I'd Call It Summer of CHEER

You watch enough movies and you become afraid...afraid that there just isn't enough wonder left in the junkyard of Amazon Prime's made-for-TV genre section from the 1970s. 

Then you watch Summer of Fear and find a new reason for living.

Quick Plot: Rachel is a teenage (I think?) tomboy living with her parents and brothers on a Californian ranch. Most of her days are spent riding her beloved horse Sundance, finding boxes to stand on to kiss her foot+ taller boyfriend Mike, and hanging out with her BFF Carolyn (FRAN DRESCHER!!!).

Life takes a downturn when her aunt and uncle die in a car accident, leaving their college-aged (I THINK?) daughter Julia orphaned and alone in the mysterious Ozarks. Despite having not seen the young woman in over ten years, Rachel's parents take the beautiful but slightly odd Julia into their home. 

You don't need a winter's bone to sense something is amiss. Before she's even unpacked, Julia is stealing the affections of Mike, fitting better into Rachel's homemade dress, and stirring up a wild spirit in Sundance. The friendly neighborhood professor (MACDONALD CAREY FROM DAYS OF OUR LIVES!!!) confirms Rachel's suspicions that her cousin is a practicing witch, leading our frizzy-haired heroine the challenge of unmasking the evil in her own home.

I don't know how else to say this other than to employ a lot of exclamation points:

SUMMER OF FEAR IS EVERYTHING I'VE WANTED AND MORE.

Based on a novel by I Know What You Did Last Summer YA scribe Lois Duncan and directed by a young Wes Craven, Summer of Fear (aka Stranger In Our House) feels like it should be the centerpiece of a slumber party hosted by drag queens. The world's most flammable cars explode mid-air, uncles and brothers shamelessly flirt their younger female relative, and Linda Blair's hair grows five inches with every reel.

Seriously, whatever is happening on Linda Blair's head should have had its own trailer. It's like someone shaved all four of my cats, sewed the fur together into a blanket, spilled the same serum used in Village of the Giants all over the mess, then tried in vain to brush it out. 

AKA, perfection.

High Points

Sure, Rachel is a tad whiney and not necessarily the brightest at setting traps for her evil sorceress cousin, but as a scrappy teen, Linda Blair is a pure joy to watch 

NOT a Low Point
I normally balk at the "special appearance by" credit so prevalent in the '80s, but if said guest star is MacDonald Carey, Days of Our Lives's Horton patriarch himself, it is indeed special

Lessons Learned
The Ozarks are a bed of a lot of folklore and mysticism

In the late '70s, it was customary to keep an autographed photo of your solid feller on your nightstand

If your cousin is from a rural region, it's totally acceptable to have a crush on her

Film Trivia of DreamsIf IMDB is to be trusted, Summer of Fear was filmed a house that was eventually owned by Sinbad. For some reason, this pleases me greatly

Rent/Bury/Buy

Summer of Fear is a thing of glory, at least if you have an unreasonable affection for cheese that involves catfights, witchcraft, and tame rat kings that settled on Linda Blair's head for safety. You can find it on Amazon Prime. Obviously.

Order On the Set

I recall hearing quite the glut of negativity aimed at Wes Craven's 2010 3D slasher My Soul To Take. The film seemed to rile up such bitter venom in all who viewed that I naturally have spent the last four years anxiously awaiting its arrival on Netflix Instant.

Try as I may, I just couldn't bring myself to wasting my valuable 1-disc-at-a-time plan on a movie that by all accounts was going to be unworthy. Most mediocre slashers are guaranteed a ticket on the Instant Watch circuit, but this one just refused to take the ride. 

Full disclosure: I finally watched My Soul To Take when it aired on the SyFy Channel (in MY day, by the way, we called it The Sci-Fi Channel; in my younger days, it was better known as The Home of Every Quantum Leap Rerun). What this means is that for all I know, scenes were edited or removed to fit into the 2-hour-with-commercials-not-for-Quantum-Leap running time. I'll never know what My Soul To Take looked like to the non-cable eyes, but I will assume it had less awkward mutings on curses and more importantly, 100% less blurred out newborn nudity.

I'm really not kidding: SyFy blurs out baby nudity. Somehow I find this incredibly disturbing. It makes something so natural and non-sexual (because: baby) into something that's apparently sexual or at the very least, harder core than Rated M. 

Anyway, I guess I find the politics of editing infant nudity way more intriguing than Wes Craven's bizarrely lazy tale of teenage stereotypes trapped in a convoluted yet unexplained curse of sorts. Still, I have a non-paying job to do, so let's get on with it!

Quick Plot: 16 years ago, the town of Riverton housed a vicious serial killer played by Raul Esparza--

This is going to be a REALLY hard review to get through, isn't it...

Sidebar, your honor: Raul Esparza is probably best known to the general American audience as the current ADA on Law & Order: SVU  (though Broadway audiences are more familiar with his musical work in everything from Cabaret to Company and so on). The man is, let me say this, 5'3.

THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING SHORT.

I'm just, you know, pointing out that the sadistic and active murderer of this film is not too much taller than me.

Moving on, Esparza is a family man who opens the film building a white dollhouse in his basement--

SIDEBAR

Yes, the dollhouse bears a more than coincidental resemblance to something you might pass on Elm Street. And yes, this will not be the only sidebar to point out a similarity between My Soul To Take and that OTHER franchise.

So. Esparza's a family man with a wife about to deliver a baby whose nudity will be blurred out. He's also the host to multiple personalities--or souls, as the film occasionally discusses--that kill. According to the film's science, this makes him a violent schizophrenic--

SIDEBAR

Are we still, a full decade into the 21st century, calling multiple personality disorder the same as schizophrenia? Have we NOT gotten past this misconception? Isn't this to psychiatry what a misuse of its/it's is to grammar nerds? Isn't Wes Craven a pretty well-educated man who at least could have double checked this on Wikipedia?

Anyway, the Riverton Ripper or Reaper or whatever you want to call him is caught by, as usual in a Wes Craven film, completely unqualified police officers who somehow let him shoot/stab several last minute victims AFTER being captured. It's sort of resolved by an ambulance accident that, 16 years later, one can still see because in 16 years, why would a town ever do something as minor as remove the burnt vehicle of a fatal car accident from the street?

Did I mention it's now 16 years later? You're forgiven if you didn't catch that detail since all of the characters shown 16 years earlier haven't aged a day. This includes supporting unqualified policewoman Danai Gurira (Michonne from The Walking Dead) who hasn't even changed her hair style in 16 years. 

Gurira's character in 1994

...and 2010

You know what HAS changed in 16 years? The baby, he of the blurred out baby nudity, is now a creepy high school student named Bug played by The House At the End of the Street's Max Thieriot. What's more interesting is that on that fateful night, there were six other babies born who might have required blurred out nudity in a deleted scene. Today, these teenagers are known as the Riverton Seven and take part in an annual performance before their peers and that burned out but still unmoved ambulance, wherein they ceremoniously slay the puppet embodiment of Raul Esparza to ward off his spirit--I mean schizophrenia--I mean, souls.  

Among the Riverton Seven are:

The token jock jerk

The token Asian artist kid

The token blond brat

The token religious girl

The token weird kid (nickname: Bug; hobby: birdwatching)

The token weird kid's friend with an abusive father 

The token blind black kid, who in the most disappointing SPOILER twist of all, is not the killer

When the awkward Bug fails to complete the Riverton party charade, the kids quickly begin to die in horrifically boring ways. Meanwhile, Bug begins to display some of his friends' personality quirks, such as being able to construct an elaborate condor costume for show and tell (because that's what high school biology apparently is in 2010) or capturing his pal Adam's movements in one of those mirror games you play in Acting 101 class. Mind you, it's not exactly clear or interesting in any way, and all of it makes me long for a much-needed rewatch of Nightmare On Elm Street 4.

SIDEBAR

I love that one. I know most horror fans see Renny Harlin's goofy take as the series' beginning of the end, but I find the visual creativity and super elaborate death sequences to be the best in the bunch. It references Kafka! Plus, it's the installment that resurrects Freddy Krueger via dog pee. 

What was I talking about again?

Right. So. Stereotypes die. Wes Craven displays a strange understanding of high school politics, envisioning a society where a bitchy super senior who goes by the name of Fang serves as a sort of fascist dictator who can enact edicts about levels of bullying and matchmaking. Maybe I just didn't "wake up and smell the Starbucks" (actual line of dialog) but I think modern teenagers aren't quite as Napoleonic as Wes Craven seems to believe.

There is so very much wrong with My Soul To Take. Aforementioned 'what the hell kind of teenagers ARE these people?' being just a teeny tiny part of it all. It's clear that this film was repackaged five times or so for test audiences, as minor plot threads seem to be introduced only to dangle lazily until you accept that you shouldn't care about them. The nature of why a schizoph--er, multiple personality carrying musical theater star could have such magical Shocker-ish abilities to inhabit and pass on multiple souls is never justified with any kind of mythology. One cop (who uses great anti-aging cream) suggests something about soul jumping. The kids sort of discuss it. Apparently, it happened in the movie and the script forgot to mention it.

SIDEBAR

I’ve now written over one thousand words about My Soul To Take. I think nine out of ten soul holders would agree that that’s at least 900 too many. And yet, I’m not done. So let me leave you with a few more bullet points worth noting. We’ll call them evidence:

Exhibit A: The Riverton Ripper uses a knife that has the word “vengeance” carved in the blade. This is an exhibit because never in the film does any real sense that the Riverton Ripper sought vengeance come into play. Other than, perhaps, the fact that the motive for Freddy Krueger hunting the children of his killers was vengeance. 

Exhibit B: I started keeping track of how many times a character turns around as the music CRESCENDOS and he/she is about to scream before realizing “oh hey! It’s just a friend.” I gave up after three.

Exhibit C: The very first shot of the killer--not musical theater multi-soul holder killer, mythical soul sharing 2010 killer--sprinting at his first victim was almost cool. 

Exhibit D: Maybe I’m reaching, but once the Nightmare On Elm Street winks started coming, I couldn’t stop seeing them. Everywhere. Bug’s best friend visits him by climbing in through his window. Maybe it’s nothing. Or maybe it’s a rather meh director trademark.

Exhibit E: It’s been at least a few hundred words since I mentioned it, and this has less to do with My Soul To Take than it does with The SyFy Channel or FCC, but seriously: the innocent biological genitalia of a BABY was blurred out, yet underage children being gutted, decapitated, and gutted again (the kills were incredibly not creative) was considered perfectly fine to show in full glory on television. Just something to consider, America.

Exhibit F: The end credits roll over an animated sequence of sorts involving condors. It’s sort of adorable. Until you remember that this is the credits sequence for a horror film that has, up to now, taken itself rather seriously

The prosecution rests.

High Points

Well, it's hard to hate a movie that includes a dramatic scene wherein the lead character gives an interactive book report on a condor while his friend is dressed as said condor and said friend dressed as condor vomits and poops on the film's minor villain

Low Points

Aside from this not being a very good movie, the mere premise of a whole bunch of kids being born on the same night can't NOT make me think of Bloody Birthday, and how much greater a viewing experience that film is (not just compared to My Soul To Take, but really, compared to 99% of cinema in existence. Have you SEEN Bloody Birthday???)

Lessons Learned

A good show 'n tell needs shock and awe (artificial bird poop and vomit helps as well)

It's not okay for everybody to be killing each other all the time

Epinephrin kicks ass

Computer imagery enhancement was at its peak in 1994

Hey. Relax. If things get too tough, just turn on the prayer condition

Rent/Bury/Buy

Yup. My Soul To Take is bad. It also earned over 1700 words from me, so it might be bad--

SIDEBAR

It is bad. No might about it.

Yet it somehow led me to write quite a bit. So whatever that says about the movie, that’s that.

A Remake Without Soul

"Wes Craven Presents" have never been three words I’ve looked forward to hearing. The product it generally implies is, well...

Sometimes starring Marc Blucas.

In other words, it’s rarely a good thing for even the catchiest of titles (you know, like, um...They) to be produced by horror’s most famous former college professor. With that in mind, I headed into 1998’s Carnival of Souls with a bar lower than the required height for the kiddie coaster.

Let’s see if it helped.

Quick Plot: Young Alex walks into her kitchen to the pleasant sight of Larry Miller raping her mother. Before you can say Final Destination 5, he snaps her neck and snaps us into the present, where Alex (Bobbie Philips) has grown into a pretty but world weary bar owner co-managing a seaside dive with her younger sister, played by an oddly stable Shawnee Smith. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Saw's first lady, but there's something very off about seeing her playing normal.

Alex has bigger problems than a dull little sister, primarily the fact that mom-killer (and apparently, child molester) Larry Miller has been released from his lifetime prison sentence. So, apparently, have a bunch of demons and a lot of very menacing water, be it in a Final Destination 4-esque car wash-gone-wrong sequence or an aggressive bathtub. Are these simple daydreams haunting an emotionally scarred Alex, or is there evil afoot in comically oversized floppy red shoes?

Wes Craven Presents: Carnival of Souls is one of the titles that often shows up on Worst Remakes of All Time lists. While it’s no It’s Alive 2009, it’s easy to see why some viewers would be so offended by this film. The original is a verifiable cult classic, an eerie little tale panned in its time and rediscovered in the public domain as one of the era’s very best ghost stories. This version, directed by Adam Grossman and Ian Kressner, is far from the worst horror output of the ‘90s, but in comparison to the rich imagery of Herk Harvey’s film, it suffers quite fiercely.

The movie’s largest issue is the hardest to conquer: it’s boring. Yes, we get Shawnee Smith warbling through a tune. Indeed, we get a character actor generally known for comedy going all out as a pedophile carnival clown with a pageboy wig. Sure, these things are special in their own odd way. But that doesn’t a not dull film make.

Running at just 90 minutes, Carnival of Souls simply takes forever. The beats are repetitive, and sadly there are only so many ‘water! Bad! It’s a dream! Water! Bad!’ cycles a viewer can suffer through before calling it a day.

Or just a bad movie.

High Points

Well, this happens a lot:

Low Points

There’s a very specific moment where Carnival of Souls lost whatever mild interest it had generated. In one of her umpteenth fantasy/dream/water sequences, Alex is haunted by a red balloon that appears out of nowhere. She carefully walks toward it, clearly leading us to a jump of some moment. And she jumps. And THEN Larry Miller’s face appears on the balloon to do some taunting.

Notice a problem?

It’s easy enough to set up a jump scare. Lower the music. Have a character walk slowly. Focus on an object/door/box/noun of some sort that will reveal a minor menace. REVEAL the menace, and we and said character will presumably jump. Have character jump and THEN reveal menace, well, that’s something you only get when Wes Craven is presenting.

Lessons Learned

It is possible to possess stunning green eyes up until the age of five or six, only to see them turn a pleasant if plain brown once you reach your mid-20s

Demon thingies rarely wear clothing, but they do enjoy a hearty dinner and hydration

Look, It’s…

John Sears! Fraternity president/casual date rapist/homophobic bigot/sworn nemesis of Steve Sanders John Sears! Um, he was on Beverly Hills 90210, and I tend to should “John Sears!” whenever he pops up in another late ‘90s horror movie (of which there are quite a few). Also, he apparently directed the much maligned Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, so make of all of these things whatever you will.

Rent/Bury/Buy

Carnival of Souls isn’t the worst thing streaming on Netflix right now, but there’s very little reason to test that theory. I suppose Larry Miller clown fetishists or remake completists will give it a go, but be aware that this is a slog. Not a They slog, but dull time nonetheless.

The Hills Have Spiders

Somewhere between the dog eating charms of The Hills Have Eyes and the blood-spewing beds of A Nightmare On Elm Street, Wes Craven directed a pre-Basic Instinct Sharon Stone, post-Devil’s Rain Ernest Borgnine, and a few stunt tarantulas thankful not to have worked on Kingdom of the Spiders in 1981’s Deadly Blessing.

It’s pretty weird.

Quick Plot: In the rural part of America, there lives a religious group of humble folks called the Hittites who, according to locals, “eat brimstone for breakfast and make the Amish look like swingers.”

Naturally, they’re led by Ernest Borgnine who naturally gets the best lines. Sharon Stone might have proven herself with Casino, but I’d still prefer my gems like “You are a stench in the nostrils of God!” to come from her costar. Especially since her orifices are being filled in other ways.

The Hittites live next to a farm run by former son Jim, a handsome young fella who renegaded from his family’s strict (read: lame) ways to marry pretty young Martha. All the sweet glances in the world aren’t enough, however, when Jim is ominously (and verrrrrryyyyy slooooooooowwwwlllllyyyyyyyyyy) killed in a freak tractor accident. Now widowed, Martha invites two of her city gal pals to spend some time being judged by her neighbors/in-laws and help her cope.

There’s not much to do in the country circa 1981. Pal Vicky starts flirting with a confused Hittite, much to the chagrin of a bearded Borgnine and the Hittite’s cousin/fiancé. Lana (Stone) has recurring arachnophobic nightmares, while Martha entertains creepy visits/egg gifts from her wacky non-Hittite neighbors. Over in the more religious parts of the land, man-child Michael Berryman calls everyone an incubus before meeting his own slow motion end and sparking the real mystery of who or what is hunting locals.

Deadly Blessing bares the strangely ironic qualities of being rather boring yet batshit insane. Craven gets decent-to-strong performances out of his cast, but the actors are hampered by mediocre dialogue. The story chugs along slowly, occasionally pausing for bursts of weirdness (Berryman screaming “INCUBUS!” for two minutes straight, for example) before its truly bizarre twist (we’re talking The Initiation levels here) followed by an even SILLIER coda.

But hey, much like the not-at-all-similar Silent Hill series, there’s something fresh and different about Deadly Blessings when compared to its horror brethren of the time. The story wanders, but even if you see a good part of the ending coming (since it’s screamed at you early on), there’s still something special about the weirdness of how it plays out. In an era of dead teenagers, it’s always nice to have slightly older characters to follow. While it’s never quite explored to its potential, the Hittite angle offers a lot of promise and helps to make some of the less significant characters at least have some kind of identification.

This is a problematic film and I imagine for some, a very dull one. But for someone who enjoys some good spider-in-the-mouth dream sequences, children crying at Ernest Borgnine, and gender-confused serial killers with no real bearing on the story, one could do a lot worse.

High Points

It’s occasionally a little much, but the frantic, perhaps fully orchestrated maniacal score helps to amp up the already crazed finale with energetic success

Low Points

Look, I understand that all humans have different body temperatures, but I’m rarely wearing five layers of flannel while my friend in the same room is drinking iced tea in a tank top and panties. I realize it’s a petty point, but the lack of consistency in season REALLY irked me 

Lessons Learned

Faith is spelled F!-A!-I!-T!-H! (!!!)

Cars are WAY better than horses

After shooting and *maybe hitting an insane killer responsible for the deaths of at least two much larger men, the best course of action to immediately take after the body disappears is to throw your still-loaded gun on the floor. OBVIOUSLY

Craven a Calling Card

It looks like SOMEONE was toying with a few pending trademarks, including:

-nightmares

-German shepherds

-Michael Berryman

-Pretty brunettes taking baths only to have something devious crawl between their legs*

*Also, as a note, it’s much more effective when said devious something crawls between a woman’s legs when she’s not wearing underwear. I’m not saying I (of all people) was looking for bottom nudity, but a snake being released at a woman’s special place loses some of its power if she’s got at the very least, a cotton barrier

Rent/Bury/Buy

Deadly Blessing is streaming on Instant Watch, and those with that service and a free 90 minutes will certainly get some fun out of a viewing. By no means is the film a classic, but it’s interesting to see a young Wes Craven at work, even if he’s weighted by a fairly crappy script.