31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 20: BLOOD FOR DRACULA (1974)

Udo Kier as the Count: An interesting and sympathetic take on the vampire genre's arch-fiend.

Following my re-discovery of FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN (aka ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN), I figured I'd finally check out its immediate followup, this time centering on fiction's most famous undead suckface. Its predecessor arrived in the U.S. with a considerable reputation for its generous helpings of sex and gore and it delivered in no uncertain terms, but little was said of the Dracula-centric followup and I always wondered why. Now I know.

Rumania, the 1920's: a delicate Count Dracula (Udo Kier) is sickly and apparently on a one-way short-ticket to lasting death, thanks to the lack of virgin blood in  the area. With the aid of his servant, Anton (Arno Juerging), Dracula relocates to Italy, where it is reasoned there will be virgins a-plenty thanks to the strong influence of the Church, and he ends up at the opulent home of the wealthy Di Fiori family. There are four nubile Di Fiori daughters for the Count to pursue, but there is also the presence of the hunky communist handyman Mario (Joe Dallesandro) to contend with, and two of the Di Fiori girls have spent a good deal of time contending with him (and each other) in the boudoir. In short succession the Count finds out what happens if he feasts on non-virginal blood (gaining two minions in the process), but will he strike out with the two remaining candidates? And what of Mario, who discovers that Dracula is a vampire? Will he do his part to save the remaining sisters from the fate of un-death?

Playing like some MASTERPIECE THEATER costume drama set in the jazz age, BLOOD FOR DRACULA is a staid and rather dull affair that comes off as a slow-moving disappointment in the wake of FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN's delirious (and funny) excesses. The nudity is certainly not skimped upon but the lack of blood in a Dracula flick is somewhat shocking. Well, to be fair, the film does pull out all the bloody stops during its finale, when Mario takes a woodsman's axe to the Count and whittles him down limb-by-limb before makin' with the stakin', but it's too little far too late. 

Udo Kier: When tragedy collides with hilarity.

The one thing the film does have going for it is another fun performance by the always-superb Udo Kier. Kier's Dracula is a fragile, sad-eyed, sympathetic monster who only seeks to survive. He's in no way the malicious, malevolent, satanic presence as seen in countless other depictions, and in many ways can be read as a commentary on the debilitating effects of hardcore addiction. I've seen and known enough junkies to know what I'm talking about, and Kier's Count would fit right in with the lot of them, only considerably more tolerable. The performance is mostly a study in sadness and futility in the face of the inevitable, and Kier's sad eyes tug at the heartstrings, but there are also a number of instances where he gets to ham it up as only he can, specifically during the moments when he suffers vomiting spasms upon supping on the blood of women who are not untried. He also somehow manages to hilariously keep a straight face while running away armless from an axe-wielding Mario.

A farewell to arms. (Sorry...)

I give writer/director Paul Morrissey credit for not feeding the audience more of exactly what he brought to the screen with his previous delving into horror but BLOOD FOR DRACULA is a disappointingly bloodless effort that is worth it for Kier and its finale, and should probably be skipped by all but the most devoted of vampire movie completists.

Poster from the original U.S. release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 19: FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN (1973)

One of the great quotes from '70's horror cinema: "To know death, Otto...You have to fuck life through the gall bladder!"

When the Italian-French FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN hit screens in the United States as ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN, it garnered attention for it's in-your-face sex and gore (all rendered in 3D) and X-rating, so it naturally piqued the curiosity of us horror kids at the time. It was well before the days of cable porn channels and the ready availability of porno flicks on home video but we children of the post-hippie-era 1970's heard all manner of what went on in films bearing that ominous "X," so just what in god's name would an X-rated Frankenstein movie be like? Even at that early point in my development, I had already seen a number of the Hammer Frankenstein films and absorbed their feel and visual language, plus to say nothing of Universal's genre-defining entries, so I could not wrap my head around how anyone could couple the blasphemy of an obsessed mad scientist's single-minded quest to craft life from the cobbled-together elements of sundry cadavers with the sweaty, explicit bedroom gymnastics of tenderloin cinema. Finding out for myself at the tender age of nine was simply not going to happen, so ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN would have to be one of the forbidden movies I'd have to wait a decade or more to finally witness, and when that event took place what I got was not at all what I expected.

The ever-awesome Udo Kier as Baron Frankenstein.

The film's story is pretty much a catalogue of Frankenstein movie tropes, especially those set up in Hammer's Frankenstein cycle, only with a good number of psycho-sexual kinks thrown in for good measure, and gore on a level far more plentiful and explicit than anything found in Hammer's output. It revolves around the efforts of Baron Frankenstein (my man Udo Kier) to build and animate a pair of Serbian "zombies" that will mate and breed a new race of ethnically-perfect specimens, thanks to the perception that the supposedly ethnically-pure Serbians are the European stock most closely connected to the glory of the ancient Greeks. Frankenstein himself is a privileged and corrupt aristocrat, married to his own sister, Katrin (Monique van Vooren), and their union is wholly devoid of love and passion, with him ignoring her (and their children) in favor of time spent hard at work on his experiments in the lab with his assistant, Otto (Arno Juerging). Life in their castle is a study in opulent stagnation and twistedness wrought by too much freedom and power, and it finds a direct counter-point in the earthy life led by the local peasantry, most prominently represented by the strapping stableboy, Nicholas (Joe Dallesandro). Nicholas comes to the Baroness's attention thanks to his dalliances with the local girls and soon finds himself called by her to the castle for some "special services" but before that task begins, Nicholas seeks to enlighten his friend Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic) to the ways of female flesh before the rather asexual fellow throws his life away as a monk. During a trip to a low-rent brothel, it becomes very clear that sex just does not move Sacha, which is unfortunate because the Baron and Otto, out hunting for a head with the perfect nose for the in-progress male zombie, mistake him for the virile Nicholas and ambush the two friends as they make their way home, with Otto knocking Nicholas unconscious while the Baron lops off Sacha's head with a huge pair of shears.

The theft of Sacha's head.

With the final component for his zombie obtained, Frankenstein's experiment nears completion but, as this is a Frankenstein movie, things do not go as planned and nothing ends well for anyone involved...

That all sounds pretty grim, right? Well, while it falls in line with the playbook of the Frankenstein sub-genre, what I did not expect when I finally saw the film after just over a decade of anticipation was that it's a jet-black, played-straight comedy. In fact, it's played so straight that a viewer could be forgiven for not noticing that the movie is a genre lampoon with its twistedness and gore very intentionally cranked up to a ridiculous degree. Udo Kier's performance as the Baron is a delight as he chews the scenery like a man possessed, hamming it up while performing unspeakable acts and delivering the most ludicrous of dialogue. Kier's Baron is clearly mad but his insanity makes his Hammer counterpart (played by the indelible Peter Cushing) seem like an exemplar of stability, restraint, and good taste. This Baron takes an obvious sexual pleasure from his unholy experiments, a pleasure he does not find within his cold marriage, and even crosses the line into outright necrophilia while working on his female zombie, an act that yielded the immortal quote found at the opening of this review. Any way you cut it, Kier is very much in on the grim joke and he totally runs with it.

(cue Alice Cooper's "I Love the Dead")

Studly Joe Dallesandro milks his masculine beauty to great effect here as Nicholas, playing the role with a sense of jaded boredom that stands out among all of the mad histrionics going on around him. It should also be noted that his performance is especially funny due to him incongruously looking and sounding like a male hustler straight out of NYC's Port Authority in the early 1970's. Exactly what this guy is doing among all of the naturally-accented Europeans in the cast is anyone's guess, but it's a welcome and looney contrast.

Nicholas (Joe Dallesandro) and the Baroness (Monique van Vooren).

While the film's decidedly un-wholesome sexual content must have been quite shocking when encountered four decades ago, what really must have earned the movie its X-rating was its generous helpings of fountaining blood and lovingly-displayed eviscerated organs, presented up-close and in 3D. Wiggling viscera is dangled over the camera or thrust at the audience to an absurd and intentionally gratuitous degree — an effect lost on home video, though the depth of field makes the intent quite clear — and I'd bet good money that the excesses found here would later be mined as one of the sources of inspiration for SCTV's series of Dr. Tongue 3D movie lampoons. And yet, despite its quantity of both arterial spewage and butcher slaughterhouse surplus, the infamous gore content is so over the top that it amuses rather than offends (though it is undeniably gross). If not for the warped view of sexuality on display, I'd recommend the film as a yucky gross-out festival that horror-loving kids would greatly enjoy, but even with that fleshy aspect out of the equation it still may be a good deal more than most responsible parents or guardians would allow the wee ones to absorb.

Just one example of the movie's voyeuristic festishizing of wounds and gore.

Though I freely admit to being a bit put off by the film's tone after ages of having built it up in my head as possibly the final word on abattoir cinema when I first saw it, watching it again — in its uncut Criterion Edition version — for this annual horror overview finds me enjoying it even more and appreciating the joy of watching Udo Kier's full-tilt take on one of the genre's archetypal characters. If you've never seen FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN, do yourself the favor and give it a look while bearing in mind that it beat Mel Brooks's YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, which is considered by most to be the definitive man-made-monster movie parody, to the punch by a year. Too bad FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN's adult approach precluded it from being seen by most of the moviegoing public during its initial run, otherwise YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, genius work though it is, might have been seen as a tepid and quaint also-ran when the two were compared.

Poster for the original theatrical release, which would appear to owe a debt of inspiration to...

Or am I reading too much into this?

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 18: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (1981)

Ginny's gruesome birthday party, where secrets come to light and little is as it seems...

Virginia "Ginny" Wainright (Melissa Sue Anderson) is a senior at the prestigious Crawford Academy,  where she is numbered among the "Top Ten," a clique of the school's uber-rich, most popular, and not-so-coincidentally douchiest students. Ginny would seem to have it all but four years ago she survived a car accident that took her drunken mother's life and caused her brain damage that required surgical correction, but a cerebral edema resulted in her losing a chunk of her memory. During a night out with her assholish friends, Ginny unwittingly finds herself a passenger in one of her friends' cars as they play "the Game," in which they attempt to jump a local bridge as it opens up to allow cargo boats to pass. The terror of the high-speed antics and the DUKES OF HAZZARD-style jump over the bridge jars Ginny's memory and long-suppressed recollections of exactly what happened on the fateful night four years prior slowly begin to unravel. But as Ginny's memories begin to gel, her friends are disappearing one by one, all murdered by someone they each recognize (but whose face remains off-camera), which coincides with what appears to be an inexorable slide into confused mental illness for our heroine. Somehow her friends are connected to the car accident that killed her mother and damaged her mind, and as events progress it appears that Ginny is committing the murders and awakening a day later with no memory of her homicidal activities, so just what the hell is going on?

When HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME to me came out in May of 1981, I was about a month shy of turning sixteen and the infamous slasher movie boom of the 1980's was beginning to carve out its bloody onscreen niche in the wake of the runaway box office triumph of FRIDAY THE 13th (1980). Though a tad too young to be allowed into R-rated movies, my peers and I nonetheless managed to see a plethora of gory horror offerings thanks to the staff at local movie houses not giving a fuck if kids bore witness to such era-defining trash. In the case of HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, a number of my friends and I piled into a slightly-older friend's beater car and made our way to the film's opening night, armed with a couple of bottles of liquor pilfered from some of our parents' stashes. As we sat in the darkness of the sleazy theater, we downed a considerable amount of alcohol and by the time the film reached its midway point we were too busy messing around and being drunkenly obnoxious to pay attention to what was going on with the movie we'd ventured forth to see. A big part of our apathy had to do with the film being nowhere near as mindlessly violent and gory as the vast majority of its ilk, so there was a strong sense of disappointment that led us all to write HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME off as a dud, and after making that assessment we headed to Compo Beach to finish off the last of our ill-gotten hooch in the wee hours. Ah, the seemingly endless days of  misspent youth...

In the thirty-plus years since that anesthetized night, I saw HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME repeatedly referenced as one of the very best of the misbegotten slasher genre and I found that popular opinion running in direct opposition to my admittedly booze-addled memories. In recent years I have revisited the slasher genre of my formative years and, for the most part found its entries lacking, yet I continue onward and hope to rediscover a hidden or forgotten gem or two. In revisiting HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME I finally understand why I was disappointed by it back in the days. It's not particularly gory or scary and it focuses on a pack of entitled, rich douchebags much like the majority of the kids I was raised amongst, so where was the fun in that? However, with the wisdom and filmic education gained over thirty-plus years, I now see the film in a very different light and totally get exactly why it's held in such high esteem these days. 

The '80's slasher boom was mostly an avalanche of cranked-out shit, devoid of quality and offering nothing more than a brain-optional MTV-era Grand Guignol for undiscriminating teens and grindhouse devotees, but they were popular, easy to produce on the cheap, and lucrative, so they proliferated for close to a decade. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME came along relatively early in the cycle  and distinguished itself from its contemporaries by actually bothering to have a solid plot with more on its mind than buckets of blood and offal, and a cast of defined characters who serve as more than ciphers fit only for the chopping. What little blood there is comes in only the briefest of glimpses and the plot is less concerned with outright scares than with slowly peeling back the layers of Ginny's fractured memory. If anything, the film owes more to the creepy, old school, mystery-tinged flavor of flicks like WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962) and HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964) than the Jason Voorhees school of "fuck and die" quasi-cautionary tales. It was that stressing of psychological misery over grue that now renders HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME as something of a minor cause celebre among latter-day genre enthusiasts, despite a couple of from-out-of-nowhere plot twists during its last act.

While not among my personal favorites from the '80's slasher cycle, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME is definitely worthy of note for all the reasons I've outlined and should be seen at least once, if for no other reason than to provide concrete proof that not all slasher films were cookie-cutter efforts cranked out by barely-competent hacks. It's a tad too genteel for its own good but that can be forgiven, thanks to the presence of a legitimate narrative, and it's worth a dozen films like HUMONGOUS, PROM NIGHT, and the majority of the FRIDAY THE 13th franchise.

Poster fro the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 17: SNUFF (1976)

Ah, SNUFF, a film whose very existence helped divest me of my innocence at an early age. A legendary topic of conversation on the nation's playgrounds during recess when it came out, this flick introduced kids of my generation to the concept of "snuff films," movies allegedly made by nameless, faceless ne'er-do-wells that graphically depicted the on-screen actual torture and murder of innocent people who'd been kidnapped off the street specifically for that purpose. The very idea really fucked with the young minds of myself and my peers who heard of and discussed this unverified phenomenon, so we were beside ourselves with simultaneous horror and morbid curiosity when SNUFF hit the screen and made the bold claim that it dared to show footage of a woman actually being murdered by the movie's crew. How the hell could something like that be allowed to be shown anywhere, let alone on the nation's movie screens, and how in hell could its makers and the company that released it not face the stiffest of penalties and not be immediately thrown in jail for the rest of their natural lives? That question haunted us kids in the mid-1970's, especially those of us who witnessed it brazenly advertised on the marquees of NYC's infamous Times Square during its heyday as the Mecca for exploitation films with a tag line that proclaimed "The film that could only be made in South America...Where life is cheap!" How could a budding sleaze-monkey like myself not be strongly intrigued by such a come-on, no matter how low and vile the resulting frisson might turn out to be?

Opening with a "Born to be Wild" knockoff instrumental blaring on the soundtrack, in South America a Manson-like figure commands his group of female followers to kill and torture a number of victims while the bored audience attempts to stay awake. A film that wastes zero time in getting right down to its shabby business, SNUFF gives its audience  the hunting and torture of a woman approximately six minutes into the film, after which the violence and gore is intermittently doled out amidst incredibly boring plot material that no one in their right mind could care about. Originally shot as SLAUGHTER by the legendary Michael and Roberta Findlay (a husband-and-wife team of exploitation filmmakers) and later "improved" with the addition of its lurid climax, the film's sole purpose is to give the most rabid gorehounds what they hope will be the most shocking displays of spewing arterial spray and slippery viscera yet committed to celluloid, but even at that goal the movie comes up short. Herschell Gordon Lewis got there first over a decade earlier and even though his movies are basically crap, at least they are entertaining crap. The same cannot be said for SNUFF. It meanders boringly from murder to long stretches of dull plot and negligible acting and back again, and it fails to engage the audience with either an interesting plot or characters to care about. And the film's main draw, the tacked-on "murder" of a cute blonde by one of the filmmakers as the camera crew captures the incident for posterity is so obviously faked that even a grade-schooler would call bullshit on its content. 

The infamous "real" murder scene: I staged more realistic effects for a Halloween haunted house when I was in ninth grade.

Considering that SNUFF was released in the days long before the advent of the internet and YouTube, where one can find a plethora of real footage of people meeting their fates in all manner of horrible ways — though not in actual footage shot for the purpose of distribution as snuff "entertainment," thank god — the obvious fakery of the big murder sequence is really a huge "fuck you" to the members of society that the film's marketing come-ons aimed to attract. 

The final money shot.

And when you really think about it, SNUFF serves to allow more introspective viewers to note that the main reason they saw the film is likely because they were curious to absorb an alleged actual sadistic homicide as a cinematic spectacle. I have often wondered what moral issues the initial theatrical audience wrestled with while sitting in the flickering indoor twilight in anticipation of the movie's promised real deal. Did it bother them at all that they had shelled out their hard-earned cash to see a vital young woman held down, mutilated, and eviscerated on camera, supposedly as an actual document? And if it did nag at them, did they leave the theater pondering what blackness or emptiness in their souls allowed them to think that treating something so sadistic and vile as an amusement for general consumption was okay? I cannot speak for them but I can tell you in no uncertain terms that if I genuinely believed that what SNUFF had to offer was in any way exactly what it claimed to be, I would never have seen it. The idea of killing someone for real and marketing it as a legitimate form of entertainment is simply appalling to me and I cannot conceive of just how psychologically and emotionally bankrupt one would have to be to dig something of that ilk. I freely admit that I greatly enjoy gore and violence in my entertainment but I am fully aware that what I consume in that department is all carefully-orchestrated make-believe, and the individuals being shot, sliced in half, beheaded, or what have you would get up, dust themselves off and go home at the end of the day when the cameras stopped rolling. Obviously, such would not be the case with what would amount to a for-real act of human butchery, and as a thinking, breathing, feeling human being, I could not bear intentional witness to the life of another member of society's sacrifice to the bloodthirsty needs of clinical sociopaths.

That said, allow me one last brief moment on my high horse so I can state flat-out that SNUFF is poverty row-budget trash of the lowest, most crass order, the kind of work that makes one question the worthiness of the human animal to draw breath while one sits in a state of stultified boredom during its 80-minute running time. 

But if SNUFF had not existed, it would never have been fodder for NATIONAL LAMPOON magazine's hilarious parody of it. "Snuff Movie," from the March, 1976 issue and written by the legendary P.J. O'Rourke, only served to throw more fuel onto the fire of playground discussion of the source movie (once enterprising kids filched copies of the magazine from their dads or older siblings). When it fell into my hands a few months prior to my eleventh birthday, my mind was blown. It was the second issue of NatLamp that I'd purchased and my parents had zero clue that I was reading such ultra-offensive, drug-related and sexually-explicit material at such a tender age, largely thanks to the fact that the local newsstands stocked it right next to issues of MAD, CRACKED, and CRAZY, assuming it was just as innocuous as those kid-friendly mainstays. Anyway, here's "Snuff Movie." Bear in mind that the 1970's were about as free from political correctness as it gets, so consider what you're about to read as a product of its era and the magazine's ultra-tasteless brand of humor.

From NATIONAL LAMPOON (March, 1976)

 Believe me, this parody is a million times more entertaining than the actual movie.

Poster for the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 16: DEAD SUSHI (2012)

"Things have reached the point where they no longer make any sense!"
— an astute observation made by one of the under-siege  characters.

Apprentice sushi chef Keiko (Rina Takeda) has spent her life training under the exacting tutelage of her father but meets with nothing but criticism of her efforts, so she runs away from home and gets a job as a kimono-clad waitress at an inn in the country. The inn is suffering financial woes and needs high-end clients in order to survive and the staff is expected to bend over backwards to please the demanding group of tony corporate assholes from a pharmaceutical company who arrive for a business retreat. As the new kid on staff, Keiko endures hazing from her co-workers and unfair disciplinary action from her bosses but just when her job situation is about to break her, things shift gears when a homeless man with a grudge against the pharmaceutical boss shows up to launch a campaign of revenge. Five years earlier, the man had been a promising bio-chemical engineer who'd discovered a serum that could re-animate dead tissue, but the serum also caused the re-animated sample creatures to become hostile and carnivorous, so the engineer was unceremoniously kicked to the curb, his career in ruins. But now his scheme for vengeance comes to fruition as he injects some of the inn's sushi chef's creations with his re-animation serum, thus unleashing an army of flying, giggling, carnivorous sushi that causes fountains of blood to spew from hapless victims who also find themselves zombified upon ingesting the meal. Trapped in the inn's remote location and outnumbered by a killer sushi army that rapidly reproduces (yes, we get to see sushi pieces get their hump on), the staff and the corporate assholes must fight for their lives, and Keiko's courage and survival skills, including her considerable martial arts prowess that she learned as a part of her dad's grueling training techniques, are put to the ultimate test.

Keiko (Rina Takeda) readies to throw down against an onslaught of fishy killer edibles.

I'll cut straight to the chase: DEAD SUSHI is a hoot. Playing like a looney, over-the-top live-action anime, everything about this film is grin-inducingly cartoonish from start to finish and it's genuinely funny in a way that loses nothing when viewed from outside of its native culture. It can also be easily described to skeptical Western audiences as a particularly Japanese take on territory staked out by the British SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004), only with the intentional ridiculousness and gore cranked up to 11, as is expected from our cinematic friends from the Land of the Rising Sun. And, informed by over four decades of zombie movie tropes, the film lampoons the genre's cliches with wild abandon, occasionally to jaw-dropping effect. And along with a gun with which to combat the undead, we are treated to a skillfully-wielded pair of edible nunchaku.

And you thought your corporate retreat sucked.

There are many, many memorable aspects and highlights to DEAD SUSHI, but the film's capable center is my girl Rina Takeda in the role of Keiko. I've been a huge fan of Takeda's world-class karate skills since her shattering debut in HIGH KICK GIRL (2009), and her straight martial arts roles have established her as one cool and brutal customer equipped with attitude and martial precision that borders on the surgical, so it was a fun surprise to see her playing a very sweet and vulnerable girl whose acumen as an ass-kicker only comes to the fore in times of dire need. She's lovable and has a very expressive face, and in the five years since her debut Takeda has grown a lot as a thespian. She's simply a pleasure to watch here, and we root for her as a character and not just as a total badass.

Rina Takeda: the only actress I can think of who can find herself on the receiving end of a sushi-related "smells like fish" double-entendre and come out of it with her dignity fully intact. (Then again, this is the first movie where I've seen such a reference somehow delivered with no trace of vulgarity, which may stem from its cultural context, so there is that.)

Perhaps an odd choice for the 31 DAYS OF HORROR by virtue of its flat-out comedic nature, DEAD SUSHI is not scary at all but its scenario is easily understood as something that would be quite horrific if it were to occur in real life. Most of the established zombie movie tropes are trotted out to the requisite gory effect (though the "blow off the head" staple is absent since sushi does not have a head) and once zombified, the rice that copiously oozes from the victims' mouths is downright revolting, so I say this definitely counts as a horror movie, albeit one from a spoof point of view. Fun on a bun, DEAD SUSHI comes highly recommended, and though it is a comedy, bear in mind that it's of Japanese origin and is thus geared toward what is perfectly acceptable within its culture of origin, meaning showers of arterial spray and gratuitous female nudity (unfortunately not Rina's), so gauge your viewing accordingly.

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-DAY 15: STRAIT-JACKET (1964)

Joan Crawford, taking no shit from adulterous scum.

When Robert Aldrich's WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962) became a smash hit and simultaneously inaugurated the "hag horror" genre — horror/suspense flicks starring past-their-prime Hollywood divas — imitations were certain to follow and follow they did, and if you ask me the best of that lot was the William Castle-directed STRAIT-JACKET. Written by Robert Bloch, the author of PSYCHO, and starring Joan Crawford (who suffered so memorably when pitted against a tits-out alcoholic and insane Bette Davis in BABY JANE), the film is a brisk little thriller that shocks with its violence (for its time, mind you) and surprises with Crawford turning in a performance that's waaaaaay better than a "B" picture like this deserves.

Unlike many thrillers about supposed murderers that try and fake us out as to the protagonist's actual guilt, STRAIT-JACKET doesn't bullshit us for even one second and shows us flat out that Lucy Harbin (Crawford) did indeed murder her much younger husband (Lee Majors in his first role) and his lover with an axe, beheading the adulterers, an event witnessed by Lucy's very young daughter, Carol (who also witnessed her father getting it on with the other woman not long before the two met the wrong end of that axe). Following the double homicide, Lucy endures twenty years in a mental asylum and is eventually released to go live with her brother and sister-in-law who kindly raised Carol (Diane Baker) to young womanhood. The reunion of mother and daughter goes as well as could be hoped for, considering the twenty-year separation, loony bin incarceration and the daughter having witnessed both adulterous sex and her mother savagely murdering the adulterers, but Lucy is still skittish and rather broken after her experiences and lashes out without much provocation or chooses to hide from all strangers.

We learn early on that Carol is in love with Michael (John Anthony Hayes), the almost personality-free son of a wealthy dairy magnate, and the two have agreed to marry, but the couple fears what will happen if her betrothed's parent's discover Carol's mother is a murderess. While that bit of soap opera drama percolates, Lucy tries to bond with her daughter and make up for all the lost years, learning about her daughter's sculpting skills and undergoing a makeover that inappropriately sees her dressing in a wig and outfit that are much too "young" for a woman of her years. When she meets her daughter's beau, Lucy is so overcome with nerves that she downs a few stiff ones and disturbingly throws herself at the young man in a sequence guaranteed to make your flesh crawl, and as if that's not bad enough, Lucy is unexpectedly visited by her former psychiatric caretaker who decides to drop in and see if she is indeed sane (he was the sole doctor at her sanity hearing who did not think she should be released). Those two incidents lead to a sad and shattering deterioration of Lucy's mental state, and there soon follows a number of gruesome axe murders that look like the handiwork of our poor, unbalanced protagonist...

STRAIT-JACKET plays like an old E.C. comic book story brought to life and is nowhere near as sophisticated as Bloch's work on PSYCHO, but it does have a visceral charm all its own and one hell of a performance from Joan Crawford. If this had not been a "B" horror flick I would bet good money that Crawford would have at least gotten an Oscar nomination. She's compelling throughout, and the scene where she snaps and tells off Michael's utter cunt of a mother is just plain heart-breaking. Also of note is George Kennedy as the hired hand who works for Lucy's brother on their farm. He's a deliciously seedy redneck stereotype, and from the second you see him you just know he's going to meet his fate on the business end of an axe; when that moment comes, it's a laughable bit of cheesy violence as an all-too-obvious fake head gets lobbed off, which only makes things that much more fun.

My only real complaint about STRAIT-JACKET is that it's a blatant WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE cash-in that doesn't rise to that film's level of script quality and taughtness. While the film goes to great lengths to convince us that Lucy is unraveling and reverting to her homicidal ways, it's very obvious from the moment she returns from the asylum as to who the killer is, and the final reveal is a bit of a reach for a number of reasons. Nonetheless, STRAIT-JACKET is very entertaining and a good entry-level bit of creepiness to get your kids started with. I first saw it over thirty years ago while under the very influential wing of a favorite babysitter who loved horror movies in general and "hag horror" in particular, and during that time she also turned me on to WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? and Robert Aldrich's similar followup to that one, namely 1965's HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE, all of which helped mold my own twisted sensibilities. I'd recommend these movies for kids ten and up because they're the perfect transitional flicks from fairytale creeps to a more grownup flavor of chilling horror that stems from family dysfunction and basic human cruelty, things kids will come to understand with crystal clarity as puberty hits and they enter the arena of existential misery known as junior high school. And since these films feature a particularly "female" area of horror, make sure your daughters check this shit out. (They're no CARRIE, but they'll serve until the girls are old enough to handle that film's apocalypse of puberty-horror and sadistic high school torment angst.)

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 14: THE GRUESOME TWOSOME (1967)

Rodney goes to work.

Was there ever a more unashamedly pure exponent of the horror movie as gross-out forum than Herschell Gordon Lewis? As a director, Lewis blazed the trail of graphic cinematic gore beginning in the early 1960's with such genre-codifying "classics" as BLOOD FEAST (1963) and TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964), followed by subsequent lesser efforts, and without such an intention Lewis kicked down the doors of what was allowable to be depicted on-screen. In many ways, Lewis's works can be seen as the horror equivalent to hardcore pornography; every bit as visually shoddy and cheap, only with its visceral punch derived was swaths of goopy red rather than glistening pink. The man's movies wielded budgets that wouldn't buy a decent lunch from McDonald's, coupled with amateur hour acting, sound quality that brought to mind the acoustics of a junior high school play, and the most rudimentary of scripts, so the end product was always something of a mess. In short, Lewis's movies were never good, suspenseful, or even the slightest bit scary, but being good or presenting their horrors with artistry or subtlety was never their point. Their goal was to turn grindhouse and drive-in screens into charnel houses, bringing audiences the kind of up-close-and-personal blood and guts that Hollywood simply would not tarnish itself by providing (or rather at least not at that point in cinema history), and in that respect they were a resounding success. As long as the audience was happy to shell out their hard-earned cash to see drippy, glistening gore by the bucketful, artistry could go fuck itself in the ear.

Clocking in at a relatively brief/merciful seventy-two minutes (four of which come from a ludicrous opening bit in which two wigs have a conversation that amounts to nothing but padding) THE GRUESOME TWOSOME can succinctly be summed up as "Nancy Drew meets Jack the Ripper," only with the murderer's signature schtick being the forcible removal of young women's scalps as opposed to their viscera (though we do get treated to an ultra-fake evisceration). There's really nothing to it other than a college coed (Gretchen Wells) doing some sub-SCOOBY-DOO investigating of the disappearances of some of her fellow female students, all of whom have fallen victim to the demented Mrs. Pringle (Elizabeth Davis) and her simpleton son, Rodney (Chris Martell), who kills the young women and re-purposes their fresh scalps as stock for his mom's wig business. The celluloid equivalent to one of the lesser E.C. Comics efforts, all this movie cares about is the camera lingering in loving closeup upon the gory goings-on, with nary a thought in its mind for anything that could fairly be called a story, and when the nasty stuff isn't going on the audience is subjected to long stretches of un-interesting and surprisingly tame moments in collegiate life.

Though the film is never boring, per se, it does test the viewer's patience with its overall mediocrity and a lengthy sequence in which our daring amateur sleuth trails the college's janitor while incorrectly assuming he's the murderer, a plot contrivance made more annoying because we know for a fact that he's not the killer. There's also yet more padding with a ridiculous drive-in movie sequence in which a couple shares a romantic meal of potato chips, fruit, and beer while spouting insipid stock soap opera dialogue that has to be seen to be believed. All of this is accented with stock music, bad editing, and that queasy look that marks Lewis's body of work, and all save for the most ravenous of gorehounds will feel gypped since all we end up with is a scalping, a beheading, an ultra-fake evisceration, and a stabbing to the eye, all of which look like the effects could have been achieved in your mom's kitchen. But when all is said and done, an undeniable sense of self-aware humor is involved here, one that knows in no uncertain terms that this is the horror movie at its most base level and it aspires to be nothing more than that. It may not be pretty, but at least it's honest.