The Dark (1979)

aka The Mutilator

Los Angeles. A mysterious killer stalks the streets at night, ripping heads off, or vaporizing people and/or heads with laser beam eyes.

Roy Warner (William Devane), man slaughterer turned writer and father of the latest victim is rather disappointed in the police work concerning the case and kinda-sorta starts an investigation of his own. For about half of the time, this investigation consists of following the police and staring angrily at them. One can understand this behaviour, however, for Detectives Mooney (Richard Jaeckel) and Bresler (Biff – seriously - Elliot) have investigation techniques very much their own: they love to complain about the press, the public, their moms as well as yours, while looking around confused about why nobody takes them seriously. Mooney also just loves to antagonize everybody he meets while showing not on iota of empathy or understanding: witnesses, victims, reporters, fathers of decapitated girls – you name someone, he’s an asshole to them; Bresler for his part eats, and eats, and then eats some more. Yes, of course donut jokes are involved.

Also on the case is up and coming TV anchor Zoe Owens (Cathy Lee Crosby), getting her teeth into the business in hopes of becoming a proper journalist instead of just a pretty face.

The Dark is another among the considerable number of projects that initially involved the great Tobe Hooper as a director. As it goes with Hooper, he soon found himself released of his duties by one of the producers. Depending on whom you ask, because his lunch breaks were too long, or because he got over budget, or, rather more believable, because a cranky producer simply didn’t like his style. Said producer then proceeded to put John “Bud” Cardos on the director’s chair, re-write the script, and probably do terrible things to the final cut as well.

That story, with its typical mix of rumours and angry mutterings by Hollywood people who were working on the same film together saying completely different things about anyone and anything involved in the production, is a lot more entertaining than the movie that came out without Hooper’s name in the credits. Because for some godawful reason what sounds like a cool monster movie that includes a couple of nice places to insert social criticism into Hooper would probably have had a feast day with is turned into a pretty damn boring police procedural. Most of the film consists of Mooney and Bresler doing little and complaining a lot while Bresler leaves food crumbs in every shot, followed by Warner doing very little as well, followed by Zoe having a discussion or three with her boss (Keenan Wynn). Repeat until runtime is full, add some surprisingly well staged monster attacks with a couple of really bad ideas (laser eyes), and a finale in which the hero just needs to touch the monster once with a torch to let it go up in flames.

It’s just painfully boring, includes no character that isn’t a static stock trope, no developments of plot lines or these characters, and really, no actual plot. Scenes that shouldn’t have started in the first place just go on and on and on, the dialogue is generally bad as well as unfun, and pain don’t hurt, because it’s too boring for it.

The only thing that’s actually remarkable – apart from the stalking scenes that really should have been in a better movie – is that the quality of the photography (DP John Morrill) is pretty great throughout in a late 70s/early 80s Dean Cundey sort of way. Alas, too many of the shots done so prettily are focussed on Richard Jaeckel looking constipated.

Toolbox Murders (2004)

Because he has found a job as an emergency room resident in Los Angeles, Steven Barrows (Brent Roam) and his – now jobless – schoolteacher wife Nell (the always excellent Angela Bettis) move into the Lunsman Arms, one of those ratholes that still dream of their former glory.

Something’s not at all right with the building; it’s the kind of place where it seems downright logical the building manager tries to sell it as part of the place’s “historical charm” when Nell and Steve find a box of human teeth in their apartment’s wall. Living in a place with very thin walls, and a creepy atmosphere that’s also in a perpetual state of loud renovation, Nell’s going stir-crazy in her new stay-at-home life, clashing with Steven (who is never there, stressed out by his job when he is, and clearly pretty low on the empathy scale) and starts to grow a bit paranoid about her surroundings. Though it’s not really paranoia when some black-clad killer actually does go around murdering inhabitants of the place with tools, right? It only makes Nell’s attempts at convincing anyone of her increasingly dire fears all the more difficult.

The mid and late periods of Tobe Hooper’s career, hell, anything he did that did not include the words “Texas”, “Chainsaw” and “Massacre” and no number in its title, are usually not well-liked by most critics and audiences. Hooper’s filmography is full of films with difficult production histories, films that don’t do what anyone but the director seems to want them to do, and films that are just plain weird. What these films never are is uninteresting, and in my experience, watching a Hooper movie that really annoyed me the first or second time around a couple of years later, can reveal those to be more than just interesting.

Even something like this sort of remake of the execrable The Toolbox Murders, in this new form a weird slasher with occult elements, can open up interesting avenues. I barely made it through the film the first time I watched it years ago, but this second time was apparently the charm.

It’s very far from being a perfect film, but I rather suspect that has quite a bit to do with one of the production companies involved folding during production, causing Hooper to shut the shoot down, and having to salvage a film out of what he had already shot. Which makes the film we got downright impressive. Sure, there are continuity errors, plot holes and the pacing is just plain peculiar, but Hooper still manages to create a creepy, threatening mood of wrongness, and turns his Lunsford Arms into one of those strange, liminal places, a house that literally has a hidden, malevolent other house hidden inside of itself. Often, Hooper reaches a vibe of creeping, illogical dread that makes this feel like a companion piece to Fulci’s House by the Cemetery (to which it is also thematically related); and like with the Fulci film, I believe the anti-logic of some of the film and its strange structure are important to create this feeling, even though they break all the rules of “good filmmaking”.


Apart from hitting exactly the kind of mood I like in my horror films, Toolbox Murders also recommends itself at least to me by its interest in all the things a good Los Angeles based horror movie should include: the intersection of occult history with the tawdry, hopeless side of showbiz (and one can’t help but think Hooper knew rather a lot about the latter), architecture that looks really bizarre and outright alien to this German from Lower Saxony, and a sense of societal indifference and poverty that subtly or not so subtly enables a lot of the bad things happening here. It’s a perfect amalgamation of quite a few of my interests, so it’s not much of a surprise I now have a decided soft spot for Hooper’s Toolbox Murders So what if it doesn’t exactly make sense?

Body Bags (1993)

The Showtime TV movie Body Bags is a horror anthology in the classic style, featuring three independent stories, the first two directed by the great John Carpenter, the other one by the sometimes great Tobe Hooper, connected by a framing device in which Carpenter himself gives a somewhat dead looking guy the film credits as The Coroner and presents the tales cracking jokes that’ll make the Crypt Keeper look funny.

Tale number one, “The Gas Station”, concerns the misadventures of psych student Anne (Alex Datcher) working the night shift at the titular establishment. She has to cope with bad luck, strange customers, and a serial killer. It is the simplest story of the three, the sort of thing Carpenter could probably direct in his sleep, but it’s made with the slick hand of an old pro, and while it certainly isn’t Halloween, it is a fun way to get the audience in the right mood for the rest of the film.

The second segment, “Hair”, is the mandatory comedy bit, but unlike most comedy segments of horror anthologies, it is indeed funny. It tells the sad and tragic tale of one Richard Coberts (Stacy Keach), whose once copious mane of hair has begun to thin considerably – so much so that the word “bald” is beginning to rear its ugly head. Desperation and ridiculous attempts at solving his problem culminate in Richard following a TV advert into the hands of the conspicuously named Dr. Lock (David Warner) and his lovely assistant (Debbie Harry) whose treatment does indeed work wonders on Richard’s head. Unfortunately, it might not exactly be hair he now has to cope with.

“Hair” is probably the high point in Carpenter’s career as a comedy director, at least in so far as it is indeed funny (though how funny for those of you who aren’t middle-aged guys losing their hair like Richard and I, I’m not sure), has a friendly satirical edge and features a wonderful turn by Keach that gets the desperate ridiculousness of getting upset over hair, and the way this stands in for the fear of mortality absolutely right, while being very funny indeed.

Tobe Hooper’s segment “Eye” tells the tale of minor league baseball pro Brent Matthews (Mark Hamill). Mark’s always just on the verge of breaking into the majors (with probably his latest and last chance coming up soon), but things never quite go his way. At least, he’s happily married to Cathy (Twiggy), and seems a pleasantly down to earth guy. When he loses an eye in an accident, he agrees to undergo an experimental full eye transplant. As we all know, that sort of thing always leads to the new eye owner either seeing dead people or terrible visions from the life of the former eye bearer. It’s the latter in Brent’s case, with the added complication that he’s also increasingly being infected by quite a bit of the former owner’s mental state. That’s particularly unfortunate since the man in question was a serial killer and necrophiliac. Even worse, Cathy looks rather a lot like the killer’s type.

This last story is a properly nasty bit of short horror, with terrible things happening to perfectly nice people for no good reason whatsoever. Hooper uses his penchant for the grotesque particularly well in a handful of daytime visions that show the worst of the killer’s exploits, while Hamill portrays Brent’s shift from good man and husband to insane monster with just the right amount of scenery chewing. There’s also a truly upsetting scene in which Brent sexually assaults his wife while fantasizing about her being a corpse that makes this final episode an escalation from the EC fun of the Carpenter stories and the framing device into the realms of horror that hits a bit closer to home, and a bit deeper. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, it’s just not the typical way horror anthologies work.


As a whole, Body Bags is a fine example of its form, with Carpenter and Hooper showing themselves from their good sides, featuring a bunch of great performances, more gore and violence than you’d probably expect after hearing of its provenance as a cable TV movie, and a cornucopia of horror actors and directors in roles minor and somewhat larger.

Some Thoughts About Poltergeist (1982)

Well, I think I can spare us any words about the plot here. After all, if you’re reading this, you’ve most certainly seen the film.

For quite some time, I’ve never really given Poltergeist much of a chance. Sure I’ve enjoyed it when I was a kid, but afterwards, a degree of dislike for its approach to horror as a carnivalesque special effects spectacular and a whole dollop of grumpy prejudice left me with a very cynical view of it, or of what it turned into in my mind. As is rather too often the case with me for comfort, I was wrong and unfair about Poltergeist. Fortunately, a recent rewatch of the painfully bland remake did make me curious about trying the original again, and watching it rather changed my mind.

Sure, I was right about Poltergeist in so far that it is indeed a film very much rooted in spooking its audience with its special effects – some of which still look brilliant to my eyes, some of which have dated as badly as CGI from the year 2001 – but it goes about it the honest way, certainly throwing something cool to look at on the screen every five minutes but also realizing special effects – even great ones – are not the only thing you need to catch an audience, and if you want to spook it for more than a few minutes, you’ll need to build an emotional connection.

The Hooper/Spielberg (how much of this is actually directed by Hooper and how much by the nominal producer Spielberg depends on whom you ask – at least some of the lighting and the sense of humour feel very much like a product of Hooper to me) film goes about creating this connection rather more subtly and rather less saccharine than Spielberg of this era is generally given credit for. The Freeling family is of course meant as an ideal identification foil for the film’s presumed white upper middle-class 80s audience, but the filmmakers are intelligent enough to realize that audiences might ask for representation but when it comes down to it, they’ll actually empathize with specific characters that are more than pure stand-ins for abstract notions quite a bit more. Consequently, the film puts a heavy emphasis on the way particularly the parents interact with one another, an - often quite funny – natural closeness that, together with fine and highly sympathetic performances by Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams, presents the couple as the proverbial Good Parents, but also as people with flaws and difficulties who bicker sometimes, roll up a joint (or read up on Ronald Reagan) or make bad jokes in front of a mirror. In other words, characters whose troubles an audience can be interested in not because they are exactly like them (whatever that’d look), but because they feel like actual people. Compare that to the remake that doesn’t even manage to get any kind of personality out of Sam Rockwell.

Thusly prepared, the horrors of losing a child, encountering the supernatural and losing quite a few of the outer determinants of the Freeling’s as members of the upper middle-class during the course of the film, take on a much more affecting face, what could be an empty special effects extravaganza turning into a film that can actually touch you emotionally. Poltergeist’s considerable impact is further strengthened by some fine supporting performances. The child actors are merely okay (but they’re not horrible, with is the only thing I really demand of acting children, because they are children), but Beatrice Straight as parapsychologist Dr. Lesh sells some of the more problematic exposition with a great impression of human warmth and dignity, and Zelda Rubinstein is just perfect as Tangina, a character that’s a genuine weirdo the film still – or even because of that - portrays with great warmth and without any irony, leaving sceptical me very okay with a character I should hate with all the energy of a hundred burning suns (compare with the insufferable holier than thou Warrens in the similar in approach but to me completely ineffective The Conjuring films).

That the film looks fantastic (the lighting often is just outright beautiful), and that Hooper/Spielberg (Hooperberg? Spieler?) know how to pace a movie perfectly hardly needs a mention.

In short: Mortuary (2005)

The Doyle family – mother Leslie (Denise Crosby), teenage son Jonathan (Dan Byrd) and little daughter Jamie (Stephanie Patton) – move into some god-forsaken small town so that mum can fulfil her mortician dreams. Too bad their brand spanking new mortuary is actually a ruin and that strange stuff seeps from the septic tank. And let’s not even start on the blood-drinking fungus turning people into fungus zombies.

I’m usually giving Tobe Hooper’s later works a bit more of a chance than most tend to do, but when confronted with a confounding piece of crap like Mortuary, even my tolerance goes out the window. I do assume this isn’t actually supposed to be a pure horror film but rather a horror comedy – or Hooper’d have to be stupid, which he clearly isn’t. Unfortunately, it’s a horror comedy whose every single joke isn’t funny, and that also takes ages to get going.

Now, in other films you’d suspect the slowness of the first hour or so had something to do with the film building mood and character, but since everybody’s a cardboard cut-out, and the mood is mostly childish, there’s only boredom coming through. Afterwards, it’s thirty minutes of kids screeching while people in bad zombie make-up waddle around or puke at them, with no second of tension, fun, humour, or whatever. Despite some awkward attempts at the grotesque, the proceedings feel painfully harmless too, with nothing to even vaguely keep one’s interest, wasting the generally decent potential of what could be a tale of kids not being able to trust grown-ups anymore (with added fungus zombies).

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The Mangler (1995)

Warning: there may be one or two last act spoilers hidden away in the text, because some things are just too good not to mention them. Plus, it’s Halloween.

Horrible things are happening in the early industrial age looking industrial laundry of evil old capitalist Bill Gartley (Robert Englund in peculiar age make-up giving a performance permanently fluctuating between the ridiculous and the ridiculously inspired): gothic looking mangler number 6 is mutilating and killing off members of the female workforce in accidents that don’t look so much like accidents but rather as if the machine had an evil mind of its own. In a normal place, the mangler would be shut down right quick, but Gartley’s the most powerful man in town, and he only cackles evilly about death and mutilation, so on the mangler mangles.

Only police officer John Hunton (Ted Levine as a bitter, shouty, sweaty and irascible hull of a man with a peculiar haircut) cares. His investigation, involving the help of his “theoretical parapsychologist” neighbour and buddy Mark (Daniel Matmor), quickly leads to the assumption the mangler is indeed possessed by a demon. Finding that out and doing something about it are quite different things, particularly as our heroes take quite some time to make the connection between demons, pacts, powerful evil old men, and sacrifices of the virginal kind.

Like all films Tobe Hooper ever made not called Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this (sort of) adaptation of a Stephen King short story is not well loved; like some of these films, it can be a worthwhile viewing if approached from the right angle.

The sympathetic viewer will need to bring along a patience for the weird, a love for the artificial, and a tolerance for the blindingly obvious yet circumspectly told when it comes to plotting. In other words, this is Hooper’s early 80s Italian-style horror movie, with all the silliness, the gooey blood and the just plain inexplicable stuff this suggests. Of course, in my house, being an early 80s Italian-style horror movie is a good thing, and Hooper is rather good at the whole business too. I, at least, can only appreciate a film with two perfectly silly looking and rather unnecessary cases of old age make-up (well, it’s not difficult to imagine Englund’s there because of his horror idol value), a main monster that is somewhat hindered in being all that threatening by virtue of not being able to frigging move, yet that still finds victims willing to step really close even after corpse number three or so, a script that contains grand ideas like pretending Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” is some kind of magical handbook, and so on and so forth. And let’s not forget the utterly crazy finale when the mangler turns into some sort of organic mecha thing - a fire-breathing organic mecha thing to be more precise.

Hooper presents the glorious mess in a tone of hysterical artificiality that – apart from the Italian angle – mostly reminds me of his own Eaten Alive and Spontaneous Combustion, films that also share the off-beat – and again rather on the hysterical side – approach to performances, not exactly logical plotting and a political subtext so blunt you can scratch the sub right away (doesn’t mean Hooper’s wrong, though). There’s a lot of dry ice fog pretending to be steam so that people have a reason to sweat a lot, harsh blue and red light coming from places where blue and red light have no business coming from, production design right out of the industrial gothic handbook, and camera angles that eschew any idea of realism for the full-time grotesque.

The same goes for the bloody stuff: like in comparable Italian movies, believability or the facts of human anatomy or physics belong to areas Hooper seems to have no regard for or interest in, so people get mangled in pretty damn strange ways completely in tune with the visual language and all around bizarre tone of the rest of the film.

Following the fashion, the haircuts, the cars and the way people talk in the film, it is also impossible to pinpoint when exactly The Mangler is supposed to take place; or rather, it is clear it’s not supposed to take place at a precise point in time at all but in a grotesque nightmare space born out of the corrupting influences of power and money, a place and time that combines 40s movie accents, Italian gore, industrial gothic and random elements of the year the film was actually produced in with wild abandon. It’s not so much a place as a state of mind turned visual. Again, the political subtext about the way capitalism turns everything into ruined shadows of its own seems pretty clear to me.

But, my imaginary reader will ask (what ever did I do before I made you up?), is The Mangler entertaining? Well, to me it is, but I can see how somebody could get bored or annoyed by it easily. It is, after all artificial, grotesque, more than just a bit silly, and most problematic at all, it seems to be the kind of horror film that’s not actually putting much (or any) work into being frightening, or creepy, or suspenseful, using all its energy for the grotesque mood, to bring a bit of weirdness on screen, and to talk politics, so if you go in expecting to be frightened, or shocked, you’ll probably hate it with a passion, and you won’t be wrong about it.

Me, on the other hand, love to wallow in a film that’s all weirdness and grotesqueness all the time, and if the price for that is a horror not very effective at horrifying me, I’m more than willing to pay it, even on Halloween.

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