The Car (1977)

Dir: Elliot Silverstein
Cinemax HD Broadcast (or Actionmax or Thrillermax...)

A week on vacation and a week of recovery, I know everyone (all 2 of you) out there have been clamoring for more posts! I actually watched this the night before I left to go out of town but didn't have time to post some musings, so here go. The Car is a well managed horror piece about a driver-less car that indiscriminately runs people over. James Brolin stars as a single father of two and one of the town's several police officers that is on the hunt for the sinister auto after it comes blazing through town with a pile of bodies in it's wake. Things get personal when it kills fellow officers and eventually hunts down Brolin's girlfriend, who had provoked it, prompting the rest of the police force to get explosives expert and wife-beater Amos (played by recognizable character actor R.G. Armstrong) to help dynamite a cliff wall on top of the demonic ride. Thankfully we never get in to too much of an explanation of what the car is, just some vague assumptions on the part of the characters that might care about that sort of thing, mostly these guys just want to blow it up. Another plus is Silverstein never let's The Car steer (sorry!) towards camp. The material is handled seriously although I would have like to have seen it more efficiently handled with a shorter run time. An overall enjoyable viewing experience though with a good horror tale that was refreshing in the sense that it never went for gore or shock, but tension. Strangely, I came across the movie because I had just read an article about Anton LaVey and his involvement with films in Screem Magazine, and then noticed this was airing, is Satan trying to tell me something? Ahhh yes, time for the oil change.

6/10

Stop Me Before I Kill (1960)

Dir: Val Guest

Sony DVD: part of "Columbia's Icons of Suspense: Hammer Films" set

Hammer fans rejoice! Grover Crisp at Columbia has brought us six previously unavailable Hammer thrillers on DVD this week. The set features six films on three discs, all in proper aspect ratio, and with their original trailers. Sadly there are no other special features, but I'm not complaining. First up in the set is the film Stop Me Before I Kill, also known as The Full Treatment, which has Hammer regular Val Guest's name all over it. He wrote, produced, and directed the film, in fact at the beginning it says a "Val Guest Production", but does not say a "Hammer Films Production" anywhere. The movie is about a race car driver (Ronald Lewis) that is involved in a terrible accident while on his honeymoon. His wife (Diane Cilento) is thrown from the car, but they both survive. The opening shot is incredible showing the dashboard in tight close-up and then pulling back to reveal the wreck and it's various details while jazz blares from the car's radio. It's so good I watched the opening again right after the film was over. We then jump ahead one year and Lewis is finally healed and ready to get back in to the world, physically anyway. Mentally he is an unstable, temperamental time bomb ready to explode on everyone. They go on holiday where they meet a psychiatrist who finds them fascinating and wants to help. Lewis' identity has been taken from him as he is now afraid to drive which was everything he knew. He now feels impotent and most of his temper is directed back at his wife in violence. He realizes that he is volatile, hence the title, but doesn't believe in all the psychological mumbo jumbo. He doesn't trust the good doctor at all, but is there a reason? It's a fine thriller that has no horror or sci-fi elements at all and makes me wonder if that's why there is no Hammer logo at the beginning. It's fairly predictable, but Guest is a very skilled director that brings some nice visual touches to the picture. It's interesting to note that the film I had just watched prior to this, Sadist With Red Teeth, had a similar plot device at it's center, with a mental health professional dealing with a man that had been in a car accident and strange that films came out on DVD so close together. I had seen two of the films in this set before, and liked them much better. I'm hoping the rest of the set will be on par with those. Either way, the set is a must have.

6/10

Sadist With Red Teeth (1971)

Dir: Jean Louis Van Belle
Mondo Macabro DVD

The main feature on Mondo Macabro's recently released two-disc set, this a new-wave influenced vampire film about a young man that was in a car crash that killed a friend. We start the film with the young man being released from the hospital and he believes that he is becoming a vampire. This belief is being reaffirmed by the hospital's psychiatrist who, for unknown reasons, wants this transformation to happen. The idea really takes shape when the man sees a scene form JLVB's earlier film, Forbidden Paris, about a man who believes he is the last vampire. This and other concepts in the movie work really well and are pretty exciting conceptually, the film though meanders a bit too much and the overall feel is one of improvisation. I'm not sure the film really has very much to say, it is, though, an interesting take on vampire mythology. The print looks great and there's a 30 minute doc on JLVB rounding out the disc.

6/10

Forbidden Paris (1969)

Dir: Jean Louis van Belle
Mondo Macabro DVD

Director JLVB (as he's named on the disc) has been recently rediscovered through some festival screenings of his film Sadist with Red Teeth, which is the main feature that this disc is sold with. This movie was made a few years before that one and is part of the "mondo film" trend of the late sixties, which were essentially bizarre travelogues where oddball humans and strange stories were photographed and then a narrator would describe the action we're seeing (not always truthfully). These stories were presented as fact but it's pretty easy to see through the ruse on most of them, particularly with these films as several people from Forbidden Paris are seen in Sadist with Red Teeth which is a fictional tale. As with all mondo films, the vignettes are hit and miss, the real stand outs in this one for me were "Hairdresser of the Dead", where a man cuts the hair of a corpse while the family, including a smiling child, watch, and "Hitler Club", where a bunch of Neo-Nazis paint a woman and scream at her and then march around in a circle in a room the size of a closet. The worse part, and frankly one to skip, is having to see a taxidermist stuff a lady's pet dog in full detail and then add a pre-recorded voice box. This disc, again part 2 of a set, has an introduction with JLVB.

4/10

Sadist With Red Teeth / Forbidden Paris (2pc) (Ws Sub)

Girly (1970)

Dir: Freddie Francis
Scorpion Releasing DVD

Originally titled Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly, this is about four psychopaths that live in a huge dilapidated estate and lure men back to the house to play games with them until they "send them to heaven". Each person in the house has a specific role (based on their names) but we never find out the truth about the relationships. In fact we never learn anything about motivation or back story which is quite a strength for the film. It plays out as a sort of black comedy but thankfully it's straight faced enough to not become a parody of horror films. The trouble begins for the quartet when they bring a man back to the house after they convince him that he accidentally killed his girlfriend while he was drunk. But once the "new friend" starts to settle in, he begins to manipulate the three women in house and tries to turns everyone against each other. Vanessa Howard gives a real stand out performance as Girly, it's too bad she only did a handful of films. The only real problem with the film is it suffers from some pacing issues in the second half. Once we figure out where this is going, we want it to get there. The disc has an interview with writer Brian Comport and an archival audio interview with director Francis. Kudos to Scorpion for getting this on DVD with such a good transfer and the care it deserves.

7/10

Kitten With A Whip (1964)

Dir: Douglas Heyes
TCM broadcast

This is another frustrating example of, "Why doesn't the main character just do this..." as in something logical. The answer, of course, is that there would be a much shorter film if that happened. In this case the people we want to reach through the television screen and slap are Ann-Margaret as a bi-polar sociopath that happens to climb in the window of John Forsythe, a successful business man that wants to run for office, and then forces him to help her. She's on the run for escaping juvie and injuring a guard. She gets Forsythe into more and more ridiculous situations that end with stabbings, smuggling fugitives over the border to Mexico, and a fatal car crash. Peter Brown stands out as a philosophical criminal with some pretty entertaining dialog. The movie is available as part of the Universal Vault collection from Amazon, but I can't attest to the quality.

"You're nothing painted blue!"

5/10

I Sell The Dead (2008)

Dir: Glenn McQuaid
Lion's Gate Blu-ray

Let me preface by saying that I love period horror films, particularly Hammer, and I believe that I have seen every film based on the true story of grave robbers Burke & Hare, so I was really looking forward to this film about two resurrectionists (played by Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden) that find themselves in over their heads with the supernatural and a rival gang of grave robbers. The final product didn't live up to my expectations however as the film gives it a real effort but ultimately finds it has no real story to tell. The movie's narrative is based around a conversation that Monaghan is having with a priest (Ron Perlman) before he is to be executed. So the movie is just a series of flashbacks with way too much exposition. And in one of the more convoluted sequences, there's a story within a story within a story! I don't believe that this was a direct reference to The Saragossa Manuscript though. Another story is so silly it's just disappointing and involves (SPOILER ALERT!) the duo finding a Communion like alien buried in an unmarked grave. The filmmakers do a good if not great job overcoming their obvious budget constraints with some inventive use of comic book style stills, but the final product feels lifeless.

3/10