The Car (1977)

In terms of sheer 70s nostalgia, "The Car" is sure to bring back memories, especially if you had HBO, which ran "The Car" frequently.  While it's rated PG and features very little blood, the existential nature of the script is pure 70s doom, and there are a few shocking moments that probably burned it into the brains of impressionable kids from a (somewhat) more innocent time.

Nikki Newman from Y&R, about to get creamed by The Car!

The small desert town of Santa Ynez, Utah, is visited by evil in the form of a sinister black sedan that drives out of the desert and starts running people over at every opportunity. As the film opens, two perky bike-riding teens get stalked and then smushed when The Car sends one hurtling down a rocky embankment and the other plummeting over the rail of a bridge that leads into a canyon. It then runs over a skeezy hitchhiker two or three times, leaving a wife-abusing moron behind as a witness.  The Santa Ynez police department, featuring James Brolin, has no idea how to deal with a homicidal vehicle that proves to be virtually indestructible. Furthermore, the characters discover what we as the audience have suspected all along: nobody is driving The Car. (SHRIEK!!)

....Home of the Funky Chicken

The thing I think is most amazing about "The Car" is that as absurd as the premise is, the movie does have several moments of giddy terror. The opening murder scene is creepy, especially the orange-tinted views of the victims from inside The Car, and the heartless way it toys with them before sending them screaming over the side of the road. There's a great sequence where The Car attacks a childrens' parade rehearsal, chases the kids and teachers up into a rocky hillside area, and then traps them in a cemetery, where a tense confrontation plays out. Kathleen Lloyd plays James Brolin's girlfriend, Lauren, a schoolteacher. She confronts The Car, which will not enter the boundaries of the cemetery (Ronny Cox later deduces it's because the ground is hallowed). It circles them furiously, revving its engine while Lauren taunts it and hurls things at it. Finally, one of the teachers escapes and summons help, forcing The Car to speed off, but later the most spectacular set piece occurs when it returns to stalk Lauren at her home, racing down her quiet residential street and hurling itself right through her house to kill her in her own living room.

The pained faces of Santa Ynez.

The number of cast members murdered by The Car is relatively high, and given Kathleen Lloyd's position in the cast, not to mention the appealing qualities of her character, it's a huge shock to see her brutally killed in such an unexpected way. Adding to the downbeat, doomy stuff even further is the fact that the script throws a whole lot of serious issues into the mix alongside the killer car, like spousal abuse, alcoholism, and the staggering number of friends and loved ones the main characters lose. It's heavy stuff for a B horror movie.

Let's face it. This guy is scarier than The Car.

A few things rob "The Car" of its potential greatness, mainly the fact that it's a PG-rated movie and it doesn't go very far with its violence or language. I only mention it because there are a few cases where the script seems to call for it, particularly the scene where Lauren hurls insults and curses at The Car. The worst she can summon up is calling the assumed driver of the car a "chicken shit scum of the earth". At least she's not as mild mannered as the teacher who yells "CAT POO!" at The Car as it drives off.  Even worse, the music has dated badly and sounds like something you'd hear in a made-for-TV movie, defusing some of the tense moments.

Lauren goes all badass on The Car.

"Cat poo!"

Old Navajo woman says, "There was no logic in this script." 



The climax of the film features another iconic moment when the surviving heroes manage to lure The Car into a quarry, where a massive dynamite explosion buries it in tons of rock and sand.  A huge fireball looms skyward, and for a moment a vague demonic form appears and screams at them.



What *really* drives The Car!

What does work in "The Car" is good stuff. The acting is often overwrought, and some of the supporting actors don't carry their scenes all that well, but the director seems to know this and keeps the scenes short.  Brolin is good, as is Kathleen Lloyd. Ronny Cox is memorable as a tormented alcoholic cop. Look for Kim and Kyle Richards (those two Real Housewives of Beverly Hills) as Wade's two young daughters. The driving stunts are pretty amazing, especially a barrell roll that results in unfortunate death for four of Santa Ynez's finest. The Car itself is pretty weird looking, custom built by George Barris, with a severely dropped top and glass tinted a sickly yellowish-orange color. I love the way the director only shows it in fragments until the parade scene, where it bursts through a barrier and lands on the roadway, our first full view of it as it starts causing mayhem among a mob of screaming kids and teachers. The sound design is effective too, with the strange whine of the engine and the inappropriately big-sounding horn creating an atomsphere of panic--how many of you drivers have narrowly avoided an accident because someone blared on their horn at the last second? The Car just does it to taunt you before it runs right over you.

"When we're real housewives, we have to do WHAT?!"

Ding dong, Land Car!

This shot is from the end credits, which are sometimes omitted when the film is shown on TV. It leaves no question that The Car is speeding around some other city, just waiting to run over some new victims.

Farewell, Jonathan Frid. (1924-2012)

The Intruder Within (1981): ALIEN drills for oil on TV

I don't know if any of you have ever seen this one movie called "ALIEN"? It was about these blue collar space travelers who were towing a bunch of raw mineral ore back to Earth after mining it from deep space.  Well, along the way they picked up a distress signal...oh, you've heard of this movie before?  Well so have the people who made today's groovy movie "The Intruder Within", which was broadcast on TV in 1981, not too too long after "ALIEN" made a zillion dollars at the box office.  The makers of "The Intruder Within" were definitely out to steal a little of Ridley Scott's thunder.  Actually, the Italians had already made their own "ALIEN" ripoff called "Alien 2: Sulla Terra", about which I will say very little here.  "The Intruder Within" does a slightly better job at creating an actual film out of the material, as opposed to "Alien 2", which seemed designed to create a loosely constructed movie where the title alone could be expected to rake in some money in theaters. 

But whereas "Alien 2" had only the vaguest connection to Ridley Scott's film, "The Intruder Within" makes me feel like if they got ahold of the script of "ALIEN", made a few changes with a red pen, and filmed their movie.  They changed the setting from outer space to an oil rig in the middle of the Southern Ocean off the coast of Antarctica. After some exposition where a young roughneck has a dream that everyone's going to die, we learn that the medical officer on board the rig was hastily replaced by the company (!). Not long after, the oil drill, which has been digging at depths "never before reached", dredges up a series of objects that resemble eggs (!!).  There's also a wormy thing with teeth (!!!) that bites a crew member, who then promptly dies.  Someone touches one of the eggs and gets cut by it; he then goes suicidally crazy.  The sketchy medical officer suspects that the objects are eggs containing an unknown life form (!!!!), and he's willing to risk the lives of the crew members in order to see what happens when the eggs hatch.  After he isolates the eggs in a locked box, one hatches and BURSTS (!!!!!) out of the box, attacking a guy cleaning the lab.  Shortly thereafter, he awakens and suddenly wants to mate with every female on board.  He rapes one unfortunate woman, who languishes a while before an adult creature rips itself out of her body (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).  It goes on a rampage that you will most likely find way too short compared to the length of time you waited for it to happen.  Even with so many plot similarities, the movie goes further and recycles some of the actual characters from "ALIEN"; I noticed parallels to Dallas, Lambert, and Parker, and there was a whole crew of Bretts.

"No, my name is NOT Dallas."

"The Intruder Within" may not be all that original, but it has doomy atmosphere in every frame.  Considering it's so similar to another film, it has a gritty life of it own after it gets going.  The claustrophobic location of the oil rig helps a lot, but so does the camerawork, which frames things in the smallish television ratio. The special effects aren't going to win anybody any awards, unless there's an award on how to make something out of so little.  I can only imagine that the budget on this was miniscule, and with that in mind, it doesn't turn out half bad.  The smallish creatures are the main problem, as they're clearly puppets and difficult to animate.  The inevitable "birthing" scene would have been impossible to show on television, and it plays out in shadows on a wall.  Although the monster suit is unconvincing, there's a certain level of creepiness to it as well, not in what it looks like, but what it sounds like: a bizarre, burping gargle followed by a deep, threatening rumble.  Once the creature starts walking the ship, the director uses point-of-view tracking shots of the creature roaming the deserted hallways, gurgling to itself.  It's weird.

There's something enjoyable about watching a ripoff film like this, and it's interesting to see the ways someone tried to creatively reimagine "ALIEN" into a TV movie.  The body count is also surprisingly high, although none of the deaths are terrifying or spectacular.  Despite being broadcast in 1981, the spirit of the 70s still hangs over it.  I recommend it to anybody who's a geek for "ALIEN", or just plain sketchy sci-fi/horror flicks. 

"I know I've seen something like this thing before, but where? WHERE?"

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

Serial killers have become such a part of the collective consciousness that they're a cultural institution, aren't they?  Compared to Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer wasn't quite as sensational in the 1970s.  I can think of earlier films where serial murderers were treated as characters, but the 70s saw a different approach: an anonymous serial killer who suddenly appears like the shark from "Jaws".  Although there wasn't a full blown slasher craze yet in 1976, there were a few prototypical examples of what would eventually morph into the 80s splatter genre.  "The Town That Dreaded Sundown" carries with it a bleak, doomy tone that was a few years away from "Friday the 13th", yet foreshadowed the grisly scare tactics of that series.

In case this is the first time you ever heard of this film, it's based on a real series of murders that occurred in Texarkana in the 1940s, where an unidentified assailant struck several times over the course of four months, claiming eight victims, five of whom died.  The film loosely dramatizes the events, although it pads the space around the attack scenes with the attempts of law enforcement characters to stop the murderer.  If you're at all familiar with the real case, then you already know the killer will not be caught, and there isn't much more to it than that.  There's an amateurishness that's hard to deny, and the director makes a grave error in heaping on too much comic relief in the form of bumbling police officers.

It's that same low budget quality that helps the film muster up what little dread that it does. The killer is menacing, wearing a white sack over his head with the eyes cut out. The murder scenes are mostly frightening, except for one sequence where a female character is stalked through a wooded area and can't quit screaming long enough for the killer to lose her trail. Her boyfriend, who has been clubbed but not killed, revives and tries to get away, but she keeps screaming at him "RUN! RUN!!", which conveniently alerts the killer to the fact that a) he's still alive, and b) he's escaping. He dies, and so does she...after the killer straps a knife to her trombone (don't ask) "plays" her to death by stabbing her in the back.

But the most shocking moment of the film for you is probably not going to be when you realize the makers of "Friday the 13th Part 2" dressed Jason to look exactly like the killer in this movie.  It's not going to be the ending, when you realize the murderer gets away with his crimes and could be OUT THERE, even today!  No, the most shocking moment of "The Town That Dreaded Sundown" is going to be when you see the killer attack none other than Dawn Wells, aka Mary Ann from "Gilligan's Island".  Not only does he shoot her directly in the face, he chases her through a cornfield with a pick axe.  Poor Mary Ann!!!  (She lives, but at what cost, I ask?)

Otherwise, I'll be honest with you, this movie is really dull.  The attack scenes deliver some chills, but the film has the atmosphere of a 1970s TV movie (despite the fact that it's a period piece set in 1946).  The bitter waters through which the viewer must wade to reach the sweet will probably not seem worth it to you, unless you're a true crime buff or a total horror geek like me.

Black Christmas (1974): It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

At a snowy Canadian university, a Christmas party is underway in a sorority house. While the girls entertain their boyfriends inside, nobody notices a shadowy figure that lurks outdoors, peering in through the windows. The unseen man scales the building using a trellis, and enters through an open attic window, and spies on the girls. After the boyfriends leave, the intruder makes an obscene phone call, and soon he attacks and murders one of them when she isolates herself in an upstairs room. Taking her body into the attic, he hides up there until the next day, when he starts with more phone calls and more murders. Eventually the girls catch on that they're in danger, but nobody ever suspects the killer is operating from inside the house, not even the police.

I feel it is an appropriate time to geek out about one of my favorite movies ever, "Black Christmas", a Canadian flick made by Bob Clark ("Deathdream", "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things", "Porky's", "A Christmas Story"). Although "Black Christmas" isn't the first slasher film, it features a few tropes that later became crucial to the slasher genre that didn't get kick started until "Halloween" inspired "Friday the 13th", leading to an explosion of films about slashers racking up body counts in unsuspecting environments. The camera often serves as a first-person viewpoint of the killer; the opening scene of the film shows him prowling around in the dark outside the sorority house, peering into the windows at the people inside, all while heavy breathing is heard on the soundtrack. I can't watch the opening of Brian DePalma's "Blow Out" without thinking about how he seems to be channeling this movie. It also has an impressive body count for its era, with the insane killer making five on-screen corpses and several more implied.

But even though there are on-screen murders (the suffocation of one sorority sister with a handful of dry cleaning bags is one of the creepiest), this movie is more memorable because of its restraint, focusing on quiet passages of suspense followed by short bursts of loud screaming and violence. Much of the shock is communicated via the film's eerie sound design, as well as the dark, foreboding house where it takes place.  It could just be camera angles and set decoration, but there seems to be danger everywhere.

"Black Christmas" is also a little bit smarter than many similar movies, challenging the viewer and utilizing more subtle visual storytelling devices instead of plot exposition to drive the scenes. For instance, it remains cagey about the identity and motivations of its murderer. There's no character in the movie that knows who he is, or what his back story is, and nothing is ever discovered, but through the disturbingly sexual phone calls he makes throughout the movie, you can start to pick up that at some point this psychotic man possibly murdered his baby sister Agnes after sexually assaulting her. The movie never spells it out for us, just scatters the bits of information throughout the film and leaves it up to us to piece together. Even more disturbing is how the killer's psychology ties in to his victims; he targets a group of young women and calls several of them "Agnes" before murdering them, seemingly suggesting that he views all females as "Agnes". Even worse, he seems to fixate on the fact that one of the sisters is pregnant, bringing in the "baby" aspect of his madness.

A few shots in the film remind me of Dario Argento, like a murder involving the use of a glass unicorn as a deadly weapon.  Clark also uses several moments in the film where a change in focus reveals important information, like a chilling scene that shows the corpse of one of the victims staring blindly out the attic window while her father walks through the snow below outside, only just beginning to feel a sense of panic over the fact that nobody can locate her. Another focus pull later in the film reveals a second victim hanging by a hook in the attic.

The film may have no real connection to "Halloween", but you can find a number of visual cues in "Halloween" that seem to have been lifted directly from this one, such as the use of the camera's first-person perspective to represent that of the killer's. John Carpenter also seems to have noticed this movie's habit of using ominous foreground cues and background cues, often with the killer lurking somewhere in the frame of the camera, unseen by the potential victims.

I love seeing Margot Kidder in this, as well as Andrea Martin. Kidder has a delicious role as a vulgar sorority sister Barb, who swears and drinks constantly, gives alcohol to children, and gamely gives the obscene phone caller a run for his money. Olivia Hussey is excellent, too, as our main heroine and final girl Jess. In contrast to many later slashers, especially the "Friday the 13th" series, "Black Christmas" portrays its female characters as intelligent and assertive; although the girls are having sexual relationships with their boyfriends, they're never presented even once as sex objects. Barb is dominating and blunt, even to her own mother on the telephone (she calls her mother a "gold plated whore" when she calls to change holiday plans with Barb so she can take a trip with her boyfriend to a ski lodge). Andrea Martin's character cancels plans with her own boyfriend to support her sister Barb, and even mousy Claire seems to be finding her voice being in the company of other assertive women; her father's shock at finding sexually suggestive items in Claire's room reveals that she is breaking away from a conservative background. Jess in particular displays a forward-thinking attitude when she is able to very carefully navigate a difficult conversation with her boyfriend in which she explains to him her reasons for wanting to abort their unplanned pregnancy. She makes a valiant attempt to explain to her lover that she doesn't want to have his baby or marry him.

As a final girl, she doesn't get to do a whole lot; "Black Christmas" only gives her one scene where she faces the killer, and after he chases her down into the basement of the house, that's pretty much it for their on-screen battle. That's a little disappointing when you view it in terms of the countless slasher movies that came afterwards, when the Laurie Strodes and Ginny Fields of the genre showed audiences how it's done.

Some viewers are frustrated by the film's ending, which offers no explanation about the killer whatsoever, even refusing to suggest his identity. Maybe that's why I love "Black Christmas" most of all, it knows that the identity of the psycho is more frightening because it's unknown and irrelevant. "Black Christmas" understands that violence and murder can be terrifyingly random, and these particular victims just happened to catch the attention of a maniac. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

How to Make a Monster: AIP's Gay Teenage Terror

American International Pictures is a name well known to geeks like me who love films from the 50s to the 70s, particularly low budget exploitation pictures.  Helmed by a sales manager and a lawyer, James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, the company also employed Roger Corman, notorious film producer known for his cheap production values.  It was Arkoff who was savvy enough to devise a formula where he created films targeting males in their late teens, and the company made a lot of money off of horror and sci-fi films.  People are always reading subtexts into horror films, like when people talk about "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and say "That was really about McCarthyism, man!"  I think "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is really about alien pods that duplicate people, but the subtext of not being able to trust people is a powerful one, lending the movie its ominous weight. 

The AIP horror movies echoed some of the same sentiments, but there was a new plot device in the form of hypnosis.  Just like "radiation" had the potential to turn ordinary insects into lumbering giant predators, hypnosis had the power to turn ordinary people into murderous monsters, and it was being used by villains with dubious intentions.  "The She-Creature" featured a man who used hypnosis to cause a woman to "regress" to a point where she became a prehistoric monster--somehow this powerful hypnotic trance caused even her body to transform.  Hey, it was a reason to have a monster in a movie, right?

But if hypnosis was the tool used by the villains of the films, same-sex relationships were the terror that lent weight to the movies' supernatural monsters. AIP had also figured out its marketing scheme by now, and it paid off with the big 1957 hit "I Was A Teenage Werewolf". Along with this new teen formula, the scriptwriters had introduced a distinct homoerotic undercurrent, suggested by the doctor who preys on Michael Landon's teenage character and turns him into a werewolf without his knowledge.  "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein" was also released in 1957 and featured an older male doctor who created a body out of spare parts--a body that just happened to stitch together into the form of a hunky young man. Reminding us that his hands have been all over that body, the scientist famously tells the creature "Speak! You've got a civil tongue in your head, I ought to know, I sewed it there myself!"

On a double bill with the AIP "Frankenstein" film was "Blood of Dracula", where the gay suspicion was turned way up.  Although the film's creature is conceived as a vampire, it was still a werewolf-style transformation into a mute, hissing creature.  It takes place in an all-girl prep school, where maladjusted new arrival Nancy is immediately set upon by a predatory female science teacher who just happens to be dedicated to turning people into monsters via hypnosis.  Using an amulet she acquired in Transylvania (AHA!), she somehow turns our heroine into a vicious vampire with rat fangs for nighttime tantrums of murder and bloodsucking.  Her purpose?  To counter the development of the atom bomb by proving that the human mind is the greatest weapon.  Because, ya know, that makes a hell of a lot of sense, right?  There are a lot of unspoken motives for all of this, particularly the undeniable erotic tension between the science teacher and another one of her pupils, a young girl who blatantly helps lure Nancy into her predicament.

1958's "How to Make a Monster" followed up "I Was A Teenage Werewolf" and "I Was A Teenage Frankenstein", but introduced a self-referential format that was decades ahead of Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven.  The script of "How to Make a Monster" actually takes place in the studios of American International, where a sequel is in production that pairs the Teenage Werewolf with the Teenage Frankenstein. Spoiling the fun is a pair of new studio bosses who make the decision to abandon horror and concentrate on beach party movies and musicals.  They give a bunch of people the pink slip, including an aging monster-makeup artist who decides not to take it lying down.  Together with his simple minded (and obviously bottom-bunk) assistant, he uses the hunky teenage stars of the Werewolf/Frankenstein movie as his stooges in a series of revenge murders.  First he lures the boys into his makeup chair, where he applies special makeup that makes them open to hypnotic suggestion.  Then he instructs them to kill his enemies.  This makeup concoction is particularly mysterious, since it apparently causes a transformation all on its own, even without the hypnosis: the makeup man puts it on himself and transforms into a Mr. Hyde type monster that kills a nosy security guard.  The climax of the film finds him luring the boys back to his house, where he gives them alcohol and attempts to talk them into allowing him to..."put the makeup on" (wink wink)...one more time. The boys, however, start to remember the strange circumstances of their hypnotic trances, and the jig is up when the house catches fire.

I think it's pretty obvious these films were lightweight nonsense, but these "teenage" horror movies had dark underpinnings of strange, intimate same-sex relationships.  "How to Make a Monster" and "Blood of Dracula" in particular painted their evildoers as sexual predators, with a lesbian teacher and a dirty old makeup man as their real villains.  We know that this is the attitude that many people have about homosexuals themselves, even moreso in the 1950s when it was "the love that dare not speak its name". The actual "monsters" in these films were really victims, youths transformed into aberrations against their own wills or without their knowledge.  Once they allowed themselves to be placed in a suggestible situation with these older predators, their lives were forever changed without them even realizing it.  Usually they wound up dead at the conclusion, or in the case of "How to Make a Monster", carted off by police to pay for crimes they didn't even know they committed.