Horror High (1974)

In the late 70s and early 80s, I was too young to go to the movies on my own, and convincing an adult to take you to a horror movie was usually a losing proposition, so TV was our last hope for seeing a lot of the horror movies we'd see advertised in the papers and on TV. Luckily for us, it was easy to find horror movies on TV. The lesser-known horror and exploitation movies usually ended up playing on late night TV or at various times on weekends, all of which was prime viewing time for kids--when the adults were least likely to be around commandeering the TV set or monitoring what we were watching. A lot of times these movies were very lurid and the violence strong even in the edited prints, and some really shocking images warped our young minds. One movie that probably haunted many a young child's nightmares was "Twisted Brain", a movie I later came to understand was originally titled "Horror High". Although the TV version was edited for violence, it still contained glimpses of the film's gruesome gore, including a man's head pushed into a barrel of acid, not to mention the bloody dead body of a pet cat.

Vernon is the typical high school horror movie nerd, the kind of student that even Carrie White would beat up. The mean jocks that terrorize Vernon call him "The Creeper", and even Vernon's teachers seem to want to antagonize him in whatever way that will hurt him the most. A skeezy janitor menaces Vernon at every turn. His English teacher determines that Vernon's poor grades in her class stem from his obsession with chemistry, so she shreds his "biology report" with her paper cutter. His gym teacher strongarms Vernon into helping his dumb football players cheat on their work by copying Vernon's answers on tests. What none of them know is that Vernon's lab experiment involves creating a formula that turns his gentle white guinea pig into a dark-furred, raging guinea-beast. Before you can say Dr. Jekyll, Vernon is drinking the stuff himself, at which point he transforms into a homicidal alter-ego who viciously murders his tormentors.

Although the movie probably was not made with young children in mind, it had a strong appeal to me as a child and I'm sure others felt the same way. Its story about a social outcast in high school has an afterschool special quality to it, because the horrible abuse heaped on Vernon mirrored real behavior many of us saw in our own schools, or even worse, had happen to us. The film's budgetary limitations add to its made-for-TV atmosphere, as does the often amateurish acting. Then just when you think you're in a safe kids movies, all of a sudden -- there's a dead cat, a woman's fingers severed on a paper cutter, a bleeding face with melting white eyes.

"Horror High" makes for a more interesting title, since the horror sequences have a drug movie angle to them (lots of colored lights, zooming cameras, rock music, tilted framing).  It definitely seems possible that it was written while high, considering some of the more outrageous plot points. For instance, why would the school remain functioning after even one murder occurs, let alone TWO murders? Why does Vernon seem to live alone with no adult supervision whatsoever? What kind of high school janitor brings his cat to the school with him? All I can say is, none of it mattered to the younger me, I wasn't paying attention to the plot so much as waiting for the next gruesome shock.

"You talkin to me?"

Cult film fans rejoice, because "Horror High" has got a few luminaries. There's one single person in the entire school that likes Vernon, and it's Rosie Holotik, from "Don't Look in the Basement!". She gives a performance similar to the one she gave in "Basement", which is to say very sweet, very vulnerable, and then very screaming. Austin Stoker (from Assault On Precinct 13 and Abby to name just a few) plays the lone detective assigned to this case of a serial killer operating inside a high school. He has the difficult task of playing it straight in a movie that is clearly not grounded in reality. It also must be said that Pat Cardi carries the film rather nicely as Vernon; looking a lot like I imagine Marilyn Manson looked in his high school years, Cardi's performance is appealingly oddball, and he manages to make a somewhat ridiculous character likable enough to be compelling, yet awkward enough that we understand why he's an outcast, too. Some of the otherwise unmentioned performances are best unmentioned, as they are barely passable. Vernon's gym teacher is played by an actor who can't read his lines all that well but does portray a convincing sleazeball character who makes Dennis Franz seem positively squeaky clean, .

"I can't believe Bill Marshall suggested that I read for this."

The music score is an eerie prog-rock sounding thing; it's more Alice Cooper than Goblin, and it's not nearly as prevalent as it should have been in the finished product. There's even a spooky, folky ballad theme song (with Vernon's name in it!), a hallmark of the 70s. The original unedited 1974 theatrical version of the film was a Crown International Release, and it got a nice DVD release by the Code Red imprint a few years back--it's now out of print, but the film usually shows up on YouTube, and the edited TV version is on a few budget DVD multi pack compilations.

Frogs (1972): Death by Ridiculous

I'll admit I have unconventional taste in films--which is an obvious attempt to make myself sound cooler than the people who might say I like movies that suck. I don't deny that "Frogs" could actually be the most straightforwardly ridiculous movie that I adore, and if you don't believe me just go check out some of the comments left on the "Frogs" IMDB page.  "Frogs" merits a meager 4.1 out of 10 rating, which isn't "Manos Hand of Fate" level, but still pretty low. Nevertheless, I love "Frogs" like a magnet loves your fridge, and I find it to be frightening and disturbing in a number of ways. Prepare to hear me out.

"Are you planning on staying a while? We have a few drains that need unclogged."

The setup: Sam Elliott (sporting the world's most noticeable trouser snake) is a "freelance wildlife photographer" named Pickett Smith. Through a boating mishap, he ends up at the island estate of Jason Crockett, played by a very cantankerous Ray Milland. A house full of guests allows for plenty of victims when the local wildlife starts to turn on human beings, somehow driven by an intelligence and understanding that they couldn't possibly possess. Gruesome death results: a hired hand is discovered dead, bitten by snakes. A man goes into a greenhouse and is followed by hordes of lizards, which knock over bottles of poison, creating a cloud of noxious gas that asphyxiates him. A woman dies after being hounded by reptiles and bitten by a rattlesnake. A woman gets stuck in the mud and is killed by an alligator snapping turtle. The death list grows!

Grandfather, please try not to call it a trouser snake in front of the children.

It's hard to know what to do with a movie like "Frogs" today, since so many films have come after it that showed similar images. There was a time when a character's death really was enough to shock an exploitation audience, but "Frogs" stands apart from most films of its time for a simple reason: this 1972 film takes great pleasure in lingering on dead bodies, showing us a series of characters who have been brought to a disgusting, undignified death.

As a child, "Frogs" was the first time a film showed me gruesome death on screen, and it takes an approach to dying that isn't typical of other period films (excluding more underground gore films and "Night of the Living Dead"). I had seen characters in movies die before, but it was usually in a shootout or some other form of action that made it seem almost noble or glamorous. The people who die in "Frogs" do so most horribly. Although obviously the movie is unrealistic, if you accept the fact that it is unrealistic and look at what's really happening on screen, it is deeply unsettling. The victims in the film are indeed killed by harmless animals, but not only that, their deaths are unusually agonizing and drawn out.

Especially effective is the protracted stalking of Iris, a daffy lady who chases after a butterfly into the marshes, then gets cornered by a bunch of snakes and lizards. The director isn't concerned with what is killing her, or how realistic her motivations are for wandering into the swamp alone with a butterfly net. The horror is not expected to come from the fact that a group of unintelligent animals could somehow work in unison to murder a human being. Rather, what's unsettling is how she gradually disintegrates, her fear causing her to lapse into animalistic appearance and behavior. Her hairstyle falls, ratted out by the vegetation she crawls through, making her look like a madwoman. Her clothing becomes filthy, and in the most excruciating moment, she trips and falls into a marshy pit of filthy water and emerges covered in leeches. Finally, completely demoralized, terrified, and drenched in silt and bloodied by the leeches, she is bitten by a rattler and very quickly dies. We see the moment of her death, and her corpse turns color to a deathly oxygen-deprived bluish hue right before our eyes. To me, this is one of the most horrifying deaths in horror movie history, even if it's also one of the most stupid--check out the stand-in mannequin arm that the rattler really bites!

There's a disjointed feel to "Frogs" that the film's low budget and glaring continuity errors help to emphasize. There is a moment when Smith finds one of Crockett's employees dead, lying face-down in a marsh in an unnatural position, with snakes crawling over him. The actor playing the victim is moving ever so slightly, although we're not sure if he's breathing or if the snakes slithering around his neck are making it move. Then Smith rolls him over to face the camera, and we get a look at his face, horribly bloated and off-color. In a series of cuts that most likely represent bad continuity, his eyes go from tightly shut to a hideous, wide-open death stare. The "bad" cuts, however, lend a hallucinatory quality to the scene, and suggest something even more horrifying: although we saw him lying face down in a wet marsh and covered by reptiles, it seems as if he was still barely alive, languishing from the snake venom, and Smith arrived just in time to see the moment of his death. How horrible to end your life paralyzed by snake venom, lying there with them while they bite you and slither over you possessively. That open-eyed death mask that his face becomes is probably the first image of a dead person that I ever saw in a horror movie, and it remains one of the most gruesome.

In another particularly outrageous and bizarre moment, a character accidentally shoots himself in the leg and, rendered immobile, is attacked by an army of tarantulas that descend from a nearby tree. An unexplained combination of vines and Spanish Moss begin to bind the man while the spiders bite him and cocoon him with webbing. As his struggling starts to slow and his death approaches, the last image of him is a horrifying one: his face, nearly buried in Spanish Moss, being covered with waves of spider webs. The movie tries to make some kind of overall statement about pollution of the environment, but it's these small images in "Frogs" that stick with you.

Judy Pace sez: "My boyfriend's dead? I am OUTTA here!"

The humans in “Frogs” make it easy to root for the animals. Ray Milland's family of the “ugly rich” seem to take pride in their roles as exploiters and destroyers of both people and the environment. Frustrated by his inability to control the blooming frog population on his small private island, Milland has reacted by increasing the use of poison until all the local wildlife has been affected. His relatives are similarly reptilian in their disregard for ethics; Milland’s daughter, Holly Irving, complains that the family fortune has been slightly diminished because of costly environmental regulations forced on their factories. Irving’s husband, David Gillam, encourages his own son to engage in a fist fight; Milland’s grandson, Adam Roarke, is the most arrogant and aggressive character in the film, driving his speedboat while drunk, picking fights with other men in his family, and pathetically longing for the glory days of his youth when he was a football hero. Only Joan Van Ark manages to avoid the selfish pitfalls of her own family, projecting an innocence and sweetness that earns her a place as one of the film’s survivors. Elliott is a free-spirited, environmentally conscious photographer who gently tries to persuade Milland to mend his ways and exist in harmony with nature. Judy Pace’s character helps detail the social implications underneath the film’s surface; a spunky fashion model/designer who is dating one of the rich family’s sons, she brings a sense of social consciousness; she reminds the black servants of wealthy, white Milland that they have no need to be loyal to their employer when their lives are in danger. Her rejection of Milland is more in line with the rebellion of the animal life on the island, although it's suggested that she and the servants are attacked by seagulls while attempting to escape. We never see their bodies, just their bloody, abandoned luggage. I prefer to think they survived, perhaps injured, but alive. 

The movie has a very strong atmosphere, thanks to some great cinematography and a bizarre electronic score by none other than Les Baxter. The settings are otherworldly at times, beautiful at others. If you can get past how far-fetched the movie is (and scores of sentient human beings cannot), the biggest liability is the acting, particularly by Ray Milland. He didn't like being in this silly movie, and apparently he was channeling this into his character. The director can't get what's necessary out of him, although it's too bad Milland couldn't see into the future and realize that he would appear in Amando De Ossorio's embarassing sock monster movie "The Sea Serpent". It may have helped him to take "Frogs" just a teensy bit more seriously.

"Oh, great. Milland is covered in amphibians again."

The fact that Spanish Moss and vines don't move on their own doesn't really matter to me, because at heart, "Frogs" is a fantasy--a particularly lurid fantasy about the revulsion that many people have for animals of this kind. Spiders, snakes, insects, frogs, these are all things that make all kinds of people recoil in fear and disgust, and...why? There is no logic to that fear, because these things are generally harmless to human beings. "Frogs" is a fantasy about what the world would be like if our unfounded fears were reality. I don't know if "Frogs" would ever be considered a work of art by anybody, but I know that I like it.

Corpse Eaters (1974): Eat At Joe's

Behold, the one image from the film that doesn't give you the urge to squint.

We all have our movies that we keep coming back to, and one of the ones I like to revisit a lot is Bob Clark's 1972 film "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things". It's a humble but weirdly effective zombie film before zombie films were a huge thing, with lots of fantastic imagery. The performances were a little grating, but there was a humorous aspect to it took the edge off of that, as if it wasn't to be taken too seriously. Although the zombies don't arrive until far into the movie, once they do it's pretty awesome. Two years after its release came a Canadian film with a similar plot involving a small group of young people who decide to hold a Satanic mass inside a vault in a dark cemetery, provoking the rise of zombies who eat human beings. Produced by a Canadian drive-in owner as a moneymaking feature for his own drive-in, "Corpse Eaters" debuted at the Hiway 69 Drive-In, and... well that's about it. An obscure oddity was born.

It is the early 1970s. We can tell this because the sideburns are long and the clothing looks like it was made out of fabric cut from curtains and bedspreads. The location: the Happy Halo Funeral Home. A mortician named Bill is working on a fresh corpse, when his creepy boss comes into the lab to ask him to work late. The boss mortician looks more than a little bit like Angus Scrimm as "The Tall Man" from Phantasm. Phantasm was a much different movie, though, because you see, in Phantasm you could actually see what was going on. Corpse Eaters is much more coy; the filmmakers knew that to truly engage the audience, you must constantly obscure your film in darkness and tight closeups that rarely allow the film to familiarize the viewer with any visual information.

But I digress...Bill is working on a corpse when Creepy Mortician (he doesn't have a name) tells him that a new job is coming in that night; some guy who seems to have been mauled by a bear. Hmmmm. Creepy Mortician decides to get in his hearse and drive around while Bill does his thing, delivering a voiceover monologue about death before driving right back to the mortuary. Why was he driving around in the hearse think-talking to himself? Never mind. Together they put the finishing touches on the 'bear victim': cottonballs stuffed into the oral cavity. I once heard that artists never really know when the work of art is completed.

Immediately we are plunged into flashback. You will not know this just by watching the film, because there is no real communication going on between the director and the viewer. But take my word for it, you are watching a flashback, and think of it as a pre-Tarantino gesture in cutting edge filmmaking. We witness two frisky young Canadian couples on a day trip via motorboat. Richie and Julie are the "dirty" ones, while Alan and Lisa are the "other" ones. (HINT: Richie is the corpse in the coffin in the introduction--the 'bear mauling' victim!!!!) Together they jaunt out to an island, where they lay down on a blanket so Richie can take off Julie's top and spray a can of Canadian beer all over her Canadian boobs. Readers, I doubt that any of you boob-lovers are going to be turned on by Julie's boobs, but have at it if you are. You get to see them for a nice long time in a scene that goes nowhere; Julie and Richie roll around a little and when Alan doesn't get any action from Lisa, he tries to turn it into a three-way. Julie is having none of that, however, so instead they all go swimming. Naturally!

Afterwards, they plot their next adventure. Bored of "the rock concerts" (?), Richie comes up with the perfect evening: they'll spend the night in an abandoned graveyard and get high on some of his pot. Lisa, the spoilsport that she is, tries to talk everyone out of it, but she's dragged along by the rest of them. The graveyard spooks her out, and things go from bad to worse when they go into a vault that's been left standing open.

Richie, always the instigator, decides to perform a black mass, something he learned from his uncle, who was "always drawing circles". Lisa warns against it, seeing as the uncle "did disappear mysteriously enough". Off the top of his head, Richie's able to recite from memory some words he heard his uncle say. The words just happen to be a Satanic incantation to raise the dead, and before you can say "children shouldn't play with dead things", there are a few dead things wandering around the cemetery. Richie goes outside to investigate a noise, leaving us in awkward silence with some super-tight closeups of Lisa, Julie and Alan as they wait for him. You know how it is when nobody knows what to say. When Richie comes back inside, he's followed by a gang of the hungry dead, who lunge at our heroes. Alan wards off the zombies with a shovel and protects Lisa, but Richie is severely injured. It's curtains for Julie, proving once again that if you show your boobs in a horror movie, you're as good as dead.

Anyway....

Lisa and Alan drag Richie back to the car and speed off. "What about Julie??" Lisa begs, to which Alan replies "Forget her!" Meanwhile, back at the vault, there's some corpse eating going on as the zombies chow down on a bunch of cherry jelly that's suddenly all over Julie's body. Yum! As Alan speeds down the road, the film cuts back and forth endlessly: speeding car, zombies eating Julie, speeding car, zombies eating Julie, speeding car, zombies eating Julie. Do not try and suggest that the makers of Corpse Eaters didn't make every attempt to give you your money's worth, because to say that would be unfair.

When they take Richie to a conveniently nearby hospital, the doctors are at a loss to explain what attacked Richie. They also don't seem to understand the meaning of "emergency", taking their sweet time to get cleaned up and prepped for surgery. It's no surprise when they're unable to save Richie, partly because they are doofuses and largely because we already know Richie winds up as a corpse in a coffin at the Happy Halo Funeral Home. One doc breaks the news to Lisa and Alan, causing Lisa to collapse backwards onto a chair. "Lisa!" Alan shouts, to which the doctor says "Oh she's just in shock, that's all, she'll be alright." Just like it would happen in real life, they put Lisa to bed for the night in a nearby room, while a scary nurse (who resembles a transsexual Howard Johnson's waitress) gives her a sedative to help her sleep. Meanwhile Alan, who still hasn't bothered to remove his blood-soaked tank top, tries to explain to the doctors what happened. Needless to say, what doctor would believe that a group of crusty-faced zombies came along and ruined a perfectly good Black Mass?

"This is Nurse Bobbi....I borrowed your razor...."

In the tradition of all good horror movies, we have a spooky dream sequence as Lisa sleeps. She sees dead people, visits Richie in the funeral home, and sees him rise out of his coffin and kiss her full on the mouth. Did I mention that Richie is supposed to be Lisa's brother? Guess we know how it is in THAT family. Richie leaves blood all over Lisa's mouth, causing her to wake up and bite Alan's neck open. Then she attacks the tranny nurse and stabs her with scissors for about five minutes until she wakes up for real and realizes It Was Only A Dream.

Meanwhile, back at the funeral home, Creepy Mortician is drinking himself blind in his office. I honestly can't blame him, I'd be an alkie if dead people were my business, too. Especially if I looked like Angus Scrimm. So while he's up there getting plastered and falling asleep on his desk, shadowy figures are moving downstairs in the funeral home. Who could these strange visitors be? HINT: If you were a corpse eater, where would you go when you were hungry? A funeral parlor is like a fast food joint in that sense. That's right, Creepy Mortician stumbles down into the viewing rooms and finds our dusty, corpse eatin' zombies chowing down. Richie is also rising up out of the coffin, perhaps signifying that corpse eating is contagious and the graveyards of the world will no longer be safe.

This is where things get a little sketchy. The editing goes haywire here, and the zombies appear to pull out The Wannabe Tall Man's eyes. But then we see him being dragged into a barred room and put into a strait jacket, eyes mysteriously intact, babbling about how he's not insane. The end. What exactly just happened here? We don't want to believe it, but not only did Corpse Eaters pull off the "It Was All A Dream" trick, it also doubles back on itself and pulls the "It Was All In the Mind Of A Crazy Person" stunt!! How many films can you say that about?

Well, fortunately Corpse Eaters doesn't ask for too much of your time, as it only runs a little bit over an hour. It's nobody's idea of a "good" movie, although it could be a rather enjoyable one. The filmmakers don't take it too seriously, and they insert an amusing gimmick into the mix: at the beginning of the film, we see a respectably-dressed balding man sitting in the theater, minding his own business, until he sees something on the screen so horrible that he gags into his handkerchief. This is the signal, viewers, the signal that something terrible is going to happen. A voiceover that sounds suspiciously like a Canadian version of Jack from "Will & Grace" warns the audience that when they see the gagging man and hear the special ululating "buzzer", this is the time to look away from the screen to avoid seeing something that might upset your stomach. Because ya know, I can see how someone with a weak stomach might accidentally wander into a film titled Corpse Eaters.