You'll Have To Wait Until Oct 28th For a Chainsaw Massacre

Pieces (1982) holds a very special place in the heart of just about everyone who grew up on the slasher films of the early 80s. A perennial favorite at the local Video Vault, it wasn’t unusual to find the space behind the ultra-lurid VHS box empty (“No, we’re not renting Splatter University instead – because it sucks, that’s why!”) It’s been years since I’ve sat down and watched the film from beginning to end, as it never got a proper US DVD release, and the import that I had picked up years ago had gone missing in the back of a closet. It was recovered during a recent fact finding expedition, but before I had the chance to give it a spin, I find this:

Hoo-freaking-ray!

Featuring a pair of the best taglines in exploitation history, “You Don’t Have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw Massacre” and my personal favorite, “It’s Exactly What You Think It Is!”, Pieces quickly became infamous for its copious bloodletting and plentiful nudity – two items that the very film that it chose to rip-off had almost none of. After The Texas Chain Saw Massacre bowed in 1974, it became an overnight watermark for nearly all subsequent low-budget horror productions. Out massacring the Massacre became a decades-long game of one-upmanship in terms of gore, while none we able to recreate the palpable air of fear of Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece. Eventually they stopped trying.

Made with European money by a Spanish crew, Pieces dispensed with any semblance of serious minded horror in the attempt to stuff as much blood and boobs into 90min as humanly possible. It was the second to last film for star Christopher George (the actor died of a heart attack in 1983) and came at the end of an admirable string of grindhouse classics, including Lucio Fulci’s The Gates of Hell and William Girdler’s Grizzly, which used George’s square-jawed countenance to excellent effect. But the film’s most memorable performance comes from Paul L. Smith. The larger than life Smith (imagine Sydney Greenstreet with the face of Peter Lorre) was a very active genre player in the 70s and 80s, appearing as a heavy in projects as diverse as Robert Altman’s Popeye – you’ll never guess who he played! – and Alan Parker’s Midnight Express. In Pieces, Smith plays one of cinema’s most obvious red herrings; a school handyman if memory serves, who lurks around crime scenes smiling like a mental patient while lovingly caressing his chain saw.

A new interview with Smith is just one of the delights waiting inside Grindhouse’s 2 disc set, so I’ve decided to hold off on revisiting the picture until it streets in October.

Coming To You Straight From Maine...

Our friend Don May, Jr. (co-founder and president of one of the great independent DVD companies, Synapse Films) has just written a nifty piece for Fangoria following a visit to the set of Offspring, based on the book by Jack Ketchum. Ketchum’s Offspring is a brisk, genuinely unsettling horror yarn about a tribe of juvenile cannibals preying on some very unfortunate vacationers in a rural area of Maine. The book is actually a sequel to one of his earliest books, Off Season – a superior work, if only for having been written first.



Ketchum, an excellent writer with a fiercely original voice, hasn’t had terribly good luck with the film adaptations of his work. Red, despite a lead performance from the great Brian Cox, was beset by production difficulties resulting in the removal of director Lucky McKee, and there was probably no way for the adaptation of Ketchum’s greatest work, the shattering The Girl Next Door, to be anything more than a pale reflection of the source material and still be palatable enough for general release.




While watching the two year slide of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series from boisterous mediocrity to numbing unwatchability, we couldn’t help but think how perfect either Off Season or Offspring would have been to adapt to both an hour-long format (both are slim volumes and can be read in a single, white knuckle sitting). But Don's set visit makes us hopeful that we'll have a crakerjack feature to look forward to.


If you’re wondering why Offspring is being filmed first, you’ll have to check out the article, here.

n.b. - There are some pretty graphic makeup EFX pics that are probably not work-safe unless you have a private office or work at Fangoria.

You'll Always Be The Duke

Shockingly, Isaac Hayes died today in Memphis at age 65. I can’t honestly say that Hayes was one of those people that I ponder frequently, but his presence as an actor and musician is undeniable. His score for Shaft is beyond seminal – it immediately became musical shorthand for brash, in your face hipness, and for nearly 4 decades it has withstood even the clumsiest ironic usage. Say what you will, it’s as much a piece of Americana as anything by Cole Porter. Although Hayes appeared in less than a handful of Blacksploitation pictures as an actor, he provided the soundtrack that started it all; his presence is felt every time Fred Williamson lights up a cigar, each time Ron O’Neal kicks a crooked cop in the stones, and every time Samuel L Jackson tries to co-op their legacy.

Though Hayes will be irrevocably tied to a specific genre, he only appeared in two Blacksploitation films (both released in 1974), Tough Guys, an Italian-produced actioner that featured Hayes as an ex-cop set to bring down a Chicago mobster played with Fred Williamson, and the more polished Truck Turner, featuring Hayes and Yaphet Kotto as dueling hitmen. But Hayes’ appearance in features became strangely infrequent; in spite of a fabulous turn as the Duke in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (“Yoooo’re the Duuuke”) and an hilarious image spoofing in I’m Gonna Get You Sucka – sometimes known by its alternate title, Keenen Ivory Wayans’ I’ll Never Make You Laugh Again – his film career seemed to mysteriously stall out There was always lots of television work, including several guest shots on The Rockford Files, and a recurring role on South Park, which Hayes probably never thought would end up as the most controversial of his career.

Hayes’ (a newly minted Scientologist) departure from the show came on the heels of the 2005 episode, Trapped in the Closet, featuring the animated adventures of Lord Xenu & Friends. Hayes, proving that a lack of humor is a common bond among all religious zealots, quit the show in a huff, and for the first time in his professional life, Isaac Hayes was decidedly uncool.

It's extra sad that such a great musician would end a career on a discordant note.

The above image is from the yet to be released Soul Brother and came from Hayes’ official website (which had not yet posted anything about his passing. It is, considering recent events, both eerie and amazingly sad.

Feel Lucky?

I know that I’m a little late to this particular party, and crapping all over photoshopped theatrical posters is old hat by now, but this one was just too funny to ignore.


As far as I know, the story with their characters was that they were forced to marry or live together or something because of some jackpot winnings, and instead of putting out a poster suggesting the age-old chestnut of romantic-comic antagonism, they gave us this (anyone else think Ashton has the wrong finger up?) It's not even a poster, it’s behind the scenes goofing caught on film. It’s a given that the days of using actual drawings and paintings for posters are at an end, but even in the age of digital-real images it’s possible to manage something great


…whatever you think of the film in question.

The Ants Are Coming, The DVDs Are Here!

Head on over to Cinefantastique and check out my review of Phase IV. We really dig Saul Bass’ only theatrical feature and applaud Legend and Paramount for finally releasing it, though we are less fond of its Best Buy exclusivity.

Go!

What's So Funny?

Okay, I know it’s a little early to get excited about Watchmen. It’s not out until March, and unlike the trailer, I’m not sure that Zack Snyder quite deserves to be called a “visionary”. But damn if this doesn’t push all the right buttons for me. Sure, some of the costumes are a bit off (it looks like they tried a bit too hard to make them look cool, when some – especially Night Owl – should look kind of clunky)

And yes, I got a bit fed up with all the slow motion in Snyder’s previous 300; but the slo-mo trailer for Watchmen doesn’t bother me because it’s the perfect introduction for all these characters that have been living in our heads for the last 2 decades. Rorschach, full of contempt – Dr. Manhattan, effectively ethereal and other-worldly – Ozymandias, aloof and vain – and then there’s The Comedian.

Eddie Blake may be one of the most unlikely heroes in the long history of comic books. Killed off just before the book begins, we learn about Eddie and his alter ego, The Comedian, through flashbacks. We see a military honor guard at his funeral, and it’s obvious that he was a hero of some note. But that’s just the beginning; we soon learn about the darker side of Eddie – things that people unfamiliar with the comic should avoid reading at all costs.

It’s very encouraging to see that Snyder, in just a handful of production stills released online and a few brief shots in the trailer (including his fatal defenestration), seems to have nailed the look of The Comedian. He may be a smug, right wing rouge on the verge of homicidal rage, but he’s our smug, right wing rouge.

Death Dives Without An Emissions Sticker

The following is humbly submitted as part of Final Girl’s Film Club series. All credit for choosing The Car goes to her.

“Oh great brothers of the night, who rideth out upon the hot winds of Hell, who dwelleth in the Devil’s lair; move and appear!” – Anton LaVey

With the above quote, so begineth Elliot Silverstein’s The Car, born, not in Hell, but at Universal Studios in 1977. The Car is in the rather unique position of being the bastard child of two Steven Spielberg films, 1975’s suspense classic Jaws, and its lesser known antecedent, a minor masterpiece about a driverless truck menacing TV’s Dennis Weaver, 1971’s Duel. With nearly every studio in the world churning out Jaws rip-offs, it made sense for that film’s studio to get in on the act. 1977 was a tough year for Universal Pictures, with big budget disappointments like Sorcerer and MacArthur sucking up resources and replacing them with negative reviews and nervous theater owners. The Car would be the perfect salve for a hemorrhaging studio; a low cost horror programmer, sprinkled with inexpensive but familiar actors (utter that phrase 5 times and James Brolin and Ronny Cox appear in your living room) and the lush trappings that the resources of a major Hollywood studio could provide.

The story takes place in a sleepy desert town in what appears to be a southwest state (although I heard a character mention Utah later in the film – anyway, it’s not important). On one bright, crisp morning, a menacing black sedan appears and quickly dispatches a pair of groovy bicyclists and French horn-doodling hitchhiker John Rubinstein – a busy morning, even for the Dark Lord. The cases soon get turned over to local deputy Wade Parent (Brolin), a widower with two young children and a fiancée, Lauren (Kathleen Lloyd). He’s not on the case for 24 hours before the town sheriff (John Marley, the “piece of ass” gourmand from The Godfather) is mowed down on main street and his best buddy Luke (Ronny Cox, getting great billing for a nothing part) falls off the wagon due to Devil car-related stress. The attacks continue, including one launched against a band practice led by the future Mrs. Parent (more on that later), but it’s only when the car is unable to enter the hallowed ground of a cemetery that the true, evil nature of it becomes apparent, and our heroes realize that it will take more than a few explosives to end its reign of terror – it will take a whole lot of explosives!



One problem we’ve always had with The Car is that it’s never made clear if the titular auto is meant to be a manifestation of the Devil himself, or merely his ride. We have trouble imagining the Devil driving a car like this – it was clearly designed to look like a demonic Cadillac, or an environmentalist’s fever dream of a Detroit gas guzzler. However, the end result looks more like something Dick Dastardly would keep at his summer place on the Cape. This is the car that would pick the Devil up at the airport.



But The Car has problems that reach beyond the conceptual. While nobody likes to imagine being run over, there’s nothing inherently terrifying about watching it happen on film. Instead of being struck still with terror, we wonder where the stunt driver was seated and how much the camera was overcranked. Jaws plugged directly into a primordial fear of mankind while The Car has to remain content with exploiting the mundane concerns of 20th Century pedestrians. And those looking for a parable of mankind’s obsession with technology coming back to haunt him will come up craps as well. The Car may have been more successful had it been retooled at the factory as a pro-ecology horror picture, with the car as a murderous manifestation of our obsession with the auto. Steven King solved the problem to a degree in his short story Trucks by having all vehicles rebel against us and replacing a literal Devil with a figurative one. Interestingly, King himself turned the story into a feature film, 1986’s Maximum Overdrive, where he ditched the visual elegance of The Car in favor of a gory, sweat soaked demolition derby, populated by some of the most gratuitous redneck stereotypes ever seen.



Interestingly, Maximum Overdrive seems to have borrowed at least one major beat from The Car. The scene begins at an outdoor band practice led by music teacher (and 70s television mainstay) Kathleen Lloyd. There have already been 4 deaths in the town attributed to a mysterious black sedan, so the proceedings are overseen by a deputy in a tall watchtower. All is well until we catch a glint of light in the distance; the glint moves closer as a dust cloud appears in its wake. When the near-sighted deputy finally sees it, the car is practically on top of the kids – coasting just under the desert dunes with only the roof visible (if this setup sounds at all like Jaws, expect a call from Universal’s legal department telling you how wrong you are). Lloyd leads the kids into an old cemetery, fenced in by a decidedly un-intimating rock wall. She then takes the opportunity to shout at, taunt, and belittle the manhood of the car, as it spins angry demonic doughnuts just beyond the cemetery gates. It’s almost as if someone on the crew hit Lloyd (ordinarily a very capable actress) with a blowdart loaded with methamphetamines, as her shrill spiel goes on for several gloriously uninterrupted minutes. Did Stephen King plan the scene in Maximum Overdrive where a pre-Simpsons Yeardley Smith, enraged by some act of auto-homicide and looking (along with the rest of the cast) like she’d just been dipped in a vat of stale beer and sweat, storms out of the truck stop and screams “We made you! WE MADE YOU!!!!!!!” as a homage? Already being familiar with The Car, I always felt that the scene played like a tribute – like a transvestite doing Cher’s 70s act in a Vegas show – and gave King major props.










And while we’re talking about the cemetery, I’d like to suggest that the car’s inability to enter it is the input of Anton LeVay. LeVay, founder and High Priest of the Church of Satan (tax exempt?), was a minor celebrity in the 70s, ingeniously capitalizing on the growing interest in the occult sparked by films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. He cornered the market on Satanism through canny appearances on talk shows presenting himself as a legitimate authority on all things devilish. Despite being erroneously credited with being an actor and consultant on Rosemary’s Baby (he had nothing to do with the film) LeVay received actual screen credit on 1975’s The Devil’s Rain, which possibly led Universal to bring him onboard The Car as an (un-credited) consultant. I like to imagine a black-robed LeVay sitting in a conference room at Universal, giving his notes to a bleary-eyed production assistant, mentally snapping the neck of the executive who decided that The Car needed 100% satanic accuracy. Unfortunately, there’s no record as to exactly what LeVay contributed to the picture, and aside from idle chatter regarding the hallowed ground of the cemetery being a no parking zone for the Devil’s wheels, there’s not much actual “research” on display.



None of this should suggest that The Car is without merit, even beyond its considerable camp value. There are a few good scares to be had, particularly the handling of the death of a major character late in the film. It’s also beautifully photographed, with the blasted red hues of the southwest (?) desert beautifully captured in director Silverstein’s 2.35 Panavision frame. A few old friends pop up in the supporting cast, too; Peckinpah regular R G Armstrong and the late, great Roy Jensen are on hand, and...did I mention John Rubinstein as a French horn-playing hitchhiker?



The Car also marked the beginning of quite a career jag for star James Brolin, who followed this up with the far more entertaining thriller Capricorn One (1978), the rough but effective Amityville Horror (1979), and the sadly overlooked 1980 kidnap/revenge drama Night of the Juggler, featuring some of the best NYC location shooting that you’ve never seen. With his chiseled features and silent movie-villain beard, Brolin almost seemed like a parody of a leading man – just a little too good looking – but he made some pretty smart career choices before television and Babs took him away from us. I hear his kid isn’t bad either.



With the correct expectations, The Car can be a pretty fun ride, just be mindful who sees you driving it. Sure, it’s cheesy – but it’s the kind of cheese that just isn’t made anymore. We haven’t had a decent possessed car movie since 1983’s Christine, and now, sadly, it seems like horror movies in general, much like automobiles, are being made better overseas.