Chadzilla ROARS!!! (The Official Blog of Chadwick H. Saxelid, Writer)

Masters of Horror: The Damned Thing (Season 2, Episode 1 - 10/27/06)

"The damned thing destroyed the whole town."

In 1981, when Sheriff Kevin Reddle was a young boy, his father went crazy.  The man shot and killed his wife (Kevin's mother) in front of Kevin, then chased the boy out into the night.  Kevin narrowly escaped being killed.  What saved him was his father being literally torn to pieces by something that Kevin could not seen.

A "something" that Kevin's father might have been referring to when, just before going on his murderous rampage, he said: "The damned thing, it found me..."

Twenty-four years later, Sheriff Kevin Reddle, now a grown man with a failing marriage and a young son of his own, fears that "the damned thing" might be returning to take care of some unfinished business...

After making one of the least popular (and arguably most disliked) episodes of the first season of Masters of Horror, director Tobe Hooper was allowed to kick off the second season with this... "damned thing", a supposed "loose" adaptation of Ambrose Bierce's classic short story.  I use quotations because the episode does not resemble Bierce's short story, at all.  The only things it could be said to have in common with its supposed source material are the title and having a character or two refer to the supposedly "unseen" monster (which is revealed at the end, of course) as "the damned thing".  I do not know why Tobe Hooper and his screenwriting partner in crime Richard Christian Matheson even bothered to credit Bierce's short story as source material.  Did they think that doing so would give their slow moving mess of a supposed monster story some intellectual credibility?  If so, they failed.  It only shows that they have no idea as to how to handle quality genre material, which is sad.

Bierce's original story was about two men discovering and being attacked by some kind of "damned thing" that could not be seen, because its unique coloring was invisible to the human eye.  While I am sure that it could be argued by some apologists that Hooper and Matheson changed the events and nature of "the damned thing" to keep their episode from looking like yet another Predator rehash, I just cannot buy that excuse.  Because far too much of The Damned Thing plays like a far too cheap to deliver the goods rip-off of the 1984 small town gone psycho thriller Impulse, which itself was nothing but a quasi-rip-off of George Romer's 1973 small town gone psycho thriller The Crazies.  The only differences are that in both Impulse and The Crazies, the viewer actually gets to see the townspeople going crazy in atmospheric and story relevant ways.  The Damned Thing does not.  In fact, it does nothing new or interesting at all.

As I get older, I sometimes find it difficult to complain about an unsuccessful genre story attempting to resemble or recreate a successful one.  That is because I have learned that recycling of a core idea or concept is what makes genre entertainment popular.  Fans like seeing, hearing, or reading the same core story over and over again.  If The Damned Thing had been more energetic and less needlessly talky (i.e. obviously padded for time) in its reinvention of an old tale, then I might have liked it.  But it wasn't.  It was just another example of the harsh truth of Sturgeon's Law.  That Law being that 90% of [any given genre's creative output] will be crud.

This version of The Damned Thing is the worst kind of crud.

The Funhouse (1981)

The Funhouse is a Final Girl Film Club Selection:

I do not know the reason why I did not go see Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse during its 1981 theatrical release.  But I do have some very distinct memories of being really excited about the movie, and of being greatly disappointed with having missed seeing it.  (Until it came out on VHS, that is.)

I was so excited about seeing the movie that I read Dean Koontz's novelization of the film - the only film novelization that Koontz ever wrote, and that had originally been published under the pen name of Owen West- long before the film was ever released.  (A common enough occurrence, even in the early 1980s.)  Although I did not know it at the time, Koontz had hated the film's simplistic screenplay enough to take some important liberties with the film's back story and both its central and supporting characters, so the novelization wound up resembling the film about as much as Hank Searls' novelization of Jaws 2 resembled the film it was supposedly based on. (In case you do not know, Searls novelization of Jaws 2 was adapted from the discarded screenplay written by Hank Searls and Dorothy Tristan, not the Carl Gottlieb re-write that was ultimately used.) Unaware of what Koontz had done, reading the book made me even more excited about the movie. 

Then there was the photo of the monster’s nightmarish face on the cover of Fangoria magazine.*  That had me almost squealing with delight.   I could not wait for it to come out it!  

[*The cover evidently also got the editors of Fangoria in trouble with Universal, as the studio wanted the monster movie aspect to come as a surprise to the audience and it was rather upset that the creature had been revealed on magazine racks across the country long before the movie even opened.  Fangoria actually printed an apology about the cover in a later issue.] 

So, why didn’t I go see it when it did come out?  I have no clue, but I do know that I missed out on seeing something that would have made for a very memorable night (or afternoon) at the movies.

 

Two couples go on a double date to a traveling carnival with a troubled history.  Their evening out goes well (after getting off to a bit of a shaky start) and the group decides to do something fun and silly: spend the night in the carnival's funhouse.  Everything seems fine, until the group sees the Barker's assistant kill someone...

The Funhouse, despite its deceptively slight premise, is one of the few true high water marks of Tobe Hooper’s highly uneven directing career.  While it is certainly not perceived as a great or "classic" film, it is nonetheless a solid and very entertaining one.  It's biggest drawback is that it was sandwiched between two of Hooper's biggest commercial and/or critical successes, the original Salem's Lot mini-series and the box office smash Poltergeist.**

[**Whether or not Hooper truly "directed" Poltergeist is something that will always be up for debate.]

Watching it again after having not seen it for several years, I was pleasantly surprised at how assured and stylistic Hooper's direction was.  (Hooper's post-Cannon Group film career has been marred by so many truly wretched films that it makes it far too easy to forget that he has made some truly great films that did not involve working with Steven Spielberg.)  Hooper and director of photography Andrew Laszlo create not only a palpable feeling of dread later in the film, but in the early, quiet sections, they also create a fully realized world that feels every bit as lived in as our own.

That early, quiet section also showcases (as both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Salem's Lot did) that Hooper is capable of directing actors and drawing strong, believable characters out of their performances.  Elizabeth Berridge's cheerful snottiness in delivering the line "It's a first date, and we're not getting married" tells us all that we need to know about her relationship with her mother.  Another fine moment is when the Barker (a wonderful Kevin Conway, who convinced Hooper to let him play all of the carnival's barkers - something that makes the character's referring to one victim as "family" more than a little bit icky) is talking to his deformed son.  The scene, a long monologue during which the Barker talks his son into murdering the group hiding inside the funhouse, not only fleshes out the sketchy back story of the two mysterious characters, it also allows Hooper to showcase the emotionally complicated bond that exists between the two.  Especially when the Barker offers the seemingly heartfelt apology for some earlier verbal abuse, "As God as my witness, I do not hate the sound of your voice."

Another thing I could not help but notice was how, in retrospect, The Funhouse seemed to be a visual and thematic bridge between Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its maligned first sequel, which Hooper also directed.  The finale to which was set inside the ruins of an abandoned amusement park.

I like to think that means something.

Three stars out of four.

Lifeforce (1985)

"That girl was no girl.  She's totally alien to this planet and our life form, and totally dangerous."

A manned exploration of Halley's Comet uncovers a huge, seemingly derelict spacecraft.  Inside that craft are three bodies, human in appearance and apparently in some form of suspended animation.  When the alien bodies are returned to Earth, the female of the trio (the lovely Mathilda May) awakens and begins feeding off the lifeforce of anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path.  The sole human survivor of the Halley's Comet explorers (Steve Railsback) finds that he shares a psychic bond with the alien vampiress and gives chase, but is it too late to save the Earth from a fate worse than death?

Even as I type these words, I still wonder just how I should classify Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce.  Is it a horror movie?  (Well, it was advertised as one.)  A science-fiction epic?  (It has more than enough spaceships, alien action, and visual grandeur to qualify.)  Or is it a monster movie?  (It has alien vampires and their desiccated zombie victims attacking, overwhelming, and then destroying London, again it qualifies.)  Lifeforce is big enough, loud enough, and over the top enough to hold each of those different, albeit similar, genre elements together in its almost coherent two hour running time.  It's all of the above.

Sad to say, but the film's producers, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, only wanted one of the above.  They drastically cut, then dismantled and reassembled the film into what they thought was a more salable mixture of fast paced monster action and action film bombast.  It didn't work and the 30 million plus dollar picture was a costly flop for the duo's burgeoning studio, the Cannon Group, Inc.  Thanks in large part to the film's finding an appreciative audience on video, an expanded version (evidently the one that played in Europe) has replaced the original, and far too overly maligned, theatrical version. What was once an almost overwhelming jumble of sight and sound now has a far more coherent, although still wildly uneven (Tobe Hooper and narrative coherence have never really been on speaking terms) viewing experience.

Lifeforce is more an unofficial remake of Quatermass and the Pit, than it is a faithful adaptation of its source material, Colin Wilson's intellectual science-fiction thriller Space Vampires.  Well, for the first two-thirds of its running time, Lifeforce does retain a surface resemblance to Wilson's book.  The derelict space craft, the humanoid space vampires, Carlson's psychic hunt for the space girl, and the visit to the mental hospital, all can be found in the pages of Wilson's book.  The desiccated zombies aren't, but the movie wouldn't be nearly as much fun if they weren't in it.  Also not to be found in the pages of Wilson's book is the destruction of London, that part was taken from the aforementioned Quatermass and the Pit.  It comes out of left field, and seems to belong to an entirely different movie, which it does, but it's an exciting, if a tad silly, payoff to the desiccated zombie action shown in the first half of the picture.

Tobe Hooper's direction is energetic, but, as I stated earlier, his narrative unfolds erratically.  Hooper's movies have always been more about the visual image rather than the subtle nuances of an intricately constructed story.  He has always prefered to engage the viewer on a visceral level, rather than on a mental one.  This makes his choice of source material (an intellectual science-fiction novel) somewhat of an odd one, but the result is a movie that truly deserves to be seen.

Masters of Horror: Dance of the Dead (Season 1, Episode 3 - 11/11/05)

"The world has big teeth, it eats girls like you for kicks..."

In a war ravaged America (nine million dead from repeated terrorist attacks) young, innocent Peggy (Jessica Lowndes) decides to take a walk on the wild side with Jak (Jonathan Tucker, Pulse).  What happens to her on that walk, and what she discovers about her own past, destroys her innocence forever.

Of the thirteen episodes from the first season of Masters of Horror, Tobe Hooper's Dance of the Dead seems to be the most reviled.  While it isn't all that successful, it isn't nearly as horrible as I had been led to believe.  Based on a short story (available in Dennis Etchison's similarly titled anthology, Masters of Darkness) by the legendary Richard Matheson (father of the episode's screenwriter, Richard Christian Matheson), Dance of the Dead, in its original form, was a dark, disturbing, and depressing look at the death of an innocent young girl's soul.  Tobe Hooper's version of that story manages to retain the dark, but it loses most, if not all, of the disturbing and depressing aspects.

Part of what made the original story so disturbing was the casual manner in which the young girl's innocence was swept away.  Matheson's short story, as constructed, would make for a great half hour short. But an episode of Masters of Horror is contractually obligated to be an hour long, so director Tobe Hooper and screenwriter Richard Christian Matheson pad things out with extraneous scenes and details that only bog down the central story.  The duo also make the mistake of personally linking the grotesque performances that take place in the Doom Room to Peggy's family, which robs Peggy's corruption of any and all sense of tragedy.  If her mother hadn't been such a scuzzball, or if her sister hadn't...well, then Peggy might have escaped from her little dalliance on the wild side with nothing more than a hangover and a collection of unpleasant memories.  As dramatized, the events that befall Peggy are more pathetic than they are tragic.  Dance of the Dead should have dug under the viewer's skin every bit as effectively as the fictional weapon Blizz ate away the skins of its victims, instead the episode just twitches and jerks around like one of the Doon Room's dancing corpses and, just like said corpse, it eventually collapses.