Author Archives: don

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

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mybloodyvalcover01Within the first 2 minutes, the film presents us with an ghastly image so repulsive as to churn the stomach of any normal human being.  Or maybe it’s just me — tattoo’s are generally not a good idea, but especially not on the breast of a young blonde.

I have to credit the writer, though, it is there for a reason; actually he milks it for two points.  In some bizarrely fetishistic role-play, a couple has gone down into  coal mine wearing coveralls and gas masks.  Long story short, the heart-shaped tattoo 1) drives the man into a rage, and 2) provides a nice target for the pick-axe.

After a nice opening, the main story begins at the mouth of the mine during the shift change.  A wee little train brings the miners to the surface and takes the next shift down.  The guys are a little too over-the-top friendly in a 1980’s beer commercial kind of way.  Especially in the shower.

It is nice for a change, however, not to watch a bunch of 30 year olds playing high school students.  Although basically they still act like high school kids, just ones who work in a mine.

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Ya might immediately think this guy was the killer since he clearly has a screw loose, picking his girlfriend up by the head!

After the gang-shower, the guys head over to the union hall which has been decorated for the prom, er Valentine’s Dance.  The girls also act like high-schoolers. Apparently not having jobs, they are making banners and paper hearts as their boyfriends come in.

A local geezer objects to all this jocularity, recounting the story of why there has not been a Valentine’s Dance in 20 years.

During the last dance, 7 men remained in the mine.  The 2 supervisors bailed for the party without checking the methane levels.  A huge explosion killed the 5 in the mine.  After several days, however, one survivor was found — Harry Warden, insane and chomping on a co-worker’s arm.  One year later, Harry returned to kill the 2 supervisors.  He cut out their hearts and left a note warning that if another dance was ever held on the 14th, there would be more murders.

And what kind of name for a slasher is Harry Warden?  Voorhees and Krueger have some pizzazz.  Although Michael Myers is also pretty boring, sounding more like a slip-and-fall lawyer.

The sheriff receives a box of candy which turns out to contain the heart from the girl killed in the first scene.  He also finds the owner of the laundromat stuffed into one of her dryers.  Like the tanning booth in Trancers, it apparently had a “cremate” setting.  Of course, the de-hearting would have killed her anyway; but at least left the open-casket option available.

Convinced that Harry Warden as returned, the sheriff cancels the Valentine’s Dance.  Displaying the cunning of a slip-and-fall lawyer, the kids, er miners decide they won’t have a dance . . . they’ll have a party!  Totally different.  Surely Harry Warden would not hold them responsible for the difference.

And where better to have a party than at the mine?  Won’t the gang at the sewage treatment plant be jealous!  To their credit, the party is kept above ground in the rec room.  Not that this prevents several of them from being killed.

Inevitably one of them gets the idea to take the party down into the mine.  One character points out that it is against the rules for women to go into the mine.  Thank God we no longer live in the dark ages where women do not have the same opportunity for pneumoconiosis and being trapped in cave-ins as men.  You’ve come a long way, baby.

Going subterranean was not the brightest idea. After several more kills, the culprit is revealed to be one of the partiers.  Turns out Harry Warden has been dead for years.  The killer’s name is Axel, which could be a great name for a franchise killer if matched with an appropriate last name.

It was clear from the editing that many scenes had been trimmed for gore.  A director’s cut has been released restoring at least some of the cuts.  MBV was good enough that I now want to see it intact.

I rate it a 12 out of 14.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • I thought “slip-and-fall lawyer” was a pejorative.  After Googling, I now see that many attorneys proudly advertise using just that phrase.
  • How can “Googling” not be in spell-check?
  • Strangely Don Francks gets a “Special Guest Appearance By” credit despite being in several scenes, and arguably being the lead in the movie.
  • Nice to see a pick-axe actually used as opposed to some films I could mention.
  • According to IMDb, when the town in Nova Scotia found out they were going to shoot a movie there, they spent $50k to clean up the mine. The producers then had to spend $75k to dirty it up again.  I suspect this is, like most wacky production anecdotes you hear, a complete lie.

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Small Assassin (S2E6)

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Killer baby!  Always a hit.  No way to screw this up, no sirree!

Pregnant Alice is rushed to the hospital.  In the ambulance, she is screaming, “It’s trying to kill me!”  She is clawing at her belly as if she expects the baby to burst out at any time.

When the new-born baby is brought to her in the hospital, she asks, “Is it alive?”  When told it is, she replies, “Oh, what a shame.”  Hmmmm, I don’t recognize the actress, why does the mother seem so familiar to me?

Husband David comes to see mother and child and everything seems normal.  Back at home, Alice is a wreck.  She says the baby screams and cries whenever David is not at home.

That night, Alice leaves the bedroom and sits on the stairs.  David follows her and she says the baby is trying to keep her awake to make her weak.  It listens to them them talking, waiting for David to leave so it can try to kill Alice.

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One of many baby-eisenstein POV shots.

At work, David receives word Alice tried to smother the baby after it had cried for 3 hours.

She confesses to David she has no love for the baby.  We get a tracking shot and see shadows indicating the baby is on the move.  Alice thinks it is a prowler.  She goes to the baby’s room and is suspicious that he is perspiring.

David is going down stairs to the kitchen when he nearly trips on a teddy bear.  Alice believes the baby put it there to kill him.  David says babies don’t do that.  Alice says maybe he’s a genius.  At this point, it is impossible not to think of Stewie Griffen.  David storms out, the baby starts crying.

Alice tells the doctor she remembers her own birth.  She did not want to be born and resented her mother for birthing her out of that warm place and into the cold, bright world.  She believes her baby was also born with that self-awareness and is taking out his resentment on her.

rbsmallassassinbaby03In the most unlikely occurrence of the episode, the doctor makes a house-call.  He finds David in a heap at the bottom of the stairs where he has fallen and broken his neck.  At the top of the stairs is the toy bear that he almost tripped on earlier.

Seeing a movement upstairs, the doctor goes up looking for Alice.  She has been electrocuted in her bed.  It is not clear how the deed was done.  It involves a safety pin, an electrical cord and possibly the metal frame of the bed.

The doctor looks in the baby’s room and finds an empty cradle.  As he descends the stairs, he locks eyes with the baby and understands that Alice was right.  Knowing what must be done, he pulls out a scalpel and gives him a 4th trimester abortion.

I rate it 5 out of 9 months.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • The idea of the self-aware baby is great, and because the story was published in 1946, this must have been one of the first killer-babies.
  • Wisely, the baby is never shown roaming the house or making the kills — I can’t imagine any way to do it.  It is all done though shadows, POV shots and a lot of gurgling.
  • David is pretty forgiving and trusting, leaving his wife alone with their baby so soon after she had tried to smother him.
  • Unfortunately, these European productions are killing me.

Awaken the Dead (2007)

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awakencover0320 movies for $5; what could possibly go wrong?  Part VI.

More ambitious than The Nurse, but not a success.

Awaken the Dead gets off to a good start with an interesting visual under the credits.  The camera races through a metropolitan area which has been flooded.  The cityscape is in black & white, and is animated or maybe rotoscoped.  This gives way to a few live color shots of an unflooded urban area.  This is the last we see of the flooding.  It is also the last decent cinematography we will see for a while.  For the next 90 minutes, the screen will be very grainy and frequently washed-out to the point of being monochrome.

awakenbegin02The “action” begins with a priest lying in bad with his arms out, crucifixion-style.  Just in case we don’t get it, he has a huge black cross tattooed on his back, and his name his Christopher Gideon.  In another part of the city, Mary Payne wakes up topless, but lying on her stomach, so she may as well be a nun.  Gideon has received a letter directing him to Mary’s house, where most of the movie will take place, to meet Mary’s father.

The film again taunts us by threatening to become good with the introduction of two Japanese schoolgirls.  They look up at a jet as if they had never seen one before and begin rubbing their eyes.  A few minutes later, after they are zombified, they disembowel a guy.  I’m still on board

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Amazingly, the YouTube version has a cleaner picture than the DVD. But I’m not sitting through it again to replace the screen-caps.

Gideon and Mary see out their windows that the world has been overrun by zombies, or at least their street.  Soon they are joined by a Jehovah’s Witness and a survivalist couple.

After the survivalist couple zombies-out, the priest goes outside guns-a-blazing.  I hesitate to include this pic lest it make this movie look good.

awakenguns01After this fight, Gideon is sporting an eye-patch, and looks a lot like the Governor from The Walking Dead.  The three remaining humans find a letter telling them to meet Mary’s father at an old church.

Mary’s father explains that this is a government operation testing a new weapon.  Buildings stay intact, no soldiers die, zombies kill everyone.  Shockingly, the government does not consider this a success, and kills him.  The same jets do another flyover, releasing a chemical which kills the zombies.

No cities were flooded in the making of this movie.

To recap:

  • Cinematography: Just dreadful.  I don’t even think it was incompetence or budget restraints; it was just terrible choices.
  • Acting: Mostly terrible.
  • Dialogue: Terrible, repetitive.
  • Make-Up: Really looked more like Insane Clown Posse than zombies.
  • Story: Adequate.  You don’t really need much for a good zombie movie.
  • Sound: Not well-recorded.  Sound does not get enough respect — in this, and many low-budget movies, expectations are lowered upon hearing the first word of dialogue.

I rate it a 4.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • This was clearly a low-budget movie, yet it has a cast of 122 in IMDb.  Sure, 97 are list as “Zombie”, but you still have to feed them lunch.
  • There is a nice Dolly Zoom early on, but it just serves to show how dreary the direction is otherwise.
  • A 10% trim off the 1:41 running time would have helped.  Or a 90% trim might have left a pretty good short.
  • Also available on YouTube, but why would ya?awakencredit03

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Decoy (S1E37)

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ahbabysitter03Oddball show-tune composer Gil Larkin is working with singer Mona Cameron and falling for her despite her being married; and despite him being a show-tune composer.  When Gil discovers bruises on Mona’s shoulder, he decides to pay her husband a visit.

Apparently, wife-beating is no longer the hoot that it was in the dark ages . . . you know, a week ago . . . in the previous AHP episode Mink.  It truly was a different time.

Gil goes to confront Mr. Cameron, who is on the phone wheeling and / or dealing.  Cameron shouts, “Richie, don’t!” as a man knocks Gil out from behind.  Richie, still unseen, then shoots Cameron.  Gil wakes up with a gun in his hand, Mr. Cameron dead, and the phone blaring out public domain pop music.

ahdecoygil02Gil realizes he is being set up, but has two clues — the name “Richie” and the caller who might have heard what happened.  The caller has hung up, but he finds a note listing two clients who were scheduled to talk to Cameron that night.

This really isn’t much of a frame-up as no one saw Larkin go to Cameron’s office and he had no appointment.  He could have just quietly slipped away after regaining consciousness.  And it was risky of Richie to knock him out.  Had Gil been unconscious when the cleaning lady came, that would have actually exonerated him.

Gil goes to see the first person on the schedule, a Japanese dancer.  This was pretty progressive casting in the 1950’s — there was no reason to make the dancer Japanese; unless she was the murderer, and that was somehow relevant.  I’m not sure whether this was a progressive casting choice or a yellow herring (I know, I know). [1]

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Classic “exposition delivered with your back to the room” stance

The next person on the list is a wacky DJ.  It is hard to tell whether this giggling beatnik doofus is high, hyperactive, ADD, drunk or all of the above.  He inexplicably hums the tune that was playing through the phone.  In this case, it is a pickled herring.

He joins the ranks of Hollywood DJs that you could not pay people to listen to (Stevie Wayne, Dave Garver, Johnny Fever, etc).  I would include Wolfman Jack in that list, except he actually was inexplicably successful.[2]

Gil returns to Mona’s apartment where the police are waiting for him.  They take him downtown to give a statement.  Returning to Mona’s place, he discovers an album of the tune that was playing through the phone.  It is an LP, but luckily he chooses exactly the right track.  When he accuses Mona of framing him, she calls Richie out of the bedroom.

When they say they can’t allow Gil to live, effectively confessing, the police barge back in.  Mona tries to pull a switcheroo on the cops, acting as if Richie had just barged in on she and Gil.  She gives a pretty great O-face (as in “O, Crap!“) as she realizes in about 3 seconds that there is no point to even trying this.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • [1] Re-reading this after someone linked to it, I did cringe.
  • [2] Trivia: George Lucas gave Wolfman Jack a “piece” of American Graffiti to appear it.  It wasn’t Star Wars, but it was huge and set him for life.
  • AHP Deathwatch:  Gil and Mona are still alive, but that’s it.
  • AHP Proximity Alert: Harry Taylor was in 6 episodes this season.  Jack Mullaney just appeared 4 weeks ago.  Give someone else a chance!
  • Frank Gorshin, in his first role, has a bit part.  He would go on to at least two iconic roles: The Riddler on TV’s Batman, and Bele the black & white dude on Star Trek (not to be confused with the white & black dude).
  • There must be some weird Alfred Hitchcock / Ten Commandments connection.  In the first season, AHP used eighteen actors from that movie.  And nine more in season two.  Of course, it was a cast of thousands.

50th Post Palate Cleanser – The Marx Brothers

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I wonder how well this has aged.  It was 50 years old the first time I saw it, so maybe it is truly timeless.  On the other hand, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit; has it gotten corny (to mix my metaphors into a tasty, tasty medley)?

You can really only shoot an elephant in your pajamas once; just like in music, you can really only Rock once around the Clock, or have one only Calendar Girl.  I guess you can also have a Mayan Calendar Girl, but not after 2012.

It might be low-hanging, but they got there first, and picked the hell out of it.

Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont in Animal Crackers.