THE LAZIEST TAGLINE

I, MADMAN (1989)

To throw an overused cliché your way, I, Madman is the kind of film no one makes anymore. Not a huge-budget project, not cast-driven, and not based on a franchise or pre-existing material (a big deal for an '80s horror film), I, Madman is, simply put, a movie. It's harmless, charming, inventive, clever, and quite silly, and it's the kind of film that horror audiences hardly ever get to see anymore. Though obviously a product of its times, its use of practical effects and even stop-motion animation, cheesy though they may look nearly thirty years later, pleasantly reek of that old-school filmmaker's mindset of how best to bring the story to life.

The idea of reality and fiction blurring in the eyes of the lead character has proven to service all kinds of genres: I, Madman for horror, The Purple Rose of Cairo for whimsical comedy, and Adaptation for abstract art. The idea of the art on which we depend for mini slices of escapism soon taking over and encompassing our reality not only makes for a clever conceptual hook, but it also satirizes the human experience, which every so often it desperately needs. The inclusion of a sequence in which Virginia is walking down Hollywood Boulevard - more specifically, down the Walk of Fame, housing the stars of many Hollywood elite - only to stop when she sees a newspaper headline about an actress being found murdered, was by purposeful design. It is reality slamming heads with fiction. What I, Madman posits is that, simply, it's okay to escape the mundanity of our lives every so often, but if we fail to confront our realities as presented to us, our fantasies will soon corrupt them, forcing us to act - AND run from claymation mutants.

Director Tibor Takacs is likely better known for the mid-'80s, Steven Dorf-having, backwards-demonic-record-spinning monster mash The Gate, which also featured a healthy dose of his fondness for extravagant practical effects and stop-motion animation. (He's also responsible for the too-weird sequel Gate 2: The Trespassers.) Having disclosed that, I, Madman is the filmmaker's superior effort. The script by David Chaskin (Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge) features reasonably believable characters, given the rather fantastic circumstances in which they exist, existing in their small and somewhat stunted lives. No one's a doctor or a lawyer or some high-falootin' big deal. The lead and the supporting characters are regular everydayers. Chaskin's small touches are the most appreciated, such as the night security guard of the piano repair shop across the street who plays melancholy melodies into the night. Such additions contribute to the uniqueness of our lead heroine's home, so when that home becomes slowly infected by the living nightmares of mysterious pulp writer Malcolm Brand, it allows alternate and unexpected means to make that infestation more disturbing. The fact that the man is a security guard is obviously representative of Virginia's life, which begins losing stability as her razor-wielding threat becomes more and more real. These are the kinds of inclusions that make the script stand out and reinforce the notion it was written with good and artistic intentions, rather than simply counting bodies to drop.

Jenny Wright (with whom many audience members, mostly male, fell in love following her role of Mae in Near Dark) plays a likable lead. Tasked with performing double duty as also playing Anna, the hunted "fictional" heroine of Brand's novels, she's equal parts frumpy and attractive, vulnerable and resourceful, helpless and strong. Alternately, William Randall Cook (also responsible for the film's visual effects) plays the creepy and unnerving antagonist Malcolm Brand. He scalps women, so you know he's a creep. Both actors play well off each other and preserve that essential horror dynamic of strong female versus maniacal male.

In keeping with certain horror expectations, I, Madman presents an engaging and sympathetic lead, an intriguing and psychotic antagonist, inventive special effects, and a healthy dose of the red stuff. Stylistically, it boasts somewhat of a giallo look, consisting of some pretty heavy and unsubtle primary colors, and the gothic and mood-setting score by Michael Hoenig (The Blob) is suitably rich and heavy. A film that manages to be fun, thrilling, philosophical, and creepy all at once, it's a wonder that I, Madman didn't land harder with audiences during its release in 1989. 

SLEEP FOREVER

10 TO MIDNIGHT (1986)

“I’m not a nice person,” Charles Bronson explains to a reporter in the film’s opening scene. “I’m a mean, selfish son of a bitch. I know you want a story, but I want a killer, and what I want comes first.”

Immediate smash cut to black, the name CHARLES BRONSON, and the driving electronic score by Robert Ragland.

One of the greatest opening sequences to any film, and it belongs to 10 to Midnight.

Charles Bronson worked with director J. Lee Thompson an impressive nine times, with 10 to Midnight being their fourth collaboration. Though none of them would be considered “classics” (as Bronson didn’t have many of those), their films are fondly remembered by the then-current and what would become the next generation of Bronson fans: films like St. Ives, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (which, while still ridiculous, opted to take a restrained step backward from the cartoonish Death Wish 3 and reground the series in reality), and lastly, 10 to Midnight, the closest Bronson ever got to making a horror film. A psychosexual thriller, 10 to Midnight has Bronson hunting down a serial killer preying on women, who commits his murders while totally in the nude when not placing obscene phone calls to girls and using a Spanish accent. It’s…as awkward as you’re thinking it is.

But, in spite of that, 10 to Midnight is one of the better made films not just in the Bronson/Thompson collaborative period, but really in all of Bronson’s career. One of the critical notices about the film claims that 10 to Midnight “sees Bronson back in his Death Wish shoes,” which really isn’t anywhere near accurate. (Sorry to call you out on it decades later, London Times.) Even a vague awareness of Bronson’s career is mostly comprised of his Death Wish series, which can be dumbed down to a simple image of him walking around with a gun blowing away people indiscriminately. But that’s the furthest thing away from what 10 to Midnight is presenting, which is Bronson taking on quite a human and subdued role as Detective Leo Kessler, a cop who – no lie! – kills exactly one person during its entire running time. You…can guess who.

It might be the presence of Charles Bronson, or perhaps producers Golan and Globus (Cannon Films, essentially) that make critics misremember this film and write it off as nothing more than typical exploitation for which the ’80s (and Bronson…and Cannon Films) were infamous. And yeah, the film sure doesn’t miss the chance to flash a random set of bare breasts on screen, but behind the somewhat slimy on-screen events (this will sound weird), there are signs that Thompson was attempting to make a film that’s classier and more intelligent than other films of its type, despite all the…well, slime.

J. Lee Thompson would go on to direct more straightforward horror fare like Happy Birthday to Me, one of the many holiday-centered slasher films made to exploit the popularity of Halloween. This decision surprised a lot of folks, being that Thompson had been responsible for a handful of classics, among them the original Cape Fear – especially when it came to Happy Birthday to Me's marketing campaign, which sold audiences their only reason to see it: “Six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see.” By this point, studios were well aware that audiences (mostly teens) were flocking to the slasher film for this reason alone: bloody murder. Shades of what was to come are present in 10 to Midnight; though the body count is rather low, the grisliness and seediness of their execution does often come off with a certain slasher film aesthetic. The final sequence, which sees “The Slasher” going after his last intended victim, is legitimately thrilling and disturbing. These instances, however, are planted into a rather traditional police procedural, which sees Bronson’s Kessler doing whatever he can – even unethical – to be sure the killer doesn’t walk on a technicality.

Uh oh, wait a minute. You mean Bronson plays a character who circumvents the frustrating machinations and loopholes of the law only to exact his own kind of vengeance?

Maybe the London Times was right after all.

For the uninitiated who are aware of Charles Bronson’s legacy but have sampled only a few more obvious titles, 10 to Midnight may come as a surprise. Not quite a horror film, not quite a slasher film, and certainly not an action film for which he was most known by then, 10 to Midnight borrows from nearly every genre to present an interesting mishmash of sensibilities and, miraculously, ends up with a rather solid “genre” picture – though which genre to which it belongs will be up to the audience to determine.

FREEZE YOUR BLOOD

OPERA (1987)

 

From the very beginning of his career, filmmaker Dario Argento was on a roll. 1970’s giallo The Bird with Crystal Plumage, his debut, still remains one of the most celebrated films of his career. Subsequently, Deep Red, Suspiria, its semi-sequel Inferno, and Tenebrae would follow, each preserving Argento’s uncannily beautiful skill with the camera and his further exploration of the giallo sub-genre. Following Tenebrae, like many of our beloved horror directors, his work would begin to fall off. Next would come the befuddling Phenomena (starring a very young Jennifer Connelly) and then 1987’s Opera, the second film in the portion of Argento’s career that’s considered gray area — a quasi-limbo each of our celebrated horror directors eventually entered. 

Argento’s Suspiria, or Deep Red — these are commonly accepted as high points, even classics. And every horror director has them. John Carpenter’s Halloween or The Thing, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead — all have achieved classic status because they deserve it. But each director would later make films that fell into that gray area where it’s not so much they are beloved because of the films, but because of the director who made them. Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, Craven’s The People Under the Stairs, and Romero’s Monkey Shines. None of these are patches on the directors’ earlier classics, but fans love them anyway because of who made them. Basically, call Halloween or The Thing silly in a fanboy’s presence and it’s war. Call Prince of Darkness silly and the response is, “Well…”

If you’ll forgive the long-winded opening, that sums up the enduring legacy of Dario Argento’s Opera. If the direct-to-video platform had been as prominent in the late ‘80s as it would eventually be in the late ‘90s, Opera would feel like it had gone direct to video, or even made for television (despite the violence). Even though it’s made by a proven director, large portions of it feel very workman and frenzied. Argento’s camerawork is still as beautiful and indulgent as ever, but it’s often ruined by the chaotic and unfocused scenes of…well, you name it. Intrigue? Investigation? Anything involving dialogue? Even the murder sequences, something Argento used to excel at, seem cornily rendered, as if he’s a director working outside of his comfort zone, even though up to that point he’d been murdering people on screen for 17 years. For long stretches in Opera, nothing will happen, and then within the span of just thirty seconds, so much will happen that you can feel your brain trying to process all the outlandish information bombarding it. Because of this, you can never just settle into the story and allow Opera’s sense of pacing to carry you along, because it doesn’t really have much of either. Not helping is that, like a lot of Italian productions of this era, Opera was filmed without on-set sound, so all the dialogue was later looped by either the actors themselves or different voice-over artists altogether. Many of Argento’s films and Italian productions in general were made the same way, but Opera bungles that as well. Much of the dialogue is rattled off with either too little emotion or way too much, which leaves the whole film feeling off kilter and strange.

Opera would be the last feature length film that Argento would make that falls into that lawless land of debate as to whether or not it’s worthy of attention. Everything that follows generally falls into the land of “for Argento completists only” where I dare not dwell. (Only the most ardent of Argento’s fanbase can make it through Dracula 3D.) If you’re an Argento fiend, then it's a given this is for you, but if you’re only a casual fan of the director, I definitely wouldn’t buy tickets to this Opera.

AN ADULT NIGHTMARE

FURTHER THAN FEAR

SLAUGHTER HIGH (1986)

God bless you, the ‘80s slasher. You were very rarely “good,” but man oh man, do you get points for not giving up without a fight. I feel like I say his name an awful lot around these parts, but John Carpenter and his low-budget Halloween paved the way for a long line of slashing imitators that would last for ten plus years (and crop up again in the ‘90s following the Halloween-inspired Scream). But whereas Halloween was good enough to transcend that “slasher” title and be a great film in general, alllllll the imitators that would follow in its wake wouldn’t ever achieve the same bragging rights and would have to be judged entirely within the confines of its own sub-genre, i.e., “______ was good…for a slasher flick.”

And Slaughter High is pretty great for a slasher flick.

Starring Caroline Munro along with a lot of other people you’ve never heard of, Slaughter High is the culmination of some pretty solid horror films to have been unleashed up to that point. Obviously the idea of killing teenagers was popularized by Halloween (even if The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had beat it to the punch by four years), but with an opening sequence ripped straight out of Carrie, during which the outcast of a high school is pranked in a sexual manner, leaving the coach to discipline the offenders with grueling exercises, Slaughter High takes these and other inspirations, melds them together, and unleashes them in one formulaic but satisfying bloodbath.

Slaughter High bills itself as a horror/comedy, but minus the opening and closing scenes, there’s nothing particularly comedic about it; it’s actually pretty horrifying. Any sequences having to do with Marty Rantzen, the school’s beleaguered nerd and the target of all the cool kids’ torments, comes off dangerously Troma-esque, but minus those, Slaughter High is fairly straightforward.

As for the quality, well, we can skip saying the acting is bad (it is), that the concept isn’t original (it’s not), and the actors don’t look like teenagers at all during the opening high school prologue (Caroline Munro was 37 at the time and it shows) and get right to what matters: the death scenes. They are wonderful, and with one of Slaughter High’s three(!) directors being a special effects maestro and overseeing only the death scenes, of course they are. Slaughter High boasts some of the best, inventive, and icky death sequences ever seen in the sub-genre. Lawnmowered groins, electric bed sex – forget that a consumer-grade bathtub would never be found in a high school: so long as you fill it with acid and a naked chick, I’m down with it, baby.

The other wonderful aspect to Slaughter High is the score by Harry Manfredini, most famously known for scoring another slasher flick – Friday the 13th and its many, many sequels. Though his music seems more suited for a somewhat darker slasher experience (as the first five Friday flicks were), fans will find it immensely satisfying and even comforting as you see hapless teens barrel down hallways set to his familiar low-string notes.

The very ending of Slaughter High is confusing as fuck and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it seriously doesn’t matter because during Slaughter High someone shotguns a beer can filled with acid and his intestines melt out of his stomach and it’s just the tops.

REMAIN SILENT...FOREVER

JANUARY IS SLASHUARY

The slasher sub-genre is one of my favorite things, and has been since I was a wee one. It was my first foot in the door of the horror genre, and some of the most famous movie maniacs in history – Jason, Michael, Freddy, and more – were there to usher me, smacking my fanny as I passed them because it’s all in good fun. As time went on, I put away this slasher love for a little bit, only breaking it out every so often when the mood struck. (The Friday the 13th and Halloween series got routine play, though. To me, they were in a class all their own.)

As I became a so-called adult, and as the time seems to click louder and louder, I, like everyone else, have been looking fondly back on the 1980s – the allegedly last time it was fully pure to be an American, when things seemed just fine, and everyone was dancing to the first round of synth pop, driving their friends to the beach in a Jeep, and living life with no consequences whatsoever. 

Among these ‘80s memories is the slasher. And man, there’s just nothing like an ‘80s slasher. The sensibilities of that magical decade were like no other, and no decade since has come close to replicating it. The ‘80s meant excess, in every regard: hair got higher, clothes got bigger and brighter, music was faster. Even the drugs were in a hurry. 

As time goes on, it’s become a personal crusade to see every single slasher movie that hails from the ‘80s, from the ones that are clearly slashers to the ones that border the sub-genre while injecting its own distinct sensibilities. Sci-fi, action, mystery, demons, monsters – if teenage bodies are dropping, and if their hair is huge, I’m in. 

So come with me as we celebrate Slashuary – an entire January dedicated to the ‘80s slasher (mostly). Days will alternate between reviews for obscure slashers along with some of my favorite all-time slasher posters, even if they're for movies that kinda suck. Of the titles to appear all month, there will be some good, some not so good, but hey, we’ll be together, and that’s all that matters. 

THAT'S NOT CRANBERRY SAUCE

ROAD GAMES (1981)

Director Richard Franklin was known in his native homeland of Australia as “Australia’s Hitchcock,” and that’s not because he was a filmmaker who made notable genre fare, but because, like another noted genre filmmaker, Brian De Palma, Franklin was fascinated by Hitchcock’s techniques and sensibilities and adopted them into his own work. His most direct tie to Hitchcock was his helming of Psycho 2, a belated sequel following 18 years after Hitchcock’s landmark horror shocker. A few years later, Franklin would take a script by well-known Australian screenwriter Everett de Roche (Razorback) and bring it to life as a Rear Window-meets-road-movie hybrid, imbuing it with Hitchcock’s famous themes of paranoia and isolation, along with his use of dark humor and quirky supporting characters.

Road Games gets mentioned a lot when notable 1980s horror titles are being rattled off, especially when that conversation is based around all the horror flicks Jamie Lee Curtis did in her youth to earn the moniker “Scream Queen,” but not only is she not present in a majority of the film, the horror is actually toned down quite a bit in favor of thrills, mystery, and black humor. And despite Road Games being an Australian production which happens to feature some American actors, along with being an obvious homage to Hitchcock, the film also fits right in with ’70s American cinema, unofficially known as the paranoid thriller era. Films like The Conversation, The French Connection, Marathon Man, and more were direct results of the Nixon/Watergate scandal, and the cinematic response was one that would also soon be revitalized by The X-Files, whittled down into one core lesson: trust no one. 

The reason Road Games fits in well with this movement is that for a good portion of the film, Stacy Keach’s Quid is doing nothing more than following his paranoid instincts on what he may have witnessed. It’s not a slam dunk for him from the beginning; he’s not convinced that he’s witnessed anything nefarious, or if he is convinced, he doesn’t have enough evidence to back it up. What he does figure out pretty quickly is that law officials are no help, and all the blokes and sheilas who overhear his frantic demands for help on the bar payphone are not only not overly concerned, but they look upon him with suspicion. There’s an indirect subplot involving a worker’s strike going on in Australia which has resulted in meat becoming scarce, but also leaving natives incredibly wary of people they don’t know. Obviously this doesn’t help matters — not only is Quid American, but he’s a long-haul truck who happens to have a trailer full of meat. Simply put, no one is eager to help him.

Where Road Games falters is with its pace. The first act unloads at a purposeful but ever-intriguing pace. Through Quid’s observations, we “meet” all the other characters on the road around him, and this isn’t for throwaway comedy, but because we will cross paths with these characters again later. It’s through this observational behavior (because what else is there to do on the road besides stare straight ahead and talk to a dingo?) that Quid thinks he may have witnessed a murder — or, at least, a potential murder. Quid fixates on the maybe-killer (Grant Page), who will be personified by his dirty black hippie van for most of the film. It’s when we’re approaching the middle of the second act, after Jamie Lee has hitched Quid for a ride (her nickname is “Hitch” throughout — which serves two purposes: character nickname and Hitchcock homage), where the pace starts to slow. Keach and Curtis have reasonably good on-screen chemistry, and watching them get to know each other is charming, but once Hitch mysteriously vanishes, and Quid begins to question what’s really going on is when Road Games slows to a near halt. After having built such good will with the audience, and provided them with reasons to be as intrigued with the plot as Quid is with that dirty green van, the air is let out of all the goings-on; even as Road Games struggles to get back on track, and it eventually does, too much time is spent waiting for that to happen.

Still, what allows Road Games to speed across the finish line as an overall entertaining contribution to the genre is its identity, helped by the quirky sensibilities of Richard Franklin. Had Road Games been just another slasher flick, but plagued with the same second-act slowdown, it would be just a footnote in the genre timeline. Even though Franklin’s intent was to homage one of the horror greats using an open-road concept, it’s his likeness — far less known to American audiences — that make Road Games a film that’s not willing to be outright dismissed. It’s a flawed film for sure, and some viewers might not have the patience to spend most of their time watching a man riding around in the cab of a truck, but there’s a reason why Road Games has stuck around for so long. Equal measures of mystery, thrills, intrigue, and black humor make Road Games stand out from the rest of its ’80s colleagues, even if it doesn’t play as well as some of them.

Road Games is an offbeat title and definitely not for everyone. The Hitchcock flair is certainly present, both in construction and realization, but also in its usage of black comedy. Though its considered one of the many titles that made Jamie Lee Curtis a “Scream Queen,” her appearance lasts no more than 25 minutes, leaving Keach to carry most of the screen time. (Okay, him and his dingo.) Its pace might be too glacial for some, and its odd tone may turn off those more used to traditional genre fare, but there’s something undeniably quirky about Road Games that makes it easily watchable. 

THE BLOB (1988)

Ah, The Blob. A film that harkens back to that magical time in horror history when films were remade because someone had a good idea and a good approach, instead of saying, "Well, it's been five years. Let's remake it again."

Long a childhood favorite of mine, for not only terrifying me to death and keeping me away from all kinds of drains for days, but also for introducing me to my first ever horror crush, Shawnee Smith, The Blob works as well now as it did then. Normally the things that would hold back a lesser picture, including the dated (but still perfectly acceptable) special effects and the hilarious fashions, The Blob has always been good enough to surpass those shortcomings caused by the passing of time and still present a fun, nasty, gooey, and ultimately harmless good time.

You all know this one: a meteor carrying a strange jell-o substance from space (or was it?) crash lands on Planet Earth and begins gooing up its inhabitants. Only one man it seems can stop them, even though dozens try. That man is the hilariously-haired Kevin Dillon and the still-adorable Shawnee Smith (call me!).

Because of the time in which it was made, The Blob relies solely on practical and in-camera effects, only resorting to opticals for a couple scenes. (They've been trying to get a new version of The Blob off the ground for years, and once it arrives, I can only imagine the absurd amount of CGI that will be sliming across silver screens everywhere.) To tell someone who's never seen it that a space-foreign (or is it???) slime begins to suck people into itself, where it strips flesh from their bones and causes the blob to increase in size and oh by the way it's actually scary at times—the end of that conversation doesn't bode well. Because of its concept, and because it’s an ‘80s flick, it’s easy to think that The Blob is a light, silly, and inconsequential good time, but it actually has a lot in common with John Carpenter’s The Thing, in that it goes for the throat in unexpected ways and highlights some pretty grisly practical effects. The Blob not only manages to work just with its concept, but in spite of it; it also has no qualms in breaking some serious horror-film taboos. It eats a kid! A kid! Take that, kid!

A wonderful cast of character actors fill the background, including a regular of Frank Darabont (co-writer on The Blob) named Jeffrey DeMunn, who appeared in both The Shawshank Redemption as the lawyer who sends Andy Dufresne to his fate, and one of the guards in The Green Mile. Oh, he also played Dale in The Walking Dead. Perhaps you've heard of it. And perhaps you knew he'd been acting for thirty years before he played a filthy man in a bucket hat for which he'll now always be known (on Twitter). (Bitter hipster fan-boy rant over.)

The Blob is a classic. It's rare to say that a remake of something is a classic, and also bests the original. But this edition of The Blob is, and has. 

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]