DAY 11. THE OLD WAY. Watch a classic from 1959 or before.

Herman Cohen started his climb up the show business ladder from the lowest rung, working as a gofer and usher at Detroit’s Dexter Theater at the tender age of 12. By 18, he’d be the manager. His career would take him from being the sales manager for Columbia’s Detroit region to their Hollywood publicity department and finally making his own films.

His greatest success came in the 1950’s with this film — which he wrote and produced for American International — which earned $2 million dollars on a $100,000 budget (approximately $18 million on a $900,000 budget when adjusted for today’s inflation). He was also behind the films Craze, Trog and Berserk!

Back in 1957, when this film was made, the idea of a teenager becoming a monster was shocking to audiences. Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff claimed that he received plenty of guff for exploiting this idea. In fact, this is the first of many I Was a Teenage movies, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

It’s also the first role for Michael Landon, who would go on to enjoy a long and fruitful Hollywood career with three landmark series on his resume: Bonanza, Little House on the Prarie and Highway to Heaven. When I was a kid, I was often afraid of the photo of the werewolf in this movie and my mother would say, “It’s just Michael Landon. You shouldn’t be afraid.” Also, as a youngster, if I ever went to another kid’s home and they were fans of Little House on the Prarie’s adventures of the Ingalls family, I’d instantly judge them as boring and want to go home.

Here he plays Tony Rivers, a troubled teenager to say the least. Unlike most 1950’s fare that portrays its protagonist as noble, we’re shown that Tony is a rough character right from the beginning. He doesn’t just rail against authority, he hates everyone. And he’s not all that forthright about it. In a fistfight with another classmate, he goes so far as to throw dirt in the man’s face and try to kill him with a shovel instead of just using his fists. His love of violence and hatred for his fellow man stands in dramatic contrast to his pretty boy looks.

Barney Phillips, who was also Sergeant Ed Jacobs on Dragnet, plays Detective Donovan, a cop who feels bad for Tony and tries to intervene on his behalf several times. After all, Tony grew up without a mom and his dad’s probably a drunk.

Yvonne Lime, who would move on from acting to becoming a noted philanthropist with her husband, plays his girlfriend Arlene. While her parents don’t seem to enjoy the cut of Tony’d jib, she’s in pure love with him, believing in him no matter what.

That said, the real horror starts at a haunted house party. After an extended dance sequence where Vic and his girl sing along to a record — amazingly, this is announced as a big deal and I can’t imagine attending a party where the highlight is some guy playing bongos and lipsynching to a 45 — Tony flips out and nearly kills the man for surprising him from behind. I mean, everyone was pranking one another to an inordinate degree and only Tony tried to outright murder Vic. Look — I hated Vic after a minute, so I get it, Tony. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have to spend time with him on an extended basis.

Don’t believe me? Just watch these antics and tell me you don’t wish you could go full lycanthrope and strike them all down.

However, Tony’s rage ends up knocking down his girlfriend, so he volunteers to meet with hypnotist Dr. Alfred Brandon. He’s played by Whit Bissell, who would play a psychologist in not only this film, but in its follow-up, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. He also had the same occupation in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

This being the 50’s, the doctor has to be a quack. He’s really only interested in experimenting on Tony, regressing him to his most primal state.

After another party at the haunted house — this is made a major point yet we never see a single ghost — Tony drives Arlene home and Frank, one of their friends, is mauled and killed. As the cops debate the autopsy, Pepi the janitor (Vladimir Sokoloff, a Russian actor playing a Carpathian, so this isn’t whitewashing as much as its Hollywood not really even knowing at this point what ethnicity is. In fact, Sokoloff would play 35 different nationalities in his career, including people from Greece, China, Spain, Mexico and so many more) tells them all the truth: these are the marks of a werewolf!

Tony feels like there’s something wrong with himself, but the principal is so happy with his progress that she’s recommending him to State College. One would assume that the marks on his permanent record have been removed.

As he leaves her office, he notices Theresa practicing her gymnastics. This drives his teenage hormones into overdrive and he responds by going full werewolf and killing her, which is about the best translation for toxic masculinity that 1957 can muster. Just seeing the comely form of Dawn Richard (Playboy Playmate of the Month for May 1957) as she stretches out is all it takes. That said — her sexuality had to be somewhat shocking for the puritanical Baby Boom era. Therefore, she had to be destroyed.

Tony’s recognized by his jacket and goes on the run. He calls Arlene for help and she can only listen, unable to reply. And a visit to Dr. Brandon only leads to the man using our protagonist and filming his transformation, at which point Tony kills everyone. The cops are forced to gun him down — silver bullets are unnecessary when you have good old fashioned American steel — and that’s all she wrote.

One of those cops — they opine that man shouldn’t mess in the affairs of God — is Guy Williams, who would soon be swashbuckling in Zorro and sailing through the galaxy in Lost In Space.

Less than four months after the release of this film, AIP would release two movies that are pretty much the same story: I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula, which is even more of a remake, just with a female lead and doctor. It’s such a paint by numbers recreation that there’s even another dance number thrown in, references to Carpathia, dialogue lifted nearly line by line and an observer who knows that it’s a vampire when no one else will believe them.

I watched this movie on the very same day I rewatched An American Werewolf In London and it’s stunning to see the different ways that they interpret not only being a werewolf, but the transformation itself. Instead of the pain that 1981’s Rick Baker effects depict, all we see here is a slow dissolve of Tony getting a furry face. But it works — for so often, this was how American audiences saw werewolves.

DAY 11. THE OLD WAY. Watch a classic from 1959 or before.

A Bucket of Blood aspires to art as much as it does junk. Written by Charles B. Griffith, whose name you can associate with films as disparate as Smokey Bites the Dust, Barbarella and Death Race 2000, it’s a tale of trying to figure out how to create art when all you can do is repeat words and images. Maybe that’s what art really is.

Roger Corman himself directed this one, shot in five days for $50,000. But hey — AIP wanted a horror film and had sets left over from Diary of a High School Bride. The same set would also be used for The Little Shop of Horrors.

We start by hearing the beat poetry of Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton, The Masque of the Red Death) at The Yellow Door cafe. People only know when to clap when they’re told, as the people he decries as sheep really live up to it. But it’s art, baby.

Busboy Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) yearns to be part of this hip crowd and wants to win the heart of Carla (Barboura Morris, The Trip), a friendly hostess at the club. As he fails to make her a sculpture, his landlady’s cat Frankie (Myrtle Vail plays the snooping older woman; she’s actually Griffith’s grandmother) gets stuck in the wall. He tries to cut it out of the wall, but ends up killing the cat. So he does what any of us would: he covers it in clay, sticks a knife in it and calls it art.

The next morning, Walter’s boss Leonard (Antony Carbone, Creature from the Haunted Sea) makes fun of the morbid art, but Carla loves it. So up it goes, on display, where the beatniks all fall in love with it. One of those crazy cats named Naolia gives him some heroin to remember her by, but Walter has no idea what it is. 

As he’s followed home by undercover cop and total fink Lou Raby (Bert Convy!), he’s told he’s going to be arrested for possession. He panics and hits Lou with a frying pan, giving him another piece of art called “Murdered Man” for everyone to fall in love with. But the secret’s soon to get out, as Leonard sees fur sticking out of his “Dead Cat” piece.

Walter is now the king of the artistic set, except for Alice (Judy Bamber, Dragstrip Girl), a model who is pretty much disliked by everyone. Walter asks her to be in his model and she agrees, only to be strangled and turned into his next art object. The results so impress Brock that he throws a party for Walter, who drunkenly beheads someone directly after and shows the results to his boss.

This has to end like all wax-related films. Walter finally feels enough self-worth to propose to Carla, who rejects him and soon learns that the sculptures are really human bodies covered in wax. Everyone chases him home, where he makes his last piece of art from himself — the “Hanged Man.”

Dick Miller said of the film — in the book Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers — “The story was good; the acting was good; the humor in it was good; the timing was right; everything about it was right. But they didn’t have any money for production values … and it suffered.”

Miller would go on to play a character named Walter Paisley in the films Hollywood Boulevard, The Howling, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Chopping Mall, Night of the Creeps, Shake, Rattle and Rock!, Rebel Highway, The Adventures of Biffle and Shoosterror and Schmo Boat.

The movie was remade in 1995 as part of the Roger Corman Presents series on Showtime. While never available on DVD, it was released as The Death Artist on VHS. It adds perhaps the one thing missing from the original: Paul Bartel. He and Mink Stole play a rich couple looking for new artists. Walter is played by Anthony Michael Hall, Carla by Justine Bateman, Shadoe Stevens is Maxwell and Sam Lloyd is Leonard. Taking place in a cappuccino bar, it also features Will Ferrell and David Cross in some of their first roles.

If you want to see this, I recommend the Olive Films Signature Edition, made to commemorate the film’s 60th anniversary. It comes complete with a new 4K scan of the film, short docs on Corman and Dick Miller, commentary by Elijah Drenner, director of the documentary That Guy Dick Miller as well as an interview with Griffith, a rare prologue from the German release and even a digest version of the film that was released on Super 8!

Much like their release of Invasion of the Body Snatchers that came out earlier this year, this is another great release from Olive.

DAY 10: ANALOGUE MANIPULATORS: Practical effects are the truth. No CGI will be tolerated.

There must have been something in the waters of the Los Angeles River in 1981, as The Howling, Wolfen, Full Moon High and this film all came out in those same twelve months. While all three are interesting films for different reasons, An American Werewolf In London astounded audiences with its special effects.

Rick Baker’s vision was to have the main transformation — set to Sam Cookie’s “Blue Moon” — happen in real-time, with no cutaways or dissolves. Director John Landis compounded the difficulty of this sequence by insisting that it be shot in bright light. This all led to six ten-hour days of prosthetic make-up, but the results were an Oscar — the first of its kind — for special effects make-up and Baker became a household name. Well, in the house of kids who subscribed to Fangoria.

While he was a production assistant in Yugoslavia on the film Kelly’s Heroes, he witnessed an elaborate gypsy funeral where a criminal was wrapped in garlic and buried feet first in the middle of a crossroads so that he would never rise again. This moment of real-life horror stayed with him for over a decade as he built his career in Hollywood.

The money people thought that this movie was too funny to be scary and too frightening to be hilarious. Time has proven them wrong.

David Kessler and Jack Goodman (David Naughton from March Madness and Griffin Dunne from After Hours) are backpacking through Europe. As they make their way across the moors, they stop at a local club called the Slaughtered Lamb. In the midst of all the fun they’re having, they innocently inquire about the star on the wall and are asked to leave. Seriously — the bar just shuts down and forces them into the night, knowing that they’ll die out there.

Look for Rik Mayall in this scene, playing chess with former pro wrestler Brian Glover. Adrian Edmonson had been invited to be at the shoot but blew it off.

As they walk into the night, the pub owners can only say, “Keep to the road, stay clear of the moors and beware of the full moon.” Of course, that means that our heroes wander off the path and are surrounded by a creature that howls at the full moon. Jack is milled and David barely survives when the pub’s patrons come out to save him. As he passes out, he sees that it wasn’t an animal that attacked, but a nude man.

Three weeks later, David wakes up in a hospital where Inspector Villiers tells him that he and his friend were attacked by a lunatic, while our hero insists that it was a wolf. That’s when things get even weirder — Jack appears, even though he’s dead, and demands that David kill himself before the next full moon. As long as the bloodline of the werewolf continues, Jack will be undead, forced to haunt the world.

As David heals up, he moves in with Alex Price (Jenny Agutter, Logan’s Run), a nurse who helped him get back on his feet. Instead of being able to celebrate young love, Jack’s warnings — and decay — grow more insistent as we get closer to that epic transformation scene.

The rest of the film is a rollercoaster of werewolf attacks and David trying to reason with Jack, who is joined by all of David’s victims inside an adult movie theater. Finally, the police — and Alex — close in.

Today, Landis regrets some of his choices as he made the film, such as cutting certain sequences to earn an R rating. For example, the sex scene when Alex and David finally consummate their relationship was a lot more explicit and there was an action sequence where David as a werewolf would wipe out the homeless along the Thames.  The director also felt that he spent too much time on the transformation scene sequence because he was so fascinated by Baker’s effects.

That said, Landis and Baker were never on the same terms after this film. It took eight years to make the movie and Baker decided to use all of the work he’d created so far for The Howling. Right around the same time, Landis finally got the movie greenlit and called Baker, who had to tell him he was already lining up a werewolf project. After getting screamed at over the phone, Baker left the project in the hands of his assistant Rob Bottin and only consulted on that film.

Special effects would never be the same after this film. Today, the entire transformation would be computer rendered, with those amazing monsters only truly existing on the screen. This film’s effects were so upsetting to even the actors that it caused depression when they first saw how damaged their faces were.

Arrow Video’s release of this film — which you can order from Diabolik DVD — is packed with everything you’ve come to expect from this label. There’s a new 2018 4K restoration from the original camera negative supervised by Landis, as well as two commentaries — one from filmmaker Paul Davis and another with actors David Naughton and Griffin Dunne. There’s also Mark of The Beast: The Legacy of the Universal Werewolf, a newly produced and feature-length documentary by filmmaker Daniel Griffith, Beware the Moon (Paul Davis’s feature-length exploration of the film complete with extensive cast and crew interviews), a new interview with Landis entitled An American Filmmaker in London, and a video essay by Jon Spira (who made Elstree 1976, a movie about ten extras who were in Star Wars) called I Think He’s a Jew: The Werewolf’s Secret. There are also discussions on how the movie impacted today’s filmmakers, special effects artists and archival making-of features. If it sounds like Arrow went above and beyond, well — they do this on just about every movie they release.

PS — Please, by all means, avoid An American Werewolf In Paris (starring Tom Everett Scott of Tom Hank’s That Thing You Do!), a movie made by none of these people that has extreme bungie jumping in it. That’s probably the only reason to watch it, actually.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by Arrow Video, but we’ve alreayd bought it several times and were planning on purchasing this new version anyway. This has no bearing on our review.

DAY 9. DIGITAL S(T)IMULATIONS: A pre-2000 movie using computer generated “special” effects.

As much as we decry practical effects over CGI — in the same way we demand physical media over streaming — there are times when it doesn’t have to be all that bad. I decided that instead of finding a poor example of computer generated animation, I’d share something that I love.

While the first CGI in mainstream film was probably 1976’s Futureworld (several modern techniques were innovated in this film, from an animated CGI  hand that was taken from Edwin Catmull’s 1972 experimental short subject A Computer Animated Hand and an animated face from Fred Parke’s 1974 experimental short subject Faces & Body Parts to an early example of digital compositing to place live actors over a previously filmed background), the two movies that I can really remember to use extensive computer-generated imagery were Tron and The Last Starfighter.

In place of physical spaceships, 3D rendered models were used to depict this film’s Gunstar and spacecraft. Their designs came from artist Ron Cobb, who also worked on Dark Star, Alien, Star Wars, Conan the Barbarian and wrote the initial script for Dark Skies, which Steven Spielberg rewrote into the mich friendlier E.T. He’s also listed in the credits for Back to the Future as DeLorean Time Travel Consultant.

There are over 27 minutes of effects in this film, which was a tremendous amount of computer animation for its time. However, this animation required half the time of the traditional miniature special effects, allowed the film to be made for just $14 million dollars.

That said — there are still plenty of practical effects, like the creature and Beta Unit special makeup, as well as the Centauri’s Starcar, which was a real vehicle created by Gene Winfield, who also created the spinners for Blade Runner and the 6000 SUX for RoboCop. His car design for The Reactor was used in a variety of TV shows, including Catwoman’s Catmobile on the Batman TV show, the Jupiter 6 car in the “Bread and Circuses” episode of Star Trek, Bewitched and Mission: Impossible, where it was part of a scheme to make a bank robber believe that they’d been asleep for 14 years.

The idea that video games were recruiting players for some high end military service started as an urban legend that games like Missile Command were saving information on its players so that they’d be ready to defend America from the inevitable Russian ICBM strike that was coming in the 1980’s. There was also the There’s also the weird tale of Polybius, a video game that never existed — or did it? — that was an MK Ultra style experiment unleashed on Portland, Oregon arcades that led to addiction, hallucinations and visits by the Men in Black. Obviously, those legends led to this film or this is all an elaborate piece of disinformation to hide the truth in plain site. I leave your version of reality up to you, dear reader.

Alex Rogan (Lance Guest, Halloween 2) is going nowhere, stuck in a trailer park taking care of everyone else. His scholarship has been rejected and he has to keep fixing things and watching his little brother instead of getting to spend time with Maggie (Catherine Marie Stewart, The Apple).

The only fun he has is playing the Starfighter arcade game in the trailer park, which allows him to pretend that he’s defending the Frontier from Xur and his Ko-Dan Armada.

After Alex becomes the game’s highest-scoring player, the game’s inventor Centauri visits, offering him a ride in his fancy car as a prize. He’s played by Robert Preston, who is really just reprising his role as Harold Hill from The Music Man, which is an ingenious gambit.

The car is really a spaceship and Alex is taken to meet the Rylan Star League while a Beta Unit is used to replace him on Earth. That’s when he learns that the game is actually a training unit meant to find starfighters ready to battle very real Ko-Dan Empire.

Alex is expected to be the gunner for the Gunstar along with the reptilian navigator Grig (Dan O’Herlihy, who pretty much owned the 1980’s between this movie, playing Conal Cochran in Halloween 3: Season of the Witch and the Old Man in RoboCop). However, all our hero wants to do is go home.

It takes alien assassins attacking the trailer park and the death of all of the other starfighters and Centauri — who takes a laser blast meant for our hero — for Alex to join the cause. While he fights the Armada in space, Beta and Maggie battle the Zando-Zan killers back down on good old Mother Earth.

Of course, Alex has the gift that all great starfighters need and saves the day. He lands his ship on the trailer park and takes Maggie into space with him, while his brother starts playing the game in the hopes of joining his brother.

This is a film with real heart, beyond its aspirations of being a blockbuster. It’s directed by Nick Castle, who you probably already know played Michael Myers in the original Halloween. What you may not know is that he wrote the movie Skatetown U.S.A. or directed Tag: The Assassination Game, The Boy Who Could Fly and Dennis the Menace. Plus, he, John Carpenter and Tommy Lee Wallace all formed The Coup De Villes and played much of the music for Big Trouble In Little China.

Despite the film being based on the idea of an arcade game, there never really was one despite the promise in the closing credits of an Atari created edition. The game was actually started and would have been Atari’s first 3D polygonal arcade game to use a Motorola 68000 as the CPU. It would have used the Star Wars arcade controls and been much like the game Lance Guest plays in the film, but it was cancelled once Atari representatives saw the film in post-production and decided it was not going to be a financial success.That said there were Atari home versions in development and they were eventually released as Star Raiders II and Solaris.

There is an NES game — it’s a reskin of the computer game Uridium — and Rogue Synapse created a freeware PC game in 2007 that’s very close to the game in the film.

The themes of The Last Starfighter have been repeated in plenty of other stories, like Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Ernest Cline’s Armada, which is pretty much a note for note reboot of the same story. Of course, Cline wrote Ready: Player One and works in a reference to the original film, but he wears his influences on his sleeve. Interestingly enough, Wil Wheaton read the audio version of this book — which will be a movie soon enough that’ll cost a hundred times what The Last Starfighter did and have a sliver of the soul — and he appears in this film.

Galoob planned to create a toyline for this movie that sadly never came to be. You can see images of it and learn more about it at Plaid Stallions.

If you’re looking for a great slice of 1984, you can’t go wrong with this movie. I love that it has a lizard best friend, fun spaceship designs, the Music Man conning people for money in the midst of a galactic war and even the promise of a sequel which never came. It’s the kind of movie that would always be a rental that everyone could agree on or the perfect film to veg out whenever HBO showed it for the two hundredth time.