Cody digs into an obscure movie with connections to major franchises.
BACKGROUND
Don’t let the directing credit on The Unseen fool you. This was not the first and only movie ever made by someone named Peter Foleg. Rather, Foleg was a pseudonym for a director who would go on to contribute a sequel to one of the biggest franchises in horror. It was future Friday the 13th: A New Beginning director Danny Steinmann! When you combine that with the fact that the story was partially crafted by special effects legend Stan Winston, it’s shocking that The Unseen isn’t more well-known than it is. But somehow it has faded into obscurity. Maybe movie-goers just felt that it should live up to its title.
Steinmann took his name off of the film because he wasn’t satisfied with the finished product - and that things were taken out of his hands to that degree is another surprise because the movie was “presented by” his own father Herbert R. Steinmann, who was also a “presenter” on George A. Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead. But despite his dad being behind it all, The Unseen apparently crumbled around Steinmann to a disturbing degree, so you won’t see Danny’s name anywhere on the film. Peter Foleg receives the directing and screenplay credits, with story credit going to Winston and fellow special effects artist Tom Burman.
Online trivia adds that an uncredited Michael L. Grace wrote the screenplay with the director, working from a previous draft by the also-uncredited Michael Viner and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre co-writer Kim Henkel, with stage actress Nancy Rifkin contributing along the way as well. So it sounds like this was a mess behind the scenes. Maybe there’s some insight into this messiness in the special features (interviews and an audio commentary) on a Blu-ray release that came out a while back – but I don’t have a copy at this time. I need to add that one to my collection. What I do know is that actor Stephen Furst says he didn’t like working with Danny Steinmann, make-up supervisor Craig Reardon was annoyed by Steinmann’s “habitual indecision,” and Steinmann had the original editor fired and replaced.
So that’s what it all comes down to: a bumpy production resulted in an obscure movie.
SETTING
There’s a small town in southern California's Santa Ynez Valley that’s called Solvang and is known for its Danish-style architecture and many wineries. The Unseen is partially set in Solvang, as the story follows a trio of women who work for a TV news program and have been sent to the town to cover its Danish festival. Unfortunately for them, every hotel room in the town has been booked, and the reservations someone at the TV station was supposed to make for them wasn’t made. So the women head into a nearby town hoping to find a room, only to find that this place is a ghost town and the local hotel has been converted into a museum. Now it’s time for desperate measures: the hotel’s owner invites the women to stay in a guest suite at his own home, a place that’s way out in the countyside.
The terrible things that happen in this movie happen entirely in and around this house. You see, the problem is, the owner was hiding a twisted secret down in the home’s nasty, dirty basement – and this secret is above to get out of the basement through the home’s air ducts, which lead to large vents in the floors of rooms throughout the house.
There were no air ducts involved, by my maternal grandmother’s house did have an air vent in the floor of an upstairs room, through which you could see down into the first floor living room. So I can appreciate a movie using such vents as a source of horror.
KILLER
The killer and the true creep in this story are two very different characters. The killer is indeed “the unseen” for the majority of the running time – but when we finally see who has been grabbing people through the air vents in this country room, it turns out to, basically, be a big baby. Played by Stephen Furst (best known as Flounder in Animal House), the character Junior may be of an adult age, but he still has the mind of a child. He bounces around in the basement like a deformed toddler – and it’s no surprise to see that Furst had a baby son at home when he was making this movie, because his wordless performance plays like it could have only come from someone who had spent a lot of time around a baby. Junior wants to play... but he gets rough with his playmates and ends up hurting them. There isn’t any slashing with bladed weapons, so I was hesitant to consider this movie a slasher, but that’s how it’s categorized, and if the victims had been killed with knives I definitely would have considered it a slasher from the start – so here we are, dissecting it like a slasher.
The real creep in this scenario is Junior’s father Ernest Keller, played by Sydney Lassick. He’s the one who invites the women back to his home – and when they’re settling in, starts spying on one of them while she’s disrobing for a bath. That’s not the worst thing Ernest has done in his life, and the exposition on his past and what’s going on in his house is delivered in a unique way. While hanging out in his museum, he starts reliving a conversation he had with his late father long ago, bouncing dialogue back and forth with his father’s disembodied voice. We learn that Ernest’s sister Virginia (Lelia Goldoni) was always a shy, timid girl, and Ernest took advantage of her, sexually abusing her. Resulting in a pregnancy. When their father found out what was going on, he was going to send Virginia away and handle Ernest’s punishment himself – but rather than take his punishment, Ernest killed his father. Since their mom had already passed away, Ernest and Virginia had the Keller home to themselves. And decided to keep their disfigured, mentally disabled offspring in the basement.
Dad’s corpse is still in a room at the hotel-turned-museum, by the way. He even still has a knife in his throat.
FINAL GIRL
The heroine of The Unseen is TV news reporter Jennifer Fast, played by The Spy Who Loved Me Bond girl Barbara Bach, who was about to become Mrs. Ringo Starr at the time... leading me to ask again, how did this movie become so obscure? There’s not a whole lot to Jennifer, but she sets out to do her job in a professional manner, is polite to the people she comes across, and stays calm and cool when dealing with issues that come her way. That includes the problems she’s facing with her boyfriend Tony Ross (Doug Barr), a football player recovering from an injury and refusing to accept that his football days are over. Jennifer recently had an abortion because she knew she and Tony were not in a place where they could start having children – but she didn’t tell Tony about the pregnancy or the abortion, and it’s implied that he got physical with her when he discovered the secret. Now he’s trying to hold on to their relationship, and even follows her to Solvang to try to talk more about it.
Jennifer is so calm and cool that she comes off as icy at times. And she’s so polite to strangers that she even agrees to help Ernest will some work he’s doing in the basement... not realizing that she has been lured into a trap because Ernest has found out about Junior’s other murders and wants the big baby to kill her as well so there won’t be any loose ends. Seeing what Jennifer endures during the extended climactic sequences – dirt, rain, Junior’s big baby antics – leads me to suspect that Bach must have been rather calm, cool, and professional herself, to be putting up with all of this.
VICTIMS
Jennifer heads out on this Solvang job with two co-workers: her sister / camera operator Karen (played by Karen Lamm) and Vicki Thompson (Lois Young). Karen is not as nice as her sister, making fun of the shy and emotional Virginia behind her back, to Jennifer’s disapproval. That’s about all we know about Karen: she has some attitude and is very concerned about her sister’s love life, doing her best to make sure Jennifer and Tony will get back together.
Vicki isn’t around for very long, so all we find out about her is that she chews gum and isn’t feeling well. She stays behind when Jennifer and Karen go back into Solvang to do the report, opting to take a bath and go to bed instead... And that’s why she’s at the Keller house without her companions, vulnerable to become the first victim.
DEATHS
The lives of both Vicki and Karen end with the women getting pulled into floor vents. Vicki is pulled into an open vent, while Karen gets caught by her scarf and pulled into a vent that’s still closed. These aren’t exactly mind-blowing death scenes, but they work well enough. More death follows at the end of the film because, of course, someone has to pay for what happened to Vicki and Karen.
CLICHÉS
An isolated home in the country that holds dark secrets within its walls. We’ve seen that before. We’ve also seen dimwitted, deformed killers like Junior before – and actually, his presence in the Keller house almost makes The Unseen feel like a companion piece to uncredited writer Kim Henkel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Give Junior a chainsaw and a handful more IQ points and he could be Leatherface.
A female character being spied on while disrobing – something that occurs not long before she gets murdered – is also something we’ve seen elsewhere. Many times.
POSTMORTEM
Some slasher fans might be disappointed by the low body count and the small amount of blood on display in The Unseen – and as I said, technically there isn’t any slasher, so I was unsure about referring to it as a slasher. But whether you call it a slasher or not, I find watching The Unseen to be an entertaining experience. I love ‘80s horror, and this is a decent ‘80s horror movie. It definitely didn’t turn out bad enough that Danny Steinmann should have taken his name off of it.
This one slipped under the radar for me, I didn’t see it for the first time until recently, but once I caught up with it, I was glad I did. I have watched it a few times now, and intend to keep it in my viewing rotation from now on. The Unseen is going to be seen by me many more times.
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