Deadly Blessing (1981)

Deadly Blessing

Release Date: 1981

Rating: * * 1/2

By John Engell August 29, 2012

Three years before Wes Craven would become a household name in horror with “A Nightmare On Elm Street,” he directed 1981’s little known “Deadly Blessing.” It is arguably the most atypical genre film in Craven’s cannon. The film features an early performance from Academy Award nominee Sharon Stone, and a score from future Titanic composer and Oscar winner James Horner.     

“Deadly Blessing” takes place in rural Pennsylvania farm country where a suspicious Amish-like sect known as the Hittites make their home. The late Ernest Borgnine stars as Isaiah, the leader of the group, whose son Jim decides to leave the tight-knit community to pursue a college education. When Jim returns to the family’s farmland with a wife, and a new perspective on life in which he embraces modern conveniences, he is exiled from the commune. The Hittites call his land the “forbidden place” and warn its youth from venturing onto it. On the night of the couple’s one year anniversary, a shadowy figure appears on the outsider’s property and murders Jim, crushing him with his own tractor.
    
His pregnant widow Martha is ostracized by the locals who call her a messenger of the Incubus. Despite warnings from police to leave town for her own safety, Martha refuses to be driven out.
    
Relations between Isaiah and his estranged daughter-in-law are further strained when one of the Hittites, a man-child played by the “Hill Have Eyes” alum Michael Berryman, is found dead on Martha’s property.
    
After Martha’s two best friends come to stay with her, the trio is terrorized by an unknown assailant, which viewers are led to assume is a member of the Hittite clan intent to purge the land of the evil they believe is incarnated there.
    
“Deadly Blessing” features several creepy and disquieting sequences involving a large spider, first in the barn and later when an arachnid descends from the ceiling into the open mouth of one of the unsuspecting girls as she lies restlessly in bed. There is also a gross-out snake in the bathtub scene reminiscent of Nancy’s scary soak in “Nightmare.”
    
The ending is a bit surreal and without revealing too much it involves a hermaphrodite, an overprotective mother and the devil himself. But don’t let that scare you away from tracking down a copy of one of Wes Craven’s most obscure efforts. “Deadly Blessing” may not be everyone’s glass of farm fresh milk, but it was unique enough to maintain my interest for 100 minutes.
    
Presently there is no region 1 issue of “Deadly Blessing” (I watched a dark, and grainy full-screen dub which just started to stream on Netflix), but the upstart Scream Factory label plans to remedy that this fall with a proper release of the film here in the States.

Staunton Hill (2009)

Staunton Hill

Release Date: 2009

Rating: * 1/2

By John Engell August 22, 2012

Like father like son. Well... not always. More like “my (insert relation) is a famous filmmaker so I can be one too.” Thus is the case with Cameron (son of legend George) Romero who decided to follow in his dear
dad’s footsteps and make movies. They are big shoes Cameron fails to fill with his 2009 direct-to-dvd dud “Staunton Hill.”

The film isn’t all bad although it is clearly inspired by Tobe Hooper’s oft-imitated “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Set around the same time as that landmark, a group of young pretty people are hitchhiking to a rally in the nation’s capital, before they accept a ride from an overzealous stranger whose truck breaks down. He then takes the group on a cross-country detour to the isolated farmhouse of the Staunton’s, who unbeknownst to them, are intermediaries in the sale of black market body parts. The matriarch of the household, played by Kathy Lamkin of the “TCM” remake, who more or less reprises that role here, has her mentally-handicapped son Buddy (Leatherface minus the mask and mechanical saw) harvest the requested organs from the outlanders for a Dr. Ostergard. The good doctor has circumvented the medicinal world’s waiting list by performing his own seedy back alley surgeries, which we get glimpses of with several cut scenes.

Romero spends the first 45 minutes of his film on its cardboard characters, who before getting stalked and slashed, do a lot of talking and walking around the barn, but don’t develop much depth. When we finally do get moving “Staunton Hill” is marginally interesting, but is ultimately an exercise in unoriginality. Romero must have believed his composition was as thought-provoking as say “The Sixth Sense,” since he insists on spelling things out to us with numerous annoying and unnecessary flashbacks (Otherwise we would have never known that the shady stranger who innocently led the group to the farm was somehow in on it).

The best parts of “Staunton Hill”? Decent cinematography, a cameo from "The Funhouse’s" Cooper Huckabee, and its awesome Anchor Bay cover art complete with ringing endorsement from George A. Romero himself.

The Blob (1988)

The Blob

Release Date: 1988

Rating: * * *

By John Engell August 15, 2012

  

As the proverbial saying goes, we all have to start somewhere. For A-list Hollywood director Frank Darabont, the man responsible for one of cinema’s greatest achievements, “The Shawshank Redemption,” and more recently for adapting the “Walking Dead” comics into a hit television program, that beginning came as a screenwriter.    

Darabont’s first feature length writing credit was 1987’s slasher sequel “A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.” A year later, Darabont would re-team with Chuck Russell, the director of that film, and together they would pen the screenplay for “The Blob.”

The blob is a purple jelly-like substance that first appears in what is believed to be a meteorite that has crashed in the small rural town of Arborville, California. After a local vagabond strays too close to the crater, he is attacked by the bubbling life form within. Bad-boy biker Brian Flagg attempts to help the man, but the crazed vagrant is nearly run over by football star Paul Taylor, who is on his first date with beautiful high school cheerleader Meg Penny. The couple rush the man to the hospital, but it is too late. The unidentified mass has claimed its first victim. Meg’s date then ends rather abruptly when Paul is promptly devoured by the blob, which by this point has grown from the size of a spilled jar of jam to something that fills a small room. 

By the time police show up, led by overwhelmed and understaffed Sheriff Herb Geller (frequent Darabont collaborator Jeffrey DeMunn), the blob has literally slipped out the back door, headed towards Main Street where the townspeople are being unceremoniously herded at gunpoint like sheep by a FEMA like body, to the local church. 

“The Blob” is nothing we haven’t seen before. After all it is a remake of the Steve McQueen movie of the same name, made 30 years earlier. It is reminiscent of George Romero’s “The Crazies” and countless others. Government agents in white hazmat suits and gas masks quickly show up and quarantine the unsuspecting small town. “No one gets in, no one gets out,” says Dr. Christopher Meddows, the man at the forefront of this secret military operation gone awry. He has come to contain the life form, not destroy it. He wants to study it for use in biological warfare, even at the expense of the citizens of Arborville, whom he calls “expendable.” Of course there is one local who won’t go quietly, in this case Flagg, who recognizes the blob’s one apparent weakness and works, with the help of Penny, to exploit it before the entire town is consumed. 

The cast puts in fine performances (although the talented DeMunn is criminally underused and is eliminated from proceedings far too early on), nevertheless the real star of the film is its special effects which have aged remarkably well. Despite nearly 25 years of industry advancements, the practical special effects in “The Blob” are as impressive as anything the big studios pay big money for today. And I have yet to see anything CGI that captures “The Blob’s” visceral realness. 

The film flopped at the box office. According to IMDB “The Blob” only grossed $8 million, which was less than half of its budget, and almost a million dollars less than its effects cost alone. 

Despite its poor theatrical performance, “The Blob” has grown (no pun intended) to be a fan boy favorite. I now include myself in that group. Good campy fun from people who clearly worked hard to create an entertaining movie with laughs and real scares.

Critters (1986)

Critters 

Release Date: 1986

Rating: * * 1/2

By John Engell August 8, 2012 
 
Many horror films claim to be an homage to a past classic. Most however, are blatant plagiaristic rip-offs intended to profit from a successful brethren. Stephen Herek’s 1986 horror-comedy “Critters” would likely fall into the latter category, though it is not without its merits.

“Critters” begins in a faraway place in space where creatures called the Krites are bound for termination on an alien penal planet. But before the Krites can be executed they hijack a fueled-up ship and make a break for the nearest habitable planet, which just so happens to be Earth. Shape shifting bounty hunters are sent to retrieve the prisoners in a race across the galaxy.

“Critters” is said to be New Line Cinema’s answer to Warner Brothers’ “Gremlins.” At the time New Line was a fledgling American film studio that had only come to prominence two years earlier with its first commercial success in Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street;” A film which was made for a song, but grossed millions.
 
New Line would employ the same low budget ingenuity as its riposte to Spielberg’s 1984 blockbuster. With only $2 million to work with, California’s Chiodo brothers were hired to create the film’s namesakes. The Krites share their distant green cousin’s gregarious appetite and unfriendly disposition, yet they look somewhat like Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog, with red eyes and a bad attitude, and are armed with poisonous porcupine-like projectiles.

Genre vet Dee Wallace (“The Howling”) stars as the matron of the secluded Kansas farmhouse were the Krites take refuge once they crash land their stolen ship. After father and son discover the wreck the film becomes rather light on plot and particularly heavy on action, as the soldiers comically search the small town, including the local church and bowling alley, for the Krites who are busy terrorizing the farm’s family. “Critters” is relatively subdued, although a young Billy Zane (“Titanic”) gets offed off-screen and one of the Krites humorously drops an F-Bomb. There is little blood, but there are some solid explosions thanks to the son’s homemade firecrackers and the soldier’s futuristic weapons.

“Critters” features no elaborate sets, no large ensemble cast,  and no effects that couldn’t be whipped up in someone’s garage. “Critters” may be the poor man’s version of “Gremlins,” but with its unassuming charm, this clone has found its own cult following.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

Gremlins 2: The New Batch

Release Date: 1990

Rating: * *

By John Engell August 1, 2012

Six years after the release of Joe Dante’s seminal classic “Gremlins,” Warner Brothers convinced the reluctant director to return for its sequel by offering him complete creative control of the picture and a very liberal budget.

Come summer 1990 “Gremlins 2: The New Batch” was unleashed on American moviegoers to little fanfare. With a budget of $50 million, nearly five times that of the original, “The New Batch” was a bona fide box office bomb, bringing in a paltry $41 million in receipt revenue domestically; roughly a fourth of its predecessor’s bounty. Dante attributed the film’s financial failure to the franchise’s lengthy layoff and thus its inability to capitalize on its own success.

Regardless, Dante’s follow-up effort feels rushed. The film rejoins hero Billy Peltzer ( Zach Galligan) and his new fiance Kate (the stunning Phoebe Cates), who have left the comfort and tranquility of small town Kingston Falls for the sprawling ambiguity of the big city (in this case, the Big Apple). The transplants have given up banking for work with media mogul Daniel Clamp’s Clamp Enterprises. Billy is now a commercial artist and Kate a tour guide in the same high-tech corporate skyscraper.

The building also houses, amongst other oddities, an animal experimentation laboratory where the Mogwai Gizmo is conveniently being caged after his master dies and he is captured wandering the city’s streets by one of the lab’s scientists. It’s not long before Billy gets wind of his old furry friend’s imprisonment and frees Gizmo, who then as a matter of course gets wet and replicates. The new Mogwai that are produced are caricatures of their former 1984 selves, as are the gremlins they metamorphosize into after enjoying a late night snack at one of the center’s eateries.

Yes, it is farfetched for even this type of fare, and the film quickly becomes as chaotic as its namesake as the creatures continue to multiply and take over the high-rise in a series of increasingly outlandish gags. Police tape off the building, but Billy and his former neighbor Murray Futterman(character actor and Dante regular Dick Miller), who is in town visiting, are on the inside and must stop the monsters before dark when they can escape into New York.

“Gremlins 2: The New Batch,” is an hour and 46 minute long love letter to the fans of the first installment, yet ironically it lacks much of the violence, and crude humor that made the original a blockbuster and a staple of the horror-comedy sub-genre. The gremlins, once genuinely scary, act like something out of a Sunday morning cartoon, as both Dante and Stephen Spielberg, who reprised his role as executive producer on the project, favored a more family friendly film that was less dark and more slapstick than the original. It is interesting to note that although the sequel is oft considered the tamer of the two films, it received a harsher MPAA assessment than its predecessor did because the PG-13 rating did not exist when “Gremlins” was released (although it did help facilitate its creation).

Perhaps “Gremlins 2’s” saving grace is its satirical, self-referential script. In one scene for example, characters debate the inherent flaws and potential inconsistencies in the logic of the Mogwai’s 3 golden rules i.e. The creatures can’t eat after midnight, but what would happen if they traveled between time zones? In another scene we see famous film critic Leonard Maltin deliver his real and scathing review of the first “Gremlins” film, before being attacked by the green little monsters.

Dante acknowledges that we are only watching a movie when at one point the celluloid appears to melt and the screen goes blank and it’s revealed that gremlins have removed the “New Batch’s” reel from the projector, temporarily putting a stop to proceedings in the cinema where the picture is being screened. Then in a rather hokey, but fun cameo, Hulk Hogan pops up and proclaims that we the audience have paid good money to see the film and he then threatens the gremlins until we once again pick up with the action.

There is even a nod to city legend Frank Sinatra as the gremlins have a New Year’s-esque celebration in the  Clamp building’s lobby complete with a rousing rendition of New York, New York.   
 
Ultimately, “Gremlins 2: The New Batch” is an entertaining if unnecessary sequel that thankfully does not damage the legacy of its groundbreaking forefather, but does little to add to it either.