Retro-Shock Theater: Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor (1990)

From the moment it was announced that Ridley Scott would be filming Prometheus, a film vaguely described as being set in the Alien universe, the overriding question was how much of Alien’s DNA would finds its way into the film. After having my questions about Prometheus’ mysterious Alien factor finally answered, I was inspired to revisit another film with its own “alien factor” – 1990’s Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor.

Initially developed as a sequel to 1983’s cult creature feature The Deadly Spawn, Metamorphosis evolved into something entirely separate from that earlier film. Deadly Spawn producer Ted A. Bohus returned to shepherd this new project but even though it was planned to be a straight sequel, for whatever reason those plans were scrapped and what emerged was a film that tread the same B-movie terrain and kept the same love of monster movies and old school FX as The Deadly Spawn but was otherwise unrelated.

Written and directed by Glenn Takajian (with “additional story material” credited to Bohus), Metamorphosis involves two teenage sisters who break into the top secret bio-research lab where their dad works as a security guard after they suspect that their dad (who never came home after his previous night’s shift) may be in trouble there.

Of course, these girls are 100% correct and, in fact, the situation is much worse than they anticipated. It seems that the government has happened upon some alien tissue so they’ve entrusted it to a research group called TALOS to run experiments on it with the hope that it will lead to some new, and undoubtedly awful, developments in the bio-weapons field.

But as movies have shown us time and again, alien DNA has a way of not behaving – especially not when it’s meddled with by scientists – and sure enough, once the tissue is spliced with lab animals and used to create mini-mutants, it’s just one infected human host later (as the head researcher suffers a nasty bite) and the TALOS facility finds itself dealing with the revolving transformation of Dr. Michael Foster (George Gerard) as he undergoes a prolonged and gruesome evolution.

As grim as the situation looks as the ailing scientist grows less human by the day, things will quickly go from simply ugly to apocalyptic if this human/alien hybrid gets free from the confines of the TALOS facility and hits the outside world. Making matters worse is the fact that Dr. Viallini (Marcus Powell), the sinister, white-haired scumbag who calls the shots at TALON, refuses to risk exposing what they’ve been up to in their labs so there’s no option to seek outside medical counsel for the researcher’s worsening condition.

Before long, the mutating Dr. Foster won’t be just writhing in a bed, he’ll be out on his feet (or slithering on his freshly slimed tentacles) looking to bring the pain and woe to any poor sap that happens to be walking the halls of TALOS – including security guard John Griffen (Matt Kulis), father to two spunky teenage daughters.

As you can gather from its simple set-up, Metamorphosis’ narrative is a by the numbers affair. Ultimately, this is a movie that’s mostly about having its characters fleeing down corridors with a slime-dripping, fang-filled, tentacle-lashing creature breathing down their necks but that doesn’t mean it isn’t great fun, or that its characters aren’t appealing. As formulaic as Metamorphosis is, Takajian mixes things up a bit by relating a good chunk of the action in flashback.

We begin in the middle of TALOS’ troubles as John Griffen investigates an anomaly alert in one of the labs only to be confronted with a bloody bio-researcher stumbling out of a lab, gasping his last breath. After Viallini and Dr. Foster’s fellow researcher (and romantic interest) Nancy Kane (Katherine Romaine) discover the carnage, we cut to hours later as Viallini has Foster recapping to two intimidating goons – Mitchell (Tony Gigante) and Jarrett (Greg Sullivan) – as well as to the audience the whole back story that brought the TALOS corporation to this point.

Once the flashbacks are over, the movie stays in the present for the duration of the film and the creature action escalates right through the climax. As to be expected in a low budget production, the acting in Metamorphosis ranges from adequate, to amateurish, to awful – but it should be said that even the worst performances have some charm.

Tara Leigh plays responsible older sister Sherry Griffen while Dianna Flaherty is her rebellious little sister Kim and Patrick Barnes is Sherry’s slightly dorky boyfriend Brian. For Barnes, Metamorphosis was his one and only acting credit while it was Flaherty’s last after appearing in two previous genre faves from Troma – The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. Tara Leigh has appeared in only a handful of projects since, including Joe Dante’s 2006 Masters of Horror segment, “The Screwfly Solution.”

Whatever caliber of acting talent Metamorphosis had or didn’t have to assist in bringing its story to life, the movie’s real star power lay in the accomplished FX work of Vincent Guastini (who handled the film’s makeup chores) and Don Taylor (in charge of visual FX). Generally, low budget creature features keep their monsters lurking in the shadows but that’s not how it is with Metamorphosis.

Here, the creature is seen in full view in brightly lit corridors and labs and is seen often and it’s all done with practical effects. As with The Deadly Spawn, there are even several stop motion shots in Metamorphosis, too. Showing savvy showmanship as well as a canny use of their funds, Takajian and Bohus don’t shoot their wad early, saving the biggest and best FX for the climax.

With a prolonged climatic rampage on tap, this is the rare low budget monster movie that doesn’t show a last minute diminishming of resources. Projects like Prometheus are exciting because it’s never a bad thing to see an A-class filmmaker mounting a large scale sci-fi/horror picture with the money and muscle of a major studio behind them but Metamorphosis represents the flip side of that coin well.

It may have gotten somewhat lost in the direct to video shuffle of the early ‘90s and failed to garner the same cult following that The Deadly Spawn has but Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor holds the torch for B-monster movies just as high. It’s got heart, genuine enthusiasm and its low budget only seems to enhance – rather than hinder – its ambitions.

Originally published on 6/11/12 at Shock Till You Drop. 

Retro-Shock Theater: The Unborn (1991)

Horror tales are often thought of as being concerned solely with the end of life, preying on our universal fears of death and decay, but the act of bringing new life into the world has provided almost equal inspiration for terror with pregnancy, birth, and the rearing of children continually exploited for all their panicked possibilities.

With the very likely to be heinous romantic comedy What To Expect When You’re Expecting currently in theaters, I couldn’t help but think of the many attention worthy counter-programming options to be found in the horror genre.

While several horror classics involving pregnancy and its potentially awful aftermath instantly come to mind, like Rosemary’s Baby or It’s Alive, I’m going with a largely forgotten item from the back catalog – 1991’s bloody baby bonanza The Unborn.

Written by the duo of John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris under the shared pseudonym of Henry Dominic (the duo’s more recent efforts have been much more high profile, such as the last two Terminator films) and directed by Roman Flender (who later went on to helm 1999’s minor cult fave Idle Hands), The Unborn stars Brooke Adams (The Dead Zone) as Virginia Marshall, an author of children’s books who has struggled for years to have a child of her own.

After several miscarriages, Virginia and her husband Brad (Jeff Hayenga) visit the offices of Dr. Richard Meyerling (James Karen, of Return of the Living Dead), a fertility specialist who might have the answer to their prayers (watch for a pre-Friends Lisa Kudrow in a brief appearance as Meyerling’s receptionist). Virginia is deemed fit to participate in Meyerling’s experimental in-vitro fertilization program and before long, Virginia and Brad are expecting their first child.

Of course, what the joyful couple is too late to find out is that Meyerling is something of mad scientist and the genetically pimped out baby currently growing in Virginia’s belly is not going to bring the couple much in the way of happiness. Brancato and Ferris could’ve constructed The Unborn as a paranoid thriller, making the viewer question whether Virginia is only imagining the worst about Dr. Meyerling and her baby or whether her suspicions are real but while we’re told that Virginia has a history of mental problems and as events spiral out of control she has to wonder whether she’s cracking up, we know from the jump that something diabolical is at the heart of Meyerling’s miraculous practices because it’s not just Virginia who’s having issues.

The film begins with a pregnant woman under Meyerling’s care undergoing violent contractions at home only to have her stomach burst open as her frantic husband is on the phone calling for an ambulance. It’s an attention grabbing opening and it serves notice that this is not going to shy away from being an exploitation film. Clocking in at a brisk 85 minutes (an ideal running time for a B-movie), The Unborn doesn’t waste a minute in getting down to the nitty gritty of fetal fury.

While we do understandably have to wait until the final act to see what kind of kid Virginia is going to deliver, Flender isn’t in slow burn mode here. The Unborn isn’t just about waiting for Virginia’s baby to arrive. Instead, we see several vicious vignettes unfold along the way as Virginia comes into contact with other patients of Meyerling who are further along in their pregnancies than she is – and none of them are having a happy time of it. Not the couple that has given birth to a genius daughter thanks to Meyerling’s intervention only to see that gifted daughter kill their preexisting mentally handicapped son. Not the woman who, driven mad by the weird effects of her pregnancy, stabs herself repeatedly in the stomach but only manages to put herself – rather than her baby with its cockroach-strength resiliency – in critical condition. And absolutely not the lesbian couple (whose non-pregnant half is played in a rare serious turn by comedienne Kathy Griffin) who engage in a bloody battle to the death as the mother-to-be realizes that she can’t share her love with anyone except her baby and decides that she needs to bludgeon her girlfriend to death with a hammer.

Produced by Roger Corman, The Unborn is ruthless in a manner that horror fans are sure to approve of, cheerfully going for as many appalling, tasteless moments as possible. With such highlights as a live mental meltdown occurring on a morning TV talk show (a very pregnant Virginia, promoting her new book, tries to get the word out to the world – hysterically shouting to the camera that “they’re eating us alive!”), a grimy back alley abortion that fails to slow the stride of a determined super-fetus (nobody puts baby in a dumpster!), that same aborted – but still extremely frisky – baby murderously wielding a long knitting needle, and a climatic decision from Virginia that can only be considered to be a perverse ode to motherly instincts, The Unborn is a rousing addition to the killer baby sub-genre.

A word of caution: The Unborn is not recommended to casual genre fans that limit their horror diet to the absolute cream of the crop. For them, the merits of The Unborn would be hard to discern. But if, like me, you’re the kind of dedicated (some might say foolhardy) genre buff who has spent thousands of horrors scrapping the bottom of the barrel, renting every last horror title that their local video store stocks in the hopes of discovering a neglected gem, The Unborn is the kind of rewarding find that makes that often thankless task worthwhile (or at least momentarily tolerable).

Like a good B-movie should, it goes to a few funky places that your typical studio genre film wouldn’t. Amid the mostly sanitized horror product of the early ‘90s, The Unborn’s scrappy nature and occasionally humorous winks (like a close-up of a blood spattered Baby On Board sign) helped it to stand out and over twenty years later, it still holds up as a modestly mounted but gonzo thriller that keeps throwing curves at the viewer until the final frame.

The mewling mutants of The Unborn might not be the bundles of joy that their birth mothers were hoping for but horror fans ought to consider them to be prime candidates for adoption.

Originally published on 5/21/12 at Shock Till You Drop. 

Retro-Shock Theater: Burnt Offerings (1976)

Some horror films are of such enduring power and undeniable craftsmanship – films like Psycho, The Exorcist, Carrie and The Shining – that they find a new and devoted fan base with each subsequent generation while others reside almost exclusively in the traumatized memories of the generation who first encountered them.

1976’s haunted house yarn Burnt Offerings would be an example of the latter, a staple of Gen-Xer’s childhoods whose reputation as a supremely frightening film has dimmed over the years. With Tim Burton’s revival of Dark Shadows currently in theaters, some fans will naturally want to take a look back at producer/director Dan Curtis’ original supernatural soap opera but thinking of Curtis’ contributions to the genre (‘70s horror wouldn’t have been the same without him) made me curious to revisit his adaptation of Robert Marasco’s 1973 novel.

Curtis’ work was almost exclusively for television (besides Dark Shadows, Curtis was responsible for many other well-remembered genre offerings, including the famed 1975 TV movie Trilogy of Terror as well as the initial two Night Stalker television movies) but Burnt Offerings was a rare excursion into feature filmmaking for Curtis – even if many of its most ardent fans ironically first discovered it not on the big screen but on TV.

Burnt Offerings tells the tale of the Rolf family – the married couple of Ben (Oliver Reed) and Marian (Karen Black), along with their twelve-year-old son David (Lee H. Montgomery) – who rent the sprawling, if slightly dilapidated, Allardyce Mansion for the summer for the too-good-to-refuse amount of $900. Now, even the most novice horror fan knows that whenever accommodations come cheap, no good will come of it. But while the low price tag on the Allardyce Mansion definitely should’ve have been a red flag moment for the Rolfs, they really should have started running the other way as soon as they met the batty brother and sister who were renting them the property – Roz and Arnold Allardyce, played with eerie eccentricity by Eileen Heckart and Burgess Meredith.

As an everyday safety measure, it’s important to learn to observe warning signs when they appear – especially warning signs that reveal themselves in bright, blinking neon – but unfortunately the Rolfs never developed that skill so not only do they shrug off the cheap rent and the spooky siblings (who like to talk about the house as though it were alive) but they even agree to take care of the Allardyces’ elderly mother who resides in a secluded bedroom in the mansion’s attic.

As the Allardyces explain, their mother never leaves her room and a tray with food will have to be prepared three times a day and left outside the mother’s door. What could be easier? Why the Allardyces would entrust the care of their mother for the entire summer to a family of strangers is briefly questioned by Ben but then quickly brushed off. After all, when you have the opportunity to live in a mansion for the entire summer for just $900, why ask too many troublesome questions?

Pushing aside whatever minimal doubts they might be harboring, the Rolf family head to Allardyce Mansion with the elderly Aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) in tow to share in all the fun and frivolity to come. Of course, the big dream summer they were hoping for doesn’t quite pan out. Ben suffers odd fits of blind rage (he tries to drown David in the swimming pool at one point), the once-spry Elizabeth (who chatted excitedly about acquiring her learner’s permit while on the ride up to Allardyce Mansion) quickly starts to deteriorate – wanting to sleep her days away and beginning to doubt her own memory – and Marian develops a weirdly obsessive relationship with the unseen Allardyce mother. Marian goes past leaving prepared trays to actually entering the woman’s room and once she does so she is quick to block anyone else in the family from making contact with their mysterious housemate.

Scripted by Curtis along with frequent collaborator William F. Nolan (Trilogy of Terror, The Norliss Tapes), Burnt Offerings is a slow burn of a film as the Rolfs gradually come apart under the uncanny influence of the house. While the house had been in a state of disrepair and neglect when they arrived, the longer the Rolfs stay and the worse their own mental and physical states become, the better the house looks. Even the dead flowers in the greenhouse are coming back to life and it doesn’t take a seasoned student of horror to see where things are heading.

It’s always odd to revisit movies that once terrified you and to see them with very different eyes and Burnt Offerings definitely appears very different now than how I – and surely how many of my generation – remember it. It no longer has anywhere near the same intensity (and not just because it’s dated – there are movies of even older vintage that I still find frightening) but yet some of its imagery is still effective.

The recurring specter of a black-clad chauffeur (Anthony James) was a chilling sight for me a child and it’s easy to see why James’ coldly smiling face (his eyes hid behind a pair of reflective sunglasses) was distressing. James’ chauffeur (who never utters a line of dialogue) is right up there with Reggie Nadler’s Mr. Barlow from Salem’s Lot when it comes to the great boogeymen of ‘70s horror.

James’ creepy chauffeur aside, what really made Burnt Offerings so traumatic to a generation of ‘70s kids was its shattering ending. Even during the ‘70s, when downbeat endings were the norm, Burnt Offerings’ grim conclusion – marked by possession, a fatal plummet, and a crumbling chimney stack – packed a special punch with its distressing depiction of the annihilation of a family.

Every child wants to believe that their parents will always be able to protect themselves, each other, and (most importantly) them from harm but the finale of Burnt Offerings offered no comfort in that regard. While it wasn’t uncommon for the protagonist of a horror film in the ‘70s to meet a bleak fate, I can’t think of many – if any instances – where an entire family came to such an alarming end.

I think every kid who watched Burnt Offerings on TV back in the day walked away afterwards looking as dazed as if they’d been hit upside the head with a 2×4. And, of course, information traveled slower then so movies were more apt to catch viewers off guard. You couldn’t find spoilers on the internet so movies had a greater advantage of surprise.

As much as Burnt Offerings buried deep psychic splinters into the memories of children who encountered it thirty some odd years ago, it’s a much more tepid experience today. I imagine that any viewer coming to Burnt Offerings for the first time now would find the film to be irritatingly slow and uneventful.

Back when it was a contemporary film, that lack of full-throttled pacing wasn’t an issue. Movies weren’t so geared to be adrenaline rides then. Even young kids were open to enjoying movies that rolled their stories out leisurely. Attention was more easily given. But that was then, and now Burnt Offerings is more of a test of patience than it is a test of nerves.

Still, the cast remains impressive. You can’t go wrong when a family is played by Oliver Reed, Karen Black, and Bette Davis (to his credit, Lee H. Montgomery – who also had appeared in the killer rat film Ben – manages not to be annoying as David) and the conclusion is still a nasty piece of work (in a PG movie, no less). Over the years, it’s become something of a neglected item when it comes to ‘70s horror but legions of fans that saw it at the right time in their lives will always carry a torch for Burnt Offerings.

Originally published 5/11/12 at Shock Till You Drop. 

Retro-Shock Theater: Two Evil Eyes (1990)

On paper, it looked like a dream project – horror masters Dario Argento and George Romero re-teaming for the first time since Argento served as producer on Romero’s seminal splatter masterpiece Dawn of the Dead (1978) but this time each gentleman would be directing one half of an Edgar Allan Poe anthology.

Originally, Argento had planned the film to involve two other directors as well (reportedly John Carpenter and Wes Craven), but scheduling conflicts and other concerns caused Argento to pare it down to the more manageable duo of just he and Romero. Even today, when expectations for their newer work has diminished some, I believe it’d still cause plenty of fan excitement for Argento and Romero to be collaborating on a project like this but back then, Two Evil Eyes held the promise of being a true event.

In addition, FX maestro Tom Savini was on board to supply his patented brand of grisly Grand Guignol so with that kind of killer talent and with such classic source material to work from, Two Evil Eyes looked like one of the most promising pictures of the increasingly horror-starved late ‘80s/early ‘90s. If anyone was going to show the world how it was done and put horror back on the map again, you couldn’t do much better than the combined forces of Romero, Argento, and Savini with the spirit of Poe guiding them.

As anticipated as Two Evil Eyes was, though, it ended up shuffling quietly onto home video with zero fanfare in the fall of 1991. At the time, the general verdict on Two Evil Eyes was that it came dangerously close to giving Poe a posthumous black eye but with the Poe-inspired The Raven currently hitting theaters, it seems like an appropriate time to revisit Argento and Romero’s tarnished team-up to see if it’s improved at all with age.

As far as Romero’s contribution goes – an adaptation of “The Fact in the Case of M. Valdemar” (previously adapted as part of Roger Corman’s 1962 anthology Tales of Terror) – the answer, unhappily, is “no.”

This remains one of the flattest offerings in Romero’s filmography. To be fair to Romero, his work on Two Evil Eyes seemed hampered from the start. His original choice for adaptation was “The Masque of the Red Death,” which he envisioned as an AIDS parable taking place in a high rise tower in the future, but even though he had completed a screenplay and hoped to cast Donald Sutherland in the lead as Prospero, Argento felt that Romero’s take on “Masque” wasn’t in the spirit of what he wanted the film to be and adding to that dubiousness, the news that Roger Corman was mounting his own remake of Masque of the Red Death caused Argento to use his position as producer to force Romero to choose a different Poe tale as source material.

Romero eventually settled on “Valdemar” – less out of a passion for that slight tale than out of wanting to avoid any overlap with Argento’s segment, which utilized so many familiar Poe plot elements that “Valdemar” was simply the rare Poe story that didn’t share too much common ground. In contrast to the metaphorical richness and potential for social commentary found in “Masque,” however, “Valdemar” offered a somewhat hokey premise involving hypnotism that had to be fleshed out into an actual story.

The story that Romero hatched – involving Jessica, the scheming younger wife of the wealthy, elderly (and near death) Ernest Valdemar, and her ruthless lover Robert (who is also Valdemar’s physician) – was disappointingly routine, with its plotting lovers, reanimated corpse, and sense of ironic justice feeling more in line with EC Comics than with Poe. Because Robert happens to have Valdemar under deep hypnosis when the man passes away, Valdemar is suspended in a state between life and death. Until Valdemar’s business is settled, it can’t be known to anyone that he’s dead so in order to ensure that Jessica inherits her full due, Robert withholds the command for Valdemar to “wake up”.

The catch is that having Valdemar existing in that limbo between this world and the spirit world serves as a gateway for what Valdemar describes as “the others” (a concept that brings a hint of Lovecraft to the story) to come through. These macabre elements are given a lackluster treatment with most of the running time devoted to the mundane machinations of the two money-hungry lovers. As Romero himself noted at the time (in an interview in Fangoria #95), “it feels like I’m directing an episode of Columbo.”

While Romero corralled some of his best Creepshow veterans for Valdemar – E.G. Marshall as Valdemar’s lawyer, Adrienne Barbeau as Jessica Valdemar, Bingo O’Malley (who appeared in Jordy’s various visions in “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verill”) as Valdemar, and Tom Atkins in a brief appearance as a police detective – sadly, none of the performances register as more than perfunctory.

Say what you will about Romero’s later-day output but at least films like Bruiser (2000) and Survival of the Dead (2009) bear Romero’s personal stamp whereas Valdemar seems like a work for hire assignment for which Romero had little feeling. On the flipside of that, Argento’s delirious, depraved The Black Cat is clearly one of his best works – so much so that his full-throttle passion for the material only makes Two Evil Eyes feel more like a lopsided film.

As Romero told Cinefantastique in CFQ’s December 1990 issue, “As I was writing Valdemar, I had a few pangs of ‘Gee, should I be more studious?’ And when I read Argento’s script – which is such a love poem to Poe with references to many of his stories – I thought he was doing a much purer thing. I felt a little like I had been lazy.” Whether Romero’s assessment of his efforts is too harsh or not, it’s undeniable that Argento as a Poe scholar and aficionado simply schools Romero – making one wish that Argento had either done the entire film on his own or that he had perhaps collaborated with someone closer to his own sensibilities, like Michele Soavi (Stagefright, The Church) – then a protégé of Argento. In fact, Soavi briefly did some second unit directing on The Black Cat, followed by Luigi Cozzi (Alien Contamination).

Harvey Keitel stars as Rod Usher, an intense photographer who specializes in grisly crime pics. He lives in an upscale row home in Pittsburgh with his girlfriend Annabel (Madeleine Potter), a professional violinist. Rod and Annabel’s relationship is a testy one, with his hostile demeanor in conflict with Annabel’s dreamy, sensitive personality. Events take a turn for the worse when Annabel adopts a stray black cat that Rod takes an instant disliking to – a feeling that is only acerbated by Annabel’s need to protect the animal. When Annabel is out one afternoon, Rod strangles the cat – photographing the deed as he does it – and disposes of the body.

Annabel suspects Rod of killing the cat but can’t prove it but when Rod later publishes a collection of his photos titled Metropolitan Horrors (briefly considered as a title for the film) with the cover photo being her cat being choked, she knows. A confrontation leads to Rod murdering Annabel and, in true Poe fashion, sealing the body behind a wall in his home – an apparently perfect crime.

Using Poe’s tale only as a loose framework, Argento and screenwriter Franco Ferrini (who previously collaborated with Argento on Phenomena and Opera) turn The Black Cat into a true Poe-pourri of references to Poe’s entire body of work with images, names, and lines of dialogue lifted from a wide range of Poe’s short stories and poems – including “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.”

Argento is so thorough in paying tribute to all things Poe that a picture of the French poet Charles Baudelaire – whose translations of Poe’s work were instrumental in advancing the critical appreciation of Poe – can be spotted hanging on the wall along the staircase in Rod Usher’s home.

An effective portrait of a tormented psyche, The Black Cat is hampered slightly by an odd sense of naiveté in regards to the kind of public reaction that Metropolitan Horrors would generate. If such a book were published, even with assurances that no animal was harmed, Usher wouldn’t have time to worry about being tormented by a cat because he’d have to deal with his home being picketed by angry animal rights activists.

Also, the concluding moments of The Black Cat are awkwardly staged. I understand that Usher must perish in the manner that was prophesied by the markings in the cat’s fur but I doubt that even the most distraught mind would think that trying to exit from a second floor window while handcuffed to a dead man weighing in the ball park of 300 pounds is a winning idea.

I remember being confounded by these closing moments the last time I saw the film about twenty years ago and they make no more sense now. Argento and Ferrini should’ve sought a better way to end their tale but unfortunately it is what it is. Luckily, what it is is still mostly great. The Black Cat was Argento’s first film shot in America (he really revels in showcasing the city of Pittsburgh), it was his first film with big name actors, and the opportunity to pay homage to Poe (and perhaps a sense of unspoken professional competition with Romero) served to bring out the best in him.

When it comes to writing the book on Poe, cinematically speaking, that honor is likely to always remain with Roger Corman. But Argento’s contribution to Two Evil Eyes endures as a heartfelt toast from one dark dreamer to another.

Originally published on 4/26/12 at Shock Till You Drop.

Retro-Shock Theater: Ticks (1993)

As most horror scenarios typically necessitate isolating the main characters from immediate aid, it’s not surprising that one of the most perennially popular settings for tales of terror has been your standard, dependable woodland cabin. Not only are rural cabins the perfect destination for teens and twentysomethings looking for a weekend away but they’re also the kind of place where all manner of mayhem can occur with little hope of rescue.

With Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s much-awaited The Cabin In The Woods revisiting and reinventing this archetypal horror trope, fans will no doubt be feeling nostalgic for past classics of the cabin in the woods genre. While the generally agreed upon gold standard of the sub-genre is The Evil Dead (1983) and its first sequel, 1987’s Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn, I’d like to champion a mostly forgotten cabin in the woods film – 1993’s Ticks.

Ticks’ simple storyline concerns a group of semi-troubled city kids – including future Robot Chicken creator Seth Green as the agoraphobic Tyler, Alfonso Ribiero of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as Panic, a would-be gangsta whose intimidating street persona hides a good heart, and ‘90s Scream Queen Ami Dolenz (Witchboard 2) as the spoiled Dee Dee – who journey to a wilderness retreat under the supervision of eager social worker Holly Lambert (Rosalind Allen, of Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice) and her sociologist boyfriend Charles Danson (Bosom Buddies’ Peter Scolari).

What these kids and their adult chaperones don’t know is that they’re heading into a proverbial tick-ing time bomb. You see, thanks to hard economic times in this logging community, many in this serene rural area (including one muttering eccentric played by Clint Howard) have turned to pot farming to make ends meet and the use by some of an illegal chemical fertilizer on their covert cash crops has sent the local tick population into evolutionary overdrive. Slimy, pulsating cocoons harbor the next generation of super ticks and in rapid succession they start to hatch and as these cocoons of doom burst, the woods become alive with hordes of scampering, skittering, blood-sucking menaces.

Adding to the already dire danger is a unlikely pair of marijuana growers named Sir (Barry Lynch) and Jerry (Michael Medeiros). Looking to keep their activities hidden from potentially prying eyes, Sir (who seems to have modeled his slick look and archaic mannerisms after some ‘30s movie villain) and Jerry (a backwoods cretin straight out of Deliverance) have no qualms about resorting to murder but by Ticks’ chaotic climax both friend and foe alike will be forced to fight for their lives inside a single cabin under siege.

For a movie about mutant ticks, Ticks has a pretty fine pedigree of talent involved. Directed by Tony Randel (Hellbound: Hellraiser II) and produced by Brian Yunza (Re-Animator, Society), Ticks was a bright spot on video store shelves cluttered with ‘90s direct-to-video dreck. Make no mistake, Ticks is 100% B-movie cheese but Randel had proven himself to be a sure, if unspectacular, hand at the genre with Hellbound as well as with the offbeat vampire pic Children of the Night (part of the short-lived run of Fangoria Films) and Ticks reflected his no-nonsense but still respectful approach to genre fare.

Yunza also had a mostly rock-solid track record at the time and his involvement in a film then was a good indicator that you’d be in for a movie that delivered the gruesome goods. At the time of its initial video release, Ticks came across as a genial throwback to the popular eco-horror fad of the 1970s (represented by such films as Frogs, Kingdom of the Spiders and Day of the Animals). Ticks comes by that ‘70s vibe authentically as its storyline was originally conceived two decades earlier by the film’s special effects supervisor Doug Beswick (known for his stop motion work on such classics as Evil Dead II and The Terminator) in a treatment titled Cycle of Blood.

As Beswick told Fangoria prior to Ticks’ release, make-up maestro Rick Baker was briefly involved early on after he and Beswick met on the set of 1971’s Octo-Man. Said Beswick in Fangoria #123: “Rick hadn’t become famous yet and he was going to do the makeup while I did the stop motion.” But as it took a couple of decades for Beswick to find a producer that was interested in his idea, future Oscar winner Rick Baker never added Ticks to his resume (it’s a shame the film was never made in the ‘70s with Baker on board as it would’ve made for a great drive-in double bill with another eco-horror classic that Baker did work on, 1976’s killer worm tale Squirm).

Despite coming up with the concept, final scripting duties on Ticks fell to writer Brent V. Friedman, who had previously penned 1992’s The Resurrected, director Dan O’Bannon’s underrated Lovecraft adaptation of the story "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." But even if he wasn’t responsible for the screenplay, Beswick is still arguably the star of Ticks as the effects done under his guidance are a nasty, gooey delight.

Fans of practical FX often cite classics like Carpenter’s The Thing or Day of the Dead as examples of how hands-on movie magic can’t be matched by CG but while those films are certainly great, I think a B-movie like Ticks shows how a very minor film can be instantly elevated by ingenious, well-executed FX.

Ticks has an amiable cast of mostly familiar faces, unfussy direction, and a fast-paced, pulpy narrative but it’s the ticks that really make Ticks tick. For an exploitation film, Ticks is surprisingly mild-mannered (despite a cast ready made for being picked off, only one youth falls victim to the ticks – although it should be said that the torturous series of events that this character suffers through is rivaled on film only by The Passion of the Christ) but the ticks (including a supersized “Steroid Tick”) are glorious to see in action.

Certain genre films endure for a variety of reasons. Some films are so innovative that they change the visual language of cinema. Some feature iconic characters. Some films embody ageless anxieties better than others. Some are of such indisputable quality that “classic” is the only word for them. But all other virtues aside, sometimes simply having just one single element that no other film has is the key to genre immortality – even if the rest of the film around it is flawed.

So if anyone asks, “Is featuring the finest mutant ticks in cinematic history enough for a movie to be remembered?” the answer is “Hell yes!” With that in mind, here’s to Ticks, a movie destined to forever remain the standard against which all (if any) future killer tick flicks must be judged – as well as yet another helpful horror film reminder for kids to stay out of the woods.

Originally published on 4/12/12 at Shock Till You Drop. 

Out With The Old, In With The Old...

The arrival of the new year is usually a time of fresh beginnings and a casting off of yesterday's baggage. But I'm in a reflective, archival mood so I'm kicking off 2017 with some flashbacks to earlier times.

From April of 2012 to February of 2013 (with one final jump back in October of '13), I penned a column for Shock Till You Drop under the title of Retro-Shock Theater, in which I reviewed random classics and cult faves. The column faded due to an increasing lack of time on my part but while it lasted, I enjoyed the platform that then-STYD editor Ryan Turek afforded me to give celebratory shout outs to some of my favorite titles.

Shock Till You Drop has gone through quite a few changes since I wrote for them (as a sign that they may have suffered a touch of the hard times that have befallen much of the net lately, at some point along the way it appears they've been incorporated into their parent site of Coming Soon.net) and while my old columns are still to be found in the STYD archives, due to all the upheavals the site has undergone over the years, few - if any of 'em - still bear my name.

In the interest of preserving those old columns on the off-chance that STYD may one day vanish altogether (you never know!) or decide to strip their archives of older material, I'm going to re-run them here.

Believe me, I don't think that any of these columns are so deathless in their appreciation of film that they can't afford to be permanently lost to time but I have just enough pride in my work, whatever its meager merits may be, to want to protect it from oblivion. Will reposting all this old stuff encourage me to kick in some new posts? I highly doubt it - the idea of writing about movies now makes me want to slam my head in a door jam - but hey, you never know!

In the meantime, Happy New Year!

The More You Think About It, The Worse It Gets

Growing up, once I went beyond just enjoying movies to becoming more interested in understanding how other people saw movies, I'd still only read about ten reviews of any new film. I'd check out what my local paper had to say, then The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, and the big magazines like Newsweek and TIME. A few solid opinions, that's all I needed. It's all anyone should need, right?

Due to their publishing schedule, genre mags like Cinefantastique were never timely in their reviews but I actually liked that better in a way because by the time they ran their take on a film, it seemed as though it was coming from a more contemplative place, rather than just representing the knee jerk opinion of opening weekend.

Now, thanks to the internet, everything is just knee jerk opening weekend opinion. When a new movie comes out, especially if it's a movie that's perceived to be bad, everyone pig piles on it.

That's mainly what keeps me from writing about new movies now, especially if my opinion is more or less in line with the common consensus. How many times does anyone need to read the same thing, just phrased slightly differently? As a reader, I don't care and as a writer, is there any point in being the 8,986,420th person to tell the world that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a piece of shit?

Not a whole lot of value in that, right?

But listen...sometimes you just can't stop thinking about a movie. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. And, for me, Batman v Superman falls heavily into the latter camp. And while it doesn't say much about my overall quality as a person, I know I'm just not going to be happy until I rip it a new asshole (SPOILERS ahead).

First off, it's a terrible movie. Yes, we can say that everybody has their own take on the film, that everybody has a right to their own valid, individual opinions but, for fuck's sake, this movie is garbage.

(Reminder: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!)

We all know that some movies are misunderstood upon their initial release and they become more appreciated in time but I just can't see that ever being the case here. I don't think the consensus is ever going to swing in BvS's favor where, like, a lot of people come around to thinking that this was not the dumpster fire that it appeared to be.

From what I've seen on message boards, the common knock that BvS fans make towards its detractors is that "oh, well, you're just a Marvel fan!" but I don't know how anyone who considers themselves to be a fan of DC would not be put off by the treatment these icons have received at Zack Snyder's hands.

What Snyder has done is like if Rob Zombie made an adaptation of the General Mills monster cereal mascots. If you can imagine what Zombie's take on Frankenberry and Count Chocula would be like, that's kind of what Snyder's Batman and Superman feels like to me. It's a movie no one in their right mind would ever ask for is what I'm saying.

Wonder Woman comes off the best simply because she's in it the least (and Ben Affleck manages a decent performance as Bruce/Batman, even as he's called upon to do some dumb, very un-Batman like things) but this movie does not do any of these characters any favors.

After watching Man of Steel, I felt that Snyder was someone who just fundamentally did not understand Superman, that he just couldn't wrap his head around either the hope the character embodies or the selfless heroism he practices, and that's proven ten fold by BvS. It's like watching Jack the Ripper try to direct a movie about Gandhi.

Now, some would say "But Superman sacrifices himself at the end! That's heroic! Come on, it's right there in the movie! Pay attention!" Yes, that is right. Superman does sacrifice himself in the fight against Doomsday. But here's the thing: it's not dramatically earned.

On just an internal logic level, the events of the climax don't hold together. We know Superman can't get near Kryptonite without losing his powers. Not only do we know this from decades' worth of stories but it's been demonstrated in the very film we're watching not more than ten minutes earlier. We see that Superman is completely useless near Kryptonite, to the point where he's just a sack of wet laundry.

But yet at the climax he picks up a spear with a big Kryptonite tip and not only flies at full speed across the length of two football fields to take on Doomsday but also still has the strength to ram the spear through Doomsday in a prolonged struggle. This is absolutely idiotic.

Especially as Wonder Woman, someone of near-equal strength to Superman, is RIGHT THERE. Literally, she's just an arm's length next to Superman. There's no reason why Superman couldn't have handed the spear to her so she could take on Doomsday. There's no reason that Superman has to do it himself other than for the filmmakers to take the easiest, most unearned route to staging his "heroic" death.

The really galling thing is that Superman still could've been killed during the course of the final battle by means of any number of plausible scenarios but to make that moment work, Snyder, screenwriter David Goyer, and co. would've have to have gone the extra mile creatively (and not even a mile, for God's sake - they just would've had to think about it for more than five freaking minutes).

Of course, that would've taken a little thought, a little extra work, and some respect for the audience. Much easier to just put that spear in Superman's hands, no matter how little sense it makes, and just have him get killed that way. So what we end up with is a "big" death that rings hollow because it comes across as exactly what it is - a pre-determined plot point that had to be met, come hell or highwater, with as little thought possible given as to how to get us there.

Superman's death isn't akin to Spock's final sacrifice in Wrath of Khan (as much as Snyder wants us to feel that it is, to the point of having 'Amazing Grace' played on bagpipes at Clark's funeral - are the Kents Scottish? - as a blatant shout out to Khan). No, Superman's death (like everything else in BvS), isn't nearly so (pardon the phrase) logical. It's just crap that has to happen to set up other crap they have planned.

Speaking of logic, while logic and the messy reality of emotions don't always have to perfectly synch up, the abrupt, nonsensical transition of Batman and Superman from enemies to friends is jaw-dropping any way you look at it. I'm not even going to get into the whole goofy "Martha" thing at this point because it's been covered in a thousand snarky memes but I had to audibly groan in the theater when Batman rescues Martha Kent and he growls to her "I'm a friend of your son's!"

That line is supposed to be a big laugh getter (I assume) but, Jesus, are you kidding me?? I could see him saying "Your son sent me." Sure, I'd be ok with that. But "I'm a friend of your son's?" Really? After he's spent months plotting to kill Superman (not just to fight him or contain him or develop a sound strategy against him but to kill him) and after we've just watched him take sick, sadistic pleasure in inflicting pain on Superman? Now they're not just allies but "friends"?

Let's be clear: the fight between Batman and Superman in BvS isn't depicted as just some brawl. Batman wasn't just trying to put a little hurt on Superman. No, Batman was actively trying to take Superman's life (even in Dark Knight Returns, Batman didn't have anything fatal in mind when he went into battle against Superman, by the way).

We're not talking about a mind-controlled Batman here. We're not talking about a possessed Batman. No, this was just plain old Batman (a Batman who's dumb enough to be manipulated into attempted murder by newspaper clippings with scrawled messages on them but still a Batman who, all anger issues aside, is supposedly in his 'right' mind). When he slowly slices Superman's flesh with the tip of the Kryptonite spear, the sick fuck seems to really be relishing the moment. If he could've carved out Superman's heart right then and there and bit into it, letting the blood of his hated enemy run thick and red down his chest, he would've. But after all that we see go down between these two, just moments later they're "friends"!

Look, being the 8,986,420th or so person to dump on Batman v Superman isn't a proud moment for me but I just had to do it. And, shit, I could go on. For hours, really - I've barely even scratched the surface of how awful BvS is. Hell, I haven't even said a word about Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor (a performance that would've been embarrassing even in a Schumacher Batman movie) but I've got to force myself to stop. I can't talk about the jar of piss. I can't talk about how somehow anyone can walk into a Kryptonian ship and be recognized as supreme leader just because they answered "yes" when the ship asked them a question. No, I can't talk about any of that.

You know, it's just a movie. Whether any movie is good or bad, life goes on either way. But, weeks later, I just can't believe how terrible this one particular movie was - this movie that had so much time and talent devoted to it. I think that's what annoys me the most - that with all the resources this production had, all the extra time they had to finesse things (remember, this was originally supposed to be out in 2015) and this is what they ended up with. How does that happen?

Is it carelessness? Indifference? Personally, I believe it's all about contempt. Like Man of Steel, this is a movie made by people who perceive these characters to be 'corny' and think they won't appeal to jaded modern viewers unless someone makes them 'cool'. That's a terrible angle to approach from. There's no way you're going to get these characters right if you believe they're broken to begin with. Add in the lack of attention to story, logic, human emotions, and so on, and, well, you've got Batman v Superman. It's probably a mistake to go too dark with these characters in the first place but you could still pull it off if you tried. The real problem here is going dark and dumb.

As a fan of DC, it's a heartbreaker to see these characters and the universe they inhabit brought to the screen with so little love, care, or understanding. As a fan, I would have loved to celebrate the sight of DC's Trinity on screen but unfortunately Batman v Superman didn't give me anything to cheer for. And if you think I'm going to bother devoting my time to watching the three hour cut of this, you're nuts.

I'm just curious to see whether Warners/DC will take any steps to course correct or if they just let Snyder continue to vandalize their properties. Either way, it's their money. It just seems like, at some point, you'd want to start getting this shit right. But what do I know?

I'm just a fan.