The Killing Kind

THE KILLING KIND

(R, Media Cinema Group, 95 mins., theatrical release date: April 7, 1973)

A singularly nasty if hopelessly sketchy revenge drama, Curtis Harrington's The Killing Kind takes the loss of innocence to some unpleasant extremes. It begins with 19-year-old Terry Lambert (John Savage) bullied into sex with 17-year-old Tina Moore (Sue Bernard) under a beach pier. Terry's subsequent incarceration shifts the mantle of victimhood from the assaulted girl to the reluctant rapist, who is released from prison two years later, reduced to an impotent creep goaded on by the eccentric older women in his orbit. Resentful and disturbed enough to find pleasure in demonstrating the proper use of a mousetrap, Terry escapes from the smothering bosom of his mom, Thelma (Ann Sothern), to seek murderous retribution against his female oppressors. But when will he stop? Can he stop? And which of the ladies in his life are going to finally wise up and stop him?

If Psycho IV: The Beginning had been a grindhouse programmer from the early 1970s, it would certainly resemble The Killing Kind. Actually, there are some ace cards in Harrington's deck that Mick Garris wasn't dealt, namely the gauzy but accomplished cinematography from Mario Tosi (Carrie, The Stunt Man) and a liberated performance from Ann Sothern, whose over-the-top hag routine gives way to a wrenching isolation that, bizarrely enough, provides the most well-rounded characterization in the cast.

Like Norma Bates herself, Thelma Lambert is incestuously possessive of her caged-up son, quick to denigrate more age-appropriate contenders for his affection as "tacky whores," one and all. And the script by Tony Crechales and George Edwards indulges her spiteful outlook. But they don't stop at the programmatic Puritanism which came to define the post-Psycho slasher boom. When Terry tries to reactivate his libido by masturbating to a porno magazine, he is foiled by the passive gaze of Tina, whom he immediately telephones while she is in bed with another stud. Terry learns that he is likely the last person she remembers from that gangbang under the pier; he can't even get the base satisfaction of an obscene phone call. Was Terry the only one Tina sought to prosecute because he didn't want to have sex with her, or because he failed to perform under pressure?

"It must be wonderful...being raped," goes an actual line of seduction aimed at Terry from Louise (Luana Anders), the repressed librarian who witnesses his violent behavior in the presence of aspiring model Lori (Cindy Williams). Stuck caring for her senile father (Peter Brocco) so as to avoid being lonely, Louise drunkenly admits her darkest secrets to Terry but is rebuffed for her honesty. The next day, when Terry viciously rejects her studious apology, she is ennobled to tell a similarly insulting truth in regards to his musical inability. Luana Anders, an underground actress who was tight with Jack Nicholson and Sally Kellerman, exudes such a strange sexiness in her supporting performance that I wished Louise would've dominated the last act more so than Lori and Thelma.

If Louise were more integral to the story at hand, The Killing Kind could've emerged as subversively kinky in its psychosexuality. Her words combined with Tina's actions imbue the film with a daringly pro-rape bent, but the film is ultimately too episodic and slavishly devotional to Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Aldrich to really develop a brazen identity of its own. Though Curtis Harrington means to pull us inside Terry's mind, he alternates camp and sadism with confident if still jarring results. A nightmare sequence in which in Terry finds his fully grown self back in the crib, with Thelma's aging tenants going from awestruck to condemning as Tina is thrown into the mix, is like failed comic relief to relieve us from Terry's attempt to strangle his mother during a neck massage.

These moments are grounded in Thelma's incessant doting over the son whom she still believes is essentially a "good boy," which is consistent as far as she goes. It's all bottomless glasses of chocolate milk and snapping photographs of her boy at every opportunity, even in the shower. But with Louise almost completely absent from the moment Terry smashes his guitar, the ancillary character of Lori has to defy common sense by coming onto the very person who nearly killed her in the pool and slashed her underwear before inspecting her broken shower head. It's hard to reconcile the pretentious and the sordid, and The Killing Kind is another testament to that dichotomy.

The real MVP of The Killing Kind, more so than rising stars John Savage (The Deer Hunter) and Cindy Williams (American Graffiti), is Ann Sothern, fresh off a string of midlife triumphs opposite Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda. She sells the brassiness, codependency and shame which Thelma progresses through. In spite of the faulty screenwriting and faded glamour, the sexagenarian Sothern allows Harrington the prickly poignancy he's constantly shooting for. It's Sothern who awards The Killing Kind its semi-respectable pantheon in the field of unjustly obscure early ‘70s thrillers, which is more than can be said for Harrington's later leading ladies, be they the talented Piper (Ruby) Laurie or the tarnished Sylvia (Mata Hari) Kristel.

But those two films had also had Dimension Pictures and Cannon Films as their distributors, so Harrington's lesser efforts at least were run through quite a few projectors in their day. The Killing Kind wasn't so lucky; it was treated as a tax deduction for Media Cinema Group, provided it only appeared in a bare minimum of theaters. And since no record was kept of the places where it played, Harrington couldn't court wider distribution from any other potential takers. The movie had numerous VHS releases and pay-TV saturation (cf: the Cinemax advert linked at the end), yet it was never released on DVD until after Harrington's death in May 2007.

That previous Dark Sky Films acquisition has now been supplanted by Vinegar Syndrome. Presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, there are handy screencaps at Mondo Digital of both the DS and VS transfers. The latter's been scanned in 2k from the original negative, and it bests that old anamorphic DVD in all regards.  Not only is there more detail on all corners of the frame, but the film's naturally grainy and glazed look is preserved with less cosmetic chicanery. Skin tones, costumes and outdoor foliage all appear with top-tier clarity and far less waxiness. Black levels and shadow details strike a proper balance given the constant darkness in which Terry acts out his malevolence. There isn't a wealth of distracting print damage, though a film of this vintage has its jittery moments. The color palette on display is superb throughout. Audio is strictly DTS-HD MA in mono, and it surpasses the source's limitations, but there is an option to listen to Andrew Belling's isolated score in Dolby Digital 2.0.

The bonus features are not as screen-specific as one would expect, instead taking a broader and more anecdotal perspective towards Curtis Harrington himself. In addition to a 22-minute interview with the director ported over from the Dark Sky disc, the 24-minute "Harrington on Harrington" featurette directed by Jeffrey Schwarz and Tyler Hubby is preserved on the Vinegar Syndrome release. Combined, these oft-overlapping interviews do give you a sense of Harrington's bizarre career trajectory, from humble beginnings to courting Kenneth Anger all the way to Paris to his renown in both the horror cinema and melodramatic TV fields. He touches on the double-dealings which caused The Killing Kind to go down in a blaze of obscurity, but both of these bonuses are more about the journeyman and his path, with a larger discussion of his work as a whole and the industry connections he made.

Two people who had their own connections are the Davids Del Valle and DeCoteau, the former being the recognized raconteur of fringe cinema and the latter being the exploitation workhorse who is a Vinegar Syndrome staple thanks to Nightmare Sisters and Murder Weapon/Deadly Embrace. Del Valle was a long-time friend of Harrington (introduced thanks to Robert Bloch and Forry Ackerman) and is thus able to be upfront about his unpredictable personality as demonstrated on this joint "historical" audio commentary track. He also appears to have worked as an uncredited production assistant on The Killing Kind, but the esteemed film historian rarely dishes any trivia endemic to the feature presentation. DeCoteau, meanwhile, was more serendipitous in his meeting Harrington (via Fred Olen Ray via producer/screenwriter George Stevens) and Ann Sothern. It was under the wing of Killing Kind production manager Sal Grasso, a.k.a. Steve Scott, Sal's nome de porn (both adult movies and pseudonyms would become crucial to DeCoteau's own resume), that DeCoteau was hired as Sothern's driver and assistant. 

What you get from this combination is a lot of frequently amusing, occasionally hilarious stories which do justice to how ostentatious and outspoken both director and star could be. DeCoteau crashed his car at the behest of Sothern en route to a restaurant; Del Valle remembers Harrington's feisty response to a rough cut of Top Gun pre-Kelly McGillis. There are also laughs at the participants' expense. When Ruth Roman appears in The Killing Kind as Terry's failed defense attorney, former Corman employee DeCoteau recalls the time he sent Roman's agent the script for Galaxy of Terror (specifically, the role which went to Grace Zabriskie) convinced she'd take any job if she was willing to appear in, say, Day of the Animals. Granted, both are catty camp connoisseurs of the highest order, so they go back to 1974's Impulse, which in which she starred opposite William Shatner in another script from Killing Kind story writer Tony Crechales, to marvel at Roman's schlock discrimination.

Del Valle and DeCoteau are still a hoot, and have been teamed up many times in the past so that their chemistry is shatterproof. But still, I can see some point where they could ease back on the six-degrees associations and get down to maybe talking about behind-the-scenes facts related to The Killing Kind. The IMDb page includes several interesting notes not found in Harrington's interviews nor David & David's commentary: the most fascinating was a scene that was cut to Harrington's dismay because producer/co-writer George Edwards was being pressured by a distributor. In it, Terry is further tormented by the sight of Tina having carefree sex that belies whatever "trauma" she experienced that day on the beach. Again, it has to be said that The Killing Kind has a charge to it whenever it concentrates, as cruel and thorny as it becomes, on the shattered sexuality Terry fails to recover. That combined with Ann Sothern's work makes this one of the better Vinegar Syndrome catalog titles I have seen recently, and I can keep this pilgrimage up for days.

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 - PARABELLUM
(R, Lionsgate/Summit Entertainment, 130 mins., theatrical release date: May 17, 2019)

Not only does Keanu Reeves' pistol-packing "boogeyman" bleed throughout the course of JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 - PARABELLUM, but the tagline could have read "More of the night he couldn't come home." In the original John Wick, the sanctity of his abode was violated by Slavic thugs and resulted in the stolen car and murdered dog that brought him back to the gruesome lifestyle he worked to retire from. Chapter 2 simply burned that shelter to ash thanks to the Italian schemer who demanded Wick honor a blood debt to usher him into the assassin's version of the Round Table. This loyalty was rewarded with a $7 million price tag for Wick's corpse, and as the series picks up where we left off, that bounty has doubled now that Wick has been declared excommunicado, leaving him nowhere to hide and with more enemies than allies, to put it lightly.

Frantically surveying the final 30 minutes of his running start, and being treated for a puncture wound as the last seconds are counted down (the doctor played by none other than the Keymaker himself, Randall Duk Kim), Wick gives chase during the first act of Chapter 3, marshalling whatever reluctant resources at his disposal into guiding him towards making amends for his life-threatening transgression. The High Table, that aforementioned shadow committee whom Wick defied in his murder of Santino D'Antonio on consecrated ground, has sent an operative known as the Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon) to ensure those who abetted Wick swear their fealty anew or pay the gory consequences. The life of one dog doesn't amount to a hill of pencils in this universe.

Series director Chad Stahelski inherits the thankless task of expanding the most meat-and-potatoes motive for revenge into a full-blown mythology where for every 25 kill shots to the head, there's a solemn vow or an existential crisis. John Wick's laser focus and five-star survival instincts, reflected in the giddy ultra-violence that has been packing them in, is bound to be recalibrated once again at the cliffhanger ending of Parabellum, which really does prepare you for war.

The NYC Continental, the scene of Wick's disgrace, becomes ever more the battleground this time, with manager/mentor Winston (Ian McShane) and concierge Charon (Lance Reddick) up to their torsos in spilled blood. So is Wick, who calls upon the Russian ballet instructor/mercenary trainer (Anjelica Huston) of his orphaned youth ("I am Jardani Jovonovich") to tear his "ticket" to Casablanca, where he seeks further assistance from Sofia (Halle Berry), manager of the Moroccan branch of the Continental. Both Sofia and the Director are amusingly blunt about the danger Wick's presence will surely invite, represented by the Adjudicator's hired cadre of sushi-serving shinobi (a couple of whom are veterans of Gareth Evans' The Raid). Their leader, Zero (Mark Dacascos) is starstruck at the opportunity to combat Wick and proves a more formidable foe than any of the brats Wick has perforated previously.

There was a time before Point Break erected his action hero stature in earnest where Keanu Reeves' prime talent was for comedy (the Bill & Ted adventures, Parenthood, I Love You to Death). The John Wick persona not only refines what made the 54-year-old actor such a draw in the Speeds and Matrices of yore, but has allowed Reeves to channel his droll timing into a Zen-like sarcasm. When Wick makes his initial errand at the New York Public Library, an ogre (Boban Marjanovic) is there to collect early on that $14 million contract. It's a lot of money, the giant reasons, but "not if you can't spend it," Wick retorts. The ensuing scuffle is as much a knockout for the viewer, with Wick using one of the many found weapons at his disposal, a book of Russian fairy tales which doubles as his storage locker, to make his towering foe practically eat his words.

Stahelski, Reeves' ex-stunt double made good, alternates confrontations like these, boffo and balletic simultaneously, and graced with the proper amounts of wry humor, with plenty of screw-turning surprises. At one point, Wick finds himself up against the High Table's very own SWAT team, all of them armored to a tee, which puts welcome strain on Wick's God mode-style impenetrability. In a reprise of the shopping montage from Chapter 2 ("I need something robust...precise"), Wick has to march back to the weapons room and upgrade his arsenal with hilarious frustration. Another spin on the second film has the museum installation showdown, previously involving Mr. D'Antonio, moved to a hall of glass panels and crystal skull displays, which ups the ante on an old action movie chestnut in a nervously rousing style.

This is where the final confrontation occurs between Wick and Zero, and it has to be said that Mark Dacascos, the Iron Chef who was once a leading man of martial arts vehicles in the days when the late Brandon Lee was similarly poised for stardom, reminds me of all the fine qualities that Lee demonstrated in his tragically short career. There is a boyish enthusiasm and elation in his scenes with Wick, including one of those uncomfortably silent truces between professionals itching to beat each other to a pulp (cf. Common's Cassian and Wick demonstrating their "professional courtesy"). The way Dacascos breaks the ice in that moment is priceless. And he matches Wick's never-say-die prowess with every particle of his being.

Laurence Fishburne, parodying Morpheus as a gloating pigeon whisperer, returns as the Bowery King, and without giving anything away, he's like the upscale Winston in he refuses to give up his turf without a self-righteous but sassy vengeance. Anjelica Huston, who has drawn flak for asking that her golden years allow her more dignified roles than that of sitcom-style geriatrics, makes the most of her snarling cameo as The Director, and in much the same way that Ian McShane (excellent, it should go without saying) wrings the right amount of subtle cockiness in the way he says "Enjoy your stay at the Continental," there is a recurring line throughout Parabellum about service that are like verbal bullets the way Huston spits them out. Halle Berry is in prime form, too, freshly adrenalized and endearingly surly as the tragic hotel proprietor who shares Wick's fondness for dogs. In Sofia's case, her best friends are two Belgian Malinois who defy the odds to turn junkyard nasty after a pivotal interrogation.

The union of star and director, however, remains a tailor's dream. Keanu Reeves, the once and future Wyld Stallyn, continues to step up his game and throw himself into a new variety of mano a mano overkill. Stahelski's continued attention to unbroken shots and spatial detail, which is where you'll once again find the projected image of Buster Keaton, brings urgency to even the most incredulous of circumstances. The Cannon films of the ‘80s which touted Bronson and Norris never once had their He-Men switch to riding side saddle in Manhattan traffic to get that perfect aim, nor were they blessed with directors as inventive as Stahelski. His style is a Cuisinart of at least 10 feverishly adored pulp filmmakers, from Walter Hill and John Carpenter to John Woo and Kinji Fukasaku, but with its own sardonic, soulful personality. Granted, its two-hour length does causes one to suggest further tightness, yet Reeves' charisma and Stahelski's color ensures perpetual investment, excess and even pleasure. Wick breaks into an antique shop in a futile attempt at coveting firepower, but ends up making human pincushions in a frenetic knife fight that awaits to be topped.

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum expands upon the brutal truth that John Wick may thinking, yeah, he's back, but that the consequences have effectively cost him any true peace until the entire system of safe havens and bureaucrats and top-ranking mobsters consumes itself whole. When he finally gets his meeting with the Elder (Said Taghmaoui) out in the Moroccan desert, he fights to reaffirm his life for love, but both his sacrificial offering and the task assigned to him push him further into the mythology of John Wick, the nightmare vision of the criminal overworld (I don‘t call it underworld because of that climax), and away from the man he was just weeks earlier. Keanu Reeves' face is that of a samurai warrior lost at the bottom of the pond he got sucked into. As a matter of fact, John Wick truly IS the boogeyman. Here's hoping Stahelski and Reeves carry on like they do until Wick's reckoning day.

(If you liked this take on John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, and have the means to support further reviews that would also benefit me in a time of need, please donate via the PayPal button or through this GoFundMe campaign that is dedicated to the memory of Gertrude Bishop, August 23, 1934-May 2, 2019)
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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.

 

American Nightmare + Visiting Hours

AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
(R. Pan-Canadian Film Distributors, 88 mins., Canadian release date: Mar. 8, 1983)

VISITING HOURS
(R, 20th Century Fox, 105 mins., U.S. theatrical release date: May 28, 1982)

I think it's aboot time I tackled some early 1980s Canuxploitation, including one which was a certified Video Nasty. And they do have a few things in common, particularly the presence of both Michael Ironside, the balding, scowling king amongst Canadian B-actors, and Lenore Zann, who managed to survive a career in trashy thrillers with ample amounts of voiceover work and Democratic representation for the government of Nova Scotia. There's also a lot of women being threatened with knives, if that happens to floot your boot.

If you remember that Black Christmas was a North American (read: north of the American border) production way before Halloween and Friday the 13th, then it becomes less peculiar that the slasher boom that was birthed by Carpenter and Cunningham was dotted by flicks which wore their maple leaves on their sleeve. My Bloody Valentine is at the top of my list, and David Cronenberg was undoubtedly a rising talent in the field. And then there was Paul Lynch, who was inspired by Halloween producer Irwin Yablans to make his own festive murder mystery with Laurie Strode herself in the cast, given that she was shooting Terror Train concurrently.

The result was Prom Night, the Canadian horror blockbuster of 1980 and the lynchpin for Paul Lynch's subsequent career as not only director, but also as a producer. So in addition to helming 1982's Humongous, Lynch financed American Nightmare in 1981 with Anthony Kramreither, producer of Humongous, to the sum of CAD $200,000. The film's producer, Ray Sager, was Lynch's assistant director on Humgongous and many of the other big Canadian horror films at the time, including Terror Train and My Bloody Valentine. Its screenwriter, John Sheppard, would be employed by Lynch again when it came time for Olivia d'Abo vehicles Bullies, featuring Bernie Coulson from The Accused, and Flying, which starred some kid who was in a lot of forgotten Canadian films from the mid-‘80s. I think his name was...Keanu?(!)

Composer Paul Zaza, the workhorse that he was, tinkled this out between My Bloody Valentine and whatever Bob Clark project he'd go on to score. And in addition to Ironside and Zann, I noticed the rapist from Humongous, Page "The Hitchhiker" Fletcher, playing Zann's moralist fiancé who gets interrogated by Ironside at the moment his girlfriend is prime killer bait. American Nightmare, which is often trumpeted as a Canadian giallo for those in the know, is an exploitation film whose topic is essentially exploitation. When the brother of a missing 18-year-old prostitute seeks police assistance, Sgt. Frank Skylar (Ironside) decides to let her closest friends die without any hope for protection. When said hooker's closest friend tries out for a hostess gig on a fundraising telethon, the producer demands she drop her skirt and snap off her blouse. And the truth of the girl's disappearance involves so many skeletons in the family closet that one of the more repulsive is preserved on Betamax.

The opening scene leaves us no doubt that Tanya Kelly (Alexandra Paul: Christine, Baywatch) the street name of teenage runaway Isabelle Blake, was brutally murdered by her last client despite a phone call warning her to get the hell out. So despite the Hardcore similarities when Eric (Lawrence S. Day: How Sleep the Brave) comes investigating based on a frightened letter from his estranged sister, this isn't Schrader. Tanya's slayer conveniently stalks about her squalid, graffiti-strewn apartment waiting to pick off her roommates as they return home from the strip joint they all perform at, the Club 2000. The cops are hardly concerned with the girls' safety, preferring to see them as the dregs of society, so they're easy pickings. Even the friendly transvestite next door, Dolly (Larry Aubrey: The Vindicator), inadvertently helps by not only leading the killer to the strippers' place of employment, but returning to the apartment even after one girl has been murdered there and the heroine, Louise Harmon (Lora Staley: Risky Business, Summer School), has fled after discovering the killer broke into Dolly's own room.

Eric, taking time off from his famous lot as pianist, comes to Louise for answers regarding his sister, but they are resentful of each other to melodramatically defensive extremes. Louise is such a hardened cynic, she blows off the fact that Tanya/Isabelle has been missing for 48 hours by saying "They come and they go." She assumes the blandly concerned Eric is another prudish scold and indignantly blows him off. When he tries to reconcile following the framed-as-suicide murder of Andrea (Claudia Udy: Joy), it's Eric who gets offended by Louise's decision to audition for his father Hamilton Grant's (Tom Harvey: Strange Brew, Scanners II: The New Order) telethon. Mr. Grant runs a charity program for needy children called Uni-Save, yet drove both Eric and Isabelle out of their childhood home.

Such a pussycat is Eric that he has to say he's sorry to Louise twice ("You come to a funeral to apologize?"). It isn't until Eric rips a mugger's ear off in self-defense that they both cop to feeling scared. Louise even treats him to one of her routines at the Club 2000 as well as something much better than a lap dance in a motel room. Now Eric has the sack to confront Tanya's hotheaded pimp, Fixer (Michael Copeman: The Fly, Gnaw: Food of the Gods II), for possession of the videocassette revealing what became of his sister that the killer is trying so viciously to conceal.

American Nightmare is the proto-Stripped to Kill, developing an endangered community of erotic dancers including a topless juggler as well as Lenore Zann's memorable Tina, who straddles a pitchfork as she absorbs the leery energy of the red lights. Zann, it has to be said, may have beaten Amanda Wyss to the punch as a blonde damsel-in-distress. The movie threatens to establish her as the female star by offering us an intimate argument with Page Fletcher's Mark, who hopes to marry her out of this seedy environment. Louise doesn't factor until the first scene in the ladies' dressing room, and even then she seems like an ancillary character. Zann has a tremendously fragility on her face when she scrambles for eyeshadow, ignoring Mark's further points of lovesick contention. And Tina's showdown with the killer in the empty bar, set to gleefully taunting whispers as she pops the safety corks off her stage prop, is easily the film's sterling moment.

Lenore Zann gives the film's most sensuous, compelling performance. It's no surprise director Don McBrearty (Coming Out Alive) recycles her devil-may-care stage show for a brief reprise once he's exhausted all other avenues for T&A. Second best is Larry Aubrey's Dolly, who play-acts as one of the girls without going the full monty and whose panic is the least pharmaceutically-induced and the most endearingly humorous. Lora Staley is charismatic enough, but poor Lawrence Day (not to be confused with Lawrence Dane) dredges up memories of Scanners' lead Stephen Lack in that all of his screen presence is contained within his eyes. As for the eternal Darryl Revok, "Mike" Ironside, he cuts his dependably imposing swath largely because the make-up crew have left untouched that blister-like scar above his left cheek. Playing the insensitive if gritty detective without that fanatical menace, Ironside doesn't steamroll over the rampant sleaziness of the rest of the film. 

American Nightmare was shot on 16mm in late 1981 but didn't surface on the Toronto streets where it was filmed until March of 1983. Its U.S. release the following year was straight to video via Media Home Entertainment. Michael Ironside didn't get to capitalize on his Scanners infamy until a full 16 months later when Visiting Hours premiered theatrically with major distribution clout from 20th Century Fox. By that point in 1982, a Canadian import called Porky's became the studio's biggest success story and, as Roger Ebert once put it, the era of the "Dead Teenager Movie" gave way to the "Horny Teenager Movie," equally low-rent and just as heavily criticized for sexism but with different aims.

Produced by the same team behind Cronenberg's splodey-head sleeper, Filmplan's Pierre David and Victor Solnicki, Visiting Hours corralled Oscar-winner Lee Grant (Shampoo) and returning Star Trek captain William Shatner and marked the English language debut of French-Canadian director Jean-Claude Lord (The Vindicator, Mindfield). It was part of a brief blip of body count films located in hospitals (Halloween II, X-Ray) and an even bigger trend involving adult female celebrities in jeopardy (The Howling, The Fan, The Seduction). But what gave Visiting Hours its everlasting charge is the fact that it was seized by those limey gatekeepers of morality and tacked onto that notorious list of 72 allegedly obscene Video Nasties.

Turns out they just didn't like protracted scenes of knives being swept up against the half-naked bodies of pretty girls. Go figure.

Grant plays Deborah Ballin, a firebrand telejournalist who is rebuking speculation that a woman who shot her husband in self-defense faked her own tokens of domestic abuse. Shatner is her pushover producer and lover, Gary Baylor, who considers pulling the heated debate to avoid a libel suit. And Ironside's Colt Hawker apparently works as the studio's janitor and is not too pleased with Ballin's crusade for women's rights. Ballin comes home to find Hawker dressed in her jewelry and mad with homicidal rage, having already slaughtered her maid. He delivers one nasty knife wound and jettisons her out of a dumbwaiter, but she is saved when Baylor arrives to find her crawling on the floor in agony.

Thus sets up, to quote Frank Cotton from Hellraiser, "the cat-and-mouse shit" to come, with Colt Hawker taking time out from his fitful pursuit of bedridden Deborah Ballin, who is awaiting surgery in time for her follow-up interview concerning the battered wife on trial, to assault Lenore Zann's frizzy-haired Lisa after picking her up at a diner. He also endeavors to menace overworked nurse and single mother of two Sheila Munroe (Linda Purl: Crazy Mama, The High Country), who catches Hawker exiting the building after claiming two more victims, including an old woman whom the resentful psycho subjects to first-degree euthanasia, snapping photographs of her asphyxiating face. Screenwriter Brian Taggert throws in plenty of pat psychology for the burly misfit, from framed letters spewing vitriol at every minority to an ignoble father who was scalded with hot oil when Hawker was a boy and now lives in a rest home.

American Nightmare and Visiting Hours are indeed similar films not just in the pairing of Michael Ironside and Lenore Zann. They are both painfully outside attempts at sensationalizing social pathologies, courting those patrons of the arts who smuggle liquor in their raincoats whilst catcalling the nubile actresses on screen and cheering on their vile tormentor. They aren't developed enough for subversion or lingering criticism, kind of like the race-baiting Fight for Your Life. American Nightmare threatens to undo itself with every strip club interlude Don McBrearty serves up, but it does have small moments like the ones with Zann's Tina and Dolly the scared transvestite that humanize the deviant casualties. And the murder mystery plot outline affords it curiosity and anticipation.

Visiting Hours, meanwhile, is like a glossy rehash of Nightmares in a Damaged Brain with elements of Peeping Tom and The Fan mixed in. The post-Psycho swath of disturbed loner bloodbaths seem to run together if you dwell on them too much, and whatever earnestness the film conveys about "repressed hostility" (which another pundit talks about within ear's reach of the antagonist) is moot given that every woman Colt confronts is reduced to whimpering docility by his sick, self-righteous vengeance. Michael Ironside is a fine actor who can freshen up a routine villain with some welcome sarcasm (Watchers) or playfulness (Total Recall) or guilt (Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II) or glazed hamminess (Destiny to Order). But with one fleeting exception where he cracks in the hospital's basement, Colt Hawker is basically a human bogeyman, the Shape of Halloween II without the costume, allowed unfettered powers of access and infiltration not limited to Ms. Ballin's operating room. Nobody at all can deduce his overwhelming presence save for Lisa, who trashes Hawker's room in retaliation and notices Sheila's face enshrined in his closet hit list.

Hawker's methodical prowess, epitomized by his self-mutilating last ditch effort to gain entry into the hospital, is stretched to the breaking point even further thanks not only to incessant stretches of pronounced victims creeping along unsafe houses, but also the bumbling way in which he fails to finish off Ms. Ballin every time he gets into that hospital. It's worth noting that he fails to kill Ballin, Lisa and even Sheila because these combined blunders drag the movie out to 105 minutes, during which time Taggert offers a few inconsequential lambs Hawker does successfully butcher, such as a meddling nurse and a gabby fellow with gallstones (R.I.P. Harvey Atkin: Meatballs, Funeral Home).

American Nightmare, for as shoddy as it gets, has the courage of its guttural convictions, whereas Jean-Claude Lord and the name cast he shepherds are a professional lot who seem to be squandering their talents. Lee Grant becomes more shrill with every scene, William Shatner seems like a complete and total afterthought and Michael Ironside coasts on his remorseless death‘s head glare. Lord is a more competent cameraman than either Rick Rosenthal or Boaz Davidson, but his occasionally tense set pieces would've had more power were they not attached to Brian Taggert's redundant, rudderless script. Taggert would go on to write the cheeky man vs. rat flick Of Unknown Origin, which was far more assured and also boasted richer contributions from director George Pan Cosmatos and star Peter Weller, but he's also responsible for Poltergeist III, another by-the-numbers spook show ripe with nefarious plot holes and teeth-rattling repetitions of character's names ("Carol Anne! Carol Anne!") where a decent story should've been.

Putting aside its memorable one-sheet poster art, Visiting Hours should itself be hooked up to a life support machine. And after having reviewed it twice in my lifetime ("Lenore Zaan?" "Video Nasties last?" Jay-sus!), I suggest we pull the plug.

Deathtrap

DEATHTRAP
(PG, Warner Bros., 116 mins., theatrical release date: March 19, 1982)

Sidney Lumet's Deathtrap, based on the long-running Ira Levin twister which premiered on stage in 1978, plays to win and then plays all over again, becoming more playful with each curveball. It's a blatant pun to hang an opening statement on, but Levin and the characters he wrote kid knowingly with the impetus of creation, the huffing motivation and the dramaturgic glossary of the pre-production stage. And Lumet, whose Christie adaptation Murder on the Orient Express will be getting revamped by Kenneth Branagh, has relinquished his grittier side (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead) for sprightly humor and potboiler suspense. The main character, an over-the-hill author of theatrical murder mysteries (with names such as "Gunpoint," "In for the Kill" and "The Murder Game") realizes while clutching his own outside goldmine: "Even a gifted director couldn't hurt it." One can easily picture Lumet coming to the same epiphany with Levin's sure thing, rewritten for the screen by Jay Presson Allen.

Sidney Bruhl (Michael Caine) could use such a windfall more than Sidney Lumet. "Murder Most Fair" has just opened appallingly at the Music Box, his fourth successive flop and the catalyst for derisive jeers from producer Seymour Starger (Joe Silver) and the theater critics on TV, among them Joel Siegel and Jeffery Lyons. "I'm doing the only sensible thing," Bruhl screams at his wife Myra (Dyan Cannon), who's resting up back at his Easthampton abode. "I'm getting pissed!" But he gets too soused and misses the train station, reaching the end of the line at Montauk ("Bloody symbolic"). Further humiliating him is the unimpeachable first draft of a play called "Deathtrap," written and sent by one Clifford Anderson, who attended Bruhl's most recent college seminar. Estimating its value at up to $5,000,000 (not including T-shirt sales), Bruhl looks at the antique mace on his wall mount of weapons, stage props and genuine articles both, and contemplates making a killing.

The purse-clutching Myra, whose angina has set her constantly on edge, is catatonic at how serious Bruhl is about the murder plot. He calls Anderson up and invites him over under the pretext of collaboration and counseling. When Bruhl goes to pick up the first-time protégé, it's not a "glandular case" or a stammering dolt he encounters, but a handsome boy scout. Anderson (Christopher Reeve), taking along the proof of his beckoning career's work, coyly rebukes Bruhl's egomaniacal assistance, all the while Myra raises a voice of frazzled conscience. Alas, Bruhl bluffs his way into one-upping Anderson by proclaiming he's got two hot new projects. One of which is based on Harry Houdini, the better for Bruhl to entice Anderson to try on "trick" handcuffs.

Welcome to Act I of Ira Levin's (filmed) play, the 40-minute set-up for ever more chicanery fraught with suspicion, envy and homicidal urges. Deathtrap continues the battle of wills between Anderson and Bruhl, but what happens is far too eccentric and witty to dictate in review form. 35 years later, it is fairly known that a chaste smooch between Caine and Reeve appalled straight audiences, inspiring novelty musician Tom Smith to claim that "Two Guys Kissin' (Ruined My Life)." Mad Magazine ridiculed the film in their October 1982 issue, and Dyan Cannon was singled out by the Golden Raspberry committee for a Worst Supporting Actress nomination (Cannon, Rutanya Alda from Amityville II: The Possession and Colleen Camp in The Seduction all lost to Aileen "Annie" Quinn).

Come on. I just tore Seltzerberg a fresh asshole for their thoughtless crimes against parody. I wouldn't trust an obscure "filkie," a poor man's National Lampoon and the homeless man's Stinker Movie Awards to make fun of what already is an immensely humorous effort. And there is a lot to laugh at in Deathtrap without acting on juvenile superiority. Dyan Cannon is advertently playing Myra for laughs. Her every doting exclamation of "Sidney" or "darling," even going so far as to call Sidney "my darling darling," is a friendly, ticklish poke in the ribs instead of a balled fist. But she is also convincingly fearful in those speechless moments as she watches Bruhl scheme, her cupcake-sweet face going haggard and pupils dilating in close-up, nervously clutching her ring finger in the backdrop. The guilt she confesses in her attempt to tell Sidney to move out is palpable.

And Cannon isn't the only one with a firm grasp on the insanity of it all. Michael Caine has been in a lot of schlocky movies where he was reduced to a stick of dynamite begging for a match. The character of Sidney Bruhl puts the flame to the fuse. Christopher Reeve was clearly still fixed in the collective conscious as a mere comic book hero. As Clifford Anderson, he's sexier, smarter and phenomenally sinister when the occasion calls for it. Caine and Reeve would recycle the same personae in Peter Bogdanovich's version of Noises Off a decade later, but Lumet not only scratches the surface, he gets these actors' exposed marrow. Reeve feigned nosebleeds as the dimwitted hunk in Noises; Deathtrap allows him uncut hilarity after rising from the dead in the Bruhls' vegetable patch.

And there's a fourth party, the Dutch empath next door who occasionally surveys the hazardous shack while sensing "pain, pain, pain!" every foot of the way. Helga Ten Dorp is a budding showbiz personality with a book about her fantastic life of ESP-assisted criminal investigation and a slot on The Merv Griffin Show. And she is played by Irene Worth in one of the most amusing supporting performances of 1982, a comic blitzkrieg on the level of Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli, Bill Murray's Jeff Slater and Joe Bologna's King Kaiser. She will, in as much as the principal stars, be diagnosed with Bruhl calls "thrilleritis malignus," or "the fevered pursuit of the one-set, five-character moneymaker." And like the "master plotter" himself, the fortune awaiting the run of "Deathtrap" strikes her as an enticing retirement fund, as she is aging out of her precognitive talent as much as Bruhl.

The biggest change from Levin's original amorality tale comes at the end, which wraps up in cautionary fashion with Anderson and/or Bruhl's play causing Helga and the porter to become starry-eyed over the prospect of their very own shot at "Deathtrap." The movie diverges in that, complementing the addition of an opening scene depicting Bruhl's pitiful opening night, we actually see who reaps the rewards (here, the porter is played by Henry Jones). The decision strikes me as less of a cheat than the Hollywood ending of Noises Off, if only because there is some context and the kind of irony you'd find in the non-directory yellow pages. The shock cut which takes us there, however, makes it come across as a rushed, if not false, note.

Sidney Lumet does more wonders with the baked-in staginess of Deathtrap than Bogdanovich on Noises Off. Once again assisted by Andrzej Bartkowiak (of Prince of the City and the subsequent The Verdict), Lumet fashions a homely menace out of the countryside mansion, replete with dapper door and windmill, and judiciously moves his camera to get over the one-set, two-act treachery. The foreboding storm which darkens the house at the conclusion works the strobe light a bit too much, and the same overkill is applied to Dyan Cannon's piercing scream during an equally scary set piece, which results in an obvious dubbing gaffe. Would that those were as natural as Johnny Mandel's frisky score, the presence of Tony "Signore Bumbacelli" DiBenedetto (as Burt, the Bartender) and Tony Walton's astute contributions to both production and costume design. 

Deathtrap's ultimate enjoyment comes down to a quartet of excellent performances, the moments where fanatical ambition gives way to sociopathic psychoses and the inflating manner in which real life writes the play. What compels Sidney Bruhl and Clifford Anderson to succeed by nefarious pragmatic necessity is either a self-loathing yearning for the simplest possible life or the cocky, deranged reverence which is the downside of most aspiring self-starters. Bruhl wants to hold on to upper-class prestige without being lumped in with the "ex-mistresses of ex-presidents, former CIA assassins and happy hookers" just out for publicity. Anderson's giddy demeanor just feeds off that fantasy. Where Myra Bruhl and Helga Ten Dorp fit into this story...well, I suggest you find out for yourself. Deathtrap is really that good. Even a gifted reviewer couldn't hurt it.

[Thanks to Drew McWeeny and Scott Weinberg of the '80s All Over podcast for lighting the fuse of this particular rundown.]

Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey + Alive + Toy Soldiers + The Good Son

HOMEWARD BOUND: THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY
(G, Walt Disney Pictures, 84 mins., theatrical release date: Feb. 12, 1993)

Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey first roamed as a children's book by Sheila Burnford in 1961 before Disney commissioned a live-action adaptation two years later. Both Burnford's tome and Fletcher Markle's movie hew closer to something like The Journey of Natty Gann compared to the cutesier Homeward Bound, which shares more in common with The Adventures of Milo & Otis but with a Look Who's Talking! twist. Don Ameche, Sally Field and Michael J. Fox (reportedly recast from Donald Sutherland, Annie Potts and Jon Cryer) speak the animal characters' inner dialogue in this case, a trio of happy pets forced to traverse the Sierra Vistas to reunite with their young masters.

Bulldog Chance (Fox), in spite of being rescued by the Burnfords (the central family here named after the story's author, yes), isn't the least bit serious about loyalty and more interested in slobbering havoc. Golden retriever Shadow (Ameche) and Himalayan cat Sassy (Field) have their own solemn bonds to child companions Peter (Benji Thall) and Hope (Veronica Lauren) to uphold when they're not trying to keep rascally Chance in line. But when Peter, Hope and Jamie's (Kevin Chevalia) mother, Laura (Kim Griest), remarries to schoolteacher Bob Seaver (Robert Hays), the Burnfords have to uproot to San Francisco on business, leaving the animals behind at the ranch home of Kate (Jean Smart).

It isn't long before Shadow starts fearing the worst, and flees Kate's sanctuary with Chance and Sassy towing behind him. All of the all-natural wilderness pitfalls greet them, from grizzlies and porcupines to waterfalls and forest rangers, but the furry leads are steadfastly adorable and the name-brand voice stars taunt each other with glee, specifically the pugnacious Fox and prissy Field (Mr. Ameche, in his last hurrah, convinces us of Shadow's bountiful wisdom). Chance has been beefed up considerably from the original prototype in terms of breed (no longer the button-eyed Muffy the Bull Terrier) and presence, the screenplay from Linda (Beauty and the Beast) Woolverton and Caroline (The Addams Family) Thompson, with uncredited punch-up from Jonathan (The Sure Thing) Roberts, allowing Fox's hound to out-wisecrack Arnold Schwarzenegger, referenced in the presence of a mountain lion.

More surprising is the choice of director, Duwayne Dunham, a reliable editor for David Lynch who has momentum on his side as much as the locale and the cute animals. The movie can't help but lag whenever Dunham focuses on the humans, mostly because the writers simply trot them out for melodramatic relief. A late-inning stretch at an animal control center goes the other way just as roughly. But Dunham's knack for adversity does allow for a couple of raw heart-clenchers: Sassy is swept away by a raging salt river, and the aged Shadow suffers a crueler fate due to unstable woodworks.

By that point, Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey does leave you whimpering like Chance for the prospect of a happy ending, which is delivered on pure family-oriented terms. Having spent a year in post-production repair, Homeward Bound is undemanding, to be true (this isn't a game-changer like Babe), but with a surefire paw up on Look Who's Talking Now! or any of the Benji films (watch out for Joe Camp's credit as "animal coordinator").

ALIVE
(R, Touchstone/Paramount Pictures, 120 mins., theatrical release date: Jan. 15, 1993)

Whereas the strays of Disney's Homeward Bound cure their hunger pains via a stream of fresh fish, the survivors in Touchstone's (and Paramount's) Alive dine on philosophical and primitive red meat. Piers Paul Read's literary document of the 1972 Andes flight disaster lends itself less to feel-good perseverance than The Incredible Journey, unless I missed the part where the golden retriever was devoured whole by the saucer-eyed kitty and the spotted mutt. Indeed, an ordeal like the one experienced by the Uruguayan rugby players, God-fearing alumni of Montevideo's Stella Maris, and their extended family would've been slightly improved by having Homeward Bound's critters scurry through the snow. Knowing my Touchstone Pictures, chances are they would've encountered Sidney Poitier and Tom Berenger instead.

Actually, the leveling of Flight 571 on Friday the 13th, October 1972, is more unsettling than any Jason kill. An unforgiving cloud blinds the pilots to craggy disaster, with both wings and the tail end clipped off on collision. The dismembered aircraft slides violently to a halt, all of the passengers' seats thrusting forward to suggest a flesh-and-blood highway accident. The aftermath doesn't skimp on visceral images of women's legs pinned down by metal rods or the accompanying mania brought on by "altitude sickness." By the time the food and drink supply is rationed, only 27 out of the initial 45 boarders remain, the pilots and a dozen-plus others dead. The mantle of leader eventually shifts from team captain Antonio Balbi (Vincent Spano) to the revived Nando Parrado (Ethan Hawke, embodying this very film's technical advisor) as the situation grows further desperate.

Indeed, it is Nando who declares his budding stewardship with the immortal line: "Well, then I'll cut some meat off the pilots. After all, they got us into this mess."

Director Frank (Arachnophobia) Marshall and writer John Patrick (Moonstruck) Shanley downplay grisly sensationalism in favor of a rousing emphasis on perilous endurance. When one poor hiker sinks into the snow and the ground falls away right in front of him, it's got a charge above and beyond the call of Rene Cardona. Alive doesn't hack it as a group portrait, given the cast is predominantly nondescript even while their numbers are thinning, but Marshall and Shanley do convey the plight tougher than most disaster movies have been known to muster. For a while at least...

...Because what they cannot do is reconcile the tactful horror of the situation with the pronounced spirituality of the characters. Portentous wraparounds featuring John Malkovich as one of the athletes (we're never clear who) speak of enlightenment in the eeriest of tones. Even though guilt and "innocence" are queried as sacrificial, the direct connotation made between cannibalism and the Communion has the effect of making those corpse cuts take on the significance of altar bread. As the lone female survivor, Illeana Douglas takes no place at this Donner Party until she whimsically decides to be fruitful, but given that the one agnostic of the bunch pays for his refusal to pray, tragedy is inevitable, and curiously weightless. Collapsing in on itself despite the technical finesse, Alive makes like an Outward Bound expedition convinced it's a vision quest.

TOY SOLDIERS
(R, Tri-Star Pictures, 111 mins., theatrical release date: Apr. 26, 1991)

Ethan Hawke may be nobody's image of South American machismo, but Andrew "The Djinn Genie" Divoff is a native Venezuelan with the same hot-blooded grit as Robert Davi's Sanchez from Licence to Kill. Toy Soldiers wants to position him as Hans Gruber in this particular hostage crisis, but first-time director Daniel Petrie Jr. is frustratingly adept at cannibalizing proven action flick tropes in as perfunctory a manner possible (cf: Shoot to Kill). Co-scripting this time with David Koepp, Petrie's own "triumph of the spirit" is a Red Dawn Reform School where the unruly sons of privilege outwit heavily-armed Latino and Aryan thugs under the volatile lead of Luis Cali (Divoff), whose biggest crime is loving his own cartel-kingpin daddy a bit too much.

Sean "Goonie 4 Life" Astin, Wil Wheaton (angstier here than he was in Stand by Me) and Keith Coogan (the twice-babysat misfit, inheriting Mikey's asthma) play a thrice-expelled discipline case, the bitter progeny of a Mafioso (Jerry Orbach) and the gawky offspring of a Republican figurehead. These self-described "rejects" of the Regis academy fall in line once Luis arrives; having arrived too late to single out a judge's son for vengeance in his father's imprisonment, he blockades the campus with remote-controlled plastic explosives, rooftop snipers and all manner of military-grade firepower. Cali also devotes hourly intervals to head counts where for one missing student, five are to be executed.

Billy Tepper (Astin) leads the kiddie insurgence and manages to deliver crucial information to the authorities within one recess period. But both parental attention and Special Forces tend to stifle (in this case, fatally) young minds, so Billy and his buds, as well as two preteen electronics whizzes, risk a do-or-die attempt to diffuse the bombs and defeat the terrorists. But the only real urgency resides in Michael Kahn's proficient editing, brisker than it was in the equally-lengthy Alive so as to be on the level of his Indiana Jones assignments. Despite the ventilation shafts, clandestine confrontations and adrenaline-fueled heroism, Die Hard, this movie's closest forebear, packed a meatier punch. The youthful hunks tend to spend their free time sans pants, and it apparently made no sense for Petrie & Koepp to damage the merchandise even slightly. 

Toy Soldiers, adapted from a novel by William P. Kennedy, bears no relation to the '84 film of the same name nor does it utilize Martika's hit ballad ("We all fall down...") as Eminem eventually would. Aside from Kahn and Divoff, the film's major assets include dependable supporting turns from Louis Gossett Jr. as the stern but lenient dean and Denholm Elliott's wryly funny headmaster. And I would be remiss if I didn't say that Sean Astin does the best he can with his overbearing delinquent hero, who in one moment is subjected to corporal punishment by Cali, once a private school attendee in his teens. Spare the rod, as they say, but spoil the child by seeking out Class of 1999. Lil' Petrie still needs to learn some discipline himself.

THE GOOD SON
(R, 20th Century Fox, 87 mins., theatrical release date: Sep. 24, 1993)

What's trashier than Toy Soldiers, grimmer than Alive and fraught with more behind-the-scenes turmoil than Homeward Bound? The Good Son. Novelist Ian McEwan whipped up the screenplay in 1986 as commissioned by 20th Century Fox, but the studio balked until 1991, during which time it reached pre-Blacklist levels of curiosity. With Michael (Heathers) Lehmann attached to direct and a cast including Jesse Bradford and Mary Steenburgen, McEwan watched with growing disillusionment as Kit Culkin blackmailed Fox into casting his golden boy son Macaulay in the titular role and Lehmann was traded for Joseph Ruben, no stranger to iconoclastic star vehicles thanks to Sleeping with the Enemy, who unceremoniously brought in a friend to rewrite McEwan's script. McEwan fought to claim sole writing credit, keeping distance from the finished product on his own terms.

His is not the only disgrace. The same Joseph Ruben who crafted 1987's low-budget creeper sleeper The Stepfather only has formalism going for him here; thus, he's prematurely interchangeable with John (Pacific Heights) Schlesinger. Cajoled into rewiring his endearingly bratty image, the distressingly humorless Macaulay Culkin doesn't seem to be having as much fun as his wicked Henry Evans suggests we should. So numbingly interested in death Henry is that he seems to have stumbled out of River's Edge rather than The Omen. The adults are mindless pushovers devoid of any psychological investment, cheating us out of a revelatory performance on a par with Terry O'Quinn, Margaret Colin (cf: True Believer) or Kevin Anderson. And no matter how effectively it is lensed, Maine is so synonymous with Stephen King as to invite unfair if educational contrast (watch out for Daniel Hugh Kelly, of the movie version of Cujo, as another father on a poorly-timed business trip).

Only Elijah Wood, who for all intents and purposes is the focal character, assures us of McEwan's sullied integrity. Cousin Mark's guilt-addled devotion to his deceased mother, which he projects onto the similarly mournful Aunt Susan (Wendy Crewson), is a solid hook for a psychological fable that declares a tyke war. The mind reels as to how Joseph Ruben could've handled the material back when The Stepfather showed he could deconstruct the idea of a nuclear family, resonantly pitting '50s idealism against '80s cynicism. Repackaged for Macaulay, whose burglar-bashing Home Alone fame could have been subverted in surer hands, every malevolent misdeed, spot of profanity and vindictive overture is patently calculated. The antagonism Mark endures from Henry and his blind protectors is ludicrously contrived. And the cliff top showdown is the only point where the film spills over with juicy camp.

More than any post-Bad Seed celebration of adolescent sadism in the first degree (or even the excellent Nick Cave song written sympathetically about Cain), The Good Son stirred within me memories of David Keith's The Curse. In it, Wil Wheaton acted alongside his own real-life sibling Anne, who in her only film credit is remembered for being attacked by a coop of homicidal chickens. Macaulay's sister Quinn Culkin experiences a similar fate, as Henry tries to dispose of his last biological rival, 8-year-old Connie, by tossing her onto thin ice. Had Joseph Ruben enjoyed himself in this case, the latent dysfunction would've made for some sprightly (or is that spritely?) mischief. Alas, that old adage of resignation sets in early and never gets lifted: "Playtime's over."