Invitation to Hell

INVITATION TO HELL

A charming but unintentionally silly made-for-television movie that aired on ABC in May of 1984, Invitation to Hell (directed by Wes Craven from a script by Richard Rothstein) follows suburbanite Matthew Winslow's efforts to resist constant pressure to become a member at Steaming Springs Country Club in the community he's just moved to with his wife Pat and two young children (Chrissy and Robbie). Quoted in Brian J. Robb's book Screams & Nightmares, Craven described the project: “The premise was that Susan Lucci was a woman who ran a country club that was attracting all the executives from these high-tech agencies, but she was really the Devil and the steam room was the entrance to hell, if you can believe that.”

As the tale begins, everything's looking up for the Winslows. In the first thirteen minutes, the family moves into a pleasant new abode and enjoys a visit from Matt's old fraternity buddy Tom Peterson, who works at Micro-Digitech (the company where Matt's just been hired). Via a scene at Matt's laboratory the next day, the viewer learns that Matt's working on fine-tuning a spacesuit intended to be used for a mission to Venus (the suit can withstand extreme temperatures, features built-in weapons, and scans the surrounding environment for threats). Six minutes later, Matt crosses paths with Jessica Jones (director of the Steaming Springs Country Club) for the first time when their cars nearly collide. A couple of minutes later, Jessica initiates Tom Peterson and his family into the club by ushering them through a doorway into a dense cloud of steam while saying, “Enter the spring and taste its power.” Twenty-six minutes in, Matt finds himself pressured by his boss (Harry) to join the club, and two minutes later Jessica (who has inexplicably stopped by Matt's workplace) also encourages Matt to join. The pressure to conform continues as newly-initiated Tom (who has been promoted) invites Matt to explore all the club has to offer. Four minutes later, Matt's wife Pat (envious of the new car that Tom's wife drives) asks Matt to join the club. Apparently sick of all the pressure, five minutes later Matt takes Pat to the club, where Tom and Jessica take them around to see the sights. Matt strays away and ventures into the foyer of the steam room, but Jessica interrupts him before he discovers that Hell lays beyond a locked door. Around the story's midpoint, Pat and her kids join the club without Matt and (after agreeing that they “forsake all for the club”) go through that door. The next day, the Winslow's dog (Albert) growls at Pat and the kids. Matt notices marked personality changes in his family, and near the one hour mark Pat asks her husband to “just give us a little bit more of yourself.” Seventy minutes in, Matt (now certain that there's a connection between the club and his family's turn to the dark side) returns to the steam room and measures the temperature beyond the forbidden door: it's eight-hundred degrees fahrenheit. Matt returns home (after apparently murdering a security guard who caught him at the steam room) and finds Chrissy beating her plush toy bunny with a crowbar. “You're not my daughter,” Matt realizes, and he locks his kids in a closet and incapacitates his wife. Matt goes to his lab, steals the experimental spacesuit, and heads to the club (where conveniently there's a Halloween costume party in full swing). At the eighty-one minute mark, Matt ventures into Hell. A ten-minute sequence in the underworld sports some truly trippy imagery, and Matt ultimately rescues his real family. Back home, Matt ventures outside where neighbors chatter about a massive fire that has burned the club down. The project runs just over ninety-three minutes before the end credits.

“I made TV movies to pay the bills and keep the lights on in my office – they don't represent my body of work,” Wes Craven once said (as quoted in the book Screams & Nightmares).

Invitation to Hell may have been intended as a satire about materialism and conformity. Patricia Winslow (who pines for new furniture, a piano, and a better car) literally loses her soul until her husband brings her back from Hell. Whatever the ambitions of the project's writer (Richard Rothstein), the final product is worth a look if only to marvel at the hairstyles and primitive computers of the eighties (and of course to enjoy the ten-minute sequence set in Hell). The project has solid production values largely courtesy of the director of photography (Dean Cundey, most famous for his work on John Carpenter projects including Halloween and The Fog).

Invitation to Hell is neither terrifying nor thought-provoking, but it is fun and entertaining.

Shocker

SHOCKER

Even if you overlook its myriad shoddy special effects, the 1989 film Shocker (written and directed by Wes Craven) falls apart the further along the plot goes, which is a shame as the first act is rather gripping. The story follows a college football player named Jonathan Parker who awakens from a dream in which his foster mother and step-siblings are murdered by a television repairman named Horace Pinker. Jonathan then receives a phone call informing him that his family really is dead. He tells his cop father about the dream, and eventually Pinker's captured (but not before he brutally slaughters the protagonist's girlfriend Alison). The movie's most gut-wrenching image appears nearly twenty-seven minutes into the tale when Jonathan sees Alison's corpse in a tub full of bloody water. At the forty-two minute mark, Pinker's execution goes all wrong. Turns out that Pinker (a practitioner of black magic) has found a way to transfer his spirit from body to body, and he's hell-bent on taking revenge against Jonathan (his biological son) for giving his identity away to the police. Pinker leapfrogs from a doctor to a cop to a jogger to a young child, and in the film's wittiest moment (about an hour in) Pinker (in the kid's body) drops an F-bomb. Pinker keeps on hopping bodies until he somehow develops the ability to travel through pure electricity. The story spirals into abject silliness ninety-nine minutes in when Jonathan and Pinker magically hop into a television and travel from program to program (momentarily appearing in an episode of Leave it to Beaver). My willing suspension of disbelief totally snapped when the hero and the antagonist jump out of a television into a random family's home, and the mother (instead of being terrified and awestruck) comments, “I've heard of audience participation shows, but this is ridiculous.” Jonathan somehow vanquishes Pinker by having his friends sabotage the local power plant. If you can sort out the logic of this film's third act, send me an e-mail and let me know how all the pieces fit together.

A review in Variety aptly summarized Shocker's flaws: “At first glance (or at least for the first forty minutes) Shocker seems a potential winner, an almost unbearably suspenseful, stylish and blood-drenched ride courtesy of writer-director Wes Craven’s flair for action and sick humor. As it continues, however, the camp aspects simply give way to the ridiculous while failing to establish any rules to govern the mayhem.” 

On one of the Blu-ray's audio commentary tracks, Craven acknowledges that the special effects are rough around the edges but never addresses the story's problems. In the book Shock Masters of the Cinema, interviewer Loris Curci quotes Craven as saying “I like Shocker.”

Upon further reflection, my biggest problem with the story is that Pinker somehow eluded capture for quite a long time even though he apparently openly parked his business van (with “Pinker's Television Repair” plastered on the side) outside the homes of his victims before he killed them. Surely an eyewitness would've noticed this vehicle and remembered seeing it near the crime scene at least once.

Casual horror fans should steer clear of Shocker, while Craven completists will be delighted with the quality of the new Blu-ray (dense with special features and sporting a fabulous transfer). I wanted to like Shocker given its intriguing core concept, but its flaws are too numerous to overlook.

The Hills Have Eyes 2 (1985 version)

THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 (1985 version)

“The boogeyman's dead,” a psychiatrist assures Bobby Carter (one of the survivors from the first Hills Have Eyes) seven minutes into the sequel. Bobby, still traumatized from the ordeal he endured eight years earlier, has an intense fear of the desert and opts to not accompany a team of motorbike racers there even though they'll be testing out a new form of fuel that he formulated. As the film opens on a closeup of Bobby, I assumed that he would be the protagonist this time around, but his role turns out to be little more than a cameo. Indeed, there is no clear lead character in The Hills Have Eyes 2, and that's one of the project's many flaws.

Whereas the first film was steeped in realism, Hills 2 (written and directed by Wes Craven) requires serious suspension of disbelief almost from the get-go. Early on, the viewer learns that Bobby's wife is Ruby (from the first film's family of savages), only now she calls herself Rachel and masquerades as a civilized woman. By a massive coincidence, the racing team that's going to test Bobby's fuel must attend an event in the desert not far from where the original film took place. Ruby accompanies the team on a bus and (twenty-one minutes into the story) agrees without much protest when the group opts to veer off the paved road on a shortcut that will lead right to her old stomping grounds. Beast (one of the dogs from part one) goes on this trip too. The bus traverses rough terrain, and jagged rocks puncture its fuel tank, thereby stranding the group (conveniently close to a seemingly abandoned property that Ruby and the bikers explore in search of gasoline). Naturally, Pluto (Ruby's brother from part one) appears and attacks his sister, then scampers off into the desert. At the thirty-five minute mark, “Rachel” confesses to the others that she is in fact Ruby from the legendary family of desert cannibals. Nobody freaks out. Pluto steals one of the motorbikes, and two of the guys (Harry and Roy) pursue him. The first death occurs fully forty-two minutes in (nearly at the midpoint) when a large rock falls and crushes Harry. Four minutes later, Roy (on his bike) ends up ensnared in a net (Pluto and his ally this time around, a gigantic fellow known as The Reaper, have developed a knack for constructing elaborate traps). Cut to nightfall. In the second half of the film, the deaths occur one after another swiftly. One fellow takes a massive spear to the chest, and seven minutes later a dude named Foster gets pulled under the bus and axed in the head. Four minutes later, The Reaper crushes a girl named Jane in his arms. Within a minute, he slits the throat of another gal (Sue). Four minutes later, Pluto plummets to his death. Ruby's fate is unclear, for around this time she hits her head on a rock and is never seen again. The only memorable and singular character (a young blind woman named Cass) fills the “final girl” role and (with the help of another survivor) outwits The Reaper in a harrowing (if unbelievable) denouement.

In a 1985 interview with Kim Newman, Wes Craven explained that the film that reached audiences did not reflect his artistic vision: “It was not intended to be released as it was. It was not completed, and I had an agreement that when we'd finished the initial shoot the producers would cut it together and we'd see what we needed. Then we'd go shoot for another five or six days. That was agreed upon but... suddenly they were acting as if that was the finished film... The whole thing is unfinished. I wasn't satisfied with the whole ending. There were a couple of main sequences in the center of the film that didn't quite work. And the whole opening needed to be shortened drastically.”

Craven articulates additional reasons for the project's flaws in this quotation from Brian J. Robb's book Screams & Nightmares: “It was a much better script, I think, than the movie turned out to be... It was very underfunded. The movie was originally budgeted on the first draft of the script, and the producers said they thought it should be expanded, so I wrote a much better and bigger script, but the budget stayed the same.”

Critics have savaged the film. A review in Variety states that Hills 2 is filled with “dull, formula terror pic cliches, with one attractive teenager after another picked off...” In his book about Craven, John Wooley opines that “the biggest disappointment about Hills 2 is the sense of detachment from what's happening on the screen, an air of unreality and not the good kind of unreality.” The Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Horror concludes, “This perfunctory sequel drops the thematic drive of pitting two mirror-image families against each other and rehashes the uninteresting Friday the 13^th strategy of isolating a group of teenagers in a rural locale and killing them one by one.” The comparison to Friday the 13^th is particularly apt given that Harry Manfredini composed the scores for many of the films in that franchise in addition to scoring Hills 2. Also, Kane Hodder (who would go on to play Jason Voorhees in 1988's Friday the 13^th part 7) performed stunts in Hills 2.

A serious missed opportunity to tell another gripping tale of primal survival, The Hills Have Eyes 2 is a curious footnote in Wes Craven's oeuvre – a critically-reviled movie peppered with bits of clever dialogue (“It ain't natural to be in a place without a disco,” says Foster when talking about being in the desert). The only film in history in which a dog's memory appears as a flashback scene (Beast recalls the time in part one when he nearly killed Pluto by tearing the savage's throat out), Hills 2 is as derivative as part one was innovative. This project really does feel like a sub-par eighties slasher film, whereas part one pushed the envelope and enthralled audiences upon its release in 1977. Unless you're a Craven completist, avoid The Hills Have Eyes 2.

The Hills Have Eyes (1977 version)

THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977 version)

[A shorter version of this review originally appeared here in September of 2011.]

An auteur film (written and directed by Wes Craven) about the Carters (a family from Cleveland) whose car (pulling a camping trailer) crashes in the middle of nowhere en route to Los Angeles, the 1977 version of The Hills Have Eyes has a slow first half balanced by a flurry of violent action in the final forty-five minutes. The Carters find themselves under attack by a savage family that dwells in the hills near the crash site. There are bloody casualties on both sides before the ordeal ends. To go into much more detail would be to spoil some of the movie’s finer surprises.

“I set out to have the two families in The Hills Have Eyes be mirror images of each other so I could explore the different sides of the human personality – the two brothers being the [antithesis] of each other within the bounds of popular entertainment,” Craven once said (as quoted by Brian J. Robb in the book Screams & Nightmares). The Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Horror suggests that Craven failed in this goal: “The film is hobbled by its inability to confront the inference that the depraved 'family' of marauders are a dark mirror image of the 'typical' middle-American family they attack. As it is, the attackers are just garishly repulsive, while their victims are neither likable enough to serve as identification figures nor placed in any critical perspective.” 

For extended discourse about the families in this movie, see D.N. Rodowick's essay The Enemy Within: The Economy of Violence in The Hills Have Eyes. You can find it in a book titled Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (edited by Barry Keith Grant).

My main complaint about this project is the abrupt ending that leaves the viewer in the dark about how the survivors ultimately return to civilization (or if they do so at all). The first half borders on being boring, but the pace really picks up after the midpoint. Gritty and realistic, the original version of The Hills Have Eyes may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I enjoyed the journey to the finale even though the members of the Carter family are somewhat bland and unmemorable. The antagonists, on the other hand, are fascinating and terrifying (at one point, they plan to devour a baby they’ve kidnapped from the Carters). One review suggests that I may be wrong in dismissing the Carters as bland: a piece in Variety asserts that the screenplay “takes more trouble over the stock characters than it needs.” 

In a featurette titled 'Looking Back at The Hills Have Eyes' on the Blu-ray, Wes Craven says, “As bizarre as the premise of the film is, I've always struggled to make the people in it seem real... that white-bread family from Cleveland... those were people that I grew up with. That mother was like my mother.” 

The original premise differs from the final film. On the Blu-ray's audio commentary track, Craven reveals that “the first version of this script... was written [in the] early seventies, obviously, and was set in 1984 during the presidential primaries, and people needed a passport to go from state to state because it was kind of like [an Orwellian] 1984 type of society. [Producer Peter Locke] said, 'We don't need all this. Let's get to the desert.' So this very elaborate script got pared down.”

If you’re looking for a decent chilling tale about primal survival against difficult odds, spend ninety minutes with The Hills Have Eyes.

Deadly Friend

DEADLY FRIEND

[A shorter draft of this review appeared here in August of 2010.]

A dark and subversive take on the “people with their own sentient robots” type of film (like Short Circuit), 1986’s Deadly Friend (directed by Wes Craven) includes some wildly entertaining moments. You just have to exert tremendous effort to suspend your disbelief.

The story follows Paul Conway, a young whiz kid who studies the human brain and has built an intelligent robot named BB. Paul and his mom (with BB) move to a new neighborhood, where Paul swiftly befriends the local paper boy (a high school sophomore named Tom) and the cute girl next door (Sam, who has an abusive and controlling father). One night Sam’s father knocks Sam down a flight of stairs. She hits her head at the bottom and goes brain-dead. Doctors intend to remove her from life support after twenty-four hours pass. Paul goes all Frankenstein and concocts a plan to insert a small computer (which he calls a pacemaker for the head) that he salvaged from BB (who earlier took three shotgun blasts from a paranoid neighbor) into her brain. With the help of Tom, he actually executes this scheme – with dire consequences. Cyborg Sam sets out to exact revenge on all those in the neighborhood who have wronged her, including her father and the mean old lady across the street (whose death scene, which involves a basketball, is one of the greatest ever filmed). Paul’s efforts to control Sam mostly involve locking her in different places (like her old bedroom and the attic). Ultimately Paul’s mom and later the police come face-to-face with the new Sam, and a cop’s bullet ends the cyborg’s deadly rampage. A brief epilogue (added at the insistence of Mark Tapin, who at the time was the Warner Bros. alpha male) makes no sense unless interpreted as a nightmare.

Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (who also wrote Jacob’s Ladder) penned the screenplay for this project (based on a Diana Henstell novel that I've never read). Rubin originally set out to write “a deep and heartfelt movie” but explains that the studio demanded additional violence after an early cut of the film didn't go over well. “We showed the picture to a bunch of Wes's fans, who hated it. All they wanted was guts, so the studio told me to give them six more scenes, each bloodier than the last,” said Rubin (as quoted by John Wooley in his book Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares).

According to Brian J. Robb's book Screams & Nightmares, Craven had the following to say about Deadly Friend: “There were seven or eight producers, and they all had their idea of what the film should be... the film became a hodge-podge, then it was censored by the MPAA. They made us submit the film thirteen times.”

Though the material in the finished film sometimes veers into silly territory, Craven successfully constructed an engaging tale that evokes both chills and laughter despite the studio's meddling. You know you’re watching a unique story when at one point you realize that the protagonist has slipped his mother a mickey so that he can sneak out of the house to perform unauthorized experimental brain surgery on the gal from next door. The tale is only ninety minutes long and absolutely worth sitting through to get to that death-by-basketball scene. Deadly Friend isn’t a realistic yarn, but it’s damn entertaining.

Some critics enjoyed the film at the time of its release. In The New York Times, Caryn James described the movie as “a witty ghoul story” and said, “Mr. Craven deftly balances suspense and spoof.” Variety noted that Deadly Friend has “the requisite number of shocks to keep most hearts pounding through to the closing credits.” Other critics were less impressed. Paul Attanasio wrote in The Washington Post that the film “is a routine horror movie, poorly photographed (by old-time cinematographer Philip Lathrop) and poorly performed...” Time Out published this summary: “This may be Craven at his crummiest...”

If you don't expect high art or a yarn steeped in realism, check out Deadly Friend for a fabulous ninety-minute dose of raw entertainment. I rather enjoy this unusual over-the-top story.

Chiller

CHILLER

A made-for-television movie that was broadcast in May of 1985, Chiller (directed by Wes Craven from a script by J.D. Feigelson) has an intriguing core concept but isn't a terribly well-made project. If you seek it out, be aware that all extant home video versions at the time of this writing have extremely poor picture quality and seem to have been sourced from fourth or fifth generation tapes.

“Chiller was about a man frozen cryogenically ten years ago,” Wes Craven once said (as quoted by Brian J. Robb in the book Screams & Nightmares). “He's now brought back to life entirely restored, except he has no soul. It's not horror in the sense of a maniac stalking people. Chiller was a kind of interesting thing.”

Chiller (which runs eighty-eight minutes including the end credits) suffers from a poor structure and the presence of a protagonist who is largely passive until her final confrontation with the antagonist. The tale opens with an apparent malfunction at a cryogenic storage facility that results in one frozen human subject (Miles Creighton) being rushed to a hospital. The protagonist (Marion Creighton, mother of Miles) waits around until twenty minutes into the story when a doctor proclaims, “He's alive.” Cut to six weeks later: Miles remains unresponsive on life support. Marion refuses to allow the medical professionals to pull the plug. At the twenty-seven minute mark, Miles finally opens his eyes. Three minutes later, Miles (in a wheelchair) arrives at his wealthy family's home (a sprawling estate) where his step-sister's beloved dog seems afraid of him. Six minutes later, unobserved, Miles snuffs out the pet's life – the first sign that Miles has not returned quite right. Miles goes back to work as an alpha male at his late father's corporation, where he berates the board of directors for giving money away: “Charity does not increase sales. It's non-profit.” Miles promptly fires his father's best friend Clarence (who ran the company while Miles was frozen) and then, emotionless, walks away from Clarence's corpse after the older man drops dead in a stairwell. Miles meets a female employee for drinks and engages in overt sexual harassment fifty-three minutes into the tale when he implies that he'll promote her if she sleeps with him. She inexplicably goes to his hotel room (later, we learn that he blackened her eye there). At the one hour mark, Marion's trusted ally (a Reverend named Felix) ponders, “When a man dies, what happens to his soul?” Six minutes later, Felix and Miles have a confrontation (in which Miles calls Felix a “meddling preacher”) that ends with the implication that the antagonist runs over Felix with his car. Felix survives and (in his hospital room) tells Marion, “The body you revived is empty. He has no soul.” The protagonist finally becomes active seventy-five minutes into the story when she interrupts Miles as he attempts to rape his step-sister. Four minutes later, Miles (with a gaffing hook in hand) stalks his mother through the house, and she locks him in a walk-in freezer. Police arrive and find Miles seemingly frozen to death, but he revives and attacks a cop. Marion shoots and kills Miles. An epilogue depicts a massive malfunction at the cryogenic facility, implying that the area will soon crawl with soulless citizens.

Walter Goodman accurately reviewed Chiller in The New York Times: “The show, written and produced by J. D. Feigelson and directed by Wes Craven as though they were following the commands of a computer, is a collection of scare tactics that ought to be frozen, wrapped in aluminum foil and placed in cryogenic chambers for at least a couple of generations. There are the rustlings and shufflings in the shadows, the creepy music, the free-floating mist, the camera moving ominously toward a victim, the sudden close-up appearances of the bad guy. With all of this, there's scarcely a chill in Chiller.”

One of the lesser projects in Craven's oeuvre, Chiller (with its protracted boring scenes and lack of an active hero) left me cold. Skip this one.

Deadly Blessing

DEADLY BLESSING

Directed by Wes Craven and released theatrically in the summer of 1981, Deadly Blessing follows a young woman named Martha who lives on a farm next to land owned by “the Hittites” (an Amish-like religious sect). Martha's husband Jim had been a Hittite but opted to disobey his father and leave the flock, thereby becoming shunned by his kin. Someone murders Jim fourteen minutes into the tale. Two of Martha's old friends (Vicky and Lana) arrive and stay with the widow to help her through her time of grief. Other nefarious events occur (a Hittite gets killed, someone unleashes a snake in Martha's bath, and Vicky's forbidden romance with another Hittite ends with her burned to death in her car), leaving the viewer to wonder who is behind this crime spree. “It's almost a traditional whodunit,” says Wes Craven (quoted by Brian J. Robb in the book Screams & Nightmares).

“What we tried to do with Deadly Blessing was to kind of do something a little bit different... in that we were gonna combine a murder mystery with a horror film,” says co-writer Matthew Barr in a featurette titled 'So It Was Written' on the Blu-ray. Barr continues, “Deadly Blessing takes basically a group we modeled on the Amish, but we made them of course more extreme, and we called them the Hittites... and the idea was to kind of set up a story with a repressive religious cult.” Barr explains that the plot involves “a young man who had left the fold, married an outsider, wanted to farm and live the modern way... he gets killed... that's where the murder mystery came in.”

On the home video commentary track, Wes Craven describes his input into the screenplay: “I did a pretty thorough rewrite. The script was in need of a lot of work.” Later, he adds, “It was an early script for the guys [Glenn M. Benest & Matthew Barr], and it had a lot of problems, so there was a lot of just making things more believable and trying to figure out the logic of it. That went on throughout shooting, I think; there was always constant rewrites and trying to make it make a little bit more sense... Structurally, it had a lot of problems, so I was just trying to straighten out motivations...”

Co-writer Matthew Barr (on a Blu-ray featurette) notes that even before Craven became attached to the project, he and Glenn M. Benest “had written the script about six or seven times already. We made some versions that were more violent, less violent, as we tried to kind of refine the story. And ultimately Wes Craven was brought in, and then he wrote and rewrote the script himself a couple of times...”

Glenn M. Benest recalls that Craven “came up with one of the scariest moments in the whole film where there's a snake in the bathtub. That is a frightening scene, and he came up with that whole thing.”

In the book Screams & Nightmares, Craven describes the origin of the snake scene: “I dreamed the entire scene as it appears in the movie complete with fades, colors, everything. I woke up and wrote it all down, and we shot that version. It worked beautifully.”

The screenplay originally ended with protagonist Martha saying farewell to her friend Lana after the two survive a harrowing night. Producers tacked on an epilogue in which a demonic creature erupts out of the floor in Martha's home and pulls the protagonist down (perhaps to hell). “The end was added on... it was forced by the studio. That was shot back in Hollywood after the film was all cut together. The producers, Jon Peters and Peter Guber, decided it needed a big spectacular ending, and they had this thing written,” says Wes Craven (as quoted by Brian J. Robb in the book Screams & Nightmares).

Co-writer Glenn M. Benest (in a video interview within the So It Was Written featurette on the Blu-ray) discusses the epilogue: “I'm pretty ambivalent about it because in a way it goes against what the film is about because to me the film is about that there isn't a devil or supernatural evil, that evil is in people. It's not out of some supernatural force... evil is what people do...”

Craven (on the home video's audio commentary track) recalls that the film wasn't well-received upon its release, but it did garner some praise. Carrie Rickey in The Village Voice called Deadly Blessing “a minor miracle: a consummately-crafted small genre movie with more ideas than most big movies...” Janet Maslin (in The New York Times) wrote that the project “is a better-than-average horror film, in large part because it isn't about terrified coeds being stalked by an ax-wielding loon. Its story is more original than that...”

More than three decades after its release, Deadly Blessing has become a cult classic. An odd film with a denouement (pre-epilogue) that only partially makes sense after repeat viewings, the project documents some beautiful landscapes and features a couple of particularly chilling set pieces (the notorious snake-in-the-bathtub bit and Lana's adventure while trapped in Martha's barn). “It's a flawed film in many ways,” Wes Craven laments toward the end of the Blu-ray's commentary track. I agree, but I also assert that the story is wholly unlike any other horror tale before or since, and for that alone Deadly Blessing is worthy of appraisal by genre fans.

Red Eye

RED EYE

“The interesting thing about Red Eye is it's not just a thriller. It is almost like a little art film,” opines director Wes Craven in a featurette titled A New Kind of Thriller that's available as a DVD bonus feature. “The entire second act is... basically two people on an airplane just talking... [screenwriter] Carl [Ellsworth] made it work with the dialogue.”

Indeed, this motion picture from 2005 (which was the first feature film credit for Ellsworth, who had previously written for television shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer) demonstrates that tension and clever banter can elevate a low-budget film to a quality worthy of acclaim. Critics sang the praises of the project during its theatrical run. In The New Yorker, David Denby called Red Eye “a dandy little thriller” that is “made with classical technique and bravura skill.” Ethan Alter (in Film Journal International) wrote that the movie “has a playful wit and enough genuine tension to make it worth your time and money.” Empire Magazine concludes that the film is “slick fun deftly handled by Craven.”

The director (in a video interview on the DVD's bonus features) describes how he became attached to the project. “Somebody called up and said, 'We have this script – first-time writer, but it's really good. Check it out,' and I was actually at the end of working a very long time on Cursed, the movie I did before Red Eye, and I was pretty much exhausted and burnt out, so, you know, 'I want to go to an island someplace and disappear for a year, but okay, I'll read it.' And it was just like, 'Oh, oh, oh, oh, juicy stuff.' And then it was like, 'Well, God I have to do this. I'd be a fool not to.'”

The bare-bones plot follows a hotel manager named Lisa who has booked a flight from Texas (where she attended her grandmother's funeral) back to Florida. At the airport, she meets a charming fellow who buys her a drink and chats her up. On the plane, Lisa finds herself sitting next to him and learns that his name is Jackson Rippner. Twenty minutes into the film (which runs a mere seventy-six minutes total before the end credits roll), the plane takes off. Just a few minutes into the second act, Rippner reveals his sinister side as his dialogue with Lisa skews darker and darker. Turns out he's part of a team hell-bent on assassinating a Homeland Security bigwig who is hours away from checking in at the hotel Lisa runs, and Rippner needs Lisa to phone her staff and move the target to a particular room so that Rippner's allies will have a clear shot at the suite with a surface-to-air missile. If Lisa does not cooperate, another one of Rippner's pals will murder Lisa's father.

I won't spoil much of the story except to say that in the third act, Rippner shows up at the home of Lisa's father, and a taut cat-and-mouse chase ensues. On the home video commentary track, Craven observes that in this sequence Rippner “was fighting her on her home territory for the first time. Suddenly he's on the other person's turf. Originally it was written for the father's house that he had moved into after a divorce that she had not grown up in, and we made it the house where she had grown up as a child, and so she knew every inch of it.”

My only complaint about Red Eye is that Lisa's dad ultimately shoots and kills Rippner about three minutes before the credits roll. I'd rather see the protagonist save herself at the climactic moment. This is a minor quibble, though, and Red Eye is otherwise an expertly-crafted yarn. Seek it out.

Summer of Fear (originally titled Stranger in Our House)

SUMMER OF FEAR (also known as STRANGER IN OUR HOUSE)

Based on a Lois Duncan novel that I've never read, the 1978 project Summer of Fear (directed by Wes Craven and originally broadcast by NBC under the title Stranger in our House) is a drama with supernatural elements rather than a horror film in the traditional sense, though the plot touches on assorted horrific notions: the death of loved ones via a car accident, the loss of a beloved family pet, and the effects of a stroke on one's ability to function.

In his book Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares, John Wooley quotes the director as saying that Summer of Fear was “where I first shot in thirty-five millimeter. It was the first time I ever used a dolly. I was working with things I never realized even existed.”

With its decent production values, the film showcases a teenaged Linda Blair as a young adult named Rachel who grows to suspect that her cousin Julia is a witch. Julia moves in with Rachel and her family after Julia's parents and housekeeper die in a car crash. Turns out that “Julia” is an imposter named Sarah who practices black magic and was the real housekeeper for Rachel's late aunt and uncle; the actual Julia also perished in the car wreck. For some reason, Sarah is hell-bent on making life uncomfortable for Rachel and her family. After Sarah declares her intent to kill Rachel and her mother, Sarah pursues Rachel and her ex-boyfriend in a car chase that ends in the witch's apparent death (an epilogue reveals that she survived).

I first watched Summer of Fear on DVD in 2009 and at the time was not impressed: I wrote, “This film is flat-out boring and riddled with flaws. Sarah's motive is unclear, the characters are dull, and the plot plods along with periodic incidents (Rachel gets a bad case of hives, for one) that the protagonist attributes to her alleged cousin's use of witchcraft. Don't waste your time.” Having just sat through the project two more times (once while listening to the DVD's commentary track), I now see the appeal of this tension-filled thriller. In addition to being a time capsule that documents the hairstyles, wardrobes, bulky telephones, and gas-guzzling automobiles of the late 1970s, the movie plays to the universal fear of one's family life unraveling. On the audio commentary, Wes Craven notes that “this is every teenager's nightmare situation: you have everything worked out in your family and with your boyfriend and everything else, and then somebody comes in and starts gaining all the power away from you.”

One of the film's more unsettling aspects is its overtones of incestuous relationships. Rachel's older brother seems attracted to his cousin. “Julia” gives her alleged uncle a neck massage and later (eighty-five minutes into the tale) invites him to “unzip me” as she changes clothes. Julia/Sarah claims that Rachel's ex-boyfriend always saw Rachel as more of a “sister” even when they were dating. These moments make me squirm in the present day and must have been exponentially more controversial back in 1978.

Though hardcore horror fans may not enjoy this entry in Craven's oeuvre, Summer of Fear has its share of entertaining moments and is worth at least one viewing for Wes Craven completists. If you go in expecting straight horror action, you'll be disappointed. The script (adapted from the Duncan novel by Max A. Keller and Glenn M. Benest) is relatively tame given that it was developed for network television, but it pushes the envelope in places and sports one particularly gut-wrenching scene (in which Rachel's beloved horse dies just before the midpoint). Summer of Fear is an atypical Wes Craven project. If you have one hundred minutes to spare and want a glimpse of a nuclear family's trials and tribulations in late-seventies California, check it out. It's a surprise-filled ride.

Night Visions

NIGHT VISIONS

A 1990 made-for-TV movie that Wes Craven directed and co-wrote, Night Visions follows a singular and memorable protagonist (a young woman named Sally Powers who has a history of mental illness, low-grade telepathy, and a fresh doctorate in psychology). In Los Angeles, Powers partners with a hot-tempered alcoholic cop (Tom Mackey) in an effort to solve a string of murders attributed to a serial killer nicknamed The Eagle due to his signature of leaving attractive female victims posed in spread-eagle positions. Peppered with periodic provocative and sometimes horrific imagery and sporting a well-staged tension-filled final ten minutes (and featuring a trippy dream sequence twenty-seven minutes into the story), Night Visions isn't nearly as unwatchable as most of the scant online reviews of this obscure project suggest. It was never destined to win any awards, but it's a perfectly serviceable thriller marred only by the unbelievable sub-plot of Powers developing a romantic relationship with a photographer named Martin (if Powers was truly obsessed with solving the case, she would not take time away from sifting evidence to go on leisurely dates) and by Mackey's habit of contaminating crime scenes.

Night Visions becomes increasingly interesting when a stressed Powers manifests symptoms of multiple personality disorder. Actress Loryn Locklin delivers nuanced performances in scenes that depict Powers slipping in and out of alternate personas. Other stars of note in this project include James Remar as Mackey and Mitch Pileggi as a police captain.

Seventy-one minutes into the tale, Powers articulates a thought-provoking profile of the killer that (along with a bone-headed move by the bad guy) ultimately leads to the discovery of his identity. I won't spoil the mystery. The Eagle is a unique antagonist with a penchant for snuffing out lives at carefully-selected geographic locations that form the points of a star when mapped out.

Night Visions at the time of this writing has not officially been issued on home video except long ago on VHS in some non-USA countries (PAL format rather than NTSC). Here's hoping the powers-that-be will sate Wes Craven's legion of fans by giving this decent little film a proper modern-day commercial release. I'd snap up a copy right away given the chance.

Night Visions doesn't rise to the quality of Craven's best work (it will never capture the popular imagination the way A Nightmare on Elm Street did), but it's above average for made-for-TV fare. Seek it out and let me know how you perceive it in the comments here on the blog.

My Soul to Take

MY SOUL TO TAKE

Written and directed by Wes Craven, My Soul to Take met with harsh reviews upon its theatrical release in October of 2010. In Variety, Dennis Harvey called the film a “dumb, derivative teen slasher movie” and “a pretty soporific affair bogged down by awkward expository dialogue, one-dimensional characters (or ones whose suggested hidden sides turn out to be mere tease), bland atmospherics and unmemorable action.” Gary Goldstein (in the L.A. Times) opined that the project is “a thrill-free snooze” with an “overly complex story.” Marc Savlov wrote in The Austin Chronicle that “this utterly mediocre forget-me-now could've been crafted by any faceless serial director.” I beg to differ with these three critics and all the others who dismissed My Soul to Take, which I perceive as a flawed but thought-provoking singular horror tale with ample scares and a core concept that demands repeat viewings to fully appreciate.

The movie opens with a gripping nine-minute prologue set sixteen years before the main story. In the opening sequence, a family man named Abel (who suffers from multiple personality disorder) finds a distinctive knife in his workshop and recognizes the weapon from TV news reports as the blade of choice used by a local serial killer (the Riverton Ripper). Fearing that one of his heretofore unknown personalities might be responsible for a string of murders, Abel phones his psychiatrist but then notices that his pregnant wife has already been knifed. Authorities arrive and shoot Abel as he's about to kill Leah (his three-year-old daughter). Abel snatches a gun from one officer, shoots him, and then offs his doctor before another cop takes him down. Wounded but alive, Abel revives in an ambulance en route to the hospital (where mysteriously seven premature births are happening) and causes a nasty crash (the vehicle flips, rolls, and ultimately explodes alongside a river). When help arrives, Abel's body is nowhere to be found.

Sixteen years later, the seven kids born the night of the prologue ring in their sixteenth birthday with a tradition known as “Ripper Night” alongside the river (by the remains of the ambulance, now rusted out and covered in candle stubs) during which one of the “Riverton Seven” must fend off a massive puppet designed to look as Abel might appear had he survived and lived in the wilderness all this time (ragged clothing, long hair, and a scraggly beard). Protagonist Adam “Bug” Hellerman (a sensitive fellow prone to migraines) is this year's “volunteer,” and he's spooked by the sight of the puppet. Before the ritual goes far, police arrive and order the teens to disperse. On his way home, Jay (one of the Riverton Seven) notices someone following him as he crosses an isolated bridge. Chased down by a long-haired bearded fellow in ragged clothes, Jay dies around seventeen minutes into the tale when his assailant slams his head against a metal post, knifes him, and tosses him into the river.

The next forty minutes of the film happen during daylight as the teens (unaware that one of their peers has been murdered) go about a typical day before, during, and after school. A female student nicknamed Fang holds sway over many friends and followers; she makes life hell for Bug and his best friend Alex, ordering a bully (Brandon) to rough them up. Thirty-three minutes into the film, Bug has a vision and sees (in a restroom mirror) Jay, bloody, swimming underwater. Six minutes later, Craven begs the viewer to wonder just what the hell is going on when Bug and Alex (alone in a corridor) begin speaking in unison and moving as if they are mirror images of one another for a minute or so. Just under ten minutes later, the present-day Ripper claims another victim and slits the throat of Penelope (a religious gal and one of the Riverton Seven) alongside the school's pool. Within eleven minutes, two more victims fall to the mysterious killer (who may or may not be Abel): Brandon and the young woman he lusted after (Brittany).

Night falls again one hour into the film, and the rest of the action plays out in and around Bug's home that evening. Craven reveals that “Fang” is Bug's sister and is in fact Leah (Abel's daughter), and the woman Bug thought was his mother turns out to be his aunt (paramedics cut Bug out of his dead mom's womb the night of the prologue). Eighty-one minutes into the story, the protagonist finds himself confronted by a cop who thinks that Bug's responsible for the four teens killed that day, and Bug finds that his aunt has also been killed. The Ripper shows up, kills the officer, and attacks Bug. I won't spoil the beat-by-beat moments of the denouement, but I will reveal the twist that confused many critics and may not be apparent until a second viewing: the night Abel died in the prologue, his seven personalities (each a unique soul) dispersed and reincarnated as the Riverton Seven, and one of them is the present-day killer. I won't tell you which one, though there are only three suspects left as the finale gets well and truly underway.

My only quibble with this film is that Alex (ninety-one minutes into the story) tells Bug that Abel developed “schizophrenia” at the age of sixteen. Schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personalities (contrary to popular opinion) and is a wholly different sort of mental illness.

“This was a script that got rewritten while we were shooting,” Wes Craven notes on the Blu-ray's audio commentary track. “It's a very complex story, and we kept figuring out how to make it better.” While some critics see the plot's complexity as a negative, I enjoyed watching a horror yarn in which not everything's spelled out even by the time one reaches the very end. My Soul to Take is a wrongly-maligned entry in Wes Craven's oeuvre, and I predict that it shall be rediscovered and reevaluated in due time. Thought-provoking, sometimes puzzling, but always entertaining, My Soul to Take is a unique spin on the “teens in jeopardy as a knife-wielding killer stalks them” sub-genre. Disagree? Leave some comments here on the blog.