A creepy anthology, decapitations, Paul Naschy, and body horror.
TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE (1990)
Between production on the two George A. Romero / Stephen King anthology films Creepshow and Creepshow 2, there was some talk about bringing the Creepshow concept to television. But since Creepshow had been released by Warner Bros., WB would have to have some involvement with any TV show based on the film. Rather than pull WB in on the deal, production company Laurel Entertainment just crafted their own new anthology show called Tales from the Darkside, which Romero executive produced and several of his frequent collaborators worked on. I haven't seen most of the Darkside episodes, but I have seen the series capper, the theatrical feature film Tales from the Darkside: The Movie.
Since the Darkside movie was directed by Creepshow composer John Harrison and contains a King adaptation written by Romero, some involved consider it to be an "unofficial Creepshow 3". There actually was a movie called Creepshow 3 released in 2006, but it was such a disaster that I try to ignore its existence. When a company has the rights to make a Creepshow 3 and choose to move forward on it without getting King and Romero attached, something is very wrong with their decision making. So as far as I'm concerned, the Darkside movie is the closest we ever got to a Creepshow 3 until the new series on Shudder.
What really keeps the Darkside movie from being a full-on Creepshow movie is the fact that it doesn't have the comic book style required for Creepshow. Instead, the film has a wraparound element that the Darkside TV show didn't have. Debbie Harry plays a woman with a horrifying secret; she has a young boy (played by Matthew Lawrence) locked up in her house and is preparing to kill him and cook him for a cannibal feast. Hoping to find a way to escape, the boy buys some extra time by distracting the woman by reading stories from a Tales from the Darkside book she has left in his cell. The stories he reads to her make up the bulk of the movie.
First up is an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle's 1892 short story Lot No. 249, with screenwriter Michael McDowell (co-writer of Beetlejuice) moving the setting from Victorian era England to modern day America. Tales from the Darkside: The Movie has an astounding cast overall, and looking back now it's pretty awesome to see Steve Buscemi, Christian Slater, and Julianne Moore all coming together to bring this mummy segment to the screen.
Buscemi plays Bellingham, a college student who has been screwed out of a fellowship award by rich kid Lee (Robert Sedgwick) and his girlfriend Susan (Moore). Bellingham surely would have been given the fellowship money if Susan hadn't written Lee's essay for him and then framed Bellingham for stealing something from the university museum. By the time Bellingham was cleared of the accusation, the fellowship had already been given to Lee - who plans to use the money to buy a Maserati.
Lee won't have the chance to buy that car, because Bellingham has gotten his hands on a mummy that he is able to bring to life and send after his enemies. This is mostly a straightforward slasher revenge tale in which the weapon is a mummy that was delivered to Bellingham in a crate marked "Lot No. 249". Things take an interesting turn when Susan's brother Andy (Slater) realizes what's going on and visits Bellingham with lighter fluid and a battery-operated carving knife. It's a fine story to get an anthology started off with.
The second story is where the film gets the closest to being Creepshow, because this segment was meant to be part of Creepshow 2. While the finished film consisted of three segments and a wraparound, the original plan for Creepshow 2 was for it to contain five stories, like the first Creepshow did. The two stories that were cut on the way from script to screen were Pinfall, which was written by Romero from a couple page outline King provided and has only ever been brought out to the world in the form of a comic book that was included with a limited edition Arrow Video Blu-ray release of Creepshow 2, and a Romero-scripted adaptation of the King short story Cat from Hell. And the second segment of Tales from the Darkside: The Movie is Cat from Hell, as Romero had written it for Creepshow 2. A chunk of the Creepshow 2 screenplay got dropped right into the middle of this movie.
Although the Creepshow comic book style is absent, Harrison did bring an extra stylistic flair to Cat from Hell, playing with color and adding in some flashy camera moves, making it stand out among the other segments of the film. Prematurely elderly character actor William Hickey plays Drogan, the wealthy head of a pharmaceutical company whose bestselling drug was tested on cats. Over four years of testing, 5000 cats lost their lives being the company's test subjects. So when a black cat shows up at the mansion he shares with three other elderly people and is present for the mysterious deaths of his housemates, Drogan begins to suspect that this creature is on a supernatural revenge mission. Determined not to fall prey to this kitty cat, Drogan hires a hitman named Halston (David Johansen, a.k.a. Buster Poindexter) to come to his house and kill the cat for him.
Why a hitman for such a job? For one thing, Drogan can't be chasing the cat around the house because he's in a wheelchair. For another, a professional is required to pull off this murder because Drogan knows the cat isn't going to go without a fight.
A large portion of this segment is made up of Drogan informing Halston of the back story, but then Drogan leaves and we're just watching Halston play cat and mouse with an actual cat while talking out loud to himself and the feline. There's not much to Cat from Hell, but it's fun and memorable. There are some moments in here that can really get stuck in your head. Although I enjoy it, I think things worked out just fine without the story being included in Creepshow 2. Creepshow 2 is great without it, and Cat from Hell still got made.
Apparently if another Tales from the Darkside movie had been made Pinfall would have been one of the segments, plus McDowell and Gahan Wilson were on board to write adaptations of the King story Rainy Season and Psycho author Robert Bloch's story Almost Human. The sequel was announced, but never made it into production. Now I'm left hoping Romero's script for Pinfall will end up being turned into a segment of the Creepshow series on Shudder.
The cannibal housewife requests that the little boy read her a love story, so the anthology wraps up with what I find to be the darkest and most troubling story of the three. Written by McDowell and inspired by a Japanese spirit Lafcadio Hearn wrote about in his book Kwaidan, this one is called Lover's Vow and stars James Remar as struggling artist Preston. When Preston witnesses a man being torn apart by a living gargoyle in a New York City alley, the simultaneously goofy-looking and terrifying creature makes him promise that he'll never tell anyone what he witnessed that night.
Leaving the scene of the gory attack, Preston meets a woman named Carola (Rae Dawn Chong) and - knowing there's a monster prowling around in the dark - takes her to his apartment to keep her safe. Their strange interaction goes well, and Preston goes on to build a life with Carola. But the knowledge that living gargoyles exist is a tough secret to keep, and there comes a time when he's tempted to break the promise he made. What happens haunted me for a while after my first viewing of this movie back in 1991.
I wouldn't put Tales from the Darkside: The Movie on the level of either Creepshow movie and don't really consider it to be Creepshow 3 myself... maybe Creepshow 2.5 during the Cat from Hell segment... but it is a very strong anthology on its own. Watching its stories play out makes for a fun and troubling way to spend 89 minutes.
NIGHT SCHOOL (1981)
Night School isn't the most obscure '80s slasher out there, but it's also not one you hear about very often. I think that's unfortunate, even though I have only seen the movie a few times myself, because this is a really good slasher that deserves to get more attention.
The story is set in Boston, where police lieutenant Judd Austin (Leonard Mann) is investigating a series of grisly murders in which young women are being decapitated and their heads are dropped into water, whether that water happens to be in a duck pond, an aquarium, or just a bucket. Director Ken Hughes and writer Ruth Avergon never let us go very long without seeing another one of these murders take place. We're treated to multiple scenes in which a killer dressed in a black leather motorcycle outfit, complete with a black helmet, goes after their intended victims.
It doesn't take long for Mann to deduce that most of the murder victims have connections to Wendall College, and specifically each of them had interactions with a teacher named Vincent Millett (Drew Snyder) - a teacher who happens to be in a relationship with the film's female lead, Rachel Ward as Millett's assistant Eleanor Adjai.
Night School is simple and keeps the murders coming at a steady pace, and Hughes also has fun toying with the audience at times. Once the killer's m.o. has been firmly established, there's a great sequence in which Hughes drags out the reveal of where the latest victim's head ended up. There are plenty of potential hiding spots, and you can feel that Hughes and editor Robert Reitano are laughing behind the scenes as they make the viewer wait to find out where the head is.
Slasher fans who haven't watched Night School yet should seek it out as soon as possible. The movie is about to celebrate its 40th anniversary and it's still not popular enough.
THE FURY OF THE WOLFMAN (1970)
The Fury of the Wolfman is technically the third film in a series of films in which writer Paul Naschy plays Waldemar Daninsky, a man afflicted with the curse of being a werewolf. But while this movie does indeed star Naschy as Waldemar, it breaks continuity with the previous films, The Mark of the Wolfman and Assignment Terror, and starts fresh. This is basically the 1970 version of a franchise rebooting its continuity.
When we meet this different take on Waldemar, who is a college professor who works with cadavers in his classes, he is just returning from a disastrous expedition in Tibet where his entire crew was lost in a blizzard and Waldemar himself was attacked by a Yeti. This Tibet element was obviously inspired by the 1935 Universal horror movie Werewolf of London, where the main character returns home after being attacked by a werewolf while on a trip to Tibet. The result is the same here as it was in Werewolf of London: Waldemar is now a werewolf.
I'm going to assume that Waldemar was attacked by a werewolf and just guessed it was a Yeti since he was in Tibet, and that Naschy isn't actually suggesting that being attacked by Yetis and Bigfoots can also pass on the werewolf curse... Then again, I wouldn't doubt that this movie thinks a sasquatch can make you a werewolf, because there are a lot crazier ideas than that one packed into this flick.
Waldemar hasn't even recovered from the trauma of his trip before receives a note informing him that his wife is cheating on him. It seems this note was passed along by the man she's cheating with, and this guy also tampered with the brakes on Waldemar's car. I guess the note was supposed to put him in a mental state that will make him drive recklessly. The idea of the wife's boyfriend making sure there's a note that would implicate him in the crime inside the car he caused to crash, possibly even on the corpse, might strike the viewer as a stupid criminal move, but there's something of an indirect explanation for this later on. And it doesn't matter much in the long run. Waldemar does have a crash that would have killed him if he weren't now a werewolf, but since he is now a werewolf he's able to crawl out of the crash, wolf out, and go kill his wife and his lover.
Then this movie shows us that werewolves can walk away from car crashes, but really need to look out for electricity. While running through a stormy night, the wolfman comes across a fallen powerline and appears to get electrocuted to death. Waldemar's body is found and buried... but his ex, Doctor Ilona Ellman (Perla Cristal) knows that he's a werewolf and not really dead, just in a dormant state. She has his body dug up and taken to her castle, the castle she has inherited for being part of the family Wolfstein (a nod to The Mark of the Wolfman and that previous continuity.)
Ilona revives Waldemar with the same thing that "killed" him, electricity. And reviving a wolfman isn't the only crazy thing she has going on. Ilona is developing a way to control a person's every emotion and cure brains damaged by insanity through the use of "waves of a determined frequency." Something to do with chemotrodes, I don't know what she's talking about. She has people locked up in her cellar as part of her research, some of whom have sex with each other to pass the time, and as a side project she's also working on creating human/plant "authentical mutants." And these plant-things even attack one of Ilona's lab assistants when she complains that Ilona's methods are closer to witchery than science.
Thankfully the lab assistant who gets attacked wasn't Ilona's right hand woman, her live-in assistant Karin (Veronica Lujan). There's some indication that Ilona and Karin are in a lesbian relationship, with Karin appearing to be jealous over Ilona's interest in Waldemar, this man who has disappointed her and made her unhappy in the past. She also seems jealous when Ilona reveals she has recruited other female assistants. Karin does have a boyfriend, but I think she and Ilona have something happening on the side.
There's also a cloaked, masked figure roaming around in Ilona's castle. The Fury of the Wolfman was throwing so much out of nowhere, off-the-wall stuff at me that I had to stop the movie halfway through and check the episode of the NaschyCast (a podcast dedicated to the work of Paul Naschy) that covered it so I could make sure I had a handle on what was going on here. I confirmed that I wasn't having trouble keeping up with the movie, the movie itself is just sloppy and nonsensical.
Naschy was so disheartened with The Fury of the Wolfman that it was one of the few things in his life that made him cry. According to him, director José María Zabalza was perpetually drunk on the set and had his 14-year-old nephew there with him to rewrite the script on the fly. That's why the finished film is always slapping the viewer in the face with random weirdness, because these weird things were apparently something that were just tossed into the script by a teenager.
Waldemar knows that there are only two ways to destroy a werewolf: either another werewolf has to do it, or the werewolf must be killed by a woman who loves him. I wonder if it was Naschy or the teenager who wrote the moment where Karen confesses to him that she cares so deeply for him that she would die for him, and says she is one who loves enough to be able to kill him, which makes no sense for the way her character has been presented up to that point. The film wants us to believe that Waldemar won her heart in a major way during the few minutes they have together while Ilona is away from the castle. He does save her from some attackers, even one who wears a suit of armor, but I'm not buying that she loves him.
They do have sex, because what else are they going to do while trapped in a castle? Never mind Karen's boyfriend and whatever she had with Ilona.
The Fury of the Wolfman isn't a very well told story, but it's strange enough to be somewhat fascinating. And all of this convoluted tomfoolery builds up to a werewolf vs. werewolf confrontation, which is also sort of like Werewolf of London, so you can't say this mess of a movie wasn't trying to be entertaining.
BODY PARTS (1991)
After Cohen and Tate, the second directorial effort for The Hitcher / Near Dark / Blue Steel screenwriter Eric Red was Body Parts, an adaptation of the French novel Et mon tout est un homme, written by Boileau-Narcejac, the writing duo whose works had previously inspired such films as Diabolique and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. An adaptation of Et mon tout est un homme had nearly been made under the title Choice Cuts in 1967, but that project had been abandoned, allowing Red to be the first (and so far only) to bring this Boileau-Narcejac story to the screen. Co-producer Patricia Herskovic and Joyce Taylor receive screen story credit on Body Parts, the only writing credit for either of them, while Red shares screenplay credit with Norman Snider.
This adaptation of Boileau-Narcejac's concept centers on Bill Chrushank (Jeff Fahey), a psychiatrist who is feeling beaten down by his work with imprisoned patients. He's struggling to find proof that he can actually help these people, "fix a broken mind." He wonders what the true roots of violence are. What makes a person become evil? Where does evil live within the human body? According to this film, it seems evil lives in the flesh.
Bill loses his right arm in a spectacular car crash that is a sight to behold. He seems to avoid an accident when he manages to bring his car to a stop right behind another, but then a third vehicle comes speeding up behind him and smashes into the back of his vehicle. The impact tosses Bill forward through the windshield, and he hits the trunk of the car in front of him at the same time his car is smashing into it, causing the back of the other car to lift up, tossing Bill's body through the air.
He's (un)lucky enough to be brought to a hospital where Doctor Agatha Webb (Lindsay Duncan) has just perfected limb transplants. An unnamed donor to provides a new right arm for Bill, a new left arm for painter Remo Lacey (Brad Dourif), new legs for a young man named Mark Draper (Peter Murnik). The transplant works well for Mark, although there are times when he loses control of his legs, they seem to have a life of their own. Like when they smash on the gas when he's out for a drive. Remo is beyond happy with his new left arm; after the transplant he's able to use it to paint art that's far beyond what he was doing before. This earns him $250,000 in just three weeks.
Bill is instantly troubled. He's plagued by nightmares every night. He has visions of violent acts - and it turns out Remo is having these same visions, they're the inspiration behind his new art. Bill does some investigating to find out where these limbs came from and uncovers the fact that the donor was a serial killer who was executed. This might explain not only the nightmares, but also why Bill's demeanor has changed since the transplant. He has a short temper, he loses control and does things like hit his son and try to strangle his wife. The evil of the serial killer remains in his limbs.
There's a great scene that gathers the recipients of the killer's limbs together in a bar, where a couple them use their new limbs to participate in a bar fight.
For the first hour, Body Parts is a straightforward psychological thriller. We watch Bill's mental breakdown as he deals with his new limb, is shocked to learn where it came from, and his behavioral issues threaten to destroy his home life. But then the movie switches things up with roughly 25 minutes to go when a stalker starts coming after Bill, Remo, and Mark... and it seems they want to collect those limbs. At that point, the movie gets kind of nuts, goes a bit off the rails. But how can I complain when that means we get some bloody action and a thrilling car chase sequence in which Bill, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, has his right arm handcuffed to the left arm of someone driving another vehicle as they speed through traffic.
Body Parts is a weird one, but it's a movie that I have enjoyed every time I've watched it over the years.
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