- It'll Sucker You In: Bloody Disgusting has the good manners to give Tentacles (1977) the proper respect it deserves. It's a Jaws rip-off about a killer octopus starring Shelley Winters and Henry Fonda where the final battle is between two orcas and said killer Octopus. Need I say More? (Bloody Disgusting)
- It's Gonna Herzegovina: An interview with the filmmakers behind A Serbian Film, which apparently made iron-stomached Tim Anderson at Bloody Disgusting curl up in a fetal position. Not sure I will want to subject myself to it. (Bloody Disgusting)
One of the things I'm learning from more prolific and pithy bloggers (Stacie Ponder of Final Girl and Jason Adams at My New Plaid Pants, in particular) is that to be more prolific, you must be more pithy.
So I'm introducing a new quickie series called "Head Trauma" documenting scenes that (as Stacie Ponder herself might say) "broke my brain" as a yung'un.
"Night Train Murders" was an Italian rip-off of "The Last House on the Left" that was billed in the US as "The New House on the Left" ... clever, eh? It takes place on the notorious overnight train to Rome and involves rape, humiliation and murder. (Years after seeing this grindhouse shocker, your humble narrator was groped on said overnight train to Rome by some sweaty Mario Brothers-looking futhermucker. Coincidence?!?!? yeah, most likely....).
In the scene in question, a young girl gets ... well ... I can't actually type it out. It's still disturbing to this day. If you have to know, here is a link to the description of the whole nasty affair.
For the purposes of this pithy post, here are a few images that haunt me to this day...
One of the things I miss about slasher movies of the early 80s is the curious lack of defensive behavior on the part of the non-surviving victims.
When an actual human being is faced with a pscyho wielding an axe, hammer, corkscrew, or Hamilton Beach Electric Carving Knife -- a little peanut-sized part of our brain called the hypothalamus kicks in and we fight or flee. This little lizard-brain that is wrapped in our bigger brain is what tries to keep us alive at all costs.
Even the most rudimentary review of any Law and Order episode will teach you everything you need to know about “defensive stab wounds.” Usually they are found along the arms when people automatically try to protect their vital organs (head, heart, stomach and groin). Slasher victims of the 80s would puzzle your average Law and Order detective with their curious lack of defensive stab wounds. In fact, most 80s slasher victims seem to lack even the most basic lizard-brainish abilities for self-preservation.
I submit two of my favorite examples of "hypothalamically-challenged" victims in 80s slasherdom:
GAG ME WITH AN AXE, I'M SURE: Marcie in Friday the 13th (1980).
After banging Kevin Bacon on a bunk bed, Marcie takes a stereotypical lone trip to the loo. After peeing and practicing her Kate Hepburn impression in the mirror (it totally killed at Aunt Ruth’s Christmas party), she decides to go investigate that strange noise over by the showers.
SPOLER ALERT: It doesn’t end well…
Note how Marcie just grabs onto the curtain, closes her eyes and screams. She almost holds out her face as is to give a nice wide-open landing strip for the business end of Mrs. Voorhees’ axe.
This is not very Kate Hepburn-ish behavior.
Why does Marcie not duck or kick or punch? Does she think Mrs. Voorhees is actually Kevin Bacon in a bad wig and cable-knit sweater playing some kind of kinky role-playing game? Does she think she's in David Cronenberg's Scanners and can blow up Mrs. V’s head with mere focused thought?
No. None of the above. I submit that poor Marcie, like so many of her 80s slasher-victim bretheren, is "hypothalamically-challenged" -- lacking the instinct for survival known even to mammals without opposablethumbs.
IS THAT A CHAINSAW IN YOUR POCKET OR...: Elevator Girl in Pieces (1982)
There are so many memorable moments in Pieces, it is hard to choose just one. However, choose I will.
What do you do when a killer dressed in black enters a teeny elevator with an enormous chainsaw behind his back? Do you (a) get the hell off of the elevator, (b) get the hiz-ell out of the elevator, or (c) smile politely, back into a corner and throw your arms out to your sides to make it super easy for him to chainsaw your arms off? (Hint: The man in black happens to be looking to collect two arms for his Femme du Frankenstein project).
The answer is at the 1:45 mark...
MAVERICK AWARD: Wendy from Prom Night (1980)
Wendy from Prom Night was a woman ahead of her time. She displayed none of the typical Final Girl behavior ... she wasn't a tomboy, she wasn't sex-shy, she wasn't particularly nice and she didn't actually live to see the ending credits.
Yet, despite not being a Final Girl, Wendy had the audacity to put up one hell of a fight. She ran, she hid, she hit back. She actually acted like someone who wanted to live. Wendy broke the passive victim mold and finally showed some hypothalamus.
By today's standards, Wendy's fight and flight may not even register. Slasher victims of the 1990s and beyond (think Drew Barrymore in Scream) tend to all be a little edgier and a little pluckier (though no luckier). I posit that they all owe their slightly longer lives (and dignity) to Wendy from Prom Night. She showed them how it was done.
In Wendy's 8 minute struggle against the glitter-ski-masked killer, a hypothalamus was born. Finally, a non-surviving victim acted like a normal person who wanted to live --
Favorite movies feel like reflections of one’s own psyche. They feel like they are being projected from within. It’s like how it feels to fall in love. You think to yourself … this movie gets me.
In 1980, at 11-years-old, packed into one of 13 screens at the Natick Mall with my Dad, that’s how Friday the 13th felt to me. I just really connected to it.
Anyone who would be reading this post (anyone? anyone?), probably knows the plot, but here’s a quickie synopsis (and, if one can have spoilers in a 30-year-old movie, there is a doozy ahead, so you have been warned):
Someone’s getting all stabby up at Camp Crystal Lake. Corpses pile up into the stormy night until plucky Dorothy-Hammill-bobbed final girl Alice takes on the killer. The killer is not Jason Voorhees (as in every subsequent sequel and remake), but it’s his mother Mrs. Pamela Voorhees, played by a camp-tastic Betsey Palmer.
A girl-fight smack-down between sweet Alice and murderous Mama Voorhees ensues. Mrs. V loses her head. Final girl Alice is victorious. In the final dream sequence, Jason Voorhees pops out of the water and drags Alice out of her canoe. She wakes up, screams. The end.
So what was it that I, an 11-year-old budding gay boy, so connected with in Friday the 13th? I did not have a murderous mother, nor was I deformed lousy swimmer, or a horny heterosexual teen in tight camp shorts.
Was it just the pure adrenalin rush of being scared and seeing people get axes in their faces? I don’t think so. Methinks the answer lies in the subtext.
The text of Mrs. V’s motivation is that she was angry at counselors who were pushing their squishy parts together while her special little deformed boy Jason drowned in the lake. But, I posit that there is a brilliant subtext and symbolism in Friday the 13th that spoke to many of us kids growing up in the 1980s with repressed, religious 1950s-era Moms.
Yes, fellow subtext freaks, Friday the 13th was really about a sexually repressed mother and her inability to accept the loss of her innocent child to the lustful impulses of puberty. Her murder spree is an acting out of the violent rageful (and helpless) feelings many of these moms probably had towards the idea of their perfect innocent children blossoming into horny teens during the confusingly sexually liberated pre-Reagan world of the late 70s and early 80s.
So in 1980, as I watched Friday the 13th in my Toughskin jeans and Pro-Keds, I was really watching the shadowy psychological drama between me and my own mother playing out on screen.
Alice, the classically repressed and boyish final girl with the childish vulnerable quality and pre-pubescent voice, was my perfect avatar into the shadowy woods of my mother’s suppressed rage against the sexual revolution that had passed her by and left her treading water in its choppy wake.
But I was also Jason -- my mother’s special little boy. My true self was already drowning. Too ugly and deformed for the world to see. A homosexual boy entering puberty into a homophobic world.
I knew I was about to become something worse than any one of those horny counselors and I was more deserving of mother’s violent punishment than they.
It took me many years of therapy before I could face down my inner Jason – the repressed ugly rage drowned deep down under twenty leagues of shame.
But he, like the Jason of lore, was unwilling to die, no matter how hard I tried to kill him.
My respect for bloggers who update consistently with compact, content filled nuggets grows daily. It has been a month since my last post and here I am with followers and comments (ok, one comment) and such. Thanks, guys! I am hoping to learn how to be a little more succinct and to up my output when things get less busy. In the meantime, we have ...
Mother's Day!
I'm not sure what I love more about this dreadful, sleazy little film ... (1) the blatant rip-off of Last House on the Left, (2) the over-the-top performances by Rose Ross, (3) Charles' Kaufman's balls out claiming of this movie as his very own above the title, or (4) Momma's death by inflatable boobs.
OK. I lied. I am sure. Momma's death by inflatable boobs was MENSA-level brilliant. All other enumerated potential loves pale in comparison.
Mother’s Day was a frittata of horror sub-genres – one part exploitation/rape and revenge, stir in a scary inbred-hillbilly family, add slasher-movie holiday tie-in, sprinkle lovingly with a Bad Scary Mom. It’s like “I Spit on Your Grave,” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” and “Psycho” had a drunken three-way and 9-months later … Mother’s Day was born.
Sure this, like all movies my Dad took me to at the drive-in, was thoroughly inappropriate for an 11-year-old. However, just like “It's Alive” brought to life my psychological shadow friend - Angry Mutant Baby, Mother's Day brought out that other major dark psychological archetype to light: the BAD MOTHER!
Now, we all have Moms. We all have complicated relationships with our real Moms. But inside of our own little heads, we also have the archetypal Good Mother ... our inner nurturer and caretaker. She is represented in religion and myth as the Goddess, Mother Mary, Ellen Ripley, Glinda the Good Witch, etc. And we also have the Bad Mother - a cluster of traumatic memories of our real Mom's failings, represented in religion and myth by the Wicked Witch, the Alien mother, Mrs. Bates, Mrs. Voorhees, Mrs. White in Carrie, etc. Simply put, the good mother gives and the bad mother takes away (and isn’t nice about it!).
Our real Moms are usually neither good nor bad, but human. Our brains as babies register our "good mother" (who gives exactly what we want when we want it) and "bad mother" (who had a bad day, mayhaps, and decides to smack our fanny) as completely separate people, leading to these enduring archetypes throughout our lives. There is the “good mother,” who held you and loved you and gave a what-for to that nasty 7th grade English teacher with submarine sandwich crumbs in his beard. There is the “bad mother” who told you, in frustration, that she was going to leave and never come back if you didn't stop fighting with your siblings and inappropriately shared her frustrations with your father with you … for instance.
Mother in Mother's Day is played by the delightful Rose Ross. She is the sweet little old Southern lady that meets young girls at Est-like meetings and brings them home to watch her mutant sons Ike and Addley rape, abuse and murder them.
(The element of exploitation, sadism, and sexual cruelty make this particular film hard to watch and equally hard to be blogger-snarky about … save for the stellar sweetness that is Mother’s death by inflatable boobs … did I mention that? However, the film is firmly on the side of our heroic heroines and does not dwell too long on the nasty rapey stuff, so I won’t address the ethics of rape in exploitation fare here)
The "bad mothers" of horror are usually violent prudes. It's hard to not notice that these are all pre-sexual liberation Moms – repressed by the society in both their anger and their sexual expression. Mrs. Voorhees hated the horny kids at camp. Mrs. White hated the sinful kids at Carrie's high school and diminishes Carrie’s gifts, shames her for wanting to go on a date to her prom, and calls her breasts “dirty pillows.” Mrs. Bates kills anything for which son Norman gets a boner. The “bad mother” does not appreciate the sexytime one bit … harrumph!
Mother in Mother’s Day is not that simple. She gets perverted glee out of watching her sons rape and torture their prey. She requires them to attend to it with an eerie military precision.
But what Mother has in common with the other Bad Mother’s of horror is her very unhealthy relationship to her “special” child(ren). She similarly has a "reverse umbilical cord" that takes from her evil spawn, instead of giving to them. She is manipulative and psychotic. (one might wonder - if one has a prediliction to wondering about such things - if Ike and Addley had been given the opportunity to move to the city and become respectable Wall Street sociopaths instead of attending to their their needy psycho mother and protecting her from her cannibalistic sister Queenie ... would they have turned out different ... been spared the hatchet to the peen and death-by-Drano revenge dished out by the headbanded heroines?).
When mother dies by way of inflatable boob, I can imagine Charles Kaufman spouting about the symbolism of the Bad Mother, the one who took, took, took, but never gave, being killed by a cheap facsimile of a mother's nurturing breast. Poetry, indeed.
In creepy ways, I could relate to at least some aspects of Ike and Addley. At 11, I felt like my Mother's special boy. I was her favorite, Momma's little helper, the good boy (yeah … the gay one).
So, watching Mother order her disordered sons to do her evil bidding, I was disturbed that there could be anything untoward about a Mother’s relationship to her “boys.” This film initiated me into the idea that Mom, too, has a dark side. Mom's can hobble their children emotionally, create inappropriate cross-generation bonds, etc. (Note to readers: It would have been nice to learn this in a more appropriate fashion than a sex-and-violence exploitation film at 11, but such was my lot.)
So dark lesson learned from age-inappropriate film #3? Love your mom, but be on guard! Moms are human beings whose capabilities for love, compassion and empathy can be hindered by their dark side which is manipulative, violent and emotionally hobbling.
Except for you, Mom. Please don't call me about this.
After the closing credits of “Psychic Killer” (and a pedophile-dodging dash at Intermission to the urine-flooded Men's room) was "It's Alive!" Attempting to draft behind the awesomeness that was "Rosemary's Baby" (which includes the sub-awesomeness of Ruth Gordon as a Satanic witch), this trashy gem about a steroid-enhanced monster-baby had the best horror movie tagline ever:
"There's only ONE thing wrong with the Davis baby ... IT'S ALIVE!".
The film starts with the bloody birth of a shadowy monstrous baby that kills all of the staff in the delivery room and then escapes out into the suburbs to wreak murderous mayhem. Its father tries to hunt It down, but in the end he can't help but love the little monster and tries to protect It from the police in the touching/disturbing finale.
Where Psychic Killer operates on pure psychological wish fulfillment ("I will so think you to death, bitch!"), “It's Alive” strikes a deeper chord, methinks, simply because it used a monster baby as its highly sympathetic antagonist. With It’s vascular arms, four fangs and three-fingered talonesque hands, It wasn't exactly cuddly (and It had that troublesome homicidal tendency), but It was a baby … perhaps a very demanding baby with hard to meet needs, but a baby nonetheless. And who doesn’t love babies?
My understanding of psychology (aka - my years on the couch) tells me that when it isn't about mother it's usually all about baby. More specifically, it is about the baby inside each of us that we try to pretend doesn't exist -- the one that surprises us when it takes over our limbs and does baby-like things like making unreasonable demands on our familiars, throwing a tantrum, grabbing anything it wants in it's line of sight … or acting out in a murderous rage.
It may seem like any other homicidal monster baby. But It is more than that. This little snaggletoothed, veiny-headed bundle-of-talons is a poignant metaphor. It is that needy, angry baby inside all of us personified, the one we deny and try to snuff out with drugs, booze, reality television, compulsive Hummel collecting, whatever. It is the inner baby that we need to learn to love and protect at all costs (like the Daddy in the movie learns to do) to become whole psychological creatures.
In other words, the journey of It from a hated, angry, biting, slashing, monstrous demon baby to a loved, cooing, cared for, happy monstrous demon baby is just about the purest metaphor for the process of psycho-therapy that a schlocky 70s horror drive-in movie can achieve.
But I wasn’t thinking that on “Drive-In Night” in 1975 when I was 6. As I watched the father and mutant reunion on screen, I was briefly (it doesn’t end well) comforted. I looked up at my Dad, sleeping with an empty carton of stale milk duds propped up on his gut, and was so certain that if he discovered me to be somewhat ... er ... different from the other kids ... a pimply faced, girly, parachute-panted mutant of sorts … that he would not shoot me, either. He would run into the sewer, gather me up in a blanket, grab my talon affectionately and tell me that he loved me and would protect me.
OK, OK. I know. It's just a cheesy movie and I’m overanalyzing it all. “It’s Alive” just copied the themes of Frankenstein and fused it with Rosemary's Baby to make a quick buck. And, yeah, the Daddy gets shot to death at the end and It escapes to the sewers to await calls from his agent to appear in sequels (which kind of kills my nice “inner child” metaphor).
But still ... I stand by my overanalysis:
Important lesson learned from age-inappropriate film #2, “It’s Alive”: We all have a little monster baby inside of us and rather than try to kill it, we gotta learn to love it … or it will rip us to ribbons.
All of 6 years old and already the grindhouse schlock of the Drive-Ins had taught me so much. But there was so much more to learn ...
I am a writer who loves good horror movies.
Horror movies are a safe place for us to plumb the depths of the dark side of the human psyche.
They let us indulge our violent shaudenfreude without anyone actually getting hurt.
Or at least that's what I tell myself to sleep at night.
I am represented by United Talent Agency.
"[Tim's] the man - that's right, not just a man, but the man - and if y'all don't read his fantastic site then y'all don't read." Jason Adams, My New Plaid Pants "To be honest with you, Mr. Tim Grant of Post-Mortem Depression doesn't blog enough for my liking...and I say that because I enjoy his blog. It's like being all into a bag of M&Ms and then you discover there are only 6 M&Ms in the bag." Stacie Ponder, Final Girl
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