MOTHER’S DAY

It’s Thanksgiving’s Day, so as a treat to all you Icons stalwarts who take time between cranberry sauce and turkey to visit our fine website... here’s a review of MOTHER’S DAY.

Okay, I’ll be honest. I don’t own any Thanksgiving themed horror movies. In fact, I’m not even sure any exist, although Brion James’ supernatural spirit does inhabit a dinner turkey and go wild in the Horror Show. But I digress. To honor the holiday spirit, I chose to review the Charles Kaufman film instead.

If that last name rings in your ears, it should. Charles’ brother is Lloyd Kaufman, president of Troma Studios. And if you were to watch MOTHER’S DAY without this information, you would certainly notice that the film is genetically linked to Toxie’s home studio. Though it wasn’t produced as a Troma film and precedes Lloyd’s first official horror flick, THE TOXIC AVENGER, by four years, this is a tried and true sister film to brother Lloyd’s output.

To describe the plot would be as pointless as the plot is simple. All you need to know is that Mother and her two demented hillbilly sons kidnap three women. Torture, rape and murder ensue. If you’re reading this review, what you really want to know is how many of the elements of a Troma film are present. Super low budget: check. Run and gun filming: check. Gallons of blood: check. Cheapjack special effects: check. Rape: check. Humor: check. Cheesy looking decapitation: check. Social commentary: check. Loony dialogue: check. The Troma aesthetic and attitude: absolutely a check.

Okay, so it’s a little slow for a Troma product, and in some ways bears a stronger resemblance to FRIDAY THE 13TH than SGT. KABUKIMAN. But when I’m watching a cross-eyed mother wearing a neck brace constantly move her head from side to side, in my mind I’m saying “God bless Troma, Uncle Lloyd.” If you love Troma’s output, it’s fact: this minor title is going to please you.

The extras might not please you so much. Lloyd starts the disc with one of his wacky introductions, complete with phony pregnant lady. The main attraction is the commentary with Charles Kaufman and assistant art director Rex Piano. They share a multitude of stories, in the most boring fashion possible; they’re not even exciting when they discuss one actor puking on another. If only Charles was blessed with Lloyd’s charisma gene. There are also two brief interview segments with Charles; he’s slightly more entertaining in those. There’s a silly feature from Troma’s Edge TV, where Lloyd plays himself and his mother. A number of trailers for other Troma films also grace the disc. And, of course, there’s my favorite Troma featurette of all, “The Radiation March.”

There’s been much talk about MOTHER’S DAY of late, not because today’s Thanksgiving, but because Darren Lynn Bousman is remaking it. I’ll spare you all the arguments about horror remakes, and also the “Why on Earth would anyone want to remake a Troma film?” But I will say that unless Bousman makes it essentially a Troma film, it can’t possibly work. If it strays from that checklist I mentioned above, as he’s already done if it’s true he spent $11 million to make it, it may be a film, hey, it may even share the title of a Troma Film, but a Troma film it will never be.

In the canon of Troma films, MOTHER’S DAY is more along the lines of SURF NAZIS MUST DIE than THE TOXIC AVENGER. It lacks an iconic character, and isn’t quite as zany as brother Lloyd’s output. But any film that has murder by blown up plastic breast has the Troma seal of approval. Toxie fans can take pride in this one.

-- Phil Fasso

Be Good to Mother. Support Icons of Fright and Amazon by Buying Mother's Day Here!

Posted by fasso at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

THE SENTINEL

Sometimes I watch a film and I can’t tell whether it’s brilliant or trash. This type of film is usually so audacious, so beyond the realm of what a normal movie-going experience has to offer, so lurid in aesthetic and storytelling, that it confuses my senses. The answer should be obvious: the film is brilliant trash. One such film is 1977’s THE SENTINEL, Michael Winner’s flick that sets the gold standard for such flicks.

As with so many other religious horror films, this one starts off in a church in Rome, and a conversation with priests about impending doom. But that doesn’t even begin to tell the story. The movie then shifts to New York, where it chronicles the life of model Alison Parker, who wants to move out of her boyfriend Michael’s apartment. After her father’s death, Alison meets a realtor who offers her an incredible deal on a vast, furnished apartment, which she can’t refuse. Upon exiting, she looks up at her new building and sees someone staring down at her from a high-up window; the blind Father Halliran. It should come as no secret that there’s something wrong with the priest, the building and Alison herself.

I’m afraid a plot summary could not close to express just how whacked out this film is. It’s probably better if I explain some of the odd occurrences. At the 20 minute mark, Burgess Meredith shows up as Charles Chazen, Alison’s neighbor. He’s accompanied by a parrot on his shoulder and a cat in his hands. He introduces the parrot, stating, “This is Mortimer. He’s from Brah-zil,” as only Burgess Meredith can. The cat’s name is Jezebel, and later in the film, Chazen will throw the feline an insane birthday party, complete with party hat for the guest of honor; at the soiree, a phrase as innocuous as ‘Black and white cat, black and white cake” becomes an unhinged motto. An encounter with the lesbians on the first floor makes the flesh crawl, as Beverly D’Angelo’s Sandra, dressed in a red leotard, suddenly begins to masturbates on a couch in front of Alison. When Alison asks her partner Gerde what the two do for a living, the big German replies, “We fondle each other.” Sex is filthy in this movie, as in the earlier flashback when Alison walks in on her decrepit, aged father having a threesome; the camerawork is absolutely lurid as it zooms in and out on the dirty old man’s leering face. A dream sequence that reconfigures the cat’s party is abundant in both nudity and sleaze. As disjointed scenes roll one into another, offering no progression but that of a bizarre nightmare, Alison’s reality rapidly falls apart.

More disturbing than any of these scenes, though, is Winner’s dementedly inspired casting choice for the climax of the film. In a move that echoes Todd Browning’s, the director cast real freaks as the monsters from Hell, a decision that not only drew great outrage against the film at the time of its release, but perfectly fit the film’s tawdry aesthetic. There’s something seriously tacky in Winner’s casting choice, and yet for THE SENTINEL, it seems not only the right choice, but the only one.

If all this sounds gaudy and exploitative, that’s only because it is. But it’s exploitative genius. Winner’s film is so bold in its imagery and ideas, so far out there past where any sane film takes its audience, that I absolutely love it. It’s the horror genre’s answer to a John Waters film. Ironically, the film only falters when it bogs down in more mundane storytelling, as it involves the police and tries to explain what is happening through the trappings of a crime procedural. Its offers to decipher things theologically, with Arthur Kennedy popping up throughout the film as a priest who knows Halliran’s secrets, falls flat as well. If the movie had only stuck to its chosen path, these answers would be unnecessary; because there are no answers to a nightmare.

My favorite aspect of THE SENTINEL is Winner’s choice casting. In between ROCKY movies, Meredith was playing lots of oddball parts in oddball horror movies; this is my favorite of them, as good old Burgess is absolutely outlandish, and plays Chazen to the hilt. Cristina Raines does a great job of falling apart, growing paler and seeming thinner and thinner in later scenes. As Michael, Chris Sarandon walks the line between caring boyfriend and potentially dangerous sociopath perfectly. Ava Gardner doesn’t belong in her role as Miss Logan, the realtor, which is exactly why she belongs in that role. And if you’re going to choose an aged actor to play a creepy, blind priest who stares out a window all day, would you choose anyone other than John Carradine? No, because John Carradine was born to play that role.

I’ve read in a number of places that THE SENTINEL was supposed to be Universal Studios’ answer to THE EXORCIST. With its religious elements, it should fit right alongside movies of that ilk. But it’s not a classy affair as THE OMEN is, nor is it as restrained or as high-minded as THE EXORCIST. That much I knew when I first saw it. What I didn’t know was whether it was brilliant or trash. The answer should have been obvious. As so often the case is when I come to question a movie as such, it’s because THE SENTINEL is brilliant trash.

--Phil Fasso

Possess the Possessed: Support Icons of Fright at Amazon and Buy The Sentinel Here

Posted by fasso at 02:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Alligator

In an era when JAWS rip offs were proliferate, screenwriter John Sayles was a hot commodity. His output was responsible for two such films, the first of which was 1978’s cheeky, low budget PIRANHA (see review here), which foreshadowed the humorous touches to horror that led to director Joe Dante’s early success with THE HOWLING and GREMLINS. Sayles’ second plundering of the big shark tale was ALLIGATOR, a middling effort that foreshadowed just what a mediocre horror director Lewis Teague would be. It’s hard for me to watch ALLIGATOR without wondering how good a flick it could have been had Dante directed it, instead of Teague.

The plot for ALLIGATOR is absolutely preposterous. A little girl’s parents take her to watch gator wrestling. After a bunch of quick cuts that indicate a wrestler just got mauled by a gator, the family returns home. The girl plays with her pet, a baby alligator. Dad, an overbearing blowhard who’s possibly abusive, takes the gator and flushes it (in a POV shot from the swirling inside of a toilet bowl, no less). Flash forward. A pet store owner with male pattern baldness funds animals for illegal genetic research. A cop with male pattern baldness investigates body parts found in the city sewer. His bald boss tries to keep the city from fear. A supersized gator who’s naturally bald taunts the cop with more and more body parts. A reptile expert who’s not bald hooks up with the cop, both professionally and in bed.

And then there’s the hunter that the cops bring in to kill the gator. The idea of hiring a great white hunter to patrol the city streets with a rifle in hand is just silly. The fact that he hires black kids off the streets as “natives” to help him track the alligator is insulting. The fact that the hunter is played by Henry Silva... well, that is ludicrous.

More ludicrous than the gator itself? Perhaps, but that’s too close for me to call. The creature is portrayed in two ways. The first looks as if it cost the majority of the film’s budget, a rather large mock up of a gator. Teague mostly uses this version to show his monster tearing with its teeth and massive jaws. It’s moderately effective. In fact, it’s much better than the alternative; because Teague could not get the mock up to move down streets and toward victims, he used a baby alligator on obvious miniatures of sets. If this movie had any chance of being credibly scary, it was gutshot by this goofy looking attempt to make a baby gator look big and dangerous. Especially when Teague has already treated us to watch a sibling flushed down a toilet with a POV shot.

And yet, I really believe this could have worked, had Joe Dante directed it. Dante would have brought a zany energy to the film, playing it for the joke it should have been; in short, it would have succeeded because it would have been PIRANHA (precisely the reason Dante would never have done the film). Teague doesn’t know quite what to do with the material. He plays much of the film as a gruff cop drama, but there’s no mystery here at all, because the name of the movie is ALLIGATOR.

Features abound like those body parts the police keep finding on this DVD. Look to the trailers for other Lions Gate films to see how millions of dollars of poorly done CGI can look just as silly as a baby alligator on a miniature set. The first of the two main features is the commentary track with Teague and lead balding actor Robert Forster, moderated from someone from Dark Delicacies. Teague tended to be repetitive on the other two commentaries I’ve heard from him, but with Forster constantly asking “Do you remember when...?” and the moderator prodding him, he’s merely dull here. This track might have had a shot at being interesting had it included Sayles, who’s not boring. Fortunately, Sayles gets his own 17-minute featurette, “Alligator Author,” during which he discusses many of the reasons for the things he included in his script for the film. And he explains why he had to change his ending more than once to preserve the gator mock up (I couldn’t make this one up if I tried, folks).

When John Sayles was writing ALLIGATOR, he was also drafting a script for Joe Dante’s follow-up to PIRANHA, a werewolf film called THE HOWLING. For both films, he was given a previously written script, and told this: Keep the title and the monster, and do whatever you want with the rest. There’s not a little bit of irony in the fact that Joe Dante directed THE HOWLING, which many consider a minor classic. Given the same talented writer, Lewis Teague put forth ALLIGATOR, a laughable horror film where the laughs aren’t intended and there’s not much horror. It’s an interesting dichotomy of what two directors can do with a common writer.

--Phil Fasso

Support Icons' and Amazon's Efforts against Hungry, Sewer Dwelling Gators: Order the DVD Here!

Posted by fasso at 05:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)