20 Horror Movies for $7.50 — Part III of XX.

We open with a SWAT team opening fire on a house in the woods.  Amazingly, most of the men inside are able to escape despite their strategy of standing directly in front of the windows, backlit,  firing at the police.  The SWAT team pulls a Waco, but the men are able to escape down a hatch in the floor. I doubt this escape route is the length of the chunnel, but the police opt to not look for the exit.  The leader concentrates on interrogating the one man left behind.  When asked who they are, he replies, “The future.”

Cut to Nita (Lindsay Wagner) and Allison (Joanna Cassidy) driving through the mountains.  They meet up with their friend Connie her hot teenage daughter at a diner where they will begin their mountain climbing adventure.  With the all female cast, and one waving a guidebook that will no doubt prove useless, there is a definite The Descent vibe; without the, you know, quality.  So maybe it’s more of a The Descent II vibe.

They hire local drunk Ding (Tom Skerritt) to lead them on horses to the top of the mountain.  Near the summit, they encounter the survivalists who escaped the burning building.  They shoot one of the guides and start shooting the horses.  BTW, in various places they are referred to as Aryans, survivalists, Neo-Nazis.

One of the men accidentally stumbles onto Ding and they fight it out until the man goes over the waterfall.  The group now has to make a decision — should the hungover Ding try to trek the 15 miles to the ranger station through thick brush?  Yeah, the girls don’t put up much of a fight on that one.

On his way down the mountain, Ding snags a trip wire that sets off a grenade sending him tumbling down the mountain.  On the plus side, it probably cut 200 vertical feet off his trip, on the other hand — tumbling down 200 vertical feet and landing on rock.

Meanwhile, young Tracy is playing with her radio and is picking up a very staticky signal which is strange — since it apparently picks up FM, CB and walkie-talkie frequencies, it must be a pretty good piece of equipment.  Nita very sensibly suggests that she climb to the top of a nearby rock outcropping for a clearer signal.  When that doesn’t quite do it, she suggests pointing the radio upstream.  Now, I’m no Marconi, if you’re lost on a mountain, 1) I suspect radio signals do not flow downhill, and 2) I suspect the search party would be coming from downstream.

Ding finally wakes up with the world’s worst hangover; also hurting from the fall.  Soon his trusty dog Buster and the girls finds him.  On the radio, they hear that the group is on their trail.  The group also says to be sure to “keep two of them.”  Well, the college girl is clearly the first round draft pick, and I would go for Lindsay Wagner as the 2nd.

In short order, Ding gets shot, and his dog is killed.  As the men spot the group and begin pursuing them, things get so intense that Nita actually unbuttons her top button.

There is all kinds of potential here to be a great survival movie like The Descent, Eden Lake or a dozen others.   Sadly, there is almost no area where it excels.  I can’t recall a note of the score (if it even had one), the bad guys were boring, the police lacked such presence that they could have been cut from the script altogether, some locations were interesting, but muted by the cinematography (or, to be fair, the cheap transfer).  Most of the cast seemed capable, just poorly used.

The standouts were Skerritt and Lindsay Wagner.  Skerritt spent most of his screen time drunk or shot so his options were limited, but he did what he could with the role.  The producers (of “Rain Man” the cover tells us) missed a huge opportunity by not making Lindsay Wagner the center of the movie.  She is identifiable as a natural leader even from the time they are in the diner.  It takes forever to bring her into the action and get a gun in her hand; she doesn’t even get to cap off the last bad guy.

Joanna Cassidy realizing she is in 2 movies in this collection.

Sigourney Weaver looked tough, so never really felt like she as playing against type (only if you were watching the movie in the evil sexist 1970’s).  Lindsay Wagner is more an older version of Sarah Connor in the first Terminator movie.  They just seem like nice women, a generation apart, who both got caught up in something they were totally unprepared for.  Lindsay Wagner has shown in some nothing parts that she can dominate the screen — this could have been gr . . . well, much better.

Post-Post:

• Skerritt was one of Hawkeye and Trapper’s tent-mates in the movie MASH, but his character didn’t make it to the TV show.  So, Ugly John and Spearchucker Jones, they kept, but Duke was a little too controversial?  It was a different time.  Well, we’ll always have Dallas.
• Joanna Cassidy has been in 2 out of 3 movies in this collection so far.  On the plus side, they were the two best.

20 Horror Movies for $7.50 — Part II of XX.

Alana Powers (Joanna Cassidy) is outside the prison where serial killer Laurence Dvorak (Bruce Davison) is to be executed that night by “Big Keyboard” for creating an alternative.  One hour before the joyous occasion, she will have an exclusive interview with him.

The usual crazies are shown protesting outside the prison.  Special scorn is reserved for the people who respect human life (of the victims, that is) as they carry misspelled signs or wear t-shirts that say FRY ‘EM despite the fact there is only one guy being executed.

Like most “journalists” Alana can’t help fawning over a man who has killed 27 women, calling his acceptance of his fate admirable.  “Mr. Dvorak, you are a brilliant man, self-taught lawyer, contributor to several legal journals”, blah blah.  Meanwhile, the governor’s denial of a reprieve is harshly described as vehement.

During the interview, the guard stupidly allows Alana to have a pencil on the table.  This despite the fact that last year at that prison an inmate killed his lawyer by jabbing an Eberhard-Faber in his lawyer’s sound-hole.  As Dvorak’s hand inches near the sharpened pencil, the guard really lets him have it — by snapping his fingers at him.  Dvorak pulls his hand back, but a few seconds later knocks the pencil off the table.  As the guard goes to pick it up, Dvorak bashes his head into the table, takes his gun, and takes everyone in the execution chamber hostage.

Whatever value this film has had better start here.  Although there is a good cast, the cheesy music and amateurish direction have just about sunk it already.  Paradoxically, it appears cheaply shot on video, but the scenes that are supposed to be shot through the newsman’s camera look even more video-er.

Dvorak has Alana introduce him on camera again.  With her butt on the line, she now refers to him as a murderer and a psychopath.  He carefully poses his fellow death row denizens — which somehow include a woman — for the camera and asks Alana to start again.

Dvorak promises the audience a discussion about “the truth of the death penalty . . . and then someone will die . . . yes, someone will die. And you will see it right there in your living room.  It won’t be a sanitized TV series death.  Blood will flow onto your carpet.”

Because what better way to convince the public that the death penalty is wrong than to equate murdering an innocent person to the execution of a tried and convicted serial killer.  And ruin their carpet to boot.

Alana talks to the woman, who is in jail for killing her children.  She calmly tells Alana that she wasn’t crazy when she did it; her husband wanted to take custody of them — so of course the child-killer is irresistible to Alana.  If she had also shot a cop we might have had some girl-girl action.

Even when Alana surreptitiously speaks to her producer about the SWAT team preparing to rescue them, she refers to her rescuers as “stormtroopers.” As someone once said, “You have have to go to college to be this stupid.”

It would have been forgivable if this character was just a flaming criminal-loving do-gooder, but no effort is made to portray Alana that way.  In fact, her character is really supposed to be a bitchy, driven newswoman.  The sympathy toward the killers really just seems to be the natural inclinations of the film-makers shining through.  I suspect they believe all people think just like them; certainly anyone they ever deal with.  Well, except them racist tea-baggers what pay their salaries watching’m on the tee-VEE.

The warden cuts the power, and in retaliation, Dvorak straps the guard into the electric chair. Turns out he had been taken hostage by prisoners once before and raped repeatedly for 17 days.  Christ, who was managing that stand-off, Janet Reno?

Since then, he has taken his revenge out on the prisoners.  Dvorak is ready to throw the switch to electrocute the guard, but the child-killer volunteers to take his place.

Things do not go exactly according to Dvorak’s plan.  There are deaths, but some are off-camera.  The group is able to maneuver Dvorak into Old Sparky, and someone finally does the right thing.

I can’t say it is a criminally bad movie.  I think Cassidy does some good work to prop up an average script and robotic direction.  And Art LeFleur is always welcome.  Davison’s role could have been made riveting with a more intense actor, though.

Post-Post:

• This is a better than average transfer for one of these collections.  The colors and resolution are fine.  They are so good, in fact, that for the first time I realized how bad Joanna Cassidy’s teeth are.  From the front, no problem.  From the side, very jagged and there might even be a tooth missing — or at least double-spaced.
• Joanna Cassidy is a fine actress, but she really shows her acting chops by sincerely plugging this low-budget joint on E!  You were in Blade Runner, for God’s sake!
• Not to be confused with Live from Death Row by Mumia Abu-Jamal, which is no doubt on Alana’s bookshelf.

Having not learned my lesson from the $5.00 box of 20 horror movies, I decided to splurge for the $7.50 box, which should be 50% better. Right?  Right?  Part I of — God help me — XX.

• Good omen: Written by Tim Kring, responsible for the great 1st season of Heroes.
• Bad omen:  Written by Tim Kring, responsible for the mediocre 1st season finale and subsequent seasons of Heroes.

An old man grasping a bible goes into a church to make a confession.  He must have had some juicy stuff stored up as a bolt of lightning strikes the church and somehow blows apart only the confessional booth.

Linda (Pamela Sue Martin) is being toasted at work for her promotion to Junior Partner of a law firm — now there’s someone who could use a confession.  She goes home for a horizontal celebration with her husband Jerry (Tim Matheson), but they are interrupted by their brutally miscast friend Slater (Woody Harrelson).

The three go out to a jazz club and meet up with new friends Josh (Jeff Conaway) and Debbi (Susan Ruttan).  Josh and Debbi have just moved to Devlin Island.  They try to lure Linda & Jerry into buying a place on Bay Cove on the island and even slip them a realtor’s card.

The next day they go to the island to check out the house and are given a tour by June Cleaver — no really, Barbara Billingsly.   All seems well until Linda sees an old man in a window shaking his head at her.

She takes it as an ominous warning, but but’s he’s probably thinking to himself as he stares at Pamela Sue Martin, “Nope, I’ll never have anything like that again.”

While unpacking, Jerry is wearing a sweatshirt with LEBON on the back.  I mistakenly thought it was a LeBron James jersey, but he would have been 3 at the time.  More on this exciting foreshadowing later.

If Wally ever brought home whore like you, I’d cut his balls off.

Slater — even the name seems absurdly prosaic for Harrelson.  He’s more of a Woody or Haymitch or White Man — takes a look around the island and notices that there is only one graveyard and no one has been buried there in 300 years.

That doesn’t seem particularly strange.  We have this beautiful island with limited space — hey, let’s waste this paradise on dead people who don’t pay property taxes or homeowner dues.  Slater gets a mysterious call about his mother being in the hospital and borrows a Jeep to get to the ferry.  As soon as he gets in, it hilariously speeds backward off a cliff and bursts into flames.  That’s about as exciting as this movie gets.  And as funny.

Other strange things begin to occur — their dog dies mysteriously, Slater’s mother was never in the hospital, their real estate agent seems to have turned into a different person, Jerry is holding a bonfire of his baseball cards, a weird kid gives Linda a dead bird and tells her, “it will all be over soon.”  She accuses the kid of having Slater’s scarf, which makes no sense as he and his luggage were burned to ashes in the huge Jeep explosion of ’87, they find a wedding quilt suggesting their neighbors have been married for 300 years, a gravestone pops up from the ground like a pop-tart.  And that old man is still just staring out the window.

Linda finally decides to sneak inside to see the old man.  She discovers that he is not their neighbor’s grandfather, but his dun…dun…DUN…son.  There is an opening in the almost titular coven and Jerry is being recruited.  His name, Lebon, is just the backwards spelling of a dead Coven member, Nobel.  As palindromes go, it ain’t exactly REDRUM.

This might have been decent had it been directed with the slightest style or suspense. The subject matter is nothing original, but that’s fine.  The execution is just lackluster even for a TV Movie.  The ending had great potential, but no energy or emotion, and the score was dreadful.

Pamela Sue Martin was adequate, but nothing more.  Tim Matheson was his usually oily self.  Woody Harrelson was just weird, playing way too normal a character.  Most of the older supporting characters are pretty good.  It was especially good to see June Cleaver in a different role.

Pamela Sue Martin will return in Poseidon III.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis:  Fine, Bay Cove is home to Bay Coven.  Hmmm I wonder if there is any significance to Devlin Island?  It was aka Eye of the Demon, which makes NO sense,
• The direction was uninspired, yet I feel compelled to carefully review more of the director’s oeuvre such as She’s 19 and Ready, The Fruit is Ripe, and Bathtime in Bangkok.
• It took me 5 days to watch this movie.
• The tag line on the cover is “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” Something tells me they were ripping off Bradbury, not alluding to Shakespeare.
• And, really, it was the good guys who came to the island.  The wicked ones were already there.
• Sadly, could not work in Easy Bay Coven,