Crushing On Valentine's Day With LoLicia Silverstone

Sometimes, all it takes is one scene--nay, 11 seconds--to transform a film from forgettable to mind blowing. In support of this statement, I give you--minor spoilers--the climax of 1993’s The Crush:

Sold, right?

Quick Plot: A sometimes American-sounding Cary Elwes plays Nick, a researcher and hack writer for a tabloid who moves to a sunny town to rent a house from a well-off family that includes the precocious Adrienne, a 14-year old Lolita so aware of her Lolita-ness that she introduces herself in short denim jeans and an iconic sunglass tilt. 

Before you can say fatal attraction, Adrienne is seductively leaning on walls in a way that makes her Aerosmith video hair look positively scandalous, much to the discomfort of Nick as he tries to woo his coworker (Bad Dreams’ Jennifer Rubin) and keep his job. Also in the way is Amber Benson (yes, Willow’s girlfriend Tara) as a suspicious pal of Adrienne and Adrienne’s tough guy dad who establishes himself as a tough guy by there fact that he’s played by Kurtwood Smith.

Of course, the fact that dad Kurtwood Smith keeps a working carousel up in his attic hampers his badassness slightly, but without said carousel, we wouldn’t have the aforementioned amazing climax.

So really, how can you complain?

The Crush is a shining example of 90s era trash cinema, making up for its lack of gore by instead cramming in ickily inappropriate sleaze. This is the kind of movie that has a 14-year-old Silverstone explain why she doesn’t like carousels with the pointed line “I ride real horses now,” and note she says this to her dad and titular crush with all the subtlety of Nomi Malone at the gynecologist. 

High Points

In her film and Shortening debut, Silverstone shows plenty of moxie (plus a huge skill at flipping her hair and sulking)

Low Points

Look, I appreciate the Dread Pirate Roberts as much as any child of the ‘80s, but there’s virtually nothing about Nick to make for a good online dating profile, much less focus of obsession for a beautiful and talented teenager like Adrienne

Lessons Learned

Wasps are social AND territorial (come to think of it, so are WASPs)

In the 1990s, real men wore pink dress shirts

Classy barbeques involve marshmallows and wine

Rent/Bury/Buy

As 90s nostalgia gets tastier with age, The Crush is a film that can make you giggle based almost solely on its time stamp. Trashy as a PG13 rating can allow, the movie isn’t by any means good, but it embraces its ridiculousness all the way through its foreshadowed wasp attack and heavy carousel creepily circling in an attic with a pull-down ladder. And no, there is no explanation for how exactly one moves a working carousel into an attic with a pull-down ladder (perhaps it’s some sort of growable carousel?) but that in itself makes The Crush the cheese sandwich that can satisfy any craving.

Patrick Still Lives...in a different continent, body, language, and movie

Pop Quiz: What’s the best way to make a sequel?

1. Retain as much of the talent from the film’s original source and continue to develop the story in a linear and sensical fashion
2. Multiply the budget and retell your story TO THE EXTREME!!!
3. Don’t do it.
4. Sell the rights to another country and let new hands do what they want, including transforming the tale into a trashtastic good time and increasing the amount of nudity and slapping by 189% 

If you selected D, the Patrick Still Lives!* is the movie for you. 

Oh boy. Is it ever.

Quick Plot: A young man and his father are standing on the side of a quiet country road when a passing vehicle hurls a bottle(? Three rewinds and I still couldn’t confidently identify the object) out the window. While the assailant is never fully identified, I’ll assume it’s someone along the lines of Roger Clemens or Johann Santana, as this one toss sends the son (a revamped, straight-haired Patrick) into a coma.

Fast forward some unidentified amount of time later, when Patrick Hershell is under the care of his slightly mad scientist dad in a secluded private hospital with a luxury resort connected to its backyard. Papa Hershell has invited a few mystery guests to spend a few days bathing, dining, lounging in the nude, being blackmailed, and eventually, murdered.

There’s a stiff Parliamentarian and his horny wife, a single young rich fellow wonderfully named David Davis, a hairy-chested playboy and his not girlfriend played by Burial Ground ’s boob-bitten mother Mariangela Giordano (and, it should be noted, her bare breasts). Also on the grounds is a pretty young secretary, two German Shepherds, and a maid/world’s worst dog trainer and bad omen warner. Everything’s all fun and Italian until Lyndon, the asexual politician, takes a morning swim and ends up a steamed and skinned corpse.

This somehow inspires Giordano's character to drink like Margot Kidder at a wedding and crash dinner naked. If that weren’t enough, she proceeds to pick a catfight with the grieving widow, then attempt to seduce David Davis (I have no plans to stop writing out his entire name). Shocking enough, not all men dig plastered middle aged women who spend 71% of their day in the nude. Instead of sweaty Euro sex, David Davis and Giordano's breasts engage in a three minute slap fight. It’s even more incredible than I can possibly explain.

Oh wait! But where did Patrick go? Not very far, since he’s comatose and only able to communicate via typewriter (the budget has clearly increased; note that this time, the keys move themselves) and once again, harnessing a crush on the attractive clinic employee. It’s a tad hard to even remember the title character amongst the sleazy joy of our soon-to-be victims, but in case you hadn’t figured it out, this is a sequel in name only. The concept remains while the tone and essentially, the genre get a turn of the decade makeover. Patrick keeps his telekinetic homicidal tendencies to kill his way through the (possibly responsible for his condition) party guests but that almost seems secondary to watching amusingly unlikable rich Italians embarrass themselves. It’s certainly more fun than Patrick, albeit a whole lot less classy. 

Depending on your mood, that can be a wonderful thing.

High Points

One death-by-car-window is pretty damn memorable and makes Rose McGowan’s garage door demise in Scream look a little less impressive

I’m not normally one to recommend a film based on its abundance of female nudity and women being slapped silly, but the ridiculousness of how both are featured in every other scene is rather amusing in itself

Low Points

At around 100 minutes, the running time isn’t unreasonable, but with such poorly paced and drawn out “chase” scenes, Patrick Still Lives (!) drags like a paraplegic learning how to walk

The death by dogs is possibly the tamest animal attack put on film since pipe cleaner spiders and drugged up toads were placed atop people pretending to be actors in Frogs

Lessons Learned

Italian women really don’t like to wear clothes or undergarments. Similarly, everybody in Europe sleeps buck naked

If a very menacing sharp object is aimed your way, it’s probably wise to close your legs

Denying your wife sex for months at at time may cause her to develop a serious case of nymphomania 

Syphilis can be transmitted through catfighting

Googly eyes floating over a green tinted set may resemble some of the baddies in Super Mario World, but they are also quite difficult to survive

Winning Line

“His death was due to a fatality.”

Is it me, or is this like saying a puppy is due to a baby dog?

Rent/Bury/Buy

If you loved the slow buildup and haunting atmosphere of Patrick, you may very well despise this film. HOWEVER, if exploitation is your cheese, melt this movie over nachos and feast like you’re the dude from Stephen King’s Thinner. This is the kind of film where the lead female, after discovering a second dead body, flees the scene shrieking, stops at a fountain to splash some water over her conveniently thin white dress, and resumes her escape. It’s a blast, but only if your definition of party involves ‘70s style Eurotrash. The DVD includes interviews with a producer and title star Gianni Dei, which are informative in a casual we-knew-what-we-were-making kind of way. I don't really see myself rewatching Patrick Still Lives(!) anytime soon, but it sure did brighten my evening.

*Since these filmmakers took liberties with the story of Patrick, I give myself the permission to adjust the title. There is no exclamation point, but doesn’t it sound better with one?

Oedipal Ground & Typos of Terror

Oh, Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror. How does one even begin to tackle such a perfect bacchanal of a film? Do I start with the casting of little person (and possible mini-me clone of Dario Argento) Peter Bark as cinema’s most persistent mama’s boy? How about the precariously placed bear trap resting amid a lovely mowed lawn? Or how about a random quote showing the easy 70sness of the characters: “You’re getting a raise from me all right, but it has nothing to do with money.”


With no real intro, let me offer a quick helping of photographic evidence:

Moving on...

Quick Plot: Three couples travel to a country house to visit an old, already eaten professor friend. Tossed in to much memorable effect is Bark's Michael, a turtleneck wearing preadolescent who resembles a grown up Stewie Griffin if all that trying-to-kill-his-mom business is just really intense foreplay. The opening ten minutes or so are devoted to separating each pair (useful when save for a mustache or lack of mustache, there’s not a whole lot to decipher each character) as they break off for varying levels of cuddling. Copious amounts of necking is put on hold when a gang of hungry and quite crusty zombies crash the fun, chomping their way through one poorly dubbed Italian after the next.

Is there more? Not really, but that’s what makes Burial Ground such a lasting film. Director Andrea Bianchi wastes little time in cutting through some fast nudity (I think there was an Italian law in 1981 that at least one minute of every film must contain some sort of breast) to give us the goods: shamblers, pure and simple. Sure, they break a little ground by picking up a few simple hand tools for extra power, but these are old school undead in a film that knows that’s what its audience wants.


Make no mistake: Burial Ground is not a good film. It’s terrible by 97% of most ranking criteria, from the acting to script and just about everything else. It does, however, expel all the virtues of any bad horror film with incredible watchability. Generous, creative, and sometimes well-done gore plus dialogue and character actions so dumb you almost want to develop a Human Intelligence Hormone and inject it into your DVD player make this a film you can’t help but love. While it doesn’t have any of the actual fright potential as something like Fulci’s Zombie, it does boast enough sleaze to make for a thoroughly entertaining time.


High Points
One of my biggest pet peeves in modern horror cinema is its reluctance to show anything during daylight. Compare the pure shock of seeing Leatherface bash a guy’s head in under the Texas sun with Jessica Biel’s barely lit getaway and you’ll see how well the AM hours can work when used correctly. Despite it’s title (more about that below), the heart of Burial Ground takes place with plenty of light, allowing full view of the grindhousey gore

With maggots squiggling out of holes and skin that resembles my cats’ well-used scratching post, these zombies are pleasantly rank


Low Points
The copy editor in me canot forgive two glaring errors:


1, If you’re planning on including a poetic endquote over the final still, would it kill you to give it a quick lookover to say, I don’t know, ensure the last word is spelled correctly? These nigths of terror foretold by profecies don’t proofread themselves


2. Speaking of that title: Unless you count the blink-and-you-miss-it prologue, the entire film begins around brunch and ends sometime before the next morning’s breakfast. Granted, math ain’t my forte and I’ve never been to Italy, but doesn’t an under 24 hour time frame consist of one nigth?

Lessons Learned
Wearing the antique lingerie you find somewhere in the closet of your vacation house will make you look like a little whore, but most men seem to like that


Next to zombies, the biggest danger in the Italian countryside seems to be bears


When your son walks in on you having sex with his stepfather, avoid the urge to scuttle out of bed and stand half naked for an extended time period, thus showing off your fabulous breasts. By doing so, you risk a) seriously warping an already warped child’s fetishes and b) planting an instinctive target for anything undead to chew on

Rent/Bury/Buy
Anybody with a love of zombie cinema--particularly from that rustily fabulous era spanning the 70s to early 80s--will get a genuine kick out of Burial Ground. This is not a turn-the-lights-off and watch in respectful silence kinda film; this is a movie made for Halloween parties, late nights avoiding work assignments, and background sleaze when cleaning the house. Who needs character, story, or class when you've got creatively done kills, Suspiria rip-off kills, and toupee wearing little people with fantastically vivid memories of nursing?


When this was named the July pick for Final Girl’s Film Club, I was actually quite scared (much more so than by anything in this actual film, natch). How could I begin to deliver any sort of critique or loving tribute to a film that so entertains by itself? The result: I probably didn’t, but thankfully, Stacie Ponder’s circle o’blogs surely have some other wonderful observations on the subject. Head over the the best horror blog on the web and follow some more contributers. It’s like a big virtual gang of writers that, should they all be gathered in one place, could annihilate zombies...with their words.