The ultimate power of evil...

My UK pre-cert video of the recently-reviewed Incubus came with a cover I haven't seen anywhere else online, so here it is in all its VideoTapeCenter glory:



(Click the image for a closer look, and sorry about the missing chunk... I was hungry, alright?)

I don't think it's as powerful as the other UK VHS cover, found here at It's Only A Movie, but the eyeball close-up (an image that bookends the film) is an interesting choice.

Incubus

Incubus is a film that works better the less you know about it. In fact, it’d be best for the story if you didn’t even know it involves an incubus. But, unless you’re illiterate, that’s probably not the case. And, if you are illiterate, I suggest you go and find someone to read the rest of this review aloud to you.

So, just what is an incubus, you ask, and can I use the name for my five-piece alternative rock band? Well, no, it’s already taken, sorry. In any case, an incubus is a sort of sexual demon that preys on women, raping them in the night and causing them to give birth to... well, who knows? Things never actually get that far in Incubus, but let me tell you, they go quite far enough for a 1981 slasher/horror film, thank you very much.


John Cassevetes plays Sam Cordell, a widowed doctor living in the small town of Galen with his teenage daughter, Jenny (Erin Noble). Our first sight of the good doctor finds him smirking to himself as he catches a glimpse of Jenny stepping naked out of the shower... Odd! But, fear not, this potentially disturbing subplot never really goes anywhere, since Sam is soon too busy investigating the film’s definitely disturbing main plot involving a string of rapes and murders around town.

It seems that young women are being attacked by a particularly vicious sexual predator whose assaults are so violent that the victims sometimes die from their injuries, while their male companions are killed outright. Further investigation reveals that some of the victims were subjected to “dry intercourse” (i.e. no semen present) while, in other cases, so much semen was found it looks like the woman was raped by a whole group of men. Cue some pretty gruesome rape-kit banter like “there was so much sperm in her that even the haemorrhaging couldn’t get rid of it”.

Things get weirder when Sam notices that the sperm samples he’s collected from the victims are red (a microscope shot shows that the squiggling spermatozoa have everything but horns and a pointy tail). Meanwhile, Jenny’s boyfriend Tim has been having strange dreams, the frequency of which seem to coincide with the attacks. Could he be the killer? Or is an even more dangerous supernatural force at work? Is it perhaps the rock band Incubus? Oops, sorry, I mean: Is it perhaps an incubus?


The answers don’t come early in Incubus, and I found this brooding sense of mystery one of the film’s most successful elements. If you watch it for cheap laughs, you’ll probably find some, but you’ll likely also find the pace boring. If, however, you take the time to be drawn into its sinister atmosphere, you’ll find it’s a serious, genuinely menacing story, very much in tune with director John Hough’s previous ghostly mood-pieces, The Watcher in the Woods and The Legend of Hell House.

And based on that alone, I loved it. You can count the number of sombre slasher movies on one hand and yet, when the genre takes itself seriously, it can be quite disturbing indeed, as it is here. (The same year’s The Prowler is another good example, while 1982’s Pranks is a nasty one I don’t get along with so well.) The attack sequences in Incubus are genuinely frightening: one simply involves something nasty seen through the crack beneath a bedroom door; others take place in an appropriately gothic museum and – in a scene that even out-creeps the similar one in He Knows You’re Alone – a cinema bathroom.

So suspend your disbelief – you’re worth it! And so is Incubus.

Rating: 3/5

The Psychic

It’s safe to say I’m disappointed with Lucio Fulci’s The Psychic. It probably didn’t help that I bought the DVD full-price, but I’d enjoyed Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (my last Fulci viewing experience) so much that going in blind seemed like a risk worth taking. Instead, all it really ended up taking was 97 minutes of my time... Time I could’ve spent recycling energy emissions or sweeping up my carbon footprints or something. Because I care. You hear that, Mr Fulci? You betcha by golly wow, I do. So the next time you make a crappy movie, just remember the effect it could be having on the environment.

Anyway, the reason The Psychic didn’t really work for me is because it’s a movie that hangs almost entirely on a twist. And, if you figure out where it’s heading early on, there’s not much else – other than a talky police investigation – to keep you particularly intrigued. Added to this, its characters take so long to understand the meaning of basic plot points that it’s often a case of frustration rather than suspense, while the twist itself is telegraphed almost from the start.

But what a start it is! Little Virginia is at school in Florence when her mother decides to commit suicide (it’s never explained why) by throwing herself off a cliff in England. Being as psychic as the title suggests, Virginia manages to “witness” the event through her mystical mind’s eye, and is treated to some gruesome close-ups of her mother’s face smashing graphically against the rocks on the way down. Luckily, Mom seems to have morphed into a mannequin by this stage – but still... surely no kid deserves to be subjected to any kind of Fulci gore effect before the age of twelve.

Twenty or so years later, Virginia is a happily married interior designer played by Jennifer O’Neill (whose previous credits, Futz! and Whiffs, make me want to reach for the Febreze). One day, whilst driving Freudian-style through a series of dark tunnels, Virginia experiences another vision – this one culminating in a woman being bricked up behind a wall. And wouldn’t you just know it? When she decides to renovate a house owned by her husband, something about one of the rooms – and, more specifically, one of the walls – looks a little familiar. A few hard whacks with a pickaxe later and Virginia is face-to-face with, not only some expensive property damage, but also a human skeleton that’s been long-hidden behind the bricks...

So far, so spooky, but it’s here that “spooky” turns to the aforementioned “talky”, and the next hour consists of Virginia laboriously piecing together some tenuous clues that eventually (and I really do mean eventually) lead her to the identity of the homicidal bricker-upper. Of course, this being a Fulci flick, there’s also a lot of close-ups of eyes. A lot. Don’t play any sort of drinking game that involves taking a swig whenever there’s a shot of someone’s staring eyes, or you’re likely to die from alcohol poisoning. That’s if the boredom doesn’t get you first.


Fulci can pull off a great climax – just look at the amazing extended chase that tops off Lizard in a Woman’s Skin or the fever-dream frenzy of The House by the Cemetery’s finale. Here, however, while you could reasonably argue the case for a suspenseful thirty-minute climax, in reality it’s taken at such a slow pace, it’s no wonder it takes half an hour to play out. The final scene is pretty tense, though, I’ll give you that.

Ultimately, then, The Psychic isn’t a patch on Lizard in a Woman’s Skin. It mightn’t be a fair comparison (and I don’t know why I’m so intent on it, other than the fact that they’ve both received recent DVD releases) but for me it bears out. Simply put, if you want thrills, mystery and the unique kind of cinemadness Fulci excels in, stick firmly with the Lizard.

Rating: 2/5

The Killer Next Door

I always felt sorry for poor Winnie Cooper in The Wonder Years, sharing a neighbourhood with the interminable Fred Savage. In 2001’s The Killer Next Door, she has an even worse problem... The two creeps who’ve moved into the big old house beside her aren’t just annoying – it seems they also want to kill her.

While we’re at it, then, shouldn’t that title be The KILLERS Next Door? They do after all come as a pair, and one of them is Tobin Bell, the self-righteous serial killer of the Saw movies. But it’s a moot point, anyway, since this low-budget thriller is known as Good Neighbor in the States, although that’s actually an even less accurate title... Sheesh!

But back to poor Winnie – or Molly Wright as she’s called in this film (Danica McKellar if you want to know her real name). Molly is a student of – something – at Somewhere University... That’s not important. What you do need to know is that she lives in a dorm house with sassy friend Rhea (Christine Horn). And by “sassy”, I mean “constantly drunk and a bit of a slut”. Molly, on the other hand, is a straight-A goody-goody who’s escaped her abusive mom and just wants to get stuck into some studying so she can rise above it all and maybe get a part in Wonder Years: The College Years.


There’s just two things that might get in the way of her sitcom dreams. Firstly, she spots one of her neighbours carrying what looks like a dead body out of the house and – oops – now she’s a murder witness whose own life may be in danger. Secondly, damn, the girl’s got a dirty mouth! “What about protect and serve, motherfucker?” she spits at the police officer investigating her Neighbourhood Watch allegations. Then, when Rhea suggests calling her mom for her, Molly fires back: “Why don’t you go and fuck yourself!” Language like that just isn’t going to endear her to fans of whimsical TV drama.

It doesn’t endear her to the local cops, either, and no matter how many times Molly contacts them about her psycho-neighbours, the lack of hard evidence leaves her looking like a hysterical, foul-mouthed motherfucker. Her only hope is recently-demoted homicide detective Paul Davidson (Billy Dee Williams) who’s been investigating missing persons in the area. Two separate cases have both led him into her neighbourhood recently... but will his tracks lead to Molly before the killers decide to finish her off for good?


The Killer Next Door works on a small scale, but at least it works. I saw shades of Fright Night in Molly’s fascination with – and fear of – the mysterious older neighbour and his young accomplice. As in that film, whenever Molly finds herself next-door (or the neighbours pop round uninvited) the tension’s pretty high, and some of the action is quite nasty as verbal threats eventually lead to physical violence.

Much of the menace comes from having Tobin Bell as one of the killers. Shorn of the masks, puppets and props associated with him in Saw, the guy is still scary, whether it’s his evil expression:


...or hairy back:

What doesn’t work? Well, you won’t forget this is low-budget. And, as we all know, low budgets buy clichés – so here we get courageous nuns, eccentric pimps, tired cops, jocky boyfriends and alcoholic mothers. Even the “disappearing body” trick gets a look-in, with the added absurdity that the killers deliberately leave the body somewhere with the intention of scaring Molly – despite the fact that lack of evidence is the only thing holding her back.

It’s not great cinema, then, but it’s not bad either. Playing Molly, Danica McKellar isn’t the best actress, but let’s not forget she managed to make us believe it was possible to be attracted to Fred Savage in The Wonder Years. Do I smell an Oscar?

Rating: 3/5

Silent Night, Deadly Night

Well, it’s the new year here at Anchorwoman In Peril! – in the same way I expect it might be new year everywhere else. So, without further ado, Happy Two-Thousand-Oh-Eight! And, yes, I’m aware I didn’t actually get round to wishing any of you a happy Christmas, so here’s a belated greeting for that one too: Merry Christmas! Ho ho ho!

Actually, make that how how how! As in: how did I manage to make it through thirty Christmasessesses without ever watching the fabulous Christmas movie I settled down with this year? And, by “fabulous Christmas movie”, I refer of course to the fabulous Christmas movie that is 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night... Did I mention it’s fabulous?

In previous years, I’ll admit I’ve found myself alarmingly loyal in the yuletide movie stakes to my two perennial favourites, namely Scrooged and The Muppet Christmas Carol. But Silent Night, Deadly Night offers pleasures above and beyond those two. There’s all the festive fun of The Muppet Christmas Carol mixed with the, well, frankly rather nasty tone of Scrooged – plus, oh, a deranged, Santa-suit-wearing psychopath murdering promiscuous teens with cries of “naughty!”. Is there anything you’d rather see at Christmas time than that? How about a deaf priest dressed as Santa being accidentally shot in front of a group of orphaned children? Ker-ching, I say! Throw another humbug on the fire! Or whatever.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is so outrageous in its portrayal of holiday hell that your own struggles with family visits and burnt turkey will seem like stocking fillers in comparison. We’re introduced to Billy, a little boy who hates Christmas so much that he traumatizes his kiddie friends with drawings of decapitated reindeer and punches a Santa Claus off his stool when asked to sit on the man’s knee. Why this hatred of all things Kringle? Well, a few years ago when Billy’s family were driving home for Christmas (just like Chris Rea) their car was stopped by an armed robber in a Santa suit (unlike Chris Rea) who proceeded to shoot his dad dead. Then this Santa-from-hell ripped off Mommy’s blouse, attempted to rape her and, as if that wasn’t enough, slashed her throat. Talk about your road to hell! Yes, it seems safe to say that Billy has issues with Christmas. And I have some with Chris Rea.

Billy and his baby brother end up in an orphanage, where things don’t really get a whole lot better. Mother Superior isn’t what you’d call sympathetic to Billy’s plight, and it’s drummed into him from an early age that sex is bad and punishment is good. Obviously, things don’t bode well for Billy’s transition into adulthood: when he’s forced into a Santa suit for his Christmas job at Ira’s Toy Store, something in the strapping 18-year-old just snaps. And we’re not talking brandy snaps, either. It’s a full-scale psychosexual bad-Santa meltdown – and you wouldn’t want to be on the not-so-cheery fellow’s naughty list in this little town...

If all that sounds a little mean-spirited and nasty, well... it is! But Silent Night, Deadly Night clearly doesn’t take itself too seriously. I’ve heard that John Waters is a fan of that other Christmas slasher Christmas Evil, but wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there’s a soft spot in his heart for this festival of bad taste too. From the imaginatively conceived slayings (including impalement by antlers and strangulation avec Christmas lights) to the nightmares before Christmas endured by just about every child character in the film, there isn’t a festive motif that isn’t thoroughly trashed by the movie. And, as for the medley of freaky songs, let’s just say that “Santa’s Watching, Santa’s Waiting” is a creepy highlight. Not to mention delightfully catchy.

Only 351 days to go until I can watch it again!

Rating: 4/5

Dial: Help

Somebody stop me buying cheap horror videos on eBay. I can’t help myself... Is there a number I can call? Can I perhaps Dial: Help?

What’s that? There’s a cheap horror video with that name? What am I waiting for?! Buy! BUY!!

No Italian horror film from those long-ago 1980s is complete without a tie-in pop song, and this silly effort from Cannibal Holocaust director Ruggero Deodato is no exception. “Baby, don’t answer... Baby, don’t answer the telephone,” warns the catchy chorus, as a spooky voice mumbles something about not being safe on the phone and/or your own. As it happens, our heroine Jenny (played by English model Charlotte Lewis) is neither; for several days now, she’s been trying to get through to her long-distance lover, Marco, to no avail. Now, sneaking into a cafe late at night to use the telephone, she gets a crossed line with a long-deserted helpline number and, before long, finds herself plagued at home by sinister calls and strange messages.

At least, I think they’re supposed to be strange. The sound was so muffled on the ancient video cassette I saw, that everything sounded a bit strange, but this may have had as much to do with the quality of the script as the sound levels. Take, for example, a top scientist’s explanation of the unfurling events: “The energies of love and hate circulate throughout the universe. Under the right conditions, they condense and concentrate themselves within a room, and those deposits of energy seek a way out. They can be so powerful as to magnify and seduce the person who’s liberated them.” Pretty scary, huh? Especially coming from, as one character puts it, “the world’s greatest expert on unidentified energy”.

Matters aren’t helped by the fact that Jenny – poor, unwitting victim of the 1980s as she is – already owns several of the scariest-looking “fashion” phones in existence, including a black contraption with pulsing lights straight out of Knight Rider, and a lilac neon-filled number that looks like it could electrocute a fly at fifty paces... Hardly the likeliest conduits for a quiet conversation with your mum! Anyway, soon the supernatural telephonic forces have graduated from leaving creepy messages to causing the mysterious deaths of everyone Jenny knows. How does a phone kill anyone, you ask? Try these on for size:

• Watch out! Telephones may attempt to strangle you with their cables!
  
• You may receive phone calls compelling you to jump off a building whilst in a trance!


• The high-pitch squeaking tones they emit are enough to kill a whole tank of fish!


• When cornered, a phone will fling its dial at you like a deadly discus!


• Don’t forget, phones have been known to levitate and stalk you around your apartment!


• You are at particular risk when bathing. The phone will leap into the bath and burst into flames!


• Take care if you wear a pacemaker. Phones may cause it to burst through your chest!


• Payphones are particularly dangerous, as they can shoot out lethal coins at bullet-speed!
  

Well, if that’s not enough to put you off calling those premium-rate numbers for good, I don’t know what is. By the end of this film, you may well be telephonophobic. Or something.

With its surprisingly well thought-out premise, Dial: Help remains engaging (geddit?) throughout. There are enough wacky details to please any connoisseur of eighties cheese, from the decor of Jenny’s apartment (giant photos of lips eating spaghetti) to the delights of the local nightclub (jazz flute and a mime-artist-cum-disco dancer). But there’s also a lack of urgency, not to mention anything even bordering on scary. Props to the film for really trying to turn the telephone into an object of fear – there’s even an attempted shock moment where a telephone LUNGES into shot, only to be revealed as a toy phone in the hands of an overly eager toddler – but the problem is, no matter how quickly they LUNGE, phones just aren’t that frightening.

Charlotte Lewis’s laidback performance works both for and against the film: on the one hand, her breezy delivery gives some of the sillier dialogue an almost naturalistic credibility; on the other, seeing her calmly approach a policeman after a night of terror-phone chaos, only to utter the line, “Excuse me, I’d like to report some deaths,” is just flat-out laughable. It’s also never made completely clear whether the phones are out to harm Jenny, protect her, or something else entirely... In fact, one scene has her rolling around the carpet, apparently being gently caressed into orgasm by gusts of wind coming out of her handset. I had to wonder what the girl would make of a hairdryer.

Dial: Help isn’t a direct line to disaster, then, but don’t be too surprised if it doesn’t manage to push many of your buttons. I’m dialling D for Disappointing.

Rating: 2/5

Obituary

Remind me never to get a job writing the obituary column for a local newspaper in a non-specific American town. Not only do you have to work 16-hour days – six days a week – but they stick you in a windowless basement with a computer that shouts “Click here! Click here! Click here!” whenever it encounters a pop-up. And, although they obviously pay you enough to live in a nice apartment full of modern art, you’re always getting passed over for that big promotion to head news reporter. (What? Like it’s too much of a step up?)

As if that weren’t enough, it’s highly likely that you’ll become the target of a serial killer who places obituary notices in the paper before murdering his victims. That’s what’s happening to Denise Wilcox, heroine of the 2006 TV movie Obituary. Look, here she is:

And here’s one of her obituaries:

I have to admit I’m not surprised she keeps losing out on that reporter job, what with sentences like: “Her love for theatrical plays was endless and being social with her closest dear friends, was something that she truly loved” [sic]. I hope she’s leaving that piece out of her portfolio, to be honest. Anyway, it’s not long before a pop-up ad appears and thankfully obscures Denise’s rather dire copy:

Swiftly followed by another:

Eek! That’s not an advert – it’s another one of those messages from the serial killer! Luckily, Denise doesn’t have her pop-up blocker switched on or she never would’ve received it. Now she’ll have to phone Lorna Woods and warn her that she’s in danger from a killer! But will Lorna believe her? You bet she won’t... What a terrifying TV movie quandary!

Obituary isn’t a terrifying TV movie, however. In fact, it’s only really mildly suspenseful (and, even then, only towards the end). Denise manages to completely neglect her 16-hours-a-day job to investigate the murders – and, by “investigate”, I mean she spreads out lots of newspapers on the floor and goes through them with a highlighter pen colouring in any handy clues she comes across (she’s obviously been inspired by Suzanne Somers’ research techniques in Exclusive):

Oh yeah, that’s Denise’s pet iguana in the photo there. Isn’t she kooky? (Denise, that is.) And yet somehow lonely... If only the right man would come along and – oh wait, that’s right: her ex-boyfriend just got that promotion she was after and has come to work at the newspaper. How, like, conflicted she must be feeling about that. Let’s just hope he doesn’t turn out to be the killer, anyway!

As is unfortunately the case with many movies of this type, what starts out fairly engaging gets a bit tiresome after an hour or so. Obituary is vaguely stylish with a likeable enough heroine, but isn’t quite demented enough to pay out on its outlandish premise. Denise’s opening narration works quite well, and it’s a shame it’s not picked up on because it provides Obituary with a spark of personality that’s absent elsewhere.

And no iguana-boiling scene? Lazy!

Rating: 2/5

The Night Stalker

There were several reasons why The Night Stalker looked like the Best Film Ever to my ten-year-old mind... and by that I mean my mind when I was actually aged ten, not as it is now. Back then (1988 if you must know) there was no internet, so I read all my film reviews in Leonard Maltin’s awkwardly titled TV Movies and Video Guide, which described The Night Stalker as a “near-brilliant mixture of double-edged horror and comedy”. The only other modern horror film Mr Maltin seemed to actually like was Fright Night – which I lived for – so it looked like this 1972 classic would be another sure thing.


This was also at a time when I spent every Tuesday afternoon after school scanning the freshly bought TV Times and Radio Times (ITV and BBC had separate listings magazines then) for late-night horror films. I seem to remember The Night Stalker getting four out of five TV Times-approved stars – another remarkable feat for something with vampires in it. Add in the fact that I was sooo into the Hammer Dracula films at the time, and surely The Night Stalker was set to be my New Favourite Movie!

Well, it wasn’t. In fact, as a kid, I didn’t really get it at all. Sure, the story was about a vampire stalking Las Vegas – but somehow it didn’t really seem to be about a vampire stalking Las Vegas. Little did my ten-year-old mind realise at the time how accurate this notion was; The Night Stalker features dead dancing girls, multiple murders, a spooky mansion and, yes, a bona fide vampire – but really it’s about the reporter covering the case, and what the authorities will do to make sure the truth never gets out.

That reporter is rumpled, straw-hatted Carl Kolchak, played – in one of those perfect alignments of character and actor – by Darren McGavin. Kolchak is called back from a holiday to report on the discovery of a dead casino employee found dumped in a dustbin. She’s been drained of blood and sports a nasty little bite wound to the neck, but it’s a while before Kolchak is prepared to cry vampire – specifically, not until three more young women have been found exsanguinated in similar fashion, and our reporter hero has survived a one-on-one tussle with the superhuman villain responsible.


But it soon becomes clear that Kolchak’s problem isn’t going to be convincing the authorities that an undead monster is behind the murders (after all, it’s hard to refute the testimonies of thirty cops who’ve shot the perpetrator at close range without killing him), it’s going to be hacking through enough red tape to get something done about it. What’s the correct protocol for arresting a 100-year-old vampire? And can taking to the streets with a wooden stake be classed as premeditated murder?

Original, influential and a big success in its day, The Night Stalker arguably kicked off the boom in TV-movie horror that lasted for the remainder of the decade, producing cult classics like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973) and Trilogy of Terror (1975). Its surprising violence (check out that brutal opening murder) and sly tone mean that it’s dated pretty well without losing that all-important seventies charm. While not quite as seventies-sational as the same year’s Hammer offering Dracula A.D. 1972 (I mean, when was the last time you saw Christopher Lee and hotpants in the same movie?) there’s still plenty of casual sexism, period Vegas detail, and gratuitous knitting in public:


Director John Llewellyn Moxey offsets the urban setting with a genuine gothic feel – from the vampire’s red silk-lined suit to a terrific haunted house – that pays off with a straight-up horror climax. Short of the caricatured bloodsuckers of From Dusk Till Dawn, I can’t think of a vampire more physically vicious than Janos Skorzeny here, and his human-but-not-human appearance is quite chilling.

I’m glad I revisited The Night Stalker, and got a lot more out of it than when I went in expecting 75 minutes of monster mayhem twenty years ago. Don’t get me wrong, there is ample mayhem (thanks to Skorzeny’s violent rampages) but the movie’s concerned with more than just fang-baring thrills.

Next up, I’ll be rewatching the Seattle-set sequel, The Night Strangler, which in contrast I loved as a kid. But first I need my copy of Maltin’s, a TV Times and a highlighter pen... Bliss!

Rating: 3/5