The Keep, 1986 ed., F. Paul Wilson
Wilson is one of those writers I’ve tried to warm up to a number of times. His “Repairman Jack” novels sound precisely like what I want in supernatural fiction, after all. But I just can’t quite bring myself to really like his work.
This is probably the closest I can get. It’s hard not to like a book about Nazis being horribly murdered in a Romanian castle. Just try to ignore the odd inclusion of Howardian High Fantasy heroes and villains by way of back-story.

So, if you created an instant horror classic, which was a massive commercial success, and spawned the equally rare well-received and contextually appropriate sequel, what do you do for a threepeat? Well, if you’re John Carpenter and Debra Hill, you ditch everything that your audience wants to see in your franchise for a surreal pagan-themed thriller that casts the Irish as a race of child-murdering lunatics, alienating both the general public and hardcore fans and leaving those few who are actually willing to give your film a shot completely baffled at your film’s nonsensical plot.

It makes a certain sort of perverse logic, actually. Halloween really was an instant classic and it represents the strongest bridge between the slasher genre and the mystery genre. (Setting aside the almost as brilliant, and earlier, Black Christmas, which Halloween certainly owes a debt to, because sometimes doing it right is more important than doing it first.) Unfortunately, after two films all that really could be said about Michael Myers had been said, and every subsequent sequel only confirmed that more and more. Not to mention that the success of Halloween inspired so many, frankly, utterly shit imitators and wannabes, and it’s not hard to see why Carpenter and Hill would maybe want to back away from that particular legacy. The downside to that, though, is that when you have control of a potentially lucrative franchise like that, you don’t want to just abandon it entirely. The devised solution, turn the “Halloween” brand into an anthology series, which each film continuing the themes of Halloween horrors, but with a new plot and characters periodically. And, actually, it’s a really good idea. The film itself, though…that’s where the problems set in.

The film opens with a man holding a Halloween mask running away from well-dressed men. He takes refuge in a gas station, and gets taken from there to the hospital, where his head is split open by a well-dressed man, who then sets himself on fire. Attending physician Dan Challis finds this whole situation awfully suspicious, especially when the pretty and half-his-age daughter of the dead man, Ellie Grimbridge starts asking questions as well. Their investigation reveals that just before he died, Ellie’s father was set to pick up a delivery of Halloween masks from the Silver Shamrock festival in Santa Mira, California; a novelty company in a sleepy mid-state town populated by Irish immigrants. The Silver Shamrock masks are the must-have item this Halloween, with their curiously tame and retro designs and maddeningly aggravating jingle which also promotes the “Horrorthon Giveaway” Silver Shamrock is hosting on television Halloween night. Challis and Ellie contrive to join a private tour of the company given to their top salesman and his family, and while on it Ellie sees her father’s car hidden in a warehouse. That night she is kidnapped by the security personnel from the company and Challis breaks in to rescue her. He is quickly captured and Conal Cochran, the company’s charismatic owner, explains his plan; to return Halloween to a night of terror and death in celebration of his Pagan heritage, by using chips from a megalith stolen from Stonehenge which have been placed inside the masks and, when activated by an electronic signal hidden in the Silver Shamrock commercial, will burn the heads of children wearing the mask and cause them to vomit up snakes and insects. Challis eventually manages to escape with Ellie, destroying the factory and Cochran in the process by causing the megalith to overload, but before he can warn the world about the commercial he is attacked by Ellie.
Because she’s a robot built by Cochran. Which pretty much destroys the entire plot and internal logic of the film.
The film ends on pleasingly ambiguous and downbeat note with Challis able to get the commercial removed from only two of the channels broadcasting it, with the fate of the commercial on the third channel (this being 1982) left unresolved.

The kernel of the idea here is actually pretty good: Pagans returning Halloween to its roots because it is their holiday, dammit. It’s a clever tweaking of the attitude some Christians take to secular Christmas celebrations. But then, it’s a Nigel Kneale idea, the man behind Quatermass. Unfortunately, his name doesn’t appear on the film because he had it removed, rather than live with the studio-mandated inclusion of several gorey, and incredibly silly and not at all necessary to the plot, scenes included in order to justify an R rating and satisfy the demands of the target audience. Who, as I said earlier, really only wanted yet another slasher film with sluts being sliced up, not a satiric riff on The Wicker Man set in California. It’s a case of the audience not quite being worthy of the material they’re being presented with, and the film suffers because of its desire to please them. Which isn’t to say that it would be a perfect film without the gore-hound pandering. The plot holes in this film are legendary. The film implies that the Horrorthon is rolling out cross-country. But if it’s being simulcast, no self-respecting kid on the West Coast is going to give up prime Trick-or-Treating hours to watch a commercial. And if it’s going time-zone by time-zone, of which there are four in the continental United States, than again, only the kids on the Eastern time are going to die. Maybe Central. But surely by the time it gets to Mountain the link between the commercial and kids fucking dying would be noted. About the only hole that’s addressed is the question of how a Stonehenge megalith was transported from Salisbury to somewhere near Gilroy, and even that is only by so purposefully lampshading the problem as to make it moot.

So, no, not good. But I’m strangely inclined to give them points for effort.
Except for the robot thing. That’s just fucking stupid.

Sometimes screenwriters turn out to be good directors as well. Sometimes actors turn out to be good directors as well. In 1988, make-up and special effects artist Stan Winston got to try out being a director with Pumpkinhead. I suspect it’s probably safe to say that the jury is still out on whether or not make-up artists are cut out for direction. Pumpkinhead did spawn several sequels and developed a cult following, but then, it’s a horror film from the 80s with a distinctive and marketable monster and it starred Lance Henriksen. It would probably have been more surprising if it had somehow not developed a cult following.

I say the jury’s out because, while the film has a couple of charms, this is pretty much its most subtle scene:

The film opens with a flashback to rural grocer Ed Harley’s childhood, when his family refused to give shelter to a man being pursued by a creature for a crime he may or may not have committed. We then cut to Ed and his son doing chores and leading a pretty satisfying life, alone in the mountains just getting by. Later, at Ed’s grocery store, some brash young city folk stop off to buy food and play with their dirtbikes. While Ed is briefly away, his son is killed when he runs after his dog onto the field where the teens are dirtbiking. The teens are split as to whether to leave or call for help, and eventually all but one go before Ed returns. Ed, reminded earlier in the day of the creature, called by the mountain folk Pumpkinhead, takes his son’s body out into the mountains to a woman reported to be a witch, asking her to unleash the creature to exact revenge. This turns out to be a less than ideal plan, as Ed soon discovers that not only is the guilt for the accident equally shared, but that the creature simply doesn’t care and Ed must experience each kill himself. The teens, meanwhile, find themselves in the usual spam-in-a-cabin scenario when Ed decides to take the creature out himself. After much chasing of teens and monsters through the woods, Ed eventually figures out what was obvious to the audience all along, and kills himself, since the creature is fueled by his own need for revenge. The film ends with the witch burying Ed’s body in the same pumpkin patch which birthed the demon, his final fate to be the body fo the creature the next time it is summoned.

The primary problem with the film is a basic lack of imagination. The creature itself bears more than a passing resemblance to the creature design from Alien, including spiky shoulders, elongated heard and prehensile tail. Oh, the color is different, but the orangey-flesh tone of Pumpkinhead only serves to make the creature somehow even more penis-like. And a penis with Lance Henriksen’s face is just disturbing on any number of levels. There’s also the question of the pacing. The film starts slow. Then it builds to a long middle section. Like, a really long middle section. Minute after minute of people talking. Or driving. Or digging. And it goes on. And on. And then on some more. Which pretty much just leaves the last act of the film for Pumpkinhead to actually show up and start killing people, thus largely negating the tension of wondering when the monster is going to appear. It also doesn’t help that, despite some of them being culpable in a child’s death, the majority of the teen victims are far more sympathetic as characters than Ed Harley or any of the other mountain folk. From the beginning, during the flashback, it’s established that the existence of Pumpkinhead, much less his use, is a sign of the “unchristian”-which here we can read as incapable of compassion or mercy-nature of the people in the community. That Pumpkinhead chooses as his first victim the only teen who did actually stay and try to help Ed’s son drives that home.

Aside from those issues, there are some interesting things the film does manage to do. It’s not quite the inversion of the “evil rednecks, virtuous city-dwellers” that I still would really like to see in a horror film, but at least it manages to offer a more nuanced view of both groups. Yes, that Pumpkinhead’s existence is tolerated by the locals, to a certain degree, is an indictment of them, but at least some of them understand that this is wrong. And while at least some of the city kids qualify as full villains, there are those who attempt to do the right thing. It’s also pretty close to an American entry in the “folk horror” category of films. It’s a genre that tends to mostly appear in British and European films and novels, since they’ve got the pagan backgrounds that usually serve as backstory. But America has folklore and folk traditions too, and it’s easy to imagine a Pumpkinhead like figure serving as a regional boogey-man. It’s something pretty different for American horror, so I feel obligated to give the film some credit there.

I may have been too harsh on The Blob. This 1984 werewolf film from Claudio Fragasso goes to even greater depths in its dedication to being absolutely terrible than that particular opus. At least the people responsible for the remake of The Blob presumably intended to make a good movie. I’m not entirely sure that such a consideration even occurred to Fragasso.
Because Claudio Fragasso made Troll 2, you see.
Yeah…

The film opens with what is quite possibly the worst music video of all time. I’m sort of dumbstruck by it, because it is just so amazingly banal as to defy description. About the only thing that’s remarkable about it is that, yes, that really is Alice Cooper. I can only presume that it was just as cost-effective to actually hire Cooper to appear in the film as it was to license a song. From there we go to Cooper, playing Vincent Raven, and his crew traveling by van to the remote house where Vince lived as a kid, and witnessed his father brutally murdered by the locals for being a werewolf. By a remarkable coincidence, just as Vince arrives in town, packs of wild dogs have been terrorizing the countryside. We then get some blurry, badly lit scenes of people scaring themselves in the woods or the old house, including a long and protracted dream sequence. The highlight of this sequence is a book Vince reads late into the night about the “scientific truth” about werewolves…featuring a photo of Lon Chaney Jr. from The Wolf Man. An odd inclusion, but also a bad sign, given the maxim to never remind the audience of a good movie in the middle of your bad movie. The next morning, the crew assembles to film another video, and things pretty much go to hell when the locals show up. From there we get the locals killing one of Vince’s friends, Vince killing the locals, wild dogs killing the remainder of Vince’s friends, Vince killing the werewolf, and Vince’s girlfriend killing Vince because, yes, it turns out that he’s a werewolf too.
And then, just to make sure the producer got their money’s worth, the opening song plays again, over clips from the film.

You would think a Italian werewolf movie starring Alice Cooper would at least have some camp value. But, no, even camp requires a certain amount of competency in film-making to work. This is just a series of loosely connected events, framed around the idea of a werewolf stalking the countryside, maybe. Even the one possible moment of originality, when the film-makers decided that it would be a really good idea to mix An American Werewolf in London with Deliverance isn’t pulled off. It occurs too late in the film to be an effective twist. And how I wanted it to work. I hate, with a passion, that sub-genre of horror concerned with how the horrible, evil rednecks terrorize the good, wealthy city-folk, and I really wanted to see a satisfying hillbilly horror plot develop. Because it would have meant at least that some kind of plot was developing.

You can pretty much miss this. If the fact that it’s by the folks who brought you Troll 2 doesn’t warn you off, and you absolutely must see a movie in which Alice Cooper kills red necks with a shotgun, I’m really not sure what I could say or do to dissuade you.

Except show you this:

The Tin Woodman of Oz, 1918 facsimile ed., ~1974, L. Frank Baum
This is the book where the Tin Woodman meets Fy-Ter, who also got all his limbs chopped off and replaced with tin ones, and then discovers that his sweet-heart married a man made out of the bits that were chopped off of him and Fy-Ter.
So, there’s that…

On the other hand, that bear is awesome.

The rise in kid-friendly horror in the 80s meant that film-makers had to get creative or neuter their efforts entirely. Most film-makers, unsurprisingly maybe, opted to go the neutering route. Tibor Takacs 1987 The Gate is a good example of a film-maker who decided to get creative instead. It’s most iconic monster, the diminutive Minions skirt that scary-cute line that a lot of other PG-13 horror movies did at the time, but as a whole the film is remarkably original as well as a clever, and for the time contemporary, use of classic monster movie techniques.

Most of the film centers on Glen (a disturbingly juvenile Stephen Dorff), a somewhat withdrawn boy obsessed with rockets. His parents leave on a weekend trip, leaving his older sister Al in charge. It’s strongly implied that Glen is growing resentful of his sister becoming more interested in boys and shopping and other teenage activities than hanging out with him, and his only other friend is a geeky heavy-metal fan named Terry, himself coping with the recent death of his mother. After a storm knocks down a tree in Glen’s backyard, the boys discover a large geode, and unwittingly open up a gate to a conveniently non-denominational Hell dimension populated by “ancient demons” of an undisclosed pantheon. Strange events begin to occur, including levitation, dead pets and hallucinogenic imagery, culminating in the invasion of the house by pint-sized monsters. The combination of heavy-metal music and the Bible lead everyone to believe that the threat is over, but no, it’s just been made worse, and soon Terry and Al have been kidnapped by zombies and Glen is left alone to fight the demonic overlord before he takes over the world. Which he does, with a rocket.
You kind of have to see that scene in context to really get it, you know?

In a lot of ways The Gate wears its influences on its sleeves. The “spooky secrets of suburbia” theme was covered before, and arguably better, in Poltergeist, but where that film was all about adult anxiety, The Gate is very much a film about the fears of children. Parents worry about what horrible secrets might depress the value of their home. Kids worry about that rumor of the workman who was walled up inside their basement, alive. Even the monsters owe a lot to previous films. Most of the effects are created using forced perspective or stop-motion. These are fairly basic techniques, and the method in which they’re achieved feels very much like a call-back to the monster movies of the 50s and 60s, particularly the films of Ray Harryhausen. The one notable deficiency with this arrangement, is that, especially with the heavy use of forced perspective shots, there isn’t a lot of interaction between the cast and the effects. People have a tendency to stand around and look at the monsters. Meanwhile, the monsters stand around and stare blankly at a rather arbitrary eye-line as well. There’s a lot of staring at things in place of interaction with things in this movie to be honest.

It’s probably worth noting that the film is very much of its time as well. I don’t just mean the blindingly bright pastel colors every teenage girl in this film wears, though that’s part of it. It’s some of the little details, both good and bad. The kid into heavy-metal, for example, is through and through a nerd. This fits precisely in with my memories of the era, that heavy-metal as a musical genre was mostly listened to by the nerdy kids. Not the dark, brooding, threat to society kids that tv and films always seemed to think listened to heavy-metal. No, it was the geeks. It’s a realistic and under-observed detail. On the flip-side, however, is the very casual way that the word “fag” is tossed around in the film. Kids say it, and it’s treated as an unremarkable thing. It’s actually used the first time in the film as a fully justified (by the film’s logic) retort to a bully. This, sadly, is very typical of films of the 80s, when “fag” was apparently one of the very few insults that heroic characters could use and still be seen as heroic, rather than raging assholes. I also find it interesting that for a film about demons and monsters from the underworld, the monsters themselves are hardly Satanic at all. Or, at least, not created using any of the standard elements of Satanic imagery. Given the wide-spread paranoia over Satanism, particularly in the media, during the decade, I half-wonder if this was a deliberate choice to avoid any unwanted controversy. The creators have left themselves the out that the movie just happens to be about monsters that live in a hellish underground realm, but aren’t technically demons from Hell, and they can hardly be held accountable for your inability to split that hair.

When the PG-13 rating was introduced in the 80s, it was pretty much a God-send to the makers of cheap sci-fi and horror films. They could include suggestive and violent material in their films, and still enjoy the increased revenue from a film that kids and teens could easily get into. That, and the fact that video rental shops pretty much never bothered to enforce ratings on anything other than out and out porn, made a lot of marginal films pretty popular. Especially the ones whose makers were able to successfully exploit the formula that was proving to be popular: gross-cute small creatures doing unspeakable things. Which Stephen Herek’s 1986 Critters did so well it launched a franchise. Well, so did all the other cute monster movies.

The puppet-monster genre seemed to fill a need for audiences, with Gremlins, Ghoulies, Munchies, Hobgoblins, Troll, and a host of even lesser films coming out within the span of a few years. Critters, in that regard, is fairly atypical of the genre, for actually trying to take some steps towards differentiating itself from the massive success that was Gremlins. (Even though Critters, like Ghoulies, actually predated Gremlins going by when work on the film actually began.) Not terribly different, though. Like all the other films, the plot consists of a cute/scary monster attacking humans and acting in a socially irresponsible way, and the film itself blends comedy rather liberally into the monster movie plot. And of course, by taking care to make sure that no matter how scary the film pretends to get, the bulk of the violence either takes place off-screen or doesn’t involve humans directly.

The film opens with a group of aliens escaping from the asteroid that they were imprisoned on, and the warden calling in a pair of shape-shifting bounty hunters to track them down. Meanwhile, the aliens have landed near a small farm in the midwest. Well, I say “meanwhile.” In actual fact, this is an incredibly slow film. It’s thirty minutes before the Critters even really show up in the film at all, and after that about half the film is the bounty hunters running around Generic Small Town causing havoc and otherwise completely failing to live up to their implied reputation as the best bounty hunters around. The rest of the film is Typical Farm Family being menaced by the Critters and running around in the dark. It’s not until the final act that we get any real conflict between the family, the bounty hunters and the Critters, and even then the problem is mostly solved through home-made dynamite. Keeping the film family-friendly appears to have neutered it of even the dark edge of Gremlins.

In the end, Critters occupies that same place that so many 80s cheapies do; primarily of interest for a chance to see a bunch of recognizable actors, either for stuff they did well before or well after this, in a film that’s just good enough that it can hold your interest without being so bad that you get bored with it. It has a very young Billy Zane being “killed” by monsters in a way that is very clearly just him holding onto a ball of fur and rolling around and screaming. That’s something, right?

I knew when I committed myself to looking at schlocky 80s films for my horror movies this year that there would be a very good chance that I would eventually hit one that tested even my patience for crappy horror films. That movie, friends, is Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of The Blob. At the best of times I’m not a fan of remaking films, especially horror films. But this film manages to get pretty much everything wrong with a remake that you can. The original film was a B movie at best. You’d think it would be ripe for a slick, more contemporary approach to the source material. No. It’s not.

What Russell gives us is a cast of pretty uniformly unlikeable characters. And while, in other circumstances, the film’s “anyone can die” approach would be a welcome change of pace, in this case you find yourself regretting that that some people actually live. The Blob itself changes from the rather aimless amorphous menace of the original film to something that displays a rudimentary intelligence. It can be angry, now. Which, frankly, is just fucking stupid. A certain degree of internal consistency is necessary for “scientific” monsters in horror movies. Yet this new Blob is small enough to sneak up on people, but big enough to engulf people whole. It’s fast enough to eat minor characters effortlessly, but slow enough that the heroes can get away from it. It can crawl up wall and ceilings…unless of course the heroes are climbing up a wall to get away from it. And, of course, it can grow tentacles to pull people through walls. When it wants to.
So basically what we have is a misguided revamp that largely misses the appeal of the original, but does amp up the gore factor considerably. We even get a rehash of the original film’s most iconic sequence, the Blob in the movie theater, transformed from something original into just another bloody killing spree.
Even the not-really-convincing arguments that the original Blob was a communism metaphor are taking horribly literally here, when the film-makers decide to give the Blob an origin. No, we can’t have it just be a menace from “outside” a perfect community. No, it has to be a government experiment to fight Communism gone wrong.
Urgh.

Here, listen to something less aggravatingly annoying Blob-related:

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Rinkitink in Oz, 1916 facsimile ed., 1976, L. Frank Baum
For some reason, Rand McNally never did Rinkitink in the “white cover” paperback editions, but Regnery did as part of their Oz line.
This is the book that features an illustration of the “Tottenhots” that I’d scan for you because it is one of the most jaw-droppingly racist things you’ll ever see in a children’s book, but I’ve already had issues with right-wing sites taking images from mine out of context this week.

Though predating the visibility of Halley’s Comet by two years, it’s hard to think of Thom Eberhardt’s 1984 film Night of the Comet without recalling the interest, and hysteria, over comets that seemed to be regular features of the mass-media. Though the 1986 apparition of Halley’s Comet was pretty much a dud, I still remember people talking about it as an omen for the end of the world, and somehow managing to be taken seriously. “But, see, here in Nostradamus where he talks about ‘the ruddy fisherman’s wealth shall outshine that of the the recalcitrant shepherd’s prodigal dowry’ that’s clearly a reference to the comet destroying Earth, and not an obtusely coded criticism of civil and religious figures of the day at all.” Thank goodness the American public is no longer that credulous. In any case though, as silly as fears about a relatively minor astronomical event are in real life, they do make for good fodder for fiction.

Reg is a fairly typical LA girl, working at a crummy job as a movie-theater usherette, and helping her boyfriend pirate copies of rare films instead of partying with her friends in celebration of an unnamed comet’s passage through the Earth’s atmosphere. Meanwhile, her little sister Sam is stuck in the valley with their step-mother, taking advantage of their father’s deployment to South America to throw a party for the neighbors and the man she’s cheating on her husband with. Unfortunately for everyone, the last time this particular comet swung by Earth it was shortly before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and the only people to have taken note of this are a group of Galtian scientists who have built an underground bunker somewhere in the California desert.
And everyone dies.
Except Reg and her boyfriend, because they were safe inside the steel walls of the fire-death-trap projection booth, though he does get killed and eaten by a zombie as soon as he steps outside. Because, somehow, if you were indoors when the comet passed you just get turned into a zombie instead of being disintegrated. Or something. The physics of all this aren’t exactly clear. In any case, Reg eventually finds Sam, who was hiding out from their step-mother in the lawn shed, and tries to convince her that everyone on Earth is now dead. Hearing a radio broadcast, they head into downtown Los Angeles and find that the entire spiel for the day was pre-recorded, but meet Hector, a trucker who also survived and headed to the radio station when he heard the broadcast. Sam makes contact with the scientists after playing around with the radio broadcasts, and while Reg and Sam wait for the scientists, Hector goes to San Diego to see if any of his family survived. When the scientists arrive, they take Reg, planning to use her for the same purpose they’ve taken every other survivor they’ve found; kill them and use them as the basis for a serum to combat the zombification, as all the scientists are slowly dying because no one thought to close the air vents before the comet passed through. Reg then has to escape with the other survivors, two children, while Hector and Sam try to get to the base in time to save her. In the end, civilization is restored by Reg and Hector forming a little nuclear family of their own.

So what we’ve got is basically a PG-13 zombie horror film with an attempt at coming up with a sci-fi based semi-plausible explanation for the zombies. It feels like a very conscious decision was made at some point, too, to make sure that the film stayed PG-13; there’s a little bit of sexual innuendo, but no real nudity, only two zombies ever actually really appear, and there’s almost nothing in the way of blood or direct violence. Unlike most attempts at keeping horror kid-friendly, though, Night of the Comet does manage to be pretty creepy. The lack of zombies works in this regard, because it gives us these vast expanses of Los Angeles that are completely devoid of cars or people. There’s a real feeling of dread and isolation that would be lost if you had hordes of shambling dead wandering around. It’s a genuinely effective emotional manipulation of the viewers that is slightly undone by the fact that Sam and Reg become rather accustomed to being two of the few people left in the world awfully quickly. But then, this is just a horror film, and deep heavy emotional drama is a better fit for “serious” films. Sam and Reg’s rapid acclimation to a post-comet world does work to give us some nice character bits, though, such as their decision to go on a clothes “shopping” spree in a deserted mall now that every piece of consumer goods they ever wanted is, essentially, now free.

Another bit in the film that works is the way in which the zombies are downplayed as a threat. There’s only a few of them, and we quickly learn that within a few days of the comet’s passage they’ll crumble away anyway. The more significant threat is in those survivors who are either undergoing zombification or simply looking to exploit the situation. The scientists form the chief antagonists, and their plan to sacrifice children in order to preserve themselves is monstrous in its selfishness. But then, these are people who decided to build an underground bunker instead of alert authorities to the danger that the comet posed to the world. There’s even some pitch-perfect 80s-movie punks who menace the girls in the mall, though the weight of their menace is undercut by the late revelation that, yep, they’re basically just more zombies who haven’t yet fully turned yet. But their villainy is fairly banal in comparison to the desperate self-preservation killings of the “best and brightest” of the surviving humans. I know, it’s surprising, that a zombie film would come to the conclusion that the “real monster” is other humans all along.