Worth Mentioning - Who Cares for Full Moon Surprises?

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. 

A classic revisited, a horrific character study, and alien invasion.

RE-ANIMATOR (1985) - REUNION EDITION (2022)

While producer Brian Yuzna will say that Full Moon founder Charles Band didn’t have any creative input on director Stuart Gordon’s 1985 classic Re-Animator, that Band simply distributed the film through his then-company Empire Pictures, the fact is that Re-Animator wouldn’t be exactly what it is if not for his influence. One week into filming, he had the cinematographer fired and replaced by one of his frequent collaborators, Mac Ahlberg. He picked the artists that provided the memorable special effects. His brother Richard provided the film with its Psycho-esque score, and their father Albert made notes on the editing process as an hour of subplots were whittled out of the running time. So if it weren’t for the Bands, Re-Animator would have turned out very differently. 

The film now has a streaming home on Band’s Full Moon Features service, and when Re-Animator started streaming there last year Band celebrated the event by putting together a “Reunion Edition” of the movie. Before the movie begins, we get to watch Charles Band and cast members Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs sit down for a 70 minute conversation that covers not just Re-Animator – and the Band contributions to the film that I mentioned above – but also the trio’s other collaborations with Gordon. From Beyond, Castle Freak, Dolls, etc.

During this conversation, we’re told that Crampton was a last minute replacement for the actress who had initially been cast in her Re-Animator role, as the first choice had to drop out after her mother read the script and disapproved of its contents. Gordon and co-writers Dennis Paoli and William J. Norris were originally hoping to turn Re-Animator into a TV series, so it’s said that the script was very thick and didn’t bear much resemblance to the finished film. In between talk of working on Re-Animator and other projects, the actors also give away some personal information: like how Gordon met his wife, and the fact that co-star Ken Foree proved to be very popular with the local ladies when they were working on From Beyond in Italy.

If you’re a fan of Re-Animator or any of the three people involved with the conversation, the Reunion Edition is well worth checking out. Then, once the talk comes to an end, Re-Animator begins and plays out in all its unrated glory. Re-Animator is a great movie – and I wrote a Film Appreciation article on it that can be read at THIS LINK.

THE ATTIC (1980)

Carrie Snodgress was able to rack up more than sixty screen acting credits before she passed away at the too-young age of just 58 back in 2004. I haven’t seen all or even most of her performances – but the roles I have seen her play have been rather off-putting. Yet the odd, off-putting presence she brought to those roles are exactly what was needed for the lead character in the 1980 horror film The Attic, where Snodgress plays depressed and lonely librarian Louise, who has a tendency to set fires.

Nineteen years ago, after her fiancé Robert disappeared on their wedding day, Louise set fire to her father’s department store. To escape from the fire, her overbearing father Wendell (Ray Milland) had to jump from a second story window... and he has had to get around in a wheelchair ever since. Years after Robert’s disappearance, Louise still pines for her lost beloved. She spends her days working at the library and taking care of Wendell. She’s miserable. So miserable that the melancholy song that plays over the opening credits ("Who cares if the sun sets or rises? Who cares for full moon surprises?") perfectly matches her mood. She recently had another mental break and set the library on fire, so she doesn’t have much longer to work there. She’s being replaced by Emily (Ruth Cox), who lives at home with an overbearing mother. Louise can see elements of herself reflected in Emily.

For most of its 101 minutes, The Attic is an intriguing character study of a very damaged woman who has an unhealthy home life with her dad – who is a total bastard. But if you’re here for the horror, you can tell throughout that something dark and twisted is coming down the line. Louise regularly fantasizes about killing her father, and Milland does a great job of making Wendell such a creep that you can understand why she has these fantasies. It seems like it’s only a matter of time before something terrible happens in Louise and Wendell’s home...

Snodgress turned in an excellent performance as Louise, making her someone we care about as we worry that she’s going to snap at any moment. We want to see her find a way to escape to a happier life. It’s interesting to watch her interact with Emily – and try to save her co-worker / friend from following a path that’s too similar to the one she took in life.

Directed by George Edwards, who also wrote the screenplay with Tony Crechales and Mel Edelstein, The Attic is a solid drama that also turns out to be a really good horror movie.

NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU (2023)

Having enjoyed the Brian Duffield-scripted films The Babysitter and Love and Monsters as well as his directorial effort Spontaneous (which I’ll be writing about in the future), I was hyped for his alien home invasion movie No One Will Save You as soon as I heard about it – and my hype for it was increased when I started seeing people say the script for the film ranked as one of the best scripts they had ever read. Having seen the finished film, I have to wonder if the bizarre, off-putting final thirty minutes of the movie worked better on the page than they did on the screen.

Kaitlyn Dever stars in No One Will Save You as a young woman named Brynn, who lives alone in her childhood home in the countryside, having lost her mother a few years ago. There’s another tragedy in Brynn’s past that involved her best friend Maude, something that happened ten years ago, but Duffield leaves the audience hanging until almost the end of the movie before he reveals the specifics of that situation. Whatever happened between Brynn and Maude, it left Maude dead and made everyone in their hometown hate the surviving friend. And it turns out to be the most important element of the movie, even though most of the 93 minute running time is spent on Brynn running and fighting for her life as aliens start invading her hometown and taking over the bodies of her fellow residents.

There are some great, creepy sequences in the film that involve grey-style aliens creeping around in Brynn’s house and some cool scenes where she faces off with these powerful creatures. Those made the viewing experience worthwhile... but eventually the movie ran out of steam for me, because scenes of alien fighting and getting caught in tractor beams can only stay interesting for so long when you don’t know what’s really going on. When Duffield and the aliens decide to take a deep dive into Brynn’s mind toward the end of the movie, it was both enlightening and frustrating. Leading to a deeply weird and unsatisfying ending. Again, I have to assume that’s something that worked better on the page than it probably will for a lot of viewers.

No One Will Save You plays out with a minimum of dialogue, and Dever did an incredible job carrying the film on her shoulders without talking. I didn’t think the movie was great overall, but it does serve as a great showcase for her talent.