Halloween II (1981)

Having recently discussed "Howling 2: Your Sister Is A Werewolf Trapped In A Very Bad Movie", and with The Big Day just around the corner, maybe this is a good time to chew on another early 80s sequel that is nearly always hailed as a bad "part 2". I'm talking about "Halloween II: Your Sister Is In the Hospital". Well OK, it wasn't really subtitled that, but it did have its own dorky subtitles like "Halloween II: The Nightmare Isn't Over!" and "Halloween II: The Horror Continues". Let it be known from the get-go that I love, love, LOVE "Halloween II", in all its tacky, cheap, cash-in glory. While it is all those things, it's also scary and very fun, and it's filmed with a lot of interesting references to other horror films. In other words, an orgasmathon for a horror geek.

You can see through "Halloween II" like it was a cheap shower curtain. It's a rather obvious attempt to cash in on a hot property even when the filmmakers seemed to have no idea what they wanted. There is no real story here, and it seems that all anybody really knew was they needed a movie called "Halloween II" to release to theaters. There's something compelling to me about filmmakers making their own cheap ripoff movie. Here was John Carpenter's name (as producer and screenwriter), and Debra Hill as well, and Dean Cundey filming it. Jamie Lee was back, and so was Donald Pleasance, and Charles Cyphers. Nancy Loomis even made a cameo as Annie's corpse, as well as a voice on the phone.

In a bold move, "Halloween II" kicks right in with the final scene of the previous movie. I'm sure there have been other films like this, like a couple of the early Frankenstein films, but I'm at a loss to come up with any other examples. It's an honest approach though, since second-parters often pretend they've got something new to say, when really it's a retread of the first film that everyone is after. "Halloween II" knows this already, and it turns up the volume so loud that you can almost hear the script meetings. There are more murders, and they're all much more gruesome than the first film. In the first ten minutes, there's already more blood than the entire first film. An ambulance comes to take Laurie away from the scene of the crime and whisks her off to the Haddonfield Memorial Hospital (or Haddonfield Memorial Clinic, the film can't make up its mind). Nobody ever stops to think that she was the near-victim of an escaped maniac, and that he might actually continue stalking her, not even Dr. Loomis, who goes berserkers. At one point he chases a boy wearing a white mask out into traffic, where the boy is hit by a car and then fried alive in a collision, but nobody seems to be concerned with that after the initial shock wears off.

Michael Myers, aka The Shape, walks through Haddonfield like a zombie, spooking Mrs. Elrod (Lucille Benson from Paul Bartel's "Private Parts"), who only wants to make her husband Harold a sandwich. He also attacks some random girl named Alice and carves a jack-o-lantern out of her neck. Poor Alice! Not too long after that, we say goodbye to Sheriff Brackett, the first wakeup call that this is NOT "Halloween" after all. He identifies Annie's body and then disappears forever, leaving Hunter von Leer to take over as the resident overacting lawman.

"Do you feel like someone's watching us, Mrs. Alves?"

"It's just that rep from the HMO again. Don't look at him."

Then the movie brings on a small group of nurses, orderlies and doctors for Michael to slash. Nurse Karen seems like a nice girl, but proves she's dumb as a box of rocks by not only arriving 15 minutes late for work, but allowing her EMT boyfriend to convince her to screw him in the whirlpool therapy tub. When a mother brings her young son into the ER with a blood-gushing wound in his mouth from a still-embedded razorblade, Nurse Jill tells her calmly that the doctor can't see her son right now and tells them to wait in another room. Another hospital drone can't even figure out how to use a walkie talkie. Poor Laurie is all but forgotten after a drunken doctor gives her a sedative and stitches up her shoulder. After enough people are skewered, scalded, strangled, and struck over the head, Laurie finally gets to snap out of her drugged haze and try and recreate some of the chase scenes from the first film. It's not exactly a breakthrough idea.

But I love this movie anyway. Although I couldn't express it at such a young age, I related to the film immediately when I saw it in 1981 as an 11-year-old horror geek. It was intended to make money, and it did so by aiming squarely at the fanboy element and giving us the chance to pretend the first film never ended. Watching "Halloween II" today, I am struck by mainly two things: the music and the inventive camera work. The overall silliness is hard to overcome, especially the increasingly outrageous climax, but "Halloween II" is best as a visual experience. The movie has a very sinister look to it, with deep, blue-black colors and nighttime dread. There are a number of shots shamelessly recycled from the original, but they still work, including one where The Shape is glimpsed through several panes of glass behind two unsuspecting characters. I also live for the brief, creepy moment where The Shape is standing right behind Mrs. Elrod in her kitchen and she doesn't even know it.

The way the frames are so carefully imagined has a lot to do with the film's success, too. One creepy death scene has the young EMT Jimmy wandering the halls looking for any signs of life when he stands outside a dimly lit operating theater; you can just barely see the hint of something white lit up inside, thru the small viewing window in the door. When he closes the distance, he finds the body of Mrs. Alves in seemingly peaceful repose, all of her blood drained out thru an IV tube. The color composition is amazing; the hint of the white uniform leading to the discovery of the body, glowing brightly in a dark room, leading to a huge puddle of bright red blood on a black tile floor.

The movie has a much more cruel edge to it than the previous film; it's not only gory, but downright brutal, such as one moment where The Shape grabs a young assistant from behind, inserts a hypodermic needle all the way into her temple and injects air into her brain, killing her. The pointless, 80s-slasher murder at the very beginning also is a sign of the times. Many of the film's best sequences, and perhaps the entire film itself, would not work at all without the familiar score by John Carpenter. The themes are all the same as the original movie, except they travel through the looking glass and are rendered in an eerie synth format that really gets under my skin.

Constant references to Italian directors like Argento and Bava keep things lively, too. The bright colored lighting recalls "Suspiria" in a number of scenes; Loomis and Marion have a conversation in the back of the Marshal's car, their faces illuminated like Suzy Banyon's when she took her cab ride to the Tanz Akademie. Laurie has to shimmy through a small indoor window near the ceiling, and encounters a hospital basement that's as improbably garish as the weird attic that Sarah found herself trapped in. Most of this is stuff Carpenter did already, but there's a distinctly European feel to "Halloween II", which has a lot of giallo-esque scenes where you see the action from the active point of view of the killer. It's got a life of its own, and it's a lot more dark than the original film, which had a number of daylit scenes. Not so with "Halloween II"; by the time you see the gray light of morning, it's all over. The final image of Laurie alone in the back of the ambulance is terrifyingly bleak.

"Halloween II" gets a bad rap, because yeah...it's a step down from "Halloween". But it's a curiosity, an anomaly, a forced continuation of a previously self-contained story that ended right about the time the first movie ended. It starts off similar to the first film and then derails until it's a jagged, reckless juggernaut coming straight for you. The fact that the movie never quite gels into something as effective as the original "Halloween" doesn't matter to me so much. Once you can accept that it's not the original film, "Halloween II" has a lot to offer on its own terms, both as a bizarre imitation and its own cruel beast.

Because, even if the temperature SHOULDN'T go up over 100 degrees, you still have to create the mechanism so that it's possible to turn it up so high it will peel flesh from your body. RIGHT?

Contamination (1980): Contaminate me

These are the things you need to know about "Contamination": 1) It involves a conspiracy to take over the Earth by making everybody explode by way of green avocado-like eggs. 2) The purveyor of this invasion by egg is a giant one-eyed creature who lives on a coffee plantation. 3) People explode in it. That's all you need to know, really. If you are in the mood for a true gorefest, this is not it, because aside from a few exploding body scenes, the majority of this movie's action scenes involve people talking, taking showers, and shooting at one another on a coffee plantation. Do not expect space shenanigans either, because aside from a brief scene shot inside a cave (standing in for the planet Mars), none of the action takes place in space. There's half of an enjoyable schlocky movie here, and half of an utter bore, but it's worth seeing at least once just to take in the sheer absurdity of the whole thing.

"Pardon me while I turn this very important knob." 

(This is what high-tech control panels built by the government look like.)

The movie opens when an unmanned boat drifts into New York Harbor. "But wait," I can hear you saying. "You're talking about Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2, right?" Well no, "Contamination" opens the same way, disbelievers. Authorities board the boat and discover that it contains a bunch of dead bodies that look like they've been run over a few times with a lawn mower. Men in hazmat suits board and find...crates of coffee! But unfortunately, the coffee is simply hiding the true contents of the crates: a horde of green football-sized eggs that look like giant avocados. They make strange humming noises and, when touched, explode in a shower of green goo. But the worst is yet to come. The green goo causes any living material that it touches to explode! So your Contamination 101 lesson for today, class: first you touch the egg. Then the egg explodes. Then YOU explode. Multiply this by every living person and thing on the planet, and...well you would need a lot of eggs for this. Not only that, you'd think that by the time ordinary people on the street started exploding due to the green eggs, the word would get around pretty fast and nobody would touch the strange, green eggs they might find in unexpected places. Now I know what you're thinking, Ripley...who's laying these eggs? Nobody. They're being grown on a coffee plantation in South America. Didn't you ever read Chariots of the Gods?

So there are these two dimwits who will be the driving force of our movie. One of them is a military bigwig named Stella Holmes. If she were somehow related to JOHN Holmes, it would explain why she's so oogy looking, but it does not explain how she made it so far up in the ranks of the military without being able to handle herself in moments of mild peril. She becomes embroiled in this egg scheme and is forced into the unwelcome company of one Ian Hubbard, a former astronaut who's now a full time alcoholic slob. Hubbard has been tippin' the bottle ever since he was on a bad mission to Mars, where he and his astronaut buddy went into a cave and encountered...something, the details are fuzzy. Hubbard made it back. The buddy didn't.

Well, that's what THEY think, anyway. The buddy is Hamilton, who now lives on a coffee plantation, just like Jim Seals from Seals & Crofts! Except, unlike Jim Seals, Hamilton had his mind erased by an alien cyclops (I suspect Jim Seals had his mind erased by other means). The alien cyclops lived in that cave, and saw those two jokers in their space suits and thought "YES! Here is my ticket out of this dump!" It somehow hitched a ride back to Earth with Hamilton, who is now its hypnotically-enslaved stooge. The alien cyclops looks strangely like the queen mother in "Aliens", which gives "Contamination" the dubious honor of having inadvertently ripped off both the original 1979 "ALIEN" AND its sequel--six years before that sequel was made!

Hmmm...do you think it's possible the makers of this film have seen "ALIEN"?

Now, I know the plot I just related to you may sound out of control wacky and all that, but what I've really done is skip over a lot of boring stuff, mostly because I do not remember it and you probably will not, either. I aint' tryin to tell you how to live or anything, but I'm just sayin'. There's a lot of sneaking around and spying, because "Contamination" wants to be a James Bond movie, too. One crucial scene takes place when Stella, doing some rather clumsy spying on the coffee plantation, decides she wants to take a shower and when she emerges from the shower, there's an egg in the bathroom with her! Some unscrupulous person that wants Stella d-e-a-d must have put it in there while she was blissfully shampooing with Clairol Herbal Essence. It's making that weird humming sound so she knows it's about to explode, so what does she do? Does she rip down the vinyl shower curtain and try and cover the damn thing so it doesn't splatter her? Does she shatter the window and climb out, naked and bleeding but otherwise alive? No. She decides to just bang on the door and scream one of the movie's best lines: "Help! There's an egg!"

Help! There's a slimy green prop! HELP!

Of course she survives her near-death-by-egg experience, because I'll let you in on a dirty little secret: "Contamination" really does not want to show you people exploding. In the beginning of the movie, we see a bunch of men in hazmat suits "explode", and of course a hazmat suit is big and clunky, perfect for hiding a bunch of blood tubes and bladders full of fake red stuff. The other exploding characters in the film who are not covered by clunky suits are rather clumsily realized. This was one of the infamous "Video Nasties" banned in the UK when it appeared on VHS, but honestly you might wonder why anybody bothered, since the gore in it is very brief and mostly unrealistic. Still, it's not often that you see components like coffee, alien eggs, cyclops monsters, and espionage so closely linked in a film. "Contamination" has its charms, but there was something seriously wrong behind the scenes here, with all that stupid spy stuff that seems so out of place. A minor trash classic was narrowly avoided here.

The latex thing with a headlight in it's head cyclops

Bingeing on Bava

I've been bingeing on Mario Bava films lately, possibly spurred on by my rediscovery of "Twitch of the Death Nerve". I've always loved Bava's films and his camerawork, but I've never watched so many of them close together. I'm already familiar with Bava's "Lisa and the Devil", "Blood and Black Lace", and "Kill Baby Kill". I'd seen "Death Nerve" (under the title "Bay of Blood") once before, but I recently dug it out of my old VHS collection and gave it a rewatch, and this time I was really taken by it.

"Twitch of the Death Nerve" is a brilliant forerunner to the mad slasher "body count" movies. While Bava was clearly riffing on the Giallo style that was so popular at the time, what he was actually doing in "Twitch of the Death Nerve" was closer to what developed in 80s films, starting with "Friday the 13th", which was heavily influenced by it. Even more so the sequel, "Friday the 13th Part 2", which took several murder sequences directly from "Death Nerve". But in Bava's film, the bizarre murders are simply part of the morbid fabric of his atmosphere, which was lush with color, texture, and retro chic. The setting of a wooded bay appears green and almost tropical through Bava's lens, even though in reality it was filmed in an area with very few trees. The film contains more unsettling images within its reels than most: a man gets his face bisected by a machete. The bloated face of a corpse is lovingly caressed by the arms of an octopus that seems to be feeding on it. A writhing beetle is shown impaled alive on a pin. Bava also avoids the typical mad slasher format by filling his flick with multiple killers, all motivated by the potential to acquire a large inheritance.




"Schock", aka "Beyond the Door Part II", is Bava's final film, and is a mixed bag. Although it contains enough of Bava's touch to be interesting, it ultimately fails as a film due to a number of wandering passages and a lack of suspense. Daria Nicolodi plays a woman terrorized by the ghost of her dead husband, which possesses their seven year old son. Bava had riffed on "The Exorcist" before, with the dreadful but amusing possession scenes he filmed with Elke Sommer to create "The House of Exorcism" (itself a re-edited version of an older, eons-better film "Lisa and the Devil"). But in "Schock", the possession element takes a back seat to the film's true haunted house soul. There are a few startling, mind-bending shots in the film, such as when the little boy reaches out to caress his sleeping mother's throat in an erotic manner, his hand appearing as the hand of a corpse. Another brilliantly imaginative scene follows the progress of a ghostly image that prowls the walls of the house's basement, circling the perimeter. It is very clearly a cutout image and at first we think the director intends for us to believe it is a ghost, but then the camera pans back to reveal the little boy, holding a family photograph with his new father cut out of it; the prowling "ghost" is the light of a bare bulb shining through the cut out photograph. The most terrifying image in "Schock" is one that was unforgivably revealed in the film's trailer, a breathtaking gut punch as the little boy rushes toward his mother from the other end of a hallway, morphing into the adult-size corpse of his father just as he reaches her.

An older film of Bava's, "Hatchet for the Honeymoon", made the rounds on late-night television with "Lisa and the Devil". I saw it as a kid and was totally uninvolved with it, although it plays much better now that I can appreciate Bava's art. You don't usually watch them for the literal stories, it's all about the visual narrative. "Hatchet" reminds me of staying up too late to watch movies on our local affiliate; it was a difficult movie to stay awake through back then. The very bizarre plot inverts the typical giallo structure by revealing the serial killer as the film's protagonist right away, a disturbed Bates Motel type who harbors mother issues and works them out by murdering brides with a meat cleaver. Although the setup is unremarkable, Bava fills in the blank spots by setting the story in a classically gothic environment; his killer inhabits an old-money style mansion with miles of intricate woodwork and ornate protrusions. The murders are disappointingly bloodless, somewhat confusingly so since they're carried out with a meat cleaver. But just try not to be impressed when Bava's villain/hero tries to throw off the cops by explaining that the screaming they heard coming from his house was actually coming from his TV set, which happens to be playing a clip from Bava's own "Black Sabbath".

Props have got to be given for the music Bava includes in these films, too. "Death Nerve" features a score by Stelvio Cipriani that mimics the exotica style of Les Baxter and Martin Denny. "Schock" is scored by Goblin, working under the name Libra, and although they seem to have saved their best stuff for Argento, they reveal some of the same magic. "Hatchet" doesn't have such a memorable score, although it's punctuated by eerie touches like a music box theme that plays during a crucial death sequence.

Farewell, Paul

Jacinto Molina, aka Paul Naschy, 1934-2009.

Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby: 70s Doom, made for TV style!

First off, raise your hand if it's a surprise to you that there's actually a sequel to "Rosemary's Baby". Yeah, that's what I thought. "Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby" is a made-for-TV movie. That's the first of several bitter pills that must be swallowed during the course of this film. Not to mention that swallowing some BEFORE the film begins will undoubtedly make your viewing experience more pleasurable. Suffering from such maladies as a psychotic script, some stilted acting, and sub-par special effects (whenever such things are attempted) you may correctly assume that this sequel to Roman Polanski's 1968 suspense film does not live up to its heritage. What a pleasant surprise, then, to find that this ultra-obscure sequel to a horror classic is a wacky 70s Doom film full of hallucinogenic images and a constantly downbeat tone.

The many faces of Andrew/Adrian

We're introduced right away to none other than Patty Duke standing in for Mia Farrow. A series of voiceovers, yet another 70s Doom hallmark, removes the need for an actual coherent narrative, and we hear the dialogue from the end of the first film. Then we finally arrive in the present, with Andrew/Adrian (even Rosemary herself can't seem to get it straight) now aged 8 and doing his best to look like an escapee from Village of the Damned. Patty Duke isn't going to make you forget Mia Farrow anytime soon, although her performance is only the first in a parade of bad ones contained in these cursed reels. Ruth Gordon returns as everyone's favorite Satanic smoothie maker, Minnie Castavet, and the best we can say about her is yeah, she's the same actress from the original. No matter, she can't pretend that she's happy about being in "Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby", and she looks embarassed. Ditto for Ray Milland as Roman Castavet, who has the unfortunate task of reciting the movie's exposition in a series of voiceovers that move the plot along like a tow truck moving a totalled Pinto.

Marjean says, Have you seen my wig around? I feel naked without it.

Guy Woodhouse is now played by George Maharis in a particularly hideous 70s makeover. The coven is intent on making Adrian live up to his destiny as the son of Satan, but Rosemary sneaks Adrian away from them and takes him on the run. They use their ESP radar powers to spy on Rosemary, but she takes refuge in a synagogue and they can't "see" her in there. She throws them off her trail and takes a Greyhound bus into the desert, where Adrian uses his glowing red eyes to rough up some bullying kids who try to steal Adrian's toy car. The fracas flushes none other than Tina Louise out of her trailer, and she ushers Rosemary and Adrian into her little abode to take cover. Tina Louise's character is Marjean, a low-rent hooker who picks up a phone call from the Coven and apparently winds up hypnotized for the rest of her life, forced to care for Adrian while tricking Rosemary into boarding a Satanic driverless bus bound for some presumably awful place. The last we see of poor Rosemary, she's pounding her fists against the back windows of the bus as poor Adrian looks on. If this scene did not traumatize you as a child in the 70s, you were probably already torturing small animals.

From there, we jump forward many years. Marjean's hair is now in a hooker bun, so we know time must have passed because only older women wear their hair like this, right? She now runs a casino, which also happens to feature a groovy house band. Adrian is a far out 70s young miscreant who likes driving cars real fast, playing guitar, and drinking. So far, so good. But wait a minute...if Adrian was born in 1966, and he's in his early 20s now, this would mean it was the late 80s. Apparently in 1976, filmmakers thought the 70s would never end, that somehow we had arrived at the only possible conclusions in terms of fashion, music, and overall grooviness. But, whatever.

Adrian is supposed to be a rock musician, and he has a creepy Jim Morrison vibe going on for sure, but unfortunately we never get to see him perform, which is one of the movie's biggest missteps. Adrian has a best friend who helpfully dresses in white all the time so we'll know he's a force of good. If that isn't enough to penetrate your skull, the screenwriter helpfully named him Peter Simon, and I'm sure he's got a few other middle names in there like Mark and Matthew. Peter tries to convince Adrian to "split" with him for San Francisco, and encourages him to get in touch with his mysterious, dimly-remembered past. Minnie and Roman, who don't look a day older than they did during the opening sequence, arrive on Adrian's birthday to give Adrian one of Minnie's famous mind-altering milkshakes, which causes him to go into a trance. It seems the coven has decided it's time for Adrian to get the business of Antichristing underway, whatever the hell he's supposed to be doing. Roman helpfully explains that it's possible Adrian will flake out on them, in which case they'll simply kill him. Gee, after all that? In what could possibly be the movie's best/worst scene, they paint his face like a mime and perform a brief TV-movie ritual, which ends with Adrian shambling up onstage at a concert and boogeying around with a weird mask on. Yes, it's the evil power of...funk music. Then Peter Simon gets electrocuted when Guy Woodhouse gets tired of him and picks up a downed power line and touches him with it. How, you ask, could Guy pick up a downed power line and kill somebody with it without being electrocuted himself? I guess we're supposed to believe in the devil, after all.

Adrian invents shock rock before our very eyes

The film's final third really sends it into the 70s Doom stratosphere: a mental institution, complete with shock therapy scenes and machines that attach to people via wires. It seems that Adrian's birthday party took a turn for the worst. Not only was Peter Simon fried with a live wire, but the entire place burned down and Marjean was killed, too. Poor Tina Louise, even her death occurs offscreen. In a moment of forced plot exposition emotional drama, a helpful nurse named Ellen tells Adrian while he's writhing on a gurney "Adrian, you're all alone now. Your aunt died, your friend died too!" Adrian has some kind of selective amnesia, but the police think he's the one who killed Peter Simon, since Adrian's fingerprints were on the downed power line. You'd think the police would question how ANY living person's fingerprints could be on a live power line, but never mind. The helpful nurse Ellen, played by none other than Donna Mills, helps Adrian escape the institution. When Guy gets wind of the fact that Adrian is out, he gets super paranoid and is convinced Adrian will try and kill him. Ellen, on the other hand, takes Adrian to a hotel and gives him some drugged wine. Uh oh. After putting on a sexy red nightie, she reveals that she is somehow one of the cult, too, and she has sex with the zonked-out-of-his-gourd Adrian. In a TV-movie kind of way, anyhow. Afterwards, Adrian wanders outside into the parking lot of the hotel and is nearly run down by a mysterious black car, which ends up hitting Ellen instead. Adrian tells the police not to bother checking inside the car because nobody would be driving it -- wait a minute, were the makers of 'The Car' watching this movie?? -- but when the police open the driver's side door, inside is GUY WOODHOUSE. Can you believe this Guy? First he sells out his wife to a Satanic cult, allows her to be raped by the devil, sends a rival actor blind, then he thinks he can just run over Rosemary's baby with a car? Good thing the crash kills the pompous ass. Adrian is so freaked out that he uses his supernatural red-eye power to shake off the police and run away.

All that's left is for the big reveal: in a doctor's office, Minnie and Roman talk to each other and bemoan the loss of their ability to control the devil child Adrian, but they are oh so happy when the doctor tells them their "granddaughter" has fully recovered from her injuries and will have a normal pregnancy. YES...it's Ellen! Pregnant with the grandchild of Satan! Finally it all makes sense...Roman planned the whole thing and sent Ellen to get knocked up by Adrian. Once the deed was in progress, he tapped Guy and told him to murder Adrian, but he hit Ellen instead. Fortunately he didn't kill her. The TV-movie end credits show her giving birth to another spooky baby to carry on the saga of doom.

Well, if anybody asks you what happened to Rosemary's baby, you just tell them this: His mother got carried off by a phantom bus, he had a hooker for an adoptive parent, and eventually he got date-raped by Donna Mills. None of this is particularly terrifying, not even the electrocution of a major character, because after it happens you're left thinking "WTF just happened??" But I actually LIKED "Whatever Happened to Rosemary's Baby", because even though it's got problems, it's extremely unique, at the very least. It's less a horror movie than a film about what personal crisis might result from being the offspring of Lucifer. It also doesn't go for the obvious; it would have been easy to make a movie where Adrian went around killing off people by pushing them off balconies and cutting their heads off with plate glass. Instead, it turns into a doomy 70s TV-movie with trippy photography (lost due to the fuzziness of the bootleg prints circulating), bizarre characters, and strange dialogue. It's a little rough around the edges, and for a movie about the Devil it asks for a lot of forgiveness. But Adrian makes a compelling hero if you squint real hard, and these kind of "finding yourself" movies were very common in the 70s. The kooky scenes with the Castavets are fun, like where Roman gives Adrian a joint at his birthday party and admits that Minnie and himself have "tried it". Watch it and be transported back to a time when something could still be called 'Movie of the Week'.

Never mind the baby, look what happened to poor Rosemary!

Howling II: Werewolf Bitch, Please.

There have been some pretty crappy "Part 2" movies in the history of sequeldom. "Exorcist II - The Heretic". "Poltergeist II". "Jaws 2". "Piranha 2: The Spawning". "Troll 2"...well OK, was "Troll" really all that great? My own personal favorite Terrible 2 is "Howling II". The appropriate subtitle of the movie depends on where you lived when the movie was released. It was known in various places as "Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf", "Howling II: Stirba, Werewolf Bitch", and "Howling II: It's Not Over Yet". No matter where you lived, however, "Howling II" was definitely known as a rotten, stinking crapfest of a movie.

Tell me the truth...do these glasses make me look conspicuous?

The first time I saw it was when I rented the big clunky VHS from our local mom & pop video rental store (except I think it was actually a mom & mom outfit). I took it home, watched it, and couldn't f'ing believe that this...this...thing...was the sequel to "The Howling". I mean, the original was one of the most totally awesome werewolf movies in the history of anything, and it was always my opinion that it was a thousand times better than "An American Werewolf In London". So why was the sequel like some sadistic movie producer's revenge on an unsuspecting moviegoing public? I do my best to love bad movies, though, so I ordered me up some "Howling II" on DVD via Netfux. Well ya know what? It's still a bad movie. But now that I am a few decades past my initial disappointment, it's a bad movie that I can really dig.

It's always about the hand with her.

Serious props must be given to those without whom this movie would not be digable at all. I'm talking, of course, about Christopher Lee, Sybil Danning, and Sybil Danning's boobs. If I had been into chicks, I would have never cared that "Howling II" sucked, because it has Sybil Danning in it and she wears a rip-away bra in the movie. She also has some of the most outrageous costumes this side of She-Ra. And even though I'm not into boobs, I am not blind, and I know when a woman has nice boobs, and Sybil Danning's got em. At least, she did when this movie was made. The producers of the movie knew it, too, because they take a scene where she rips off her bra and they repeat it about 25 times over the end credits. No, really. They do.

Why don't I get a decent transformation like Picardo did in the first one?

The genius producers of the film also knew not everyone is into boobs, so they got Christopher Lee to be in their stupid movie. It's amazing that he agreed to do this, but there he is. As a reward, the director lets Chris wear a far out pair of wraparound sunglasses while spying on a group of werewolves in a "punk" club. You'd think Christopher Lee would stand out, seeing as he's a 60-something gray haired man in a middle of a club where the average age is 25 and everyone has hair that looks like it was run over by a lawnmower, but the shades really lend an element of disguise to his getup.

The film's story involves the brother of Karen White, Dee Wallace's character from the original movie. At Karen's funeral, Christopher Lee shows up and tells brother Ben that his sister is a werewolf. After much protest, Ben realizes that Chris is 200% correct, and with his TV-news reporter girlfriend in tow, he joins Chris on a trip to Transylvania to do battle with Stirba, queen of the werewolves. Sybil Danning plays Stirba, who has got to have a damned good Transylvanian hairdresser tucked away in her castle somewhere. Early on in the film, she has a menage-a-trois with two other werewolves, and here is where we first discover the movie's biggest problem: it doesn't know what a werewolf is. "Howling II" believes that if you sprout hair all over your body and put on a Planet of the Apes mask, then you're a werewolf, and it proceeds full speed ahead with this concept. Of course "The Howling" had KICK ASS werewolves, so right away we see a big problem with this sequel. Obviously the filmmakers knew this, because they have their werewolves do things like roll around in bed snapping at each other and clawing one another.

Stirba demonstrates the internationally-recognized gang hand sign for werewolves

The 'good guys', with Chris Lee and the other two imbeciles on their side, gather in the village and then set out to raid Stirba's castle, while Stirba calls a meeting of werewolves. At first she indulges them in an orgy, then sends them off to do battle against Chris Lee and his four other warriors, who are armed with titanium bullets. You'd think that 30 werewolves wouldn't have any trouble taking out five human beings walking through a dark forest, but these damn wolves don't have all their dogs barking. They just lurk in the bushes a lot, then lunge at the people one at a time. With that kind of an army backing her up, Stirba might as well have walked down into town waving a white flag. But lo and behold, we find out that Stirba and Chris Lee's character are actually brother and sister, and Stirba wants him to become her lover. If she had succeeded in seducing her brother, she would have smashed the taboos of bestiality AND incest in one fell swoop, but instead she gets stabbed in the heart. All that, and all he had to do was walk up to her and stab her? We don't know how she ever got to be Queen of the Werewolves, unless she lucked into it when her predecessor died of heartworm.

"Howling II" is one of those bad movies you just kinda have to see to understand. I can't imagine anybody thinking it's a "good" movie, but I doubt you'll realize just how weird and strange things can get in a "part two" sequel before you see Sybil Danning rip her bra off nineteen times in a row.

Let's Scare Jessica To Death (1971)

There ain't a better example of prime 70s low budget horror than "Let's Scare Jessica To Death", the kind of movie that doesn't show you as much on screen as it does in your own head, making implications and suggestions while never really stating exactly what is happening. It's strange that the movie's title and ad campaign seemed to position it as an exploitation shocker. While it's definitely low budget, it doesn't have much in common with the grindhouse movies that it was undoubtedly paired with at the drive-in. On the surface it's a movie about a ghostly vampire who inhabits an island community, but at its heart is a story about a likable, fragile woman who knows she is losing her grip but can't do anything about it.

Happy Jessica / Losin' It Jessica

The film opens and already we're treated to a hallmark of the 70s Doom genre....the flashback moment! Here is Jessica, alone and despondent, sitting on a rowboat in the middle of a lake wearing nothing but her nightgown. How did she get there? Well, the helpful watery dissolve takes us back to the beginning, when we see Jessica, her husband Duncan, and their friend Woody traveling in a big black hearse. Woody is kind of a hippie, Duncan is a bald guy who looks pretty uptight for a professional musician--he's leaving behind a position with the New York Philharmonic in order to get Jessica away from the city. Jessica has just spent some time in a mental institution, and her doctor has finally released her. Duncan has taken his life savings and purchased a farmhouse on an island in Connecticut.

Jessica's fabulous nervous-breakdown pad.

Jessica's breakdown is not entirely behind her. She is haunted by voices in her head, and we hear them whispering to her even from the very beginning, when she is in a graveyard doing tombstone rubbings and sees a strange girl watching her. "Don't tell them, they won't believe you." Jessica doubts her own sanity after her breakdown, and she assumes that Duncan and Woody do, too. When they arrive at the farmhouse, Jessica sees another strange girl on the porch. The others see her too, and Jessica seems relieved. "I really did see something!" she smiles. It seems like all she needs is for someone to sneeze in the wrong direction and she'd go teetering over the edge again.

Hi I'm Abig-errr, Emily. Yes, Emily. My name's Emily.

They discover that the girl in the house is Emily, a young drifter who was squatting in the house because she thought it was abandoned. She gathers her things to clear out, but Jessica feels bad for her and asks her to stay the night. That evening consists of some dinner-eatin', guitar strummin', and spirit summonin'. Yes, Emily suggests that they hold a seance, never a good thing in a movie whose very title suggests that someone will be scared to death. Nothing happens during the seance, but it sure creeps Jessica out.

More things begin to happen to Jessica that make her question her sanity, but there really does seem to be something weird going on. An antiques dealer in town gives them the lowdown on their new home's bizarre history; he reveals that the three subjects in an antique photograph that Jessica finds in the attic are none other than the Bishop family, Abigail Bishop and her parents. Abigail drowned on her wedding day, and is rumored to roam the countryside as a vampire. Could this explain why Emily looks exactly like Abigail? Is this why the town seems to be populated entirely by old men with bandages on their bodies?

Boy, caring for this orchard is murder.

Of course it doesn't take much to figure out that not only is Jessica losing her mind, Emily is the long-dead Abigail, insinuating herself into their lives. However, it's Jessica's breakdown that really delivers the chills. Zohra Lampert is great as Jessica, who is likable and friendly, but slowly drawn back into whatever madness she was suffering from. It's no wonder, seeing as she's being attacked by vampires, but is it really happening to her? Or is she just imagining everything? Either explanation is just as bad.

I first saw "Let's Scare Jessica To Death" on TV as a kid. I think it was on the CBS Late Movie on Friday night, but I can't be entirely sure. I do remember the introduction for it, with the super-serious, deep voiced announcer saying the name of the movie like it was the most terrifying thing you'd ever see. Well I admit I was just a kid, but the movie still gets under my skin. It has a very heavy atmosphere, full of whispering voices on the soundtrack, bizarre old men, dead pet moles, and spooky houses. As a kid I had no concept of a mental breakdown, and the fact that Jessica is trying to turn her life around and recover makes it all the more compelling to see her losing her grip.  Zohra Lampert delivers a very physical performance, often based on simple facial expressions and subtle moments rather than the screaming and terror that other horror heroines are usually called on to project. She really gets us inside her character's head, aided by the film's bizarre audio mix that often loops her own inner thoughts over footage of her face reacting to the weirdness going on around her. Just as good is Mariclare Costello, who is very scary and sexy as Emily/Abigail, just like a good vampire should be. She gets her own whisper track, too, a menacing one.

A terrific and scary moment is when Lampert and Costello are sunning on a raft and suddenly Costello pushes Lampert in the lake and seems like she's trying to drown her, and Lampert feels powerless to try and stop her. The sequence is even more uncomfortable because Costello keeps touching Lampert intimately and trying to kiss her, combining the attempt on her life with sexual advances. The vampires in the film are not the kind that need to avoid sunlight, there's more of a similarity between them and the helpless disease victims that David Cronenberg created later in films like "They Came From Within" and "Rabid", or the living dead cannibals in "Messiah of Evil": ordinary-looking people who suddenly want to bite or scratch you so you'll be just like them. But by the time the movie comes full circle and we wind up with Jessica again, floating all alone on that rowboat in her nightgown, the fact that the movie was about vampires is somehow forgotten. Although there's nothing in it that'll scare you to death, this movie left me with an uneasy feeling that lasted a long time after the credits rolled.