Worth Mentioning - Your Suffering Will Be Legendary

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Blacula, Pam Grier, Abbott and Costello, Pinhead, and more.

BLACULA (1972)

A blaxploitation movie built around the concept of "Blacula" could have easily been insulting and trashy, but director William Crain and the producers at American International Pictures lucked out when they cast William Marshall in the title role. Marshall worked with them to give his character dignity, and guided them as they reworked the "Blacula" of the title from a guy named Andrew Brown into Prince Mamuwalde of the Ibani tribe. Marshall brings a strength and clear regality to the role; his Blacula is no joke, he has all the gravitas someone playing Dracula should, he just happens to be a different character with a different skin color.

The story written by Joan Torres, Raymond Koenig, and Richard Glouner goes back to 1780 Transylvania, when Mamuwalde and his wife Luva (Vonetta McGee) went to Castle Dracula on a diplomatic mission to bring their culture into the community of nations and seek the end of the slave trade. They do not find Count Dracula (Charles Macaulay) to be supportive. Dracula believes "slavery has merit" - and he also implies he would like to keep Luva around as one of his own sex slaves. When Mamuwalde objects, the bloodsucking Count bites him, turning him into a vampire, then locks him inside a coffin with the intention of making him suffer from the blood craving forever, with no way of quenching his thirst. The racist Dracula even gives Mamuwalde the new name Blacula before sealing him in the coffin. Luva is shut in the crypt with Mamuwalde's coffin, forced to starve to death while listening to her husband's cries. Dracula was a real prick.

Jump ahead to 1972 and we learn that Dracula was destroyed by Van Helsing almost 150 years earlier. Items from his castle are now up for sale, and some of them are purchased by a gay couple from Los Angeles, Bobby (Ted Harris) and Billy (Rick Metzler). Including Mamuwalde's coffin. The gay characters in this movie don't get quite the same respect the Black characters do, but there are racial slurs in here as well. When you watch Blacula, you have to be ready for some '70s coarseness.

While Bobby and Billy plan to sell most of the Castle Dracula items on the antique market, Billy wants to place the coffin in their living room -  but before he does, he wants to open it and see what's inside. The lock is busted off and Mamuwalde is freed from inside for the first time in nearly 200 years. And Bobby and Billy are the first people he's able to feed on.

From there, we get a bit of the "reincarnated love" story that Francis Ford Coppola would later work into his version of Dracula, as Mamuwalde sees that Bobby and Billy's friend Tina looks just like his long-dead wife Luva; in fact, she's played by the same actress. It's surprisingly easy for Mamuwalde to convince Tina to be his forever. It's good for her that it's also surprisingly easy for her sister's boyfriend, pathologist Doctor Gordon Thomas (Thalmus Rasulala), to deduce that there is a vampire stalking the streets of L.A., so he is able to get some police support as he tries to save his girlfriend's sister and stop Mamuwalde.

Blacula is better than you would ever imagine a movie with that title would be, and there are some really cool horror scenes along the way, including a moment with a vampire in a foggy graveyard, a memorable shot of a vampire running down a hallway in a morgue, and the climactic confrontations. I actually like this movie more than a lot of Dracula adaptations I've seen.

FORTRESS 2: RE-ENTRY (2000)

John Brennick (Christopher Lambert) went through a lot of trouble to escape the hi-tech, futuristic prison called the Fortress in director Stuart Gordon's 1992 film Fortress, so I was somewhat bummed when a sequel came along and dropped Brennick back into prison. Back when I first saw Fortress 2 in 2000 or 2001, I was also bummed that the sequel wasn't nearly as good as its predecessor. Revisiting it twenty years later, I actually found the movie to be enjoyable this time. It's still not anywhere near as good as the first Fortress, but entertaining when taken on its own merits.

Fortress writers Troy Neighbors and Steven Feinberg came up with the story for Fortress 2, with John Flock and Peter Doyle taking over as writers while Gordon was replaced at the helm by Geoff Murphy (The Last Outlaw, Under Siege 2). In the first movie, Brennick and his wife Karen (then played by Loryn Locklin, played in this film by Beth Toussaint) were jailed for having a second child at a time when America is under fascist rule and has a strict one child policy, never mind that the Brennicks' firstborn died. This one picks up ten years after the Brennicks escaped from the Fortress, and they've been on the run all this time with their young son Danny (Aidan Ostrogovich). Unfortunately, the law catches up with them, which is why this movie exists. Karen and Danny are able to get away, but John Brennick is arrested again and tossed into another hi-tech prison.

While the prison in the first movie was underground, the sequel goes in the opposite direction: the prison Brennick is locked away in this time is a space station orbiting Earth. Of course, Brennick immediately starts trying to figure out how he can escape from this prison and get back to Karen and Danny, which is quite complicated when any plan is going to have to involve hijacking a space shuttle and flying it back down to Earth. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the prisoners are closely monitored and have neural implants that the prison's computer system ZED will use to zap their brains if they misbehave. (In the first movie the prisoners had devices implanted in their intestines that were much cooler than these neural implants.) If a prisoner does something really egregious, they're jettisoned out into space.

Brennick gets some assistance from fellow prisoners played by Liz May Brice, Anthony C. Hall, Nick Brimble, and Willie Garson (whose character is mentally impaired after an implant malfunction) while Yuji Okumoto and Fredric Lehne get prominent roles as guards. This space station is under the control of a man named Peter Teller (Patrick Malahide), the son of a higher-up at the Men-Tel corporation that runs these prisons and stepson of Susan Mendenhall, played by the great Pam Grier.

Aside from the presence of Grier, everything about Fortress 2 is a step down from the first Fortress, but if you can get past that and just go along with what this lesser film is showing you, it's a decent way to spend 92 minutes. It really adds nothing to the Fortress story, you'd be fine just sticking with the original... but it's not bad!

AFRICA SCREAMS (1949)

As wealthy Diana Emerson (Hillary Brooke) and her lackeys plan to go an expedition into the jungles of Africa, they're finding it very difficult to locate a copy of a book called Dark Safari, which contains a map they'll need for their trip. Luckily for them, book store employee Stanley Livington (Lou Costello) claims to have memorized this map - and for the price of $20,000, Stanley's buddy and co-worker Buzz Johnson (Bud Abbott) says they'll be able to lead Diana and her team to their destination, where they hope to cross paths with a giant ape called the orangutan gargantua.

And so there we have the set-up for a film all about the shenanigans Abbott and Costello get up to in the African jungle. There they encounter lions, chimps, crocodiles, a cannibal, and yes, there is also a giant ape running around. John Landis probably loves this movie, since it has a man in an ape suit. Adding to the humor is the fact that Stanley is so afraid of animals, he even freaks out when faced with a kitten.

Something noteworthy about Africa Screams is that it has two Stooges in the cast; Shemp Howard, who was one of the Three Stooges alongside Larry Fine and his brother Moe Howard at this time, and Joe Besser, who would replace Shemp as a Stooge after Shemp died of a heart attack six years after this. Shemp, one of the most popular of the Stooges, plays a sharpshooter who's so nearsighted that he gives Mr. Magoo competition, and he isn't in the movie nearly enough. Besser, the least popular Stooge, has a fun role as Diana's whiny butler.

I've always been a fan of Abbott and Costello, as their version of Jack and the Beanstalk was one of my favorite movies to watch (repeatedly) when I was a little kid. So there's always a comforting, nostalgic edge whenever I watch one of their movies. Aside from a bit of questionable race content that you might have expected as soon as you read that a movie from 1949 features a cannibal tribe, Africa Screams is a mostly pleasant way to pass 79 minutes.

HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II (1988)

When Clive Barker was bringing his short story The Hellbound Heart to the screen, he wanted to call the film Hellbound. It ended up having the much cooler-sounding title Hellraiser instead, but when the sequel came along the following year Hellbound did make its way into the title. Barker didn't return to write or direct Hellbound: Hellraiser II (he was still around as executive producer and gets a story credit), but the film is still widely considered to be one of the best horror sequels ever made. Some fans even prefer Hellraiser II over the original. I can't go that far myself, but I do think it's a good sequel, even though it takes a while to get going and get past rehashing the events of its predecessor.

Directed by Tony Randel, who had been uncredited as editor on the first film, from a script by Peter Atkins, a longtime friend of Barker's who had started a theatre company with him and Doug Bradley in the '70s, Hellbound gets started with a scene that is quite unexpected, as it shows us the origin of the franchise's poster boy, the Cenobite known as Pinhead. It's revealed that all Cenobites were once regular humans, they've been turned into these supernatural sadomasochists by Leviathan, the god of Hell. Pinhead used to be a military officer named Elliot Spencer (Bradley, who plays the character in and out of Pinhead makeup) who made the mistake of solving the puzzle box known as the Lament Configuration, the device that opens a gateway to Hell and summons the Cenobites. The knowledge that the Cenobites have human beginnings will turn out to be important information to have as the film goes on.

Pinhead has been Pinhead for decades. The majority of the film takes place immediately after the events of the first Hellraiser, with heroine Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) waking up in The Channard Institute, a psychiatric hospital run by Doctor Phillip Channard (Kenneth Cranham) - who soon enough is revealed to be a "mad scientist" level horror villain. Channard knew about the Lament Configuration, long before Kirsty was admitted into his hospital, he even has a collection of similar puzzle boxes. He's an intensely curious fellow who got into the psychiatric field, and became a brain surgeon, because he wants to unlock the secrets of the brain. He fancies himself an explorer of the mind. And the brain isn't the only thing he wants to learn about. He also wants to find out about Hell and the afterlife. To gain this knowledge, he gets his hands on a blood-soaked mattress that was in the home of Kirsty's father and her homicidal stepmother Julia. The mattress Julia died on.

It's interesting to note that at this point in the Hellraiser franchise, the filmmakers considered Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins) to be the primary villain of the series. When her lover Frank (Sean Chapman), her husband's brother, escaped from the clutches of the Cenobites and needed to feed on humans to regenerate his missing skin, it was Julia who lured unsuspecting men into her home and attacked them for Frank. She was responsible for a lot of death. You need your villain to come back for the sequel, so now Channard raises Julia from Hell in the same way Frank escaped previously, by causing blood to be spilled on the spot where the Cenobites took her out. Julia rises from the mattress with no skin. But that's a brief inconvenience, because Channard has plenty of mental patients at his disposal to sacrifice so she can regenerate.

It isn't until after Julia gets her skin back that Hellbound really becomes interesting to me. I find that the first 50 minutes of the movie kind of drag, and we've seen this skinless person regenerating stuff before. It's at the 50 minute mark that the film finally takes us into all new territory. That's when Channard takes a Channard Institute patient named Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), a mute young girl who spends all her time solving puzzles, and puts the Lament Configuration in her hands. Channard has Tiffany solve the puzzle and unleash the Cenobites so he can get a glimpse of Hell. When Pinhead and his fellow Cenobites show up - yes, it takes 50 minutes to reach that point, which shows how much focus was on Julia - Pinhead decides not to flay Tiffany because he knows she isn't really the one who drew them there. "It is not hands that call us, it is desire." While the Cenobites were distracted by Tiffany, Channard and Julia took the opportunity to pass through the gateway into Hell. And Kirsty, who has been figuring out what's going on with Channard and Julia, follows them.

And this is what makes Hellbound: Hellraiser II special. It actually takes viewers on a tour through its vision of Hell. This isn't the place we've heard about with fire and brimstone and Satan, this is a labyrinth that shows people imagery based on their worst memories and fears. For example, Tiffany finds herself wandering through a carnival where a clown is juggling his own eyeballs. Kirsty is confronted by Frank, back in Hell. And Channard gains more knowledge than he could have dreamed of, as Leviathan turns him into a Cenobite. It's the concept and imagery that I enjoy about the second half of Hellbound; Channard is actually one of my least favorite things about it, because he turns out to be the sort of movie maniac who drops cheesy quips when going after victims. 

Hellbound: Hellraiser II is a good movie. Not as good as the first movie in my estimation, certainly not better, but a solid follow-up. There are some great ideas in this sequel, and they did exactly what you can usually expect a sequel to do, which is widen the scope and go for being bigger than its predecessor. The jaunt through Hell makes this feel like a fantasy epic in the second half. Tony Randel brought a terrific vision to this sequel, and it's no surprise that the visual effects used to bring Hell to the screen look so cool, since Randel was an effects artist himself. The film has classic horror elements with the mad doctor; it has Julia getting a boost from "wicked stepmother" to "evil Queen", as she puts it; it features another strong heroine performance from Laurence; and it allows viewers to spend a bit more time with the Cenobites, which is always entertaining because these characters are so interesting-looking. I don't know how the filmmakers didn't see the Cenobites taking off in the way that they did, it's obvious that these are the characters people were going to keep coming back to see.