The Screengrab : the texas chain saw massacre

The Slasher Movie Comes of Age

Phil Nugent — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In The Atlantic, James Parker sings the praises of "that most misunderstood of genres," the slasher flick. Actually, Parker doesn't really make a case for the genre being misunderstood so much as boldly step up to declare that he watches them voluntarily, and he can quote Ted Hughes (“Its mishmash of scripture and physics, / With here, brains in hands, for example, / And there, legs in a treetop.” ) and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, which, though a fine rendering of a classic work, does not include an appearance by a naked Angelina Jolie in flesh high heels. "The classic slasher flick," he writes, "is produced at high speed, on a squeaker of a budget, and bows briefly for an anointing of critical scorn before going on to make piles of money. With a bit of luck, that critical scorn will be amplified into cultural censure—1980’s rape-revenge slasher, I Spit on Your Grave, for instance, was widely and windily reviled, to the enduring profit of its makers. 'The more the film was attacked,' writer-director Meir Zarchi confided to Variety last year, 'the more money shot into my pocket.'” He must have done pretty damn well. I'm not sure that I've ever actually seen I Spit on Your Grave, but I remember, as if it were yesterday, the 1981 "special" episode of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's old syndicated movie-reviews TV show Sneal Previews that was set aside for the purpose of heaping scorn and disgust on what were then just beginning to be called slasher (or "splatter") films, with I Spit on Your Grave a prime target. Watching a clip from the movie, in which a bunch of scuzzball louts swaggered around the fallen body of a violated young woman, sandwiched between the TV showmen clucking and posturing about the death of civilization, one felt much as one does at a screening of Freddy vs. Jason: it's not clear who you should root for, but you'd settle for checking off the box marked "None of the Above."

Part of the appeal of slasher movies is that they're disreputable. But the fact that a writer like Parker can admit to having taken pleasure from watching slasher movies in a magazine like The Atlantic shows how far we've come since...well, since 1976, when Harper's, a magazine pretty much on the same social outreach level as The Atlantic, ran Stephen Koch's "Fashions in Pornography", which gave the author a chance to step out onto the heath and rend his garments in appalled despair over the fact that Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had been screened at the Museum of Modern Art. (With the title of his screed, Koch clearly anticipated the current term "torture porn", which New York magazine reviewer David Edelstein is so proud of having coined.) In movie circles, Koch is best known as the author of Stargazer, a classic, admiring survey of Andy Warhol's films, and his dismay at seeing some trashy little drive-in slaughter-fest being garlanded by a prestigious New York City culture institution may partly reflect one man's concern that his fringe cinema of choice be recognized as deserving of a place in the canon before some white trash gorehound's fringe cinema of choice. My grandmother was a good Christian Southern lady, and if a bus containing either Andy Warhol or Tobe Hooper had broken down in front of her house, she would have invited both of them in and gorged them on homemade pie, but she wouldn't have watched the movies made by either gentlemen if she'd been able to borrow someone else's eyeballs.

"Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough," spoke Noah Cross (John Huston) in Chinatown, a movie whose nose-slitting sequence speaks to a part of the audience that has no insurmountable problem with being titillated with a little gratuitous shock and bloodshed, so long as there's a story and big stars to go with it. Back in 1981, maybe nobody seriously expected slasher movies to last this long. But they did, and now they're at least half respectable, partly because those of us who, back then, were just old enough to watch clips from them on Sneak Previews but who couldn't see the movies themselves until they hit cable or Mom and Dad left us alone with the VCR, are now adults who, because this stuff was always there, can imagine stuff that's even worse. Some of these adults are now filmmakers whose job it is to imagine stuff that's even worse. As Parker sees it, "Saw and Hostel succeeded, above all, because they are serious slasher flicks. The extremity of their goriness reclaimed the splatter death from mainstream movies (where it’s become unremarkable to see a man fed screaming to a propeller, or run through with a drill bit). And the immersive nastiness of their aesthetic—decayed bathrooms, foul workshops, seeping industrial spaces, blades blotched with rust—distilled the slasher-flick elixir: atmosphere. No franchise thrives without it."

Parker continues: "Just as crucially, Saw and Hostel feature excellent and novel villains." Saw's Jigsaw is, or if I interpreted the art work on the last installment correctly as I whizzed past it on the subway umpteen times, was, a terminal cancer patient whose Rube Goldberg torture devices are intended to impress upon his victims the importance of appreciating life, an area in which he judges them to have been falling short. And the wealthy businessmen who, in the Hostel series, pay top dollar to torture healthy young American backpackers to death can be taken as some kind of comment on the rapaciousness of the class that brought us the new Depression. Earlier generations of genre filmmakers were a little confused when informed that they were in the social commentary business, but Hostel director Eli Roth talks about it as if he thought he might be eligible for a Pulitzer: "“Thanks to George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld," the insists, "there’s a whole new wave of horror movies.”

What's kind of off-putting is how much of the new wave has hit the beach before, with fewer Roman numerals attached. So far this year we've seen remakes of Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, and Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, a movie so proudly vile that the fact that it could provide fodder for a pricey Hollywood remake--let alone the fact that its director could have gone on to work with Meryl Streep--just about single-handedly carried us all into an alternate universe. Later this year there'll be a sequel to Rob Zombie's remake of John Carpenter's original Halloween. This deluge of remakes may be part of what's now respectable about slasher movies: unless you're the Marquis de Sade, it's hard to come up with a really new take on having a madman run around turning people into kindling, and if your movie is going to look a lot like a lot of other movies, why not latch onto the name of a golden oldie and "honor" it with an official remake rather than imitate it and get tagged as a rip-off artist? If Parker, as a fan of the genre, is concerned that it may finally be killed off by losing its capacity to shock, either from endless repetition or misplaced self-seriousness, he isn't letting on: "In a tolerant spirit," he writes, "the slasher fan gets in line for the new sequel or prequel or remake or 'reboot.' If it’s crap, so what? The next one might be better."

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

This 1985 instant-midnight-movie classic just about killed off the concept of the underground-horror-cult-item by being too perfect; a beautifully executed, straight-faced H.P. Lovecraft update with farce timing and gory slapstick, it hit its marks with such stunning aplomb that it's hard to think of a similar film that wouldn't be embarrassed to be compared to it. That includes pretty much every subsequent attempt by the first time filmmaker Stuart Gordon, previously known as founding director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company, to follow it up, though its star, Jeffrey Combs, has managed to keep the spirit of Herbert West alive through his performances in other movies -- especially Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, where his deranged, ghostbusting FBI agent is a scene-stealing fusion of Dr. West, Fox Mulder, and Hazel Motes.

19. EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959)

Georges Franju's nightmare classic was first released in the U.S. in 1962 in a re-edited, English-language version called The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. In a time when foreign films really had to fight for American distribution, this was a peculiar kind of triumph that demonstrated that it was possible for certain special films to bridge the audiences that responded to the critical theories of Andre Bazin and those who were more at home with Joe Bob Briggs. The restored version that has since become the standard text even here makes it clearer that the movie (about a mad doctor's attempts to restore the once-beautiful, then damaged and now slate-blank face of his daughter) is an attack on unthinking scientific experimentation that draws on the deliberate tapping-into-the-irrational of the Surrealists and such films as Cocteau's Orpheus -- but it's still a movie about a guy whose hobby is stripping the kissers off kidnapped women until he gets eaten by his own attack dogs.

18. MARTIN (1977)

After many failed attempts to successfully follow up on Night of the Living Dead, and two years before returning to the zombie well with Dawn of the Dead, George Romero made this riff on the vampire genre in his beloved Pittsburgh. The title character, played by twenty-six-year-old John Amplas, is a forlorn, alienated young man who appears to be a serial killer and wishes he were a vampire. In its own odd way, Martin, more than any other film of its time, anticipates the Goth subculture of Anne Rice and the post-punk concept of vampires as creatures of morbid romantic fantasy, though it's an ironic comment on that kind of attraction, not a celebration of it: at key moments, Romero shows us Martin's fantasies of himself as a suave, literal lady killer with seductive powers, before staging his murders as the unpleasant messes they actually are. Romero himself turns up in a cameo as a priest who, sought for guidance by an Old World relative of Martin's, turns out to be less interested in hearing the man out than in raving about The Exorcist.

17. ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968)

If Charles Grodin doesn’t exactly spring to mind when you think of the great stars of horror, then you’ve never seen Rosemary’s Baby. Kicking off the 1970s devil movie craze two years before the start of that morally ambiguous decade (and one year before director Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the minions of real life demon Charles Manson), Mia Farrow dramatized the worst-case-scenario fears of young mothers everywhere as the title character in a defiantly downbeat movie where motherhood is perverted, the fetus is the villain, the bad guys win and we get to see Ruth Gordon naked for the first (but, thanks to Bud Cort and Hal Ashby, certainly not the last) time in her distinguished career.

16. THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)

These days Leatherface is just another lovable lunk in the horror franchise Hall of Fame, right up there with Jason and Freddy Krueger, but despite all the sequels and remakes, the impact of his 1974 debut is undiminished. There's nothing complicated about the plot: five young people traveling across Texas in a van happen upon a seemingly deserted farmhouse where they make the sudden and violent acquaintance of the hulking butcher and cross-dresser Leatherface and the rest of the demented Sawyer clan. Tobe Hooper's film derives much of its power from its grimy, snuff-film authenticity; it looks as though it may have been discovered moldering in the attic of the decaying Sawyer farmhouse. When Leatherface revs his chainsaw while closing in on a victim in the deep, dark woods, you can only think, yep, that would certainly scare the living shit out of me. Leatherface's final dance of death in the early morning rays of the sun is perhaps the seminal image of hillbilly horror. Much has been made of the movie as metaphor for any number of things – Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, the collapse of the counterculture, the dissolution of the nuclear family and possibly the 1973 World Series for all I know – but as flat-out unrelenting exploitation of the modern suburbanite's fear of backwoods people, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has few peers.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Phil BOOOOO!-gent, Andrew OsBurning-in-Hell, Baron Scott Von Frankendoviak

Introducing the Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As a special Halloween treat for Screengrab readers, I will be prying my eyelids open Clockwork Orange-style for a 24-hour marathon of movies based on the works of Stephen King. Because I have not completely lost my mind, these 24 hours will not necessarily be consecutive. I’ll be stringing them out all week, with each entry covering roughly six hours worth of possessed cars, killer dogs and corn-worshipping children. (However, once I’ve completed the task and reported my findings here, feel free to conduct your own 24-hour-straight experiment. I did this once before for my book Hick Flicks, watching 24 consecutive hours of hillbilly horror movies – including all four chapters of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre saga then in existence. About 18 hours into it, my dog was begging for mercy and I had to switch to the Golf Channel for a few minutes to decompress.)

I’ve set a few ground rules for this descent into the depths of cinematic terror. First of all, the roster must include only horror movies. No prison flicks or coming-of-age stories or whatever the hell Hearts in Atlantis is. This is a Halloween special, after all, so I need giant rats and werewolves and shit like that. Secondly, I eliminated any movie I’m very familiar with – The Shining, Carrie and Stand by Me, to cite the most obvious examples – as well as anything I’d seen in the past decade or so. That includes recent fare like The Mist, 1408 and Dreamcatcher, as well as the movies I watched for this High Hat piece on the state of Maine as depicted in King’s works. I didn’t want to be able to cheat and go by memory – although it’s not like any of you would really know if I did, anyway. Still, the integrity of the process must not be compromised, and since there are so many King movies out there, it wasn’t hard to limit myself to stuff I’ve either never seen or saw so long ago, I barely remember.

With all that being said, tune in tomorrow for Part One of the Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon!

Fantastic Fest Review: “Wild Man of the Navidad”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Here’s a surefire way to get me to attend a screening of your home-grown, no-budget movie: conceive it as an homage to the grimy backwoods horror classics of the ‘70s and put Bigfoot in it. Make it a Texas Bigfoot movie and I’ll be first in line. (I attended the Texas Bigfoot Conference a few years back, and you can read all about it – I know you saw this coming – in Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema.) That’s more or less what first-time feature filmmakers Justin Meeks and Duane Graves have done (with an assist from original Texas Chain Saw Massacre writer/producer Kim Henkel) in Wild Man of the Navidad.

Sure, you could argue that the Wild Man isn’t technically Bigfoot, but like the “Fouke Monster” of The Legend of Boggy Creek (surely an influence on Meeks and Graves), he’s a big, hairy cousin of our friend Sasquatch. Like Boggy Creek and its other '70s ancestors (including Chain Saw), Wild Man purports to be based on a true story, in this case the journals of rancher Dale S. Rogers of the tiny town of Sublime, Texas. Meeks plays Rogers in the film as a troubled man with a catatonic, wheelchair-bound wife who is cared for (and occasionally molested) by chubby, shirtless Mario (Alex Garcia). After losing his day job, Rogers is forced to open up his family’s land to hunters. This causes a bit of a crisis of conscience, since he knows the Wild Man is out there somewhere (he leaves a skinned rabbit on the back porch each night to placate the creature). Sure enough, those who venture out into the bottoms are later found with their internal organs externalized. Along with the local sheriff, Rogers determines to rid the Navidad of this deadly creature once and for all.

Wild Man is set in the '70s, and in many ways, it’s a masterful recreation of the backwoods horror classics of that era, from the stylized opening credits to the near-flawless production design. (Where did they find those pop-top cans of Lone Star?) The supporting cast members are likewise authentic-looking, right down to their tobacco juice-stained beards, although you wouldn’t call any of them actors. They’re all locals who are pretty much playing themselves, and you won't find any Brandos in the rough here, but at least the accents are right on and you can really believe these guys know how to make a "cactus pussy" (don't ask, just trust me). The design of the Wild Man is also ingenious; instead of the usual suit made of carpet remnants, the creature (or man) is draped in the pelts of animals he's killed, so you don't know what he looks like underneath.

The only thing detracting from the illusion that this is a lost drive-in classic from 1974 is the fact that it was shot on digital video, but unfortunately, that's kind of a big deal. This type of movie should look like it was found in rotting film cans dredged up from the bottom of a swamp, and video doesn't come close to capturing the appropriate texture. The choice is certainly understandable - that's how you get a no-budget movie made these days, after all - but it takes suspension of disbelief to a higher degree of difficulty. Still, if you have a soft spot for the backwoods horror of yesteryear, you'll probably get a kick out of Wild Man.

Related:
All-Night Bigfoot Movie Marathon
Take Five: Cryptozoology

Reviews by Request: Three on a Meathook (1972, William Girdler)

Paul Clark — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader Cameron for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks) see the bottom of this post.

I only have myself to blame. When I first came up with Reviews By Request, I did so in the hope that some loyal Screengrab readers would be recommend some treasures I hadn’t yet seen. However, there was always that fear that I’d left myself open for someone to come along and request something really terrible, and I would be committed to it by my word. And now, sure enough, it’s happened. I can’t begin to guess why reader Cameron might recommend William Girdler’s Three on a Meathook. Perhaps he legitimately likes the movie, or maybe he wanted to shake up the format a bit by recommending something crappy. Perhaps he’s one of those democratic souls who believe that every movie deserves a fair shake. Whatever the reason, I’ll honor his request. I’ve given my word, and I’ll be damned if Three on a Meathook is the movie that’s going to make me break my word.

That’s not to say I wasn’t tempted to mothball the feature this week. Hell, when I first started playing the DVD, it kept skipping and stopping, so maybe that was a sign. But I forged ahead all the same, cleaning off the disc and using another DVD player. And wouldn’t you know, that did the trick. I settled in to watch this movie which I hadn’t even heard of before Cameron recommended it to me, in the hope that maybe it would be some long-last classic of the horror genre. It wouldn’t be unprecedented, after all.

Then the movie began. I knew I was in for a long sit from the opening shot- a slow, deliberate pan across a cityscape, ending in a zoom into a hotel window. This seemed a bit too familiar. “It’s the opening shot of Psycho,” I thought. I wondered, optimistically perhaps, if Girdler might be wittily paying homage to the Master by beginning his debut feature this way. But as the film continued, I realized that the Three on a Meathook was a ripoff, and a shabby one at that. If Girdler had any talent as a filmmaker when he made this movie, he did a damn fine job keeping it to himself.

There are so many things that are wrong with Three on a Meathook that it’s impossible to know where to begin. Should I mention Girdler’s inability to set, let alone maintain, any sort of tone? His nonexistent sense of pacing, which leads to frequent digressions such as when protagonist Billy (James Pickett) goes into a bar and Pickett essentially stops the movie in order to watch the band American Xpress perform not one, but two songs? How about his godawful editing selections, as when he cuts away from a dinner scene to a completely unmotivated shot of the same scene from outside the house? Or how about those plot twists- one obvious, one nonsensical, both lame?

Possibly the most glaring issue with the movie is that the characters are so stupid. Now, I realize that Three on a Meathook was made in 1972, before the clichés of the slasher genre were long since established. But I’m not talking about characters wandering off alone here. I’m talking about a character who believes he has a problem with murdering young women against his will, yet doesn’t see any problem with picking up a truckload of female hitchhikers or bringing home a young woman he meets in a bar. I’m talking about a killer who doesn’t lock up the evidence when there’s a guest in the house. I’m talking about a woman who discovers a shed where the killer keeps his victims, then promptly runs back into the house where she knows the killer is. Part of what makes a successful horror movies is that we can relate to the characters, and we can imagine ourselves making the same decisions they do. Who could possibly identify with anything these people do?

It also helps when the movie is, you know, scary. And Three on a Meathook definitely isn’t that. Girdler’s chintzy visual style makes it impossible for him to build any atmosphere, and he barely even tries. The movie has plenty of violence and gore, but it’s all makeup and special effects, and even if they were good effects- which they certainly aren’t- gaping wounds and decapitations aren’t scary in and of themselves. Girdler’s only trick to elicit screams from the audience is zooming in quickly on “shocking” imagery, accompanied by dissonant synthesizer chords (Girdler also composed the score). Sorry, but unless you’re two years old and have never seen a movie before, this just doesn’t do the trick.

I’m reminded of a quote from Citizen Kane, in which Joseph Cotten says, “it’s no trick to make a lot of money, if what you want to do is make a lot of money.” Similarly, anyone can make a movie, provided all the person does is want to make a movie. Horror has long been a way for young aspiring filmmakers to create a calling card for themselves, as horror movies can often be made on the cheap and there’s always a market for scary stuff. However, only a chosen few of these movies can reach the heights of Night of the Living Dead, and most attempts to capture that same magic have been closer to Three on a Meathook than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It’s not a hateful movie, just a useless one.

I suppose that’s what pissed me off about Three on a Meathook, that it was so bad that I couldn’t even feel anything about it except vague annoyance. A great movie transports me, and good ones entertain me and sometimes stimulate my mind. Hell, at least when a movie makes me angry, it at least makes me ponder the reasons for my reaction. But aside from the aforementioned quote from Citizen Kane- surely the only time Welles’ masterpiece and Three on a Meathook would be mentioned in the same breath- all I could think of was how much this movie was wasting my time. There were so many other things I could have done with the 80 minutes it took to watch the film, and the hour it took to write this review. I suppose that faced with a movie like this, all that’s left for me is to remember the words of Willie T. Soke, who sagely said, “they can’t all be winners, kid.” Amen to that, Willie.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Oh, and please- no more William Girdler. I’m pretty much Girdler-ed out for a while, I think. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Forgotten Films: "Demon Lover Diary" (1980)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

With George Romero's Diary of the Dead, the "horror movie as pseudo-home video artifact" category that already includes The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield (and, in a way, Brian De Palma's Redacted) is an official subgenre, one that has been handled by spirited amateurs, old masters, and slick, gimmick-seeking pros. Yet the unacknowledged granddaddy of this type of film may be an actual documentary that, despite having developed a healthy cult status from festival appearances, has never been legally distributed or released on video. It's the 1980 Demon Lover Diary, a record of the making of a no-budget fright flick in the mid-1970s. That movie was released in 1976 and alternately known as The Devil Master and The Demon Lover. (Not to be confused with the 2002 Olivier Assayas film demonlover or the 1987 Scott Valentine vehicle My Demon Lover, though now that we mention it, does anybody know what ever happened to that movie's lead actress, Michele Little? She was cute as a bug's ear.) The documentary was shot by Joel DeMott, the girlfriend of Jeff Kreines, who had been hired to work on the horror picture as cinematographer. (DeMott and Kreines were both MIT grad students who had studied with documentarian Richard Leacock.)

Kreines and sound man Mark Rance were induced by director-writer Donald Jackson and his star and co-director and co-writer, Jeff Younkins, to sign on to help them realize their labor of love, partly with an agreement to allow DeMott to record the process. But it soon became clear that Jackson (who installed his new friends in a room at his mom's house) and Younkins were flying by the seat of their pants and that they didn't exactly love having their incompetence preserved on film for posterity. From what we're shown, Jackson and Younkins have no visible talent of understanding of the craft of film, but they do have something at least as important to anyone hoping to make a career in The Industry: a scary, mesmeric ability to get their way, at least temporarily. (The cast of their movie included Gunnar Hansen--"Leatherface" from the original Texas Chain Saw Masssacre--as a professor of the occult, and Marvel Comics artist Val Mayerik. They also somehow talked Ted Nugent --no relation, thanks for asking!-- into lending them the use of his house and some of his well-stocked arsenal.) Jackson appears the be the more convincing talker, but Younkins really puts the "labored" into "labor of love". His character in the movie wears a single black glove throughout his performance; it turns out that this is because he lost a finger in an industrial accident, which, it's strongly implied here, was staged deliberately so that he could plow the insurance money into the movie's budget.

The ghouls in The Demon Lover are pure plastic, but the galloping paranoia, delusion, personal resentments, and general sense of festering mania captured in Diary are the real thing. Anyone who's spent time around no-frills filmmaking sets will experience a shiver of recognition as the outsiders, who have ceased to hide their contempt for the true believers, hole up in their corner of the house where they are not welcome, begin to feel the effects of sleep deprivation, and snicker and giggle while chanting, "The Demon Lover sucks, The Demon Lover sucks, heigh-ho the derry-oh..." The movie ends with our heroes getting the hell out of Dodge, fleeing Ted Nugent's property by car and convincing themselves that they're being followed and can hear gunshots. The strangest thing about all this may be that it did not signal the end of the careers of the central players. More than half a dozen years later, DeMott and Kreines made Seventeen, a cinema-verite film about teenagers that was deemed too gritty for PBS, which had commissioned it, but which went on to win the Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 1985 Sundance Film Festival. More surprisingly, Donald Jackson has subsequently forged a long career for himself as a writer, producer, and director of movies with such eye-catching titles as Roller Blade Warriors, Lingerie Kickboxer, Rollergator, Guns of El Chupacabra and Hell Comes to Frogtown, which starred Rowdy Roddy Piper and Sandahl Bergman and which I once watched most of on USA Up All Night while blitzed out of my mind!. As for the nine-fingered Jeff Younkins, he is the author of the well-regarded Combat and Survival Knives: A User's Guide.

Nothing But Dark Skys From Now On

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

"Imagine," Gary Giddins writes, "having only one great film in you, and that film being The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." That Tobe Hooper classic, along with the lesser 1977 Eaten Alive, in which Neville Brand plays a hotel keeper who feeds people to his pet crocodile if he doesn't like what they've written on their comment cards, are now available on handsomely packaged DVDs from Dark Sky, a company that Giddins salutes for doing yeoman's work in the specialized field of retrieving rough gems and striking obscurities from the pop junk pile of half-forgotten and poorly received horror pictures. Dark Sky's catalog includes Trilogy of Terror, the 1974 anthology TV-movie that's legendary for its concluding segment, in which Karen Black, entering the screen-queen pantheon in a tatty bathrobe and a flying cloud of auburn hair, raced around her '70s bacheleorette pad pursued by a spear-wielding Zuni tribal doll with the "Check, please!" name of "He Who Kills." Giddins notes that, as an example of the nifty bonus extras that are a Dark Sky trademark, the Trilogy disc boasts a new interview with Karen Black: "Rolling her eyes in recollection of the filmmaking incompetence, she recalls the spills she had to take while pretending to wrestle the doll and offers her own analysis of the film's cult following: 'Women are afraid of vaginal entry'."

Other Dark Sky discs include Mario Bava's 1966 Kill Baby, Kill, John McNaughton's art-gore shocker Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Curtis Harrington's The Killing Kind (made in 1973 with a cast that includes Ann Sothern, John Savage, Luana Anders, and Cindy Williams), and the unclassifiable Spider Baby, a 1964 film by cult director Jack Hill that makes The Addams Family look like The Brady Bunch. (It features a young Sid Haig channeling Hank Wordern and the star, Lon Chaney, Jr., singing, for lack of a better word, the opening theme song.) Coming soon from Dark Sky: the 1973 Ricco the Mean Machine, described by Giddins as "a Mafia revenge film in which Christopher Mitchum sets out to destroy a mob with his pageboy flip and a few awkward karate chops." An as yet undiscovered influence on Javier Bardem's haircut in No Country for Old Men? Duty compels me to check it out.