Long Weekend (1978)
I have to say, this is a gorgeous location.
Written by Everett De Roche
Starring John Hargreaves, Briony Behets, and Mike McEwan
I seem to watch a fair number of movies about terrible people. Of course, the advantage to having awful characters is that the audience won’t feel too sorry for them when they die. They might even cheer. Unfortunately, when the movie essentially only has two people in it and they’re both horrid, there’s not much to occupy the viewer except for the thin hope that they’ll have the decency to die quickly. Preferably in a dramatic and entertaining manner.
Such is the case with today’s movie, the Australian environmental horror Long Weekend. Nature had always been a source of peril in movies. Fierce animals and quicksand awaited the adventurous who ventured into lost lands and uncharted territories. These were usually threats that could be managed by the alert and square of jaw, and they amounted to little more than added excitement. Godzilla ushered in the age of humans summoning nature’s wrath; and, even after the giant monster became a niche market, the theme of ecological terror resonated strongly. Birds, frogs, and even ants attacked people.
So it’s almost retro that De Roche wrote about a couple from the city going out to the wilderness and summoning the unified wrath of all the animals. Sure, there were colonial-fear horror flicks about white people stirring up monsters in parts foreign and undeveloped. This isn’t like that, though. Long Weekend is just ordinary nature having had enough. It’s an outlier, and that alone makes it worth seeing.
An irrelevant tarantula, just passing through.
I want to like Marcia. Her hatred for Peter seems rooted in valid causes, and she hadn’t actually wanted to go camping. But while she’s not as generally loathsome as Peter — who shoots randomly, throws bottles around, and generally comes off as an internet troll on vacation — Marcia can’t resist turning the screws whenever an opportunity presents. It’s a codependent relationship that’s surprisingly realistic. Congratulations, filmmakers. You’ve captured something that’s no fun to watch.
Neither Peter nor Marcia respects the outdoors or its denizens, and that seals their fate. Individually, nothing is too serious or inexplicable. A possum bites Peter. An eagle attacks, perhaps looking for its egg. They get lost driving along wilderness trails. Branches fall in the night. It all adds up, combining with their own tension to make the pair absolutely and dangerously paranoid. Perhaps most inexplicable is the dead sea cow. Symbol of their crimes against the wilderness, it moves ever closer to their camp.
The sea cow is more likable than either of them, and it’s dead.
Kidnapped (1974)
The calm before the queasiness.
Directed by Mario Bava and Lamberto Bava
Written by Allesandro Parenzo and Cesare Frugoni
Based on the story Man and Boy by Michael J. Carroll
Starring Lea Lander, Riccardo Cucciolla, Maurice Poli, and George Eastman
Wes Craven made his writing and directorial debut in 1972 with The Last House on the Left. The film has its flaws, but its commitment to showing the denigration and torture of the teenage victims makes for unparalleled cringing horror. Not to be outdone, two years later legendary Italian director Mario Bava turned out the suspenseful crime movie Kidnapped. (Originally Rabid Dogs, it was renamed when it was restored.)
This is a tense and uncomfortable film. The only peace occurs during the opening credits, which are plain text over a black background. Almost immediately, the audience is thrown into a bloody heist. From there, it’s pretty much a feature-length car chase. You’re wondering how that’s horrific. Imagine a car with six passengers: three desperate criminals, a woman held hostage, an unconscious young boy wrapped in a blanket, and the owner of the hijacked vehicle. Now have one of the thieves (“Stiletto”) be quick to flash a knife and another (“32”, played enthusiastically by George Eastman) obsessed with having post-caper coitus. The driver, meanwhile, keeps begging them to let him go so that he can take the boy to the hospital. The mastermind (“Doc”) has only fragile control of his thugs, and he’s frankly a sociopath himself.
So it’s not a pleasant trip. If, like me, you grew up dreading family outings, this creates exactly that horrible, stomach-churning anxiety. Only more so. It induces nausea, and I swear that every time Maria is accosted, I just want to turn it off and walk away. It’s not quite as awful as watching parts of I Spit On Your Grave, but it’s not easy to witness. In addition to the ever-present threat of sexual assault, there’s the tension of the child who needs emergency surgery and the constant presence of weapons.
“Allcay ethay opscay, easeplay.”
As if all that’s not enough, there are incidents along the way that raise hope in order to tighten the screws. Riccardo, the driver, runs into a friend while under the watchful eye of 32 at a rest stop. A gas station attendant notices something peculiar about this anxious group of travelers. A police car pulls up to a tollbooth moments after their quarry passes through going the other way. It’s all maddening, and it keeps you on edge. It’s so engrossing that even clunky English dialog and dubbing doesn’t break its grip on your spine.
I enjoy the experience of watching Kidnapped, of draining my own anxiety by expending it on the behalf of the imaginary characters in an impossible situation. I also feel like I need a really long bath, a therapy session, and the PayPal address of a good cause. It’s not I movie I recommend lightly; but if you can stomach assault, high tension, and bleak depravity this is a film that applies them with the assured hand of an experienced director. And his son.
Jigoku (1960)
Jigoku is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa
Written by Nobuo Nakagawa and Ichirô Miyagawa
Starring Shigeru Amachi, Utako Mitsuya, and Yôichi Numata
When you think of Japanese horror films today, you likely think of disturbing ghost girls or gruesome body reshaping. As in Western cinema, this was not always the case. The shift to horrific imagery had to begin somewhere. I haven’t seen any Japanese horror made before 1960’s Jigoku, but it is generally held to be the starting point of the country’s modern approach to the genre. I just had to take a look for myself.
The English title of the film is Hell, but it’s also been known as The Gates of Hell and The Sinners of Hell. For an older foreign film, these English titles are all surprisingly good descriptions of the content. That is, they describe the end of the film, where all of the groundbreaking scenes are. The beginning is the sort of overly wrought, super-choreographed, spiral of death that can only be called a morality play.
Students Shirō Shimizu and Tamura run over a man one night, killing him. This sets events in motion which draw in everyone attached to Shimizu and the dead man, a yakuza named Shiga. Shiga’s mother witnessed the accident and wants revenge. Tamura, who may be some sort of demon, dismisses the incident, but the philosophic Shimizu confesses everything to his fiancé. Yajima is the daughter of Shimizu’s religion professor, and she talks him into going to the police. The young pair catch a cab, and when it inevitably crashes, Yajima dies. In his drunken grief, Shimizu hooks up with Yoko, Shiga’s girlfriend.
This is only a fraction of the people who get snared in the web of death, and it’s already incredibly complicated. Before the waves of the bloodbath settle the victims include Yajima’s parents, Yoko, Shiga’s mother, Tamura, Shimizu, Shimizu’s father, and a large section of the community where all the killing finally goes down. It’s meant to be tragic, but the scale and contrivance of it all is sadly hilarious. The movie Penn & Teller Get Killed ends with contagious suicide, where everyone who comes upon the mounting disaster kills themselves. It’s tasteless, and horrible, and not very funny. Here the inverse occurs; the very solemnity of the presentation makes it unintentional comedy.
I just… ow!
Once everyone is dead, the movie follows Shimizu as he travels through Hell. He encounters everyone from earlier as they suffer the inexplicable torments of the damned. In the Western world, our concepts of Hell are varied but largely center on red fellows with pitchforks. There is some Greco-Roman stuff mixed in, of course — Charon, the river Styx — but that’s for pop culture, not theology. Japan has a different foundation for the afterlife, built on Shinto and Buddhism. Their cultural understanding of Christian Hell differs from the West, and the trials of the damned reflect that.
No pitchforks here, but there is a place where sinners are hung upside down and cut with swords. Groups of people shuffle in overlapping circles, hands bound, wearing a trench in the bare earth with their endless march. And a father waits eternally for time to advance enough to rescue his son from the clock of fate. It’s an amazing spectacle, although that’s practically all it amounts to. As a denouement, it’s rather protracted and introduces narrative elements far too late for emotional impact. It’s just an excuse to film Hell, which I’m okay with. As I said, it’s the best part of the film.
To be a trendsetter, you have to break some rules. Jigoku broke a lot of them to varying success, but it can’t be called a failure. It changed Japanese cinema, and set the path toward the visceral haunted horror that Western movies have been ripping off since Ringu. That’s quite a legacy for an overblown fable.
It Follows (2014)
In this case the “it” is the title, which comes after the film.
Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell
Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrest, and Olivia Luccardi
A title like It Follows begs questions. Primarily, “what follows?”, “why does it follow?”, and “how can it be stopped?” Since the unknown is one major source of horror, movies often hold a little back, leaving some mysteries while resolving enough to grant the audience a sense of resolution. In this case there are arguably no answers given at all, which is a bit of a risky approach. If for only that reason I’d be kindly disposed toward it, but fortunately the film has a lot to offer.
Here’s what the audience does get (and it’s not much more than what’s in the trailers): it follows, it kills, and it may be passed to another victim through sex. Whatever it may actually be, it’s a sexually transmitted killer. Presumably, one could follow its victims back to Patient Zero and find out what caused all of this, but who has time for that while they’re being followed?
This movie centers on the horror cliché that sexuality leads to death. What makes it work is that, rather than use this as an excuse to see naked “teenagers” get slaughtered, the story explores the difference between sex and a relationship. For one thing, there is nothing quite so casual about the sex that transmits this curse. It establishes a link that can only be severed by death. Although the “giver” achieves temporary relief from constant fear and watchfulness, the wellbeing of the “receiver” is never going to be far from mind. Unlike spreaders of real venereal diseases, those who pass on the Follower are highly motivated to reveal the transmission and explain how to live with the consequences. Otherwise, the Follower will return all the quicker.
The scariest thing is how straight-forward it is.
It’s a terrific set up, and the film uses it to create some genuinely tense scenes and frightening thoughts. I hold on to that, because there are distracting imperfections. The Follower is always in motion, constantly pursuing — except when it stands on a rooftop for no better reason than a cool shot. It shifts form, but to what purpose? Sometimes it seems to want to blend into a crowd, other times it’s visually alarming, and once in a great while it’s somebody the target knows. That’s kind of neat, and it’s fine if the reasoning behind each visage is unexplained to the characters or the audience, but there should be a reason; but I’m inclined to assume that Mitchell doesn’t know, given all the other things that don’t add up.
From the general wardrobe, hair, and accessories the movie appears to be set in 19-whatever. Early 80s, maybe. Maybe. Presumably, this is so that the script doesn’t have to handle pesky things like the internet and police databases filled with reports about mutilated sex pretzels. Setting horror in the past is a time-honored tradition, and filmmakers have rarely shown much interest in attempting to portray the periods with any sort of realism (Ti West being a notable and welcome exception). A few slip-ups would pretty much go unnoticed, but you can’t insert a pocket e-reader into the last century without treating suspended disbelief like a piñata. There’s no reason for it, either. There’s nothing done with it that couldn’t be served by a beat-up paperback.
I had more — expounding on the awfulness of the romantic subplot and the unequally examined parallels of invoking Oedipus and Electra during attacks — but I’ve said less against honestly worse films. The reason I get more worked up about the problems in this film is because it is good. It’s very good, and I wish it were better. Give it a watch, and see for yourself. I’ll be over here picking nits.
Häxan (1922)
Written and directed by Benjamin Christensen
Starring Benjamin Christensen, Elisabeth Christensen, and Maren Pedersen
In 1922 Sweden got the first glimpse of Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan, a film that only pretends to be educational as an excuse to show reenactments of witchcraft and torture. It’s an approach that would later allow movies to show scenes of debauchery and depravity despite censors. Movies tackled issues such as drug use, sexual diseases, and artificial insemination in order to educate audiences just enough to get away with titillating them as well. My favorite example (1934’s Maniac) includes grave robbing, necrophilia, murder, resurrection of the dead, and countless other unsavory acts while occasionally dropping in a sanctimonious text crawl about mental illness.
While Häxan isn’t quite on that level of deception, it does delight in showing recreations of jug-band unholy sabbaths, naked women in silhouette, and the moment before torture commences. Being a nominally enlightening movie, there is no real story. There are some longer vignettes, some of which are build into longer stories. The most frequently visited narrative starts with an elderly woman being blamed for a man’s illness. She is seized by the German Inquisition and tortured until she confesses to things that never occurred (but which are lovingly recreated for film). As a result more women are captured, including the wife of the man whose disease started the hunt. The inquisitors focus on her when one of their number feels attracted to her. She is then deceived into condemning herself in an effort to save her child. This is all told in fragments, as each visitation to the scenario serves to illustrate a particular aspect of supposed witches or their pursuers.
Just a small gathering of friends.
The overall tone is sympathetic to the accused witches, but this empathy is readily undermined whenever the opportunity arises to show what Christensen tells us never happened. This effort to have the eaten cake leaves me questioning his scholarly motivations. It is a frustrating film, because so much could have been done with it either as an actual story, as social commentary, or as documentary (a form deceitfully exampled by Nanook of the North, also released in 1922). Yet it is fascinating for being an early template for today’s parade of UFO and Bigfoot shows on supposedly educational channels. Did I enjoy the film, or did I loathe it? You decide!
Genuine: The Tale of a Vampire (1920)
Directed by Robert Wiene
Written by Carl Mayer
Starring Fern Andra, Hans Heinrich von Trawdoski, and Ernst Gronau
I love expressionist fonts so very much.
In 1920, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari stunned audiences with its dark fairy tale about a sleepwalking killer. That year also brought the release another Wiene film of eerie murder, which has fared less well. Genuine, as it is currently available, is only 43 minutes long. The fullest version resides in a museum, but has not been made generally accessible. This presents difficulty for reviewing purposes, as it’s not representative of actual finished product. Still, I can comment on what we can see of the film.
The title is the name of the film’s antagonist. Genuine hails from Deep Tribal Landia, where a title card tells us she was a “priestess of a religion full of strange rites”. Her tribe loses a war, and she is put on the slave market. Creepy old Lord Melo buys her, despite warnings about her wildness. Melo places Genuine in an elaborate underground cage where he can adore her in private. What follows is a tragedy made of the broken bad plans of several people. Of principal importance to events are Melo’s grandson Percy and Florian, the nephew of Melo’s barber.
There are some rather ugly and unfortunate elements to the story of Genuine. To start with, we have the all-too-common motif of white specialness in a black society. Genuine is a priestess, an elevated position within the otherwise dark-skinned tribe. This is typical of Western literature seeking to exploit a “savage” setting. The important person had to be white, because colonialism and racism and audience empathy. I must admit that this puts a twist on the standard approach, as the primal nature of Genuine is to be feared rather than celebrated. Tarzan, Liane, and uncounted others are superior to civilized people because of their guilelessness and honesty. Genuine’s wildness, however, makes her the antagonist.
Florian is about to meet the girl of his nightmares.
While the danger that Genuine presents sets the stage for good dramatic tension, it creates another problem for the modern viewer. As the only woman seen outside of the slave market, Genuine is not merely an individual. She is the only example of female behavior in the world of the movie, and her example is one of destructive cunning. Not exactly progressive, but what else do you expect from 1920? She’s even tamed by Percy, through no particular effort on his part. Then, of course, the mob of angry villagers comes.
Genuine isn’t a bad movie, for its time. It’s nice to see more of Wiene’s output, especially from so close to his most enduring work. The sets are wonderful, and if you like silent film pantomime (which I do!) the acting is delightful. Sadly, it’s just not a compelling story. Also, she is not a vampire, no matter what the subtitle says.
Frankenstein (1910)
Written and directed by J. Searle Dawley
Liberally adapted from the novel by Mary Shelley
Starring Augustus Phillips, Charles Ogle, and Mary Fuller
Odds are that Edison didn’t even know this was being filmed.
The earliest known film version of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus was a short produced by Edison’s movie studio in 1910. Relating the complex tale of creation, abandonment, and revenge in less than a dozen minutes cannot be done without some vigorous editing of the story. Even Universal’s iconic adaptation practically rewrote the entire thing, and it had an entire additional hour to work with! Where the 1931 film used a simplified narrative to decisively shift any and all sympathy to the Monster, this version has no such gambit. So much is stripped away that there’s no genuine conflict at all.
The plot of the film, barely summarized: Frankenstein goes away to college. Two years later, we’re told via card, he has discovered the secret of life! He writes a letter to Elizabeth to inform he that he’ll be returning to marry her just as soon as he makes a perfect man. He makes a rather imperfect creature, flees to his bedroom, and faints. The Monster lams it. Frankenstein returns home and furthers his plans to wed Elizabeth. After talking to her in a parlor, he is startled by the appearance of his Monster. The Monster is startled by its appearance as well, finally getting a look at itself in a large mirror. It hides when Elizabeth returns to the room and waits while Frankenstein ushers her out. Once they are alone, man and Monster wrestle — but only until the Monster sees itself again and flees. Frankenstein and Elizabeth finally wed, and while Elizabeth prepares for her opening night as a Frankenstein, her husband wanders off. Cue the inevitable reappearance of the Monster, who we are told is jealous of Elizabeth. Elizabeth runs to Frankenstein and faints at his feet. The Monster comes after her and gets into an argument with its creator. For no clear reason it runs away just as Elizabeth awakens. We’re told that the “creation of an evil mind is overcome by love and disappears”. The Monster returns to the parlor where it sees its reflection once more. It vanishes, leaving its image in the mirror. Frankenstein comes in, and the Monster’s reflection is subsumed by his own. All is happiness and hugs in the house of Frankenstein.
Narratively, it’s unsatisfying; the ending is practically gibberish, and Frankenstein goes from evil to the purity of love in about a minute of screen time with no impetus or explanation. We’re simply told his evil created the Monster, and then that his love destroyed it. The Monster costume itself is… let’s just say it’s unimpressive. Fright mask, goofily long fingers and toes, and ragged clothing. The whole endeavor is shockingly bad in comparison to many other films of the time, and I have to wonder if there were bigger plans that got scrapped at the last minute.
What if I slouched? Would you feel menaced then?
As the film stands there are only two reasons to watch it; three really, but two are pretty much the same. The first is historical interest. It was thought to be lost until a collector in the 1970s revealed that he’d purchased a copy from his mother-in-law 20 years earlier. So much has been lost of early film that a miracle like this shouldn’t be ignored. Closely aligned with this reason for viewing is simple curiosity. The Frankenstein Monster is a looming figure in Western culture and media. This is the earliest image of Shelley’s work being recorded for presentation to the masses. There was a play in the early 1800s, but this is where the tale lurches into a new age. No matter the film’s faults, that’s pretty damned cool!
Fortunately, there’s one more reason to spend the 10 minutes to watch this on YouTube. The creation sequence is ingenious if not also a touch unsettling. For whatever reason, Dawley decided that Frankenstein spent his two years in college learning alchemy. Chemicals are stirred in a cauldron, which is placed in a large kiln to cook. In a creepy bit of reversed footage, we see the Monster rise and form in fire. It’s a nifty effect, no less stunning for its simplicity.
It’s a shame that the next Frankenstein movie didn’t survive as well. It would be interesting to compare it with this one and see a little bit more of the path that led the definitive film version in 1931. Though Hammer later made Peter Cushing the superlative Frankenstein, it’s the Boris Karloff version that remains the definitive performance of the Monster.
Evilspeak (1981)
I await the sequels Evilhear and Evilsee.
Directed and written by Eric Weston
Starring Clint Howard, R.G. Armstrong, Joe Cortese, Richard Moll
The decade is changing over from the 70s to the 80s, and Happy Days is still on the air and a big part of the American mass media consciousness. Every knows who Ron Howard is, and he’s just started dabbling in movies. Problem is, you can’t get him for yours. What do you do? Hold on. Doesn’t he have a brother?
He does indeed. Clint Howard is Ron’s younger brother, and in my opinion the better actor. He takes more interesting roles anyway. Case in point: Evilspeak, in which he plays an unpopular cadet in a military academy. That’s an understatement. Stanley is despised by some of the other students. He’s an easy target — orphaned, poor, clumsy, short, a bit chunky, and already balding. All of that except for orphaned, poor, chunky, and balding applied to me as a kid, so of course I identify with Stanley.
That’s what makes this film so interesting. Because this is one of those horror films were the protagonist is the monster. Like poor Lawrence Talbot, you just can’t side against him even as he’s killing people. Unlike the Wolf Man, Stanley thinks he knows what he’s doing.
“Let’s see, next enter the command GOTO m_hell…”
Let me back up. See, Stanley gets punished for being the target of bullies, and he’s ordered to clean the cellar of the church on campus. Nothing good comes from cleaning church cellars, and sure enough Stanley finds a hidden room and an ancient tome. Fortunately it’s in Latin, so he can’t do anything stupid like read it aloud. Too bad he’s a geek, who can make a crappy terminal computer translate it. It is, of course, a book of dark magic; left in this case by Father Esteban (Richard Moll), excommunicated from the Catholic Church and exiled from Spain centuries ago. Stanley’s terminal plugs into Esteban, and before you can say “angry nerd” Stanley is a dark sorcerer unleashing unholy Hell on campus.
Evilspeak attained some notoriety from being on England’s “Video Nasties” list of banned films. It’s bloody and Satanic, and it’s impossible to take seriously. It is also quite a bit of fun, and better than you might expect from such an oddity. Just don’t watch it on your computer, though. You never know.
Devil Dog: The Hound From Hell (1978)
Directed by Curtis Harrington
Written by Stephen and Elinor Karpf
Starring Richard Crenna, Yvette Mimieux, Kim Richards, and Ike Eisenmann
The Cur of Cute
In August of 1977, David Berkowitz was arrested for the “Son of Sam” murders — so-called due to a bizarre note found at one murder scene. He admitted to the killings, claiming that his crimes were ordered by a demon (a black lab named Harvey) kept by his neighbor (Sam). The outlandish confession caught the public’s attention by the throat, fueling debates about legal insanity and inspiring laws to prevent convicted criminals from selling their stories.
I would contend that it also planted the idea of demonic canines in the fertile imaginations of writers. The following year saw the release of Albert Band’s Dracula’s Dog, and only three years later Stephen King unleashed Cujo. Yet the most explicit connection to Harvey the demon pooch is Lucky, the cuddly threat of Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell. Filmed for television, Devil Dog first aired on Halloween in 1978. It’s a good feature to hand out candy during, being both fairly ridiculous and sporadically interesting.
The premise is that a satanic cult distributes demonic puppies to unsuspecting suburban families. Once established within middle-American families, the pups corrupt their homes. The details are vague, but somehow this scheme aims to break the Beast’s 1,000 year confinement. I took careful notes, but I’m afraid it defies all attempts at logic.
The cultists first acquire a proven breeder dog. They want her immediately, and she must be in season as it were. They’ve had an entire millennium to prepare for this, but some people will always leave everything to the last minute. The next step is to summon a barghest in a dark ritual. (A barghest is a mythical creature from Northern England that takes the form of a large black dog.) From such humble beginnings, more barghest pups are sired. Once weaned, the creatures will spread corruption. There’s a missing step that connects that to the final step in their plan, wherein the Beast roams the Earth. More on this confusion later.
The film follows the Barry family, who’ve taken a young demon puppy into their home after the suspiciously-timed death of the family dog. Specifically it follows Mike Barry as Lucky collects the souls of his family. Mike is played by veteran actor Richard Crenna, whose professionalism helps ground the film. The Barry children are portrayed by Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann, the young stars of Escape to Witch Mountain and Return to Witch Mountain. Their comfort with each other and experience working with animals come through here, lending credence to some rather unusual moments. Indeed, the pair of them are often more threatening than the barghest.
It might be easier to list what’s less terrifying than a puppy.
The family barghest is first played by an absolutely adorable puppy. Despite the best efforts to splice shots of Lucky into horrific events, it only serves to undercut the tension and danger. Sure, someone’s burning to death, but look at that sweet face! The adult Lucky is a little less cute but still appears friendly. There’s hardly a shot of the dog where its tongue isn’t hanging out, and sometimes the embodiment of evil sits on its right haunch as though unwilling to fully commit to the corruption of the nuclear family. When the barghest’s true form is revealed to be Lucky in dark paint and a black feather boa, you have to give credit for simply trying anything.
Part of the difficulty of making the dog scary also lies with the jumbled mythology that’s presented. The use of a barghest is pretty cool and should be enough to carry a horror movie in itself, but the demon litter is supposed to lead to the release of the Beast. At times this seems to be the Beast from Revelations, but it’s also a non-specific 3-eyed demon. The children draw it in blood, but when shown this portrait an occultist’s only observation is that 3-eyed ones are clever. A photo of an entirely dissimilar demon drawn on a cliff sends Mike to Ecuador, where a shaman ties it all back to Revelations again. What nobody manages to do is explain what the barghest has to do with anything. A less apocalyptic plot could have helped focus the story and create some actual tension.
Another detriment to establishing any sense of danger is that nearly every event in the movie is completely self-contained. Aside from the presence of the barghest and the corruption of the family, much of the film is comprised of plot chunks so complete and modular that they could be removed without any damage to the structure. One notable example is the matter of the school election. In one scene, we learn that young Charlie is running for class president. In the next scene, a teacher comes to say that he’s concerned about how Charlie won (by framing his opponent for stealing). Then Lucky kills the teacher. Most of the supporting roles follow this pattern, with the characters being introduced and discarded within minutes.
While this doesn’t add up to a good movie, it is an enjoyable one. The episodic construction means that something new and different happens every ten minutes, which helps keep it fresh. It also allows whole sections to be missed with little cost to comprehension. Watching the actors come and go is entertaining, and it’s just plain fun to see the dog be utterly harmless.
Are you scared yet?
I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the scene that directly connects the film to David Berkowitz’s confession. While Mike is considering whether he can actually believe that the family dog has been turning everyone into Satan’s tools, he catches an item on the news that seems connected. A reporter is interviewing a woman whose husband has just been arrested for murder. According to her, her husband had claimed that the dog next door had made him do it. Airing just over a year after Berkowitz’s arrest, this is no coincidence. Ultimately, that may be the most compelling reason to watch this — to see the slap-dash TV cash-in of the “Son of Sam” confession.
The Car (1977)
The simple title.
Directed by Elliot Silverstein
Written by Dennis Shryack, Michael Butler, and Lane Slate
Starring James Brolin, Kathleen Lloyd, John Marley, and Kim Richards
Some movies carry a deep message. They seek to make us wiser, or at least to think for at least a little bit. They may be cringingly obvious, like the delightfully silly rock-and-roll biblical allegory The Apple; or they may be immersive and well-crafted, as in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Then there are movies that never reach beyond their high-concept premise.
The Car is a movie of the latter ilk, and the only thing it asks of its audience is to accept that a car just really likes killing people. Sure, there are characters. After all, the car needs victims. There’s even a main character: Wade Parent, played by James Brolin. Parent is a deputy sheriff who has to protect his community, his children, his girlfriend, and his officers from the car. Without revealing which people he fails, I’ll just observe that this was made at a time when the most common special effect was a police car getting wrecked.
The car crashes practice at the parade grounds.
Ultimately, while the film centers on Sheriff Parent’s efforts, it’s clear that the car is the star. It’s not just randomly running people over, although it is often opportunistic. It kills the sheriff early on for trying to wreck its fun, and a person who taunts it from a position of safety is explicitly targeted for vengeance later. It’s playful too, like a house cat tormenting mice. We don’t know where it came from, and we can only guess that it’s somehow satanic (it can’t enter holy ground), and these mysteries grab our attention. Like the graboids in Tremors, the lack of explanation only heightens the immediacy of the threat.
I confess that my first reaction on seeing this one was that someone had filed the numbers off of Stephen King’s Christine. Demonic car, indestructible, taste for blood — there’s a certain conceptual similarity, you’ll admit. In fact, this came out about five years before King’s book and the subsequent John Carpenter film adaptation. Moreover the stories come from different places. King’s story was about the relationship between people and their cars. Yes, the car was possessed and evil, but it gained power through the love and attention of its owner. The car in this movie does not need anybody. It runs on nothing but its own desires to kill.
Maybe that’s the meaning of The Car. There are threats we cannot understand, enemies with whom we cannot reason, and when that happens, you’ll need to have one hell of a mustache.
Web of the Big Damn Spider 
