Demons (1985) - 30th Anniversary

"The very definition of geek show cinema, Demons is nothing more than 90 minutes of mindless, gut wrenching mayhem..." - DVDTalk

Lamberto Bava's Demons is a film that is so easy to misread as 'mindless, gut-wrenching mayhem.' There's nothing wrong with mindless, gut-wrenching mayhem at all. I voted for it in the last election. But Demons just isn't that. Demons blasts you with wild, gory horror action, oozing demonic sores, pounding heavy metal music, and terrible dubbing. It's so successful at this that you barely notice how carefully constructed this film is.

Demons begins with a little prologue set in the subway. The first shot is the lights of the train shining out of the darkness at we the audience, like the light of a projector. An attractive girl on the subway suspects a mysterious punk with a chrome mask covering half his face is stalking her. She gets off the train at her stop and finds the man is still behind her. She runs up the stairs toward the light of day. She feels safe, until the punk steps out in front of her. He hands her an invitation to a movie at the MetroPol, then silently walks away. She's relieved. He's in a costume, promoting the movie, right? He doesn't answer. But she gets a second invitation for her friend.

What's interesting about this scene is that we, and the girl, are both conditioned to expect movie events to happen in real life. In real life, men in metallic masks don't stalk you on the subway then slay you with a gleaming knife. In real life, this is just some weirdo. But in a movie, he'd be a black-gloved murderer. Or he'd become one at the end of the chase sequence. Movie reality has saturated real reality through our imaginations. We're prepared for movie events to happen to us. This girl has seen her horror movies.

This scene also introduces us to our main female protagonists, Cheryl and Carmen, and the central setting of the movie, the MetroPol. Most of the movie will take place in the MetroPol and will center around the movie they are being invited to watch. End of prologue.

We then plunge into the first act by meeting our main characters: the MetroPol and its stylish usher, Tony the pimp and his two whores, the blind man and his slutty amanuensis, and our leading men, George and his preppy friend. There doesn't appear to be any discerning characteristic in who the chrome-masked punk chooses to invite. They're just people. The wide variety of very different people who can all come together and enjoy the same movie.

In the lobby with them are props from the movie they are about to see. Again, film reality is intruding into real reality. Most patrons regard the memorabilia as museum pieces. But Tony's uncouth whores are quick to try on the strange mask. This contact between the audience and the film's substance is what opens the gates of hell. She is infected, so to speak.

The audience is seated. The lights dim. The light of the projector shines into the darkness. Then the film within the film starts much as the real film, with two lights shining out of the darkness. This time the lights of motorcycles. A group of college students are driving into a cemetery to explore the crypt of Nostradamus. The man on one of the motorcycles is recognizably the same man who wore the chrome mask. As these students point their flashlights in the movie, the usher points her flashlight at individual groups in the audience. It's as though the movie were looking at them, one-by-one. In the Nostradamus movie, the actor from the subway puts on the mask of Nostradamus. He receives a cut on his face and we see, at the same time, the cut on the whore's face.

The whore runs to the bathroom to tend to the cut, but it blisters and explodes as she transforms into a demon, just as the man in the movie. Cross-cutting juxtaposes the action in the movie of the infected man trying to kill a woman with the whore trying to kill the other whore, who came to check on her. She's gashed just as the girl on screen is murdered. Trying to hide, the second whore finds herself behind the movie screen. As the killer in the movie slices an opening into a tent to get at another girl, the whore rips through the film screen in just that spot, as though the movie itself were exploding out into the real world the way the demon puss explodes out of the gash in her neck.

As the patrons all rush to check on the whore, Cheryl and Carmen realize it's all happening "just like in the movie." As they do so, in the background we see the possessed man in the movie (the same man who gave the girls the invitations on the subway), his face filling the screen, regard them/us with a sinister smile. The second whore begins to demonize. So ends the first act.

The metaphysics of Demons raises some questions, of course. The Nostradamus film had to have been made prior to the patrons being invited to the theater. So if the film is evil, were the actors infected in the making? And then how are they functioning in society? Or is it produced through supernatural means? Or is it really just a movie and the theater is the sinister force? This is a Dardano Sarccheti penned movie. It meddles with the notion of reality, but has little regard for logic. My point thus far has been just how carefully the film is crafted to decay your sense of what constitutes reality, what distinguishes the barrier between a film and an actual experience.

As the demons, their numbers growing, wreak havoc in the theater, the survivors flee to the doors to find they've been walled in. The event's organizer is most industrious. Tony the Pimp and the preppy guys who have been hitting on Cheryl and Carmon team up to lock a demon in using a vending machine. They then try to stop the madness by trashing the projection room. They find no projectionist, but just a computer, not unlike the mechanical autodialer in 976-EVIL, running the film. Smashing up the machines does nothing to stop the horror already unleashed, however. They conclude that it's not the movie that's evil, but the theater itself. They don't know, as we do, that there are serious links between the theater and the movie.

So here's a good time to stop and ask, "What the hell's the point?" Sure, maybe the movie is actually well-constructed and does break down the barriers between film and reality. But it's still just Motorhead and gore effects, right? Demons was made in 1985. The Video Recordings Act had just taken effect in Britain, creating the "video nasty" by banning obscenely violent or erotic movies. This was part of a wider discussion about the influence of violent movies on individuals and society, whether these movies weren't creating violence. The same discussion we have about video games today. I think Sacchetti was playing with this idea, that these movies are a corruptive force. But Sacchetti is not a subtle guy. That's why I love him. He's giving us a reductio ad absurdum. Look at how corruptive these movies and the theaters that show them are--it's not just spurring a few nutjobs to mass-murders, it's transforming the whole of society into demonic killing machines. It's apocalyptic. Hence the use of everyone's favorite apocalyptic poet, Nostradamus.

This is why he starts the movie with a girl afraid of a man on the subway. She's afraid of him because she's conditioned to expect movie violence in reality. She's fearful, like the people who signed the Video Recordings Act. When she lets her guard down and accepts the invitation to the movie, she finds the corruption of the movie spilling out all around her, threatening her with grievous harm.

In what follows, a hideous hag demon emerges out of Carmen's arched back, a group of coke-snorting punks break into the theater, a demon escapes at the same time, our preppy leading man, George, steals a motorcycle and sword prop from the lobby, and a helicopter crashes through the roof of the theater. On the roof, Cheryl and George are assaulted by the man with the chrome mask. They slowly jam his head onto some nails, escape the theater, and flee with some well-armed jeep-drivers. Cheryl begins to transform and is quickly shot.

All of these events are over-the-top, full of guts and mayhem, and lacking much logic. They chronicle the spill of the violence from the movie into the rest of society from just one ill-advised screening. As for the narrative, the man in the chrome mask, who appears to be some sort of cyborg, is the only link between the theater and the film, so it's a safe bet that he's behind the whole scenario. Why or how is never explained. Logical or not, any or all of these events could be read into the theme I argued for. I don't think it's of much value to treat the whole movie as a meditation on the influence of violent movies on society, or to view every event as symbolic. The use of movie props to defend oneself show the positive power of immersion into horror movies. The violent punks breaking in and releasing a demon can show that it is our own flawed society that's at fault, not movies. But then, in this movie, the movie IS to blame! The punks are innocent blunderers. Again, it's a reductio ad absurdum for these kinds of statements about horror movies.

Demons is a film whose logic is really in the editing. Like the scene in the ducts, where the young man keeps hearing demon claws approaching. We see the shots of the claws. His face. His girlfriend's face. Only after he lets her take the lead do we realize the missing information: those were her hands. Demons is a triumph of film language over conventional logic to tell its story and make its point. This, more than "mindless, gutwrenching mayhem" and heavy metal, is why it remains a relevant and exciting movie thirty years after release. Demons is not just a wild ride; it's an expertly-crafted wild ride.

The Antiquated Terror of 976-EVIL (1988)

976-EVIL is a movie about a premium-rate horoscope hotline that either kills or corrupts its callers. Hoax (Stephen Geoffreys), the nerdy hero-villain, uses the hotline to escape his reality of not-having-sex and getting beaten in the graffiti-covered bathroom by high school ruffians. The hotline starts giving him advice, but soon it gives him claws, long, stringy hair, and a desire to kill his busty Spanish teacher.

A lot of movies simply do not profit from the passage of time. Quite the opposite, their relevance seems to evaporate as they're left in the wake of the "whirlwind of progress." These are movies that have capitalized on fleeting fads and unfulfilled promises. One might expect 976-EVIL to be amongst those. But, the strangest thing, this movie seems immensely enhanced by the otherwordliness of its obsolescence. It now evokes hidden, disconnected pockets of virtual space only accessed through antique rituals. Allow me to explain.

In 1971 the 976/1-900 number was first created. Nobody used it for six years, until good ol' Jimmy Carter came along and created the "Ask Uncle Jimmy" hotline. I'm not kidding. Of course, you couldn't have phone sex with Jimmy Carter--that was coming later. Not with Jimmy Carter, but with fat women with seductive voices. The 976 number had the unique property of being monitored and screened at local levels, which gave it a lot of versatility when it came to use as a premium, pay-per-call number. And since we live in America, that's exactly what happened.

In the '80s, the popularity of the 976 number, and later the 1-900 number, surged. All sorts of stupid shit was out there for you to call and waste money on. You could call the Two Coreys if you'd finally worn out that Lost Boys (1987) VHS tape. You could call the Warrant hotline and found out if she really is his cherry pie. You could call a joke hotline and get a cheap, vaudeville joke for $0.99/minute. There was an insult hotline that would, yes, just insult you. Another one would try to make you cry. Video game hints, various types of phone sex, KISS, Bill and Ted, Freddy Kreuger, He-Man--you name it, and there was a premium-rate number for it.

Here are some links to genuine ads for 1-900 numbers, for your historical enjoyment.

Freak Phone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk_J0vm3bCI

Creep Phone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMK7uzxfVac

Spooky Stories Line

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pqrMFI14Xc

What's really interesting about these lines is that they were such an analog means of networking. The internet generation has grown up with a form of databasing virtual space that is easily accessible with a click. The 1-900 number craze was an attempt to carve out that virtual space, but when there was nothing but phone lines, tape reels, radio waves, and paper. The closest thing to databasing the space was a local TV ad you'd see once after an episode of SNL and never see again, or simply cheap, paper ads distributed by an old man in a greasy coat.

The idea that there could be lots of strange, obscure niches of this virtual space that you'd never know anything about was a really high probability. You'd just have to stumble upon the ad to know it's there. And so it wasn't implausible that something like the 976-EVIL number could exist. A goofy, occult horoscope number for whatever small audience would be interested. (Most of these numbers that were not aimed at children were, after all, aimed at lonely nerds with odd tastes.) That there could be sinister, rather than capitalistic purposes to such a line is not so difficult to imagine.

Something about that old, analog technology seems more feasibly malign. A mysterious website seems like a very twee sort of notion, as does a mysterious HDMI signal. A mysterious phone line or radio signal, perhaps because they have a more elemental nature than their human-coded digital cousins, just feel more genuinely frightening. Or perhaps because, on the internet, you can "navigate away". It's a distant, nebulous connection. A "cold connection," to steal one of McLuhan's notions. A phone line or radio wave seems to be a physical connection, present in your home, your ear, near your body: it's a "hot connection." You call someone and you're bringing them into proximity with you. You don't always know who or what you're calling, what you're letting in.

When I first watched 976-EVIL, I was perhaps ten years old. There was no internet--not as it is today, anyway. 1-900 numbers were still advertised on late-night TV and the scariest thing about them was the phone bill. Game tip hotlines were part of my world. The notion of a mysterious phone line like the one depicted in the movie was still evocative, I suppose, because stumbling upon that ad could actually happen. Really, what I identified with was the beaten-down protagonist. The narrative was current for me.

Watching it today, when 1-900 numbers, while extant in some countries, are very archaic, it is much more evocative. These mysterious, old virtual spaces are like sorcery; dialing in is a dark art not to be tangled with. Like slumbering gods, these spaces could still be out there, no longer advertised, far from any database, but waiting to be awakened. These lines were housed in physical locations and, as in this movie, could be automated by very clunky, analog machines with magnetic tape. These machines could still be out there. While most were not just innocuous, but even downright silly, there could, just maybe, be some with sinister purposes. Waiting.

As a narrative on its own, 976-EVIL is decent. The real tension in the movie is between Hoax and his studly, popular cousin Spike. They have a close relationship, despite being so different. Hoax turns to the phone line instead of his cousin when he's feeling particularly resentful and abandoned. He shoulda went with the sex line. If there's any major flaw in this movie, it's in how quickly Hoax turns to the darkside. It's not like he gradually gets addicted to the number. One or two calls, and he's already a-murderin'. A quirky detective is on the trail and actually visits the hotline's headquarters in a scene I particularly enjoyed. It's in this scene that we meet the machine behind the eponymous number.

976-EVIL is not such an amazing movie in itself, but it latched onto this strange artifact in such an evocative way. In 1988, the premium-rate hotline was a novelty, like internet cafes in 1998. Perhaps the farther we get from the reality of such analog hotlines, the more strange and mysterious 976-EVIL will seem. And the more strange and mysterious it seems, the better it will come off. At least this movie, and its Wynorski-directed sequel, stand as the only 1-900-themed horror movies out there.

Road Games (1981) - 2.5/4

For all of us who’ve ever thought Rear Window (1954) would’ve been better as an Australian trucker movie with Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, well, there’s Road Games. Written by the great Everett De Roche for Richard Franklin (who went on to do Psycho II (1983)), Road Games is a very fun movie that’s probably a lot more light than it ought to be.

Stacy Keach is Pat Quid, the over-educated, wisecracking, American trucker who reads Chaucer to his pet dingo for fun and hauls pig carcasses across Australia for work. My kinda guy. When Quid notices some suspicious activities surrounding a mysterious van (is there any other kind?), like the sexy hitchhiker it picked up just kinda disappearing, he begins to wonder if that guy isn’t the Ripper he keeps hearing about on the radio.

Like Rear Window, we’re supposed to wonder all along if the guy in the van is really a killer or just a guy who likes screwing hitchhikers—not a crime in Australia at that point. But I don’t think there’s any real doubt about who the killer is or whether Quid is over-imaginative. Keach is so damned likeable in the part, there’s no doubting him. The real question is whether he’ll be able to convince the other loonies he meets on the road.

But Quid doubts himself. And as he does so, various oddballs from the Australian roads come his way, much to our amusement. There’s a lot of good comedy here, like in many of Hitchcock's quirkier films. And it serves a purpose. The suspicions begin to fall on Quid, as his efforts to thwart that van he keeps stumbling upon get him in deeper and deeper trouble.

Jamie Lee Curtis shows up as a helpful hitchhiker, ‘Hitch,’ interested in solving crimes and a little slice of Keach. Fresh off Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Prom Night (1980), and Terror Train (1980), she comes with the promise of getting a good slasher movie. But that never really happens. More Rear Window than Dressed to Kill (1980), the killer remains at a distance, observed and, since we’re in a truck, stalked, but never really confronted or fled from. In fact, the killer’s identity is ultimately quite a let-down. There’s little real carnage or thrills, just classical suspense. 

That’s where the Hitchcockian style tends to hurt the movie, as it seems to really need a more vicious slasher element to it. Instead, we stick close to our protagonist and the final confrontation can only go one way. It’s rather quaint. But the playfulness of Road Games goes a long way to mitigate these disappointments. Quid and Hitch are fun to hang out with.

The Hearse (1980) - 2.5/4

Inheriting something around Joseph Cotten is always a bad thing. Whether it’s the castle in Baron Blood or the Georgian country home in The Hearse, things won’t go well. Trish van Devere, sexy in an untouchable schoolteacher kinda way, plays Jane Hardy, a lady who inherits a whole lot more than she wanted in the neglected The Hearse.

Jane inherits the house at a vulnerable time in her life, when she really needs some change, solitude, and evil, demonic hearse stalking. Her therapist agrees—except with the last part. The townsfolk all seem to hate her. Joseph Cotten in particular, because he feels he should get the house for very vague reasons that never really make sense. The only friends she can make are teenage boys, because she looks good in jogging shorts and they’re teenage boys. Soon Jane finds herself stalked at a distance by a strange, black car. Could it be teenage boys looking to tap that, or is it that wily Joseph Cotten?

To retreat from the headaches of smalltown living, Jane begins reading her deceased aunt’s increasingly lurid diary. This aunt goes from pondering whether to keep her fiancée or go with her lover to engaging in satanic pacts with the lover. Somehow this soothes Jane. More helpful is the extremely suspicious ‘Tom Sullivan,’ a man who comes upon her on the road and decides to court her with all the charm and personality of a weather radio.

Although some suspicion is cast on the antagonistic townsfolk, there’s little doubt that the hearse is a denizen of hell and has some connection to her aunt. There are plenty of other mysteries that hold up for quite some way into the movie, nearly up to its surreal conclusion. The narrative is exceptionally well-paced and just keeps throwing enough stuff at you that it's hard to put it all together.

The Hearse plays most of the movie on a decidedly low key. We get a lot of Jane’s “me-time,” polite interactions, date nights, and arguments with Joseph Cotton. I happen to enjoy that as much as the more horrific aspect of the plots. There’s a quaintness to The Hearse, like a Victorian novel. Like Jane Austen corrupted by Poe. The themes of demonic passion are shared with Wuthering Heights and Melmoth the Wanderer. Trish van Devere’s almost aristocratic presence and husky voice only furthers this sensibility.

Turkeyshoot (1982) - Revisiting an Ozploitation Classic

Turkeyshoot, or Escape 2000, is one of Brian Trenchard-Smith’s classic Ozsploitation films, along with Dead-End Drive-In (1989), before he started directing Lifetime movies. Turkeyshoot is really composed of two parts. The first half is a Cruel, Futuristic Prison movie, like Fortress (1992) or Riki-Oh (1991), and the second half is a Most Dangerous Game movie. The staples of both types of movies are hustled through with enthusiasm and imagination, rarely missing a beat or dragging. There are a few missed opportunities, but this is balls-out fun with the manic barbarism Trenchard-Smith excelled in.

Steve Railsback and Olivia Hussey are snatched up in what looks like some sort of middle-class gift shop for the crime of—I dunno. Railsback pissed someone off and Hussey made the mistake of saying, “Hey, stop kicking him in the ribs repeatedly.” For her trouble, she awakes in the back of a truck with a slutty blonde and is carted off to the prison of her dreams.

The prison is, of course, run by a sadistic warden. When are these prisons not run by sadistic wardens? It’s part of the job description. Sadistic Warden II, must have advanced experience in sadism or equivalent education. This fella’s named ‘Thatcher,’ because nobody liked Margaret Thatcher. His personal goal, he decides, is to break Steve Railsback. Because Railsback is the peppy, defiant guy we’re going to like. Sadistic wardens hate those guys. So much of the torture goes to him.

The prison guards are known as ‘toads,’ we learn, and have all been castrated and/or dismembered because it’s supposed to make them meaner. Despite this, they repeatedly try to rape Olivia Hussey. She spends a lot of time running and screaming, when she’s not getting pep-talked by the blonde and Railsback, or avoiding the co-ed shower room.

The beatings, torture, and attempted rapes are all the usual fare you expect in the first half of a prison movie. Usually I don’t like the first half of a prison movie. The whole point of the first half of a prison movie is to make you swell with resentment and splenetic fury as the heroes are helplessly oppressed. It’s just the build up so you can enjoy the hero kicking the ever-loving crap out of the sadistic warden. With Turkeyshoot, it’s hit-and-miss. Railsback’s tortures are kinda lame, Hussey is never really in danger of getting raped, and the worst that happens is a young woman is punched in the face and another prisoner offers to bury her alive.

The catch with Turkeyshoot is, instead of getting a second-half of warden-killing, it turns into The Most Dangerous Game (1932). During the prison scenes, Trenchard-Smith sets the ground for the hunt to come. We meet Thatcher’s rich, powerful friends as they prepare. The lady with exploding arrows, the gay guy with a bulldozer and beastman (who may or may not be his lover--it's the subtlest thing in this movie), and the fat, old politician with a shotgun. Cool villains, except for the old guy. Once Railsback pisses Tatcher off enough, he decides it’s time to go a-huntin’.

Each of the villains pick out a prisoner they want to hunt, torture, and kill. Thatcher’s is Railsback. The old guy gets Hussey. The archer gets the slutty blonde. The hunting sequence is fun and suspenseful, like most human hunt movies. It’s really the wacky villains that elevates it above the average, however, almost like Class of 1984 (1982). They each get to perform a kill, showing off their unique style of playing with their victims.

Turkeyshoot’s reputation as an exploitation gem is largely due to its wacky, anything-goes approach and the general sense of being over-the-top. By today’s standards, it certainly seems to be far from the top, however. There is little gore to speak of. The nudity is swift. The villains have a sense of cruelty, but they could be much worse--compare to the Hostel movies. Trenchard-Smith’s direction also tends to be aloof. There’s little in the way of stylistic innovation or Hitchcockian manipulation. A flat, transparent presentation of the action is his approach and that’s probably not the best for the hunt sequences.

Hussey’s character was another major, missed opportunity. She spends most of the movie cowering, shrieking, and gazing in terror like a tipped cow. She never fights back, though she’s awfully good at fleeing behind Railsback. I’m not even sure why she’s in the movie, other than the be the tantalizing piece of ass to motivate Railsback. 

But Railsback is already motivated by social discontent. He plays into the subtext. The warden is named after the conservative British Prime Minister. The lady with the arrows represents elitist leisure at the expense of the poor. The gay dandy with the bulldozer the culturally elite and the rich, Trump-like developer, plowing over the commoners. I don’t know enough about Australian culture and history to take the discussion much further, but it’s clearly comprised of distaste for British influence and ‘80s yuppyism.

Whatever its flaws or ambitions, Turkeyshoot is still a pretty unique film. This is the sort of movie they rarely make anymore, the kind that could never be a chore to sit through, that has intelligence, and yet can be enjoyed equally with the brain off.  It’ll continue to be an exploitation classic. And in the hands of the right director, it is certainly ripe for a remake.

Disconnected (1983) - 2.5/4

Phones are creepy. The proliferation of cellular phones today has transformed them into almost an extension of the body. I'm old enough to remember a world without cell phones. I'm old enough to remember rotary phones--and I ain't even that old, I'm just from a small town. In those days, the phone is this mysterious chunk of plastic you keep in your home where disembodied voices can access you at almost any time. Sure, it's usually your grandma asking if you remember where she put her purse. But sometimes that call at 3am could be someone you don't know, and you're permitting that stranger's voice to be in your home, to have access to your ear. Phones are creepy.

Disconnected is a movie that wouldn't work so well in the era of cellular phones. Something about those analog lines was different, both more personal and yet more otherworldly. Especially when we had no caller ID and couldn't google the number. The protagonist, Alicia, has a white rotary phone--a Model 500, I suppose--that starts ringing in with strange calls. As she recriminates her boyfriend for possibly screwing her twin sister, she hears her boyfriend talking to her sister over the phone. Thing is, neither her sister nor her boyfriend live with her and it's no party line.

Meanwhile, a serial killer has been murdering women and the police are desperate to find him. Just happens Alicia's rebound guy is none other than the slasher himself, a soft-spoken film buff who hits on her in the video store. These murders are remarkably bland affairs in which the effete film buff repeatedly sticks his embarrassingly small blade into dispassionate sluts. Including, eventually, Alicia's slutty twin herself, Barbara Ann.

What really makes Disconnected stand out is not Joe, the rude video store customer who leers at Alicia while asking about the latest porn releases. It's the weird phone calls. As the film's title indicates, the calls are 'disconnected' from the rest of the plot. Sort of.

The killer is shot by police halfway through the movie, leaving Alicia in a confused state she can only alleviate with chain smoking and binge drinking. We watch her 'downward spiral,' I guess, in a variety of indulgent montages that say, "Hey, I may have gone to film school." And I'd believe it. Gorman Bechard's direction is pretty assured for a debut slasher. Still, usually once the monster is dead, the movie ends.

That's the trick. The serial killer isn't really the monster. Alicia's mental state aside, she does continue to receive bizarre phone calls in which an alien voice growls gibberish at her. We also learn in passing that the serial murders are continuing, and all victims received harassing phone calls before they got it. Aha!

But then, just when you're intrigued about what's really going on, that's when Bechard decides to end the movie. And he ends it on a high note: with an old man leaving Alicia's apartment and walking away with his hands behind his back. Dun nun nuuun! That's actually the way the movie started. The old man asks to use her phone and is never seen again. What could it all mean? Only two people know: Gorman Bechard and Joe the porn afficianado--that's just my theory.

Disconnected is certainly one of the more peculiar slashers ever made. It's interesting, tries to be ambitious and subtle, fails miserably in the blood and tits departments, but succeeds in totally confusing everyone. That's a C+ in my book.

A Phenomenological Viewing of Scalps (1983)

The first shot of Scalps is of a hideous, aged Indian's face gazing angrily at us from the darkness. He leaps, showing a young man's body wearing blue jeans. Suddenly we see a man beheaded with gory detail of his hands catching at the gushing blood. We don't know the victim, at least not yet. The action and characters are totally abstract. It is a montage beginning in pure malice and ending in heinous violence.

Cut to a desert road over which rides a dusty old pick-up. We're now given a location for the abstract prologue: the desert. The next shot answers our suspicions: It shows a man in black robes with the head of a lion. We have no idea where he is in the desert, only that he is there and his rising is a response to the arrival of the truck. The score, consisting of long, droning synth chords is ominous and menacing. The shots of the truck suggest the driver, an old man, is being watched from all angles of the desert, and by the lion-headed man; but the oblivious driver drives on. The man parks, pulls out a shovel, and heads toward some chosen spot. The lion-headed man snarls. The man approaches a cave. We see him at the entrance from within, seeing him as an intruder. After puttering around at the cave mouth, he is overwhelmed with the urge to slit his own throat and does so, despite resistance. Only after this do we get the opening credits.

Some films have no prologues, some have one, but not many have a whole two prologues. Scalps is, needless to say, a very peculiar film. Unsurprisingly, it has never found much of an audience. Upon release, it was Siskel & Ebert's 'Dog of the Week' and maligned for its viciousness. The main audience for the film today, namely Fred Olen Ray fans, will be surprised to find none of the playfulness that characterizes his camp b-movies like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988), Beverly Hills Vamp (1989), or Evil Toons (1992), with their abundant, contrived tits-'n'-ass and silly violence, or even less facetious efforts like Deep Space (1988). In contrast to the playfulness of his later films, Scalps is mean-spirited and nihilistic, its gore, unlike the rubber arms and transparent blood of Chainsaw Hookers, is intended to horrify. Perhaps standing out most, however, is the violence to women, which is fairly extreme in Scalps and which only features in Chainsaw Hookers in catfights; most of the violence in that and Ray's other films of the time is done to men, by women. Ray himself has said he didn't find Scalps fun and wouldn't want to make another film like it. Whatever audience the film might have left, such as those looking for a bodycount slasher will be frustrated by its atmospherics and such oddities as the unexplained, lion-headed man.

Part of the reason for Ray's distaste for his own film and its general oddness is the egregious distributor interference Ray alleges--and it's easy to believe him looking at the resultant film. The first prologue I noted contains footage from what is the penultimate death of the film and is therefore quite a spoiler. It also happens to be a spectacular beheading sequence, at least for 1983. If the distributor wished to catch the audience from the first few seconds and promise lots of horrifying stuff, that's a good way to start. The second prologue, probably Ray's own, contains the much tamer death of a nearly bloodless throat-slitting. The distributor clearly wanted to make what is a strangely atmospheric slasher less plodding, so they wouldn't have to give out any refunds to bored patrons. Even adding the gory first prologue didn't satisfy them, however. The shots of the lion-headed man are, Ray claims, mostly added by the distributor and were taken from test footage never intended for the final cut. Even the superimposition of the old Indian sorceror's head was added. In short, the bulk of the film's peculiarities are the results of extreme (unheard of to such a degree) interference from the distributors.

Ultimately, however, it really doesn't matter whether Fred Olen Ray or the distributor put the lion-headed man on screen; what matters is how the phenomena of the film affects me, or you, and understanding the film's effects. Scalps doesn't have any 'meaning', at least not in the traditional sense. But it does have a phenomenological process and both how that process functions and how affects us reveals something. So let's get back to the film.

After the two prologues, the first establishing an abstract malice and violent force, the second establishing the otherwordly inhospitableness of the desert, the narrative movement begins. After the oddness of the prologues, we now are placed in normality: normality of location, action, and narrative. A disorganized archaeology professor, we learn, is preparing a less-than-legal 'field trip' into the desert, where he and his graduate students will actually be digging in Indian territory. Unable to go himself yet, he sends the students--three males and three females--ahead. So we meet the characters, see them in their ordinary university environment, and begin what is a standard "dead teenager" plot in which we fully expect a maniac to slaughter most of the group.

The shot beginning the second act is of the students' car exiting a tunnel, with the camera mounted on the car. We, along with the students, are exiting the normality of the university and the modern, civilized world in which it's located and entering the mysterious vistas of the desert. The sole outpost of civilization, as in any horror film, is the gas station. This is the point where they will be warned not to go on and must decide whether or not to pay heed; of course, these are city folk and they pay cash, not heed. The more mystically-inclined of the group, lone-wolf D.J. looks down at an old, Indian man on the shop steps and is assaulted with a vision of the glowing-eyed old Indian sorceror from the second prologue. The old Indian later warns the group that the desert is a dangerous place and they must stay away from the place of the blackened wood. As he explains that it is the burial ground of many Indians who met violent ends, we see shots of nearly all the students' deaths from later in the film. The Warning Scene, in a horror movie, is supposed to suggest a choice to the protagonists. But by accompanying the Warning with flashforwards to the characters' deaths, we're being shown they have no choice; there is a certain inevitability to their deaths. They were dead the moment they exited that tunnel. So, apart from D.J., the group assumes the blackened woods is the place to go and off they head into the Other World of the desert.

Entry into the desert is greeted with the ominous music from the second prologue, the droning synth chords suggesting untold menace in spite of D.J.'s claims that the desert is beautiful. We see a shot of an Indian spirit wielding a bow. (In fact, it appears that this is a shot of the Indian sorceror-possessed body of one of the students from later in the film, taken out of the timeline. That he could be watching the students enter the desert is, therefore, particularly ominous and menacing, their deaths particularly inevitable.) The students drive past the abandoned truck of the man who died in the second prologue, left behind like the husk of a dead insect. As the camera pans left, we see what the students don't: the dessicated remains of the man, the skull's jaw wide open in an eternally silent scream. The students are going beyond this point, into a realm of death where the living have no business.

After this slow, atmospheric drive through the desert, they arrive at a spot where they decide to park. One of the girls notices a buzzard in the sky and believes it's a buzzard they saw earlier that followed them the whole way. D.J. agrees that it is the same buzzard. Again, the suggestion is that they are already dead. Nature knows what they don't. The tensions suggested are between culture and nature, the land of the living and the land of the dead. As D.J. bangs some metal sticks together, making primitive, percussive music under the blaring sun (shot from a very low angle), shots of the hideous Indian from the first prologue and of more gory violence to the students are cut in. They are in a realm of relentless, powerful nature, reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975); and a land where death, not life, holds sway.

From here, the tensions in the film's structure--between the malice and violence found in the first prologue and the ethereal, ominous sense of doom found in the second prologue--begin to conflict and the film is admittedly somewhat messy. On the one hand, the trappings of any Friday the 13th knock-off are present: a group camping in the wilderness, tents, attractive co-eds, sex (or at least the potential for it), and soon graphic violence. On the other hand, elements of the mysteriousness found in the second prologue still come through. In the dark, around the camp fire, the students notice a drumming. As they put their ears to the ground, they hear the traditional Indian music more clearly. This is unsettling as it is. They are in the middle of the desert where they saw and heard no-one, and yet there is this sudden music, as though a whole group are present nearby. One of the couples decide to look for the source of the music. They find a camp set up with a camp fire, but no-one is present in the camp. As the male student looks into the fire, the ghostly head of the Indian sorceror appears for a while, chanting with the drums; then the fire explodes in the student's face.

After the couple returns, the male of the couple is changed. He refuses to acknowledge the existence of the camp and is verbally abusive to his girlfriend. He has, with the explosion of the camp fire, been possessed by the sorceror. From this point onward the spirit of the first prologue begins to take dominance over that of the second. The man takes his girlfriend out for a walk, where hits her, rapes her, and ultimately slits her throat and scalps her. Her friends eventually grow concerned and find her in a search. While the others frantically plan out what to do, D.J. grows peculiarly resigned to their fates. More ominous music plays as D.J. tells the group the possessed friend gave her a talisman and said he'd return. (This is actually foreshadowing: when the first possessed student is killed, the Indian sorceror 'returns' by possessing D.J..)

Now the classic bodycount slasher is set up. There is a violent monster loose and it is going to inflict violent deaths on all the young adults. One of the remaining males heads to the abandoned truck seen earlier and is clubbed by the possessed student, now physically resembling the Indian face from the first prologue. There is an insert One of the remaining girls is shot full of arrows. Finally, the remaining male kills the possessed student, but is beheaded with a trowel by the newly-possessed D.J.. This beheading is the one seen in the first six shots of the film. So the destinies of the students have been completed. By journeying into the land of the dead, they have joined the dead.

The main action of the film over, we get an epilogue. The professor who sent them out into the desert comes to check in on them. He enters a tent and falls out with an arrow in his eye socket. We're taken into the tent where we find the possessed D.J. clanking her metal sticks together, shots of the gory, dead bodies accompanying each clank.

The living are no longer intruding into the land of the dead. Nature has swallowed up civilization and science, with its limited ways of seeing, of understanding what constitutes truth. Only D.J., who looked beyond the restricted worldview of the modern world, is preserved. And if we look beyond the approved ways of seeing a film, as I've tried to do in this analysis, we can see that Scalps is a unique and powerful film. If we bring a standard approach to viewing Scalps, as with many other unconventional films, we, as the excavators in the film, are destined to fail.

____
* - Please note that in Canada the term 'Indian' is used to refer to 'Native Americans', even on a legal level. The term 'native' carries connotations of primitivity that are more offensive than an ancient error of geography.

We're All Perverts: Viewing Incubus (1982)

The very first shot of Incubus, over which the opening credits appear, begins in total black; the camera pulls out gradually revealing that we are looking into the iris of a brown eye; the eye blinks twice. Why are we beginning a film about a sex-demon in an eye? Perhaps we are being promised that we will see, in what follows, what this eye has seen; but that would only be a valuable promise if we could detect that the eye had seen something horrible. Since the eye could be said to look entranced or in love just as well as horrified, something else must be communicated in this choice. Other films use similar techniques: Blue Velvet (1986), after a brief prologue, takes us into the severed ear for a devious nightmare until we emerge from the protagonist's ear at the coda. In Blue Velvet, we understand we are being taken into the mind for a cinematic nightmare. In Incubus, rather than entering an eye in the first shot, we are in fact emerging from the eye. Only in the final shot do we re-enter the eye. The procession isn't into a subjective realm and back into an objective one, but rather a projection of the interior, subjective onto the exterior, objective world. What we witness in this film, the first and final shots seem to tell us, is a drama of projection: what happens when minds project their dreams onto the real world. Let's see if this interpretation bears out.

The plot of Incubus concerns a young man named Tim who has begun to have nightmares about a woman being tortured by hooded men in a dungeon demanding 'Tell us!' He screams, "Leave her alone!" and awakes in a sweat. Each time he has one of these dreams, a local girl or woman is brutally raped, sometimes to death, and any man interfering is murdered. Tim gradually begins to worry that he's responsible for the deaths, though he doesn't know how. His mysterious grandmother (Helen Hughes) seems to suspect him as well. Meanwhile, a recently-moved surgeon, Sam (John Cassavetes), tries to protect his 18-year-old daughter, Tim's girlfriend, from the menace and work with the sheriff (John Ireland) to find the culprit.

The first, and most obvious, case of 'projectionism' in this plot description is Tim's dreams. His dreams are of a sadomasochistic nature. Later in the film he describes the procedure as a 'battle of wills', with the tortured woman laughing and the torturers amping it up to break her. Both parties involved are taking some sort of pleasure from the proceedings. The full nature of Tim's dreams remains nebulous throughout the film, however. At times he seems to see the victims in his dreams, but later the 'players' of the dream are identified as his grandmother's family and his mother; at other times the dreams seem to be unrelated to the victims other than always occurring in conjunction with a rape. Whatever the case, the cruel and slightly incestuous sexuality of Tim's dreams are projected onto real people in the real world through the incubus.

The brutality of the rapes is exceptional: each woman's uterus is ruptured by the force of the rape and (it is implied, though not stated) the size of the creature's penis; one woman's windpipe is split, suggesting she was both vaginally and orally raped; and in some cases the woman are filled with what Cassavetes calls an "incredible" amount of semen, so much "even the hemorrhaging couldn’t get rid of it"; and nearly all of the women die as a result of the rape alone. Though we never see any actual rape, the shots of the women screaming, in one case rendered in a relishing slow motion, along with Cassavetes's solemn descriptions of ruptured uteruses and gallons of sperm, are disturbing enough.

The key to Tim's projectionism, and perhaps to the whole film, is, of course, his relationship to the incubus. The incubus never does, and perhaps isn't even capable, of attacking until Tim has one of his dreams. The dreams themselves come upon Tim uninvited, leaving open the question (as far as the narrative goes) of who is having the greater influence over who. Either way, Tim's conscious participation in the world must cease before the incubus can begin its rapes. While Tim is conscious, the incubus is an earnest newspaper editor named Laura Kincaide. She seems to be entirely unaware that she is the incubus and is capable of leading a fairly normal life. Tim's consciousness keeps her in balance, as it were; he's like a superego operating on an id. When he is overtaken by his dreams, the intelligent and thoughtful woman becomes a demonic rapist: pure, uninhibited desire is set loose. If consciousness is participating in the world as it is, without imposing our fantasies upon it, then when Tim becomes unconscious, he loses his grasp between his dream world and the real world and the incubus is free to enact his masochistic dreams/desires upon the world--particularly upon women, as they are the locus of his erotic urges. Therefore, the template this relationship between Tim and Laura sets up is one of latent, perverse desires becoming active without limit.

What we want to see now is whether this template has any repetition amongst the film's characters. I think it does. There is a shot during the first rape-murder scene where a young man goes to his truck. We see on his front bumper a sign reading, "Galen: 150 years of boredom." Galen is the name of the small town. Apparently its occupants view the town as very uneventful. What's curious and important about this silly bumper sticker is what it reveals about the distinction between the surface and what's hidden. Everyone in Galen has secrets. Again, much like in Blue Velvet, beneath the pleasant surface of the small town are hideous perversions and secrets we normally never acknowledge. Every character we spend significant time with is shown to have some secret. Tim has his dreams. Agatha Galen (Tim's grandmother) has both the secret of Tim's origin and her family history. Her family, the Galen's, were witch-hunters and when they went a-hunting during the last slew of incubus attacks, they killed a supposed witch who give birth to Tim. She also give birth to a girl, Laura, who was sent out for adoption elsewhere. Laura's big secret is, of course, being the incubus. Even the sheriff is hiding the unsolved slew of incubus attacks and that the source of his appointment as sheriff is Agatha.

The biggest surprise, however, is the secret harbored by Sam and his daughter Jenny. Sam hints, though never confesses, that he murdered his last girlfriend, Julie. After his wife died, he got an 18-year-old girlfriend and began neglecting his daughter. When he caught Julie cheating on him, he fought with her. He said she 'managed' to get away, so he chased her down and feels guilty over it. He never states the results, but we get teasing flashbacks of a woman lying on the ground in the rain, covered in blood. He later tells Laura that Julie is dead. Presumably he murdered the girl, then moved to a small town in hiding. That Sam murdered a young woman would be bad enough, but there is also a creepily incestuous tone to his relationship with Jenny. The very first scene in which we meet Sam, not knowing who he is, he is entering his home, going upstairs, and looking at a woman exiting a shower totally naked. We realize only later that the girl he looked at is actually his daughter. He doesn't want her to have a boyfriend. She promises to never leave him. They kiss on the lips. This doesn't mean he's ever molested his daughter; it just means that, like Tim's dreams, Sam has this perversion in his hidden life.

Everyone in Galen does have a perverse hidden life. 'Galen' is, in fact, Swedish for 'crazy'. And in the Freudian sense, this is correct: everyone in Galen is crazy. To be perverse is to veer from normality, to be crazy to some degree. Ordinarily we moderate our perversions, inhibit which of them we allow to enter into the world. What this all amounts to is a sort of vision of the world (with Galen standing in for the whole world) as perverse. Everyone is a pervert. There is no-one alive who does not have perverse desires of one sort or another--whether incestuous, masochistic, sadistic, or anything else--usually beneath the surface. We inhibit them out of a sense of dignity, propriety, morality, spirituality, or any number of other values.

Complementing this vision is the moral: what happens if we uncheck those perversions, let them reign uninhibited? It is through and in the character of the incubus that hidden, perverse desires become revealed and even actualized in the world of the film. And through the incubus, we find sex, cruelty, and death inextricably bound. The distinction between eros and thanatos, as it were, depends upon the distinction between our fantasy life (which may be as perverse as we like) and our real lives (which must be inhibited). Sex without limitation consumes its participants; infinite sex is death. Sexuality has its creative power when limited, ordered by form.

The most powerful moment in Incubus, the finale, illustrates this point very well. Sam has Laura, Jenny, and Tim in his house. He's preparing to induce Tim's dream in order to interrogate him and learn its secrets. Before starting, Jenny approaches him and tells him she's going to get some rest. Here director John Hough gives us an important and intricate shot: as Jenny heads to her room upstairs, the camera tracks and pans to follow her progress up to and into her room at the top of the stairs; the camera then pans to Sam and tracks back toward him; Sam looks toward the kitchen, leading the camera to pan toward the kitchen in time to see Laura emerge with a trey of coffee; Laura enters a doorway near the kitchen and the camera pans to look past Sam into the living room; Laura meets the camera's focus in the living room and exits the doorway Sam is looking through to talk to Sam; Sam tells her he would like her to go upstairs to see Jenny and she agrees to do so. This could have been handled much more easily with editing. Hough chose to choreograph the shot for a reason, namely, to link Jenny's and Laura's destinations. Both are going to end up in her room. Laura is sent to Jenny's room by Jenny's father. He has a desire to protect her, yes. But he also has that subtly incestuous relationship with Jenny. It is the tension between the surface desire (protective father) and perverse desire (sexual interest) that leads to the film's great tragedy.

As Sam interrogates Tim, he urges Tim to "Bring it through the door. Let it come through the door." This suggestion of penetration coincides with the incubus's penetration of its final victim. Tim sees the victim in his dream, finally; instead of his mother's face, he sees Jenny's. Tim rushes upstairs with a knife Agatha gave him and tries to kill Laura, but Sam interferes and Tim stabs himself. Laura hugs Sam, asking him to never leave her. As they embrace, he sees over her shoulder Jenny's body lying in bed, bleeding profusely from between her legs. Laura, the incubus, raped her as he was interrogating Tim. He sent Laura to the room; he induced Tim's dream; he's responsible for his daughter's death.

Sam's hidden desire to fuck his daughter was brought into the real world by the incubus. Despite all his conscious efforts to protect his daughter from all harm and, for that matter, sex, his activities resulted in her being raped to death. The tragedy is of Greek proportions, with bodies littering the stage, piercing dramatic irony, and disturbing sexuality haunting the spectator long after.

The final shot is a zoom into Sam's eye. He blinks twice, then the camera zooms into the black of his iris until we see nothing but black: the black of our hidden, perverse desires. The vision the film expresses is a moralistic one, viewing unrestrained sexuality is inherently deadly. We may all be perverts, but we have fantasies for a reason and they should remain fantasies. In the sexual free-for-all of the early '80s, these notions would have seemed very reactionary; it's not surprising the film was loathed by critics upon release. A case of bad timing, I suppose: had Incubus been released when the AIDS epidemic gained enormous attention in the mid-'80s, it may have struck the same critics as an insightful critique of uninhibited sexuality. AIDS, after all, did much as the incubus did insofar as equating limitless sex with death.

Just because Incubus has a strong vision underlying its artistic choices does not mean its a perfect film, of course. Some of the film's creative decisions are questionable. Particularly the repetitive, cruel rapes. The first rape shows only the result: a traumatized girl. The second rape doesn't just show, but dwells upon the terror and agony of the rape victim, a 40-something museum curator with children. The point, by now, is already made. The third rape is at least dramatically justified, as Hough constructs the film so as to make the audience believe Tim is the incubus. (He's always running out of a scene just before a rape.) However, the fourth rape is unnecessary and, being so near the climax, only interferes with the film's pacing. Perhaps realizing this, Hough tries some virtuosity with the final rape setpiece to make it more exciting. Particularly, he amps up the gore. But there's also a stylish shot in which the camera is attached to the bottom of a wheelchair, so we see a body through the gap of a bathroom door before the girl in the wheelchair does. I have a suspicion that Hough was influenced by Argento's gialli films, where stylish murders punctuate the detective action. But in those films, the murders can continue throughout the film because the characters murdered are related to the plot. These rape-murder scenes are of previously unknown characters. They add horror to the film, but never suspense. We have no idea who the rape victims are. A couple playing around a lake, a museum curator, some girl visiting a Bruce Dickinson concert in town (!), and finally a man and his two daughters at a farmhouse.

Still, one could argue that the final rape of a girl in a wheelchair is an act of particular perversion. One could also argue that each rape victim had someone who desired to rape her. The first victim was called a 'bitch' by her boyfriend before the rape. The second victim had a wimpy husband. The third victim was at a metal concert; the stage performance was an enactment of Samson and Delilah with a song about a 'two-timing' woman. And the fourth victims were, like Sam and Jenny, daughters with a single father. Though the rapes might not be dramatically ideal, they can be seen as adding to the picture of a perverse Galen.

Overall, whether one agrees with the main thrust of the vision in Incubus, the film's vision is certainly consistent and interesting. Hough, whose horror films are generally underrated, has made a fascinating work of art with this film, magically managing both very sleazy subject matter with a very serous, diginified tone.