreen visual effect. Whilst cinematographer David Myers was more known for his history in musical concert films and working with musicians - he was the cinematographer on Renaldo and Clara, and was there to film the legendary Woodstock (1970) concert film - he also was cinematographer on a lesser known George Lucas project, THX 1138 (1971), a very aesthetically distinct film which, whilst different animals in aesthetic and tone, makes the stylization found here in Human Highway not a hard abrupt turn in his career. The look of this film stands out for what does admittedly wander to and fro from what presumably could be a plot, such as Otto considering torching the buildings for an insurance scam.

Sadly this does have one badly aged and problematic joke, of a stereotypical Middle Eastern (Saudi Arabian) figure of wealth that comes to the diner, clearly an actor in brown face and Young’s character using a racial term that is not acceptable. It is a sole sour note to a film where its biggest sin would be that, for Neil Young fans or film viewers, it is so scattershot and a weird flight of fancy it would lose people for not really caring for an actual story. You have to tolerate its peculiar lurches and that Neil Young, whilst capable of composing the likes of Cortex the Killer, or pissing Lynyrd Skynyrd off enough they added additional digs at him in live performances of Sweet Home Alabama, has a very dad humour sense of comedy too. His character Lionel with Russ Tamblyn play to old style slapstick, and the diner staff are over the top, so if you at all find this "lame" or still think this with a dismissive viewpoint, neither is that going to help with Human Highway. David Lynch is an apt comparison, more so as members of this cast would appear in his work – Stockwell and Hopper in Blue Velvet (1986), Russ Tamblyn in the Twin Peaks series - but even his most explicably comedic work, like the one season TV series On the Air (1992), whilst also having cheese ball humour, still possessed his own distinct sense of surrealism.

By the end of the film, Human Highway even rejects pretense of plot, as alongside abrupt nuclear catastrophe, a music number to celebrate it, and end credits evoking the Heaven sequence from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983), a portion of the film is Lionel being knocked out and having an extended fantasy about his rock success. This transpires after he meets his idol, also played by Neil Young, and knocks his head working under the star’s limo, starting a multi-scene dream sequence where, splicing in real concert performances, even the most impatient viewer will be rewarded, as Human Highway would have been worth preserving for the duet between Young and DEVO on My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue). This becomes of note as, whilst this timeline has been questioned¹, it is Mark Mothersbaugh, as he sings in the lyrics, credited to the phrase "rust never sleeps", which became the album this song would appear on with its acoustic counterpart. The heavier version of the song I first learnt of becomes a ten minute version here with added electronic noise instrumentation, and Mothersbaugh in a baby crib on the lead vocals, a sequence which is spectacular if you can appreciate a full blown rock jam session. It is, for a legendary song, an impressive moment for rock film history even if you sit through the whims of Human Highway and do not appreciate its goofball cheesiness.

That entire dream scenario may put off some who can even appreciate the first half, as it has its own aesthetic choices. It oddly evokes another director, Chilean figure Raúl Ruiz, and his eighties work with the obsession with idiosyncratic production design, saturated colour and viewers having to watch his work in VHS rips only, as Young choose to depict this passage of his own film with what feels like Vaseline smeared on the screen throughout.  Shifting between real concert footage, and moments of more slapstick, you have the character of Lionel is touring with the type of woodcarvings of Native Americans you would see in front of cigar stores in American films, seemingly wandering off at some point by themselves, and Young and real Native Americans at a celebration in front of a pyre, all of which becomes a stream of consciousness. The entire experience is unpredictable in a way, legitimately comparable to some experimental films, which can be appreciated but also liable to cause some viewers to pull their hair out for cohesion. Human Highway does show a lot of indulgences in its form, undoubtedly, but at the same time, baring the one joke I references earlier, the obvious issues with the film structurally have thankfully given way to so much that stood out and stayed with me in a positive. The final film altogether is absolutely of a period in Neil Young’s career which was ready to divide people, and even outside of it, this is an eccentric film I could appreciate but could have frustrated me if I was in the wrong mood. Thankfully I was in the right mood and could even at its silliness something to admire.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Stream-of-Consciousness/Wacky

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

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1) The Weird Story of Neil Young’s Human Highway by Jim Knipfel, written for Den of Geek and published June 4th 2018.

Psycho II (1983)

 

Director: Richard Franklin

Screenplay: Tom Holland

Cast: Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Vera Miles as Lila Loomis, Meg Tilly as Mary, Robert Loggia as Dr. Bill Raymond, Dennis Franz as Warren Toomey, Hugh Gillin as Sheriff John Hunt, Robert Alan Browne as Ralph Statler, and Claudia Bryar as Emma Spool

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

How do you follow up a legacy defining film? After Alfred Hitchcock passed in 1980, thus screenwriter Tom Holland, future director of Fright Night (1985), and Richard Franklin, director of Roadgames (1981) in Australia and openly an admirer of Hitchcock, had this challenge ahead of them when they collaborated on a Universal Studio’s follow up of Psycho (1960), with Anthony Perkins two decades on returning as Norman Bates. The opening reuses the legendary shower scene from the first film in the opening, but the Jerry Goldsmith score sums up the tone perfectly for a different film.

This does a good job in avoiding a poor rehash, with a plot to its credit playing to an idea, gas lighting someone, Hitchcock did use. Norman Bates is still a sympathetic figure, despite being a murderer, now with the context he has been rehabilitated, back at Bates Motel with all the repressed memories, those which caused his psychosis, and the potential vilification by the outside world as likely to prevent him ever atoning for his sins. Neither is it helping someone is trying to torment him, even with notes said to be left by his mother. With Dean Cundey as the director of photography, this feels like a grand film, when sequels existed but were not inherently expected for every title which were huge successes, and could be disasters regardless of genre and especially if the expectations of the original’s acclaim were at stake, something which can be attest to with the response to Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). As an attempt to credibly follow up the original Psycho, presenting its own drama even if with awareness and influence of the slasher film boom Psycho itself helped inspired, the sequel does well. It is strange seeing Norman Bates near a Pac Man arcade cabinet, but that is as much the point, a man out of time from a film that hit like a lightning bolt, even among the heavy hitters of Hitckcock’s filmography, and returning in the midst of horror movies inspired by it.

What Psycho II is a horror film with the emphasis on a strong cast, provided with a weight for its thriller plot and having some gruesome scenes in the wake of Friday the 13^th films. No one is giving a bad performance, Perkins about to return for a surge of recognition in this role that would lead to films like Crimes of Passion (1984), matched by the likes of Robert Loggia as his therapist, to Meg Tilly as a diner waitress who ends up at the old Bates home as a friend, subverting the original film in a willing guest of the hotel alongside both a shadow of doubt there for her and additional context that will pull the rug out of their relationship. The slasher influence is there – one scene befits the era, of a young guy and girl making the unfortunate decision to get high and heavy pet in the Bates home cellar – but what this becomes is closer to something you would find in an Italian giallo, the kind of storytelling influenced by Hitchcock too, especially as you have to factor in Vera Miles, in an inspired choice, returning as Lila Crane/Loomis, the sister of Janet Leigh’s character switching roles with the irony of hindsight, now the concerned person who wants Bates to stay in jail even if it leads her to doing something legitimately evil morally to punish him.

The film does recreate images from the first film, even the psychoanalyst explaining the plot at the end of the prequel, so there is the real sense of this being a film made by fans of the source returning to it. They have a Herculean challenge in a way – Hitchcock is a sacred figure, and barring one or two exceptions, a TV movie The Birds II: Land's End (1994), or Christopher Reeve post his tragic accident starring in a 1998 TV remake of Rear Window, readapting his work has not happen a great deal unless entirely out of coincidence. Psycho was an exception, and the sequels and re-adaptations are their own universe, where Anthony Perkins would direct one of the films, and there was a cancelled attempt to turn the series into an anthology series, by way of an unsuccessful 1987 TV movie, with a young Lori Petty. Barring one aspect which may be very controversial, a final twist about Bates’ family which I will not spoil, Psycho II does not take huge risks but does an admirable job in being a retrospective on Norman Bates himself, whether it would be possible to ever live a normal life, and succeeds when making a sequel to the Alfred Hitchcock film could have been an ill-advised mishap.

Bad Dreams (1988)

 

Director: Andrew Fleming

Screenplay: Andrew Fleming and Steven E. de Souza

Cast: Jennifer Rubin as Cynthia Weston; Bruce Abbott as Dr. Alex Karmen; Richard Lynch as Franklin Harris; Dean Cameron as Ralph Pesco; Harris Yulin as Dr. Berrisford; Susan Barnes as Connie; John Scott Clough as Victor; E. G. Daily as Lana; Damita Jo Freeman as Gilda; Louis Giambalvo as Ed; Susan Ruttan as Miriam

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

In the shadow of Nightmare on Elm Street becoming a huge horror franchise in the late eighties, 20th Century Fox joined among others on the supernatural horror bandwagon with Bad Dreams, in which the prologue, as you always want, introduces a cult actor like Richard Lynch in a prominent cast member, in this case as the head of a hippy cult, Franklin Harris, anointing members with what seemingly is ladles of water.

It is later revealed it was gasoline, the house exploding from the resulting fire, beginning the film with one survivor Cynthia, a young teen, having to bare the memories of what happened after the thirteen year coma she wakes from after the incident. This is a big film in context of this genre, in terms of the studio distributing it, just from the soundtrack -  I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night) by The Electric Prunes, a punk cover of My Way, and more strikingly Guns 'n' Roses before they went big with Sweet Child of Mine, long before it become a radio staple even here in Britain - and there is a deliberately sense of this trying to match the success Nightmare on Elm Street had. Specifically, this was made after the third film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), which managed to figure out the tone of the series and become a favourite for fans, this explicitly riffing on its premise and re-casting Jennifer Rubin, a prominent side character in that film, as the lead Cynthia here. Prominently as well, with director Andrew Fleming starting here and continuing through the next decades in Hollywood, you have as his co-writer on the script Steven E. de Souza, a big figure in Hollywood who, also in 1988 when Bad Dreams was released, co-penned the script for Die Hard, which mid-way through a career with credits alongside other big actor films is arguably the hugest title for his entire career. Souza is someone I like, even when his directed and written attempt to adapt Street Fighter (1994) as a video game franchise to the big screen was seen as a failure, and you can spot his sense of humour and witticisms throughout this.

The Dream Warriors set up, of a group of patients being targeted one-by-one by an unnatural force, is obvious here, as with Harris the cult leader who, like Freddy Krueger with his burnt face make-up, occasionally appears burnt up to in the border beyond life and death. Like Dream Warriors, it is a series of set pieces where people are picked off with the only difference that, with the doctor running the group here, said male figure here is openly a sceptic to the scenario who is yet trying to rationalise the alarming number of freak deaths taking place one soon after another. Honestly, Bad Dreams is pure horror spectacle even in terms of being pure cheese as well as what works, with some flair but until its ending twist is going in an expected route for the set-up even in terms of the exaggerated takes on mental health by a game cast, such as the nervous wreck of a former newspaper reporter, for the equivalent of a Weekly World News where Bat Boy came from, who chain smokes like a furnace. They are picked off one-by-one in inventive deaths like Dream Warriors, the equivalent of a haunted house ride of a film, and your taste will entirely depend on whether you can appreciate this.

There are some memorable incidents, including someone seemingly deciding to play hit-and-run on their senior in the hospital car park and gleefully killing them, to the surprising level of gore such as the gruesome moment someone ends up going through the turbine in the boiler room and literally recreating the song Raining Blood from Slayer onscreen. Probably the most idiosyncratic aspect of this whole film does need major spoilers, but suffice to say, this set up with a supernatural slant becomes a more “rational” ending, which comes off more contrived than if ghosts were involved yet provides an appropriate heightened nature of a ludicrous murder twist. [Major Spoiler] I highly doubt even with the variety of side effects and causes medicines can induce in real life, any that can cause people to kill themselves as happens in this, or hallucinate about Richard Lynch would be allowed anywhere near a medical storage facility on a hospital unless you wanted a scandal. [Spoilers End] It comes off like a giallo twist, where attempting a rational route than taking a supernatural slant becomes stranger than accepting the idea of the unnatural over materialistic logic in a plot. It feels appropriate for the film, far from a criticism, and does provide a distinct touch for Bad Dreams. Even in among this too, remembering the film it was inspired by, this does thankfully play to some unnatural imagery as it subjectively pulls the rugs out from under a viewer a few times. In reference to something that is already talked of, without spoiling which scene mentioned it is, this manages to get away with the “it is all a dream” segment twist by having a moment so abrupt and jarring for a character to be involved with that it actually comes off as gleefully inspired in a sick humoured way.

Of course as well, it provides a fascinating tangent into the careers for those involved as Steven E. de Souza is a big name from this era of action and Hollywood blockbusters, making a rare jump into horror cinema, and Andrew Fleming, despite mostly staying out of the genre, if more well known for The Craft (1996), a film I will admit I always found disappointment in for how its ending seemingly conforms against the promise it has about all female tale about witchcraft, but had a legacy for people who caught it at the right age. This is a cool piece in their careers, not the best of these Elm Street inspired films but certainly a memorable one.