31 Days, 31 Horror Movies: Eaten Alive (aka Death Trap)

Eaten Alive (aka Death Trap)

I think I've seen most of Tobe Hooper's movies, though nothing recent (Toolbox Murders or Mortuary), and in general I think the quality of his work is pretty high. Maybe not consistent or extremely well written, but... I mean, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is rough and raw, but it's exceptionally well-made, shot, and edited. There's skill as well as talent involved. Eaten Alive, though...

I spent maybe 90% of this movie thinking about how terrible it is. I mean, just poorly shot, written, scored and (with some exceptions) acted. The plot is just a thin excuse to have women get naked and for people to get killed in gory ways. The 'crocodile' is an awful prop (that's not used much - a wise decision, but frustrating as well). In some ways it reminded me of earlier, terrible, low-budget exploitation films like Two Thousand Maniacs.

It takes real skill to make an indoor set look so sleazy

BUT. But, man... it's all shot on sets, indoor and outdoor. Like, obvious, cramped, garishly lit and half-assed set-dressed sets. Hell, at times you could be forgiven for thinking it was a bad copy of some forgotten MGM musical about - well, about some lunatic hotel owner and his pet alligator.

An EXTREMELY REALISTIC alligator. Crocodile. Whatever.

Over time the film actually started to win me over a little - enough that I could sit through it, after several moments thinking I might turn it off. I think - I THINK - it's actually supposed to be a comedy. There are definitely characters - like the bordello owner - that are supposed to be funny. They AREN'T funny, but I think they're supposed to be. And Robert Englund - many years before V and Freddy - is pretty watchable as a scumbag. The over-the top soundtrack of twangy country music - with extra twang - makes some of the scenes even more surreal than they already are. There's a couple that simply goes insane at one point - for no reason that I can tell. (Why is she wearing a wig? Why is he dressed like Johnny from Night of the Living Dead? Why is there a shotgun in their trunk?)

Also, this scene goes on like 15 minutes too long.

 It's really a difficult film to like, though. The main character is played by long-time character actor Neville Brand and he's got some skills - but he spends most of the film rambling in long, nonsensical scenes that kill any momentum and tension built up by the murders. The murders themselves are poorly choreographed and shot, with bad gore effects. The casual racism and misogyny is ugly and tough to sit through today - and often time seems incredibly awful and mean-spirited, which I know is weird to say about a horror movie, but I don't know, it was just - nasty. Marilyn Burns spends a good 15 minutes of the film tied to a bed and just flailing about and trying to scream, and that's about 14 minutes too long. And it commits the cardinal sin of not being scary - it's just too weird and cheap (in a studio soundstage way) to effectively frighten. There are moments - Judd goes crazy at the drop of a hat, and that kind of volatility can build tension pretty well - but they're few and far between.

"I'm gonna harvest me some crops!"

 Somehow I've ended up with a two-disc special edition of this movie, but I can't imagine listening to the commentary or watching any of the extras. Not any time soon.

31 Days, 31 Horror Movies: Lifeforce

Migraine brain is a random brain. Sorry for the particularly pointless rambling on this one.

Lifeforce

Lifeforce is a weird movie. It's an exploitation film presented in Hammer sci-fi terms on a1980's blockbuster budget. The Vampire Lovers as imagined by Nigel Kneale. There are special effects by a Star Wars veteran, a bombastic score by the composer who created the Pink Panther theme, a script by the guy who wrote Alien, and it's directed by the man who gave us The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

I'm not going to pretend that I first saw this movie for the special effects or because I liked the director. In 1986 the only reason to see this movie - which bombed at the box office in 1985 - was because of Mathilda May. Yeah, there was that awesome Fangoria cover featuring one of the desiccated zombies, but I'm sure it was the breathless assertion "she's naked for the whole movie!" that suckered me in.

I remember being a bit disappointed. Not in May, as she was exactly as advertised, but in the movie as a whole. There was something there, some bigger movie that seemed to be weirdly truncated. The effects weren't quite as realistic as Fangoria had made them seem and the story seemed disjointed and a little herky-jerky, as if the director couldn't quite decide on the pace. I wrote it off as a B picture that had somehow gotten an A budget and whose main claim to fame would forever be the breasts of its star.

Yes they're real - and they're spectacular.

Fast forward several years and I'm re-evaluating a bunch of horror movies I had written off in my youth. This had all been precipitated by a viewing of Halloween - a movie I had discarded as being all reputation with no real skill or scares. I'd watched it again and had been astonished at the difference between my memory and the actual film - how good it really was. So I was picking up other films that I'd dismissed and Lifeforce was one of them.

While not experiencing exactly the same level of revelation as with Halloween, it IS a much better film than I remembered it being. Ms. May is in no way diminished by this re-evaluation.

The Medium
I found a used copy of the Scream Factory Blu-ray release of Lifeforce. This is certainly the best the film has ever looked, with a clean and crisp presentation and, notably, much richer color. There are a fair amount of extras, including two audio tracks, a making of featurette, cast interviews and both the extended and theatrical release.

The Movie
Lifeforce is based on a book called Space Vampires by the prolific Colin Wilson. I recently saw a copy of that book at a local flea market and wish I'd known then, as I would have picked it up. The title was changed to try and appeal to a wider mainstream audience, but the original title really tells you all you need to know. There are vampires. They're from outer space.

An expedition to Halley's Comet finds an ancient spacecraft hidden within the corona. Upon investigation they find thousands of desiccated corpses of a bat-like creature - and three perfectly preserved humanoids encased in crystal. They decide to take the three humanoids back to Earth (as well as one of the bat things).

I'm sure anything on such a friendly looking ship must be fine!

Much of this sequence was cut in the US, and I'm not sure why. It's got some decent special effects and the alien ship is appropriately creepy. It helps set the mood and tone of the picture and I think having it removed did the film a disservice. It does make the film seem more like a sci-fi film at first, but I think having it restored improves the story immensely.

Thirty days later the Earth spaceship enters an Earth orbit, but ground control (the British Space Agency - which seems like a Quatermass reference) can't establish communications. A rescue mission finds the ship gutted by a fire - its crew all dead, except for the commander, Carlsen, who is missing. They also find the unharmed bodies of the three humanoid aliens.

The bodies are taken back to Earth where a team of scientists are put to work trying to figure out what they are, but one - the female of the group - awakens and sucks the life out of a hapless security guard. Despite being a facility full of security guards (and apparently also full of sequences of glass-walled rooms) the girl escapes.

These sequences are pretty effective. Yes, the woman is naked the whole time. Yes, this is pretty distracting. However this is actually part of the point - the security guards don't take a pretty naked woman seriously and get shocked into unconsciousness for their presumption. Though she's naked, there's little actually sexual about her behavior - even when she's kissing the guard or telling one of the scientist's to 'use' her body, she's slightly distant. And always predatory.

And sometimes very bloody.

In fact there's a lot of sexual situations that don't feel very sexual in this movie. Carlsen - having escaped the fire - turns out to have a connection with the female vampire and has several intimate encounters with her that all feel tentative and cold. There's more heat in a scene with a male victim coming to life and draining the doctor that was about to cut him open. I can't help but feel like this distance is due to a certain discomfort on the part of the director. I think this would have been a very different film if it had been directed by, say, David Cronenberg.

Do you feel a spark? Because I feel a spark.

Things unspool pretty quickly from the woman's escape on. She jumps bodies, sending Carlsen and a member of the SAS on a chase around England trying to find her before she drains/infects too many people. The male vampires awaken and spread the infection. One of the scientists discovers a way to kill them - stabbing them through the 'energy center' of their body with iron - but too late to do him much good. Patrick Stewart (in wheelchair, no less) makes an appearance as a man possessed by the female vampire (I'm fairly sure the kiss that he and Steve Raislback's Carlsen share is also restored. I don't remember it from the US release).

I never realized how beautiful your eyes are...

The final act of the film finds London under attack by the vampire plague with the ship - now free of the comet and hovering over London - sucking up the souls, the 'lifeforce' of the victims like some giant spooky Hoover vacuum of doom. Carlsen heads into the city for a final confrontation with the woman leading to a semi-spectacular conclusion featuring nakedness, glowing clouds and a huge sword. 

"I don't want to alarm you, but there's a blue hula hoop of fire over our heads."

Watching the movie this time around I can see why I was disappointed originally. I was expecting a completely different kind of movie. I'd seen Poltergeist and heard about Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so I went in thinking I would see something gory and horrifying with a Stephen Spielberg level of production quality. Needless to say, that's not quite what you get in Lifeforce. (For the reason why I hadn't yet SEEN Texas Chainsaw Massacre, see my recent review of the same here: http://digitalapocrypha.blogspot.com/2014/08/fear-flashback-friday-texas-chainsaw.html).

Instead you get a much... smaller feeling movie. More intimate, I guess. The setting and scale of production doesn't ever reach quite far enough for the epic story. Even the climactic, apocalyptic end sequences in a London full of zombie-like vampires feels like it was shot on a set - which it probably was. What it ends up feeling like is a Hammer production from an earlier time - like a lost Quatermass film. Its largely British cast and English locations enhance this impression.

The special effects are mostly decent, though they remind you that glowing blue clouds were the pinnacle of awesome in the 1980's. The zombies are a little too static and puppet-like for me now, but there's still some fun to be had in various sequences, particularly a scene in which a caged zombie runs at the bars of his cage only to explode into dust. The more sci-fi sequences are quite good and make a welcome addition.

This guy was kinda cool for the 30 seconds he's in the film.

The much ballyhooed nudity is still a distraction, but less of one than I remember. The film shies away from more complicated questions of sexuality and gender identity, despite plenty of opportunities to explore them in more depth. Again, I wonder how that would have been handled by a more daring director. Problematically, the naked males are treated very differently than the female - and are never presented completely naked. A scene in which the Carlson slaps and struggles with a woman who has been recently possessed by the female alien is also difficult to watch, and a throwaway line to the effect of the woman being a masochist does little to reduce the discomfort. (Though another line - "She wants me to hurt her!" has the possibility of more depth, as you're not sure whether he's referring to the actual woman or the vampire.)

The Bottom Line
Watching Lifeforce as if it was a Hammer picture really enhances the experience for me.  Not being fifteen anymore also lets me appreciate the acting on a different level, particularly the way Matilda May controls and overpowers every scene she's in, regardless of her supposed vulnerable state.

It's still a flawed movie, but it's much better than I remember it being, and is often quite fun and interesting in weird ways. There's a really good exploitation horror flick hiding in here. Or a fairly decent Hammer Quatermass film. They just don't quite gel together.

Fear Flashback Friday: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Directed by Tobe Hooper, Produced by Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper, Jay Parsley and Richard Saenz, Screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper, Starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, Gunnar Hansen, and Teri McMinn

I still approach viewing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a little trepidation. This is not a safe movie. It's weird and ugly and violent. Of course it's also familiar, strangely beautiful and has less gore than your average X-Files episode. It's a horror movie classic that this horror movie fan could only bring himself to watch once before.

I didn't even intend to watch TTCM for this installment of Fear Flashback Friday, as it's not really a movie I think of as enjoyable. But Marilyn Burns passed away this week. As Sally Hardesty she was the only one who escaped Leatherface, the original Final Girl. I wanted to make a joke about the 'great Leatherface in the sky' finally catching up to her, but it seems disrespectful (and I see I managed to sneak it in anyway).

Anyway, it seemed like I should revisit Chainsaw, the great bugbear of my horror movie viewing, the one classic horror film that seemed too much for me. If it was grueling and awful to sit through, well that would be my penance for that 'Leatherface in the sky' joke.

The reason for my apprehension about Chainsaw is all about childhood and anticipation, a combination of factors that lead to the movie becoming bigger (and more awful) in my mind than it actually was. This will ramble a little, so bear with me.

When I was 8 or 9 years old I went 'camping' with one of my many relatives. I think might have been Danny Snowman, if so - thanks for scaring the crap out of me, Danny! When I say camping, what I really mean is that we dragged our sleeping bags out into the backyard and slept under a camper shell. That's one of those white, aluminum, hard top things that sat on the top of a truck bed. Danny's folks had put it out on the grass and we climbed in, closed the back and got cozy - if a little claustrophobic.

The absolute peak of truck camper technology.

This was probably late summer, early fall, and it was cold and DARK at night. We were pretty far out from town and there were no streetlights and, if I remember correctly, no outside lights on Danny's house either. A little moonlight made its way through the cloudy plexiglass to limn our faces, but that's about it. To pass the time we engaged in that time-honored camping tradition - we told scary stories. I have no recollection what story, if any, I might have told. (Maybe about bigfoot, which was a favorite topic of mine back then, thanks to In Search Of.) I remember - DISTINCTLY - the story Danny told.

There was this family, he said, in Texas. They were all weird and stuff, like mutated or something. And they used to grab people, like hitchhikers and young people walking, or maybe sometimes people would come to their house looking to use the phone or something. Anyway, they would grab those people and hang them up on meathooks. And then they would chop them up with chainsaws and make them into, like, sausages and stuff. And then they would EAT THEM! And they would make furniture out of their bones and skin. 

I may have opined how this seemed really gross and not at all likely (though I remember thinking uneasily about how I had no real idea what went into sausages). Danny emphatically shook his head. No, this was REAL! This ACTUALLY HAPPENED. And they made a movie about it and the movie was called THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

There were a few moments of silence after this declaration. The name sort of echoed in my mind, fraught as it was with horrific possibilities. TEXAS. CHAINSAW. MASSACRE.

And then, in the distance, in the dark, the sound of a chainsaw starting up echoed through the trees.

Now this was northern Maine, and the sound of chainsaws is not exactly an unknown thing, even at night. Coming as it did in the dramatic pause after that story? We may have gone a little mad for a moment. There was a frantic scramble to get out of the camper and into the house. There may or may not have been some (manly) screaming. And I'm fairly sure we slept with the light on (even though that's what babies did). I never forgot about it, that's for sure.

Fast forward several years and I'm sitting on a couch at a friend's house, about to watch some horror movies. I was a fan by then, a veteran of movies good, bad and ugly. I'd seen 10,000 Maniacs and Blood Sucking Freaks. Hell, I'd seen Cannibal Apocalypse, which had a certain nasty reputation of its own. I was well versed in the language of gore, and could compare decapitations and blood splatter with the best of them.

But I had still never seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It had grown, somehow, in my mind. It had become some apotheosis of horror, a gruesome and grueling experience only one step removed from a snuff film. It put paid to all my notions of being a hardened connoisseur of horror, because I was afraid of it. Afraid of a movie.

My friends had discovered this egregious gap in my horror movie viewing, and had set about righting this perceived wrong. There was a stack of horror movies on the coffee table and amongst all the gaudy VHS covers was one featuring a man in a leather mask wielding a chainsaw, behind him was a closeup of a woman's bulging eyes. At the top, yellow text proclaimed "The Most Horrifying Motion Picture I Have Ever Seen" by some guy named Rex Reed. I couldn't stop staring at it. We watched a few movies before finally getting to Chainsaw, but I don't remember any of them. I just remember getting more and more worked up, sweating, heart racing. Today we'd probably call it a panic attack, but at the time I thought I was getting sick.

Uh... how about Goonies? Can we watch Goonies instead?

When we finally watched the film I was so worked up that I could  barely pay attention. Even now I can only remember flashes of that viewing. The hitchiker cutting his thumb, Leatherface slamming the kitchen door shut, the only really gory bit where Leatherface falls and the chainsaw cuts into his leg. The screaming. It was all vaguely stroboscopic in my mind - flashes only. And then it was over. And I remember thinking, "There. I've seen it. Now I never have to see it again." And I never did.

Until last night.

I had decided on Tuesday, when news of Marylin Burns' death had broken, that I would finally re-watch Chainsaw. I had assumed that enough time had passed that I would no longer be so uptight about the film, but as the viewing time approached I found myself growing anxious. I was annoyed and astonished to discover that this movie - technically, just the IDEA of the movie - still had so much power over me, but I guess that's what childhood trauma does to you (again, THANKS Danny). When the time finally arrived I descended into the basement like a man heading to the gallows. "Well, I guess I'll see you," I said to my wife. If she heard the nervousness in my voice she didn't comment on it.

The Medium
The version of the movie that I have is the two disk Ultimate Edition DVD. Yes, I own a copy even though I haven't watched it. It just seemed like something a horror movie fan should have in their library, you know? Anyway, for a DVD the picture quality is quite good and the list of extras should please any fan, with two documentaries, two commentary tracks and plenty more. Until the 40th anniversary blu-ray comes out this fall, this is as good as it gets, content wise.

The Movie
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been studied and critiqued and reviewed over and over. There's not much that I can add that'll be in any way a new thing. So this is just a quick overview of my experience watching the film this time.

The opening text crawl explains the film setup quite well and if the voice sounds familiar that's because it's John Larroquette. The following opening sequence - a series of strange noises in darkness followed by flash of light illuminating what appears to be a rotting corpse - sets the tone and lets you know that things are going to be pretty awful. That the filmmaker is not going to play nice. After a brief burst of anxiety - like static on the radio - I was able to settle down and enjoy this sequence and the credits as fine bits of horror filmmaking. I particularly like the credit sequence with the shots of sunspots - even the sun is sick, Hooper seems to be saying, so what chance does life on Earth have?

A really quick plot outline: A group of kids, including brother and sister Franklin and Sally Hardesty, are traveling in a van. Ostensibly they're going to check on their grandfather's gravesite, as there has been a spate of grave desecrations in the area. Low on gas - and unnerved by a violent hitchhiker - the group stops at the old Hardesty family home, now a rundown ruin. They run afoul of a local family with unique appetites and are killed, one by one, until only Sally remains.

I hadn't realized how well shot this movie is. The framing and editing is just top notch. The shot where the hitchhiker runs to catch up with the van, framed with a vast stretch of blue sky and empty Texas countryside, is a favorite. It simply oozes isolation.

As the hitchhiker scene progressed I once again experienced a surge in that old anxiety, but it's just a great sequence, a really unnerving bit that serves to throw the group off their dynamic and, of course, set us up for some of the really disturbing scenes to come. After that I was able to really throw off the old expectations and just enjoy the movie for what it is, which is a fantastic horror movie.

There's a certain documentary feel to the film, which serves to heighten the fear. It really DOES feel like something that might have happened. The acting is pretty naturalistic and gets even more so as things progress. Marylin Burns, in particular, really sells her horror and desperation in a way that's almost uncomfortable to watch. 

Time and time again watching the movie I found myself just amazed at a shot or a scene - the sequence when Pam goes into the house is fantastic, for instance. That tracking shot under the swing is just a thing of beauty - the house looming in the frame. Later on you remember her exposed back in this shot and shudder at what happens. That living room and the furniture.

Don't go in there! And put some sunscreen on, for crying out loud.

Gunnar Hansen is awesome in this as well. Having never really, REALLY watched this before, I was blown away by his performance as Leatherface. With no lines to speak of and a face always covered in a mask, he manages to convey a fully realized character. That moment - after Jerry shows up and is dispatched - where he walks into the living room and almost has a nervous breakdown is tremendous. There's a whole life behind that moment, and Hansen sells it.

Things crank up to 11 after that, with Franklin and Sally trying to find their friends, a pretty horrific dinner party and lots of chases featuring chainsaws. The final shot, of Leather face almost dancing in the sunset, spinning around with his chainsaw, borders on the poetic. This is a classic film for a reason and I feel a little sad that I've neglected it for so long.

The Bottom Line
This was, honestly, a bit of a revelation for me. Once I got past my anxiety and was able to settle in and just watch the film I was transfixed. It's just a tremendously well-made film. Yes, it's a bit grimy and raw, but that's part of what makes it so good. It feels real, and as such you become invested and a little bit scared.

I'll be watching this again soon, I think. I missed out on having this as part of my horror movie background and feel like I need to catch up. Luckily these DVDs have plenty of background material, so I'll get some of the history and details I've been missing.

And Marilyn Burns, wherever you are, you were pretty great.