The Crush + The Hand

 

THE CRUSH

(R, Warner Bros. Pictures, 89 mins., theatrical release date: April 2, 1993)

There's an old maxim about horror movies and thrillers where one's enjoyment is directly proportional to the grandiosity of the villain. How many of the most beloved hair-raisers can you recall which were as good as their principal antagonist? Die Hard remains a towering inferno of a popcorn pic largely because of Alan Rickman's deceitfully debonair Hans Gruber, whose propensity to praise designer suits in one moment and then blow someone's brains out the next brought out the fiery urgency in the equally interesting hero, John McClane. In the Line of Fire worked a similar magic between Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich (Cyrus the Virus, anyone?), and who can forget Hannibal Lecter even after all those inferior spin-offs? There's even poker-faced appreciation of such slasher behemoths as Freddy, Jason and Leatherface, mythical characters who were never meant to be relatable to in the first place. The Crush wants to be on that plain so badly, you can hear writer/director Alan Shapiro's back snap like chilled celery at his self-elevation. 

His anti-heroine is certainly a familiar type even by the lax standards of 1993, where Drew Barrymore graduated to femme fatale (cf: Poison Ivy) and Amy Fisher was a gossip rag fixture. But what really got me interested in revisiting The Crush reaches past an entire decade prior to Shapiro's film (and the year before my birth date), way back when a TV movie called Summer Girl premiered on CBS. That Diane Franklin vehicle casts a large shadow over every and all subsequent film I will ever see involving a teenage girl whose sexuality is so sociopathic, it threatens to expose the adult victims as even more childish than their adolescent tormentor.

And thanks to Shapiro, I've never felt more confident about such a generalization in my entire life, because The Crush is just that shallow.

This has nothing to do with nostalgia in regards to Alicia Silverstone, who rode MTV's gravy train to It Girl super-stature on the back of this film. Surely, I can remember seeing Aerosmith's string of Get a Grip video singles ("Cryin‘" and "Crazy" and "Amazing") knowing full well that the blonde starlet anchoring them was the joint winner of the network's trophies Best Breakthrough Performance and Best Villain for her portrayal of  "Adrian" Forrester. And I grew up watching Silverstone's career reach the heights of Clueless and plumb the depths of Batman & Robin. And once Blast from the Past with Brendan Fraser came and went, so did Ms. Silverstone, making way for Reese Witherspoon and fading into the ether of '90s kid memories just like Diane Franklin at the end of the '80s.

More important is that The Crush occupies that nutty boom in Hollywood post-Fatal Attraction involving that most programmable of stock villains, the Deranged Interloper. I saw it in Pacific Heights, The Good Son and a dozen other movies involving crazed lovers, roomies, policemen, and nannies. There was hardly anything subversive about them except for their vocation, concocting cheap paranoia among the upwardly-mobile who had every reason to believe their temp secretary or their fruit-of-the-loom progeny were out to get them. The Crush is the jailbait-next-door equivalent of those films, and as good a reason as the death of the music video to feel upset stomach at the rise of MTV as pop culture gatekeeper.

Alicia Silverstone's first-time luck is certainly more fascinating than anything in The Crush, including the central character. While MTV and Fangoria latched onto her star, nobody in 1993 was singing the praises of Cary Elwes, not even with the forthcoming release of Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights, a deliberate echo of the goofy charm Elwes demonstrated in The Princess Bride. The Londoner was instead saddled with one of the weakest lead roles in cinematic history, his "hero-victim" Nick Eliot being the epitome of complicit dullardry. A bespectacled milquetoast and journalistic writer of the teensiest skill evident, Nick nevertheless cruises out to Seattle once hired for Pique magazine, a coastal tabloid whose managing editor (Matthew Walker) thinks his investigative talents are esteemed enough to land an interview with a notorious embezzler. He finds suitable living and working residence in the guest house of Cliff and Liv Forrester (Kurtwood Smith, Gwynyth Walsh), but nearly mows down their 14-year-old daughter Adrian before setting one foot on their property.

Nick's apparent detriments of intuition and acclimation come into greater focus once Adrian starts making her play on the dopey if handsome writer. No review would be complete without mentioning that Silverstone's character was named Darian when the movie initially circulated, based on a genuine underage suitor Alan Shapiro had the misfortune of attracting. The real life Darian's parents threatened to sue James G. Robinson, thus the name was changed to protect the guilty for subsequent television and home video releases, including its BD debut from Shout! Factory. Soundalike actors dubbed all instances of the name "Darian" and an obvious insert appears at one point, although those who still have eagle eyes at the end will notice one slip. And the theatrical trailer has yet to be tampered with, either on disc or YouTube.

Anyway, "Adrian" (quotes will be dropped as long as you know who I'm actually referring to) is half of Nick's 28 years and the Valley Girl as bookish overachiever, with advanced knowledge of entomology, equestrianism and classical piano performance. It's hard to watch The Crush in any format and not see Cher Horowitz shoehorned into the role of a lonely, disturbed prodigal child, albeit one with a truly Californian hardbody Shapiro ogles in scantily-clad close-ups to the tune of Auto & Cherokee's "Taste," which was previously heard in the end credits of Stay Tuned minus the female moans. This happens after she has stolen a kiss and sucked Nick's fingers whilst assuring him "Don't be afraid of me." She even calls him up to taunt him with the phrase "I got my period," getting a rise out of Nick despite no actual puppy sex going on.

Teasing is the nature of Adrian's game, as when Nick sneaks into her bedroom looking for a missing photograph and hides in her closet while she disrobes for a bath. He bumbles further, she turns around and flashes him full frontal with a grin. Making a break for the front door, Nick is greeted by Cliff Forrester, who takes him up to the attic where his failed childhood present, a restored carousel, sits in neglect while he does the usual possessive daddy shtick with a pair of pliers. Forget about the name change: this doting fruitcake of a father alone seems more like a lynchpin for legal matters. No wonder Kurtwood Smith's insult of choice on That '70s Show was "dumbass."

When voyeurism fails to sway him, Adrian gets really steamed and scratches an obscene word onto Nick's snazzy car. Having screwed herself out of any future acts of endearment, she erases the floppy disk containing his deadline interview with the reclusive embezzler after having successfully rewritten his previous article. In the single most ludicrous moment of this consistently overheated film, Nick realizes Adrian's sabotage during a staff meeting, drives all the way back to his house, calls out for Adrian, wanders into the girl's candlelit shrine to him in the basement, gets duly creeped out, seals up the basement with hammer and nails, rewrites the entire article from memory whilst ignoring Adrian's desperate phone calls, drives all the way back to the office, and arrives with his salvaged article well before sundown. We see that Nick had asked his photographer girlfriend Amy Maddk (Jennifer Rubin: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Screamers) to stall for him, and I can only assume that she performed the same trick Winona Ryder used to wow the troops in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.

Nick sleeps with Amy, who is then attacked in her bolted-up darkroom by a hive of wily bees...erm, wasps (?) fed through her air duct in a plastic bag but reappears at the end looking just as Karen Duffy-ish as ever, if not more so. Adrian also promptly arranges the horseback "accident" of her best friend Cheyenne (Amber Benson) when she sees her attempting to warn Nick somewhere more private. Only after Nick is evicted, fired and arrested on a sexual assault charge does Cheyenne, who was clearly out of the hospital before his disgraces (and why didn't he visit her there?), does she confess to Adrian's murderous past in time for her to be tied to Mr. Forrester's prized merry-go-round for a predictably vicious, slow motion-enhanced climax. You see what I mean about the previous paragraph highlighting the film's piece de ridicule?

There will be those in the bottom-feeding world of online critics who will tell you The Crush succeeds on some dubious camp level. Don't bother. Not only does Alan Shapiro, who previously toiled in Disney's made-for-TV wing, fail to measure up to the entertainingly lurid gaslighting and dementia found in Summer Girl let alone the rabbit-stewing tension of Fatal Attraction, but The Crush is far less provocative and sexier than David Fincher's music video for Billy Idol's 1990 hit "Cradle of Love." For all her deliberate Lolita poses, Adrian emerges as another somnambulant psychotic akin to Macaulay Culkin from The Good Son. And the exceedingly passive and bland Nick is a torpid substitute for Humbert. Romanticism is evoked through another literary staple, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, both physically (a poster for the 1939 William Wyler movie adaptation) and verbally, but the contributions of first-rate cinematographer Bruce Surtees and veteran suspense composer Graeme Revell are staggeringly unambitious, tailored as they are to Shapiro's prevalent crassness.

If his autobiographical elements are to be believed, The Crush is at once embarrassing and reprehensible. Nick is a hack writer whose work is improved by the proofreading of a 14-year-old girl and who, for all his supposed snooping credentials, can't even creep inside her house without acting the fool. He seems completely devoid of moral confidence let alone common sense (these have to be voiced by Jennifer Rubin, who makes the best of her ancillary love interest role), cloddish qualities unbecoming of a mature professional and which hinder any genuine sympathy for his mounting plight. Cary Elwes' faltering American accent attests to the lack of real sophistication in Shapiro's handling of this mild-mannered victim. 

Adrian functions in a psychological vacuum just as well, nothing more or less than a vindictive brat whose fanatical devotion to Nick is, as is often the case with these movies, skin deep. Proffered as sumptuous virgin flesh ("You can taste it if you want"), Shapiro fails to establish Adrian as a social misfit from an wealthy if unhappy family and instead ratchets up the pout-lipped pathology to numbing indifference. She's a prurient sop to male vanity who makes a handy punching bag knowing you're too stupid to match wits with her. And because Elwes and Kurtwood Smith are that dense, it's naturally appalling to see Adrian taking a hit which sends her literally flying across the room.

But don't worry about a thing. Adrian gets such great psychiatric care, they don't even straitjacket her so as to prevent her from writing letters to the man whose life she tried to ruin. And there's a friendly staffer who keeps the cycle intact for the open ending. At which point, I mourned tearfully not for the direct-to-video which never was, but for the Channel Awesome episode that remains to be seen.

 

THE HAND

(R, Orion Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures, 104 mins., theatrical release date: April 24, 1981)

Oliver Stone's The Hand comes with an equally auteur-minded reputation for having aired some deep psychological sludge from the toxic waste barrel of the mind. To be fair, Stone (already having won an Oscar for his script for Midnight Express) is working from a Marc Brandel novel, The Lizard's Tail, whose bitter aftertaste was too strong not to fester into the movie adaptation. And given the choice between The Hand and The Crush, I'll take Oliver Stone over Alan Shapiro in a millisecond. He directs Michael Caine to an edgy, volatile extreme that is more grounded yet cheerfully over-the-top than Alicia Silverstone was allowed. Tinges of honest humor shake up the nastiness, especially when Caine's Jon Lansdale, a displaced comic strip creator, pounces on a lucrative teaching engagement only to wind up in California's closest equivalent to Hicksville, with its redneck bar, doltish students and woodsy cabin home raring to fall down around his ears.

Sadly, The Hand has a ridiculous plotline of its own and even shakier execution that draws more from classic creature features than contemporary baby boomer thrillers. A dispute between Lansdale and his unfulfilled wife Anne (Andrea Marcovicci) over her relocation to New York is settled prematurely by the accidental severing of Lansdale's right hand. The appendage is lost in the nearby grass field, and Lansdale finds his career takes a similar nosedive given he's no longer able to draw anymore. His burbling resentments are reciprocated by the missing hand, which goes about killing those who have angered him. These murders proceed even after Lansdale relocates to his professor gig, and come Christmastime with his family (also including Mara Hobel from Mommie Dearest as the Lansdales' daughter), he's dreading Anne's killing at either his loose hand or its mechanical replacement.

David Cronenberg made his name on a similar demonstration of biological revenge with The Brood, but Stone gets it started only to shut it down with attack sequences worthy of Ed Wood and a mean streak at the expense of fleshing out a juicy pulp premise. It's not required that a film about a repressed man's seething anger over his dippy wife's yoga fetish and his comic strip's unauthorized overhaul try to be tactful, since it does achieve a slow-burning cauldron of rage deserving of spillage. When Annie McEnroe (Beetlejuice, Howling II) as lustful local girl Stella Roche, a checkout clerk who plays teacher's pet in a fit of boredom, gets strangled by Thing for her carnal indiscretions, it's like...sheesh, the slasher movie lives. 

The sentient hand restrains itself by not wrapping its rotting fingers around the neck of Charles Fleischer as the opportunistic "collaborator," David Maddow, who essentially overthrows Lansdale with the blessing of his agent, Karen Wagner (Rosemary Murphy). This makes Stella's demise seem all the more queasy and sexist, especially given Lansdale's grudge against Anne's self-help guru, a stereotypically fruity sensitive man. Caine's egomaniacal loner operates on a level of mental darkness that doesn't mesh with the B-movie revelation that he may himself be the real killer, an expository dump which falls upon the lovely Viveca Lindfors, guest appearing as a psychiatrist and who is as welcome here as in Creepshow and The Sure Thing.

Oliver Stone sacrifices himself by playing a drunken vagrant whose laughably convulsive death scene is made worse by the lack of a zipper on the front of his hobo pants. Needless to say, this doesn't mitigate the bilious disappointment of the ensuing movie, which doesn't earn all of its male pattern paranoia. Michael Caine, for what it's worth, remains a class actor who brings measured intensity to his character and who isn't as shouty as The Hand's reputation suggests. He did more braying in the opening scenes of Deathtrap, a better film but also a more deliberately stagy one. My own memory of The Hand is inexorably tied to viewing it Joe Bob Briggs' late night cable show MonsterVision, where the drive-in critic was caught off guard by faulty censorship during Caine's most vulgar dispute between him and Andrea Marcovicci (The Stuff, Jack the Bear). What better endorsement can you give Caine's work other than the fact that the folks at TNT were so invested in Lansdale's meltdown that they let a couple of four-letter words slide? Top that, Vincent Canby!

Stone bettered himself easily once he finally got to direct Platoon (again for Orion Pictures) and Born on the Fourth of July, projects which needed an intriguing failure like The Hand and a couple of sideline gigs for Milius and De Palma to attain some gravity as well as the all-important greenlight. The Hand tries for atmosphere even during its requisite POV shots and it all leads to nothing. At least here, as opposed to The Crush, tech levels appear to have more finesse. Can you imagine an effects team including Carlo Rambaldi, Stan Winston and Tom Burman giving it the college try? James Horner on the soundtrack, Richard Marks' editing prowess and J. Michael Riva doing the production design? Bruce McGill and Tracey Walter in supporting roles? That's my idea of Hollywood catnip if there I ever imagined such a brand.

 

Fight for Your Life + Cannibal Apocalypse

FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE
(R, William Mishkin Motion Pictures, 86 mins., limited release date: Nov. 1977)

Looking back at the Video Nasties outrage via the two Severin Films DVD packages I belatedly reviewed, I find it to my eternal amusement just how seriously the watchdogs of public morale took some phenomenally low-rent, dreadful movies. Even from the clips on show in the trailer reels and documentaries, that something like Snuff could trigger extensive media pearl-clutching is boggling to my mind. It was all based on the fear of depravity and corruption in children and never about the quality of so many of these films being skid row deficient. God knows that if there were discussion of the filmmaking merits of Snuff or any handful of titles charged with obscenity, a real discussion would be held and the whole furor would be exposed for the self-righteous farce it was. The argument was never about the seams showing in these films, and similar seams in the parliamentary crackdown on Video Nasties were effectively quashed by a self-serving deference to "morality."

One of the movies I staved off watching for the longest time until those two write-ups were completed was Fight for Your Life, which is unique in the history of the DPP 72 in that it has endured as a craw-sticker since being denied cinema certification in England back in 1981. It has not been released on UK video ever since the pre-classified tapes were seized by police, and Stephen Thrower's enthusiasm for it has gone unheard in the age of DVD. In this case, as with I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left, the combination of low-rent production and down-and-dirty subject matter has awarded the film a shelf life beneficial to any cult cinema gawker in the mood for the disreputable.

But unlike Meir Zarchi's bloodthirsty "take back the night" saga of retribution nor Wes Craven's implicating if frustrating knock on Ingmar Bergman, Fight for Your Life taps a grindhouse theme wholly uncommon to its vilified brethren: racial prejudice. Though director/producer/editor Robert A. Endelson and screenwriter/associate producer Straw Weisman ladle on child endangerment and sexual assault for that extra dose of queasiness, much of the harshness pertains to wall-to-wall verbal abuse and the demeaning reinforcement of stereotype at gunpoint. Whereas Krug Stillo felt compelled to demand Phyllis Stone piss herself in Craven's flick, Jessie Lee Kane (William Sanderson), the alpha psycho of Fight for Your Life, gets cross-country mileage out of the many ways the epithet "coon" can be used against the middle-class black Turner family.

Kane's particularly obsessed with breaking down the paterfamilias, reverend Ted Turner (Robert Judd). Though he bandies about "Deputy Dawg" and "Aunt Jemima" in regards to mother (Catherine Peppers) and granny (Lela Small), Kane's ire for "Martin Luther Coon" is fiery enough to demand Ted do a Stepin Fetchit shuffle, firing off bullets at his feet in the manner of a Wild West gangster. Ted, a devout Christian who sermonizes "the meek shall inherit the earth" almost every time at the pulpit, is even brutalized with his own good book by Kane, who tests the "turn the other cheek" philosophy to its depraved extremes. Kane's hard knock life is the source of some psychologically-deep impotence, which is how Ted and Grandma Turner dish out their own spiteful retorts in the fog of Kane's bigotry. In a more polished movie, a genuine battle of wills could emerge in the way Ted is enabled to act on his primitive rage only to push his virulent captor that one step further over the edge.

The only polish Fight for Your Life receives is from the fine folks at Blue Underground, who've remastered the film to a rather distressing sheen. I got the feeling that DVD is not the ideal way to view a movie like this, which cries out for thick grain, frequent projector stutters and a rowdy crowd willing to receive the pervasive invective for its ultimate reward. From its awkwardly-looped first scene, where a pimp dutifully shakes down one of his clientele for heroin, to the show-stopping duel between Kane and Ted, facilitated by a feeble police squad who undergo their own compromising of principle, Fight for Your Life is downtown gristmill fodder all the way.

As his behavior should make obvious, Jessie Lee Kane is indeed an extremely dangerous fugitive, who takes advantage of the police truck transporting him nearly getting fender bended by cold-cocking and then shooting the officer who decides to check on him. His accomplices on the run are the Hispanic thug Chino (Daniel Faraldo) and scar-faced Asian bogeyman Ling (Peter Yoshida), and the trio make off in said pimp's ‘76 Mercury on a violence-dotted run for the border. A liquor store robbery is witnessed by Corrie Turner (Yvonne Ross), Ted's daughter, whose captivity by the trio results in the ultimate appearance of these convicts at the Turner household.

Lt. "Rulebook" Reilly (David Cargill) commandeers one of the least-interesting manhunts ever, grating against the lax local jurisdiction of Captain Hamilton (Richard A. Rubin), while Kane and friends make themselves at home under the Turners' roof until sundown. Two family friends are sacrificed in the process, done in by the hulking Ling. Karen (Bonnie Martin), the white girlfriend of slain soldier son Val Turner (Ramon Saunders), is chased off a cliff while fleeing the rapist's pursuit of Ling, who then bludgeons preteen Floyd Turner's (Reginald Blythewood) best bud and blood brother Joey (David Dewlow), who also happens to be the son of Captain Hamilton.

Perfunctory and deadening rather than unpredictable and relentless, Fight for Your Life isn't as distressing as Last House on the Left or the similar invasion terrors of Straw Dogs and The Desperate Hours. A sequence in which Kane decides to "teach a lesson" to one of the Turner women with some rope and a tree peters out sans any truly disturbing lynching correlations, thus Endleson and Weisman fall back on the gang rape of poor Corrie as the breaking point for the family. The aforementioned beating of Ted with his Bible is presented in fast-motion POV that ridiculously undercuts the brutality of the moment. And the film's narrative momentum is so hokey that when the Turners pick up knives during one moment of convenient revolt, it also comes off an inconsequential despite further aggravation of the main baddie.

Robert Judd, whose only other acting credit was in Walter Hill's Crossroads (released in the same year Judd died), is the one relative unknown performer whose ascension to vengeance is natural enough to give them film a needed edge of vérité. But the main draw of Fight for Your Life is character actor William Sanderson in his screen debut as Jessie Lee Kane. In 1982, Sanderson's career picked up steam thanks to roles in Blade Runner, Raggedy Man and on TV's Newhart, but until then he was counted on to provide hillbilly menace in films like this and David Paulsen's Savage Weekend, filmed in 1976 but shelved for three years until The Cannon Group salvaged it. Sanderson's performance is equally as rough as Judd's if not more so, and Robert Endelson doesn't capitalize on those "sad eyes," to borrow a phrase which Granny uses to taunt Kane. There's more pathos in J.F. Sebastian's silent elevator ride to doom than there is any moment Kane grouses about his lost manhood.

There's also rougher justice meted out to Krug and Co. in Craven's Last House than there is to the criminals in Fight for Your Life. By the time the tables have turned for good, one of Kane's accomplices is shot in the groin and another flies out of a window to be impaled on a shard of glass. The basic purpose of these exploitation pictures is to watch cruelty reciprocated by the victims with rabble-rousing urgency followed by stone silence, yet between the rainbow coalition of hostility indoors and the worthlessness of the cops who arrive as Corrie is plainly being raped, Fight for Your Life is the kind of nihilism which indifferently shrugs it off by saying "You get what you pay for."

CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE
(R, Eurocopfilms/Almi Cinema 5, 96 mins, U.S. theatrical release date: Sept. 18, 1981)

Find some comfort food, improbable as it may seem, in a movie called Cannibal Apocalypse. Despite its title being censoriously taboo for the British government, this isn't another indigenous Italian melee of animal snuffing, barbaric torture and "are we the real savages?" philosophy. Antonio Margheriti begins in the jungle, but takes us instead to Vietnam with a passel of stock footage that eases us into the ensuing wartime mission. Sgt. Norman Hopper (John Saxon) comes upon an ambush, replete with surprise use of plastic explosive, but blasts his way out and locates a couple of POWs, including his hometown friend from Atlanta, GA, Charlie Bukowski (Giovanni Lombardo Radice). The captive soldiers, alas, have developed a taste for human flesh, and burly black prisoner Tony Thompson (Tony King) decides to take a nibble from Hopper's outstretched hand.

Such is the recurring nightmare/flashback Hopper endures in domestic life, and things get worse once Bukowski is granted a temporary leave from psychiatric hospice and tries in vain to rendezvous with his former superior. The rebuffed veteran decides on a matinee screening of From Hell to Victory only to suffer a lip-smacking relapse while observing a couple making out, necking the young woman quite literally. Fleeing the scene, trailed by a biker gang hankering for vigilante justice, Bukowski holes up in a flea market and takes arms against the marauders. Hopper is called to negotiate Bukowski's surrender, but he and his cannibalistic malady refuse to be contained much longer.

Perhaps the purest action director in the gut-bucket genre lorded over by Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei, Margheriti tempers the grisly chaos with energetic set pieces such as the opening 'Nam  attack and Bukowski's civilian battle, humming a twisted "Yankee Doodle Dandy" as he feasts on one of the bikers. Having gotten the most bang for his buck, Margheriti suitably deploys some top-notch FX work from Giannetto De Rossi (of Fulci's Zombie and The Beyond fame) as the virus circulates, with an infected nurse locking and chomping tongues with Hopper's blood analyst and another of the rabid survivors getting a hole shotgun blasted through his stomach. The way it is filmed, the camera panning the victim's face down to the open wound and then back up again, is the most indelible money shot I've ever seen in a proudly Italian gorefest.

Margheriti also borrows from Fulci the scriptwriting services of Dardano Sacchetti (in a movie full of Anglicized credits, his is "Jimmy Gould"), who tries to incorporate some vague biological rationale for the cannibalism as well as frame Hopper's torment within concerns of betrayal on account of his wife, TV news reporter Jane (Elizabeth Turner). It seems that Dr. Phil Mendez (Ramiro Oliveros) was a former beau of Jane's, and the good doctor even goes so far as to say "You should've married me instead." A tragic story of renewed love is paid off, despite wobbly characterization that has Hopper succumbing out of nowhere to the childish advances of the teenage tart next door, Mary (Cinzia De Carolis). This tryst is meant set up something more ironic for the last reel.

At least Johns Saxon and Morghen (Mr. Radice) command the screen no matter the war zones. Saxon was vocal about his soul-crushing disappointment towards the cannibal subgenre in a documentary included on Image‘s DVD (which I ridiculously reviewed on Epinions.com once upon a time), but it doesn't show in his performance. And while I prefer Dario Argento's Tenebre, in which Saxon was a mere supporting star, Saxon is credible despite the material. Radice, however, looks the part of a boyish case of shell shock rather uncannily and acts with crazed vigor. To rightly contrast their playing styles, just watch the scene where Hopper talks Bukowski (love that literate name) into deflating a tear gas canister with urine. Radice is no stranger to Video Nasties, thanks to appearances in Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox and Ruggero Deodato's House on the Edge of the Park (he was also memorably drill killed in Fulci's City of the Living Dead, but that somehow escaped the Brits‘ attention).

Given the low-key plague scenario as well as the original Italian title being Apocalypse Domani (translation: "Apocalypse Tomorrow"), Cannibal Apocalypse tries to find some inspiration outside of George Romero, conjuring Cronenberg‘s Shivers & Rabid as well as Francis Ford Coppola. Margheriti is too pulpy a filmmaker to realize such a fascinating mash-up, but compared to Fight for Your Life and many of the sluggishly sleazy Video Nasties I'd just as soon forget, it's not a total detriment. If you want to read into it a particularly lurid translation of post-traumatic stress disorder, with electric saws grinding up human goulash in loving close-up and Saxon fitting himself back into his old Vietnam War uniform to accept his fate, you wouldn't be off-base. Personally, I embrace Cannibal Apocalypse for what it most resembles: a large pizza Margherita with double the cheese and tomato.

Evilspeak

EVILSPEAK
(Unrated, The Moreno Company, 97 mins., theatrical release date: February 26, 1982)

Satan worship and the underdog story, two great tastes that go together... Wait, that was how I started out my last review, which was of Warlock, a movie good enough to deserve the Reese's-referencing intro. Good God, I need to keep working on my Diane Franklin tribute or else I'll never get the peanut butter girl out of my system. I should be talking TerrorVision...what movie is this, again?

Ooh, boy, I'm watching Evilspeak! Or, as I like to call it, "The Computer Wore Devil's Horns." This is the 1981 movie in which Gentle Ben's playmate concocts the world's deadliest virus to get back at the noxiously sadistic students and staffers who abuse him at every turn. It's based on a story by Stephen King...er, Joseph Garofalo, but what's so familiar about watching a bullied kid pushed into a corner where his or her only salvation is the supernaturally-assisted homicide of his many tormentors? Besides, the main character's name is Stanley, and the movie proper isn't eponymous as opposed to those many genre divas with names like Carrie or Jennifer or Ruby.

Like many a young actor, the incomparable Clint Howard had a small window of time around the dawn of the eighties where he was in his early twenties and could pass himself off as high school characters. So after playing Eaglebauer, the bathroom stall entrepreneur of Allan Arkush's Rock ‘n' Roll High School, he was cast as a teenager in Eric Weston's Evilspeak, specifically an orphaned outcast named Stanley Coopersmith. A puppy-faced charity case enrolled at West Andover Military Academy, the odds are clearly stacked against Stanley's sad psyche from the start. The alpha male clique led by Bubba (Don Stark, Donna's daddy from That ‘70s Show) is tempted to sabotage the weak Coopersmith's pleas for affirmative action on the soccer field by the coach himself. Not even the sympathetic black friend Kowalski (Haywood "Dwayne" Nelson) proves to be much of a buffer. The brutish headmaster Colonel Kincaid (Charles Tyner) berates and paddles whatever discipline he can into Stanley, and the kid's detention duties are to clean up the chapel's dingy basement under the supervision of an alcoholic pederast named Sarge (old reliable R.G. Armstrong).

Is it any wonder that Stanley gravitates toward the tutelage of the ancient occultist Lorenzo Esteban (Richard "Bull" Moll!), an excommunicated Spanish monk who once deduced that "Satan is God" but whose portrait still graces the church walls?! Stanley uses his computer to translate the Latin passages of Esteban's journal, but soon his wicked spirit has been manifested fully into the mainframe (Windows Update can bite me). Stanley tries to perform his own Black Mass ceremonies, but is oblivious to the flashing screen demanding he procure a human sacrifice. Circumstances beyond his control turn out to be in Stanley's favor: first the Sarge has his neck snapped by the possessed PC, and then Colonel Kincaid's frumpy/foxy secretary, Miss Friedemeyer (Lynn Hancock), who confiscated the book with the sole purpose of prying the Pentagram off its front cover, is attacked in the shower by bloodthirsty boars. The tome conveniently teleports itself back to its rightful owner.

Bubba's goon squad inevitably go past the breaking point in their traumatizing of Stanley ("Arf arf..."), and on the eve of the big homecoming game, "Cooperdick" finally succeeds in raising Hell. Except for that gonzo 10-minute stretch of Reckoning Day retaliation, where our levitating loser takes delight in decapitating the Colonel with a broadsword, those evil pigs make an encore and the whole church bursts into a glorious inferno, Evilspeak is just as programmatic and dimwitted as you'd anticipate.

What‘s most damning about Evilspeak is that it's just so boringly base until its wad-shooting finale. Despite a checkered cast of TV icons and character actors which also includes Claude Earl Jones as the passive aggressive coach, Lenny "Luca Brasi" Montana as the merciful chef and Joe Cortese as the Reverend Jameson, there is too much misery for the sake of misery. Much like Jennifer and definitely unlike Carrie, the bullies in this film are charisma vacuums built for maximum contempt, cruel ciphers whose bile-inducing detestability is clearly meant to push the viewer over to Stanley's (and by extension the Devil's) side. There's something potentially mischievous about this blatant manipulation, especially when Jameson's pious sermon built around a sports analogy cross-cuts with Stanley on the verge of his breakthrough/breakdown. But co-writer and director Eric Weston has staged the earlier proceedings way too po-faced and drearily for it to make much difference. If Brian De Palma is fiendishly campy, Eric Weston is flat corny, the single worst attitude an exploitation filmmaker can exhibit.

It takes a leaden touch to make the shameless synergy of cheesecake and sausage factories that is Miss Friedemeyer's bare-naked demise by carnivorous hogs complete and utter tedium. You can claim in defense that Weston's devotion to establishing Stanley's hopeless plight be taken as slow-burn, but the moments of straight schlock such as this stop the film cold and only add to the sense of cynicism. All of the characterizations are purely one-note, even the Methodically gangly Clint Howard in the first lead role of his kooky career, so much so that your defenses actually strengthen rather than crumble.

Like My Bodyguard as re-written by Anton LaVey, only much less compelling, Evilspeak did manage to court some controversy when it was classified as a Video Nasty in England thanks to an uncut print distributed on tape without ratings board certification. In America, the film was clumsily censored so it would pass with an MPAA-approved R, never to be seen in any kind of restored form until Anchor Bay issued a composite print on DVD in 2004. The finale itself is rather cheesy as far as FX work goes, with the many slashed heads resembling stuffed fruit or pointy sculptures, but at least Weston finally delivers those long-awaited thrills. The eeriest image involves a Christ figure's wrist pulsing to life, the embedded nail loosing itself to fire directly into Reverend Jameson's forehead. Also worthwhile are some effectively ominous computer graphics and subterranean set design. And Clint Howard gives a painfully earnest performance, the best this film has to offer, which makes up for in conviction what it lacks in plausibility.

However, that Anchor Bay disc is out of print, so the home video rights moved over to Code Red Entertainment, a company sadly known at this point for becoming a money pit. If you really want to experience Evilspeak, hold off until Shout! Factory issues it on Blu-Ray in the spring of 2014. At least an eighth of the movie will definitely be worth the wait.