Demons (1985)

"El sueño de la razón produce monstruos" - Goya

When I was a child in the early 1980s, I used to look at the video covers of horror movies with a mixture of trepidation, awe and covetousness. I knew that if I ever managed to get my grubby little hands on the actual tapes, I would witness a universe of unparalleled depravity and gore, in which horrible things would constantly be happening to people for no reason at all while the souls of the damned howled torturously on the soundtrack. These video covers frightened the hell out of me, and I couldn't wait to see the pure, unadulterated real thing.

Of course, when I actually started watching the movies whose covers had such a huge impact on me I couldn't help but be disappointed. The Deadly Spawn, Boarding House, The Burning - not only were they massively over-sold by their posters and video covers,, the copies I managed to see were often cut versions that had came to New Zealand via the censors in Australia or the UK. Worse, many of the movies that really would have had a strong impact on me if I'd managed to see them - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Eaten Alive etc - had completely vanished from the shelves, some the victims of NZ's new video censorship laws and others simply played to death.

It was a while before I saw anything that came close to my initial imaginings of what a horror movie must be like. The first was the legendary first twenty minutes of Dario Argento's Suspiria, and the second was the last sixty minutes of Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead. But the movie that came closest to my childhood dreams was a peripheral movie from the Argento stable, Demons

At first glance, all Demons wants to do is run around screaming and biting people on the throat and gouging out their eyes. That's all I got from it on my first few viewings, and I was perfectly happy with it. But this time around I've realised that there's something going on beneath the skin, something that's threatening to swell and burst and splatter green goo over everything.

The story of Demons is really something. It opens with Cheryl (Natasha Hovey), a music student, taking a train to Berlin on her way to university. She starts getting glimpses of a sinister masked man (Michele Soavi), who then stalks her through the subway... in order to give her a free movie ticket. She convinces her friend Kathy (Paola Cozzo) to bunk off school and take in the movie. At the theatre, they encounter an amusingly diverse crowd.

First and most fun are Tony the pimp (Bobby Rhodes) and two sex workers, Rosemary (Geretta Geretta) and Carmen (Fabiola Toledo). While they clown around, Rosemary takes a silver demon mask (reminiscent of the one worn by the subway stalker at the start) and tries it on, cutting her face in the process. There's also Werner (Alex Serra) and his daughter Liz (Bettina Ciampolini); as Werner is blind, he relies on Liz to describe the movie for him as they watch it. Liz takes the opportunity to secretly make out with her lover (Claudio Spadaro) while Werner is oblivious. Two young guys, George (Urbano Berberini) and Ken (Karl Zinny) take a shine to Cheryl and Kathy and decide to limpet themselves to the reluctant young women. The rest of the audience is fairly anonymous, though it also includes Fiore Argento, daughter of Dario and half-sister of Asia.

Once everyone has taken their seats, the movie begins. Of course, it turns out to be a horror movie. It tells the story of a group of young people who break into Nostradamus's tomb in the middle of the night, where they find a prophecy about how the world will be overrun by demons. One of them (Michele Soavi - the same actor who played the masked man at the start) finds a demon mask and puts it on, despite his friend's warning that anyone who wears the mask will become a demon.

Just as this happens, Rosemary finds that the cut on her face from the mask in the lobby has started to bleed again. She heads to the bathroom to get cleaned up, and is understandably distressed when she finds that the cut has swollen to a boil, which bursts and splatters green goo everywhere. Soon Carmen goes to find her friend, only to discover that - just like the guy in the movie - Rosemary has changed into a demon. She slashes Carmen's face and they both run off. Soon Carmen finds herself trapped behind the movie screen as her own injury starts to swell and burst. She pushes her way through the screen, transforming into a demon as she does, and in this way the movie quite literally bursts into the audience.

It's at this point that Demons goes absolutely nuts. After a spectacular on-screen transformation Carmen starts slaughtering people at the front of the auditorium, while a gleefully cackling Rosemary runs in from the back and starts creatively killing everyone she sees. The soundtrack thunders with '80s heavy metal, and everybody runs around screaming, especially once they discover that the exits have all been bricked up and they are all trapped in the theatre. Anyone who is wounded by a demon becomes a demon themselves, sooner or later. The movie immediately degenerates into a delirious orgy of violence and gore from which it never returns. Obviously, I am using the word "degenerates" as a compliment.

Meanwhile, a carload of young punks are driving around snorting cocaine out of a Coke can. They bicker amongst themselves childishly and throw tantrums when one of them spills the coke. They don't seem to have anything to do with anything until they attract the attention of the police, and end up ducking into the Metropol through a side entrance, which they leave ajar. As they go in, something sneaks out...

Horror is perhaps the most self-referential of all movie genres, and horror movie aficionados tend to be unusually film literate. The movie references in Demons are even deeper and more multi-layered than is usual in the genre. The concept of a horror-film-within-a-film influencing events in the "real" world is quite common (see such movies as Bigas Luna's remarkable Anguish, the so-so Popcorn or John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, for example), but none of them take the theme quite as far as Demons.

The masks seen in the movie, which seemingly cause the demon plague, are similar to those seen in The Mask of Satan, the first great Italian horror movie, directed by Mario Bava, the father of Demons director Lamberto Bava. In Bava Sr.'s film, the masks have spikes on the inside and are nailed to the faces of the movie's villains; in Bava Jr.'s film, it is a cut on the face from the inside of the mask that causes the demon plague.

The name of the theatre, Metropol, alludes both to an actual famous Berlin cinema and to Fritz Lang's 1927 expressionist film Metropolis; there is also a poster for Metropolis seen in the theatre. Germany is, of course, the original home of the horror movie thanks to expressionistic movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. There is also a poster for Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of Nosferatu in the Metropol, bringing the expressionistic horror movie closer to the present, as well as an in-joke poster for co-writer/producer Dario Argento's movie Four Flies on Grey Velvet. (There are also posters for Paul Newman's uninteresting Harry & Son, for the anti-nuclear weapons concert movie No Nukes, and for the Australian band AC/DC, whose music the filmmakers probably wanted to use.)

The casting of a grown-up Nicoletta Elmi as the Metropol's usherette Ingrid is a multi-layered reference in itself. Although only about twenty at the time, Elmi was an Italian horror movie veteran, having started her career in Mario Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve in 1972 [*]. Elmi's biggest impression before Demons was probably in her small role as a sadistic child in Dario Argento's Deep Red, though she also appeared in such gems as Paul Morrissey's Flesh for Frankenstein and Aldo Lado's Who Saw Her Die? She hadn't been visible in the genre for almost ten years, but she had retained her distinctive looks as she grew up, and although Ingrid is a bit of a red herring, Elmi's sinister (and now also sexy) presence confirms that the characters are definitely trapped in an Italian horror movie.

In the movie within the movie (which I don't think is ever given a title) the actor who wears the demon mask and cuts himself on it is the same actor who plays the masked man handing out free tickets at the start of Demons. Soavi also worked behind the scenes as Lamberto Bava's Assistant Director, a position he had also held on previous Bava and Dario Argento movies. While working on Demons he also filmed behind-the-scenes footage for a documentary called Dario Argento's World of Horror, in which he deliberately turns his camera to a mirror and films himself and his camera to accompany his own directorial credit. Somehow, Soavi also found time to film a music video for Claudio Simonetti's theme music.

Along with the aforementioned mask, the other props from the movie-within-the-movie that we see in the lobby are a motorcycle and a samurai sword. Towards the end of the movie, one of the heroes leaps on the bike, grabs the sword, and starts hooning around the theatre cutting demons to shreds. In this scene, it's not just the evil that's come out of the movie but also a means of curtailing it.

And of course in the scene where Carmen is infected, she finds herself pushing through series after series of red curtains - a recurring Dario Argento image from movies like Deep Red and Opera, usually signifying the beginning of the journey into horror - and finds herself behind the movie screen itself. As she starts to transform into a demon, her screams mingle with those of the movie until she finally rips through the screen itself. This scene was copied in the 2012 movie Gangster Squad, in a scene that appeared in the trailer but was ultimately cut out of the movie beause of concerns about a real-life mass murder in a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. [**] It is also reminiscent of a scene in the same year's The Purple Rose of Cairo, written & directed by Woody Allen, in which a character steps out of a movie into the audience.

Apart from its surprising metatextual sophistication, there is a lot to enjoy about Demons just in the realms of good dumb fun. There are many excellent transformation and gore effects by Sergio Stivaletti, on only his second movie, which still impress today; in particular the elaborate transformation of Carmen still looks amazing. The whole cast gives amusingly over-the-top performances, in particular Bobby Rhodes as Tony the pimp and Geretta Geretta as Rosemary, the lead demon. The seemingly unrelated scenes of the coked-up punks driving around Italy offer their own kind of dumb fun. The unexpected arrival of a helicopter at a pivotal moment is cited by some as being the best moment in the entire movie, and the amazing apocalyptic ending (which features another cameo from a distinctive young horror veteran, Giovanni Frezza from Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery and Manhattan Baby, among others) sends the movie off on a high note.

There are also a few unexpected and effective moments of quiet horror. Many people point to the scenes of the demons prowling the corridors with glowing eyes, but I would single out the beginnign of Kathy's transformation as my favourite creepy moment in the entire movie. Having stumbled through the previous scene in a state of shock, Kathy looks up at Cheryl and asks in a distinctively different accent to the one she's used in the rest of the movie, "This place... Where am I?" and then, as her eyes turn red, "Who are you?" The implication that the demons may be rational creatures driven to insane bloodlust as they come into our world is nicely disturbing. Of course, the horned demon that bursts impossibly out of Kathy's back moments later is pretty cool as well.

On the downside, most of the female roles are pretty weak. Not that Demons is a movie with well-written male characters, as characterisation is pretty much beside the point here, but all of the women in the movie basically scream and cry while the male characters tell them to pull themselves together. Horror is one of the few genres which regularly presents women as strong and capable, so it's a shame to see Demons letting the side down. Other than that, unless you're going to carp about the plot being weak - which is also beside the point - or things not making much sense - which almost is the point, as the more "what the fuck?" moments are also the most fun - there's nothing to complain about here.

I recommend Demons to anyone who likes wild & crazy horror movies. If you enjoyed the first two Evil Dead movies or Rec 3, this should be right up your alley. And what's more, there is a sequel that is just about as good as the original (as well as various fake sequels of wildly varying quality).

But that is another story...

[*] Bava Jr. worked as an assistant director on both Twitch of the Death Nerve and his father's next film, Baron Blood, which also featured Elmi. ^

[**] I actually saw this trailer before a screening of The Dark Knight Rises on the very night that the murders were committed - luckily not in the same theatre. ^

Troll (1986)

I first saw Troll in the mid '80s, when we were shown it as a treat at school. Other treat videos that same teacher showed us included Maro Camus's spaghetti western The Revenge of Trinity, Rumble Fish, The Terminator, and the Jackie Chan/Sammo Hung/Yuen Biao kung fu comedy Wheels On Meals. In hindsight, that year was probably a big influence on my subsequent filmgoing habits.

Troll certainly made an impression on me. Although it was never actually scary, it had an unsettling vibe to the whole thing. Although it's clearly intended to be a kid's movie, it starts off by seemingly doing away with a little girl so that a hideous shape-changing troll can take her place. It then deals with most of the supporting cast in surreal but fairly ruthless manner, all the while maintaining a genuine weirdness. It's the movie where Sonny Bono mutates, swells and splits apart, finally exploding into a mess of fairy-land foliage and bizarre goblin creatures, all of whom start to sing.

The movie is told from the point of view of the Potter family (and yes, both the father and the son are called Harry). It's the daughter in this family, Wendy, who is replaced by a troll. Her parents, Harry Potter Sr. (Michael Moriarty) and Anne Potter (Shelley Hack), are only slightly bemused when their daughter starts foaming at the mouth, growling unnervingly, and packing away burger after burger before trying to take a bite out of her dad. "It's the stress of the mood," they shrug, and keep bumbling through their day. Only Harry Potter Jr. seems to notice that things have started to turn completely fucking nuts.

Fortunately for Harry Jr., one of the other tenants is a witch called Eunice St. Clair (June Lockhart) who is able to explain everything. The troll, it seems, used to be her boyfriend, a wizard called Torok. (Amusingly, in the portrait of the pair of them Eunice has hanging on the wall, Torok is painted to resemble director John Carl Buechler.) Torok had started a war in an attempt to unite the human world and the fairy world, and was turned into a troll as punishment; now he is trying to pick up where he left off. Eunice has been standing guard for centuries, waiting for him to make his move.

Meanwhile Wendy is going from apartment to apartment, turning all of the the tenants into mythical creatures and fairyland foliage. Interestingly, although all of the men turn into ugly little rubber creatures, the only woman (Julia Louis Dreyfus) is turned into a group of good looking and mostly naked young women. Hm. In the midst of all this, Harry Sr. plays air guitar while blaring his record collection and Anne just kind of wanders around obliviously.

Some parts of Troll are pretty hard to take. A scene towards the start, where most of the supporting cast is introduced during a fire alarm, is particularly offputting. On top of the squalling alarm, everybody's performances are turned up to 11 and there's a lt of frantic running around and screaming. The moment the alarm was turned off I literally breathed a sigh of relief and the movie instantly became a lot more likeable. By the time we got to the first transformation scene, I was completely sold.

The cast is a mixed bag. Moriarty, who at around this time was giving eccentric and nuanced method performances in Larry Cohen movies, plays Harry Sr. as a grinning dope, and Hack is at her most vacant. Little Jenny Beck looks like she's having a ball playing Torok-as-Wendy; she had recently played Elizabeth, the human/alien hybrid, in V. June Lockhart is funny as Eunice, and there's a cameo by her daughter Anne Lockhart. Noah Hathaway, as Harry Jr., is a bit wooden and is given a few too many reaction close-ups. By far the best actor in the movie is Phil Fondacaro as Malcolm, a university professor who Torok/Wendy befriends. Fondacaro also plays Torok the troll, whose voice is provided by prolific voice artist Frank Welker (Gremlins, Scooby Doo).

The special effects  are mostly pretty good, in a low-budget kind of way. Director John Carl Buechler was also the main makeup effects guy for Empire, and he showcases his own work extensively here. Torok is the besy creation here; he's quite convincing and his face is mobile and expressive. Most of the other creatures are simpler puppets, but they share a rather charning ugly cuteness. Sonny Bono's transformation scene is a real highlight; I remember that getting a lot of laughs, and other vocal noises, when we watched it at school about quarter of a century ago.

Troll was mostly filmed on a sound stage in Italy with a mostly Italian crew, including cinematographer Romano Albani, who had previously worked with Dario Argento on Inferno and Phenomena. It has some of that distinctive Italian horror flavour, and not just because the whole movie is looped in typical Italian tradition. This is because it is produced by the father & son team of Albert Band and Charles Band, for their notorious Empire Productions, who were always fond of filming in Europe if they could get it for cheap. I guess you could think of Troll as one of the Bands' pioneering efforts, along with the previous year's Ghoulies and the next year's Dolls (from Troll scribe Ed Naha). Charles Band's next company, Full Moon, would be notorious for its endless recycling of the "small things on the rampage" idea.

The apartment sets for Troll were reused almost immediately for another Empire picture, David Schmoeller's Crawlspace, which also shares a number of few members but otherwise has nothing in common with Troll except in being deeply weird. Another Empire reference is that there is are posters for Parasite 3D and Dungeonmaster poster on the son's wall. Dungeonmaster is a weird, disjointed movie in its own right, not helped by the fact that it has seven directors, including Buechler's debut.

Re-experiencing the weirdness of Troll was oddly satisfying. I am tempted to follow it up by revisiting another movie John Carl Buechler directed for Empire, the similarly bizarre but much gorier Cellar Dweller. Until next time...

Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)

Baron von Frankenstein (Udo Kier) lives in isolation with his sister Baroness Katrina von Frankenstein (Monique van Vooren) and their children Monica (Nicoletta Elmi) and Erik (Marco Liofredi). The Baron has already completed a female creature (or zombie, as he calls her, played by gorgeous Italian model Dalila Di Lazzaro) and has nearly finished her male counterpart; he is now looking for a suitably virile head, and for some reason he is determined that it must have the perfect nose. Once the male is completed, he plans to mate them to breed a Serbian master race (presumably all with perfect noses) that he can rule over.

As the Baron's sexual energy is all poured into his creations (quite literally), the Baroness seeks sexual fulfilment with a horny young farmhand, Nicholas (Joe Dallesandro), who she has caught in flagrante delicto with several young women. By sheer coincidence, the Baron also has his eye on Nicholas, but in a case of mistaken identity he decides that Nicholas's friend Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic) is the one with the perfect head ("Look at that nasem!"), not realising that Sacha is a sexually repressed homosexual on the verge of entering a monastery. One enormous pair of shears later, the Baron's male creature has a new head, but the Baron's plans to mate him with the female creature do not go as planned. Indeed, the final act of the movie sees almost every character having their desires thwarted in extremely gruesome fashion.

The only exceptions are the Baron and Baroness's two young children. Through all of this, Monica and Erik have been watching their parents' activities closely. The movie opened with them imitating the Baron's experiments using a doll (which bled when decapitated); it ends with them taking up scalpels and closing in on sole survivor Nicholas, who is suspended helpless from the ceiling. It had been mentioned that the Baron and Baroness's parents are coming to visit. I wonder how they will react to what they find...

It's easy to see why Flesh for Frankenstein horrified many viewers on its first release in 1973. It was released with Andy Warhol's name attached to it, which drew in people who would normally not go anywhere near an exploitative horror movie. Even those who heeded Warhol's affinity for trash as art would have been troubled by what they saw here. The combination of hoary horror tropes with vivid gore and sex would be troubling enough, but the bloody and explicit scenes of necrophilia are still beyond the pale forty years later. Not content with the usual orifices, the Baron opens the stitching on his female creation and penetrates her internal organs, leading to the movie's most infamous line (parodying Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris): "To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder!"

I first saw Flesh for Frankenstein on video in the '90s, and loved its pitch-black humour and outrageous combination of sex and gore. Watching it again now, it seems more extreme than ever and just as entertaining. It's a good looking, lushly produced movie with a beautiful score, which just makes all of the taboo-busting seem all the more ripe. I'd love to see it in its original 3D, just to see the various scenes where blood and guts were clearly supposed to jut out at the audience. I'd snap up a 3D blu-ray in a second, but I'd much rather see it on the big screen.

The blood and gore is played for laughs, with the camera often lingering on patently fake props of severed heads and limbs, and yet I still found much of it to be quite queasy. Part of this is doubtless because of the atmosphere of absolute depravity that permeates the entire movie. I doubt that many people get turned on watching it. In fact, most scenes featuring sex and nudity are immediately followed by scenes of extreme gore, as if the movie is deliberately cock-blocking the audience. Not that the sex is itself particularly titillating; one hilarious scene features full-on armpit sucking, complete with the wettest sound effects imaginable.

It's fun to look at the ways in which the filmmakers play with and invert ideas from earlier takes on Frankenstein. In Mary Shelley's novel and James Whale's movie Bride of Frankenstein, a male creature is made first, and then a mate is provided; here the female creature is the first to be completed, and a male is created specifically to mate with her (Husbandry of Frankenstein). In Whale's first Frankenstein movie, a "criminal brain" is accidentally substituted for the desired "normal brain"; here the desired "virile heterosexual" head is missed and a "repressed homosexual" head is substituted in error. In the novel, Frankenstein marries his adopted sister; here he has married his biological sister. And then there's the simple fact that Frankenstein's creature(s) are usually depicted as looking monstrous (a rare exception is the made-for-tv movie Frankenstein: the True Story, also from 1973 and co-written by Christopher Isherwood); here they are both depicted as attractive and desirable, despite their wetly fresh scars complete with heavy stitching.

German actor Udo Kier is perfect in the role of Baron von Frankenstein. His unique line delivery and distinctive good looks ensure that the Baron is a consistently funny and charismatic presence, even though he is never even remotely sympathetic. Kier had already been in several movies - most notably the notoriously gruesome Mark of the Devil, for which audiences were given sick bags - but Baron von Frankenstein was his breakthrough role and lead to a prolific career as a beloved cult actor in all manner of genre, mainstream and arthouse movies. Writer/director Paul Morrissey quite literally discovered Kier on his way to make the movie - they just happened to be sitting next to each other on the plane to Italy and struck up a friendship.

For me, the other most notable cast member is Nicoletta Elmi as Monica. A very distinctive-looking young girl with red hair and freckles, Elmi made memorable appearances in a number of Italian horror movies of the period. Many people remember her as the cruel child who impales a lizard (seemingly for real) in Dario Argento's Deep Red; she also had notable roles in two Mario Bava movies, Baron Blood and Twitch of the Death Nerve, Luigi Bazzoni's Footprints on the Moon, and as the main victim in Aldo Lado's chilling child-murder giallo Who Saw Her Die?

Elmi's biggest role was as the lead in Massimo Dallamano's possession movie The Cursed Medallion, at age 11. Her final film to date was as the beautiful, sinister usherette in Lamberto Bava's Demons. She subsequently retired from acting (aged 21!) and has since become either a doctor or a speech therapist, depending on which source you trust. I'd love for someone to track her down and interview her about her sterling Italian horror movie career.

The other actors acquit themselves well enough, although campy over-acting or wooden non-acting are the order of the day. Arno Juerging is particularly funny as Frankenstein's assistant Otto, though he would make a bigger mark in Blood for Dracula (more about that later). Monique van Vooren is effective as Baroness Katrina von Frankenstein, managing to create some sympathy for a self-centred character whose dialogue is largely savage invective.

Although it was written & directed by the American Paul Morrissey, best known for the films he made for Andy Warhol, Flesh for Frankenstein was made in Italy with a mostly European cast and a talented Italian crew. For example, cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller had shot the classic Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and went on to such things as Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso and Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper, while special effects designer Carlo Rambaldi worked on everything from Mario Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve to Alien and E.T.. Morrissey's only import was Joe Dallesandro, from his Warhol movies, whose New York accent sticks out like a sore thumb.

Prolific genre director Antonio Marghareti was credited as co-director on Italian prints for quota purposes, and in an interview in Fangoria he took credit for "saving" the movie, saying that he took over directing both this and its sister film Blood for Dracula at the producers' insistence because of Paul Morrissey's incompetence. Both Morrissey and Udo Kier have disputed this, with Kier saying that he was never directed by anyone other than Morrissey. It seems likely that Marghareti did some second-unit work, directing some special effects sequences (e.g. a bat attack on Monica & Eric).

Speaking of Blood for Dracula, that movie was made back-to-back with this one. The story goes that they wrapped this one in the morning, Udo Kier, Arno Juerging and Joe Dallesandro got their hair cut during the lunch break, and then they started filming Blood for Dracula that afternoon. We'll be looking at that one next. Until next time, then...

John Dies at the End (2012)

John Dies at the End is a rock 'n' roll good-time movie. It's like a stoner buddy comedy, but instead of smoking pot the characters inject a sentient hallucinogenic drug which can allow people to travel through time and to alternate dimensions. At times it seems like a non-stop montage of disgusting creatures and outrageous gore. I'd like to see it attain an Evil Dead 2 level of cult status.

The story is kind of double-narrated, in that it is framed as being told by David (Chase Williamson) to a journalist (Paul Giamatti), but David also has a near-constant inner monologue that Giamatti's character is not privvy to. The movie them throws us into the deep end with a sequence that it does not tell us actually takes place after the main story has finished, in which David and his buddy John (Rob Mayes) are called out to help a young woman who has a problem with her undead boyfriend. After encountering a bizarre creature that forms itself out of pieces of meat from a deep freezed, David and John realise that each of them see the girl who has called them as looking like a completely different person - the ramifications of which are only made clear towards the end of the movie.

We then flash back to their initial encounter with the sentient hallucinogenic drug, known colloquially as "Soy Sauce," and from there into a non-stop wild ride as they realise that they find themselves in the position of having to save the world, without yet knowing that they are saving it from.

Part of what makes John Dies at the End work so well is the obvious glee it takes in its own inventiveness. It's a frantic cavalcade of bizarre and twisted ideas piled precariously on top of each other, cackling madly as it goes, and yet even throwaway bits turn out to have purpose; for example, even a small bit of dialogue about phantom limb syndrome early in the movie turns out to be important. Once you get your head around the non-linear and flashback-heavy structure - the filmmakers expect the audience to put the sequence of events together in their heads - the story holds together more coherently than I expected from the setup. I wouldn't say that it's tightly plotted - it's far too convoluted than that and quite a few loose ends are left hanging - but it's certainly not just random weirdness for its own sake.

John Dies at the End also benefits from a strong cast. Newcomers Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes are great fun as David and John, and they're backed by a supporting cast of strong character actors, including Glynn Turman as a confused cop, the Tall Man himself, Angus Scrimm,  as a priest, skinny creature actor Doug Jones, Clancy Brown cast against type as a slick and charismatic spiritualist, and Paul Giamatti as the sceptical journalist listening to David's story.

Unfortunately, as ths cast summary shows, there are no strong female characters in John Dies at the End. I gather that the role of Amy (Fabianne Therese) was reduced considerably for the movie, and others were left out of the film version. Even Molly the dog (as the was called in the original book by David Wong) was changed from female to male (and now called Bark Lee). This is a consistent problem in writer/director Don Coscarelli's career; the only strong female lead in any of his work is Ellen in Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, a character carried over from Joe R. Lansdale's original story.

Despite this demerit, all in all this is a greatvehicle for Coscarelli's talents (he previously wrote & directed the Phantasm movies, Beastmaster, and Bubba Ho-Tep). Please make movies more frequently if you can, Mr. Coscarelli.

Deadly Blessing (1981)

Young farmers Martha (Maren Jensen, Athena in the original Battlestar Galactica) and Jim (Douglas Barr, Bill Stillfield in Designing Women) find it aggravating enough that Jim's father Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine, Harry Booth in The Black Hole), who leads a strict Amish-like sect called the Hittites, disapproves of their marriage enough to have cut Jim off from his family. But when Jim is unexpectedly run over and killed by his own tractor in the middle of the night, his simple cousin William (Michael Berryman, Pluto in The Hills Have Eyes) is stabbed while peeping through windows and then strung up in the barn, and someone puts a water moccasin in Martha's bath, it's time to buy a gun. Because this is a Wes Craven movie, and Craven has no time for protagonists who respond to threat with anything less than lethal force.

Soon, Martha's friends Vicky (Susan Buckner, Patty Simcox in Grease) and Lara (Sharon Stone, Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct) have ralied around so that they can tell her about their spider-nightmares and try to score Martha's Hittite brother-in-law John (Jeff East, Young Clark Kent in Superman: The Movie). Meanwhile, Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine, Dutch in The Wild Bunch) keeps going on about how they are with the Incubus (undefined here but usually a male demon that seduces or rapes women), non-Hittite mother & daughter Louisa (Lois Nettleton, Sister Marion in Mirror Mirror 2) and Faith (Lisa Harman, Tabitha in Tabitha) act weird and vaguely threatening, Vicky maces a dog, John tries to rape his fiancée/cousin Melissa (Colleen Riley, Jane in The Hills Have Eyes Part II), Lara finds a milk carton filled with blood, Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine, Cabbie in Escape from New York) beats the shit out of a little kid, and a Wes Craven tv movie plays at a hard-top theatre.


Despite all of the weirdness and the trappings from other horror subgenres, Deadly Blessing is the closest Wes Craven came to directing an old-school slasher. A Nightmare on Elm Street and Shocker are supernatural stories with undead villains, Last House on the Left is a rape/revenge movie, The Hills Have Eyes is closer to the rural massacre subgenre, and the Scream movies are metafictional slasher parodies. Deadly Blessing, at the end of the day, is about someone putting on their black leather gloves and killing people, complete with one of the genre's oldest and most hackneyed pseudo-psychosexual rationales; everything else is just red herrings or window dressing.

Except for that goddamned ending. But more about that later.

The script may be all over the place, but Deadly Blessing looks lovely and has some good set-pieces, from the huge, empty spaces seen in the opening shots of Hittites working the fields to the claustrophobic scene of Sharon Stone being stalked through a spider-infested barn. James Horner's score may steal too bluntly from Jerry Goldsmith's for The Omen but it helps make the scope of the movie seem bigger than the usual mad slasher flick.

Sharon Stone features in the two best horror set-pieces in the movie. The most famous is a dream sequence, which made it onto the poster (see the bottom of this post for both a clip and the poster). The other, and my favourite part of the movie, is the aforementioned scene where she is locked in a barn filled with cobwebs and spiders and possibly the killer and definitely a corpse. Deadly Blessing was Stone's first speaking role, and although her lack of experience shows in other scenes, she really shines in this dialogue-free sequence.


(Incidentally, legend usually has it that Stone had the spider that was dropped in her mouth de-fanged, which lead to it starving to death. This is untrue: freeze-frame that sequence and you can tell that it's a fake spider. The large huntsman spider that crawls on her décolletage is the one that she had de-fanged.)

The bathtub scene in Deadly Blessing was apparently inspired by a dream Craven had the night before shooting; he later memorably reused it in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Fans of the auteur theory will be able to find a number of themes that also appear in other Craven movies: a stern father figure, a sense of isolation, visceral nightmare sequences, booby traps, protagonists who fight back as fiercely as they're attacked, and of course a silly producer-prescribed ending.




After everything has been wrapped up, rough justice has been served, and even Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine, Mermaid Man in SpongeBob SquarePants) has pronounced that "the messenger of the Incubus is dead!", Martha is left alone in the house. She's now widowed and pregnant and has to tend to the farm entirely on her own. Then the Incubus jumps out of a hole in the floor and drags Martha down to hell. The End! Then the audience says, "What?" Yes, it's one of those clichéd '80s horror shock endings that not only makes no sense, it makes a mockery of everything that's come before! The end of Deadly Blessing is particularly out of left field, but it's part of a long tradition that can be traced back through Friday the 13th and Carrie to Deliverance and beyond.

All in all, Deadly Blessing is a fairly good entry in Wes Craven's extremely uneven directorial career, and a slightly unconventional slasher movie with some utterly tacked-on pieces of a supernatural horror movie. Craven's main contribution to the script seems to be the horror set-pieces, which are the best parts of the movie even while working against the story. If you're looking for an entertaining and nostalgic piece of '80s horror nonsense with more class than sleaze, this is a good bet.

This post was originally written for Stacie Ponder's Film Club, but I got in too late. So it goes.