Sharing three more of the videos Cody has written for the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and now I also write scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
- Frailty, Dead Calm, and Shocker
- 100 Feet, Freddy vs. Jason, and Pin
- Night Fare, Poltergeist III, and Hardware
- Dark City, Mute Witness, and The Wraith
and - Army of Darkness, Cannibal Holocaust, and Basket Case
Below, you can see three more videos that I have written the scripts for.
The timeline of the Halloween franchise is quite a jumbled mess, so we tried to make sense of it all with a video series called Halloween Timelines. I wrote the script for the episode that covered "The Thorn timeline":
Script:
With this video, we’re continuing our journey through the various timelines in the Halloween franchise, and now we’ve reached the point where Halloween movies started flat-out ignoring previous entries. Halloween III: Season of the Witch had been set in a different universe than the first two Halloween movies, but it did still acknowledge their existence, as John Carpenter’s Halloween was shown on TV in that film. But Halloween 4 takes us back to the story that Halloween and Halloween II had started, the story of masked slasher Michael Myers. To do so, the film had to just forget Halloween III ever happened – and while it would be controversial when future sequels decided to ignore previous movies, most fans didn’t mind that Halloween III had been set aside. They were just happy to be seeing The Return of Michael Myers.
The fact that Halloween III’s attempt to turn this into an anthology series was a failed experiment was something that everyone quickly accepted. Halloween creators John Carpenter and Debra Hill were still involved when executive producer Moustapha Akkad laid down the law and said Michael Myers would be coming back for Halloween 4. Carpenter and Hill were even responsible for hiring part 4’s first screenwriter: Dennis Etchison, who had written the novelizations of Halloweens II and III under a pseudonym. The plan was to have Etchison write the script and Joe Dante direct the film. But Etchison took a supernatural approach to bringing Michael Myers back to Haddonfield, Illinois, and that wasn’t what Akkad was looking for. When he rejected the Etchison script, Carpenter and Hill sold their stake in the franchise to him and walked away.
The Halloween 4 we did get came from the creative team of director Dwight H. Little and writer Alan B. McElroy, and after an atmospheric title sequence that perfectly captures the look and feel of a Midwestern Halloween, we find out how they overcame the challenge of bringing Michael Myers back without Jamie Lee Curtis. While Myers seemed to be choosing victims at random in the first Halloween, Halloween II had established that he was specifically pursuing Curtis’s babysitter character Laurie Strode because she was his sister. He had killed his older sister on Halloween night when he was just six years old, and after a fifteen year stay in a mental institution he had escaped to kill his younger sister on Halloween. If you don’t have Curtis as Laurie, what is his motivation? Of course, you go to the next generation in the bloodline. Comatose since Dr. Samuel Loomis set him on fire at the end of Halloween II, Myers regains consciousness after ten years when he hears that he has a niece.
That niece is seven-year-old Jamie Lloyd, played by Danielle Harris. As of Halloween 1988, eleven months have passed since her parents died in a car accident, and Jamie is now in the care of the Carruthers family, the most prominent member of her adoptive family being the teenage Rachel Carruthers, played by Ellie Cornell. Rachel has a date set up on Halloween, but when her parents have an important event to attend and the usual babysitter has a broken ankle, Rachel gets stuck watching Jamie and taking her trick-or-treating – not realizing that Jamie has a homicidal uncle who is stalking the streets of their hometown of Haddonfield, looking for the little girl and knocking off anyone who gets in his way.
Luckily for Jamie and Rachel, Donald Pleasence is also back as Dr. Loomis, even though he was caught in an explosion with Myers at the end of Halloween II. Myers ended up in a coma, but Loomis was somehow virtually unscathed, he only sports a bit of scarring on his face and on a hand that he keeps covered with a glove. Just like in the first two movies, Loomis is on the trail of his former patient, out to stop his reign of terror.
For filmmakers stuck with the “Michael Myers is out to kill his relatives” concept introduced in Halloween II, and also stuck with having to bring back the villain without the heroine, Little and McElroy did an awesome job of continuing the Myers story. With Halloween 4, they delivered a film that ranks highly among the best slashers of the 1980s, mixing the Halloween style with an ‘80s vibe that today really enhances its nostalgia factor. When he was hired to write the script, McElroy only had eleven days to knock it out because the Writers Guild was about to go on strike. He did it, and you can see in the finished film that he was aided by the fact that he stuck very closely to the structure of the first movie. There are times when Halloween 4 is a direct copy of the first Halloween, it’s just bigger, flashier, and bloodier. Michael Myers escaped from the mental institution without killing anyone in the first movie, but when he escapes from custody in part 4 he massacres an ambulance full of people and leaves a bloody mess. He killed a mechanic to steal his overalls off screen the first time, he kills the mechanic on screen here – and Loomis doesn’t just find evidence that Myers did this like he did in ’78, he finds the body, sees Myers, and there’s gunfire and an explosion. And in the end, Myers doesn’t just get shot six times by one person. He gets pumped full of lead by a bunch of police officers and knocked into a mine shaft.
Halloween 4 ends with a moment that echoes the beginning of the first Halloween. Myers killed his older sister while wearing a clown costume, and the implication is that evil is hereditary when Jamie Lloyd, wearing a clown costume, picks up a pair of scissors and starts slashing away at her adoptive mother.
This “everything old is new again” approach worked out well. Halloween 4 was a hit, and fans were very happy to see Michael Myers rampaging across the screen once again. Jamie Lee Curtis may have been missed, but viewers were quite impressed by child actress Danielle Harris. Her performance as Jamie Lloyd endeared her to a lot of horror fans, and she remains a prolific genre icon to this day.
The return of Michael Myers was a triumphant one, and Akkad wanted to strike while the iron was hot. Halloween 5 reached theatres the very next year… and things didn’t go so smoothly with that one, mainly because the filmmakers made the mistake of overthinking and over-complicating a very simple concept. Michael Myers is a masked maniac who kills people on Halloween, that’s as complicated as Halloween ever needed to be. The “Laurie Strode is his sister” addition was unnecessary, and the unnecessary additions go much further in both the fifth and sixth films.
Halloween 5 (which marketing materials refer to as Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers) begins by showing us how exactly Michael Myers escaped from the ending of the previous film. He’s swept down a river and ends up at the home of someone who takes care of him as he lies dormant for the next year. This would have made some sense if the film had stuck with the original intention of director Dominique Othenin-Girard and his co-writers, which was to have the caretaker be an occultist called Doctor Death. This guy would have been a Myers fan responsible for drawing a symbol on the killer’s wrist that represents “eternal life”. Of course someone called Doctor Death would keep Myers in their house for a year. But after the scenes with Doctor Death were filmed, the decision was made to replace him in reshoots. In the finished film, Myers is taken in by an old hermit, and it’s not clear why this guy lets him sleep in his shack for a year. We still see the symbol on Myers’ wrist, but since we didn’t see Doctor Death or the hermit put it there, we have to assume this was something that was always on his wrist, we just never saw it. Why the hell does Michael Myers have a symbol tattooed on his wrist?
This whole symbol thing gets even stranger when a Man in Black catches a bus into Haddonfield and we see that this mysterious person also has that symbol tattooed on their wrist. Who is the Man in Black and what is this symbol supposed to mean now? The fact is, no one involved with Halloween 5 had any idea. The filmmakers just randomly decided to throw the Man in Black into the mix and have him lurking around in a handful of scenes throughout the movie. The only possible explanation that was considered during the filming was that the Man in Black might be Michael Myers’ twin brother we had never heard about before. That’s why both characters are played by the same person, stuntman Don Shanks.
When Michael Myers wakes up just in time for Halloween 1989, we find that Jamie has become more like her uncle in that she no longer speaks. She’s a patient at a Children’s Clinic and is said to be nine years old in this one, so she somehow aged two years in just one year. She has also developed a psychic connection to her uncle, so sometimes she is able to see through Michael Myers’ eyes as he stalks and kills the people around her. Among his victims is Rachel, and killing her off was a very unpopular move. Fans who came to care about her in Halloween 4 were not happy to see her make an early exit from Halloween 5, especially since she’s replaced by one of the most disliked characters in the entire franchise, the very wacky Tina, played by Wendy Kaplan.
This sequel is bogged down by bad writing and poor decisions, but it does have some classic scenes of slashing and suspense, including a chase scene involving a Camaro and an incredible climactic sequence that takes place inside the crumbling, old Myers house. That location was another questionable choice, since the house looks nothing like the one we saw in the first two movies, but what happens inside that place is great. Then everything falls apart with a cliffhanger ending where the Man in Black walks into the Haddonfield Police Department with a machine gun and rescues Myers from a jail cell. Nobody knew why that happened, they left that up to the makers of Halloween 6 to figure out. Part 6 wouldn’t come along until six years after the release of 5, so the mystery of the Man in Black was on the minds of Halloween fans for quite a long time.
The mystery was solved in the film where the Michael Myers saga went completely off the rails, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, directed by Joe Chappelle. By the time you’re done watching it, you might wish it had been directed by Dave Chappelle. Although scripts involving virtual reality and Myers being dragged to Hell by demons just like Jason Voorhees was in Jason Goes to Hell were rightfully rejected, the Halloween 6 we got still went in a direction these movies never should have. It explains Myers’ evil by saying that he’s the latest in a long line of people that have been afflicted by the curse of Thorn, which compels the cursed person to kill their family – and this urge to kill is especially strong when a constellation of stars in the form of the Druid Thorn rune appears in the sky. That symbol on Myers’ wrist, that’s the Thorn rune, which is why he’s now surrounded by a Druid cult that has kept him safe for the six years since the events of part 5. This cult idea didn’t come out of nowhere, screenwriter Daniel Farrands was drawing inspiration from the novelization of the first film, which dug into the Druid roots of the Halloween holiday, as well as from the scene in Halloween II when Loomis discovers that Myers has written the word “Samhain” on a wall at a crime scene, something which always felt out of character for Myers and was another sure sign that John Carpenter was feeling desperate when trying to give part 2 some kind of story.
The leader of the cult is the Man in Black, who is revealed to be Dr. Wynn, a character we previously saw in the first Halloween and is now played by Mitchell Ryan. Why exactly Wynn came to Haddonfield in the previous movie is never explained, nor do we find out why a doctor who leads a cult had to resort to catching a bus to get there. What we do discover is that both Myers and Jamie Lloyd – now a teenager played by J.C. Brandy because Dimension Films didn’t want to bring Danielle Harris back – have been in the custody of the cult ever since the ending of part 5. And somewhere along the line, Jamie got pregnant, because The Curse of Michael Myers begins with her giving birth to a boy who’ll be named Steven.
Which brings us to the fact that there are two very different cuts of The Curse of Michael Myers out there. There’s the theatrical cut, which has flashy editing and plays down the cult aspect as we get near the end, and there’s the so-called Producer’s Cut, which goes all-in on the cult idea. There’s no indication of who fathered Jamie’s baby in the theatrical version of the movie, while the Producer’s Cut implies that Myers impregnated his niece during some kind of cult ritual. It seems the cult needs to sacrifice this baby so the curse of Thorn will be passed on to someone else – and it looks like the next candidate is a young Haddonfield kid named Danny, the grandson of Laurie Strode’s adoptive father’s brother. This is really starting to sound like a soap opera, isn’t it? Danny, his mom, his uncle, and his grandparents now live in the old Myers house, which looks more like it did in the first two movies than it did in part 5.
Living across the street is a grown-up Tommy Doyle, the kid Laurie was babysitting in the first movie. Now he’s played by future Ant-Man Paul Rudd, and he has figured all of this Thorn stuff out. He also ends up taking care of baby Steven and trying to keep him safe from Myers after Jamie Lloyd gets killed. Tommy is aided in this endeavor by Danny’s mom Kara, played by Marianne Hagan, and by good old Dr. Loomis, who is shocked to find out his old buddy Wynn was the Man in Black. After Myers stalks through the streets of Haddonfield on yet another Halloween night, really putting a damper on the movement to bring Halloween celebrations back to the town after they’ve been banned for years, the climax of the film takes place at Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, the same place Myers escaped from at the start of the first movie.
The ending is where the theatrical cut and the Producer’s Cut really go off in different directions. Committed to the cult idea, the Producer’s Cut has Myers immobilized with a magic trick that Tommy pulls off with a circle of stones. It’s the power of the runes! Then Wynn and Myers swap clothes while Loomis receives the Thorn curse and has to become the new leader of the cult… Yeah, they actually filmed that stuff. They thought it was a good idea at the time. The theatrical cut, on the other hand, ditches the cult nonsense and has Myers massacre a bunch of the cult members, then adds in its own brand of nonsense with mention of genetic engineering and shots of fetuses in aquariums. How did the Halloween franchise get here? And when Tommy gives Myers a beat-down with a lead pipe, why is there green liquid leaking out of his mask?
These are questions that will never be answered, because the producers realized they had driven the series into a dead-end with all this stuff. The cult, the genetic engineering, the runes, the green liquid, all of that was left behind when development began on the next Halloween sequel. Those ideas weren’t the only things disregarded, either. To get Halloween and Michael Myers back to the basics, the decision was made to act like parts 4, 5, and 6 never happened. Jamie Lloyd never existed. And Laurie Strode never died. The seventh Halloween would act like it was the third Halloween, serving as a direct sequel to the first two films. A lot of fans who had been invested in the story of Jamie Lloyd were disappointed to see her get written out of existence, but other fans were very excited to see Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Myers face off again for a rematch twenty years in the making.
We’ll talk about Halloween H20 and that whole new Halloween timeline in the next video. In the meantime, thank you for watching our show. If you like what you see, please subscribe to our JoBlo Horror Videos channel, tell your friends who like this sort of content, and turn on the bell to receive notifications for all of our latest videos. We’re an independent company and we appreciate all of your support!
For the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I wrote about the oddball 1981 film The Pit:
The Pit script:
Screenwriter Ian A. Stuart and executive producer John F. Bassett have both described their 1981 horror film The Pit as “B-grade garbage”, but if this is a movie that its own filmmakers would throw into the garbage heap, it’s also one that many horror fans have happily dug up over the years and proclaimed to be hidden treasure. We don’t consider this deeply strange, often inappropriate, oddly unnerving movie to be garbage – we count The Pit as worthy of being featured here on the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: While Ian A. Stuart would go on to be involved in the production of more than one hundred films and television programs that aren’t listed on his IMDb page, The Pit earned him his sole writing credit for a narrative feature, making it all the more disappointing that he wasn’t happy with the outcome. Stuart’s issues with the film really stem from the producers’ decision to hire Lew Lehman to direct, as it seems nearly every choice Lehman made during the production was the exact opposite of the choice the writer would have made.
The Pit was the first and only film Lehman ever directed, but he had a lot of experience working in theatre, so giving him the chance to make a movie was a sensible idea. He had even been the first managing director at the Charles Playhouse in his home town of Boston before he moved to Canada to work in film and television – primarily in the music department, but also as a producer. The fact that he was American may have also played into the decision to hire him for The Pit, because while the movie was a Canadian production it was actually filmed in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin – a location Bassett had fallen for when his daughter Carling, a future professional tennis player, attended tennis camp there. Lehman had also just earned some horror cred, as he was one of the writers on the 1980 horror film Phobia, directed by the legendary John Huston. Phobia hadn’t turned out very well, but it gave Lehman genre experience nonetheless.
The choices that didn’t sit well with Stuart began with the hiring of Sammy Snyders to play the lead role of Jamie Benjamin, a very disturbed young boy the writer had envisioned as being 8 or 9 years old. Snyders was in his early teens when he was cast, and while he was meant to be playing slightly younger than his actual age, Stuart felt that the age difference was enough to throw the whole story off track. While Jamie had been written to have an interest in the women around him, the scenes dealing with this interest were meant to come off as being more innocent and mischievous. Due to Snyders’ age, Jamie does come off as being quite the creepy little pervert in the film, even if he’s not aware of just how much of a creep he’s being. His level of maturity is lagging behind his outward appearance, which was not Stuart’s intention in the script.
Jamie has a crush on his live-in babysitter Sandy, played by Jeannie Elias, and sneaks into the bathroom while she showers – but she bathes him in one scene, so he might think it’s not such a big deal that he’s in the room with her while she bathes as well. Jamie also mentions that his mother bathes him with questionable frequency, an implication of molestation that Lehman added. Jamie’s creepiness goes even further with the local librarian, Laura Hollingsworth as Margaret Livingstone. Not only does he paste her face on a picture he cut out of a nude photography book, but there’s also a really crazy sequence in which Jamie calls the woman on the phone, claims to have kidnapped her young niece, and says he’ll only let the girl go if Margaret strips in front of her window so he can see her from outside. Jamie takes Polaroid pictures as he watches, pictures he’ll be looking at “a lot”.
But The Pit isn’t just the story of an adolescent pervert. Jamie also has very weird interactions with his teddy bear. The bear speaks to him, it’s his advisor and his confidante… and usually a talking teddy bear would be the strangest thing in a horror movie, but here the bear is just one strange ingredient in a whole stew of weird. Teddy had been the title on Stuart’s script, but the film is called The Pit because the large hole Jamie finds out in the woods contains furry little flesh-eating creatures that he figures are troglodytes. Or, as he calls them, tra-la-logs, a mispronunciation that Stuart hated because he had written it to be “troglodies”. He thought “tra-la-logs” sounded ridiculous… and it does, but that’s part of The Pit’s charm. It is ridiculous and weird, with a lot of messed up stuff going on in it.
Jamie takes on the job of caring for these tra-la-logs, who are stuck at the bottom of the pit, and makes sure to keep them fed. At first he steals money so he can buy meat to feed them, but when that’s no longer an option he decides to start feeding people to these voracious little creatures. People who have wronged him, like the school bully, an old lady who was rude to him because she thinks he’ll grow up to be a hippie, Margaret Livingstone’s hateful niece Abergail – yes, the girl’s name is Abergail, with an R in there, it’s not just another one of Jamie’s mispronunciations – and the guy he sees as a rival for Sandy’s affection. Now Jamie is killing people, but it’s for a good cause. A tra-la-log’s gotta eat!
BACKGROUND: Stuart was inspired to write the Teddy script after having conversations with two of his friends. One was a ventriloquist who would use his dummy to communicate with troubled children, and Stuart was struck by the idea that the children would ignore the ventriloquist’s presence to focus only on the dummy that was interacting with them. The more direct and obvious inspiration came from his child psychiatrist friend, who told him about a patient who drew pictures of creatures that he felt he was in control of. The kid would imagine these creatures devouring the people he didn’t like, and once that happened he would no longer acknowledge the person’s existence. That’s how we get the tra-la-logs in the film, but the troglodies in Stuart’s script did not really exist, just like the creatures drawn by the psychiatrist’s patient didn’t exist. The psychiatrist told Stuart, “I’ve had to sign commitment orders for children who are 8, 9 and 10 years old, who are not really children. They’re little balls of hate and fury. And the only reason they haven’t killed somebody yet is they’re not big enough and strong enough. But, someday. Unless you deal with that problem, you have that next murderer, next rapist. That child who’s full of hate and fury is going to react violently against the world.”
Stuart wanted to tell the story of such a child, and he wanted the film to be a serious and realistic examination of his mental condition. Everything involving Jamie feeding people to the creatures in the woods was meant to be happening entirely in his mind. There was supposed to be a twist ending where the viewer would see that everyone the trogs had eaten were still alive – but Lehman didn’t shoot that twist ending. He took the straightforward creature feature approach, so in The Pit Jamie is a troubled kid and the trogs also exist. The interactions with the teddy bear may still be entirely in Jamie’s mind, although Lehman shot the bear in a way that also might make you wonder if it is actually possessed by some kind of entity.
If you want to see how Stuart meant for the story to play out, a novelization of his screenplay was written by John Gault and published with the original Teddy title. If you can get your hands on that book, apparently it tells the story in the dark and serious way that Stuart intended.
The screenwriter was not consulted about any of the decisions made after Lehman signed on, but he wasn’t kept away from the production completely. He did have to come in and shoot some of the scenes for Lehman because the director’s wife wouldn’t let him shoot any of the moments involving actresses who were nude or scantily clad… except one. Lehman cast his own 18-year-old daughter Jennifer as a skinny-dipper who appears late in the film, so he was present for the moment when she flashes her breasts. Jennifer Lehman would work on several more productions in the future, but as a business manager and accountant. Skinny-dipping in The Pit remains her only on-screen acting role.
Despite some involved having negative opinions about the finished product, The Pit seems to have been an enjoyable production to work on, especially for Beaver Dam residents who were hired to be part of the crew – and those who were paid four dollars an hour to be extras in the film. For example, the crew member responsible for hairstyle continuity was a local Beaver Dam salon owner. While she was appalled by the nudity and violence when she saw the movie, she had such a blast working on it for the six weeks of principal photography that she briefly considered moving to Canada to work as a hairdresser on more film productions. Her husband helped art director Peter Stone build the pit, which was a fifteen foot deep hole that was dug on a Beaver Dam property, lined with aluminum screening, sprayed with foam insulation, painted black, then dressed with roots and twigs. The bottom of the pit was covered with hundreds of boxes so the actors who had to fall into it would have a soft landing.
It sounds like Sammy Snyders had fun in Beaver Dam, as he would go out dancing at a local disco bar during his free time. He actually started off as a dancer before he got into acting, and retired from acting soon after The Pit so he could continue pursuing a career as a dancer. He’s a dancing instructor in Toronto now, teaching moves to classes full of people who, for the most part, have probably never seen his performance as Jamie Benjamin.
The filming of The Pit wasn’t all good times and dance breaks, they did hit some bumps along the way. Jeannie Elias was cast in the midst of production because Lehman felt the actress who was originally cast as the babysitter didn’t have the right chemistry with Snyders. That wasn’t the only recasting situation – according to Elias, the director had originally wanted the trogs to be played by children. But once the kids were put in the trog costumes and put to work in the heat of the summer of 1979, they ended up getting sick, so the decision was made to replace them with little people. The trog costumes were re-designed along the way because Lehman wasn’t happy with the way they looked, and the shots of the trogs inside the pit were reshoots conducted on a stage in Toronto. The look of the trogs is yet another thing that Stuart doesn’t like about the movie, so the re-design and reshoots didn’t do any good as far as he’s concerned.
According to actor Richard Alden, who plays Jamie’s father in the film, The Pit ran into some more issues in post-production, as Lehman’s plan to take the same approach to his film as John Huston took to Phobia didn’t go as expected. Alden said, “Huston cut his films in his head. Lew tried to do that and it didn’t work quite so well, I don’t think, because he had trouble putting it together.”
The Pit seems to have cut together just fine in the end, although it starts off with a jarring “flash forward”, as the first sequence in the movie shows Jamie knocking a bully into the pit on Halloween night – a sequence that we’ll see all over again nearly one hour later. Lehman and editor Rik Morden obviously thought they should get the movie started off with a kill, so they just lifted one from later in the movie and dropped it at the front in a rather clunky and awkward way. This causes some confusion early on, since it takes a while to understand that Jamie isn’t already feeding people to the trogs when the story begins, we’ve just seen a glimpse into the future.
There’s not much information available on how well The Pit performed when it was released in 1981. All you’ll find on Box Office Mojo is that it made five hundred and sixty dollars in the U.S., which doesn’t bode well for the rest of its take. Regardless of whether or not it made its budget back from theatrical play, it definitely started building a cult following as soon as people started renting it from video stores, unaware of the insanity they’d be witnessing once they hit Play on their VCR. The Pit has earned such a notable following over the years that Kino Lorber released a special edition Blu-ray in 2016.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: If a director had shot Stuart’s screenplay in exactly the way the writer wanted his story to be presented, maybe it would have resulted in an awesome, disturbing, realistic horror movie. According to Stuart, Bassett had another child psychiatrist read the screenplay before filming began and the doctor said the script was “the best depiction he had ever read of the mind a psychotic child”. There’s definitely merit in something like that, but it’s tough to imagine that sort of movie would have had nearly the amount of entertainment value that The Pit has. Stuart wanted his movie to have sensitivity, subtlety, and class – but The Pit is better without it.
Much of what makes this a great movie to watch are the decisions Lehman made and Stuart disagreed with. The fact that the trogs are real makes the movie much more fun than it would have been if Jamie was just imagining them, and the casting of Sammy Snyders really makes the movie what it is. Snyders, who has said he was oblivious to some of the more inappropriate aspects of the story, did a terrific job playing his very unusual character. He sells the oddness of Jamie perfectly – sometimes his bad behavior is amusing, and sometimes it’s effectively troubling. But while Jamie is occasionally creepy and needs someone to teach him that many of the things he does are very wrong, Snyders is also able to make him an endearing character. We certainly like him better than some of the jerks he ends up feeding to the trogs, and many viewers will probably be rooting for him to get out of this crazy situation without losing his life to the creatures he’s taking care of.
In the end, it may have been the film’s greatest benefit that the director and the screenwriter had opposite opinions on what was happening in the story, because those dueling viewpoints helped the film achieve its strange tone, where some of these things should only be occurring in the mind of an unbalanced young boy, but somehow they’re real.
The film was also given a nice boost by the music composed by Victor Davies, who took the salary he was paid and used it to hire more musicians to give the score a bigger, more Hollywood sound. It was worth the price he paid, because he and his collaborators turned in a great horror movie score.
BEST SCENE(S): Many of the best scenes in The Pit involve Jamie tricking people into taking a tumble into the trogs’ pit, which is made even better by the preceding scene in which he tries to get a cow to follow him to the pit. Realizing it’s going to be impossible to feed this cow to the trogs, Jamie tells it “I didn’t want to hurt you anyway” – then he moves on to the back-up plan of feeding humans to the trogs, which is much less unsettling to him than the idea of dropping animals into the hole. Innocent animals don’t deserve the fate of being torn apart by the tra-la-logs, but the nasty people he knows do.
The creature feature action reaches a new level toward the end of the film, when the trogs escape from the pit and start rampaging through the Beaver Dam countryside, attacking people like Lehman’s skinny-dipping daughter… And it all builds up to the perfect ending.
PARTING SHOT: Stuart has said that executive producer John F. Bassett apologized to him for what they did to his screenplay. Sadly, Bassett passed away in 1986 – which leaves us to wonder if he would still be apologizing for The Pit if he could see the fact that it’s enduring as a cult favorite forty years later. This movie is nothing to apologize for, it’s something to be celebrated because it’s such an awesomely weird piece of entertainment, a film that seems to take glee in the strange characters, sights, and scenarios it presents to the viewer. The Pit is so much fun to watch, it’s a shame that Lew Lehman never directed another movie, as we probably could have gotten some more great genre flicks out of him if he had.
But at least we got The Pit. So thank you to Bassett and to producer Bennet Fode for picking Lehman to direct their project. They made the right choice.
Also for the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I recommended Eric Red's 1991 disassembled serial killer movie Body Parts:
Body Parts script:
Eric Red already had two genre classics to his name before he made his feature directorial debut with the hitman thriller Cohen & Tate. He had written the Robert Harmon film The Hitcher, and co-wrote Near Dark with director Kathryn Bigelow. After he finished working on Cohen & Tate, he felt like directing a horror film himself, and went searching for a subject that would allow him to mix psychological thrills with gruesome gore effects. That search led him to the 1965 Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac novel Choice Cuts, which he brought to the screen as 1991’s Body Parts – the film we’re taking a look at in this episode of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Attempts to make a cinematic adaptation of Choice Cuts began long before Eric Red got his hands on the book; in fact, when Red looked into obtaining the film rights, he found that a Choice Cuts film had been languishing in development hell for about twenty-five years by that point. Several scripts had already been written, most notably one by Robert Benton, who won Best Screenplay Oscars for Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart, and his Bonnie & Clyde and Superman co-writer David Newman. The project had also passed through the hands of other directors, including the legendary Alfred Hitchcock – and it makes sense that Choice Cuts was such a hot property when you take into account the fact that Boileau and Narcejac had also written the novels that had been turned into Diabolique and Hitchcock’s own Vertigo.
Red was able to save Choice Cuts – or, as he would end up calling it, Body Parts – from development hell rather easily. All it took was a chance meeting with Paramount’s Frank Mancuso Junior, the son of Paramount chairman Frank Mancuso Senior. Red pitched the idea of Body Parts to Mancuso Junior, who then took him to see Paramount’s president Sid Ganis. Once Ganis heard the pitch, he gave the project a greenlight immediately. Red was told he would have a ten million dollar budget to work with and would be filming in six months. So then Red had to get busy working on the screenplay.
While it’s easy to understand why someone would want to make a Boileau and Narcejac adaptation, it’s also easy to understand why filmmakers found Choice Cuts to be a tough story to crack. Told from the point of view of a police secretary, the novel begins with the execution of a criminal whose body parts – arms, legs, heart, lungs, everything – are harvested and transplanted to various recipients. Then something goes terribly wrong, and all of the people who have parts of this criminal in them and on them start turning up dead. There were some things in that source material that could have come off as being silly if brought to the screen and not handled in the right way, like the story of a woman who received one of the male criminal’s legs meeting and falling in love with the man who received the other leg. There were also a lot of recipients to deal with – and, according to Red, the main problem was one of perspective. The narrator of the novel was removed from the situation, observing from the outside. When given the chance to take his own approach to the subject, Red decided to make the lead character someone who’s smack in the middle of this strange situation: the man who receives the criminal’s right arm.
Red’s adaptation is very clever. His version of the story centers on psychologist Bill Crushank, played by the great character actor Jeff Fahey. As part of his job, Bill has to interview Death Row convicts to determine whether or not they’re sane enough to be executed, which is tough for a man who got into this profession because he wants to help people and wishes he could cure them of their mental illness. When Bill loses his arm in a car accident, his lost limb is replaced with a fully functional arm from a donor. But once Bill starts suffering from nightmares, disturbing visions, and changes in behavior and attitude, he begins to worry that his new arm is at the root of his troubles. His fears seem to be confirmed when he discovers that the arm came from an executed killer. As Bill says, there’s now a murderer’s blood in his blood. Which brings up the question: where does evil come from? Could Bill be infected with the evil of the man his arm used to belong to? Having a psychologist as the character who has to deal with this issue was a great idea.
Red also simplified things by having the killer’s body parts go to much fewer recipients than they did in the novel. There are only three recipients in the film: the killer’s legs went to athlete Mark Draper, played by Peter Murnik, and the other arm went to artist Remo Lacey – who is played by genre icon Brad Dourif, and has a creative and financial breakthrough when he uses his new arm to paint with. Neither Draper nor Lacey have negative side effects to the degree that Bill does, but as the film goes on they will run into plenty of troubles of their own.
After writing the first draft of the script, Red had to pass the writing duties over to two other screenwriters, Norman Snider, who co-wrote Dead Ringers with David Cronenberg, and Larry Gross, who was a writer on Walter Hill’s 48 Hours, so he could focus on getting ready to direct the movie. Since so many versions of Choice Cuts scripts had been written on the way to Body Parts going into production, the Writers Guild had to look through all of the existing drafts to decide which writers should be credited on the film – and while Red and Snider ended up sharing screenplay credit, Gross unfortunately didn’t make the cut, even though Red requested that he be credited for his work on the script. The guild also decided that Joyce Taylor and the film’s co-producer Patricia Herskovic should have story credit, which remains the sole writing credit for both of them.
Heading into production, Red assembled a strong supporting cast around the transplant recipient characters. Kim Delaney plays Bill’s wife Karen, with Lindsay Duncan as Doctor Agatha Webb, the surgeon who performs the transplants; Zakes Mokae is a detective who enters the story in the second half; Paul Ben-Victor plays a Death Row prisoner Bill interviews on a couple different occasions, and turns in a very intense performance; and there’s John Walsh as Charley Fletcher, the killer whose limbs were transplanted. This is where we have to truly pass into spoiler territory, as Red made the story more exciting and cinematic in the way he handled the twist that comes late in the novel. In the book, the police secretary discovers that the presumed dead criminal is actually still alive and the transplant recipients are being killed because the criminal is reclaiming his body parts so he can be put back together. Body Parts reaches that twist earlier than the book did so Charley Fletcher can be an active participant in the second half of the film, attacking characters and retrieving his limbs while sporting a neck brace in tribute to a popular image from the 1935 The Hands of Orlac adaptation Mad Love – a story that was about a man who receives the hands of an executed murderer. Charley’s mission to get his body parts back allows Red to achieve the mixture he originally wanted when he set out to make a horror movie: a psychological thriller with some gross-out gore effects, which were provided by Gordon J. Smith and his team.
BACKGROUND: Body Parts had a comfortable 45 day shooting schedule that went rather smoothly. A slight issue came up when a test screening audience wasn’t satisfied with the way Charley Fletcher was taken out in the end, so some additional photography was done to give him a more definitive death. With a crowd-pleasing ending in place and a couple severed arm gore effects removed to appease the ratings board, the film continued toward a wide theatrical release that was scheduled for August 2nd, 1991. Then real-world horror came in to cloud the public’s perception of Body Parts: less than two weeks before the release date, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was captured in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As news reports filled papers and airwaves with talk of the victim body parts that were found in Dahmer’s apartment, Paramount decided to pull the ads for Body Parts in Milwaukee – and when this move was noticed by the media, Body Parts became associated with Dahmer’s crimes in the exact way Paramount had been hoping to avoid.
Body Parts was released on August 2nd as intended, but the film didn’t recoup its ten million dollar budget at the domestic box office – its take in North America ended at just over nine million. The film did go on to reach more of an audience on home video and cable, and has developed a cult following over the years. Its following doesn’t seem to be nearly as large as the ones The Hitcher and Near Dark have, but it does have its appreciative fans, and in 2020 Scream Factory chose to honor it with a special edition Blu-ray release.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Body Parts is a great example of a film that provides satisfying pay-off to fascinating build-up. Red draws the viewer in with the dark mystery of what’s going on with Bill Crushank following his arm transplant, and Jeff Fahey gives a terrific performance as we watch the mild-mannered psychologist, whose wife describes as the best man she knows, fall apart and turn into someone with violent mood swings, who will even hit his kids in anger. Many viewers will probably predict that Bill is going to be the villain by the end of the film – but then Red and his collaborators made the smart decision to shift gears and widen the scope of the film. This isn’t just the story of a man’s mental deterioration, or of his corruption by the limb of a killer. It’s bigger and crazier than that. As Red said, when figuring out how to bring the Choice Cuts story to the screen it seemed obvious to him that, “In a movie, the whole last act had to be the killer out on the street ripping his parts off the transplant recipients in slasher movie fashion so the movie would escalate from psychological thriller into full-on horror action mode.”
That escalation is what makes this such an entertaining movie to watch; the psychological thriller stretch of the film is highly intriguing, then things get adrenalized when Charley Fletcher enters the picture, bringing with him gory death scenes, car chase action, and explosions.
It’s also great to watch Bill interact with his fellow transplant recipients, especially the always captivating Brad Dourif, who has an excellent scene in which he tells Bill how well his artistic endeavors have been going since he received his new arm, and Bill tells him the imagery he has been painting are things Charley Fletcher saw when he was killing people.
BEST SCENE(S): One of the best scenes in the movie involves all three of the transplant recipients hanging out in a bar. Of course, as often happens in movies, this bar scene breaks out into a brawl, and during the scuffle we see that Charley’s limbs still seem to have violent instincts in them. Bill beats the hell out of several fellow patrons with his new right arm, and is so out of control that he even hits Mark Draper in the middle of the fight. Draper immediately reacts by kicking Bill with one of his new legs.
Another standout moment is the accident in which Bill loses his arm in the first place. This crash is a jaw-dropping sight, as Bill is tossed through the windshield of his car, then hits the trunk of the vehicle in front of him and gets thrown further through the air. Part of why this is so shocking is due to the fact that it was a stunt gone wrong, the stuntman wasn’t supposed to get tossed around quite so much. Thankfully, he wasn’t hurt in this accident, so it worked out well for the movie.
But the very best sequence in Body Parts is also the one that was the toughest to plan and film. It’s a major stunt sequence in which Bill is sitting in the passenger seat of a car when Charley Fletcher pulls up beside him in another and handcuffs his right arm – the one that used to belong to Charley – to his left arm. Charley then starts speeding through traffic, hoping to rip Bill’s arm off in the process. The handcuff sequence took two and a half nights for Red and his crew to film, in sub-zero temperatures on Lakeshore Drive in Toronto. As Red describes it, “There were over a hundred intricate and complicated set-ups required to get all the coverage. Filming involved plenty of inter-coordinated car stunt work with some very tricky camera placements. We used cars hooked together with camera rigs on back, we shot off insert cars, had cameras on bumper mounts, side mounts, you name it — we used precision stunt drivers for many of the shots and used Jeff Fahey and the other actors in cars on tow rigs for some shots.”
The result is a spectacular sequence that, once you’ve watched this movie, you’ll never forget.
PARTING SHOT: An adaptation of the Choice Cuts novel could have been good if it had been made at an earlier point during its time in development hell. It certainly would have been interesting to see what Alfred Hitchcock would have done with the concept. But genre fans really lucked out when the story ended up in the hands of Eric Red. With Body Parts, Red delivered something quite special, an awesome blend of thrills, action, and horror that is carried on the shoulders of Jeff Fahey, in one of his best roles, driven forward by a score from Loek Dikker, and features some incredible stuntwork and shocking gore. The film didn’t reach as big of an audience as it should have when it was released in 1991, but its audience is always growing and the film is still readily available to be discovered by new viewers. Once people do have the chance to see Body Parts, it tends to go over well. Red has even said that this is the only movie he has made where the audience applauds over the end credits at screenings because they enjoyed it so much. He witnessed this happening at separate screenings that were held twenty-five years apart, proving to him that his film has stood the test of time.
The applause is earned, because Body Parts is yet another very cool movie from the man who has brought us films like The Hitcher, Near Dark, Bad Moon, and 100 Feet.
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals!
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