The Hand (1981)

Let's hear it for "The Hand", one of the best movies ever made about a crawling hand.  Well, no, let me rephrase that: what I meant to say was, "The Hand" kinda sucks.  It was 1981, the year of such other great horror movies as "The Howling", "An American Werewolf In London", "Evil Dead".  So, what the hell is "The Hand"'s problem?  Why couldn't it get with the program? 

Well, for one thing, it's hard to be a good movie when the movie's about a crawling hand.  It's just not really all that scary.  "Oh, there's a hand crawling on the ground?  Well that's really weird, step on it.  Or run over it with a lawn mower.  Or, just put a laundry basket over it and put a heavy book on top to hold it in place."  What damage can a crawling hand do?  In "The Hand", it not only crawls, but it seems to teleport right onto the necks of its victims.

Michael Caine is a cartoonist married to a woman who talks like one of the "NPR girls" from Saturday Night Live.  Their house in the country is getting on her urbane nerves, and she wants to take an apartment in New York City.  What she fails to tell him is that she intends to take her daughter and move there without him.  In what is possibly the movie's only truly effective scene, they're setting out for NYC to look at a potentially fabulous apartment to rent. NPR woman is driving, and she has an unfortunate case of road rage that results in an accident that severs Michael Caine's hand.  Blood everywhere!

At that point, the movie could probably end, because that's probably what you'll remember most after watching "The Hand".  Caine gets a prosthetic hand to replace the one that's currently rampaging through his life, but his days of cartooning are over.  He leaves town and takes a job teaching, meets a biker chick and begins an affair, makes a sleazy friend, and is stalked by his crawling disembodied hand. I think we're supposed to dread and/or anticipate the moments when the hand might appear and strangle somebody, but honestly it only happens a few times.  And get ready for some massive spoilage...I mean really, I'm going on a spoiling rampage here: it turns out that the hand didn't really do anything, it was really MICHAEL CAINE doing all the strangling.  Bet you didn't see that one coming, did you? You probably won't see the twist-twist ending coming, either, where the hand really does choke a doctor to death while Caine watches (Viveca Lindfors, who had a much more enjoyable cameo role in "Creepshow" the following year as dotty old Aunt Bedelia).

I'm not sure what Oliver Stone was going for with this one. I can't even speculate as to how much cocaine he was doing at the time, because "The Hand" isn't crazy enough to indicate anybody was having any fun at all. I admit, a crawling hand is a creepy idea, and they can be fun for a brief moment, like in "Evil Dead 2".  I remember a crawling hand in that all-time TV classic "The Eye Creatures", and that scared me when I was about 8.  Oh, and Christopher Lee fell prey to a severed hand in "The House That Dripped Blood".  But crawling hands aren't really scary enough to carry their own movies, and even though it is very talky, "The Hand" was definitely promoted as a horror movie. It got coverage in "Fangoria", I remember reading about it and seeing shots of the gruesome hand effects, both Michael Caine's bloody stump and the crawling demon itself. But ultimately, "The Hand" comes off just like its title villain: it's no big deal.

Drive-In Super Monster-Rama 2013!

The 7th annual Drive-In Super Monster-Rama is over, and what a wild couple of nights it was. There's something about these events that really is like going back in time, and this year the Riverside really went all out and decorated the place a little extra spooky, including a haunted graveyard just outside the snack bar. Perfect for this year's Peter Cushing celebration!

Eeeyaaaaah!

Friday night's lineup began with "Brides of Dracula", Hammer's 1960 sequel to their original 1958 "Dracula" starring Christopher Lee (known in the US as "Horror of Dracula").  "Brides of Dracula" doesn't have Christopher Lee in it, as a voiceover narration reassures us that Count Dracula is indeed dead. However, Cushing is back as Van Helsing, and this time he investigates another outbreak of vampirism in Transylvania, propagated this time by a certain Baron Meinster (David Peel). As the film opens, Meinster is being kept chained in his castle by his mother (Martita Hunt), who is in the habit of bringing young girls to the castle so that they may be his victim. This time, though, Meinster convinces the girl to unchain him, and he's on the loose once more. Cushing is great as usual in this, only the second time he ever played Van Helsing, and the story isn't bad at all. It's easy to see why they brought Drac back for the next one though, as Christopher Lee's presence is sorely lacking.

1969's "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed" is another one I've missed all these years, and it's one of the stronger Frankenstein entries I've seen yet. Cushing's Dr. Frankenstein returns yet again to continue his experiments, which always seem to change with each movie.  In the first he pieced together a body from various parts and brought it to life. In "Frankenstein Created Woman", he had a method of trapping a person's soul and implanting it into another body. Now in "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed", he is working on brain transplant techniques, with a colleague that somehow we've never heard about in all the other films. His colleague, Dr. Brandt, is in an insane asylum, which leads Frankenstein to break him out and transplant his brain in order to cure his insanity. This was one of the more disturbing Hammer "Frankenstein" films I've seen, as the actors were all very good and mostly convincing. The 'creature', which is of course Dr. Brandt's brain in another man's body, is compelling because once his brain has been transplanted he's treated like a monster, even though he's perfectly rational and otherwise normal. It's a gruesome idea but also really scary on an existential level--is everything we are contained in our brains? Is that where "we" live? Would we still feel the same if we were in another body?  Hammer's Frankenstein movies are always bleak and gory, but they sometimes poke your brain a little, too.

1972's "Fear in the Night" was another film I was completely unfamiliar with. One of the weirder Hammer films, this one was about Peggy (Judy Geeson), a young woman recovering from a nervous breakdown who meets a man named Robert (Ralph Bates) and marries him. Before she can leave to move in with him, she is attacked in her apartment by a man with a prosthetic arm who tries to strangle her. After she recovers from that incident, she moves in with her new husband at the remote boys school where he serves as an instructor. She quickly discovers something eerie is going on, since there don't seem to be any students. Cushing is the mysterious headmaster who happens to have a prosthetic arm, and soon after she arrives at the school, she is once again attacked by the mysterious figure. Joan Collins also appears as Cushing's icy wife, and now you can probably see exactly where the story goes. I really got into this film's atmosphere, although it wasn't perfect. The plot was a little obvious, with some strong similarities to "Diabolique", and something about the whole movie doesn't click, although Cushing does give an effectively ambiguous performance.

The final feature for Friday night was "From Beyond the Grave", a 1974 anthology film from Amicus Films. I was thrilled that our print featured one of the film's alternate titles, "The Creatures". Cushing is a shopkeeper with an antiques store known as Temptations Ltd, and the four segments of the film focus on different customers who attempt to cheat him in some way and suffer cruel fates because of the cursed items they've purchased. Although it's got some great atmospheric cinematography and sets, the stories are a little dull, especially a humorous one about a man who consults a medium to get rid of an invisible demonic entity perched on his shoulder. The best story is the first, in which a young man buys a large ornate mirror containing a ghastly apparition that compels him to kill people.

Saturday night's program was even better, kicking off with "Madhouse", another Amicus picture starring not only Peter Cushing, but Vincent Price and Robert Quarry. If Christopher Lee had somehow made an appearance in the movie, nirvana may have been reached. "Madhouse" is a morbid slasher film in which Price stars as a horror movie actor named Paul Toombes. Paul suffers a breakdown when his fiance is murdered just before their wedding, her head cut off and then reattached to her shoulders so that when Paul comes up behind her and tries to kiss her, it falls off onto her dressing table. Due to a blackout he suffered before the incident, Paul is not sure whether or not he committed this crime. He's acquitted of the murder, but confined to an institution for over a decade. Upon his release, he resumes his horror career playing the same character, and murders start happening again, with the victims killed in exactly the same way as characters in Paul's films. Although it sounds like a plot that's been done many times before, "Madhouse" is actually a lot better than the premise itself. There's a glaring absence of gore and any actual violence in the film is tame and fairly bloodless (especially the opening decapitation), but the bizarre plot features a number of creepy ideas, such as a former actress that Paul worked with who suffers her own cruel fate while Paul is institutionalized and emerges as a burn victim living in self-imposed exile in a basement with a bunch of spiders that she keeps as pets.

"David, press that button David. Did you hear me David? David? David!"

"At the Earth's Core" from 1976 was another flick I'd never seen before, and what a hoot it was. Cushing stars alongside Doug McClure ("The Land that Time Forgot", "The People that Time Forgot", "Humanoids from the Deep") as a daffy scientist who creates a manned vehicle to drill through the Earth's crust. He and his assistant, David (McClure) wind up going too far and find themselves in an underground cavern fed by volcanoes and containing a number of bizarre prehistoric monsters and human tribes. The story, from a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is quite simply ridiculous, and so are the special effects. This was not a problem for me though, and I loved this movie in the same way I love the movie "Infra Man" and other monster flicks that had a less-than-stellar budget. The thing that irritated me about "At the Earth's Core" was the script, which contained countless utterances of "David!" from Cushing. "David! Look at this plant! David! Look out! Look over here, David! David! David!" At one point, he cries out "David!" and somebody whips him for it, and I felt a momentary sense of happiness wash over the audience.

The third Saturday feature was "Asylum", shown here under its 1980 American re-release title "House of Crazies". A young doctor arrives at a rural insane asylum to interview for a position, and is given a challenge: he must visit with the asylum's four patients and decide for himself which of the four are the mysterious Dr. Starr, former director of the institution who has gone mad and become a patient. The four stories contained here are much more weird and unexpected than "From Beyond the Grave", with the exception of a silly dual personality story starring Charlotte Rampling that you can see coming from a mile away. But nothing could really prepare you for the opening story, in which a philandering husband and his mistress (none other than Barbara Parkins) plot to murder his wife. The husband chops her up into little pieces, wraps the body parts in brown paper and stores them in a freezer in the basement. Thanks to the wife's interest in black magic, the body parts become reanimated and attack both of them, strangling the husband and attacking Parkins when she arrives at the house. "Asylum" really works because the wraparound story is a good one too, with a genuinely creepy moment when the elusive Dr. Starr murders someone, leans over the body with a stethoscope and listens for a heartbeat, then lets out this hair-raising insane laughter.

The final movie of the weekend was the one I was most anxious to see, 1977's "Shock Waves". I discovered "Shock Waves" years ago on home video and immediately fell in love with it. A small group of tourists on a chartered yacht encounter a strange phenomenon when their compasses go haywire, the sky turns orange, and they are later rammed by what appears to be an immense ship. When dawn comes, they learn the ship that hit them is a rusted out wreck on the reef of a nearby island. Forced to leave the boat due to the damage from the ship, the party soon learns that they're being stalked by a group of waterlogged zombies, products of a German experiment to create unkillable soldiers for use in World War II. The commander of the project, played by Peter Cushing, is the only inhabitant of the island, living in self-imposed exile. The return of the ship, and the return of the zombies, signals the end for him and anybody else who can't escape the island in time. "Shock Waves" suffers from poor editing and pacing, along with muddled motivations. Countless times we see the zombies getting in and out of the water, for no apparent reason, intercut with scenes of victims hiding in places on land, and in a few places there seemed to have been scenes cut out, resulting in a confused narrative. There is also very little gore, as the zombies don't want to eat you, just drown you. These flaws don't hurt the movie too much though, and they actually contribute to the dreamlike atmosphere a great deal. The zombies are very cool, too.

What a great program it was this year! Being the huge Cushing fan that I am, I was thrilled to see so many films at once in which he appeared. Even the trailers in between the films were mostly for Peter Cushing movies--even "Star Wars"! The weather was decent as well, just a little bit of rain on Saturday night. It got cold Friday night too, but you have to come prepared for these drive-in marathons. Speaking of being prepared, I am glad the Riverside is prepared to deal with people who have a dead battery at the end of the night...my car wouldn't start Saturday. Thanks for the jump, guys, and hope to see you in April for the second annual April Ghouls!

Demented (1980): Linda Spits On Your Grave

Not a film about Juggalos....

Someone I can't remember (probably either Confucius or Helen Steiner Rice) once said that there are no strangers, just friends we haven't met yet.  If movies were people, "Demented" is like one of those friends you wish you'd never met. Annoying, cheap, loony, offensive, obnoxious, flaky, boring as hell...and yet, so insane that you have a crazy story to tell afterwards. It is something so questionable that I hesitate to even give it any attention. You may not want to encourage this new friend named "Demented" any further.

In the opening scene, Linda Rodgers (Sallee Young) is raped in a horse stable by four miscreants with stockings over their heads.  One might think that a movie which dares to open with a gang rape scene might have something more substantial to say, but apparently a less explicit version of "I Spit On Your Grave" is what the filmmakers were going for here, since the rest of the movie is utterly lightweight and silly. Linda returns home from a "sanatorium" (their word, not mine) with her husband Matt, played by Harry Reems. Yes, the porn star Harry Reems, veteran of the notorious "Deep Throat" as well as numerous other porn flicks and stag reels. Here he proves that his porn career was probably the wiser choice, as he doesn't have any real acting chops. That's OK though, because Sallee Young has even less acting talent. She blows most of the dramatic moments by either whining in a nagging voice or reacting as if she's completely insane at any given moment, which kind of makes it hard to take a movie about rape and revenge seriously. Matt brings Linda home and seems to be devoted to her recovery, despite the fact that we later learn he's been dallying with some common tramp who apparently doesn't have any empathy for Linda and is only concerned about the fact that Matt is a doctor and has money she can siphon out of his bank account. 

See this? People keep "innocently" doing shit like this to Linda. Why would the gardener greet her like this?

Linda seems to be alright for about two seconds at home, until she's left alone and starts seeing hallucinations of her attackers, who have since been caught and imprisoned for what they did to Linda. This makes it somewhat confusing for her when four young men from the neighborhood have a chance encounter with her in front of her house and apparently decide right then and there to start fucking with her and driving her out of her mind. They return wearing bizarre masks and break in while her husband is out, chasing her through the house and threatening her, for apparently no reason other than "it was in the script". She escapes them the first time by locking herself in a room, and when her husband returns home, he's not entirely sure anything really happened due to Linda's previous hallucinations. The police aren't able to do much either, with no evidence of the four men being there, so Linda feels even more helpless. Matt isn't much help to Linda, either; even though he seems genuinely sympathetic to her, he keeps caving in to the demands of his mistress, Carol (Kathryn Clayton), who forces him to leave Linda alone so Matt can come over to her apartment and do the nasty. Linda's sister, Annie (Deborah Alter) also arrives for a visit, but Linda seems to resent her visit and chases her off by acting hostile.

"HEY, lady, nice wallpaper!"

This is the main problem I had with "Demented," it walks a line between serious and ridiculous, and it stumbles back and forth between the two like a drunk performing an unsuccessful sobriety check. The opening rape scene is pretty harrowing, because here's this female character we don't know yet who is brutalized by four men at once. The shock value is short-lived though, because Sallee Young's performance is so off, the character's credibility quickly evaporates after she starts to have dialogue.  Her delivery is shrill, especially in the scenes where she's supposed to be terrified and she goes up into this Minnie-Mouse-via-Katherine-Hepburn register of speaking. The scene where the four boys first attack her in her home ends up being laughable due to Young's absurd screaming. Remember the opening scene in "Blow-Out", where the co-ed in the shower opens her mouth and emits this ridiculous scream that deflates the entire scene? That's what's going on here, but for REAL. Shit like that happens, and then we have Harry Reems's character acting like a douche, leaving his traumatized wife all alone so he can go stick it to some gold digging lingerie model. Occasionally some effective moments get through, like when Linda confronts her final victim and cooks him a steak before killing him, asking him "Why were you so mean to me? Why didn't you stop?" Everyone was just so pathetically mean to Linda, and not only her rapists. But usually when she had any dialogue at all, I just wanted her to shut up, which made me feel like a bad person.

"Huh? Are you telling me you can actually take lessons for acting?"

So back to the plot...well, you see where it's going, don't you? Linda's creep of a hubby leaves her alone again, and the boys break into the house while Linda is sleeping, wearing their Joker masks. One of them (we never know most of their names) goes upstairs to "get" Linda and bring her downstairs. He climbs on top of her, unaware that she's armed herself with a meat cleaver under her pillow. One whack in the neck later, he's dead and Linda's finally off the deep end. That's when Sallee Young slips into her "crazy" voice, which sounds a lot like Ginger from Gilligan's Island. She goes downstairs and somehow isolates one of the boys, even though there are now three of them. After giving him alcohol and letting him pass out, she sets her sights on another one, taking him up into the bedroom, "seducing" him, and then castrating him with a piece of piano wire. She murders the other two, and then when her husband comes home she murders him for good measure. The end.

"I'm demented, and I LOVE it!"

"Demented" is interesting mainly due to its seeming obscurity.  It was directed by Arthur Jeffreys, for whom this is his only credit on IMDB. 'Nuff said? It was written by Alex Rebar, who has a slightly better reputation in cult films, having portrayed "The Incredible Melting Man" in 1977 and written 1974's "Beyond the Door". But where "I Spit On Your Grave" and "Last House On The Left" were shocking and graphic, "Demented" pulls most of its punches, and is neither bloody enough nor shocking enough to be noteworthy. Even the castration/emasculation has no blood and is completely implied--somehow Linda performs the entire thing without even pulling down his pants. I'm not sure what to think of the way it plays Linda's traumatic rape for the sake of making her go homicidal on a quartet of kids who weren't even really responsible for her assault. If it had any dramatic impact then it would be easy to justify having it in the film, and instead it fails because its own low budget and ineptitude on the part of the actors (all are guilty here, not just Salley Young). But these are all accusations that were already leveled at every "rape and revenge" movie in the genre, starting with "I Spit On Your Grave."  I have to admit, I enjoyed how utterly stupid "Demented" is, but it's the kind of movie you only watch one time in your life. I'm not sure where "Demented" is coming from, but I do know I was glad when it went back there.

It's coming!

What!? Only one more weekend until the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama!!?? Yes, it's true! Scores of retro monster movie lovers will descend on the Riverside Drive-In in Vandergrift, PA to watch this year's fantastic lineup of eight fright flicks--all of them featuring none other than Peter Cushing. Egad!

Also, don't forget to vote for the Riverside to win a free digital projector at the link below. Vote every day for the next eleven days!

http://projectdrivein.com/#vote_91

Keep My Grave Open (1976)

They're not kidding, fella. Believe me.

Few films are as hallowed in my humble world as 1973's "Don't Look In The Basement", directed by low budget auteur S.F. Brownrigg. With a modest five films in his repertoire, four of them are horror films, the last of which was 1976's "Keep My Grave Open". Having never seen it before, I was pleased to discover that it was indeed like his other films, ultra low on budget and deliriously high in rural gothic atmosphere. Like a Texan John Waters, Brownrigg made most of his no-budget films with recurring actors and actresses, and many of them appear in this one. The most notable is lead actress Camilla Carr, whose role in "Don't Look In The Basement" was that of Harriet, the unbalanced, murderous woman who thought her baby doll was a real baby.  Here, Carr plays Lesley Fontaine, a disturbed young woman who lives in an isolated rural mansion, and whoo baby does she ever go off the deep end.

Brownrigg opens the film with a lengthy sequence involving a transient man hitchhiking along a rural road.  He comes to a large house off the beaten path, and wanders up to it. Finding nobody at home after calling out numerous times, the man goes inside and raids the refrigerator of some food, including a large steak. When he takes the food away and builds a fire to cook the steak, he is swiftly approached by a shadowy figure that kills him with a large sword.

As the hitch hiker is killed, Brownrigg uses one of my favorite horror movie tropes: someone strikes a death blow with a knife, and there's an abrupt jump cut to a butcher chopping meat in a deli. This is where we meet Lesley, doing her grocery shopping in a small general store (replacing those stolen groceries, of course), but when she returns to the mansion, we learn that she seems to share it with "Kevin", an off-screen person that refuses to answer her from behind his locked bedroom door. It isn't long before we realize we will never see Kevin, and that Lesley has a dual personality thing going on. A few people come into contact with the reclusive Lesley, including her psychiatrist, Dr. Emerson (Gene Ross) and a young man named Robert (Stephen Tobolowsky) who tends to Lesley's horse. Dr. Emerson seems to know all about "Kevin", although we're not sure exactly who Kevin is, or was, or if he ever was.

Lesley dresses up like Kevin though, and goes all stab-happy. First Robert's girlfriend Suzie (Ann Stafford) gets skewered, and her death scene is the film's best: "Kevin" locks her in her room, but Suzie doesn't know she's in trouble, completely oblivious to a moment where the sword comes stabbing inward at her from between the door and the jamb. She slowly starts to panic until she's frantic and she gets impaled while leaning against the door again. We learn that Kevin is/was Lesley's brother, and also that Lesley's problems stem from her incestuous attachment to him. In an overly indulgent sequence, Brownrigg shows Lesley making herself as sensual as possible for Kevin, putting on makeup and a dress and then drifting weirdly to Kevin's bedroom, where the camera gets on top of her in bed for what seems to be a first-person sex scene. Camilla Carr makes Lesley a very compelling anti-heroine, the heartbreaking way she meticulously makes up her face and dresses in order to seduce Kevin into loving her. Just as she's "rejected" by Kevin, Robert arrives and she refocuses her seductive tactics on him, ultimately blackmailing him into having sex with her and then dressing up like Kevin to dispatch Robert with the sword.

The film is meandering and slow paced, and Brownrigg is definitely an acquired taste. The murder sequences are not the point of the film, although they're definitely intended to titillate the audience with the potential for blood and guts. Alas, "Keep My Grave Open" is much more reserved than the bloody "Don't Look In The Basement", and here Brownrigg seems less concerned with the murderous aspects of Lesley's breakdown. Her rampage is a lot like Catherine Deneuve's extended freak-out in "Repulsion", mostly based on what's going on in Lesley's warped mind.  There's isn't much of a story here, as it's just a matter of people who are unfortunate enough to wander into Lesley's path, but there is indeed depth to Lesley's character. At the film's conclusion, she reveals to Dr. Emerson the fateful event that seems to have caused her fractured psyche: a moment when Lesley's cruel and abusive aunt caught her innocently changing her dress in the same room as her brother and tormented her for it. When Lesley tries to seduce Emerson, he instead leaves to bring help for Lesley, which she knows will lead to the discovery of her crimes. Rather than face up to her actions, Lesley commits suicide by overdosing on pills; when she drops the glass pill bottle in her sink, she scoops up the pills as well as the broken glass and swallows both.

Maybe the strangest thing about "Keep My Grave Open" is how it never really gives the viewer a definitive answer about Kevin's identity. All along we've assumed Kevin to be either dead or a figment of Lesley's imagination, but as she stumbles out onto the front porch and slowly dies from the pills, Kevin's shadowy figure emerges onto the balcony above her, watching. She looks up at him and we're not really sure if he's there, or if she's imagining him. But then he appears the next day at Lesley's grave, too, dressed exactly as Lesley used to dress when she committed murders while wearing his clothes. He then returns to the mansion and speaks to Lesley, who is no longer there, the same way she spoke to him when he wasn't there.

Brownrigg made his films for audiences who were usually viewing them late at night as B features in a drive-in theater, and even though he didn't have much money to make these movies, he understood how to make them watchable and interesting. Some directors just threw these kinds of movies together and didn't care about the final product, but S.F. Brownrigg was definitely an artist and had a unique downbeat vision. Several sequences in the film seem to be more lengthy that necessary, possibly to pad out the film to feature length (it already runs just barely under 80 minutes), but it's this kind of indulgence that makes me think of Brownrigg as an auteur. Lesley's 'makeup' scene goes on and on, giving us excruciating closeups of her lips, but combined with the disorienting soundtrack music it also has a hypnotic effect, especially considering it occurs at night in the mansion, while Lesley's madness is in full swing. Another lengthy sequence occurs when Lesley stalks a prostitute she has brought back to the house for "Kevin". When Lesley appears in her Kevin outfit, the prostitute takes off, and unlike the other victims in the film, she fights back effectively, wounding Lesley and almost getting away. Almost.

"Keep My Grave Open" benefits greatly from Camilla Carr's performance, but most of the other actors are good, too. As I mentioned before, there are several holdovers from "Don't Look In The Basement", including Gene Ross, Jessie Lee Fulton, and the wonderful Annabelle Weenick, whose performance as Dr. Masters in "Basement" was unforgettable. The soundtrack music was done by Robert Farrar, who scored all of Brownrigg's horror films, and it's extremely similar in tone, with repeating riffs that effectively communicate the films anxiety and unstable atmosphere. Unfortunately, S.F. Brownrigg only made a few films, but the ones he left us with are worth revisiting, just to get that grungy, creepy feeling that he was so good at creating.

Whoever created this alternate title card was definitely not trying. At all.

Kevin finally appears...or does he?

Time Walker (1982): Mummies, mummies...MUMMIES

Please don't reveal our shocking twist ending...oh wait, never mind.

Usually when I write about these favorite (and unfavorite) films of mine, I spoil most of their surprises, but I do include a disclaimer over there in the side bar, too.  I warn you.  The people who made "Time Walker" aren't so polite, because at some point during this movie's life, someone decided to retitle it "Being From Another Planet". Sadly, this nifty little twist is just about the most interesting thing the film has to give, and talk about giving away your pie with breakfast...imagine if "Fight Club" had been titled "They Were Both The Same Person". Even with the non-spoiler title "Time Walker", the film's poster positions the film as if it's about a malevolent alien. So, since the producers of "Time Walker" didn't care about spoiling their movie, neither do I.

"Time Walker" opens with an archaeological dig inside King Tut's tomb. A team from the "California Institute of the Sciences", spearheaded by Professor Douglas McCadden, discovers a sarcophagus and takes it back to said "California Institute of the Sciences" (which might not be a real thing, since it only has one reference on Google not related to this movie). Once there, they open it and discover a mummy covered in green dust, which they hypothesize is some sort of dormant mold. When they x-ray the mummy, the radiation activates the mold, which now consumes the flesh of anybody who touches it. It also brings the mummy back to life, and it has an agenda: a scheming college student named Pete (Kevin "Lucan" Brophy!) discovers a hidden compartment in the sarcophagus that contains five "crystals", which he naturally steals and tries to get money for. Nobody believes him that they are 2000 years old, probably because they're totally not 2000 years old and look just like the decorative prisms you can buy in any new age store or bead shop. So instead, the kid gives them to hot college chicks, which puts them in harm's way when the mummy starts tracking them down to reclaim them.

My name is Lucan, I live on the second floor.

Check out that hi-tech computerized security system!

The "mummy" of course is not a mummy at all, it's an alien being that was discovered in the desert by ancient Egyptians. When they brought it back to nurse this "stranger" back to health, the green mold killed anybody who touched him, including King Tut. The bodies were sealed inside the tomb to keep the mold from killing anybody else, and now these fools have unearthed it. Ha!

OK, I admit I'm totally in love with that cheesy concept, and it could have made "Time Walker" a really enjoyable movie. I love the idea that it's a walking mummy movie, and it turns out to be an alien being. There are some cult luminaries in the film, not the least of which is Austin Stoker ("Abby", "Assault on Precinct 13", "Horror High"), who doesn't have a big enough role. Sometimes it IS the size that counts, people, and when you have a recognizable name, you go with that. James Karen is also in the cast, playing a sleazy university bigwig...isn't it crazy that James Karen appeared in this the same year he appeared in Spielberg's Tobe Hooper's "Poltergeist"? Nina Axelrod ("Motel Hell") is here too as the "good girl" female lead, Susie. Interestingly, another cast member of "Assault on Precinct 13" appears here in a minor role, Darwin Joston. 

"Oh it's not a mummy, it's an alien? BFD, my face is still rotting."

As it stands, though, this movie is only mildly appealing. It's compellingly silly enough to be enjoyable as a bad movie, but I can't figure out what the filmmakers were going for here, because it's a PG rated horror flick with very little gore and a modest body count. The director, Tom Kennedy, has only a few IMDB credits. "Time Walker" is his only directorial credit, and he seems to have worked mostly in TV, which might explain why this film resembles a TV movie in both its presentation and content. The cinematography is mostly unremarkable, with only a few spooky movie tropes in use here. There are numerous mummy point-of-view shots that are tinted green, but not much terror on hand at all. One mildly suspenseful sequence has the mummy going after Susie while she does research in the library, which is apparently abandoned because she does not encounter one single person when she starts screaming and running from it. There's also a menacing moment when one of the crystals ends up in the possession of a ditzy coed who is babysitting, and it's in the baby's crib when the mummy comes to collect it. The mummy doesn't actually kill many people though, and it doesn't hurt the baby. The coed though ends up with the green mold on her, which eats her face off when the doctors x-ray her. The mold scenes are really the only gory moments in the entire movie, and there are only two of them.  

No no no, that's his hand, his HAND.

The biggest thing that makes "Time Walker" look like a TV movie is its conclusion, which is one of the lamest climaxes in stupid movie history. The alien, which actually doesn't want to hurt anybody, collects all of his crystals, which he uses to transport himself home by inserting them into a triangular device. McCadden gets shot when one of the villainous goons in the movie tries to shoot the alien, and the alien grabs ahold of him and together they vanish in a cheesy neon special effect shot. Then immediately afterwards, the words "TO BE CONTINUED...." come up, and the credits roll. Yeah, the filmmakers decided a movie doesn't really need a proper ending, not when you can just throw the words "TO BE CONTINUED" up and insinuate there will be a sequel.

If that's not a "Xanadu" moment, I don't know what one is.

Up until that point, "Time Walker" manages to limp along in its bandages, full of stilted acting, mildly effective special effects, and super cheesy music. Don't miss the rollicking frat party scene, where those crazy 30-something college kids have a mummy party and rock out to a song called "Mummified". 

"Hold on just a century...YOU'RE not Richard Dreyfus...."

As of this writing, you can watch "Time Walker" on YouTube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zabhd3E8JDU