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Some Horror Movie Choices for Halloween

Rating: NNNNN


With everyone and his brother running around trying to recreate the
70s-style horror movie – remaking The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Cabin
Fever, Wrong Turn, House Of 1000 Corpses – why not spend Halloween
with the real thing?

Carpenter nails it

HALLOWEEN

(Anchor Bay, 1978) D: John Carpenter, w/Jamie Lee Curtis,
Donald Pleasance.

PRINCE OF DARKNESS

(Universal, 1987) D: John Carpenter, w/ Donald
Pleasance, Victor Wong.

The original dead babysitter movie – imitated more times than I can
count – Halloween still retains an almost theoretical elegance in
John Carpenter’s widescreen compositions and free-floating moving
camera. The story has a mythological simplicity – psycho returns to
his hometown and starts killing babysitters, with Donald Pleasance’s
doctor in pursuit. Anchor Bay’s two-DVD set includes a new making-of
documentary, and they licensed the Carpenter/Curtis commentary from
the old Criterion laserdisc.
Universal has finally issued, on a bare-bones disc, Carpenter’s
extremely underrated Prince Of Darkness, wherein Donald Pleasance as
an aging priest recruits a bunch of scientists to come to the old
church where a large cylinder of fluid is coming to life to begin the
rule of, oh, I don’t know… SATAN! It’s a silly premise, as horror
movies often are, but delivered with a chilling style and conviction.

Cravin’ Craven

THE HILLS HAVE EYES

(Anchor Bay, 1977) D: Wes Craven, w/ James
Whitworth, Dee Wallace.

Wes Craven’s third film is a bit of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre rip –
ordinary folks drive off the main road and discover that people are
crazy out there. But what they also find is one of the great tropes
of the 70s horror film, which is the horrific funhouse-mirror version
of the American Family. Filmed in the Mojave Desert in the middle of
the summer, this is a memorably nasty horror picture. What it lacks
in budget it makes up for in savagery, and if it lacks the wit of
Craven’s masterpiece, A Nightmare On Elm Street, it is a movie that
wants to steal your sleep. Excellent DVD from Anchor Bay includes a
making-of, a Wes Craven commentary and the Craven episode of The
Directors from the AFI.

Cohen Collection

GOD TOLD ME TO

(Blue Underground, 1976) D: Larry Cohen w/ Tony
Lobianco, Deborah Raffin

THE WINGED SERPENT

(Blue Underground, 1982) D: Larry Cohen w/ Michael
Moriarty, David Carradine.

Larry Cohen is a kind of exploitation genius savant. He got people to
put money up for some of the strangest horror films of the 70s, and
God Told Me To is one of the strangest. Tony Lobianco plays a New
York City cop investigating a series of apparently random multiple
homicides, only each of the killers gives as his motive, “God told me
to.” Well, he did, sort of, if the living god can be taken as the
hermaphroditic offspring of a virgin birth caused by an alien
abduction. Tremendously creepy, and until Blue Underground’s recent
DVD issue, extremely hard to see uncut. Cohen had a fondness for
shooting hand-held and in the streets without permits, and thus gets
a great New York mood. Take a look at Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure for
evidence of its influence.
In Cohen’s other movie about gods, Q: The Winged Serpent, the Aztec
god Quetzalcoatl – a giant winged serpent – takes up residence in the
Chrysler Building. It’s a bizarre conceit, but with Moriarty at his
twitchiest and Carradine as a cop puzzled by inexplicable events, its
also convincing. Really!

Blood Simple

THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD

(Lion’s Gate, 1971) D: Peter Duffell, w/
Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing.

This is a different kind of 70s horror movie. It’s really a 60s
horror movie that was made in the 70s, a vignette compilation from
stories by Robert Bloch (Psycho) from Amicus, the studio that looked
like Hammer but wasn’t – their casts were almost interchangeable with
Hammer’s, with Hammer babe Ingrid Pitt providing the cleavage in this
one. These are strikingly atmospheric, four stories about strange
doings in an English country house, all of them with essentially the
same quest – a really annoying character gets his or her comeuppance
– but it’s worthwhile as an old-fashioned creepshow.

And speaking of Hammer and Pitt, you might look for the
bargain-priced MGM double bill issue of Countess Dracula and Vampire
Lovers, the first a sombre look at the life of Elizabeth Bathory, the
latter an adaptation of Sheridan LeFanu’s Camilla.

– JOHN HARKNESS

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