House (1985)

Horror writer Roger Cobb (William Katt) is having a hard time. His new book about his experiences in Vietnam doesn’t come together however hard he stares at an empty page. This is a particular problem since his publisher really wasn’t happy with him leaving the horror bestseller field in the first place. But then, Roger has reasons to be blocked: some time ago, his little son disappeared without a trace from the house where Roger was raised by his aunt, which in turn has led to the end of his marriage to soap opera actress Sandy Sinclair (Kay Lenz).

When news arrive about his aunt having committed suicide in the old house, Roger at first only goes there to take care of its sale. Some curious experiences convince him to change his mind right quick, though, and he moves in, at least subconsciously hoping to find out what really happened to his son. What follows is an intimate exploration of grief through his supernatural experiences in the house. No, wait, this is a mid-80s horror movie, so there’s none of this thoughtful stuff. Instead, the house harbours some kind of dimensional breach, through which monsters slip and attack Roger, and generally fuck with him.

Coming at Steve Miner’s House from today’s perspective, when even the dumber end of the horror spectrum is all about metaphor, trauma and particularly exploring grief, can be a somewhat dislocating experience. Like the titular house, the past this was made in is another country, where horror didn’t have to prove quite so hard it was about serious grown-up business. It’s a particularly curious effect because the film features all the elements you’d need for a contemporary grief horror movie: Roger’s multiple traumata, the grief about the loss of his child, the broken marriage are all prime material for psychological depth, but House goes out of its way to not treat any of this seriously or with any emotional weight.

So Vietnam only becomes an occasion for some pretty terrible studio-bound war flashbacks that’ll set up one gag of the film’s climax; Roger’s grief is only there to give him a reason to stay in the house and fight monsters and weird hallucinations instead of running away screaming like a sensible chap, and Sandy is only another convenient narrative contrivance. It’s a very different approach to this sort of material than you’d see today, enough so that I honestly felt somewhat discombobulated by it.

And, once I got used to the way things were done in The Past, actually pretty amused and well entertained, as well. The creatures – designed by James Cummins and executed by a team of seventeen people, apparently – are the stars here, created through lovely grotesque craftsmanship. The creatures are just funny enough to be horrible, which fits the generally zany style of humour the film prefers.

In tone, that humour feels like a kind of dry run for what Sam Raimi would do a couple of years later in Evil Dead 2, just with a less well-developed comical timing – Miner is no Raimi, and Katt most certainly no Bruce Campbell not just because of his deplorable lack of chin – and much less blood. In fact, I wouldn’t blame anyone watching this thinking the film at hand to be tonally inspired by Raimi when going in blind. Clearly, it’s just a case of directors having comparable ideas of what’s funny, though.

As a horror comedy, House is simply a fine time. It never overstays its welcome or rides one joke for too long, and while it is neither subtle nor deep, it makes up for that by its energy and commitment to dumb fun.

Three Films Make A Post: Carrol Jo Hummer--A working man who's had enough!

White Line Fever (1975): I know that this film by Jonathan Kaplan about an independent trucker played by Jan-Michael Vincent taking on the long-haul version of The Man has quite a few admirers. However, for me, the mix of traditional trucker exploitation, hicksploitation humour and earnest working class “Organize!” doesn’t really quite come together. Taken alone, every given scene is a perfectly fine example of its given genre, together, they result in a film of wildly fluctuating tone and uneven pacing that really would have needed to decide where it wants to put its emphasis.

Kill Me Again (1989): This is the first of now quality TV director John Dahl’s neo noirs after his time as a music video director, a series of films that would lead to at least two absolute classics of the genre. For its first two acts, this is nearly on its way to that status as well. Dahl uses his slick and polished style and the desert sun to perfectly replace the play of shadow and light of the classical noir, letting his characters go through variations of classic tropes that get enough of a twist to feel new. Val Kilmer (before he apparently started to believe that the main job of an actor is to sabotage the movie he is in), his then wife Joanne Whalley and Michael Madsen fit into this surface bright noir world perfectly.

Alas, the film breaks down nearly completely in the final act, with too many implausibilities even for a noir, and a bad case of random plot twist syndrome.

The Dry (2020): While I respect it and its approach, I can’t say I really enjoyed Robert Connolly’s adaptation of Jane Harper’s novel as much as I’d have liked too. There’s certainly a great sense of the dry Australian outback it takes place in on display, and the film also makes the book’s flashback structure flow much more organically than its source.

But for my tastes, the film is a bit too distanced from the crime(s) and the people at its heart, using a clinical look on its characters and their travails that makes it difficult to empathise with them, packing little emotional heft despite being about things of great emotional weight.

Murder by Night (1989)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

The charmingly named “Claw Hammer Killer” is haunting the nightly streets of New York, murdering women, as these guys inevitably do. His latest exploits are a bit below the standards of your typical ultra-competent movie serial killer, though, when one of his victims runs into a car, causing a crash and an explosion. Caught in said explosion is one Alan Strong (Robert Urich), probably out jogging at that moment, or something.

Neither we nor he do know what Alan was actually doing, for he suffers from a hefty bout of amnesia that leaves his past near and far a total vacuum to him. Apparently, he soon learns, he’s the reclusive owner of a successful restaurant he never enters, as well as the owner of a load of crappy modern art in his living room. He’s also a cipher to the world as much as he is to himself. Well, unless you’re the cop investigating the Claw Hammer Murders, that is. For said cop, one detective Carl Madsen (Michael Ironside) doesn’t buy Alan’s amnesia at all, and believes him to be a rich guy trying to avoid the trouble that comes with witnessing a murder.

Karen Hicks (Kay Lenz), the police psychologist tasked with helping Alan, does not at all agree with that opinion, but then, she clearly has no professional ethics and can’t resist the old Urich charm, so she’s soon having an affair with her patient. Why, she’s so into him, she’s even going to stand by him once Alan as well as Madsen start to suspect Alan might not be a witness, but the killer himself.

Paul Lynch’s Murder by Night, a TV movie made for the USA Network whose TV movie output was specialized on making genre movies below the explicitness of HBO but rather above the usual network TV movie fare when it came to sex, violence, and bad ideas, is rather a nice example of the form. Well, one might complain that it doesn’t go quite as far with its basic concept as it could do, turning the whole affair into more of a gaslighting affair than the portrait of a man who doesn’t know himself getting into trouble. On the other hand, however, the killer and his plan are sufficiently nasty and ridiculous to base an effective little thriller on.

The film is of course – being a TV movie - a bit conservative in its construction, so anyone who knows this kind of film will cop relatively early to what is actually going on simply by knowing the basic structure of this kind of plot. Lynch sells it pretty well, though, timing reveals and reversals nicely, and making good use of Urich’s general nice guy image exactly to cause just enough doubt in the audience. Plus, there’s another TV nice guy actor playing the actual killer, so you gotta congratulate the movie for some cleverness here, too.

The cast is generally doing a fine job inside the constraints of what this is, Urich being likeable and confused, Jim Metzler being likeable and evil, Michael Ironside doing his patented driven asshole cop bit as convincing as he always does, and Lenz doing the best with what she is given.


So, all in all, Murder by Night is a nice little example of a well-made TV thriller, winning over hearts and minds, okay, my heart and mind, via the virtues of craftsmanship.

The Passage (1979)

Some time during World War II. The resistance against the Germans hires a nameless grumpy old Basque shepherd (grumpy old Anthony Quinn, wearing the appropriate beret to prove his basqueness) to lead a Swedish scientist (James Mason, a very Swedish gentleman, as we all well know) sought by the Nazis through the Pyrenees. Of course, things will turn out more complicated than that. Firstly, it becomes soon clear the good Professor isn’t going to come alone but is bringing his whole family – his ill wife (Patricia Neal), his rebellious teenage son (Paul Clemens) and his soon-to be raped by Nazis daughter (Kay Lenz).

That’s enough to make the Basque even grumpier, but what’s worse is that the Germans have sent a guy after them who is insane even by the standards of the SS – Captain von Berkow (Malcolm McDowell), wearer of swastika underwear, torturer by kitchen implement and all-around murderous crazy bastard. And the whole “crossing the Pyrenees” bit? Well, the Basque will spend large parts of the film getting the family there from Paris.

If you’re interested in a film where the sensibilities of the more sensible of Charles Bronson’s main directors, J. Lee Thompson, seem to have magically turned into those of that other Bronson favourite, old sleazebag Michael Winner, this is the film to watch. Given the quality of the cast, one would expect The Passage to be a pretty serious adventure movie with moments of earnest drama; instead it is a lurid concoction of crazy ideas, bizarre bullshit, scenes right out of a Nazisploitation movie, and a couple of scenes one might buy as earnest if not for the tone of everything surrounding them, like a certain heroic sacrifice late in the film.

The most bizarre and the most entertaining part of the whole thing is certainly Malcolm McDowell’s performance. McDowell portrays his crazy cartoon Nazi as if his Alex from A Clockwork Orange had found a place and time where he truly belonged, torturing people, having at least four different kinds of murderous hissy fits, gloating, presenting his swastika underwear with crazy laughter, imitating Hitler in front of a mirror, and so on and so forth. Of course, the way the film goes, the laughter and amusement McDowell’s crazy capering produces crashes right into moments of intense discomfort. His very special underwear, for example, is positioned right in the middle of the scenes in which he first humiliates Lenz’s character and then rapes her. There’s also a comparable scene where cartoon Nazi strutting ends with an actually horrific massacre of the family of Christopher Lee’s character (inevitably, given the way this one casts nobody in an appropriate role, playing the leader of a group of Romani). It’s as if Thompson is doing his damndest to make a viewer uncomfortable in their enjoyment of evil cartoon Nazis.

The thing is, I’m honestly not sure at all if Thompson is doing this one purpose, perhaps trying the make a point about our enjoyment of atrocities in cinema if it is only presented with a wink, if McDowell is sabotaging/saving the film, or what the hell was going on behind the scenes here. It certainly is never boring to witness, but instead at times funny, at times unpleasant and at times bewildering. For the last one, there’s for example a highly peculiar fake-out ending that suggest a whopper of a 70s downer only to then explain that the combined powers of Quinn and Mason’s fatherly voices can put a dying Nazi into a hallucinatory state. I have no idea why that bit is in there, what anyone involved was thinking, or honestly, what the hell I was watching for half of the time.


Ironically enough, given how crazy parts of the film are, the cast apart from McDowell (who is not from planet Earth) makes usually surprisingly naturalistic acting choices for their surroundings, while Thompson works a lot with hand-held camera and set-ups that suggest a naturalistic/documentarian approach. Which, as should be obvious by now, is another choice that makes little sense whatsoever, but in the most interesting way possible. From time to time, Thompson also manages to slip in a couple of perfectly straightforward action and suspense sequences, as if this were your typical World War II adventure movie.

In short: Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987)

After his very impressive killing spree in New York, serial vigilante Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) has retired from the business and is working as an architect in Los Angeles again. He has already acquired a new family in form of girlfriend and journalist Karen Sheldon (Kay Lenz) and her daughter Erica (Dana Barron). But don’t worry, Kersey will soon enough find a reason to murder again, for Erica dies of a cocaine overdose. After Kersey kills the dealer responsible, he is contacted by a mysterious millionaire (John P. Ryan) who convinces him to think bigger and stop the drug problem once and for all. To that goal he provides Kersey with arms and information about the two major LA drug operations.

Kersey’s soon in his serial killing groove again, despite the usual incompetent (George Dickerson) and corrupt (Soon-Tek Oh) cops on his trail. He even has a plan he must have read in a Punisher comic: provoke the two drug groups into a gang war, because that sort of thing has never cost innocent lives, right?

After the sheer insanity of Death Wish 3, J. Lee Thompson’s The Crackdown is a bit of a let-down in its insistence on being only general action movie dumb instead of completely out of its mind, and of being mildly tasteless instead of a Michael Winner film. There’s just no way a competent little action film without all too much that’s memorable can look exciting compared to the force of nature that came before.

Of course, I don’t really see how the sequel ever could have topped what was going on in part 3, particularly that film’s final half hour. This goes even more so with someone like Thompson in the director’s chair who seems somewhat lost in the kind of explosion fest this tries to be, coming more from a classical thriller background as he does, and sometimes looking as if he struggles to get quite as unsubtle as the material needs him to be. Consequently, the best directed scenes here aren’t the large shoot-outs or the roller rink massacre in the end, but the smaller skirmishes when Bronson fights only a handful of guys, because then the rules of the thriller apply instead of those of the 80s action film, Cannon style.

The Crackdown is still decent entertainment, mind you, for while Thompson isn’t putting his best foot forward, there’s enough basic competence here to keep the film moving, and such a mass of explosions, dead bodies and general carnage (if you just pretend you haven’t seen the true meaning of these words in Death Wish 3), the worst thing I have to say about it is that it doesn’t feature particularly memorable explosions or carnage.

Headhunter (1988)

A series of deaths among the local Nigerian community awaken the mild degree of interest deaths among the poor and the black tend to awaken in Miami’s police force. Racist idiot Captain Ted Calvin (Steve Kanaly) sends out what must be his least favourite couple of detectives to solve a series of murders you’d usually build a task force for. The lucky ones are Katherine Hall (Kay Lenz) and her peculiar partner Pete Giullani (Wayne Crawford). Pete’s suffering from marriage trouble: seems as if his wife (June Chadwick) has found her lesbian self after what we can only assume to be a decade or more of horror and is throwing him out on his ass, and if you ask me why that’s going to be important for the course of the film, I surely don’t know. But then, I didn’t write the script.

But, let’s get back to the murders – as the film does from time to time too. These aren’t your run of the mill killings but rather bizarre beheadings after which the head of the victim goes missing. Because they sure as hell wouldn’t find anything out on their own, Nigerian-American shaman/lawyer Samuel Juru (Sam Williams) provides a bit of exposition and informs our heroes they are looking for some sort of demon that drove the Miami Nigerians from Nigeria. Which they of course don’t believe.

But no matter, for the demon finds himself threatened and challenged by the two worst cops in town kinda-sorta being on his case doing nothing of consequence, and starts to haunt them with hallucinations and attacks instead of letting them get on with drinking in bars, walking around town muttering nonsense, and not doing anything that could solve even the case of little Timmy’s vanished ball.

Seriously, I got nothing here. I have no idea what Francis Schaeffer’s film is supposed to be, what it’s supposed to do, or what the people involved think its plot is. About half of the film belongs to the peculiar genre of the mumbling, rambling cop film, consequently spending its time on showing our police heroes (yeah, that’s sarcasm right here) being shlubby, mumbly, and totally ineffective, investing a lot of time into Pete’s personality crisis without it having any pay-off or much connection to the supernatural plot beyond his wife and her lover becoming victims at the end. Mostly, that part of the film takes places in bars, cars, and other places where characters can mumble some nonsense at each other, and honestly, I have no idea why the film showing half of this stuff.

I have even less of an idea about the supernatural plot. There’s a demon, who might have a cult, and might do something or other even worse than beheading people we never learn anything much about, I suppose. He’s mostly an invisible wind for large parts of the film (at least those parts that are indeed concerned with him), and turns into a rubbery suit for the big tiny chainsaw against monster finale, but otherwise, I have no idea what his game is, why he feels threatened by two characters who couldn’t find their own asses, or why I should care.

If all this sounds rather vague and disconnected, welcome to Headhunter, a film that spends most of its time not actually doing anything except for being somewhat peculiar and pointless, and certainly never deigns to attempt stuff like entertaining its audience, telling a story, building up a mood beyond “huh?”, or anything you might connect with, you know, a film, and which, alas, just isn’t weird in an interesting enough way to keep one awake watching it.

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