RetView #68 – The Birds (1963)

Title: The Birds

Year of Release: 1963

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Length: 119 mins

Starring: Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, Veronica Cartwright

Few films can legitimately lay claim to being bona fide classics, though most of The Birds’ accolades came after the fact. In 2016 it was deemed to be culturally, historically or aesthetically significant enough to be selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the US Library of Congress. By then it had also won the Horror Hall of Fame award (1991) and been voted the seventh-scariest movie of all time by a poll carried out on the British public by Channel 5 (2006). The film has been tremendously influential, having been referenced by filmmakers Guillermo del Toro and John Carpenter, among others and on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes it has a 95% rating, the critics consensus stating; “Proving once again that build-up is the key to suspense, Hitchcock successfully turned birds into some of the most terrifying villains in horror history.”

All this praise is remarkable considering that the movie was panned by several notable critics on its release. Writing for the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann called it, “the worst thriller of his [Hitchcock’s] that I can remember,” while Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the famous director, “Was once widely quoted as saying he hated actors. After his 1960 ‘Psycho’ and now ‘The Birds,’ it must be fairly obvious that he has extended his abhorrence to the whole human race.”

On the surface the plot is simple enough, but the real beauty is hidden in the complicated interplay between the primary characters. The movie opens in a San Francisco pet shop, where carefree socialite Melanie Daniels (Hedren) encounters Mitch (Taylor) who is looking to buy some lovebirds for his sister’s birthday. For some bizarre reason she pretends to work there, and Mitch plays along, though he recognizes her from a previous court appearance. When the jig is up, Melanie asks how he knows her name, to which he replies, “A little birdie told me.” Brilliant.

At around 29-minutes, after being attacked by a legitimate angry bird, Melanie holds a cotton ball against her wound. The way her hand and forearm are positioned makes the appearance of a bird, with a ring on her finger forming the eye. Tippi Hedren later confirmed this, and said that Hitchcock had instructed her to insert subtle hints about the upcoming bird attack throughout the film.When Mitch leaves, Melanie buys the lovebirds and follows him all the way to Bodega Bay where he’s visiting his parents, only to give him the birds and tell him that she loathes him, none of which is remotely weird, apparently, even in the sixties.

Things get spicy when Melanie meets Mitch’s previous love interest, a schoolteacher called Annie (Pleshette) and his overbearing mother (Cartwright) who doesn’t think anyone is good enough for her son. Shades of Psycho there. Amidst all this simmering tension, it’s almost a relief when some birds go rogue and start dive bombing people to death. We never really find out why, though Hitchcock later said in an interview that the birds rise up against the humans as punishment for taking nature for granted. The only context we are given in the film is a radio report heard near the end which indicates the Bodega Bay attack is not an isolated incident and the problem is so bad that the military might be forced to intervene.

What many modern viewers may not pick up on are the hidden implications in the plot and nods to popular culture. The Birds was made shortly after Chinese leader Mao Zedong ordered all the sparrows in the country to be killed as part of the ‘four pests’ campaign during the Great Leap Forward because they ‘ate too much grain.’ Starting in 1958, hundreds of millions of birds were killed causing an unmitigated environmental disaster known as the Great Famine (1959-61) which ultimately led to the deaths of an estimated 45-million people. Too late Mao realized that he sparrows didn’t just eat grain, they were also nature’s pest control, and without them locusts and other insects were allowed to run riot decimating crops and disrupting the area’s fragile ecosystem. With this fresh in the news at the time, the insinuation was that though calling in the military to kill the birds might solve the immediate problem (angry birds) it would spark a similar chain of events in America which could lead to the downfall of Western civilisation. It is assumed that the movie does not finish with the usual THE END graphic, because Hitchcock wanted to give the impression of continuing, unending terror.

The Birds was loosely based on the story of the same name by Daphne du Maurier which appeared in her 1952 collection The Apple Tree. Coincidentally enough, on August 18th 1961, as Hitchcock was developing the movie, there was a mass bird attack on the seaside town of Capitola, which was substituted for Bodega Bay in the movie. It was an early purveyor of the much-overlooked genre known as ‘eco horror’ which usually feature animals or nature striking back and taking their revenge on humans. Other examples include Jaws (1975), Cujo (1983), Lake Placid (1999), Black Water (2007) and even Doomwatch (1972). Hedren was 33 years old at the time of filming (and ironically had a five-year old daughter called Melanie, as in Melanie Griffith. It’s unclear whether Hitchcock deliberately gave her character the same name) but was listed as being 28 in the press release because 33 was considered too old for a starlet to be making her big screen debut. Over the years numerous salacious rumours have come to light regarding Hitchcock’s treatment of her, the situation itself providing the storyline for a HBO movie called The Girl (2012) in which Hedren was played by Sienna Miller.

Trivia Corner:

When audiences left the U.K. premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square, London, they were greeted by the sound of screeching and flapping birds from loudspeakers hidden in the trees to scare them further.

RetView #67 – Xtro (1983)

Title: Xtro

Year of Release: 1983

Director: Harry Bromley Davenport

Length: 81 mins

Starring: Bernice Stegers, Philip Sayer, Simon Nash, Maryam d’Abo, Danny Brainin

If you watch a thousand sci-fi horror movies, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything else as bizarre and downright weird as this one. Tony (played with unsettling aplomb by a 10-year old Simon Nash who later wound up in Birds of a Feather) is a disturbed little boy badly affected by the sudden disappearance of his father three years earlier who he claims was taken by a bright light, the implication being that he was abducted by aliens. His mother (Stegers) and her new lover (Brainin), unwilling to accept the alien abduction theory, assume that he simply ran off. As you can probably imagine, everything is sent onto a tailspin when he reappears announcing ominously “I’m back.”

Truth be told, daddy (Sam Philips, played by Philip Sayer, who also appeared in The Hunger with David Bowie before tragically died of cancer just a few years later at the age of just 42) makes one heck of an entrance, bursting out of a woman’s horrifically distended belly fully-formed and chewing through an umbilical cord. All things considered, he makes a decent go of fitting back into the family, seemingly oblivious to the friction he causes, but his plans go somewhat awry when Tony finds him chowing down on his pet snake’s eggs. This isn’t long after the poor kid walks in on his mum bumping uglies with someone who wasn’t his dad, but he seems far more traumatised by this most recent event. And things only get weirder from there. When he makes amends with poor, traumatized Tony, Sam also sucks his blood, vampire-like, in the process passing on some rather impressive special powers which Tony uses to bring his toys to life. He then sends these toys, which are now magically life-size, to brutally murder an elderly neighbour who, upon finding Harry the pet snake in her salad, crushes it with a hammer and delivers it back in a plastic bag. He also sets them on Analise, the French au pair (d’Abo, who would go on to be a Bond girl in 1987’s The Living Daylights) and her boyfriend. In fact, Tony becomes increasingly belligerent as the movie progresses and is a right little twat by the end, when all the main characters converge at the holiday cottage where the initial disappearance occurred.

Upon its home video release in 1983, the film was subject of a prosecution case in relation to obscenity laws, and consequently got caught up in the whole ‘video nasty’ furore. Surprisingly, it had actually been passed uncut by the BBFC with a well-deserved ’18’ certificate. Several different endings were made, and which one you get depends on which version you see. A pair of sequels followed, Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1991) and Xtro 3: Watch the Skies (1995), neither of which bore any relation to the characters in the original. According to Wikipedia, in 2011, director Bromley-Davenport confirmed that a fourth instalment was in the works but 11 years on it is yet to be delivered, which maybe isn’t such a bad thing.

Writing for Starburst magazine, Alan Jones suggested that stegers had been ‘horribly mis-cast’ but went on to state that the special effects were “minor miracles of ingenuity” for their low budget and admired the movie for “trying so earnestly to resuscitate low budget exploitation sf/horror films in this country.” Variety found the film “too silly and underdeveloped in story values to expand beyond diehard fans” and that “Harry B Davenport builds little suspense and no thrills in a film devoid of stuntwork or action scenes. It’s just another “check out that makeup” exercise, consisting of brief scenes and poor continuity.”

Critic Roger Ebert absolutely panned the film, awarding it 1 of 4 stars, saying, “Most exploitation movies are bad, but not necessarily painful to watch. They may be incompetent, they may be predictable, they may be badly acted or awkwardly directed, but at some level the filmmakers are enjoying themselves and at least trying to entertain an audience. ‘Xtro’ is an exception, a completely depressing, nihilistic film, an exercise in sadness. It’s movies like this that give movies a bad name.”

Retrospectively, TV Guide went one better (or worse) in ‘awarding’ the film 0 of 4 stars, calling it, “A vile exercise in grotesque special effects” and “An excuse to parade all manner of perversities across the screen,” further stating that, “Not only is this disgusting, it lacks anything that remotely resembles suspense.”

Easy to see, then, how it warranted three sequels.

Trivia Corner:

Despite never having met him, Queen guitarist Brian May was so affected by Swansea-born actor Philip Sayer’s premature death that he wrote the song Just One Life, which appeared on his 1992 solo album Back to the Light, in his honour.

Previous RetView entries can be found HERE.

Ryan Adams – Nebraska (album review)

Ryan ‘Not Bryan’ Adams has covered Bruce Springsteen‘s muted masterpiece Nebraska in its entirety. That came as a bit of a surprise. Not that it should. He has form in this area, having also issued song-for-song covers of both Taylor Swift’s 1989 album (2015) and Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (2022). Adams is nothing if not resourceful. After being cancelled and then (sort of) uncancelled when charges of sexual misconduct against him were dropped after an FBI investigation, Nebraska was his sixth album of 2022, and two of them were doubles. That’s some effort. Even more admirable is the fact that he made it free to download. That at least injects some integrity into the project and suggests he did it out of genuine respect rather than as a quick cash grab, and God knows he could do with the money. His output hasn’t always been consistent, veering wildly from the stone cold classic Rock n Roll (2003) to the unchained weirdness of his sci-fi metal concept album Orion, but he’s one of those artists you have to admire, if nothing else for his unwillingness to do things by the book.

Anyway, let me try to focus on the subject at hand. Nebraska. The original was recorded at home on a 4-track by a burned out Boss in early 1982. They were intended as demos for the E Street band, then riding the crest of a wave after the soaring success of The River album and tour, to work up as their next project, but were eventually released more or less as is. As Wikipedia says, “the songs on Nebraska deal with ordinary, down-on-their-luck blue-collar characters who face a challenge or a turning point in their lives. The songs also address the subject of outsiders, criminals and mass murderers with little hope for the future—or no future at all.”

If that sounds depressing, that’s because it is. Music critic William Ruhlmann called it “one of the most challenging albums ever released by a major star on a major record label” and the release was seen by many Springsteen fans as a reaction to the generally sunny, positive vibes running through the majority of previous album The River. There’s no Sherry Darling or Ramrod here, though I’ve always thought Stolen Car and The Price You Pay could easily be transplanted onto Nebraska. That’s a conversation for another day.

It isn’t just the cover. The running order on Adams’ version mirrors the original too, so the first thing we here is the title track, a first-person narrative sung from the perspective of Charles Starkweather, who went on a killing spree with his teenage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in 1958. The story goes that Springsteen was inspired to write it afters seeing the biopic Badlands, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. In fact, he liked the movie so much he’d already nicked the title and used it for a song on his seminal Darkness on the Edge of Town album. Most long-time Boss fans name either that or Born to Run as his career-defining album. Me, I’m in the former camp. Adams makes a good fist of it, and drops in a few subtle chord changes which lift the track slightly above the low-fi original. The album in general benefits from a proper production process. Granted, the original has charm and character in spades, but there’s no escaping the fact that it sounds like the set of demos it was intended to be.

Adams echoes Springsteen’s stark, often plaintive vocal delivery much of the time, but many of the tracks have been revamped or, ahem, reinterpreted to some extent. This can be quite a shock to the system on first listen, but I don’t hate it. What would be the point in faithfully adhering to every chord and nuance? If nothing else, the expression on offer gives this release a sense of identity and makes it its own animal. Johnny 99, one of my favourite tracks on the original release, is given a new breath of life as a rockabilly anthem, while Open All Night receives the opposite treatment, slowed right down with mournful vocal tones layered over the customary acoustic and harmonica accompaniment. The length is extended accordingly from 02:58 to 04:25. My Father’s House handled in a similar way, this version being longer and slower, the composition seemingly given more space to breathe.

State Trooper is perhaps given the most drastic reconstruction, this new version built upon a grungy, driving electric guitar riff which at its climax descends into an orgy of manic howls, distortion and angry reverb reminiscent of the Jesus and Mary Chain. If you only listen to one track off this album, let this be the one. Reason to Believe is another track that has been completely reworked. Gone is that spiky three-chord acoustic riff that carries the original, to be replaced by a minimalist piano. This track is perhaps best suited to RA’s vocal range, and it’s a fitting way to close out the album. Parts of the album reminds me of the way Springsteen himself reinterpreted the tracks on his 2005 Devils & Dust solo tour where he turned multi-instrumentalist and innovator. Strangely, Adams’ version of Atlantic City, one of the tracks you would think offers itself up for reinterpretation more than any other (Springsteen himself has played numerous different versions in concert, more recently with a full band backing), largely adhere to the original.

Critics might call this self-indulgent but I quite like it. Covering a classic song takes balls, covering an entire classic album takes bigger ones, and its difficult to see what Adams can really gain from it. It seems to me he’s on a hiding to nothing. It’s getting something of a mixed response, but I kinda like it. Besides, it’s free, and it’s not often you get something for nothing. Nebraska is available to download free.

Grab it quick while you can.

RetView #66 – It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

Title: It Came from Beneath the Sea

Year of Release: 1955

Director: Robert Gordon

Length: 79 mins

Starring: Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue, Donald Curtis, Harry Lauter

In typically dramatic fashion, this B-movie classic begins with a bristling voiceover about nuclear submarines culminating in the sensational pronouncement, “The mind of man had thought of everything! Except that which was beyond his comprehension!”

Oh dear.

We are then transported to one such submarine captained by Commander Pete Mathews (Tobey) on exercise in the Pacific Ocean, where the crew pick up a mystery object “bigger than a whale” on their sonar. Uh-oh. The sub comes under attack by this massive unknown creature but manages to limp back to Pearl Harbour where it is examined by a team of marine biologists (headed up by Domergue, who sticks around to provide the love interest – more about that later). Subsequently, some tissue is discovered and is found to belong to a giant octopus. The scientists conclude that the creature is from the Mindanao Deep, a submerged trench eat of the Philippines said to be more than 10,500 metres deep, and has been forced from its natural habitat by that pesky H-bomb testing.

When a spate of disappearances are reported in the area, the U.S. Military have to act before the creature makes its way to San Francisco (because that’s what giant cephalopod do, apparently). They are only partially successful, and in the climax we witness a titanic showdown between the creature and the Golden Gate Bridge during which, let’s face it, neither side is likely to be covered in glory. Despite being an inanimate object, the bridge actually holds its own. The rumble is enough to spark panic in the streets, the city’s residents apparently ignorant to the fact that simply being on dry land would ensure their safety from sea monsters. Though, that said, the local sheriff (Lauter) was on dry land when he was attacked so it’s probably better to be safe than sorry. We don’t actually see the monster ‘in the flesh’ until the second half of the film, but the suggestion is there, the constant threat, which makes it a neat little metaphor for nuclear war. When the giant man-and boat-eating radioactive octopus does make an appearance in order to pick on a Canadian freighter, the order is to abandon ship which makes total sense. There’s a giant octopus nearby, let’s all just jump in the water.

This is pretty standard Fifties fare, with people’s post-war insecurities and pervading nuclear fear being played out regularly on the silver screen. It must have been absolutely terrifying to be a crewman in those early experimental submarines when you weren’t just unsure whether the engineering and technology that was supposed to keep you alive would hold up, but you also weren’t sure what else was in the water. To add an element of cold realism, key scenes were filmed in and actual sub (the diesel-electric USS Cubera) with the help of serving navy personnel in supporting roles. The movie was developed in the wake of the first Hydrogen bomb explosions partly as a retort to Universal Studio’s (Columbia’s great rival) hugely successful It Came from Outer Space (1953). It Came from Beneath the Sea was even more of a success, as it was produced on less than a quarter of the budget and made more at the Box Office where, upon release, it was paired with Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), widely acknowledged as one of the first true zombie movies.

One of the most fascinating aspects of It Came from Beneath the Sea is the clumsy love triangle subplot involving Professor Lesley Joyce (Domergue), her colleague Dr. John Carter (Curtis) and Commander Pete. At one point, when they all should really be more interested in the big monster terrorizing the ocean, Carter patiently explains to Commander Pete that Lesley is representative of a “new breed” of women who, “Feel they’re just as smart and courageous as men.” Well, I’ll be damned. It’s almost as awkward as the set-up in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Despite his having all the personality and charm of a tennis ball, Joyce is clearly attracted to the more macho Commander Pete, and doesn’t resist when he comes on to her. She then goes back and asks John what she should so about it. Incredibly, Beau Numbero Dos doesn’t get mad about it, and simply encourages Joyce to explore the emotional implications of the kiss. Okay, mate, Ta. For the rest of the film Lesley flits between both leading men, stating that when all the octopus business is cleared up she’ll be embarking on a lengthy tour of Egypt with John, before turning around and accepting commander Pete’s impromptu and quite unexpected marriage proposal. So yeah, while adding a human element, all that malarkey was confusing and somewhat unnecessary. Stick to the monsters, please.

Whilst the acclaim wasn’t universal, upon release the film was met with generally favourable reviews. Radio Times called it a, “Classic monster flick,” while contemporary resource Allmovie (previously All Movie Guide) wrote that it, “Utilized elements of the documentary, with a narration that makes the first half of the movie seem almost like a newsreel, which gives the action a greater immediacy. This is all presented in a cool, clipped realistic manner, with a strong but convincingly stated macho tone…It all served to make the first quarter hour of the film almost irresistibly suspenseful, and gave Harryhausen one of the best lead-ins that one could ask for, for his effects.”

Trivia Corner

The stop-motion creature effects were designed by the legendary Ray Harryhausen, who also worked on Mysterious Island (1961). To save money, he was only allowed to animate six of the octopus’ eight limbs, leading him to jokingly name the creature “his sixtopus.”

Scroll through more classic RetView entries HERE.

RetView #65 – Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead (2011)

Title: Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead

Year of Release: 2011

Director: Noboru Iguchi

Length: 85 mins

Starring: Arisa Nakamura, Asana Mamoru, Mayu Sugano, Asami Sugiura, Kentaro Kishi

Seven minutes into this movie I needed something stronger than bottled Stella and WTF because bottled Stella and WTF just wasn’t cutting it any more. Even in the bizarre realms of Japanese horror, I don’t think I’ve seen anything this wacky before.

The plot evolves around karate student Megumi (Nakamura) who, consumed with guilt and grief over the suicide of her bullied sister, accompanies a group of older friends on a camping trip into the woods. Things get weird when they go fishing in a river known for carrying ‘parasites that keep super models thin.’ The voluptuous Maki (who wants to be an idol) takes this on board and before anyone can stop her, swallows a massive tapeworm they find inside a fish they catch. Before you can say, “WTF? Where’s my Stella?” a zombie appears from nowhere and chews someone’s finger off, prompting Megumi to deliver a spinning kick to the head that snaps his neck.

“Megumi! That was too strong!”

“It was just a normal kick.”

Thoroughly freaked out, the group then leg it to a deserted village where poor Maki suffers a sudden diarrhoea attack and relieves herself in an outhouse, only to be molested by more zombies. The rest of the group, meanwhile, are rescued by an old villager who also has tapeworms. In a fit of despair he blows his head off with a shotgun and one of his eyeballs flies out, straight down the throat of the nerdy one of the group. And then, without so much as pausing for breath, its on to fight more pervert zombies. It’s okay, though, Megumi finds a double-barrelled shotgun and takes out a whole room full of them without reloading once, but let’s not be pedantic. Another of the unfortunate zombies is offed when someone sits on his head and crushes it (“I killed him with my butt!”), a scene which is replayed multiple times in case you missed it the first time. You get the feeling the makers were doing it to somehow stir the viewer’s loins, but my loins stayed firmly in place.

After a bit, a mad doctor turns up, kills a rogue tapeworm with a nail gun, and then they all have dinner together. The doctor reveals that the zombified villages are all riddled with tapeworms and the reason they bite is to lay eggs. Not good news for that bloke who had his finger chomped off. Let’s just say he has a very bad reaction. Phew.

Just so you know, by this point the movie is barely half way through. There’s another 45-minutes or so of this utter madness. Director Noboru Iguchi, who also wrote the screenplay, certainly knows how to keep up the pace. He started his career in JAV (Japanese Adult Video) movies, where he ‘explored’ several genres including bondage and incest, common themes in Japanese porn. Or so I am led to believe. Iguchi is best known for a film called Final Pussy which, as a result of a military experiment going wrong, has a lead character with guns bursting out of her boobs whenever she gets aroused. What a passion killer that must be. After crossing into the mainstream, Iguchi won plaudits for his work on various horror/comedy/gore films such as The Machine Girl (2008), Mutant Girls Squad (2010) and Dead Sushi (2012).

Incredibly, this cult offering has amassed almost 2,000 ratings on IMDB with an average rating of 4.7/10. Starburst magazine enthused “Silly, sure. But, when you have a theatre full of grown adults laughing and having a good time you know it’s going to be an instant cult classic.” Meanwhile, in their review, Variety said, “The title alone will help it worm its way into fantasy fests and Asian cult ancillary, to be seen by viewers who will need to be drunk or otherwise zombified to enjoy it.”

To be fair, they aren’t wrong. I’m tempted to say it got a bit outlandish towards the end, but that in itself would be a stupid thing to say. It was outlandish from the start. Even the poster is outlandish. But if you have a thing for farts, vomit, martial arts, giant parasites, exploding heads, shit-covered pervert zombies, or any combination of the above, this one is for you.

Trivia Corner

In the credits, an actor called Demo Tanaka is credited as ‘the shit zombie,’ presumably because he crawls out of a toilet all covered in shit, and then proceeds to sling it at people. Incidentally, the actress Asana (no, really) Mamoru had to control her bowels in the outhouse scene that made the shit zombie famous so she didn’t actually shit on him. Some of the farts heard are real, apparently, which must be a valued addition to anyone’s showreel.

RetView #64 – Death Line (1972)

Title: Death Line

Year of Release: 1972

Director: Gary Sherman

Length: 87 mins

Starring: Donald Pleasence, Norman Rossington, David Ladd, Sharon Gurney, Hugh Armstrong, Christopher Lee, Clive Swift

As this series of deep dives into the land of movies past has progressed, I’ve actually discovered a lot about myself. One thing I’ve found, as you might have gathered from previous entries like Severance, Witchfinder General, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, The Descent, and 28 Days Later, is that I have developed a deep appreciation for British horror. I guess it’s not that remarkable. Being a Brit myself, it just feels more relevant and relatable. And the accents are funny. Death Line, lauded by Time Out as “One of the great British horror films,” and a classic example of what Hellraiser director Clive Barker calls ’embracing the monstrous’ is an undisputed classic of the genre. The stiff upper lip, ‘keep calm and carry on’ ethos is exemplified in an early scene where Inspector Calhoun (Pleasence) yells, “We’d better do something. Quick. And the first fing we’re going to do is get some tea!”

It might sound stereotypical, cliched, cheesy or even borderline offensive to some (in the current climate, virtually everything is offensive to some), but the thing is, that’s probably exactly what the majority of British coppers say at the beginning of murder investigations. Or at least they did in the early seventies. These days they probably prefer a glass of sparkling spring water.

Released in the US under the alternative title Raw Meat in a slightly edited form (in order to avoid a potentially-damaging X rating) Death Line was actually a joint US/British enterprise. It was directed by American Gary Sherman (Dead & Buried, Poltergeist III and the TV series Poltergeist: The Legacy) but as it has a predominantly British cast and is set in London, we are claiming it.

Much of the action takes place in and around Russell Square tube station in Camden, a Grade II listed building, but most of the underground sequences were actually filmed at Aldwych which was closed in 1994. There’s something iconic about the London Underground, like the Paris Catacombs or the ampitheatre in Athens. It’s broody, dark, and somehow menacing, something which has been put to good use in several movies, most notably in the black comedy Three and Out (2008) and that famous sequence in American Werewolf in London (1981). It also comes complete with a rather bloody and chequered history, something which is more than hinted at here, making it the perfect setting for a horror film.

The plot follows a couple of journalism students, Patricia (Gurney) and Alex (Ladd) who almost literally stumble across a man lying in a stairwell. Dismissing him as a drunk, they do the proper thing and report their finding to the police. Cue the aforementioned Inspector Calhoun, who discovers the drunk, revealed as a wealthy Conservative minister (no change there, then), has since disappeared. A colleague then tells Calhoun about an urban legend telling of a group of descendants from an 1892 cave-in who still live below-ground surviving on the flesh of commuters.

Cor blimey!

Unperturbed, the amiable Patricia and Alex continue to frequent the Underground and become separated one night, which leads to Patricia getting up close and personal with the chief cannibal (Armstrong) who is now on a murderous rampage having just seen his pregnant lover die. A brutal climactic showdown sees said chief cannibal, credited simply as ‘The Man’ incapacitated and left for dead, but we all know how that usually plays out. As movie villains go, The Man is a complex character who elicits both compassion and repulsion. When he abducts Patricia he is torn between eating her and caring for her, and despite his grisly antics the viewer can’t help feel a twinge of sympathy. Not least because he’s been lumbered with perhaps the weakest and least-threatening catch phrase in horror movie history. He does inject some impressive vigour into it, though.

Death Line was well received by both audiences and critics, with Robin Wood of The Village Voice writing that it, “Vies with Night of the Living Dead (1968) for the most horrible horror film ever. It is, I think, decidedly the better film: more powerfully structured, more complex, and more humanly involved. Its horrors are not gratuitous; it is an essential part of its achievement to create, in the underground world, the most terrible conditions in which human life can continue to exist and remain recognizably human. [It] is strong without being schematic; one can’t talk of allegory in the strict sense, but the action consistently carries resonances beyond its literal meaning.”

Interestingly, a 2017 article in Little White Lies claims that Death Line offers an, “Oddly prescient message about social inequality in London. From the very first scene, a member of the establishment (James Manfred, the wealthy conservative minister) is framed as corrupt, with Manfred’s perversion and hunt for flesh effective exposition to the cannibal horror that follows.” True, the only people the Man slaughters probably had it coming, which would make him a hero in most movies. The article goes on to use the film as a metaphor for the then-recent Grenfell fire, noting that, “The film’s soundtrack consistently features the haunting sounds of screams and digging; echoes of an industrial revolution that has benefitted one side of society more than the other.”

Quite.

Trivia Corner

The part of the cannibal was originally offered to Marlon Brando, but he had to pull out when his son Christian contracted pneumonia.

RetView #63 – Re-Animator (1985)

Title: Re-Animator

Year of Release: 1985

Director: Stuart Gordon

Length: 86 mins

Starring: Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale, Robert Sampson, Jeffrey Combs

It’s been at least a couple of months now, so I think it’s about time we had another 80’s cheese fest. Re-Animator, aka H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-animator on account of being loosely based on Lovecraft’s 1922 work ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’ fits the bill perfectly. Directed by Stuart Abbott, who also directed From Beyond (1986), Dolls (1987) and wrote Honey I Shrunk the Kids (1989) and The Dentist (1995), it was originally intended to be a stage play, before given The Treatment, and that sense of intimacy has largely been preserved. With it’s a small cast, tightly-woven plot, and snappy dialogue, it’s easy to see why Re-Animator is now considered a bona fide cult classic. Shot in only 18 days, it is the first film in the Re-Animator series, and was followed by Bride of Re-Animator (1990) and Beyond Re-Animator (2003), neither of which hit the heights of the original.

After leaving his last place of education under something of a cloud, medical student called Herbert West (Combs) enrols at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts (a fictional educational establishment in a fictional town in a real state), moves in with fellow student Dan Cain (Abbott), and then proceeds to turn the apartment into a laboratory. His experiments include killing and then re-animating Dan’s cat Rufus several times, much to the horror of Dan’s girlfriend, Megan (Crampton). Don’t worry, cat lovers, Rufus gets his own back. Dan tries to tell the Dean of the university (who happens to be Megan’s father) about West’s experiments but he is ridiculed, and the pair kicked out. They then hatch a plan to sneak into the morgue to use the reagent they have developed on a human subject to prove it works. It does, except the dead guy returns as a zombie-like crazed person. That’s when the Dean stumbles upon the scene, and shit gets really wild.

Producer Brian Yuzna (who played one of the hospital corpses, largely for his own amusement) described the film as having the “sort of shock sensibility of an Evil Dead with the production values of The Howling.” There are more than a few scenes to keep the gore hounds among you happy. My absolute favourite shows Dr Hill (Gale) in a role that the great Christopher Lee allegedly refused, removing skin from a corpse’s head on the way to extracting their brain, which he does with the words, “It’s very much like peeling a large orange.” According to IMDB, the special effects department went through 24-gallons of fake blood during the shoot, special-effects guru John Naulin said that Re-Animator was the bloodiest film he had ever worked on. In the past he had never used more than two gallons, which has to be some kind of compliment. Upon release, Re-Animator received an X (adults only) rating, and was later edited to obtain an R rating for video rental stores because some stores’ policies prohibited them from renting ‘unrated’ films with an MPAA rating of X. In the R-rated version, much of the gore was edited out and replaced with various scenes which had been deleted for pacing purposes, including a subplot involving Dr. Hill hypnotizing several characters to make them more suggestible to his will. A short scene was also added showing Herbert West injecting himself with small amounts of the reagent to stay awake and energized, which may have affected his thinking over the course of the film. On the other side of the pond, British Film Censors weren’t impressed with the scene where the severed head Dr. Hill attempts to rape Megan and refused to pass the film for release in the United Kingdom until the sequence had been cut. In Japan, the film is titled “ZOMBIO” though the title is dropped for the sequel because it translates as “Drifting Spirits” and makes no sense in the context of the film.

Re-Animator was received well, winning over many of the more arty critics. In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Re-Animator has a fast pace and a good deal of grisly vitality. It even has a sense of humor, albeit one that would be lost on 99.9 percent of any ordinary movie-going crowd.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas said, “The big noise is Combs, a small, compact man of terrific intensity and concentration,” and David Edelstein, writing for Village Voice, an influential New York tabloid that closed in 2017, placed the film in his year-end Top Ten Movies list. In their book Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft, Andrew Migliore and John Strysik write, “Re-Animator took First Prize at the Paris Festival of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror, a Special Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and even spawned a short-lived series of comic books. Even though it was a hit with audiences, the film generated a huge amount of controversy among Lovecraft readers. Fans thought the film a desecration of Lovecraft; their literary hero would never write such obvious exploitation!”

Trivia Corner

In December 1986, the year after Re-Animator was released, Barbara Crampton did a nude pictorial in Playboy magazine under the title, “Simply Beastly. Behind every successful monster, there’s a woman.” In an October 2020 interview with Entertainment Weekly, the then 61-year revealed that she was only given a second round of auditions for the role of Meg because the girl who won the part the first time around turned it down after her mother read the script and said “Oh, no. You’re not doing this.”

RetView #61 – Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Title: Creature from the Black Lagoon

Year of Release: 1954

Director: Jack Arnold

Length: 79 mins

Starring: Richard Carlson, Julie Adams, Richard Denning

There aren’t many movies that start with the big bang. Where can you go after that? In the first two minutes or so of Creature from the Black Lagoon we are treated not only to a massive explosion, but also a potted history of 15 million years of life on earth. And if that wasn’t enough, we end up tracking a team of explorers somewhere in the Amazon when they find a gigantic petrified claw which apparently belonged to some kind of amphibious creature they dub ‘Gill man’. In the wake of this discovery, the expedition shifts its focus to seeking out a live specimen, and then trying to escape when they realize the live specimen doesn’t much fancy a life in captivity and strikes back, a pivotal moment coming when the hunted becomes the hunter. It’s enough to make you dizzy. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that when this movie first hit cinemas, it did so in 3D. 1950’s technology was a far cry to what we have going on at the Cineplex these days, but let’s give them credit for trying. Upon release, the movie also broke several records for the amount of underwater filming it features, all of which is stunningly shot using a variety of (then) innovative techniques.

The story goes that producer William Alland was attending a dinner party during the filming of Orson Welles’ 1941 classic Citizen Kane (in which he played a reporter) when Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa told him about the myth of a race of half-fish, half-human creatures living in the Amazon River. Alland wrote some story notes using the imaginative working title The Sea Monster, which eventually morphed into Creature from the Black Lagoon years later. Just as he did on the Incredible Shrinking Man, director Jack Arnold does a masterful job. There’s a lot going on beneath the surface (sorry). First we have the simmering sexual tension between Kay (Adams) and her two male leads, who are both competing for her affections in vastly different ways. There’s David (Carlson) who dotes on her, in an old-fashioned, wrap-you-up-in-cotton-wool, slightly controlling way, while love rival and pantomime villain Mark (Denning), seems to take a more preening, misogynistic approach, parading around in his tight shorts whenever possible and being vocally resentful of Kay’s mere presence, which seems a bit counterproductive. Let’s not forget that this was an era when it wasn’t unusual to see leading men in movies wallop their woman about the chops if she dared step out of line. To be brutally honest, this pair of numb nuts make Gill-man seem like a real catch (sorry again). He’s also a bit creepy, by the way. Not only does he have scales, big bulbous eyes and massive clawed hands, but he likes to swim underneath Kay mirroring her movements whilst she unwittingly frolics about in the water. Tellingly, though, at the end when he finally kidnaps her, the creature doesn’t literally puts Kay on a pedestal.

In some quarters, the creature has become a metaphor for repressed sexual tension, which must have been rife in 1950’s America, what with the twin threats of communism and nuclear armageddon hanging over everyone. He is forever lurking insidiously behind the scenes, always threatening to break through to the surface and create havoc but never quite managing. The cultural impact of Creature from the Black lagoon has long been debated, the discourse summarized here.

The subtext is clear, but that doesn’t make it any less fascinating. It’s those pesky humans messing about with nature again. The poor amphibious creature and his relatives and cohorts had been quietly pottering about minding their own business in remote parts of the world for millennia. And quite possibly would’ve stayed there, too, had a bunch of selfish assholes not turned up and ruined everything. Shades of King Kong here, and even The Thing. The plot could even be a thinly-veiled attack on colonialism, or marauding white people in general. Watching it now, you can’t help rooting for the monster. In a contemporary article on Tor.com, Ryan Britt writes, “You never wanted them to kill that poor sea monster. In fact, you kind of wanted to see him take every single person on that boat out.” Adams herself later said, “There always is that feeling of compassion. I think maybe it touches something in ourselves, maybe the darker parts of ourselves, that long to be loved and think they really can’t ever be loved.”

Despite it’s modest beginnings, Creature from the Black Lagoon was a monster smash (That’s the last one, I promise) leading to two sequels, Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), and making an indelible mark on the movie-going public. Stephen King has said it was the first film he remembers watching. There has long been talk of a remake, mentioned in connection with such luminaries as John Landis, John Carpenter and Guillermo Del Toro, who credited the original for influencing his 2017 masterpiece The Shape of the Water, but it hasn’t surfaced yet (Okay, I lied).

Trivia Corner

After Universal had finished making the third and final film, a studio worker threw the creature’s costume in a dumpster, from where it was retrieved by a young man who repurposed it as a Halloween costume before selling it to Forrest J. Ackerman, a writer for Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine.

RetView #60 – Death Ship (1980)

Title: Death Ship

Year of Release: 1980

Director: Alvin Rakoff

Length: 85 mins

Starring: Richard Crenna, George Kennedy, Nick Mancuso, Sally Ann Howes, Kate Reid, Saul Rubinek

I’d never even heard of this Bloodstar Films production until I read about it in an issue of the venerated Fortean Times magazine (FT396, if you’re interested). I’ve always had a thing for Nazi zombies, as referenced before in previous RetViews Shock Waves and Outpost. I also recently discovered that I have a thing for horror set on ships. I have no idea why that is. It could be something about the bleak, all-encompassing emptiness of being at sea, but it’s probably more to do with the fact that if some supernatural shit befalls you in a house, or even a cabin buried in the woods, you can always just count your losses and run. You can’t do that on a ship. You have to stay and face whatever evil shit is about to befall you. Anyway, the potential for Nazi zombies and an evil sea-faring vessel combo suckered me right into Death Ship. Throw in Richard Crenna from the Rambo films, Saul Rubinek from True Romance (and Frasier) and George Kennedy from, er, Cool Hand Luke and Earthquake, I was already sold. And if all that wasn’t enough, just look at this poster!

So what’s it all about?

Well, stuffy Captain Ashland (Kennedy) is on his final cruise before handing over the reigns to Trevor Marshall (Crenna) who has brought his wife (Howes, in her final film appearance) and kids along on the trip. At a glitzy on-ship party there’s a band playing, some drunk people, and lots of terrible dad dancing. Everyone is having a great time. Except Captain Ashland, who you doubt could have a great time anywhere. But all the decadence and debauchery comes to a sudden halt when the cruise liner smashes into something and sinks, leaving just a handful of survivors unfortunately including Marshall’s annoying kids, a lecherous young officer, and a near-hysterical passenger, floating around on a makeshift raft. The next morning they find the grumpy captain in the water, which is a stroke of luck, or maybe not, then they come across a massive, ominous-looking black ship anchored in the middle of the ocean with a ladder down ready to receive them, which seems like another mad stroke of luck but turns out to be quite the opposite. Thinking they’ve found salvation, the survivors board the strange ship to find it deserted. Still, it’s better than being on the raft, or so they think. The first sign that something isn’t right comes when ship’s entertainer Jackie (Rubinek) is suddenly scooped up by a possessed winch and dumped screaming head first into the sea. Bye, Jackie. It was fun while it lasted. Things degenerate from there. The remaining survivors, whilst trying to navigate this mysterious vessel full of disembodied voices, creepy shadows and inanimate objects that take on lives of their own, get picked off one-by-one, until only the good-natured Trevor Marshall, his wife, and those annoying kids are left and ultimately find themselves back where they started on another flimsy-looking rafty-thing in the water. There’s probably a message there.

Life and soul of the party Captain Ashland and the underlying friction between him and his would-be replacement Marshall is instrumental in all this.

“You don’t know how to handle a crew or passengers!”
“Maybe so, Marshall. But I know how to handle ships.”

At one point, Ashland even dons a discarded German navy uniform and appears to channel the ship’s long-dead and rather sadistic head honcho whilst embarking on a murderous rampage. It all leads up to the highly anticipated revelation, which ties things up nicely and makes for a nice, satisfying conclusion. Especially after the evil Captain Ashland comes to a suitably sticky end and, of course, good triumphs over evil.

It’s easy to see why Death Ship got lost in the shuffle. It doesn’t have the immediacy of other popular horror flicks of the day like Cannibal Holocaust, Friday the 13^th or Prom Night. It could, however, be a distant cousin of The Fog. It has a much more brooding atmosphere and, dare I say, slightly more substance reinforced by some remarkable cinematography, an impressive plot, and a killer (sorry) cast. It’s picked up a few retrospective reviews like this one on Warped Perspective, which is a real indicator as to whether a movie is truly attaining cult status, and review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes gives it an overall score of 4.2 out of 10 based on 5 reviews, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. One review states, “Death Ship is a terrific, low-budget cheesy supernatural tale that should definitely appeal to midnight movie horror fans. I thoroughly enjoyed the film, and I feel that this is one of the most underrated films in the genre.”

It’s hard to argue with that, and those sentiments are echoed by Jeremy Blitz of DVD Talk, who said, “It isn’t a perfect film, but it is an enjoyable one, especially for fans of the somewhat lower tier horror efforts of the late seventies and early eighties.” Its flaws, however, are plain to see. Many called it unimaginative or derivative, with a shower scene in particular said to mirror the famous one in Psycho a little too closely. Incidentally, the shower scene in Death Ship was shot in one take, as it was deemed too expensive and troublesome to clean up the blood and shoot it again. It wasn’t all plain sailing (boom!). Damningly, TV Guide called the movie “ludicrous” and gave it a one-star rating. It’s probably safe to say that despite its considerable merits, this won’t be something that many of it’s stellar cast will look back on with much pride. For one delightful moment whilst researching this piece, I thought I’d stumbled across a modern(ish) remake. But that turned out to be nothing more than the result of some artwork someone mocked up in Deviant Art. Good effort, though.

Trivia Corner

As the ghost ship collided with the cruise liner, brief scenes of an explosion, a grand piano falling between decks, and the engine room flooding were cut in from another movie entirely. The movie in question was The Last Voyage (1960).

RetView #59 – 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Title: 10 Cloverfield Lane

Year of Release: 2016

Director: Dan Trachtenberg

Length: 87 mins

Starring: John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallacher Jr.

Apart from Quarantine 2 – Terminal I haven’t covered any sequels in this series thus far. There are reasons for that, but it might change in the not too-distant future. For now, you’ll have to make do with this, that rarest of things; a sequel on a par with the original. In fact, 10 Cloverfield Lane isn’t a bona fide sequel at all. In the words of uber-geek producer JJ Abrams, it’s more of a ‘blood relative’ of Cloverfield. The original script was called The Cellar, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the original movie. It was written by Josh Campbell and Matt Steucken back in 2012 before being acquired by Abram’s production company, Bad Robot, and adapted to suit.

When the first Cloverfield movie, a found-footage monster flick, was released in 2008, it became an unexpected smash hit, prompting Abrams to turn it into a loosely-connected franchise which, to date, consists of three films all taking place in the same universe, known as the, ahem, Cloververse, with a fourth in production. Each movie deals with creatures from different dimensions attacking earth as a repercussion of experiments carried out aboard the Cloverfield Station in outer space.

If it’s monsters you’re after, though, you may be disappointed with this particular instalment as it would be more accurately defined as a very effective psychological thriller. It follows twenty-something Michelle (Winstead, who previously starred in Final destination 3 and the 2011 prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing, also called The Thing, confusingly enough ) who, after splitting up with her boyfriend, is involved in a car accident. She wakes up in an underground bunker with a broken leg and is told by the bunker’s owner Howard (Goodman) that he took her there for her own protection because the air outside has been poisoned as a result of earth coming under some kind of attack. Suspecting Howard deliberately ran her off the road and abducted her, Michelle is immediately suspicious but has little choice but to play along. The mystery thickens when she is introduced to the bunker’s third occupant, Emmett (Gallacher Jr), who tells her he had been employed by Howard to help him build and stock it. He saw an explosion in the sky and, fearing for his safety, forced his way inside, injuring his arm in the process.

Still dubious, Michelle makes up her mind to steal the keys to Howard’s truck and make good her escape. But before she can open the hatch leading to the outside world, she sees a woman outside covered in skin legions and begins to think Howard may be telling the truth. Bunker life isn’t THAT bad. They have plenty of food and water, and enough books, DVD’s and board games to keep them occupied. However, as the unlikely trio settle down to ride out the metaphorical storm, certain troubling details begin to emerge about Howard. What happened to his missing daughter? What kind of ‘waste’ is he disposing of in that vat of acid in the bunker? What made him flip out playing charades? And why does he dislike Emmett so intensely? All this, added to the tension, growing cabin fever, and general air of paranoia, makes for a powerful movie with a nerve-shredding climax. I’m not going to give away the ending here, but suffice to say it’s one of the most unexpected and breathtaking in recent memory.

Perhaps surprisingly, the movie was met with generally favourable reviews, levelling out at an impressive 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Guardian said it was “More Hitchcock than Xbox” and Jeannette Catsoulis of the New York Times praised the cast and cinematography, saying, “Sneakily tweaking our fears of terrorism, ‘10 Cloverfield Lane,’ though no more than a kissing cousin to its namesake, is smartly chilling and finally spectacular.” Its critical success was replicated at the Box Office, where it grossed over $110 million from a $15 million budget. Not quite as impressive as the first instalment, but close enough.

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Trivia Corner

In one scene, Howard is watching the 80’s classic Pretty in Pink. In this movie, Molly Ringwald’s character has a hobby of making dresses. This is a subtle reference to Michelle, who had earlier confided to Howard that she dreams of being a fashion designer.