I expect that Sgt. Tierney, as fine a policeman as he may have been, never looked too deeply into Alice Hardy's mad tale of being dragged into the waters of Crystal Lake by a boy named Jason. In coping with the messy aftermath of a major crime, he wouldn't have had time to be distracted by any wild stories. Besides, Alice's account was almost secondary when the facts so clearly spoke for themselves. Right?
Surveying the slaughter the day after, it must've seemed like an open and shut case. Pamela Voorhees, having been unhinged since her son drowned at Camp Crystal Lake due to counselor neglect back in the summer of '57, went on a killing spree spurred by the planned reopening of the camp. But yet, as neatly explained as the events of Friday the 13th might have appeared to be, there were still a few details that ought to have raised the eyebrows of even a lawman like Officer Dorf.
For instance, how did Mrs. Voorhees - a woman in her early '50s - manage to lift a grown man like Ned into an upper bunk without serious difficulty?
Then there's the curious manner in which Jack was killed. A lot of women Mrs. Voorhees' age have to ask for help unscrewing the lid off a jar of pickles but apparently this one is so jacked that she can drive an arrow right through both a mattress and some dude's neck. Damn!
But Tierney must really had to scratch his head at the condition he found poor Bill in. In fact, I'll bet this sight single-handedly blew his mind. Not because of the awful brutality of it, but because he couldn't begin to understand how a fifty-something woman, working alone, could have possibly lifted a grown man off the ground and then impaled him to a door with arrows. That's a mystery on par with the building of the pyramids, I'd say. Definitely the kind of thing that would make a cop ask a lot of questions.
In fact, this case is nothing but questions. Like, how did Mrs. Voorhees hurl a grown woman through a window? Brenda wasn't a heavy gal by any means but we're talking at least a buck nineteen of dead weight. Try throwing that over your head through a window and see how well that works out.
Not only does Mrs. Voorhees do something with pure brute strength that ought to require the use of a plank and fulcrum...
...But after sending Brenda crashing through the window, Mrs. Voorhees is able to run back to the location of her jeep and then drive in to meet Alice and somehow not even appear winded! Had Mrs. Voorhees lived to make it to trial, there isn't a defense lawyer in America that couldn't have convinced a jury that she wasn't the killer. Or at least that she didn't have multiple accomplices.
Maybe Tierney realized that nothing about that terrible night added up. But what could he do - his only living witness wasn't making sense, babbling on about a boy in the lake. As for how a girl could possibly have lopped someone's head off with a swing of a machete, well, that was just one more incredulous detail to add to the legend of Camp Blood.
It's a story not meant for any police report, but one to be told around a campfire.
For most adolescent boys in 1987, especially those who considered themselves to be hardened horror fans, The Lost Boys wasn't a cool movie to rally around. Even though I didn't hate it, I still felt it was my duty to refer to it condescendingly as an "MTV vampire movie." That brand of high-handed scorn hardly made an impact on The Lost Boys' reception, though, as it became a hit in the summer of '87 and remains a cult favorite to this day.
Whether it was viewed as a positive or a negative, The Lost Boys absolutely was an "MTV vampire movie," aimed squarely at the hip youth culture of the late '80s (if Hot Topic had existed then, this movie would've been a goldmine for them). At the time it was easy to dismiss The Lost Boys as slick nonsense, more of a fashion show than a horror show, but today with neither vampires or MTV being what they used to be, it's a ripe time to develop a new appreciation for director Joel Schumacher's film. Whenever the most emblematic teen films of the '80s are brought up, titles like The Breakfast Club and Say Anything always hit the top of the list but The Lost Boys is so, so '80s. I would say that all it's missing is a Tangerine Dream score but the soundtrack is pretty perfect as is - and unmistakably '80s with tracks by Echo and the Bunnyman and INXS.
Before The Lost Boys, Schumacher made one of the classic "Brat Pack" movies, St. Elmo's Fire, and like that Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, and Emilo Estevez-starring film, The Lost Boys boasted a hot young ensemble of actors. Unlike St. Elmo's, though, The Lost Boys' cast were all virtual unknowns. I can't imagine anything like that happening today - the success of a big movie being allowed to rest on a cast of no names. Jason Patric and Kiefer Sutherland may have had famous fathers (Jason Miller and Donald Sutherland) but neither were anywhere near being stars themselves at the time.
Back then, a movie - especially a youth-orientated one - didn't need stars. In fact, the movies were supposed to turn their neophyte casts into stars but now studios are too cautious not to stock even teen pics with already proven draws.
If studios had the mentality then that they do now, who knows what kind of misguided cast would've made their way into The Lost Boys. Instead of Sutherland as vampire ring leader David, it probably would've been '80s pop star/actor Rick Springfield (who actually did play a vampire in the 1989 TV movie Nick Knight). What a loss that would've been as Sutherland makes for one of the great cinematic vampires. I seldom notice the character appearing in fan discussions of classic vampires, maybe because it's still not fashionable to champion The Lost Boys, but Sutherland really is outstanding here.
Interestingly, while it's no mystery what David and his crew are (even the posters proclaimed "It's fun to be a vampire"), the reveal of their bloodsucking nature doesn't come until late in the movie. It's not until the one hour mark that any fangs are bared. Making the wait seem negligible, Schumacher and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam, along with the cast, do a fine job of making brothers Michael and Sam Emerson's introduction to their new home in the coastal town of Santa Carla ("the Murder Capital of the World" as some graffiti on the back of a billboard ominously dubs it) engaging without having to lean on much in the way of thriller elements.
Most movies would've portrayed the character of younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) as either a Mark Petrie-esque horror fan who's immediately sensitive to what's what in Santa Carla or else as a snooping type who happens across the existence of vampires thanks to his voyeuristic habits but instead, Sam is a happy-go-lucky comic book aficionado (but not a horror fan) who finds the assertions of the young vampire hunting duo of Edgar and Alan Frog (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) - that Santa Carla is a haven for bloodsuckers - to be risible. It's a refreshing change of pace that Sam is not the typical lonely, introverted teen lead as seen in horror movies like Phantasm.
Also flying in the face of convention is the fact that Michael (Patric) is seduced into vampirism by another male vampire. Typically (especially today in our Twilight world), either Michael or David would've been written as a girl but in The Lost Boys you've got a male bringing another male into the fold. There is a female love interest for David in the form of Jami Gertz's character of Star but she's such a wanly handled element as neither Michael or David seem particularly interested in her.
Schumacher clearly knew what he was doing and I appreciate now more than I did then how subversive it was in '87 for him to make a teen film that was so gay-themed (few would blink at it now - hell, Glee 3-D is out this weekend - but in the '80s it wasn't so readily accepted). Even without the homo-erotic tension between Michael and David, Haim's Sam would have had the gay front covered all by himself. You've got his wardrobe choices, which are, um, far more colorful than most straight teen boys would ever be comfortable with; he sings " Ain't Got No Home" by Clarence (Frogman) Henry (with what sounds like the line "I ain't got a man!" which isn't found in the original lyrics) while in the bathtub; and he has a beefcake poster of what looks like Rob Lowe in a half shirt pinned to his closet door rather than a poster of, say, The Fall Guy's Heather Thomas.
All of which is admittedly only circumstantial evidence but I don't think Schumacher is trying to be ambiguous about Sam's sexuality. Putting him in a "Born To Shop" T-shirt (rather, than, say a rock or heavy metal T-shirt) just can't be an accident and by the same token, neither is the fact that Sam is shown to be such an upbeat, angst-free kid.
As a horror film, The Lost Boys still isn't much to write home about but in the wake of Twilight, it looks almost bad-assed and its charismatic cast still charms (and not just its younger players - Barnard Hughes as Grandpa delivers one of moviedom's best last lines). The Lost Boys wasn't the movie I was looking for back in the summer of '87 but now it seems like exactly the kind of movie that summers were made for.
On a final note, no discussion of The Lost Boys would be complete without a shout-out to Jacked Up Sax Player. Seldom has such an impression been made with so little screen time.
By the summer of '86, everyone knew what to expect from a Friday the 13th movie. Since 1980, the Friday the 13th films had been an annual event and - as critics were quick to note - each one had been virtually identical to the last. Despite the curve ball that 1985's Part V had thrown by having Jason Voorhees replaced by a copycat killer, all five Fridays had served up similar slasher shenanigans - each one made with the same blunt, no-nonsense approach, with any artistry reserved for their make-up FX. Given the history of the franchise, no one expected much in the way of surprises from the sixth film but in August of '86, writer/director Tom McLaughlin showed what a little extra effort could accomplish within the Friday formula.
Prior to this film, Jason had been something of a mystery. Introduced via flashback in the original Friday as a mongoloid child with buoyancy issues, his appearance at the end of that film as a moss covered avenger dragging Final Girl Alice into the waters of Crystal Lake was only meant to be a dream. But by 1981's Part 2, reports of Jason's death were shown to be greatly exaggerated. His curious upgrade from dead child to living adult never received much in the way of explanation but the impression given in the early Friday sequels was that however it was possible that Jason was up and about, he was still just a really tough dude - nearly impossible to kill but still mortal.
When Jason was slain in 1984's The Final Chapter, it seemed like an affirmation that he really was only human after all. He went down pretty decisively thanks to a machete to the head (among other grievous injuries - the machete was just kind of like that one last piece that brings the Jenga tower down) and stayed dead in A New Beginning. But Jason fans weren't having it with any copycats so the keepers of the franchise were forced to put their star slasher on the road to recovery. With Jason Lives, any further ambiguity about Jason was put to an end. From then on, Jason was no longer either some backwoods hillbilly with a knack for ignoring pain or an undead thing coughed up from Hell. Instead, he officially became a zombie.
McLoughlin opened his film with Jason's spectacular resurrection as Tommy (Thom Mathews), Jason's killer in The Final Chapter, refuses to leave well enough alone and digs up Jason's body, stabs it in the chest with an iron fence post, and then watches agape as a bolt of lightening strikes the post, sending a surge of electricity through Jason that revives his rotting corpse. Then, it's Game On.
Before Jason Lives, the series hadn't exactly been Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer but it wasn't too zany either. Like, no one would've ever thought about having Jason doing far-out things like battle a telekinetic teen or go into space. But after Jason Lives, that stuff didn't seem like such a stretch. Despite the familiar ingredients he was working with, McLoughlin made a monster movie rather than a slasher pic and after that, the latter Friday films inevitably became much more comic book. That's something that exasperated me at the time but now I'm pretty fond of even Jason Takes Manhattan.
Life's too short to hold grudges, I say.
I'm still not that taken with the nudge-nudge style of humor found here but McLoughlin did score an impressive cast of performers who were skilled across the board rather than the hit-or-miss groups that had populated the previous films - and he showed a real eye for atmospherics. This is the first Friday that didn't look cheap, the first where some thought clearly went into the visuals beyond considering the best angle to shoot the FX. Something else that McLoughlin should be commended for is how he kept his storyline moving in a way that previous Fridays didn't. By having Tommy spend the movie breathlessly pursuing Jason all while fighting the pissed off local law who are convinced he's nuts, there's a relentless pace here that the other Fridays didn't have. There's no time for any Strip Monopoly games or idle guitar strumming in Jason Lives, I'll tell you that.
McLoughlin's film, with its more mainstream sensibilities (this is dangerously close to being family-friendly), pointed the way towards a potentially more upscale future for the Friday series but no one helming a subsequent Friday pic ever ran with that. They did, however, continue the monster movie angle (Jason was once again revived by electricity in Part VIII) and embraced the opportunity to incorporate more fantastical elements. Jason Lives did it best, though, and twenty-five years later it remains the last real highpoint of the series and a great memory of the summer of '86.
Things started out so well when it came to adapting Stephen King's work from page to film. When your writing is brought to both the big and small screens by the likes of Brian DePalma, Tobe Hooper, Stanley Kubrick, George Romero, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, and the underrated Lewis Teague, you're talking about some high caliber cinema! But as those early King films came out, save for DePalma's Carrie, they all met with gripes from fans and critics.
Time has been very kind to The Shining, Salem's Lot, The Dead Zone, Creepshow, Cujo and Christine but reactions were initially mixed. And those were the prestige King films - as the '80s wore on, the floodgates were open and many lesser adaptations hit the screen, junk like Children of the Corn and Silver Bullet. The general consensus was that no one was able to do King justice.
Looking back, that doesn't seem to have truly been the case - it was more a case of people being way too hard on mostly solid movies - but in 1986 it didn't seem so outrageous that King himself should be allowed to take a crack at directing his own material. Producer Dino De Laurentiis, who scored a big King win by ushering The Dead Zone to the screen and suffered a couple of misses with Cat's Eye and Silver Bullet offered King the opportunity to get behind the camera and adapt "Trucks," a short story that had appeared in King's 1978 collection Night Shift.
A brief, oddball tale about machinery inexplicably coming to life and subjugating humanity, "Trucks" didn't seem like such a great choice to expand to a full-length film. Unlike, say, "The Body," there wasn't a lot of meat on its bones. More than that, the amount of mayhem required by the story didn't seem like something a first-time director should be taking on. Even an experienced director would've surely run into problems with Maximum Overdrive (by the way, De Laurentiis teamed King with a camera crew that only spoke Italian) - and that's not even taking into account how dirt stupid the material was. Had Maximum Overdrive been the best movie it could've possibly been, it still would've been terrible. To use an apt vehicular analogy, from the start Maximum Overdrive was a car crash waiting to happen. I haven't read much about King's addiction issues, which were reportedly raging in the '80s, but I have to assume that King was at his most coked-out when he willingly signed on to this.
In an interview with Fangoria, King claimed he set out to make a "moron movie." As he went on to say "...they're the best kind of movies as far as I'm concerned. Back to the Future is a moron movie. Rambo is a moron movie. I loved them both." From this quote, it's clear that King was not the right person to direct any movie - whether it be based on his own writing or whether it be the latest installment of the Police Academy saga. The best bad movies are always made by people who tried (and spectacularly failed) to make good ones. Movies that are deliberately dumbed down from the start never work - and the less said about the fact that King considered Back to the Future (a film that boasts a damn sharp screenplay) a "moron movie," the better (even Rambo, with its sleek action and pacing, doesn't deserve that designation).
Watching Maximum Overdrive, it's hard to figure out what King's mindset was, outside of just ascribing it to mountains of blow. He may have claimed he wanted to make a moron movie but even given that, it's hard to understand why he decided to stock his film with so many crude, slobbish, screeching caricatures. His fiction is filled with such types but, if anything, King portrayed these characters in even broader terms on film than on the page. His Creepshow character of luckless hayseed Jordy Verill looks like David McCallum's super-evolved Welsh miner from The Outer Limits episode "The Sixth Finger" next to Maximum Overdrive's cast of rednecks.
There are a few noble souls trapped in the besieged Dixie Boy diner, like Emilo Estevez's ex-con turned short order cook and Laura Harrington as a no nonsense, tomboy-ish hitchhiker, but most of the folks that populate the movie are not so endearing - such as Pat Hingle as the oafish owner of the Dixie Boy, Bubba Hendershot. Hingle's character is of a type that reoccurs often in King's fiction - the small time tyrant who gleefully abuses the tiny bit of power they possess - but King lays it on so thick and he seems to have encouraged his cast to play their roles as grotesquely as possible. Yeardley Smith (who would go on to voice Lisa on The Simpsons), whose character of a newly wed bride ought to be sympathetic, spends most of her screentime shrieking like a cat with its tail caught in a garbage disposal and its whiskers in flames.
On top of its mostly unpleasant characters, Maximum Overdrive also has no scares to offer. I suspect that a more experienced director could've done a better job of goosing the audience with jump scares, for whatever that's worth, but I doubt that any director could've made such a silly concept unsettling. Watching Dennis Weaver pursued by the unseen driver of a tanker truck in Steven Spielberg's gripping Duel is scary. Watching a group of characters forced to pump gas for a miles-long line of sentient trucks, not so much. And King oddly lets far too many members of his large cast make it to the film's conclusion. For a movie that practically begs to have a double digit body count, nearly the entire group that started off being trapped in the Dixie Boy ultimately make their way to freedom.
King joked upon Maximum Overdrive's release that he made have made the modern equivalent of Plan 9 from Outer Space but unfortunately Maximum Overdrive is too plodding to share that film's entertainment value. King did one thing right with his one and only feature film (well, maybe two if you'd like to say that the Green Goblin truck is kind of cool) and that's having rock gods AC/DC supply the score. It isn't the greatest score, no, but at least hearing the occasional thunderous AC/DC riff helps to fight off the powerful urge to sleep.
In the film's hyperbolic trailer, King spoke directly to the audience, saying that "if you want something done right, you ought to do it yourself" and promising "I'm gonna scare the Hell out of you!" When the final product hit screens in July of '86, it was clear that of all the directors who had attempted to bring King to the screen so far, King himself was arguably the worst - sparing Children of the Corn's inept Fritz Kiersch any further shame. As readers of Fangoria knew, the dreaded MPAA had forced King to excise much of Maximum Overdrive's splatter FX to save it from an 'X' rating - something that diluted his film's impact, King argued - but the truth is no amount of gore would've turned Maximum Overdrive into a good movie.
Every once in awhile I'll forget just how shitty this movie is and want to give it another chance. I always sucker myself in with the thought that this must be a fun, trashy movie - an '80s relic that surely plays better today - but it's so not that. I have such fond memories of looking forward to Maximum Overdrive's release back in the summer of '86 that I keep hoping I'll discover that it's become a true guilty pleasure. Instead, it's about as fun as sucking on exhaust fumes.
I will say this, though - if they ever put out a Maximum Overdrive DVD with King paired with Joe Bob Briggs on a commentary track, I couldn't say no to that.
Last summer I was newly unemployed - a situation that was accommodating to the notion of launching a summer-long series of essays. From May to August last year, Shock Till You Drop head honcho Ryan Turek and I co-penned Summer Shocks, a loving look back at some of our favorite hot weather horrors from 1979 to 1999.
I would have loved to have suggested a Son of Summer Shocks this year but my focus had become almost exclusively directed towards finding work rather than on writing and now that I finally have a job and some economic (and mental) stability is returning to my life, the summer is already at its halfway point.
Still, there's plenty of summer left and while it lasts, I plan to give some shout-outs to a few favorites that weren't gotten to last year. I can't guarantee that I'll post something every week but as much as I can before Labor Day I'll be jumping back in the pool of summer time classics.
In the meantime, here's last year's Summer Shocks:
I just wish that this year was yielding a better crop of horror films.
The only two theatrical releases so far this summer - Priest and Super 8 - have not satisfied. For one, both are more correctly identified as being either action or sci-fi. For another, whatever category you want to put them in, I just didn't care for either film.
So now it's up to next month's releases of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Final Destination 5, Fright Night, Apollo 18, Attack the Block, and Shark Night 3-D (on September 2nd) to save the summer.
Boy, summers go by too fast, don't they? Back in May, Ryan Turek and I celebrated the summer of '79 with The Amityville Horror and Phantasm but now September's here and that's it for Summer Shocks. There's been plenty of great summer movies in recent years but it's a little too soon to be getting nostalgic about them so 1999 seems like an ideal place to stop and The Blair Witch Project a proper high note to end on.
I had a lot of fun with these essays and thanks to Ryan for being so enthusiastic from the start about running with this series. Spending the summer writing about these movies brought back a lot of fond memories of seasons gone by and I'm a little sad to have to bring it to a close. But then, the end of summer is always a little bittersweet.
For my full Summer Shocks review of The Blair Witch Project, click here. And for the entire run of Summer Shocks, check out the links below the trailer. That leaves nothing left for me to say but thanks for reading and, of course, "See you in thefall!"
Man, 1998 is so long ago that I first saw the trailer for Blade on E! Television's Coming Attractions show. In an age where people can watch this shit on their phones now, it's nuts to remember a time when it was a useful function for E! to devote a half-hour of their programming to showing the latest movie trailers. I would get pissed if I forgot that show was on! Worse than missing it altogether was if I only caught the very last preview, saw the recap of what they played that week only to find out I missed, like, the Dark City trailer and then have to hope the same episode would be showing again soon.
Anyhow, when I saw the Blade trailer, I immediately had a good feeling about the movie. Sure, a good trailer can fool you but Blade just looked incredibly cool to me. It had the right vibe to it. When I saw Blade on its opening weekend, I was ecstatic over how good it was. This is one of those movies where all the elements came together just right. In one swoop, the days of Marvel movies being direct-to-video jokes were over. Better yet, a Blade II was inevitable.
I only wish that director Stephen Norrington had stuck with the series - or at least had returned for Blade: Trinity because, well, that movie sucked hard. I can't hate on David Goyer because Blade wouldn't have been what it was in the first place if he hadn't convinced New Line to go with a serious, big-budget take on the character but man, as for his work as the writer/director of Trinity all I can say is "WTF?" But hey, that's all blood under the bridge now. The way I look at it, it's a minor miracle that both Blade and Blade II (under Guillermo del Toro's direction) were as as terrific as they were.
Who would've ever guessed that out of all the heavy-hitters in the Marvel Universe that Blade would be the first one to be the subject of a great film? So much for putting all my money on Squirrel Girl.
For my full Summer Shocks review of Blade, click here.
Movies about bugs always get under my skin. One of the films from my childhood that traumatzied me the most was Bug (1975), directed by Jeannot Szwarc (responsible for some of the best Night Gallery episodes) and produced and written by horror icon William Castle (his last project before his death in '77, Bug's screenplay was based on the Thomas Page novel The Hephaestus Plague).
I haven't seen Bug since I was a kid but although I expect it would look awfully goofy to me now, back in the day the sight of a woman's head bursting into flames as a bug crawled into her hair and ignited it upset me to no end. The insect world is so freaky to begin with, if Bug told me that fire-farting cockroaches could be released from the Earth one day, I was ready to believe it.
So to sum up: bugs - a real source of anxiety for me (don't even get me started about the spiders in The Mist). Guillermo del Toro's Mimic isn't nearly as freaky as Bug but it's a very respectable addition to the sub-genre of insect horror. Released in the summer of '97 to little notice, it still hasn't been rediscovered - even with del Toro's name meaning much more now than it did in '97. The studio interference that del Toro faced on Mimic did take a toll on the finished film but for the most part, it's a creepy effort that's well worth appreciating.
The '90s were not known for boundary breaking excursions into hardcore horror. All told, it was a pretty light decade for fear fare. But I'm not adverse to "light" horror. This stuff has to be fun sometimes, too, you know. Too often in recent years, horror seems to be about punishing the viewer for watching. I don't mind a horror movie being grueling but when it comes to stuff like A Serbian Movie (2010), I'll stick with something more mainstream, thanks. Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe it's because I'm a parent now. I don't know. I grew up on shit like Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Make Them Die Slowly (aka Cannibal Ferox, 1981) but nowadays, when I hear that a movie is incredibly fucked-up, I've got no interest in it.
But I digress. What I meant to be talking about is a movie that is as untraumatizing as they come, the 1996 teen witch thriller The Craft. Like I said, I'm fine with movies like this. A lot of horror fans huff and puff about any movie that isn't going to make their friends and family sick to their stomachs but The Craft is a good time as far as I'm concerned. 1996 was the year that the long horror drought finally ended and The Craft was one of the first cracks in the dam before Scream let the flood loose. Horror hadn't been gone-gone, of course - horror never completely goes away - but that next big wave or trend just hadn't come since the '80s. But the sleeper success of The Craft signalled that a new resurgence in teen horror - with attractive casts and kickin' soundtracks - was coming.
And whatever your opinion of The Craft, you've got to give it up for Fairuza Balk's performance. You've just got to.
I still remember being taken back by the first shot of The Crow, as the camera glides over an inner city hellhole. I don't know exactly what I had expected from the look of the movie, but I knew that I didn't expect anything so stunning - not from a modestly-budgeted adaptation of a little-known comic. Thanks to the internet, it's so hard to be surprised by movies these days but in '94, it was pretty easy - even for a hardcore movie junkie - and from the get-go, The Crow definitely surprised me.
Nowadays, it's common - even mandatory - for filmmakers to "get" comic books. Many still don't - as Jonah Hex proves - but on the whole, Hollywood is more comic-literate now than at any time previously. But in the early '90s, studios and directors were still figuring out how to translate comics to the screen. Unlike, say, the directors of Spawn, Steel, or Judge Dredd, Crow helmer Alex Proyas had a natural affinity for the material he was adapting (by all accounts, star Brandon Lee shared the same affinity) and that made The Crow a true eye-opener.
The day the story broke that Lee had died, I kept hoping the news would turn out to be a hoax. It just seemed too sad to be true. Watching Lee's heartfelt, would've-been-star making performance in The Crow all these years later, it still does.
To read my full Summer Shocks review of The Crow, click here.
Before I say a few things about my Summer Shocks selection for 1993, let me just say how crushing it's been to discover how badly Jurassic Park has dated. I don't know - maybe I'm the last one to find this out, maybe everyone else has known that Jurassic Park sucks for awhile. If so, bear with me.
I was all set to go with Jurassic as my pick for '93. I saw the movie several times in the theater and still have fond memories of seeing terrified kids haul ass out to the lobby during the first T-Rex attack. It was the most notable movie event of that summer, the movie that single-handedly ended the era of stop-motion animation.
Watching Jurassic Park now, though, is a painful experience. The effects are still astonishing but the characters are just dead weight (even good actors like Sam Neil, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Jackson can't do much with their parts), any screen time spent on the kids is torture, and talk about a drawn-out set-up! I knew that it took awhile to get to the T-Rex attack but it's over an hour (!) and every minute drags by getting there. By the time the T-Rex finally shows up to party I had fucking had it with the movie and everyone in it. On the upside, I watched Jurassic Park III afterwards and still really dug it as a solid B-movie. But that superior sequel was from 2001 and this is the summer of '93 we're talking about, which brings us to Jason Goes To Hell.
There's not a lot of support out there for this movie and I get that. I think the fact that the series went on to ignore this entry altogether makes it easier to appreciate on its own terms as a one-shot deal but yet I do agree that writer/director Adam Marcus and co-writer Dean Lorey should have put down whatever they were smoking, checked their egos, and made a real Friday the 13th movie. If only Sean Cunningham had brought back director Joe Zito for Jason Goes To Hell, I bet Zito would've delivered something tight. And it's a guarantee that no metaphysical, mystical nonsense would've made its way into the film.
Shit, back in the day there'd be no way that Marcus would've been allowed to film a single page of his screenplay. According to interviews in Peter M. Bracke's book Crystal Lake Memories, when Zito did The Final Chapter and Tom Savini came up with the idea of having Tommy Jarvis kill Jason with a handmade microwave contraption, the money guys back then said no way, that it was too "sci-fi" for the Friday the 13th universe. Machetes - now that was what Friday the 13th was all about. Those guys who called the shots on all the sequels through A New Beginning would've taken one look at the Jason Goes To Hell screenplay and thrown it out the window.
That said, and putting aside the fact that everyone involved in this film needed to have some sense shaken into them, there's some fun to be had with Jason Goes To Hell. I'm sure that Sean Cunningham regrets letting Marcus and Lorey run with the ball but it is what it is. For my full review, click here.
In the slasher films of the early '90s, it wasn't about invincible boogeymen anymore. No more heavy-breathing dudes in ski-masks stalking slumber parties. Now it was about the outwardly normal people who worked with you, who took care of your kids, who you were dating, who were your neighbors or tenants. Or, as in the case of 1992's Single White Female, who could be your newest roommate.
These movies weren't as down and dirty as the early '80s slashers had been but yet they were more serious about scares than most of what passed for horror at the time. You know, if you wanted a good seat-jumper, you were better off with something like The Hand That Rocks The Cradle than Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice.
Like most cinematic trends, this one ran its course in about five years - falling out of favor just in time for Scream (1996) to re-invent the slasher genre again. But while it lasted, it was great fun. When Obsessed came out last year, I got all excited thinking that the "blank from Hell" genre was making a comeback. That was the movie where Ali Larter plays a temp worker who sets her sights on her handsome, well-to-do boss and gets violent when her planned seduction of this married man (and new father) hits some road bumps. It looked great and it looked like it could've came out in '92, smack at the height of the yuppie slasher trend. In the end, though, it was just so-so. It was adequate but it just didn't have the flair that the psycho flicks of the early '90s had. They really knew how to do crazy right back then.
To read my full Single White Female review, click here.
The summer of '91 was especially barren for fear fare but on the upside, that only made the, ah, limber medical chiller Body Parts all the more memorable. It's probably hard for younger fans to imagine a time when there wasn't a glut of horror movies to enjoy but that was the way it was back then. I mean, this summer is a little light but at least there's been Splice, Predators, Survival of the Dead and [REC] 2 (the later two in limited release and VOD) and The Last Exorcism and Piranha 3-D are on the way.
In comparison, the summer of '91 had Body Parts, Child's Play 3, and Dead Again (and calling that horror is really stretching it). So with so little to see, you had to appreciate what was out there.
With Body Parts, that wasn't so tough as I liked it from the get-go. It's flawed, yes, but the cast is terrific, the premise is classic, and writer/director Eric Red knows the genre well enough to be able to surprise even seasoned viewers once or twice. It'll never be a classic but it's still a keeper. I also fondly remember it because a friend of mine at the time inexplicably insisted on pronouncing Fahey's name with four syllables. Whenever I see Body Parts, I always hear my long ago pal's voice saying "Fa-ha-hey-ey" in my head. Good times!
There's no way around it - the early '90s were a dry time for horror. Whereas the '80s were an embarrassment of riches, the '90s were more often than not just an embarrassment. Still, there was some fun to be had and I actually have an odd affection for this era of horror. There's something about looking back on these lean years that makes me nostalgic. One of these days maybe I'll figure out how to put in words. In the meantime, I'm looking back on the summer of 1990 for Summer Shocks this week.
It was a better summer overall than the dismal summer of 1989 but still not a very horrific one with many of the best offerings being such genre splicers as the horror comedy Gremlins 2, Sam Raimi's action-horror film Darkman, and the dark kid's film The Witches. The fact that Disney marketed their killer spider film Arachnophobia as a "thrill-omedy" says it all about where the attitude towards horror was back then. Straight-up horror just wasn't welcome.
Another genre-combo, the sci-fi/horror/action film Class of 1999 wasn't as high-end as its major studio competition. Directed by Mark Lester (Commando), Class of 1999 was an unpretentious B-movie that delivered solid action and FX on a meager (by Hollywood standards) budget. One thing I love about the early '90s is that it was the last hurrah for cheesy genre pics getting theatrical distribution.
Yes, cheesy genre pics are still out there but they're much more polished productions. And they also have a chance in Hell of being real hits. In early '90s, you had films like The First Power, Popcorn, Eve of Destruction and Split Second in theaters and it was strictly the diehard genre fans who came to see them. Maybe that's what I liked the most about the early '90s. Save for the occasional blockbuster, you didn't have anyone coming to genre films thinking it was the hip thing to do. These days, being a geek and being up on geek culture is cool; back then it was kind of an underground thing.
I saw a lot of horror and sci-fi movies in near-empty theaters back then but it was always time well spent. Like the kids in Class of 1999, I learned a lot. To read my full Summer Shocks review, click here.
When it comes to horror franchises, I'm all about Friday the 13th. Halloween was a classic, no doubt, but as a series it was a weak player. Friday the 13th, though, they knew how to roll those movies out and the first movie hit when I was exactly the right age to be affected by it. Awed by it, really, because of the fact that I was too young to see it immediately - the same with its first two sequels (The Final Chapter was the first Friday I saw in the theaters, thanks to my mom generously consenting to take me and my best friend). But having those films be off-limits to me for a few years only made them become larger than life in my imagination. Had I been able to see the Fridays in the theaters from the start, they wouldn't have had the same mystique for me.
Like everyone else, as the '80s went on I thought the series became pretty pathetic but in looking back, nostalgia wins out. If I had to choose my least favorite of the Paramount Fridays, it'd have to be The New Blood. A lot of people love that one but while I'll give it up for the amazing look that Jason had in that film (John Carl Buechler really rocked the make-up on that - it doesn't get much better than seeing Jason's exposed spine), the ending is so atrocious that I just can't enjoy the movie. Jason Takes Manhattan has a dumb ending, too, it's just not quite as dumb as New Blood's. That's an arguable point, I know, but I'm sticking with it. Admittedly, I thought Jason Takes Manhattan was garbage back in '89 but over time, I've forgiven it for sucking.
In light of how turgid and joyless so much modern genre fare is, I give Jason Takes Manhattan points for being fun and not the least bit full of itself. It's the kind of film that could have only come from the pre-internet age. Thanks to the threat of online backlash, studios and filmmakers are way too hip now about the danger of going too far off from what the fans of a franchise expect. This doesn't stop them from making shitty movies, of course, it's just that they make them shitty within a more focused parameter. They toe the line a little more but that usually just makes for more cautious crap, not better films.
Jason Takes Manhattan comes from a time before studios thought catering to the fan base would be in their best interest and I kind of like that. Today, geeks are seen as a force to be reckoned with (Comic-Con begins tomorrow, in fact!) but the masochist in me is weirdly fond of the days when we weren't made to feel so entitled. And Jason Takes Manhattan remains the poster boy for those times.
For my full Summer Shocks review of Jason Takes Manhattan, click here.
To watch the 1988 remake of The Blob today is to be newly annoyed by its belly flop in theaters over twenty years ago. Man, they pulled out all the stops with this movie but yet audiences just didn't show up. Quality-wise, this movie doesn't need to hide behind any of the usual excuses of "it's good for a cheesy horror movie". No, it's just good, period. It's a genre film, simply out to entertain but it's well-written, well-acted, well-directed, and doesn't look down its nose at the audience. It's shocking how seldom all that comes together, even in the most prestigious productions. And yet you get the feeling that no one involved with The Blob thought they owed anything less than their best work. The result is an absolute top of the line movie about a flesh eating blob from outer space. I have a lot of affection for the 1958 original but this is clearly the superior film in every way. And while Rob Bottin's work on The Thing is forever getting (deserved) props, I think Tony Gardner's fabulous Blob FX don't get nearly enough acclaim.
By the way, I saw Predators and liked it but I'm waiting to see it a second time before writing a review. I want to be sure that it really is good and that I wasn't just cutting it slack for not sucking.
I expect that Sgt. Tierney, as fine a policeman as he may have been, never looked too deeply into Alice Hardy's mad tale of being dragged into the waters of Crystal Lake by a boy named Jason. In coping with the messy aftermath of a major crime, he wouldn't have had time to be distracted by any wild stories. Besides, Alice's account was almost secondary when the facts so clearly spoke for themselves. Right?
Surveying the slaughter the day after, it must've seemed like an open and shut case. Pamela Voorhees, having been unhinged since her son drowned at Camp Crystal Lake due to counselor neglect back in the summer of '57, went on a killing spree spurred by the planned reopening of the camp. But yet, as neatly explained as the events of Friday the 13th might have appeared to be, there were still a few details that ought to have raised the eyebrows of even a lawman like Officer Dorf.
For instance, how did Mrs. Voorhees - a woman in her early '50s - manage to lift a grown man like Ned into an upper bunk without serious difficulty?
Then there's the curious manner in which Jack was killed. A lot of women Mrs. Voorhees' age have to ask for help unscrewing the lid off a jar of pickles but apparently this one is so jacked that she can drive an arrow right through both a mattress and some dude's neck. Damn!
But Tierney must really had to scratch his head at the condition he found poor Bill in. In fact, I'll bet this sight single-handedly blew his mind. Not because of the awful brutality of it, but because he couldn't begin to understand how a fifty-something woman, working alone, could have possibly lifted a grown man off the ground and then impaled him to a door with arrows. That's a mystery on par with the building of the pyramids, I'd say. Definitely the kind of thing that would make a cop ask a lot of questions.
In fact, this case is nothing but questions. Like, how did Mrs. Voorhees hurl a grown woman through a window? Brenda wasn't a heavy gal by any means but we're talking at least a buck nineteen of dead weight. Try throwing that over your head through a window and see how well that works out.
Not only does Mrs. Voorhees do something with pure brute strength that ought to require the use of a plank and fulcrum...
...But after sending Brenda crashing through the window, Mrs. Voorhees is able to run back to the location of her jeep and then drive in to meet Alice and somehow not even appear winded! Had Mrs. Voorhees lived to make it to trial, there isn't a defense lawyer in America that couldn't have convinced a jury that she wasn't the killer. Or at least that she didn't have multiple accomplices.
Maybe Tierney realized that nothing about that terrible night added up. But what could he do - his only living witness wasn't making sense, babbling on about a boy in the lake. As for how a girl could possibly have lopped someone's head off with a swing of a machete, well, that was just one more incredulous detail to add to the legend of Camp Blood.
It's a story not meant for any police report, but one to be told around a campfire.
