by ·Comments Off on Poltergeist (1982, Tobe Hooper)

The perfect 1980s movie. Mom smokes pot while dad reads a Reagan book. The family is snacking constantly! Family members are introduced while asleep, the dog making the rounds of the household eating snacks out of their hands and beds, and then no amount of haunting can make them lose their appetites. Horror movie I watched at a formative time and haven’t really revisited in forty years – fortunately it holds up.

First casualty is the family bird, who dies before we even meet her. The chairs-move-by-themselves bit escalates quickly to the tree/clown/closet/TV horror night, then the family calls in a university team (led by Beatrice Straight of Chiller) who faithfully documents the haunting but is in way over their heads. When the house gets too dangerous the other two kids are sent away and the great Zelda Rubinstein is summoned to provide self-contradictory advice, successfully rescuing Carol Anne from the TV dimension. Then they do not leave the house immediately: Coach Dad takes a late meeting at work (the real estate company that built the neighborhood on a graveyard) while the house attempts to eat the others. Then in part two they’re followed by an evil preacher and Coach gets possessed by a tequila worm, and part three was maybe set in a city parking garage? Maybe we’ll revisit these next shocktober.

The member of the research team who decided not to come back:

Mom is JoBeth Williams of The Big Chill:

by ·Comments Off on The Stuff (1985, Larry Cohen)

Not much backstory – we go from the stuff being discovered in a hole in the ground to its mass marketing within four minutes, then get to business following Moriarty, an industrial spy working for an ice cream company threatened by the stuff’s sudden popularity. Obviously primo Cohen, though the first time I watched I wasn’t yet a Moriarty-head and didn’t groove on its wavelength.

When your family has all enjoyed the dessert product and wants you to have some too:

Moriarty accrues teammates along the way: marketing exec Andrea Marcovicci (The Hand), some kid who fled his zombified family, and M’s old friend Chocolate Chip Charlie (Garrett Morris of Cooley High). Feels at times like they’re the only survivors of a stuff-pocalypse, but when the tide finally turns against the sentient brain-eating alien dessert product and our heroes force its distributors to eat stuff, there are enough unaffected people to revolt and reclaim humanity and the TV news tells us “the casualties were in the thousands.”

The team in an unguarded moment, right before Chocolate Chip gets melted:

Moriarty and the girl find the stuff mines – fortunately he brought along timed explosives. They go to see a crazy recluse racist colonel worried about commie infiltration – he’d send in the army to blast stuffies with machine guns. Stuff addicts become empty vessels who crack apart when punched – the effects range from cheap and hilarious to nightmarish (some beautiful shots of antigravity flaming stuff).

Nightmare on Stuff Street:

by ·Comments Off on O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985, Piotr Szulkin)

Stratified society in a post-apoc bunker, Jerzy Stuhr is a fixer who goes everywhere, sees everyone, and knows that the bunker is on the verge of physical collapse and the ark that’s supposed to arrive to save us all doesn’t exist. As great as the others I’ve seen by Szulkin.

by ·Comments Off on Altered States (1980, Ken Russell)

Pre-Big Chill William Hurt and Post-Close Encounters Bob Balaban are doing isolation chamber tests in 1967, Hurt appreciates the trippy demon visions he experiences in the tank, and shares his thoughts on the matter while his girl Blair Brown is trying to make love to him.

A decade later Blair is leaving socially awkward Hurt while he’s heading to Mexico to try mushrooms (to open ancient physiological pathways in human consciousness), which take him to another place that he can’t remember when he sobers up. So he heads back into the isolation tanks, enlisting angry skeptic Charles Haid (pre-Nightbreed!) to observe.

Now on mushrooms in the tank, Hurt witnesses the birth of mankind and bodily regresses to gorilla-state. None of the others (not even lab tech John Larroquette) can deny something crazy is happening here, so Hurt keeps it up, getting arrested for monkeying at the zoo. But he goes in too many times and hellraisers himself into a primordial vortex (even more impressive since Hellraiser hadn’t been invented yet), leading to some major fluid/space/video effects.

Honestly weird movie, surprising that Cronenberg didn’t make this. A small part of the runtime is rapid editing of trippy imagery, larger part is a guy turning into an ape and wreaking havoc, mostly it’s intellectuals talking rapidly at each other. Criterion says Russell was picked after 26 others had passed and the results made everybody mad at him, haha.

by ·Comments Off on Special Effects (1984, Larry Cohen)

Having a very Larry Shocktober. This one’s not as good as It’s Alive III, more like Murder a la Mod without the mods, but it fits in nicely with the meta-slasher Scream movies. And despite a lower budget, crappy music and some shady editing tricks, it’s a much more lively doppelganger movie than Enemy turned out to be.

Enemy would burst into flame if exposed to this much bright color:

Zoe Lund (Ms .45 herself) plays two characters with at least three names. First she’s an aspiring actress working in a nudie club, pushy but not smart, getting herself into the apartment of famed/troubled filmmaker Eric Bogosian (the Talk Radio guy), whose kink is murdering girls on camera (see also: Dangerous Animals).

Bogosian in his Freddy Krueger sweater:

He can’t be that bad, he’s got a cockatoo:

Now things get twisted, as the detective (the cabbie killed in opening scene of Island of the Alive) is convinced the girl’s estranged husband killed her, so the director offers to help by making a film in which the murderer husband will relive his crime on camera, casting a lookalike (Zoe Lund again, as a do-gooder with a His Girl Friday voice) as his/their victim. The cop is offered a technical advisor position, gets obsessed until the director bars him from set for interfering. Happy ending: New Zoe falls for Dead Zoe’s husband even though he’s a dick, and they electrocute the director in his own pool.

by ·Comments Off on It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987, Larry Cohen)

Very first character is an asshole cab driver, the second is a cop who mutters to the camera how many weeks he’s been on the force (six), movie seems off to a bad start then they’re both immediately killed by a newborn mutant baby, yay.

Where did my friend go?

The plot is: the dad of a mutant baby has a viral moment in a courtroom, the gov’t decides to exile the dangerous babies to an island instead of exterminating them, a few years later the dad with nothing left to lose joins a scientific(?) expedition to the island (“surely they’ve developed a language of their own”) where everyone else is killed and he helps the mutants escape to the mainland then he and his ex run off with the only surviving baby.

Karen burns her ex’s tell-all book:

But the movie is less about plot than it is about letting dad Michael Moriarty go hogwild. Between his early courtroom antics, his late no-fucks-given mode, and his ability to psychically communicate with mutant babies, it’s his show. She’s not in it much but it’s funny to watch a Karen Black movie the day after not seeing her in The Devil’s Rejects. Cohen throws in new ridiculous plot points (sympathetic Cubans smuggle Moriarty to Florida, the last adult mutant lives just long enough to hurl ten cops off a rooftop). Easily the best of the Alive trilogy, all those times I wanted to rent this video in the late 80s, I was right.

Moriarty freaks out Maniac Cop star Laurene Landon:

by ·Comments Off on Housekeeping (1987, Bill Forsyth)

Unusual tone: quirky people in absurd situations, but not a comedy, as signaled early on when mom drops off her two daughters at grandma’s then drives herself off a cliff. When Grandma dies a couple of ill-suited aunts take over, then eagerly hand off to wandering aunt Sylvie (Swing Shift‘s Christine Lahti, excellent), who moves in with the kids and (kinda) takes care of them. Still not a comedy, the kids grow apart as one wants to fit in at school and the other wants to stop even attending school. When things get tense in town, Sylvie responds per family tradition: by running away, taking the remaining kid with her.

Mom’s last ride:

Burning down the house on their way out of town:

by ·Comments Off on The Terence Davies Trilogy (1976-1984)

Children (1976)

Watched this after an episode of Shifty to reinforce how terrible is England. Everyone’s catatonic or an arsehole or both. Kid is bullied, his mom cries on the bus, his dad is violent, has fits, then dies. The kid also appears a decade later, gay and depressed. As far as miserable British youth movies, it’s no The Wall, whose soundtrack I happened to hear last week.

Hearse reflection:

Lawrence Garcia in Cinema Scope:

From the perspective of Davies’ later work, the film is most notable for its eschewal of a causal dramatic progression — and I use that term advisedly, for Davies’ construction refuses the temporal asymmetry that one might be inclined to impose on the film, resisting one’s impulse to fix the adult Tucker’s scenes as the stable present from which the childhood sequences would be merely reminiscence. Children is unique in that it is as much premonition as recollection. Although not yet marked by Davies’ singular use of music, it established something arguably even more central to his cinema: the principle that the tides of time flow backward as well as forward.

Every inch of England is filled with horrors, but this sign was the worst thing I saw:

–
Madonna and Child (1980)

Same guy (different actor) dotes on his mum, prays, suffers extreme catholic guilt. He goes to work (as an accountant, possibly). He puts on his leather and goes out to clubs or tattoo parlors or to pick up men at the toilets. Both have lot of stillness and prayer, but I liked this one better than Children. Not as much of the mother as you’d expect from the title, and she’s asleep in half her scenes (Sheila Raynor also played a mother in A Clockwork Orange).

–
Death and Transfiguration (1983)

Same guy (now Wilfrid Brambell of A Hard Day’s Night) old and dying, having flashbacks to when he was played by different actors. Finally Davies is using melodramatic pop songs mixed in with the christmas carols and hymns.

Garcia:

With even more concentrated force than the films that would follow, it depicts an entire life as a kaleidoscopic whirl of disjunctive images and sounds, most notably the alarming, unabated death rattle of an elderly man on his hospital deathbed, gasping for breath as the screen fades to white. It is a haunting distillation of a remark Deleuze attributes to Fellini, that “we are constructed in memory… simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity.”

by ·Comments Off on The Beast To Die (1980, Toru Murakawa)

Date is a psycho criminal, played by Japan’s coolest man Yûsaku Matsuda, but in this movie’s world violence tends to be awkward and clumsy and nobody is cool. Date is already being tailed by beardy detective Hideo Murota (also beardy as the first doctor in Dogra Magra) when he comes across an aggrieved waiter with frizzy hair (Rikiya of Tampopo and Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter) and enlists him in a bank robbery plot.

Turns out Date is a shellshocked war photographer (always you lose points when you bring real war atrocity footage into your dumbass crime picture, let this be a warning), which is why he “walks like a dead man” and acts weird around his girl even though he’s supposedly a classical music fan and she’s a hot concert pianist. The shellshock doesn’t explain why he tells really long stories though. Having recently watched Heat, I’m gonna be comparing all cops and robbers movies to that – these guys are more intense than Kilmer and company, killing both their girls before/during the big heist.

Pre-game pep talk:

Detective with 30 seconds left to live: