Ghostwatch

    This is an odd one to analyze in at least three ways: it’s one of those foundational works whose influence is so widespread now it comes across as utterly familiar even though it was doing a lot of things for the first time. It’s also been well documented as a fictional program whose original notoriety came from people mistaking it for an actual documentary. Finally it’s almost thirty years old so it’s hard to put yourself in the headspace of someone watching it without context in 1992 when you’re watching it in 2020 with the television landscape and communications technology so fundamentally different.

    Let’s do the best we can. ‘Ghostwatch’ was a 90 minute program that aired on October 31^st, 1992 on the flagship channel of the BBC, BBC1. Although it was promoted and listed in the Radio Times as a drama the fact that it was made and presented for its duration as an actual news broadcast fooled quite a number of people. It was hosted by several actual television personalities as themselves, principally Michael Parkinson in the studio and Sarah Greene on location at the supposedly haunted house, with comedian Craig Charles throwing in color commentary. It’s hard to translate those figures into any analogues today for a number of reasons: first the US doesn’t really have an equivalent to the BBC and how central it was to news dissemination at the time nor does trust in individual news personalities run as deeply, for better or worse we’re much more skeptical of our news sources. To translate to similar US figures of the time it’d be a bit like Tom Brokaw presenting a live broadcast as an official NBC newscast with Katie Couric in the field and Ted Danson cracking jokes on the side.

    The biggest changes almost 30 years of technological progress has had on the impact of the show isn’t so much on the production side of the show itself, although the studio segments are stodgy, the cameramen in the field are trailing cables behind them quite a lot of the time, and the entire thing is shot on tape to give it that early-90’s live look, it’s in what information was available to the audience watching at home. Unless you physically had a copy of the Radio Times (the UK equivalent of a TV Guide) you had to rely on what the show was presenting itself as to know what you were watching. There was also no internet to look up information while you were watching to do instant fact-checking. And in perhaps the cleverest touch unless you were physically taping the show yourself and were willing to interrupt your recording to go back and look at the recording to check whether or not you had seen something you were hostage to the “live” format. The reason this is so clever is that the show itself takes rather frequent advantage of the fact that people are watching this as it’s broadcast to their rather-fuzzy CRT tvs and so will have spooky figures appearing in the backgrounds of shots yet when they go back to “check the footage” it will show nothing as the entire program had been shot and edited weeks before.

    Similar to the infamous Welles broadcast of “War of the Worlds” there were numerous stories about people mistaking the show as non-fictional but since it was 1992 instead of 1938 these are much better documented. Although the outrage has grown in the telling there officially were around 30,000 complaints eventually filed about the show and it was banned from rebroadcast for over a decade. To this day it’s never been re-shown on UK television, although it is available on DVD and streaming. Many people were genuinely scared by this show.

    Although obscure to the general US public it’s very well known among horror aficionados and its influence can be felt far and wide. The makers of ‘The Blair Witch Project’ claim not to have been aware of it before making this movie, although that has been questioned. The entire found-footage horror genre has its arguable start here and rather pleasingly ‘Ghostwatch’ had already solved most of the problems people have with how those movies are presented. It’s explicitly a news broadcast by the BBC so any questions of why there are so many cameras, how are they getting footage, how is stuff supposedly filmed live being edited (Parkinson will frequently turn off-camera and request that the staff pull footage from earlier in the broadcast and they’ll have it several minutes later), it’s all answered by the very format its aping.

    With the benefit of hindsight it’s fairly obviously fictional on a re-watch. For the most part they do a very good job fitting everything together but a lot of it is clearly staged and some of the performances don’t really ring true. Oddly enough it’s not the presenters who give the off performances, they’re clearly experts at appearing as their “on” personas at all times and seamlessly channel it into their acting. The two child actresses are very good too and the actress playing their mother interacts with them well. The most mannered performance and the one that I feel would have clued me in almost instantly if I’d been watching at the time is that of Gillian Bevan playing Dr. Lin Pascoe, a paranormal expert. In my opinion she’s trying too hard to make things seem scary and dramatic while the more detached presentation style of Parkinson does a much better job.

    The show does a very good job for the first 45 minutes or so of laying things out in a clear, precise manner giving the audience the facts, having some nice banter between the presenters, and in general just acting like a news program about a possible haunted house where nothing particularly scary is happening. At around 50 minutes we’re presented with the first couple of seemingly supernatural events and things go a bit wobbly in terms of suspension of disbelief before it’s then revealed that one of the children is banging on some pipes herself and the entire thing deflates as a likely hoax, with the paranormal expert instantly becoming defensive and coming across as being rather desperate to believe. Parkinson is particularly good in this section, coming across as a polite but aggressive skeptic and increasingly challenging the in-studio expert.

    Around the hour mark more and more things start to happen that can’t just be waved off as the children making noises and at around an hour fifteen the show basically turns full supernatural with things like a mirror jumping off the wall and injuring a camera man, mysterious noises coming from the walls and in particular a small room under the stairs, and the studio itself supposedly becoming haunted by the ghost. There’s some hurried exposition about the broadcast itself having turned into a “nationwide seance” before the lights go out and the camera cuts for a few moments before turning back on to show a possessed Michael Parkinson wandering alone in the studio. Cut to credits which reveal the writer, director, and actors’ names, just like any other fictional presentation.

    By that point the damage had rather already been done and quite a lot of the public was furious. On Sarah Greene’s next appearance on tv she had to assure any children watching that she was fine. All of which begs the rather obvious question: is it any scary? As I said at the beginning that’s hard to say. Is it scary by today’s standards? Honestly, no, without even knowing the backstory it would come across as just another found-footage production. Would it have been scary at the time? To a lot of people it obviously was. With the names attached and the way it was presented if I’d been watching it back in the day I may have given it more of the benefit of the doubt but certainly by the end I would’ve been clued in enough to check the end credits. Is it worth a watch now for the first time? It’s certainly a well-told and well-presented ghost story and as long as you don’t actually expect to be frightened I can see any horror fan having a good time with this. If nothing else it’s useful for seeing where all of these other movies got their ideas from. It’s much more culturally relevant in the UK where it’s entered into something like their broadcast folklore, something people around my age and older can tell stories about what it was like to live through. I’ve heard about it for so long that I’m glad I’ve finally gotten around to watching it and I can certainly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it before. In a way I almost feel like the BBC’s reaction to banning it from rebroadcast has only helped its reputation in the long run. Unless you go to the effort to track it down and watch it it’ll always be that scary broadcast they tell stories about panicking the nation all those years ago. Not a bad way to be remembered.

 

Road Games

    This movie does not belong in this month. It’s like putting ‘Rear Window’ in a marathon with ‘Pscyho’ when it’s not even Alfred Hitchcock month. It may have been marketed as such and the poster is certainly misleading but this is not a slasher film in any way, it’s a straight suspense thriller.

Like two things in this poster are accurate.

    Speaking of ‘Rear Window’ that was apparently the inspiration for this screenplay and when you watch it knowing that it really shows. Director Richard Franklin apparently gave screenwriter Everett De Roche a copy of ‘Rear Window’ while they were working on the film ‘Patrick’ in 1978. This inspired De Roche to take the basic premise of that movie, transport it to Australia, and change the character from a house-bound journalist to a long-haul truck driver who keeps himself amused by observing the other motorists on Australia’s long, straight highways. Richard Franklin was a well-respected director principally noted as the direct of ‘Pscyho II,’ a movie that is far better than it has any right to be, and De Roche wrote prolifically for Australian film and television. I’m not nearly as familiar with Australian cinema as I need to be, there’s way more to it than ‘Mad Max.’

    Stacy Keach plays a truck driver named Quid who spends his time on the road talking both to himself and his pet dingo to pass the time. Several times during the movie he makes a point of clarifying to people he meets that while he drives a truck he is not a “truck driver.” From his reading materials to his habit of quoting poetry he comes across as a man who has lived many lives and while not unhappy with his current lot is clearly looking for more. The movie belongs almost entirely to him with his character being onscreen about 95% of the time with other characters dipping in and out as he makes the long journey to Perth. The only major supporting role is that of Pamela, or Hitch as she’s nicknamed, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Similar to the clashes with the Hollywood system that came from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ movies there was some controversy about an American actress taking work way from Australians at the insistence of US financial backers, apparently a pretty familiar story down there.

Just a boy, a girl, and his dingo.

    The plot is quite simply a mobile ‘Rear Window’ with the main character slowly being convinced over the course of the film that the driver of a green van he keeps coming across is a serial killer leaving behind a trail of female victims. If the movie wasn’t made as well as it was this “simple” plot might be a complaint but the move more than fills the rest of the time with character depth, clever dialogue, and solid plotting. In director Franklin we have someone who likes long, contemplative takes of both the vastness of the scenery and simple character interactions, letting the scenes breathe in a way you wouldn’t expect when so much of it takes place in the cab of a truck. Edits are used to heighten tension and for emotional beats, just like in a real movie.

    Stacy Keach as Quid is inherently likable, which initially struck me as odd as I forever associate him with his incredibly intense turns in ‘The Night Configuration’ and other, more sinister roles, but then I remembered he’s an actor with actual range. Curtis is also very likable and was apparently cast due the ‘scream queen’ reputation she’d acquired and how it would complicate her hitchhiking character. The filmmakers have gone on record as wishing her part had been expanded once she had been cast, apparently not quite realizing at the time what a resource they had in her, and it’s hard to disagree.

    One of the most refreshing aspects of the movie is its subtlety. You don’t have to pay attention to every fragment of the news heard over the radio or keep track of every vehicle Quid passes and then catches back up with but you’re rewarded if you do. Characters established in one scene will be reacting in the background later. His character, and through him the audience, starts noticing odd little details about the driver of that green van he keeps seeing that slowly add up to genuinely suspicious behavior but Quid never quite moves into outright obsession about it. He’s constantly coming right up to the edge of believing his own theories but then he’ll come up with a reasonable explanation and back down without dismissing his suspicions entirely. Arguably the reason he finally gives in and throws caution to the wind in a final chase through the back streets of Perth is the slow build up of a lack of sleep and drive time, something the movie is constantly setting up.

Did I not mention the meat truck?

    The reason I’m not going into many plot details while freely admitting it’s basically just ‘Rear Window’ in a truck is because the pleasures of this movie are in the execution and character details, not the basic plot. My theory about ending a movie with character beats continues to hold, there’s technically a jump scare at the very end but the rest is pure character arc goodness. If you’re a fan of Hitchcock I’m not saying that this is up there with his best work but it’ll certainly go toe-to-toe with something like ‘Torn Curtain.’

    I knew I was in trouble with this movie when even cursory research turned up the fact that this is one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite Australian movies of all time. You can have many different opinions about Tarantino as a person but you have to admit the man knows his way around a screenplay and he very vocally adores this one. Despite my hazy memories of weekend afternoon showings on the USA network this isn’t a horror movie and it certainly isn’t a slasher film. As kind of a treat for myself I decided to cap off this month of reviews with three Jamie Lee Curtis movies in a row and I wasn’t about to do ‘The Fog’ since that’s obviously a film of quality and doesn’t deserve to be lumped into the same category as ‘Night of the Demons’ but then neither does this movie so I guess I lost either way. Or won, I guess, depends on your perspective. I’m kind of back in ‘Dreamscape’ territory where it turns out that the movie a lot of people think is pretty good is actually pretty good. I would very much recommend giving this a try, especially if you’ve written it off as just another slasher movie when it’s much more than just that.

 

Pilot Season – She-Wolf of London

    While having an admittedly great title (possibly stolen from a 1946 film) this show has to have one of the most tortuous production histories I’ve ever seen. This show was a product of the Hollywood Premiere Network (HPN) which was formed in 1989, itself rising from the ashes of the Premier Program Service (PPS), an attempt by Paramount Domestic Television (‘War of the Worlds’) and MCA TV (the record label, which through various acquisitions had bought both a half-interest in the USA Network, the other half belonging to Paramount, and also purchased WWOR-TV in New York City, one of the largest independent tv stations in the country) to cobble together it s own “fourth network” in competition with the then-struggling Fox network. After the demise of PPS HPN was formed by partnering WWOR-TV with KCOP-TV in Los Angeles to form a kind of bifurcated national platform. It shopped around to other independent stations a two-night package (including ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ as part of the package, remember Paramount owned Star Trek) consisting of ‘Shades of L.A.,’ a supernatural neo-noir starring a detective who could communicate with ghosts, ‘They Came from Outer Space,’ a sci-fi comedy featuring twin aliens from the planet Crouton which was created by Tom McLoughlin who also created the third show ‘She-Wolf of London,’ a US/UK co-production. All three series would be canceled within a year and the network disbanded.

The opening credits make the ones for Sylvester McCoy's Doctor look sensible.

    The production troubles don’t end there for ‘She-Wolf of London.’ The UK half of the production was done by Harlech Television (HTV) which was licensed to service the West Country and Wales region of the UK. Among the original board of directors was Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (this has nothing to do with the show, it’s just interesting). They were best known for their work producing children’s television and were the first British broadcaster to air ‘Sesame Street’ (again just interesting). After the first fourteen episodes were shot in England HTV pulled its funding from the show and it relocated to LA, cutting both the budget and the cast and drastically retooling the show. Now re-branded as ‘Love & Curses’ only six LA episodes were produced before the show ended entirely.

    Shooting a television show in England under the auspices of a foreign production company while being based out of Los Angeles apparently caused its own set of problems. As the FCC isn’t a thing in the UK several episodes contained nudity which needed to be edited out of the US broadcast versions. About the only in-depth look at the series I’ve been able to find is the video essay by YouTube critic Allison Pregler and according to her research miscommunication was a frequent problem.

    So let’s finally get to the pilot itself. Creators of the show were Mick Garris and Tom McLoughlin, frequent mainstays in the lower echelons of horror film and tv. The only relatively known cast member was Kate Hodge who had previously starred in ‘Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III’ and would go on to find steady television work. No one else involved went on to anything of much note.

    The episode opens on an airplane with our hero Randi Wallace flying over to study under Professor Ian Matheson. After something of a labored meet-cute on the first day of class the two get to talking about his work. It’s at this point I need to mention the dialogue which is both belabored and so on-point as to be genuinely embarrassing. Like how the word ‘randy’ means ‘horny’ in British idiom? There’s a whole minute spent on that. They also spout genuinely nonsensical academic terms at each other about their research into the supernatural to fool the audience into thinking they’re smart. At no point do the characters in this show act like people.

    She mentions she’s having problems with her housing, he mentions his parents run a B&B, and just like that we have a sitcom premise. Over dinner with a set of British stereotypes she mentions she’s going “ghost hunting on the moors” which everyone who’s read the title for the show can translate as “will be attacked and turned into a werewolf.” The family natters on about possible future plot points and relatives while we’re all waiting for the werewolf attack. Later that night the professor gets what should come across as inappropriate as she’s getting ready for bed but the show treats it as no big deal, so sure.

    Cut directly to a tent presumably on the moors where Randi is typing on perhaps the bulkiest laptop I’ve ever seen, even for 1990. Cue werewolf POV cam and a severely edited attack on her tent. She wakes up in the hospital with a doctor and the professor standing over her, which is I’m sure how the NHS works. The editing goes nuts for several minutes as it cuts between hospital stuff and flashbacks to the same few seconds of werewolf attack and I can’t tell if it was originally shot this way or it was cobbled together back in the US from what footage they had. Eventually she ends up back at the B&B with more British nattering.

    One of the selling points of HPN was the reduced budget of their shows and the presumably lowered licensing cost to the independent stations and it’s here that the lack of resources start to show. The episode starts flinging itself from scene to scene without the most basic of establishing shots or connecting dialogue, the audience just has to try to keep up. She’s in a library, cut to Ian reading in his office, then she’s in a laboratory with test animals, cut to Ian, cut to her wolfing out, cut to Ian who is apparently the only person left on the entire campus and who hears her transforming and so wanders out to investigate. He find the cages holding the test animals torn apart and is suddenly frightened by an awkward insert shot of a werewolf head. He gets chased to the library where we get a couple of shots of the werewolf costume in all its un-glory (and random slo-mo shots, I’m starting to feel bad for whoever had to edit this nonsense).

    Eventually the werewolf corners him in a closet and then just ... goes away for no discernible reason. Suddenly it’s the next day and Ian is talking with the police among the destroyed cages about Randi’s disappearance. They suspect her of some crime, it’s unclear of what kind or why and then the scene is over. Randi wakes up while taking a shower in a men’s locker room, which is at least interesting, and then we cut to the police leaving Ian’s office after having questioned her, which thanks show, glad that aborted subplot went nowhere and will never come up again. Also glad she’s still naked from the shower and wrapped in a blanket, that seems right. She instantly tells Ian she was the werewolf, which he doesn’t believe. She asks for his help in figuring out what happened which he instantly agrees to.

    This episode is increasingly spinning into incoherence. Cut to B&B, she’s reading. Cut to hypnosis session back in Ian’s office, she remembers the attack scene we’ve already witnessed. Cut to them both on the moors, climbing stuff. Now they’re picnicking, including two bottles of wine, where she was attacked. I think they’re flirting but it’s hard to tell. Now they’re chasing each other over rocks for some reason, and still flirting? She literally steps on a clue, a ring they instantly identify as having burst off someone’s finger and now they’re driving home and it’s all about the ring that was established mere seconds before. They come across a “traveling Gypsy carnival” because of course they do, they pull over for no established reason and Randi decides to talk to them. Ian objects even though he was the one driving and pulled over in the first place. Off-screen dialogue indicates that Randi’s “instinct’ is directing her to a fortune-telling Gypsy woman complete with crystal ball.

    She dismisses them until Randi shows her the ring which, again, she literally stepped on just minutes ago and is now claiming must have come from the werewolf that attacked her. She tells them to leave and they are instantly arguing several layers deep about werewolf mythology, how she was cursed, how to break the bloodline, I need to remind you that this caravan was introduced literally less than 90 seconds of screen-time ago. She senses another member of the caravan is the werewolf and now they’re in a car chase after him. After several jumbled shots of cars on dirt roads the werewolf they’re chasing pulls a literal Toonces moment and drives right off a cliff. The two of them teleport down the cliff where the werewolf is still alive, screaming in the wreckage of the car which then instantly catches fire and explodes. The caravan has disappeared, Ian believes her now, and with the most awkward ‘we ran out of footage’ cut I think I’ve ever seen they’re back at the B&B for more British nattering. They now have a makeshift dungeon in the basement of the B&B which, fine. There’s an awkwardly inserted shot of a newspaper ad for ‘occult researchers’ and then the show slaps us upside the head with the end credits.

I mean, sure.

    I am in something like awe of this episode of television. It plays like someone shot a bunch of footage in vague approximation of a written script then shipped it halfway around the world to be assembled by a completely different set of people into something as close to broadcastable as possible. From everything I’ve looked at this seems to have been at least possible given the production history. The thrown-together nature of the funding and distribution network behind this show somehow seems to have filtered down into the finished product. It’s the first tv show (and I’m including ‘Sleepwalkers’ in this) I’ve seen in some time to be so deeply confused at both a production and narrative level. 1990 was not a great year for television by any means but it did give us ‘Northern Exposure’ and ‘Law & Order’ so competence was at least possible. If you can track down episodes of this show its worth checking out for the bewildering set of circumstances that led to such a thing actually being produced. When I mentioned way back in my review of the pilot episode of ‘Friday the 13^th: The Series' that “some truly weird shows were produced more or less outside of what we would now think of as the standard top-down managed model” I had no idea the rabbit hole went down quite this far.

 

Terror Train

    I think I’ve developed an interesting theory as to how I can tell if a movie is any good or not. If the movie ends when the plot ends it is likely not a very good movie. If the movie ends when the characters have reached the end of their character arcs it is more than likely a somewhat quality movie. Of course this requires watching the entire movie up until that point so hopefully I’ve come to some sort of conclusion already but it’s something I’m going to keep in mind going forward.

I like the idea, movie, but that is not a scary train.

    I’m having a hard time with the plot mechanics of ‘Terror Train.’ Like ‘Prom Night’ it’s one of those slasher whodunnits that were a popular sub-genre during the 80’s. From what I understand the ‘Scream’ movies operate under this framework as well: the killer is an already established character or is pretending to be that character and part of the plot is working out which person on screen it secretly is. In doing some research I learned who the killer was and the details of the “twist” at the end so I spent a great deal of the movie trying to imagine a fictional version of myself who didn’t know any of that and whether my imaginary self would have worked it out before the ending. I rather think I would have but then I would, wouldn’t I?

    Released in 1980, less than three months after ‘Prom Night,’ this was the third movie to cement Jamie Lee Curtis’ image as a “screen queen.” The film was put together by producer Daniel Grodnik and was explicitly pitched as “’Halloween’ on a train.” It was directed by Roger Spottiswoode, who did some actual movies like ‘Turner & Hooch’ and ‘Air America,’ and written by Thomas Y. Drake, who did not. It was the first slasher film released by the studio 20^th Century Fox and featured supporting turns by Hart Bochner of ‘Supergirl’ infamy (and was also Ellis in ‘Die Hard,’ I genuinely didn’t know that!) and David Copperfield, of all people, who is surprisingly convincing in his role as a magician. It did okay business and received mild to mildly negative reviews from critics at the time. While from a production standpoint it’s much more impressive than ‘Prom Night’ I think I like it less and that’s almost entirely due to the characters.

    Note to future slasher films made forty years ago: don’t have as your main characters a bunch of douchebag frat bros and their girlfriends, I’m going to automatically root for the killer. Until he starts also killing the train staff, and even then that just makes me want the killer to die as well. This is what I assumed the plot of ‘Prom Night’ was going to be: the victim of a cruel prank getting revenge on his tormentors. About the only things interesting about it are the setting of an in-motion train, which introduces some nice logistical complications, and the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis as the main character, and even then I just want her to be in her own, separate movie. I’m not saying that Curtis isn’t a good enough actress to sell her friendship with these terrible people, I’m saying that her innate likability completely clashes with every moment these frat douches are on screen with her. I would’ve loved a movie where she and the train conductor (played by Ben Johnson) just hung out near the engine and played cards.

David likes these characters as little as I do.

    The premise is one of those three-sentence pitches that must happen in board rooms all the time: after a cruel prank by a fraternity a killer decides to get revenge three years later during a graduation celebration. This celebration is a costume party on a moving train. The killer sneaks on board and starts killing people one by one in various costumes until only Jamie Lee Curtis is left and who must fight for her survival.

    The first kill happens about fifteen minutes in when the killer murders the most annoying character up to that point, steals his costume, and then boards the train. There’s a good half hour or so before the next kill, after which they’re spaced out appropriately. The costumes are a nice excuse for the killer to wander among the guests and watch his victims, which can be creepy, but he does eventually develop magical killer powers that let him know where everyone is, when a body is about to be discovered so he can get rid of the evidence, or where the one place to hide is so that his victim, fully aware there’s a killer after him, doesn’t look there before he strikes. Once he turns into variable-costume Michael Myers I rather lose interest.

    There also doesn’t seem to be much moral sense in the order of the kills. The most guilty is kept for second to last and the least guilty, Curtis, is the final victim. I guess you could argue either way about that, hard to both complain about magical killer powers and also complain about taking advantage of random killing opportunities. And I really like trains so although it makes sense for him to get rid of the staff as a way to remain undetected I do find it inherently annoying. Dude was just enjoying his life shoveling coal, leave him alone.

    I will, however, fully complain about the ending. Eventually the killer has Curtis to himself in I guess the office car and all I could think as they tousled was that even this early in her career there was no way that Curtis couldn’t take him. This is not a physically imposing killer and a solid knee to the stomach would put an end to it. Every time she was in momentary danger I kept wondering why she was throwing the fight. Curtis does in fact finally win out, supposedly tossing him from the train, and to me that’s a solid enough ending. Then I saw there were still fifteen minutes left and settled back in. She’s eventually cornered again, struggles with him again, and then Ben Johnson whacks him with a shovel and he falls out of the train and into a ravine. One last shot of the train and then hard cut to credits.

No, bad movie, you're just being stupid now.

    This is when I noticed that pattern of bad movies ending when the plot ended. It shows you what the director and producers really cared about. Oh, killer’s dead? No reason to show anything else, then. The only movies I’ve watched for this month that tied any kind of bow at all around any character arcs at the end were ‘Split Second,’ ‘Dreamscape,’ and ‘Pumpkinhead,’ and that last one wins by just a technicality. I doubt it’s a coincidence that those were three of the ones I liked the most. I always want to push back against critics saying that it’s “just” a horror movie or “just” an excuse to get murder up on screens but it’s harder when the filmmakers seem to agree with them.

    In the end this is just an okay slasher film. It’s not well done or weird enough to earn itself the title of any kind of cult classic. It’s interesting for fans of Jamie Lee Curtis to see how even this early her screen persona is starting to solidify: she’s the not-horrible one who ends up being capable. And if you simply must watch every slasher film of even remote quality then sure, add it to the list. Otherwise it’s just rather awful people being killed by a killer with the sketchiest justification while riding on a train. Mind you, it did make me want to ride on a train again, and that’s not nothing.

 

Pilot Season – Werewolf

    What a strange and fascinating relic of the 80’s I’ve stumbled across. I was actually looking up facts on ‘She Wolf of London’ (stay tuned) when this got caught up in my searches. I can honestly say I’d never heard a single thing about this show before.

I mean, yep, that's a title card all right.

    Back in 1987 the Fox broadcasting network was a fairly different beast than it is now. The rise and rise of Rupert Murdoch and the dread empire he built is far too big a subject to tackle for just this measly show but we can examine a slice for some background. First launched in 1986 The Fox Broadcasting Company was hardly the first attempt at a fourth broadcast network (after NBC, CBS, and ABC) but it was by far the most successful one. It was formed by the gradual takeover of 20^th Century Fox film studio and eventual full ownership of a number of flagships stations reaching roughly 20% of the American market. They then cobbled together enough independent stations to be considered a nationwide network and officially launched in October of 1986.

    Almost everyone is familiar with their first two breakout shows, ‘Married ... with Children’ and ‘The Tracey Ullman Show.’ They gradually rolled out more shows over the following weeks, filling in the rest of their airtime with films and reruns of past shows they’d acquired the rights to. The new shows included such stalwarts as ‘Mr. President’ and ‘Duet’ (and, to be fair, ‘21 Jump Street,’ featuring a then-unknown Peter DeLuise of later ‘Stargate’ fame) as well as a Saturday lineup including ‘The New Adventures of Beans Baxter,’ ‘Karen’s Song,’ and debuting on July 11^th, 1987, ‘Werewolf.’ The network struggled for its first three years of broadcast, becoming something of a joke, before the debut in 1990 of, yes, ‘The Simpsons.’ Thus began its slow march towards cultural dominance.

    ‘Werewolf’ is so of its time it’s fairly close to parody. After a terrible opening monologue by a character later introduced as bounty hunter Joe Rogan we cut to a club with the camera acting as a person’s POV. People nervously get out of their way as they make their way to the bar and order a drink, picking it up with an awkwardly angled hand so the camera can catch the raised symbol in scars on its palm. After a few moments the symbol starts to bleed.

    And the entire time the soundtrack is blaring Mike & the Mechanic’s “Silent Running.” If you’re not familiar with the song I’d take a listen, it’s actually really good, if entirely inappropriate for the opening of a werewolf drama.

    Soon enough a couple is attacked in the parking lot with any werewolves kept off screen. After a quick cut to presumably the next day we’re introduced to our main character, Eric Cord, soon to become our titular werewolf. After making out with his girlfriend poolside we’re treated to a sequence of his driving his soft-top convertible to the timeless classic “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades” by Timbuk 3, a song I will always associate with the show ‘Head of the Class.’ The soundtrack to this show, I swear.

    He gets home and finds his roommate hunched over a gun loading it with what turn out to be silver bullets. When confronted the roommate admits that the recent gruesome murders were done by him in his werewolf form. Our hero is disbelieving but agrees to tie up the roommate and wait until midnight to see what happens. While the roommate is tied up he explains the rules of how werewolves work despite never having been taught them himself, the key part of which is that if you can kill the head of the werewolf line it’ll get rid of the curse. Midnight comes, the roommate transforms, breaks the ropes tying him down, and Eric shoots him dead but not before being bitten.

    This pilot is an entire 82 minutes long and I need to stress to you how much padding it contains. Everything I’ve described above has taken us to the 34 minute mark. From the opening monologue (and don’t worry, we’re not done with that yet) to the poolside make-out session to the roommate telling in painstaking detail how he was attacked by a werewolf everything has an extra five or so minutes tacked on for no storytelling reason whatsoever, especially since none of these elements will be revisited after this pilot.

    Our hero is arrested, charged, and makes bail. This takes another nine minutes of screen time. He attempts to explain to his girlfriend what’s going on and eventually convinces her to lock him a storage locker. That’s another nine minutes. He’s missed his court date (I know it’s only been a couple of nights and court dates are set months in advance, just go with it) so a bounty hunter is set on his trail, the aforementioned Joe Rogan. Eric somehow ‘senses’ the werewolf who turned his roommate, confronts him at a marina, then runs away. Thirteen minutes this time. He gets his girlfriend to tie him up in a motel bathroom only to have the original werewolf show up and kidnap her. He falls and hits his head in the bathtub and some time later is awoken by the bounty hunter who found him somehow and takes him into custody. He wolves out, escapes, rescues his girl, and decides to go on the run, chasing the man who turned him into a werewolf. The end.

    It’s all very ‘Kung Fu’ / ‘The Incredible Hulk’ in that after the pilot the episodes’ plots were Eric making his way from place to place and helping out those he met along the way with his werewolf powers, all the while searching for the one-eyed werewolf (yes the bad guy has an eye-patch). This makes some amount of sense when you look at the talent behind the camera. The show was created by Frank Lupo, who also produced 70’s stalwarts such as ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ ‘The A-Team’ and ‘BJ and the Bear,’ the latter two of which shared a similar picaresque structure. Something else to note is that the episodes of the actual show were only half an hour long and even though it was canceled during its first season it still produced 28 more episodes. I’m not sure if they were going for a more soap-opera style structure or if they were just trying anything in those early days at Fox.  I can’t even tell you if the show is good or bad, it just is.

    The pilot ends as it opens, with Joe Rogan giving that monologue to presumably no one. It’s worth quoting in its entirety: “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe in flying saucers and those who don’t. When the world isn’t the same as our minds believe then we are in a nightmare. And nothing is worse than a nightmare except one you can’t wake up from.” Actually I tell a lie, that’s the truncated version from the end, there’s more at the beginning, most of it pointless filler, but I did forget the best line: “Growing up I remember reading the book ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ After Alice went down the rabbit hole a flower talked to her. She was surprised. You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to know if a flower ever spoke to a man that man would know terror.”

    And then BAM! “Can you hear me … can you hear me running?” God I love the 80’s. 

"Can you hear me running, can you hear me calling you?"