In short: Dead of Night (1977)

This anthology movie was directed and produced by Dan Curtis, the doyen of US TV horror of his time and is, as was often the case with Curtis’s project, particularly the anthology films, scripted by Richard Matheson.

The first segment “Second Chance”, based on a short story by conservative semi-professional nostalgist Jack Finney (ask me privately about that man’s “Time and Again”, if you want to hear a proper rant) concerns a young, highly nostalgic man (Ed Begley) making a trip back through time thanks to a vintage car and inadvertently creating his new girlfriend by saving her grandfather before he can speed himself to death in that same car. It’s a competently enough realized tale, but it is also very slight and frankly not terribly interesting in any way that matters to me.

Story number two is “No Such Thing as a Vampire”. It sees Matheson adapting himself. Some 19th Century village is plagued by what looks a lot like vampire attacks. Particularly Alexis (Anjanette Comer), the wife of local rich man Dr. Gheria (Patrick Macnee) seems to be a victim of the bloodsucker, or at least that’s what the local peasantry believes. Gheria for his part is sceptical, but he still calls in family friend Michael (Horst Buchholz) for help. Until the tale ends with the sort of underdeveloped twist that left this viewer mostly surprised when I realized that this was indeed all twenty minutes of set-up ended with. Before that, it’s a pleasantly atmospheric tale, with fun performances – Comer does some particularly enthusiastic scenery chewing early on, and Buchholz milks being drugged in an utterly delightful way – and semi-gothic photography. Alas, for that terribly bland ending.

The anthology climaxes in “Bobby”, a script which Curtis would recycle a couple of decades later in Trilogy of Terror II. Here, a bereft mother (Joan Hackett) attempts to call back her drowned son with the help of black magic. A little later, her little Bobby (Lee Montgomery) does indeed knock at her door. Something isn’t right with the kid, though, as well as with the mother’s nostalgic remembrances of their time together.

Like twenty years later, this last tale is the high point of the anthology, its set-up using Matheson’s and Curtis’s flair for creating suspense with characters in a physically constrained space excellently and to great effect. The story also recommends itself by having a much harder edge than the first one and by being psychologically much more interesting and satisfying than the middle tale, really showing how dark and intense 70s TV horror could get in the right hands.

As a whole, though, Dead of Night (which one should of course not confuse with all those other films with the same title) is a bit of a disappointment, an anthology film where I’d be tempted to skip two out of three tales on my next viewing.

In short: Sweet Sixteen (1983)

Freshly arrived in a small town in Arizona with her archaeologist father (Patrick Macnee) and a mother (Susan Strasberg) who is actually from the area, Melissa (Aleisa Shirley) has the hearts – and certain other organs – of the local boys all atwitter with her rather provocative behaviour (at least for a fifteen year old as played by an actress who most assuredly isn’t that age anymore), and her strange city ways. Alas, someone is killing off her beaus with a nasty knife, though the otherwise highly conscientious and pretty smart Sheriff Dan Burke (Bo Hopkins) doesn’t really seem to read the murder spree running through his town quite this way.

Dan, sometimes “assisted” (cough) by his murder mystery mad daughter Marci (Dana Kimmell) and his son Hank (Steve Antin), does have quite a mystery to solve. His job isn’t made any easier by the racist element of the town wanting to blame everything on “the Indians” – something that pisses him off righteously – nor by Melissa’s tendency to lie to gain attention.

Marketed and often treated as a slasher online, Jim Sotos’s Sweet Sixteen is in actuality a small town murder mystery with a couple of elements of exploitation cinema added for saleability. In practice, this means the murders are a bit bloodier than in your traditional mystery, and there’s some gratuitous nudity. Otherwise, this is very much a film about a small town sheriff having to find out whodunnit.

It’s not a terribly complicated or convoluted mystery either, but rather the sort of film whose killer is obvious once you’ve copped to the general tone of the whole affair. Which turns out not to have been much of a detriment to my enjoyment of the film, for what it lacks in slasher virtues and a head-scratching mystery, it mostly makes up for in likeability of characters and cast, for most of the time getting by on charm quite well.

Sotos must have understood where the strengths of this project were quite well, for Sweet Sixteen spends nearly as much time in the kitchen of the Burke household as on the case, showing off the charming and often wryly funny interactions of a very nice family, Hopkins as well as Kimmel and Antin actually coming off as a proper family without much of a sense of hysterical melodrama, the kind of people you enjoy spending screen time with even when a given scene doesn’t do much to develop the plot. This tone runs through all of the film’s human interaction, a genuine warmth and sense of humour that is pretty much the opposite of how actual slasher movies do their thing.


Even though this tone dominates most character interactions even outside the Burke family, the film doesn’t pretend small town life to be completely idyllic. It suggests there’s a sense of family in this small town population, but sometimes being part of a family means hitting your racist shithead relation's head against a wall for a bit, or you find yourself becoming the victim of a knife attack. And isn’t that a lovely thought for any film to leave us on?

Waxwork (1988)

Four college students, Mark (Zach Galligan), Sarah (Deborah Foreman), China (Michelle Johnson) and Tony (Dana Ashbrook) - the Poor Little Rich Boy, the Virgin, the Slut, and the Idiot respectively – make a very special late visit to the mysterious Wax Museum of an even more mysterious man (mysterious David Warner). As we all well know, wax museums are incredibly dangerous when there’s no masked luchador around, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise when China and Tony get sucked into different exhibitions which, it turns out, work as time bubbles where they live out and die in some rather unhealthy episodes (the vampire life of Miles O’Keeffe and a very short werewolf tale with a minute of John Rhys-Davies shouting grumpily as is his custom) to eventually become waxen parts of the exhibition.

At first, Mark and Sarah don’t think too much about their friends’ disappearances, but when they stay gone the next day, they start a little investigation that’ll lead a poor cop (Charles McCaughan) into a mummy-induced death, and give Mark some opportunity to learn important things about his family history from his godfather Sir Wilfred (Patrick Macnee). Sarah for her part’ll learn all about her rather un-horror-movie-virginal desire to be whipped to death by the Marquis de Sade (J. Kenneth Campbell) – who for some reason likes to dress like a pirate. It’s all part of mysterious David Warner’s rather dubious plan for destroying the world (“Somebody has to!”), and only a Poor Little Rich Boy, a masochistic Virgin (something I’d really love to become a new horror movie character archetype) and Patrick Macnee can save us!

Ah, US late 80s and early 90s horror, you are a bit weird aren’t you, with your insistence on turning everything into a comedy (like our contemporary horror TV shows, come to think of it), and never showing stuff that could actually disturb someone on a deeper level beyond the pleasant “yuck”.

If you can cope with that, though, Anthony Hickox’s Waxwork should be quite a good time, for this is a film that may not have any intellectual or emotional depths (or even many shallows of that sort) but that is also so full of an utterly un-ironic love for the horror genre’s past it’s bound to charm (possibly the pants off of) anyone who shares this love. The film demonstrates its love by including oh so many sight gags and so many moments of joyful genre nonsense you’ll mostly probably really miss stuff just by blinking, I couldn’t help but be impressed by their sheer force of numbers.

The waxwork exhibition episodes are of course mostly a basis for the film to let rip homages on all the most classic horror monsters, specific films (I particularly dig the early George Romero camera angles in the zombie bit), and all things macabre. Just imagine, the film grins, what if your Universal or Hammer horror would end really badly for the heroes and include many more buckets of blood? Turns out that’s very fun to watch, particularly in the hands of Hickox (now a solid direct-to-DVD-action director, then a promising horror guy), who knows how to time the icky stuff, as well as the jokes and directs everything as if he had a big happy monster-mashing grin on his face. The film even has so much love to share, it also finds space for a bit of a swashbuckler homage, as well as an excursion that makes the masochistic subtext of certain classical horror movies text. Bonus points also for having the oh so typical virgin character really getting into the whole death by de Sade thing, and orgasms, and not only not killing her but making her mildly ass-kicking afterwards (though I curse the film for not keeping that development in the much inferior sequel).

There’s so much love going around here for everything: Warner and Macnee clearly standing in for classic horror hams and beloved actors and doing good by it, the shrugging absurdity of the film’s finale that just might be the most fun updated peasant mob versus monsters sequence we’ll ever get to see, and so on, and so forth, until a crawling hand (hi, Ash!) crawls good-bye.

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