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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: DEEP DARK (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Medaglia

FEATURING: Sean McGrath, Anne Sorce, Denise Poirier

PLOT: An failed artist’s last stab at success is given an unexpected boost by a mysterious creature living inside a hole in his shabby studio apartment, but the hole’s motives are not entirely charitable, and the arrangement may come at an unexpectedly high cost.

Still from Deep Dark (2015)

COMMENTS: Among the unsung heroes of modern cinema are the home-video closed-caption writers. They must not only transcribe the dialogue but provide detailed descriptions of sound effects that offer meaningful context for the mood and the stakes of a scene. Surely some sort of award is owed to the unknown captioner for Deep Dark, who was tasked with delivering a full accounting of the first appearance of the hole in the wall who will change the life of our protagonist, and came through with this masterpiece: “[eerie sounds, vaguely wet, vaguely female]”.

It’s an auspicious introduction. We’re told that the Hole has inspired Pollock, Warhol, and Patrick Nagel, and she sparks a sea change in the artistic output of tiresome whiner Hermann by expelling pearlescent orbs that drive art patrons to ecstatic distraction. Her sultry, needy entreaties (delivered by Poirier, best known for voicing the title character in the “Æon Flux” animated series) leave him completely in her thrall, so much so that it is far from surprising that she eventually demands more of him, culminating in an encounter that reveals the Hole to be, shall we say, glorious. One of writer/director Medaglia’s craftier decisions (in his only feature to date) is to leave details about her true nature or origin completely unaddressed. The mystery only enhances her power over everyone who encounters her.

What we have here is a Little Shop of Horrors scenario, in which a monster provides a loser with the key to success, only to demand more and more in return—up to and including blood. Deep Dark is clean and efficient at delivering its story in a tight 80 minutes and taking advantage of a small cast and limited locations to convey its thrills. The film looks good, too, with a crisp editorial sensibility and evocative use of locations both publicly bright and privately grimy. Outside of Poirier’s very good voicework, the actors are definitively fine, turning in perfectly workmanlike performances that deliver the material without enhancing or undercutting it. Like Hermann’s art, though, Deep Dark is missing something. All the pieces are in place, professionally delivered, but it just doesn’t feel like there are any stakes. Events unfold almost entirely as expected, and even the movie’s most graphic moments are evocative, but not shocking or surprising.

Where the film falls the furthest from the goal line is in developing a voice or message uniquely its own. There’s the hint of satiric intent—Medaglia subtitles Hermann’s art and life with ironic descriptions, a tool that will be echoed a few years down the line in The Menu—but the targets are lame and the delivery is weak, especially since there’s a strong argument that we don’t see a single piece of good art in the film. Characters who could provide depth or further complications are assigned subplots that never fully take shape; a curious landlady is the most notable, but Sorce’s influential gallery owner is frustratingly inconsistent, by turns mercenary, snobbish, and weak-minded as needed. Medaglia has his straightforward horror tale, complete with a notably interesting monster. He just doesn’t have much more than that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Both deeply disturbing yet strangely alluring, the film offers audiences something inherently crazy and incredibly macabre… if like me you have a fondness of the strange and bizarre then Deep Dark is a film worth seeking out.” – Jon Dickinson, “Scream” (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Patricia, who called it “hilariously disturbing” and added “gotta love the weirdness of it…” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE GOLEM (1920) / GOLEM (1979)

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When Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, and a host of other horror icons were lining up at the doors of Universal Studios in search of eternal fame, somehow the humble golem failed to get the invite. An immensely powerful beast molded out of clay, brought to life by a mystic Hebrew incantation, it may have had too much in common with Mary Shelley’s invention; or more likely, Hollywood’s Jewish studio chiefs prudently sidestepped anything that would offend sensitive and vociferous gentile audiences. Still, even without the spotlight, the legend of the golem has quietly endured, so much so that Golems appear in the vaunted Reader Suggestion Queue twice. Today we examine these two tales, one a literal origin story, the other something more abstract.

THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD (1920)

Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam

DIRECTED BY: Paul Wegener,

FEATURING: Paul Wegener, Albert Steinrück, Lothar Müthel, Lyda Salmonova,

PLOT: When the Emperor decrees that all Jews must leave the city of Prague, Rabbi Loew invokes the help of the demon Astaroth to construct a defender for his people out of clay.

COMMENTS: An early classic of German expressionist cinema, you will find quite a few reviews of this silent rendering of the original folk tale about the avenger of clay. They tend to focus on three main topics: the source material that came to inform the film, the peculiar history of how it came to be made, and a detailed recap of the plot. It feels like someone’s got my number, because that’s where my instincts would normally lead me, as well. So let’s try and cover those basesin one fell swoop, and then we can turn in a different direction: the ancient folktale was codified in a 1915 novel, which writer/director/star Wegener spun into a trilogy. The first two, set in contemporary times, are now lost to history, but the third, a prequel delivering the backstory in which a rabbi summons the warrior to defend the Jewish people but soon loses control of his creation, has survived the years, and that leads us here.

That background established, it’s important to note how neatly The Golem serves to meet the moment while paving the way for the horror legends of the future. While the story is set in medieval Prague, the fanciful decoration owes more to Méliès than the Middle Ages: impossible peaks tower over the city, while buildings are adorned with twisty staircases and walls never Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE GOLEM (1920) / GOLEM (1979) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FIEND (1980)

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DIRECTED BY: Don Dohler

FEATURING: Don Leifert, Richard Nelson, Elaine White, George Stover, Greg Dohler

PLOT: A “fiend”—an evil spirit that takes possession of a corpse and absorbs the life energy of humans-–moves into the quiet suburb of Kingsville, where a concerned neighbor immediately suspects a connection between the new resident and an unsolved killing spree.

COMMENTS: God bless the Don Dohlers of the world. They don’t have a lot of resources, they don’t have a lot of talent, but by gum they love movies, they’ve got determination, can-do spirit, and just enough cash and friends and family to put together a chiller. You don’t go into a Don Dohler movie with the hope that it will be very good, but it’s a whole lot of fun watching him in there giving it the ol’ college try.

Shot after his debut feature The Alien Factor, Fiend finds Dohler a more experienced filmmaker, but also working with an even thinner budget of a mere $6,000 to continue his bid to become the of Maryland. So he develops a story around an original monster–the title character, a kind of free-floating, body-possessing demonic entity–to sit alongside vampires, zombies, and werewolves. We get an impressively economical introduction to our star villain: after a shapeless red cloud plunges into the grave of a recently deceased man, the reanimated body rises and, within the course of the next 6 minutes, strangles a conveniently located woman in the cemetery, moves into a split-level ranch in the Baltimore suburbs (what was the house closing like?), and chokes another woman while she walks the five miles through the woods from her carpool stop to her home. 

This kind of efficiency is typical of Fiend, which does not waste a lot of time with details. In the space of a few months, the monster takes on the name Longfellow, acquires a cat and a lucrative career teaching music, hires an accountant-cum-Renfield to manage his extensive operations, and builds a combination music studio/shrine to Satan in his basement where he keeps an ample supply of professional headshots of his prospective victims. So it’s only fair that the only force powerful enough to stop him will be equally lucky. Gary is a persnickety neighbor who has it in for Longfellow from the start (supposedly because of the noise, but more likely because the newcomer has an even more impressive mustache). But he should play the ponies, because he immediately pegs Longfellow as the local serial strangler through intuition alone, with not a scrap of evidence to back him up—much to the frustration of his unduly patient wife. Fortunately, a visit to Longellow’s subterranean lair provides all the proof he needs, and the battle of wits commences.

The usual hallmarks of bad-moviedom are here. The acting is wooden and mannered, the score-by-Casio is repetitive and intrusive, and the script is driven by incredible coincidence. (Does the cemetery groundskeeper carry copies of the obituary for every corpse in the place?) But you can tell that Dohler is a deeply earnest storyteller. Compelled to shoot his scenes of mayhem in broad daylight, he makes the killer’s audacity add to the overall sense of unease. Recognizing the convention of secondary horror characters whose ignorance does them in, Dohler crafts a pretty decent action scene in which a bystander attempts to come to the aid of a potential victim, complicating the villain’s plans. Most intriguingly, he hands the hero’s mantle to the abrasive Gary. It’s almost charming to watch Gary barrel around, insisting that something suspicious is going on and bitterly rejecting his wife’s insistence that he lighten up. It puts an intriguing twist on the fact that he’s right about everything. 

On a side note, here’s a mystery for you: where the hell are Gary and Marsha’s kids? There’s no shortage of children in the film, including Dohler’s own son; one of those youngsters even ends up at the wrong end of Longfellow’s glowing hands. We’re certainly supposed to believe the Kenders have kids, because they talk a lot about their filmmaking project for Scouts (an opportunity for Dohler to drop the name and the address of his real-life bookshop), but we never see them, not once. Is this a scenario borrowed from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It’s truly bizarre.

Fiend is not a good movie. Crucially, it’s not a scary or suspenseful movie. But it benefits strongly from a second viewing, when you can set aside all the film’s ineptitude and appreciate the purity of the effort. Viewed in the right circumstances, it’s a goofy piece of fun, and the world of cinema can always use a goofy piece of fun. That’s a legacy to remember Don Dohler by, long after both he and the Fantasy Kingdom Bookstore at 704 Market Street have left the mortal plane.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Even the amateur quality of the performances contribute to the film’s overall dream-like feel…  I mean, don’t get me wrong. This is definitely an amateur film, full of clunky dialogue and the occasional slow scene. But so what? Even those flaws add to the film’s nicely surreal atmosphere.” – Lisa Marie Bowman, Through the Shattered Lens

(This movie was nominated for review by Joe. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Fiend (Special Collectors Edition) [DVD]

Fiend (Special Collectors Edition) [DVD]
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Capsules

CAPSULE: KRYPTIC (2024)

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Kryptic is currently available on VOD for purchase or rental.

DIRECTED BY: Kourtney Roy

FEATURING: Chloe Pirrie, Jeff Gladstone

PLOT: Cryptozoology fan Kay catches a glimpse of a monster in the Canadian woods, sparking an identity crisis.

Still from kryptic (2024)

COMMENTS: I think it’s no real mystery why Kryptic fails. It’s not the fault of lead Chloe Pirrie, cinematographer David Bird, or anyone on the visual effects team. The movie is competently shot and acted; it’s a professionally assembled low-to-mid-budget genre film. There is a memorable recurring scene of, shall we say, crytpid gooeyness, and a couple of cool quick-flash shots suggesting hallucinations or buried realities: a face that suddenly takes on a demonic sheen; hands whose fingers, on second glance, appear inhumanly long. All this suggests talent on hand. And the issue isn’t really that the movie is too weird, confusing, or inconclusive, although Kryptic has more than enough strangeness to frustrate the mainstream viewer. But when it works, it works, despite the ellipticality.  No, the problem clearly lies with the screenplay.

The first thirty minutes or so, which set up the premise, are perfectly fine. Kay catches the merest glimpse of a cryptid in the woods while on an (all-female) tour hosted by a Jon Lovitz impersonator; this results in near-total amnesia. While putting together the pieces of her life from clues lying around her unfamiliar car and home, she discovers a news story about a woman named Barb Valentine, a cryptozoologist who recently disappeared—and who looks exactly like Kay. It’s a promisingly mysterious beginning, even if there is nothing especially eye-catching (the second-long encounter with the creature is even less illuminating than the Patterson-Gimlin film).

The last twenty minutes or so are also not really the problem. Some will complain that the final events explain too little, but there is at least a legitimately ian flavor to the proceedings. Most importantly, while the events of the finale are still confusing, they are at least confusing in an interesting way.

No, the problem with Kryptic is clearly its long, meandering second act. Kay follows “clues” which lead her from one mildly quirky but scarcely interesting character (nearly all of them women) to another: a hotel owner, a fellow cryptid enthusiast, a magician in a bar, a trailer park family. None of these encounters make much of an impression or provide much of a clue as to where the story is eventually heading. The only meaningful developments in the entire section occur in our heroine’s head. She starts increasingly pretending to be Barb rather than Kay—or maybe she thinks she is becoming Barb? Meanwhile, she has a lot of flashbacks (or maybe flashforwards) to the aforementioned sticky fantasy involving the cryptid, usually sparked by some observation of sex. Kryptic is not up to the challenge it sets itself of illustrating that interior character arc. The encounters that make up the bulk of the movie act are inevitably dry conversations that could be fast-forwarded through without losing much of value. It seems that the script just did not have enough decent ideas for a full 90 minutes; and yet, the movie runs 102 minutes, and feels even longer. This suggests some basic advice for new directors: when padding a film, add only the minimum amount of scenes necessary to reach feature length.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…pure high strangeness… You can’t always be in the mood for a semen-covered, super weird, mind-melter but it’s par for the course with a kooky cryptid tale.”–Johnathan Deehan, Nightmare on Film Street (festival screening)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: WITHOUT WARNING (1980)

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DIRECTED BY: Greydon Clark

FEATURING: Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Tarah Nutter, Christopher S. Nelson

PLOT: An alien hunter is on a killing spree in a small western town, but a pair of teenagers finds they must contend with a sinister truck stop owner and a shellshocked army veteran as much as the murderous monster.

Still from without warning (1980)

COMMENTS: Greydon Clark is a self-professed bargain-basement moviemaker. There’s a reason he titled his autobiography On the Cheap: My Life in Low Budget Filmmaking. (For that price his paperback is going for on Amazon, he probably could have made a whole film.) But that doesn’t set him apart from the many B-movie honchos who ply their trade. No, Clark’s superpower was that he knew how to cast stars. Faded stars, but stars nonetheless, who were willing to put in a couple days work in exchange for a small paycheck and one more moment as the biggest name on the set. In return, Clark got to use their reflected glory to give his movies a sheen of credibility and Hollywood glamour. Such Tinseltown luminaries as Joe Don Baker, Alan Hale, Jr., Jim Backus, Peter Lawford, Pat Buttram, and answered the call of a Greydon Clark production at one time or another. So when it came time for the monster-in-the-woods cheapie Without Warning, you could count on a cast list just as lavish: Larry Storch, Ralph Meeker, Neville Brand, and all signed on for a day or two. It’s that special touch that separates Clark from his contemporaries.

Two of those casting coups are actually the marquee attractions here. Jack Palance and Martin Landau, more than a decade away from taking home Oscar gold, are here to chew up half of the budget and all of the scenery. Once on the set, they clearly weren’t directed so much as unleashed. Palance has his particular brand of discomfiting fun, shouting down his scene partners with wide-eyed, raspy mania. You can’t point a flashlight at your face and tell the kids with a mad laugh, “Hey, I ain’t the crazy one” and not take some joy in your work. Meanwhile, Clark deliberately named Landau’s character Fred Dobbs after Humphrey Bogart’s paranoid fortune seeker in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Landau has clearly decided to adopt that mania and ramp it up to the 4th power. The film is giddy fun whenever the two men share the screen, and the pairing has the unexpected effect of making Palance seem cool-headed and grounded in comparison to Landau’s bubbling cauldron of PTSD- fueled mania. 

I’m talking about the actors a lot, and frankly, it’s because the story isn’t all that much. You’ve got a series of mildly gory killings, and you’ve got a pair of teen couples who march blindly into harm’s way. (One of those doomed horny teenagers is none other than David Caruso in one of his first film appearances.) It’s very much your standard horror flick. Clark does try to make the movie a little less by-the-numbers with some savvy choices. The fact that the killer in the woods turns out to be an alien hunter out to collect pelts is novel for its time. (Clark joyfully notes not only that his tale precedes the strikingly similar Predator by seven years, but that they hired the same actor–giant Kevin Peter Hall–to play the equivalent role.) He also gifts the hunter with a sci-fi weapon that looks like a street taco with oozing tentacles, an organic-looking prop that introduces a gross novelty to the proceedings. (Palance carves into the mustard-spewing little creatures with gusto.) And he even manages a neat bit of misdirection with Nutter’s Sandy, a Final Girl with a rare sense of logic and self-preservation. She’s not exactly a feminist icon, but she faces down her boyfriend’s machismo and Palance’s aggression with surprising determination.

There’s a lot of genuine behind-the-scenes talent slumming it here, too, including cinematographer Dean Cundey (future Oscar nominee for Who Framed Roger Rabbit), makeup artist Greg Cannom (future 4-time Oscar winner), and most notably, legendary monster-maker Rick Baker as the uncredited brains behind the alien hunter’s mask (which bears a striking resemblance to this guy). And it is their work that helps the film float a few feet above its humble origins.

Without Warning is by no means a hidden gem. It’s almost entirely devoid of suspense, extremely predictable, and the parts that once reveled in the grotesque now feel almost quaint. But this plucky little film punches above its weight class, succeeding at enough things to be pleasantly diverting. Greydon Clark may not have had a great film in him, but all things considered, this one’s not bad at all, and that’s something.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This cult favorite isn’t a particularly good movie but it has enough wacky elements and a few moments of genuine tension that have made it a lovable low budget gem… easily the best movie about an alien trophy hunter bagging human prey with the use of flying, plasma-slurping alien flapjacks.” – Brian Bankston, Cool Ass Cinema

(This movie was nominated for review by Brad. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Without Warning (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

Without Warning (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]
  • From Greydon Clark, the legendary cult director of Satan’s Cheerleaders, Angels Brigade, The Return, Wacko, Joysticks, Final Justice and Uninvited
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