Prom Night

    Okay, that’s twice in a row now where a movie that could’ve been schlock has been helped immensely by a solid central performance. I’m not arguing that this movie is on the same level as ‘Dreamscape’ but having a lead actor with that much raw charisma and acting ability does tend to center and steady the entire production.

Oh, it's a skull, the body in the knife is the nose, and - I get it.

         

    Another quirk of casting is Leslie Nielson as her dad. This movie came out just a few weeks after ‘Airplane!’ and was during that odd period where he would alternate between dramatic and comedic roles. Although he received top billing he’s very much a supporting character, spending most of his time being the concerned adult in the room.

    Released in 1980 the movie was directed by Paul Lynch and developed after he had a conversation with producer Irwin Yablans, who had produced ‘Halloween.’ It was very much intended for this movie to be in the same vein as that film and it was developed as such, basically just switching out Halloween for prom night. The plots do diverge from there, however. I wouldn’t call this so much a ripoff but instead as commercially inspired by.

    Opening in 1974 the movie starts with a group of four rather bratty kids playing a killer-themed game of hide and seek in an abandoned building before accidentally causing one of them to fall out of a window to her death. They swear to never tell anyone what happened and run away. Slightly later the cops and her parents are at the building and watch the body being loaded into an ambulance. There’s a throwaway line about the police suspecting someone, just enough to establish the character exists. Cut forward to the present day of 1980 and we see her parents, her older sister (Curtis) and younger brother mourning at her graveside. So right away this movie dispenses with the idea that the killer is secretly the victim seeking revenge. Don’t worry, they have plenty more possibilities.

    The next hour or so plays out as a typical teen drama with petty rivalries and everyone competing to get the best date to prom. It’s established fairly quickly that the victim’s sister and brother are friends of the kids who caused her death, the four of them having successfully kept their secret. There’s a decent framing device of anonymous calls to each of the four former kids involved in the death coupled with a quick flashback to their childhood selves to establish exactly which character is which.

    While prom drama is going on the movie starts setting up possibilities for the eventual killer. The police talk about the suspect they had back when the girl first died who was a known sex offender (whatever that actually meant back in the 1970’s). When they tried to take him in for questioning there was a car chase that ended in a crash, causing extensive burns and placing him in an asylum which, it just so happens, he just escaped from that very night. Hard to see this as anything but a firm nod to ‘Halloween.’ There’s also a creepy maintenance man at the school who Jamie Lee Curtis is very overtly frightened of. The school delinquent tousles with the group, gets indefinitely suspended, and may well want revenge. I tagged the brother as the killer from the start but was idly wondering if it might be the mother or father until we actually see the killer on screen and whose stature could only be the brother.

    Once the killings start the rest of the movie is pretty much just crossing them off the list. What’s an interesting contrast to ‘Halloween’ is how very clear it is that this is a flesh-and-blood killer, and not that skilled of a one at that. The first kill, sneaking up behind a girl and slitting her throat, goes pretty well, but after he kills the second girl in the back of a van her date starts the car and almost gets away several times, the killer pretty awkwardly clambering all over the outside of the van before it accidentally goes off of the cliff. The third kill is the bitchy friend and goes on the longest. The killer chases her all over the closed-off parts of the school with an ax, repeatedly missing and losing track of her. It’s rather refreshing for a slasher film to have the killer’s whereabouts always established for the audience, you always know how close to getting away she really is. Eventually she stumbles across a corpse, panics, and gets an ax to the face.

    The movie ends at the prom itself. The final kid from the opening scene turns out to be Curtis’ date to the prom and the prom king as well and clearly killing him at the ceremony is supposed to put a cap on the evening. Due to shenanigans by the suspended trouble-maker there’s a case of mistaken identity and the wrong head goes flying, causing the prom attendees to flee in a panic. As Curtis rescues her date from where he’d been knocked out and replaced the killer catches up to them on the dance floor. They struggle and Curtis get a hold of the ax and delivers a blow to the killer’s head. They stare at each other and she recognizes him before he stumbles out of the school and collapses to the ground in front of the assembled crowd. She pulls off his mask to reveal her brother. He admits he witnessed their sister’s death, names the four kids as responsible, and then dies as Jamie Lee Curtis cries her way into the credits.

    Contemporary critics were not kind to this movie, although like so many 80’s slasher flicks both time and nostalgia have been kind to it. It was decried as part of the disturbing trend towards more and more violence in movies although in reality any actual violence is strictly off screen. Except for a little nudity this could run uncut on basic cable on Sunday afternoons.

    It’s not actually that bad of a movie, as far as these things go. It’s reasonably stylish and competently directed. The cast has chemistry, although to be fair I should rather say that Jamie Lee Curtis has chemistry with the entire rest of the cast. The script is not stupid, the dialogue is completely fine, and the characters have some depth to them. You could complain about how long it took to get the deaths but I only find that’s a problem in these movies if they’re not using that time to do anything constructive (looking at you, ‘Piranha II’) and here they do some character work, lay some plot groundwork, and generally build a nice atmosphere. If you’re a fan of slasher films and somehow haven’t already seen this one I’d definitely recommend it. If you’re looking for a ‘so bad it’s good’ movie then I regret to inform you that it’s actually pretty decent.               

 

Pilot Season – War of the Worlds (1988)

    What an odd duck of a television show. There have been numerous adaptations of the source material over the years, the two most famous at the time this was produced being the infamous 1938 radio broadcast and the 1953 movie adaptation. Normally a first-run syndication show such as this would be a loose adaptation or sequel to the original book which would presumably be cheaper. Interestingly due to various copyright extensions the rights to the book had not yet entered the public domain. Instead this is in fact a direct sequel to the film version to the point where footage from the original is actually incorporated into the episodes themselves, an oddly ambitious move.

    The questions over rights issues begin to resolve themselves when you realize that the effort behind this series originated with that film’s producer George Pal and one of the involved production companies was Paramount Domestic Television, Paramount having made the 1953 film adaptation. This also presumably explains a scene in the second half of the pilot where the main characters enter a secret military warehouse and it’s framed and shot almost identically to the warehouse from ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ another Paramount property.

    Paramount was also one of the studios behind the push for first-run syndication in the first place, being involved in shows we’ve already touched upon such as ‘Friday the 13^th: The Series’ and ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation.’ They were clearly leveraging the intellectual properties they already owned into television series and ‘War of the Worlds’ would seem to be a natural fit. This is also the same era where they tried to launch their own affiliates network, UPN, which would fight a bitter war of attrition with Warner Brothers’ WB network, eventually resulting in the existence of The CW which we all know and love today and the absorption of all things Paramount into the hive-mind that is CBS.

I admit that's a pretty great show logo.

    On the whole this is not a badly put together show with one huge, glaring exception that runs right down the center like a crack in a window, which we will circle back around to. The basic premise, to steal a line from ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ is: “Well, everyone knows that the aliens died at the end of ‘War of the Worlds.’ What this show presupposes is: maybe they didn’t?” Instead of dying the aliens went into suspended animation. The government, mistaking this for death, stored the alien bodies in steel drums and hid them away in military installations.

    The pilot opens with non-denominational terrorists (the kind the thieves in ‘Die Hard’ were just pretending to be) seizing control of a military compound in the middle of nowhere in order to gain access to a communications satellite they plan to use to broadcast their demands to the world. I’m not sure how much of this is actually nonsensical and how much of it is semi-realistic based on the telecommunications technology of the time. There are explosions and squibs and there is some budget here but it’s still television in 1988 and it rather painfully shows. I will say the editing in this sequence stood out as particularly choppy.

    After seizing control of the base the terrorists begin to make preparations for their broadcast. In all of the fighting some of the barrels were damaged and several aliens take the opportunity to emerge, although of course never on camera. It’s never really explained how this attack led directly to their escape, there’s some hand-waving about how the military was also storing nuclear material at the site which killed off the bacteria keeping the aliens in suspended animation but why they chose now to escape is never addressed, maybe the noise woke them. The terrorists being to be picked off by aliens who are always just off-screen and portrayed by three-fingered rubbery appendages that enter frame and drag the terrorists out of sight with far more strength than I recall them showing in the film.

    Intercut with all of this is various scenes at a college campus introducing us to our eventual protagonists, consisting of a quirky scientist studying deep-space transmissions looking for signs of extraterrestrial life and his colleagues. This is when that crack in the window first really starts to show. After the aliens take control of the base they send a transmission back to presumably Mars (actually not-Mars, they end up discovering they’ve actually from a planet much father out since by that time we had a much clearer idea of the surface of Mars) asking for assistance which our scientist heroes intercept. We will ignore that this isn’t how any of this works and just roll with it. He and his newly hired microbiologist colleague (again just go with these vague scientific specialties, it’s necessary for the development of anti-alien biological weapons later) hop into a car and head on over to the source of the transmission where they run into the military following up after the terrorist attack. They talk themselves onto the base where the scientist sees a metal drum clearly opened from the inside, nearly has a panic attack, and basically runs back to the university.

    And here is where the premise of the show splits the window right down the middle. As he’s reflecting on a picture of his child self with his parents we have a flashback to scenes from the actual film version of ‘War of the Worlds’ and through framing it’s clear that he witnessed his parents being killed in the invasion. After the flashback his colleague stomps into the office and resigns over his behavior. He explains he freaked out because the alien invasion is happening again and she scoffs, saying he’s crazy to think it’s aliens.

    Which ... what? In the universe of this television show there was an actual massive alien invasion 35 years before and everyone acts like it’s news to them. To draw a distasteful analogy this is like the entire United States forgetting the Oklahoma City bombing because it happened so long ago. If this was some kind of plot point, if it was addressed in some way as a global conspiracy or governmental cover-up that all the news organizations agreed to or just some kind of explanation was offered it likely wouldn’t be enough but it would at least be something but for the entire rest of the pilot it’s unclear from moment to moment if a character does or does not believe in aliens or an invasion or not. Some of them acknowledge that we were invaded but seem utterly nonchalant to the idea that it could happen again, some seem to have never heard of it, and characters can change their entire stances on the issue seemingly at random from scene to scene. It’s also addressed as a purely American problem when I’m pretty sure the rest of the world would be pretty darn paranoid about aliens from that point on as well.

    As reasonably solid as the rest of the show is I’m afraid that central failing rather wrecks the whole thing for me. I can understand wanting to be a direct sequel to the movie, that’s a great hook for a show. I can also understand the budget constraints of a tv show restricting the amount of alien action on screen, far easier to make it a low-key invasion stretched out over time. The problem is that those two things are fundamentally incompatible with each other and the show makes little to no effort to paper over this central flaw.

    The show did last long enough to be renewed for a second season, at which point the show-runners were replaced by Frank Mancuso Jr., producer behind ‘Friday the 13^th: The Series.' Two of the main characters were killed and replaced by a single, presumably cooler character and the basic premise of fighting against a reborn alien invasion was jettisoned in favor of jumping forward in time to feature a human resistance faction fighting against a completely different alien race who replaced the original aliens from the original premise and had since conquered the Earth. It was canceled roughly halfway through this retooled series although they did produce more episodes to give the show something of a conclusion.

    The characters on the show are fine, they’re quirky and distinctive and the actors have a decent enough interplay that something could’ve grown out of this over the course of a show. It may have just been for the pilot but there was clearly a budget on-screen and the idea of exploring those iconic aliens from the film is a good way to garner interest. There’s even a single shot near the end where I got the briefest of chills, when a group of the aliens have managed to acquire some of their old ships and start right back up where they left off in the invasion. The sight of those saucers with the ray-gun stalks and the laser sound effects was actually pretty effective. There are far more ‘secret invasion’ shows than I would’ve thought and it’s hard to get noticed as something special. The central hook of this show really could’ve done something but it doesn’t seem like they fully rose to the occasion, and then whatever they were doing right got spiked right into the ground by that second season. If it really sounds appealing the entire series is available on DVD for a pretty reasonable price. CBS apparently wants that intellectual property money.

 

Night of the Demons

    French literary critic Nino Frank is often credited with coining the term ‘film noir’ in 1946 to describe a number of American crime films which he saw as having a number of characteristics in common. 1946 is significant because it was the first year after the Nazi occupation of France and so the country had been flooded with American cultural products. Having them all come in at once instead of over several years allowed patterns and similarities to jump out where they might have otherwise been missed by simply watching them over the years during which they were produced.

    Whether he originated the term or not (there is some dispute) he certainly brought it to prominence and also tied it to the French literary imprint Série Noire and its related genre of crime fiction referred to as roman noir. Often the books published as these ‘black books,’ whether they were translated American or native French works, were the basis for the movies making up this newly identified genre of film.

    Once identified and codified classic film noir gave rise to the neo-noir of the Cold War era where the ‘rules’ of what made a movie a noir film began to be examined and deconstructed (I’d argue reaching its peak with ‘Kiss Me Deadly’) which in turn influenced the French New Wave, which in turn influenced the American independent film scene of the 1970’s, and on and on it went splintering into a hundred different directions and having unforeseen knock-on effects. If you’ve ever wandered into the Film section of a book store this is what all those books are ultimately about.

    As you can see genre works can often quickly generate a kind of feedback loop where, once a body of work is identified as part of a genre or a sub-genre, they are deconstructed or re-contextualized and, in essence, become their own genre of introspection, art about art. This might sound incredibly solipsistic, an artistic medium disappearing up into itself, but for a practical example imagine having never seen an action film before and then watching ‘John Wick,’ or having never seen a Western before watching the Coen Brother’s version of ‘True Grit.’ Or for that matter watching a Hallmark Channel original Christmas movie without understanding what the actual function of that movie is supposed to be. Genres come with their own inbuilt expectations that can be either fulfilled or thwarted as another tool the artist can use.

Pffffft.

    All of which is to say that ‘Night of the Demons’ makes no sense as a piece of anything, much less art, without understanding it in the context of 80’s horror movies. It arguably could not have existed at any other time or place than 1980’s America. Not to say that this is a deconstruction of the form or that it’s doing anything clever with genre tropes, because it certainly isn’t. This is not so much a movie as a very short checklist of boxes to tick in order to fulfill the technical requirements of what was generally understood to be a horror movie at the time of filming. This would be the smallest building block possible to use in the construction of an idea of whatever the “80’s horror” genre means. This is also arguably the first time I’ve felt personally insulted by a movie, directly attacked for being the kind of person who would voluntarily sit through this 90 minutes of ostensible entertainment. The only reason I’m not as mad at this as I was at ‘Ghoulies’ is that I got the sense the makers of ‘Ghoulies’ thought they were actually making something that people might be impressed by. I get no such sense from ‘Night of the Demons.’

    Technicals out of the way first: released in 1988, directed by Kevin S. Tenney and written by Joe Augustyn, neither of whom went on to do anything of note. Of the actors the only ones of any interest are Cathy Podewell, who was on ‘Dallas’ for several years, and Linnea Quigley, often referred to as a ‘scream queen’ by fans of the horror genre. It did modest business, spawned some direct-to-video sequels, and has something of a cult following for reasons I am not privy to.

    The entire plot of the movie is as such: unpleasant teens gather at an abandoned mortuary to have a Halloween Party. Demons alternately kill and infect the teens until two are left who escape. Everything else of note: there is swearing and nudity and in one scene they play ‘Stigmata Martyr’ by Bauhaus which is a good song. There is nothing else of even moderate import.

    This movie is like a bowling ball covered in grease, there’s no good way to get a handle on it. In a certain sense it perfectly is what it is, an hour and a half of unpleasant characters dying in unpleasant ways for the vague entertainment of the audience. None of the characters are interesting, none of the deaths are memorable, there is no attempt at a backstory other than ‘spooky place has spooky demons.’ It might be fun to sit through with friends in order to make fun of it but that’s true of almost anything. I’ve had good times sitting through Sam Firstesnberg movies with friends and those are unqualified trash.

    It might sound like I’m about to launch into some kind of Roger Ebert-style moral outrage but it’s all too boring and pathetic for that. There are offensive things in here, sure, the female characters are treated horribly the male characters, the nudity is frequent and gratuitous, but the violence is so tame as to be forgettable and the only way I would actually condemn anything about this movie were if I were to find that the members of the cast or crew had been mistreated in real life. Sure the movie is fairly reprehensible but they all knew that when they agreed to the script.

    This movie is as substantial as mist, I’m surprised it didn’t evaporate as soon as I was done watching it. The fact that it has any kind of praise at all, and unironic praise at that, is rather baffling to me. I rather enjoyed the goofiness of ‘The Hitcher,’ I was able to dig a little the 60’s vibe of ‘The Dunwich Horror,’ I was even able to conjure up something of a morality tale from ‘Pumpkinhead,’ of all things. This was just empty noise and visuals that took up far too much of my time and far too little of my interest.

 

Pilot Season – American Gothic

    Shaun Cassidy may have some problems with women.

    I vaguely remembered ‘American Gothic’ as being one of Sam Raimi’s side projects and I was almost entirely wrong. He was certainly involved but only through his production company, Renaissance Pictures. 1995 was a big year for them, it was the same year that ‘Hercules: The Legendary Journeys’ and “Xena: Warrior Princess” debuted, so his attention may have been a bit elsewhere. He did lend the show composer Joseph LoDuca, an associate of theirs, and some of the camera work in the pilot is reminiscent of Raimi’s signature mobile camera style, and that seems to be about it.

    Instead the driving force of the series was former pop star Shaun Cassidy who was transitioning into television writing and production at the time. This was the first show he spearheaded and would go on to be involved in some fairly interesting shows such as the alien-suspense series ‘Invasion’ (three guesses what that show’s about), ‘Roar,’ and “Emerald City.’ Maybe one of the series he was involved with made it past the first season but he’s apparently pretty good at getting shows onto the air in the first place.

Pour one out for poor, misunderstood Grant Wood.

    The show takes place in the town of Trinity, South Carolina. The opening narration is done by Gary Cole as Sheriff Lucas Buck, the man who not-so-secretly runs the town from behind the scenes, and is about how everyone’s lives would be hunky dory if they just did what he told them to do. The first scene proper takes place in a run-down house where a boy, Caleb, is being given a begrudging birthday party by this already-drunk father. His older sister, dressed up essentially as a porcelain doll, is played by baby Sarah Paulson. She’s clearly been directed by someone who’s heard descriptions of Tennessee Williams’ stories but had never actually read one as she starts to repeat the phrase ‘someone’s at the door’ and acting all twitchy. Things escalate quickly and soon Caleb and his sister are barricaded in a room with the father battering down the door.

    Caleb smashes out a window and goes running for help, coming across Sheriff Buck in the woods. This could either be lazy writing or foreshadowing and by the end of the episode I’m still not sure. The two of them and a deputy race back to the house. Sheriff Buck finds the father standing over his daughter, shovel in hand, distraught at what he’s done. Sheriff Buck ushers him from the room, goes back to the girl, and after making a few comforting noises snaps her neck.

    It’s at this point that the show has a decision to make: soap opera or horror? Either one would work. A kind of modern reworking of an older-style melodrama set in a South still thinking of itself as part of the past but slowly changing would be interesting. A town overseen by a corrupt sheriff, characters hopping beds, a traumatized little boy as our window into it all. Or we could go full on supernatural, have the sheriff as an active corrupting influence spreading malevolence over the town, bringing people into his orbit as he slowly puts a plan together to summon Satan or something. I have a feeling they were leaning into the second one but they didn’t fully commit so all of the supernatural in this pilot is crammed in at the end and barely rises above what could be waved away as hallucinations, which would work in a two-hour pilot but gets blunted significantly when you stick a week’s break in the middle.

    There’s some decent work going on here. Gary Cole is, of course, terrific, and is the absolute center of the show. He can flip from charismatically affable to quietly menacing in an instant and make them both believable. The entire show needed to be centered on him. Caleb is fine as a viewpoint character but in the pilot he’s just sad and reactive and we’re given no reason to care about him except for the fact that The Sheriff does. The rest of the characters, even Sarah Paulson, are barely sketched in, with the possible exception of Buck’s deputy who spends the episode wracked with guilt about witnessing The Sheriff killing the girl. Some of the best scenes are Buck just absently fucking with him and making sure he’s under control.

    I glanced over the episode synopses for the rest of the season and was frankly a little underwhelmed. I remember being interested in this show back when it aired but never managed to catch it and was hoping it was like ‘The Others,’ a forgotten little gem. Unfortunately from everything I read it sounds like the network started actively screwing with the show from about the midpoint on. They aired it wildly out of order, replaced one character with an almost identical one halfway through the season, that sort of thing. Not that you can blame it all on the suits of course, apparently plot points would be raised and then forgotten, characterizations would flip depending on the needs of individual episodes, and remember what I said about Shaun Cassidy and women?

    I need to be a little careful, I suppose, I don’t know anything about Shaun Cassidy in the real world, but here is a summation of everything involving the women characters on this show: one witnesses her mother being raped, goes fiction-style insane, is murdered, and then turns into a ghost whose sole function is to guide our main, male character. There’s Caleb’s mom who is only introduced so she can be raped by Sheriff Buck and then give birth to Caleb. There’s Caleb’s cousin who is awkwardly shoe-horned into the episode who has dead parents and is only around to both avenge them and help Caleb. And then there’s the local schoolteacher who nebulously works with Sheriff Buck and sleeps with both him and anyone he tells her to because apparently she’s just always super horny.

    I’m still not sure what the actual point of this show is or what any of the characters actually want. Sheriff Buck wants to adopt Caleb for some reason and everyone else is reacting to that and that’s really all I can figure out. The supporting cast are either on the Sheriff’s side or on Caleb’s with the rest of the town barely acting as a backdrop, which I suppose is fine for the pilot but I get the sense it never gets much better for the show as a whole.

    To pull out my increasingly creaky pilot list: establish the premise, demonstrate how it would function as an ongoing series, and establish the characters. I’m not really sure that this manages to do any of these, not entirely. There’s a plot for this individual episode but I have no real idea of what the show would be after that except maybe The Sheriff trying to adopt Caleb again and again. I get no sense how it would function as an ongoing series. I like the idea of a corrupt Sheriff and how the town handles that but that’s not really what they’re doing here. The only character established with any kind of presence is Sheriff Buck and while that performance is almost enough by itself it’s really not for an ongoing television show.

    The overall gist that I get is that this was a muddled show that started with some promise but got pushed around by the network in a quest for ratings. If there was a show bible, an end point they were working towards, they managed to keep it pretty secret from the audience. Apparently they knew going into the last episodes of the show that they weren’t getting renewed and still ended it on a cliffhanger, which is a dick move. I really did want to like this show but I get zero sense that this was going anywhere I would find particularly interesting.

 

Pumpkinhead

    The most impressive thing about ‘Pumpkinhead,’ and the thing that surprised me the most, is that it’s actually a pretty strong morality tale dressed up as a monster movie. Purely on its merits as a horror film it’s just above average, with some very impressive special effects brought down by a lack of clear, confident direction and an underwritten script, understandable in a first time director. The bedrock themes of the story it’s telling are surprisingly consistent and well thought out. While the dialogue and character work in the script need several more rewrites and a lot more room to breathe someone at least gave this story a spine.

He does not, in point of fact, have a pumpkin for a head.

    Released in 1988 ‘Pumpinkhead’ is the directorial debut of Stan Winston. Not being that big into the more technical aspects of special effects I of course knew the name but it wasn’t until I did a little bit of looking into him that I realized exactly how important and influential he was. His work on ‘The Thing’ alone would have cemented his place in effects history but he was also instrumental in the first two ‘Terminator’ movies, ‘Aliens,’ ‘Jurassic Park,’ and too many more to mention, eventually earning four Academy Awards and many more nominations. The man was at the peak of his craft. Rather unfortunately that craft was not direction. While not an embarrassing effort there’s a reason he only ever went on to direct one other feature film.

    The titular Pumpkinhead, only ever called such by children, is your basic vengeance demon with a price tag higher than anticipated. It’s not much more than a straightforward “be careful what you wish for” premise but for a horror movie it manages to keep to that premise and stick the landing. A lot of the so-called ‘rules’ of horror movies (looking at you, ‘Scream’) were really just in-jokes by genre fans and if you go back and watch the movies that supposedly codify those rules they’re very rarely consistent. Things like “sex equals death” and the like, these rules were never in place for the actual filmmakers. Nor did a killer’s motives or abilities ever really need to make sense, it would vary from scene to scene depending on the necessary scare. At least that was the case in the 80’s when this movie was made, the better ones have grown up a bit since then.

    The premise of the movie is a bit, let’s be kind and say thin. It opens in 1957 in the deep rural country. A family is going to bed, casting scared glances at the shadows, when a man comes banging at their door for help from the thing that’s chasing him because of what he did to that girl. The family refuses and he runs off, quickly taken by a gangly monster, watched from a window by the young boy of the family. Cut to 1988 when the boy has grown into Lance Henriksen, who as always gives a better performance than the movie deserves. He’s now raising his own boy alone as a widower, running a small roadside vegetable stand.

    Enter the city folk, and here’s where the thin characterization really starts to become a problem. There are three couples, three men and three women, and over the course of the film they start getting killed off, but except for one or two they’re not established enough for us to really even keep track, much less care. There’s one woman who spends so much of her screen time crying on a couch I kept forgetting she existed. The city folk are on some kind of vague vacation involving off-road motorbiking and about eight and a half minutes after being introduced they’ve accidentally killed Henriksen’s kid. All but one run off, a man who stays to inform the father of what’s happened.

    Henriksen gathers up his boy and goes to see the local witch while the city folk gather at the cabin they’ve apparently rent and argue about what to do. Turns out the one who killed the kid already has a DUI and is worried about going to prison. The interesting thing is that before the vengeance demon ever becomes a factor the city folk have all calmed down and decided to turn themselves over the police so if Henriksen had done nothing at all he still would’ve seen justice done.

    Instead he takes his son to see the witch who flatly states she can’t do anything to help him. I was paying attention to the words people were saying at this point, having already noticed the fairly pointed moral story on display, so I noted that it’s the angry father who first brings up the vengeance demon to the witch. She doesn’t so much as hint at its existence before then. She flatly states it can be done but it’s going to cost him everything. He pays her in jewelry, again at no prompting from her, and asks what he needs to do. She sends him off to dig up a corpse from the local spooky cemetery. He does and brings back a small, wizened mummy of a thing. She cuts his hand and the hand of his boy and pours the blood on the corpse. It instantly starts to inflate and stir back to life and the witch curtly sends Henriksen on his way.

    This is 20 minutes into an 86 minute movie, the one thing you can’t accuse this thing of is moving slowly. The demon immediately moves on the city folk and the first person it takes out is the one person who did the right thing, who stayed with his boy until his father came. It’s clear that this is about vengeance, not justice. Henriksen feels it as the demon kills him and his girlfriend and immediately regrets his actions, gasping in horror. He shakes it off and goes home, having apparently decided to endure it, before the demon attacks another person. He immediately goes back to the witch and demands she call it off. She says she can’t and asks him what in the world he expected would happen, that it would be easy? She rather accurately calls him a fool. He vows to stop the demon himself and the witch says he’ll fail and end up in Hell all the quicker.

    The rest of the movie plays out like you’d expect, the remaining city folk keep running from the demon as it picks them off, Henriksen shows up a couple of times to try to stop it, the connection between him and the demon becomes more and more evident until it’s basically wearing his face as it moves to kill the last few people. Henriksen discovers that if he’s hurt it hurts the demon too so he shoots himself in the head. He’s not quite dead, though, and begs the last remaining woman to finish him. She does and the demon falls dead. The movie ends with the witch taking up Henriksen’s corpse and burying it in exact same spot in the cemetery from which he’d dug up the demon earlier. Subtle this movie isn’t, but I liked that.

Seriously, this thing is a jerk.

    What I’ll end on is noting again that the demon effects are great. In too many shots it’s clearly just a man in a suit but the facial animatics are top-notch. It keeps cutting away from people getting killed to the demon grinning to itself, clearly enjoying itself. A few times it goes out of its way to taunt people or keep them alive longer than necessary just to draw out the suffering. In addition to being a vengeance demon this thing is a straight up asshole as well.

    There’s a reason this had ended up something of a cult classic. It did lukewarm business in theaters but as so often does with better-than-average genre fair it picked up a second life through home rentals. Aside from the effects work there’s nothing super special about it. I would’ve like more craftsmanship in the script and production design but it’s a monster movie with a solid beginning, middle, and end and tells the story it wants to tell. As I’m starting to learn that’s not something you can just assume all movies are going to have.

 

Pilot Season – The Others

    It’s nice to be pleasantly surprised. I have yet another show to go on the pile of things to watch.

Gone too soon.

    In the fall of 1996 NBC introduced a gimmick into its Saturday prime-time schedule: The Thrillogy, three suspenseful genre shows tied together by a common sensibility. Saturday nights were a notorious broadcast tv wasteland so it made some amount of sense to try to goose some ratings out of the night by tying them together into a loose theme and Saturdays were apparently spooky. The original lineup was ‘Dark Skies,’ ‘The Pretender,’ and ‘Profiler.’ We’ve already covered the first one but the second and third might ring some distant bells. ‘The Pretender’ and ‘Profiler’ were by far the more successful series, both lasting four full seasons with ‘The Pretender’ even getting a couple of TNT made for basic-cable movies. They also crossed over from time to time, existing in the same tv universe, although apparently not in the Tommy Westphall Universe.

    ‘Dark Skies’ never quite made it to the end of its first season and when the block returned in the fall of 1997 it was replaced by ‘Sleepwalkers.’ We all know what happened there. Although ‘The Pretender’ and ‘Profiler’ continued to air together the moniker ‘Thrillogy’ was dropped until the mid-season introduction in 2000 of ‘The Others,’ after which it was pulled out of mothballs. At the end of that season all three shows ended up getting canceled and NBC has never visited the term again.

    It wasn’t my intention to do a Thrillogy trilogy, as it were, of the three less successful shows, it just kind of worked out that way. ‘Dark Skies’ wasn’t too bad for what it was, it certainly had ambition and a lot of potential, just not the greatest execution. I’ll be talking about ‘Sleepwalkers’ for years. Luckily for me it looks like I managed to save the best for last. Of the three shows it’s the least grandly ambitious and I would argue its success is at least partly due to that fact.

    The show was created by the screenwriting duo of John Brancato and Michael Ferris whose output is a decidedly mixed bag. They cut their teeth on such fare as ‘Watchers II’ and ‘Mindwarp’ before a pretty decent run of movies with ‘The Net,’ ‘The Game’ (yes, the Fincher one), and ‘Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,’ which I actually saw in theaters and don’t hate. Then they wrote ‘Catwoman’ and never really picked themselves back up after that. Interestingly five of the 13 episodes were written by Glen Morgan and James Wong of ‘The X-Files’ fame. This was just after their stint as show-runners of ‘Millennium.’

    The only really recognizable actors on the show were John Aylward, Bill Cobbs, and John Billingsly, all fairly prolific character actors. Of the rest they’ve all worked steadily in supporting roles and in smaller movies except for one who apparently starred in ‘Suits.’ They all inhabit their characters quite well and even in just the pilot give very strong ideas of their roles on the show and how they’ll be used going forward.

    The show is set on an unnamed college campus. Our main character is Marian, who dialogue establishes is a relatively small-town girl a little lost and unsure of herself in college. She marvels that her friends seem to know what they want to do with their entire lives while she has trouble picking a major. That night she’s awoken in her dorm room by what sounds like a woman crying but it turns out her roommate is asleep. She gets a glass of water from the sink and sees a dead woman in the bathtub. She drops the glass and wakes her roommate, who finds her sobbing in the bathroom.

    The next day she’s tracked down at the library by one of the professors from the college. He explains his area of interest is the unexplained and supernatural. Her roommate has apparently been spreading the story of what happened the night before and word got around to him. He tells her a girl died of apparently suicide in that dorm room bathtub the year before. He invites her to a meeting of a group he’s put together of like-minded people called ‘The Others.’ She is not interested.

    That night her roommate tapes her muttering a phrase over and over in her sleep and asks how it’s going looking for a room transfer. This is apparently enough to get Marian to head over to the meeting of The Others where we get a quick introduction to our various characters. There’s the professor who isn’t psychic but just wants to help, a rather pretentious girl who actually makes a living as a psychic, an empath who works as a medical resident, a socially awkward guy who it’s implied is schizophrenic and gets chaotic flashes of insight, an older blind man who’s basically a cranky bastard but with psychic powers, and the owner of the house they’re meeting in who’s in his 80’s and has been a medium for decades.

    There are two main threads to the episode from there and they both do a good job of showing both how the show would function going forward and who the characters are. In what would be considered the b-plot the professional psychic, the cranky bastard, and the socially awkward guy are hired by an old woman whose husband died in a freak accident and left her finances in a mess. She has to sell the house but it seems like he’s haunting it. The haunting is quickly confirmed and although it’s presented as scary, with objects moving and fires spontaneously starting, it turns out that the dead husband is haunting the house in order to guide his wife to the hidden safe where he stored all of the money he saved over the years. He was desperate to keep her from selling the house until she found it and when she does he ‘passes over’ and there’s a very nice scene where the pretentious psychic gently explains it’s ok for the wife to move on now as well.

    The a-plot is Marian dealing with the ghost in her bathtub. It’s made clear by the impressions the other in the group get that Marian is one of the strongest psychics they’ve ever encountered but she refuses to acknowledge or embrace her gift, which is causing her problems. After that initial meeting she keeps trying to disentangle herself from the group, insisting it has nothing to do with her, but things with the ghost keep escalating. She starts auto-writing the same two letters over and over in class, has an episode at a party where she’s suddenly dancing with the ghost and spacing out pretty hard, and then after getting drunk trying to ignore the ghost she gets full-on possessed and tries to recreate the girl’s death by taking sleeping pills and crawling into the full bathtub.

    The medical resident gets a flash of what’s going on and rushes over in time to save her life but now she’s unconscious in the hospital. The group goes over the recording, the auto-writing, and news reports of the girl’s death and figure out they’re all referring to the girl’s ex-boyfriend. There have been hints throughout the episode that the death wasn’t suicide and the implication is that the ex-boyfriend killed her. The professor tracks him down where he’s living rough, basically hiding out in his apartment and drinking. He convinces him to come with him to the hospital in an attempt to contact the girl’s ghost.

    Meanwhile the older medium psychically talks an unconscious Marian through the process of fully contacting the ghost. In a decently stylized sequence where they filmed the actors underwater but lit it so it looks like they’re just floating they talk, the ghost apologizing for almost killing her, saying she didn’t mean to. When the ex-boyfriend arrives the ghost inhabits Marian and informs him that while she didn’t commit suicide he also didn’t kill her. They had a stupid fight and she accidentally fell asleep in the bathtub after taking too many sleeping pills. She knows he’s let his life fall apart after her death, blaming himself, and she tells him to forgive himself and move on since it’s his guilt keeping her from passing on. He cries and apologizes and says he will and the ghost moves on as well. Marian goes into cardiac arrest, apparently having gone too deep to contact the ghost, but the older medium helps pull her back out.

    So we end with the group back at the house over dinner, laughing and talking and comparing notes, a deliberate contrast to where the episode started. Marian has made some real friends and is starting to understand what she wants to do with her life. It’s a strong note to end such an ostensibly spooky pilot episode on.

    I liked this episode quite a bit, I would’ve been quite sad if I’d watched it back in the day only for the show to get canceled after 13 episodes. I especially like how both the a and b plots ended up having happy endings, which is not how you expect a pilot to lay these things out. Reading quick synopses of later episodes this is clearly not always the case and they do start building a story-line on the show of an opposing, threatening force but obviously never got to follow through with it.

    The characters are fairly interesting and rarely just one thing. Everyone rather makes fun of the professional psychic for using tarot cards and burning incense when none of the rest of them feel it’s necessary but she clearly does have a gift and isn’t really bothered by their criticisms. The professor is at the same time a psychic fan-boy, helping out because he doesn’t have the gift he so clearly wishes he does, and also, although he can be awkward, he steps up and leads when necessary. The cranky bastard makes a point of being unpleasant to people but when things turn serious he drops the act and lets his genuine concern show. The quasi-schizophrenic character could easily have been a problematic portrayal of mental illness but the group is consistently understanding and supportive of his needs and never speak down to him, just give him quiet support which he clearly appreciates. And the older medium clearly has a deep backstory with a need to help others and looks fondly on these younger proteges.

    None of this is groundbreaking stuff but to so clearly delineate characters while establishing a premise and having two storylines in one pilot episode is no small feat. It’s not rocket science but it is solid work. No scene or character interaction is ever doing just one thing, it’s usually both moving the plot forward and giving us insight into characters. There was a lot of potential for growth with this show and it’s the first one in quite a while I’m regretful didn’t get the opportunity. It was never reissued on home media nor is it streaming anywhere but the entire series in on youtube, I’d really suggest checking it out.