Directed by Michael J. Fox and written by Scott Alexander (Big Eyes, Ed Wood), “The Trap” has Lou (Bruce McGill) and Irene Paloma (Teri Garr) faking his death for insurance money. The problem is that he goes away to Brazil and while there, his brother Billy (Bruno Kirby) steals his girl. Sound like a giallo? Well, there mom is played by Carroll Baker.
“Greetings, bores and ghouls. I’ll be with you as soon as I finish with this customer. We were just going over some of the terms of his coverage. I’ll bet this is one clause he won’t be getting out of. Tonight’s nasty nugget concerns a man with a problem. He wants to collect on his life insurance without dying in the process. I call this little annuity: “The Trap.””
Fox had already worked with producer Robert Zemeckis on Back to the Future. Lou works for Zemeckis Pizza and Fox shows up as the prosecutor at the end, as Lou has changed his identity and looks, getting arrested and executed for his own murder. Another McFly-related actor is in this. Sergeant McClaine is played by James Tolkan, who played Mr. Strickland.
Lou’s horrible, so you don’t dislike his brother and wife for having an affair or making out on top of his coffin with him inside. In fact, you kind of want them to be able to get away from the evil Lou and just enjoy their life and love. This is a fun episode and Fox only directed one other time, as he did an episode of the TV show Brooklyn Bridge.
This episode is based on “The Trap” from Shock SuspenStories #18. In that story, the wife is in charge and the husband is forced to be in the crime, along with an undertaker who has an affair with the domineering spouse. It was written by Carl Wessler and drawn by Jack Kamen.
April 5: Moriarty! — Happy birthday Michael Moriarty. Watch one of his movies.
Michael Moriarty and Larry Cohen worked together on Q: The Winged Serpent, The Stuff, It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive and in the Masters of Horror episode “Pick Me Up.” Cohen told The Flashback Files, “He’s very difficult, but not with me. I always get along great with the actors who have bad reputations: Moriarty, Rip Torn, Michael Parks, Broderick Crawford. People who have trouble with everybody else usually have a wonderful time working with me. And I have a wonderful time working with them. I’m not an authoritarian director. I don’t go in trying to boss everyone around and play Otto Preminger.”
Moriarty was born in Detroit and was the son of Eleanor and George Moriarty, a surgeon, and the grandson of George Moriarty, a major league third baseman, umpire and manager. In addition to his work on the stage, he earned Emmy awards (Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for The Glass Menagerie, Holocaust and James Dean, as well as a Tony for Find Your Way Home. Most folks know him best from Law and Order, playing the role of Ben Stone. He left the show in 1994, claiming that his departure was a result of threatening a lawsuit against Attorney General Janet Reno, who was attempting to censor the show. On The Howard Stern Show, he offered to return if Wolf was fired and he placed a full-page advertisement in Variety asking for other actors to stand with him against censorship. NBC and Wolf claimed he was fired for erratic behavior.
Shortly after leaving Law & Order, he moved to Canada, declaring himself a political exile. He was granted Canadian citizenship and now lives in Vancouver. He’s also a political writer and a jazz musician when he’s not acting.
As for this movie, Larry Cohen had written a draft for the 1979 miniseries Salem’s Lot. It was rejected by Warner Brothers, but years later, when they wanted a low budget movie from him, they agreed to a sequel that was loosely based on King’s story. He also was influenced by the play Our Town and told Michael Doyle in the book Larry Cohen: The Stuff of Gods and Monsters, “The intention was always to bring a sense of humor to the picture in playing with the established elements of vampire movies. Audiences recognize aspects of the mythology and know what they mean, but I don’t like vampire movies particularly. In fact, I find them very tedious. With A Return to Salem’s Lot, I tried to revamp the vampire legend by making vampires the most persecuted race in Europe.”
Joe Weber (Moriarty) is an anthropologist who comes back to America to take care of his son Jeremy (Ricky Addison Reed), who is causing trouble for his ex-wife Sally (Ronee Blakley) who wants to commit him to a mental home. They move to Salem’s Lot, taking over an old house from Joe’s Aunt Clara and soon learn that the entire town is filled with vampires, led by Judge Axel (Andrew Duggan). As Jeremy meets young female bloodsucker Amanda Fenton (Tara Reid), while Joe meets Aunt Clara (June Havoc), who has never died. The town has gotten past the issues of drinking human blood, like AIDS, but feeding on cows. They reach out to Joe, an anthropologist, by asking him to write the Bible of vampires. He also reconnects with a girl he slept with when they were teenagers, Cathy (Katja Crosby) and discovers that the vampires came from Europe at the same time as the Mayflower, which is an interesting idea.
This is a movie that has its hero be filled with violent outbursts, like beating a human drone to death with a rock or stabbing the final vampire with the America flag after setting all of the coffins on fire. Joe is helped by Nazi hunter Van Meer (Samuel Fuller), who is the best part of the movie. And oh yeah — the town has already started to take over his son.
If this was called anything other than Return to Salem’s Lot, I think people would love it. It has Daniel Pearl as its cinematographer and there’s plenty of grisly gore at the end. Shot around the same time as It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive, it’s not Cohen’s best work, but even his lowest ebb is better than many’s greatest effort.
This Saturday at 11 PM EST, join Bill and Sam on the Groovy Doom Facebook and YouTube pages for a TV movie! It’s The Curse of the Black Widow which you can find on YouTube.
Every week, we watch one or two movies and discuss them, share the ads and have a drink that goes with the films. Here’s this week’s recipe.
April 4: Repeats Again? — Write about a movie that is based on a TV series.
The Phil Silvers Show, originally titled You’ll Never Get Rich, is a sitcom which ran on CBS from 1955 to 1959 but is better known as Sgt. Bilko. It started Phil Silvers as Master Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko, who runs a series of scams at Fort Baxter to make money instead of doing his job. Most of the first two seasons were written by creator Nat Hiken and Neil Simon was one of the writers in later seasons. DC Comics also published a Sergeant Bilko comic book which lasted 18 issues and a Sergeant Bilko’s Private Doberman series that lasted 11 issues.
Jonathan Lynn created the TV show Yes, Minister and directed Clue, Nuns on the Run, My Cousin Vinny and The Whole Nine Yards, so he knew comedy. Andy Breckman worked on Late Night With David Letterman and Saturday Night Live, as well as writing the movies Rat Race and Arthur 2: On the Rocks before creating the TV show Monk.
So with talent like that and Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd and Phil Hartman in the cast, this movie should have been a success. It wasn’t, losing around a million dollars. It also won Worst Resurrection of a TV Show at the 1996 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards.
But you know, for a film that was critically savaged when it came out, I couldn’t help but enjoy it. Sure, Martin is a long way from his best work in this and so much further from his stand up, but you know, if you like Steve Martin, it works. As far as I’m concerned, Aykroyd and Hartman are the two best Saturday Night Live cast members ever, so I’ll watch anything they do. And I love old TV being repurposed.
Master Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko (Martin) is in charge of the motor pool at Fort Baxter, serving under Colonel John Hall (Aykroyd), who is more concerned with developing a hover tank than Bilko and his men’s money plans until Major Colin Thorn (Hartman) threatens everything by inspecting the base and even trying to steal Bilko’s long suffering girlfriend Rita (Glenne Headly, who teamed with Martin before in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels).
You also get new recruit Pfc. Walter “Wally” T. Holbrook (Daryl Mitchell), Spc. Dino Paparelli (Max Casella), Spc. Tony Morales (Dan Ferro), Spc. Luis Clemente (John Ortiz), Sgt. Raquel Barbella (Pamela Segall, the voice of Bobby Hill), Pfc. Mickey Zimmerman (Mitchell Whitfield) and 1st Lt. Monday (Phil Silvers’ daughter Catherine). Chris Rock briefly is in it as is Travis Tritt as Travis Tritt, which is the perfect role for Travis Tritt.
Somehow, this is the only movie that Aykroyd and Martin appear in together. What’s funny is that Phil Hartman loved to impersonate Paul Ford, the original Colonel John T. Hall on TV, and used the impression during his Saturday Night Live. Everyone thought he was too young looking to play Colonel Hall in the film.
My favorite laugh is the end credit: The filmmakers gratefully acknowledge the total lack of co-operation from the United States Army.
Maybe movies have gotten so much worse since 1996 — they have — but I really had fun with this. I laughed a few times and yes, it’s kind of silly, but that’s what a comedy should be.
April 3: Remake, Remix, Ripoff — A shameless remake, remix or ripoff of a much better known movie. Allow your writing to travel the world (we recommend Italy or Turkey).
The first Bollywood film to be completely shot in Los Angeles, Kaante combines The Usual Suspects with Reservoir Dogs and the inspiration of Tarantino’s movie, City On Fire, and becomes its own movie. Director and co-writer Sanjay Gupta said of the movie, “The whole world thinks Kaante is Reservoir Dogs. No, it isn’t. There are a few similarities in the second half of the film, but the genesis of Kaante was the Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri & Sons Jewellers robbery case, which was later made into the film Special 26. Till today, that’s unsolved. My idea was: ‘What if they were six boys from Dagdi Chawl, who conducted the most successful heist in the history of India, go back to Dagdi Chawl, which is suddenly surrounded by cops?”
Six Indian men living in America — all with a criminal record — are arrested by the police and interrogated about stealing laptops. Enraged at being profiled, they work to rob a bank where the LAPD paychecks come from.
They are Jay “Ajju” Trehan (Sanjay Dutt), Yashvardhan “Major” Rampal (Amitabh Bachchan), Marc Issak (Suniel Shetty), Andy (Kumar Gaurav), Bali (Mahesh Manjrekar) and Mak (Lucky Ali). After the bank robbery — during which they have an extended gunfight with a SWAT team — they go back to their secret hideaway. There, Bali goes all Mr. Blonde on a police officer and gets killed by Mak, who ends up being Mr. Orange.
So, yes, imagine Tarantino but add in a near 3 hour running time because, of course, Indian Hindi-language movies need music numbers.
Quentin himself said that this movie was his favorite of all the movies influenced by his work. “I think it was fabulous. Of the many rip-offs, I loved Hong Kong’s Too Many Ways To Be No.1and this one, Kaante. The best part is, you have Indian guys coming to the U.S. and looting a U.S. bank. How cool is that! I was truly honoured. And these guys are played by the legends of Bollywood. Here I am, watching a film that I’ve directed and then it goes into each character’s background. And I’m like, “Whoa.” For, I always write backgrounds and stuff, and it always gets chopped off during the edit. And so I was amazed on seeing this. I felt, this isn’t Reservoir Dogs. But then it goes into the warehouse scene, and I am like, “Wow, it’s back to Reservoir Dogs.” Isn’t it amazing!”
Tarantino later screened Kaante at his New Beverly Cinema with Reservoir Dogs and City on Fire.
It is amazing as it shows so much more than its inspiration. There’s a lot that explains why the characters are getting involved in the robbery, such as Marc wanting to save his dancer girlfriend from a club owner, Major is trying to save the life of his terminally ill wife and Andy is trying to get custody of his son.
It also has so much influence from other American movies, as Gupta tried watching Reservoir Dogs but found it boring as he loved the movies of Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. He didn’t want too much talking and instead, you get explosive battles. The arrest and interrogation scenes are very close to The Usual Suspects and the tip of the cap to that movie is that the main officer is named Detective MacQuarrie, a reference to screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie.
How realistic is the idea of this movie? Suniel Shetty, after going back to his hotel after working out, was taken by the police as they suspected he was a terrorist as this movie was filmed right after 9/11.
When I was a kid, maybe around 1979, WPGH in Pittsburgh had an ad for a new show called SCTV. Now, the name means Second City Television from the Second City theater in Chicago, which always took pride as a second-rate city. Pittsburgh was way lower on the list of important cities, but the commercial pointed out that one of the cast members, Joe Flahery, was from here. And if anything, Yinzers are beyond proud of the people who come out of our city.
Starting at Second City in 1969. he eventually moved to Canada to start the second school. While there, he was part of the TV show SCTV and played numerous roles, such as TV newsman Floyd Robertson, who was also horror movie presenter Count Floyd. He based this role on “Chilly” Billy Cardille from his hometown, to the point that episodes where Count Floyd showed art movies and had to act like they were scary. This comes directly from Chiller Theater spending a few weeks under the title The Saturday Late Show, showing Italian films like Crazy Desire, No Love for Johnnie, The Reluctant Spy, The 10th Victim, Dingaka, Sins of Casanova, The Success, Casanova 70, Red Culottes, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, The Easy Life, Marriage, Italian-Style; Boccaccio ’70; The Naked Kiss and The Bigamist.So when Count Floyd showed Ingmar Burgman’s Whispers of the Wolf and asking when the werewolf would show up, it was based on movies he had seen growing up. Count Floyd was so complete with his Chiller Theater impression that he was often joined by a sidekick known as The Pittsburgh Midget, played by Flaherty’s brother Paul Flaherty. He’s a nod to Stefan, the Castle Prankster, who was played by Stephen Michael Luncinski on Chiller Theater.
If you read enough of my writing, you’ll notice I say “blow ’em up real good.” That comes directly from Big Jim McBob, another Flaherty character. I also love Guy Caballero, the owner of SCTV, who uses a wheelchair for respect.
For as much as everyone worships the early years of Saturday Night Live, SCTV was always better.
Flaherty played a lot of cameos in his career. He’s probably best known for playing the Western Union worker who gives Marty the note at the end of Back to the Future 2 as well as the stalker who keeps bothering Happy Gilmore. He was also on Maniac Mansion.
But these are just roles. His family has lost a father, one who his daughter said he loved old movies and they got to share that together.
For me, he proved that you could be creative and come from Pittsburgh without losing who you were. So many episodes of Count Floyd had references to West Mifflin and the Golden Triangle, things no one in the rest of the country would know about.
Imagine my joy in learning that other people loved Flaherty and his roles as much as I did and they weren’t just from here.
If you’ve never watched any of his work, please do. It felt like such a secret language when I was young to know SCTV. Now, I want to share it and spread it. So much of what this great man did that made me laugh made me who I am and what I write.
April 2: Mondo Madness — Write about a mondo movie.
There was no internet in 1977 and the world was much larger, so the idea of what was in America could be seen as mysterious as countries like Africa that mondo filmmakers had already explored.
Directed and written by Romano Vanderbes (who also made This Is America Part 2, The Sex O’Clock News, America Exposed and the compilation Sex Maniac’s Guide to the U.S.A.), this is also known as Jabberwalk and starts with “America the Beautiful” being played by The Dictators.
The America in this movie is the one that the right warns you about. It’s a place where demolition derbies, pro wrestling — there’s Ivan Putski! — and mud wrestling are our three biggest sports. Polygamy, nude beaches are packed, love boutiques are shopped by teenage girls, quick divorce and fast marriage is the order of the day, plus there are rentable BDSM dungeons, group sex encounter groups, dildo factories and legal brothels are everywhere. Even when people decide to actually get married, they go to the Poconos and have to undertake mandatory gun shooting classes to prepare them for the cities and suburbs of the United States where violence is a celebrated fact of life. Even church is just done inside your car now so you can keep moving to whatever is next, which is usually sex or death or being hooked up to electrodes that shock you when you eat too many french fries. Sorry. Freedom fries.
Also known as Crazy Ridiculous American People, this has everything from Don Imus hosting the 1975 Miss All Bare American pageant to a worship ceremony at the Church of Satan (incorrectly saying that people get so excited that they start hurting one another during rituals), a dildo salesman, the Eros Awards for pornography — look for Fanne Fox, Bree Anthony, female rock band Isis, Ron Jeremy, C.J. Laing, Marc Stevens, Helen Madigan, Darby Lloyd Rains and naked people painted silver — as well as Arnold casually walking out of a Gold’s Gym, the AccuJack masturbation machine, a man getting his penis tattooed, hot dogs being made, a clown church, suicide’s being fished out of the water around the Golden Gate Bridge (by the way, when my wife and I were first dating, she made me watch The Bridge doc about this while drunk and I was worried why I was allowing her in my house and now we’ve been married for nine years), cryogenics, drive-in funerals, brothels for senior men where older women are paid five and even ten dollars to sleep with them, a bank robbery, the many deaths in an Indianapolis 500 race, co-ed prisons, Mormon men with twelve wives and so much more.
At one point, before that internet I discussed at the open and the one you’re reading this on now, these movies were shocking. Then again, Vanderbes is Dutch and should know all about Amsterdam and that America is pretty puritanical, but maybe in 1977 we were all about sex before Reagan and the Religious Right and AIDS.
It’s all voiced over by Norman Rose, who narrated Harold and the Purple Crayon, Tennessee Tuxedo, Message from Space, Pinocchio in Outer Space, War Between the Planets and Destroy All Monsters. He’s also Mr. Smith, the perverted dirty caller who gets Alice so excited in The Telephone Book.
What really gets me is that no matter how much sex is in this movie, there’s also the specter of Americanized violence leading everything. Our country was won by the gun and as movies like this and The Killing of Americaremind me, this kind of bloodshed that we gives hopes and prayers for every time and say that we can’t stop it and then it happens every single day. But it was like that in 1977 too as this movie continually reminds us. Worse, if it can get that way, kids today are upset about anything sexual while also fascinated, but not enough to make anything artistic or awesome. What I;m saying is that the 1970s of this movie are so far away that they only exist in this amber-grasp of VHS scuzz.
April 1: Drop A Bomb — Please share your favorite critical and financial flop with us!
No, not Jess Franco’s Justine which came out the same year.
This is a bigger movie.
Maybe not better.
Directed by George Cukor and Joseph Strick and written by Lawrence B. Marcus from the novel by Lawrence Durrell, Justine takes what is seemingly an impenetrable source and turns out, well, something.
Why two directors? The pre-production was done by Strick, who intended to shoot the movie in Morocco. He did some location filming there, but battled Fox execs and star Anouk Aimée. When he did not hire along with the studio’s wishes — and fell asleep on the set while working — Cukor was brought in. Instead of shooting on location, the rest was shot in Hollywood.
It ended up losing $6,602,000, which in today’s money is $55,824,857.00.
Let’s go back a bit. The book that this was based on is part of The Alexandria Quartet, a tetralogy of novels by British writer Lawrence Durrell. The first three books are a Rashomon-like telling of three perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Egypt, before and during the Second World War. The fourth book is set six years later. Justine is the best-known of these books. The author saw the four novels as an exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject–object relation all within the theme of modern love.
Seems like a blockbuster, right?
In the book, the narrator — unnamed but revealed as a man named Darley in later novels — tells of his time in Alexandria and his tragic romance with Justine, a mysterious Jewish woman who was once poor and now married to the rich Egyptian Nessim. Darley is quite similar in background and life to the actual writer of this book.
I love the way that Justine herself is described: “alluring, seductive, mournful and prone to dark, cryptic pronouncements.” Feels like my dating history. There’s also another book within the book written by another lover of Justine, as well as her diary, all of which tell of her many lovers and teh dark hurricane that she brings into the lives of men.
There are also bits about the study of the Kabbalah and secret political games.
As for Durrell, he was born in India to British colonial parents and spent much of his life traveling the world. He worked as a senior press officer to the British embassies in Athens and Cairo, press attaché in Alexandria and Belgrade and director of the British Institutes in Kalamata, Greece and Córdoba, Argentina. He was also director of Public Relations for the Dodecanese Islands and Cyprus. Yet he resisted only being listed as British and didn’t even have citizenship, needing to apply for a visa every time he came to the country, which was embarrassing to diplomats. Also, he may have had a relationship with his daughter Sappho Jane, who was named for the Greek poet whose name is associated with lesbianism.
It’s hard to sum up an artist’s complex life in one paragraph but there you go.
Anyways, this movie feels cursed. Even people who left it worked on bombs. For example, Joseph L. Mankiewicz was working on the screenplay when he was approached to take over Cleopatra. Speaking of that movie, it’s failure led to original producer Walter Wanger being fired and original star — and the person often blamed for Cleopatra — Elizabeth Taylor being replaced.
The actress who was picked to play Justine, Anouk Aimée, was so upset at being separated from her lover Albert Finney that she wanted to leave. The actor had to visit her and tell her to complete the movie. In the book Conversations with My Elders, Cukor was asked who the worst actor he had ever worked with. He answered Aimée, saying “That picture could have been much more than it was allowed to be.” He said that the problem was “Attitude. Intractible. Like Marilyn Monroe, but without the results. Let me tell you, that girl knew she’d probably never work in Hollywood again, or she’d never have defied me like that.”
I love this review from Roger Ebert: “What Cukor has salvaged from this morass is rather remarkable. “Justine” is a movie that doesn’t work and is usually confusing, but all the same it’s a movie with a texture, an atmosphere, that’s almost hypnotic. People who go to movies to enjoy the story will be enraged, and people who go to Justine with any familiarity with Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet will be appalled. But people who go to movies to watch the way scenes work, and to relish the rhythm of an actor’s performance, will like Justine more than they expected to.”
There’s a great cast at least. Nessim is played by John Vernon, Darley by Michael York, Narouz is Robert Forster, Pursewarden is Dirk Bogarde, plus there are roles from Jack Albertson, Michael Constantine, Michael Dunn, Barry Morse and Severn Darden. They’re great actors seeking a script to work with and sometimes it works, but there’s so much to get through and the first hour seemingly is formless. I don’t know if this film came out today if anyone would even feel like wading through it; attention spans have changed greatly in its lifetime.
In the 60s, 20th Century Fox seemed like they were unable to get anything going. Cleopatra was such a failure that they had to release all of their contract actors just to save money and sold their studios to Alcoa. They were saved by the box office of The Longest Day, The Sound of Music, Fantastic Voyage and Planet of the Apes but would make other flops from 1969 to 1971, including Hello, Dolly! and Myra Breckinridge.
Tobe Hooper followed up The Texas Chainsaw Massacrewith another film that examined the horror and depravity that existed with South Texas.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre co-writer Kim Henkel was inspired by Joe Ball, the Alligator Man, who owned a live alligator attraction in the 1930s. Despite being suspected of several murders, legend had it that Ball would feed the dead women to his alligators. Ball started as a bootlegger before opening his Sociable Inn in Elmendorf, Texas, which was surrounded by a pond where he’d charge people to watch him feed them live cats and dogs. After former girlfriends, barmaids and even his wife went missing, two policemen tried to question him. He pulled a gun and shot himself — either in the head or the heart. That said — there are many that believe the stories about Joe Ball to be simply Texas folklore. He did exist, though.
Working under the title Death Trap (the film is also known as Horror Hotel and Starlight Slaughter), this entire film was made on a soundstage, using the Raleigh Studios pool as a swamp. This enabled Hooper to create what he called a “surrealistic, twilight world.” True to form, issues with the producers took him away from the film before the shooting ended, but he had a decent relationship with the actors. Cinematographer Robert Caramico finished the direction of the film once Hooper left.
This movie starts grimy and stays that way. Buck (Robert Englund in an early role) demands kinky sex from Clara Wood (Robert Collins, Matilda the Hun from Death Race 2000!), who refuses. This scene contains the line, “I’m Buck and I’m here to fuck,” line that Quentin Tarantino used in Kill Bill.
No one says no in Miss Hattie’s (Carolyn Jones, who is better known as Morticia Addams!) house of women, so Clara is kicked out. One of the girls takes pity and gives her money to stay at the Starlight Hotel, a rundown motel in the swamp. There, she meets the owner, Judd (Neville Brand, famous for playing Al Capone in The Untouchables TV series and The George Raft Story), who we soon learn is a demented sex maniac. He attacks her, chasing her into the swamp where a Nile crocodile eats her. Yep — don’t get too attached to anyone here. This is very Psycho territory, where bad people meet even worse ends.
A couple soon arrives — Faye (Marilyn Burns, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and Roy (William Finley, Winslow Leach from Phantom of the Paradise), along with their daughter Angie (Kyle Richards, Lindsey Wallace from Halloween!) and dog Snoopy. Don’t get attached to Snoopy, who isn’t long for this world. As Angie finds a dead monkey and screams, the dog runs into the swamp where he is eaten. Roy goes to kill the gator, but is stabbed by Judd’s scythe. Then, the insane motel owner ties Faye to the bed and tries to grab Angie, who hides under the porch of the building.
Harvey Wood (Mel Ferrer, The Visitor, The Antichrist and first husband of Audrey Hepburn) arrives with his daughter Libby looking for Clara. Sherrif Martin (Stuart Whitman, Guyana: Crime of the Century, The Monster Club, Ruby) helps them as they search for Harvey’s runaway daughter. Libby goes out with the sheriff while Harvey stays back at the hotel. As he finds Faye tied to the bed, he’s also killed by Judd and his scythe.
The sheriff kicks Buck out of the bar — remember him? — and he goes to the Starlight with his underage girlfriend. While they’re having sex, they hear a scream. Buck discovers Faye, but is pushed into the swamp where he is devoured.
Finally, Libby comes back and saves her sister and Angie. Judd goes insane and chases them into the swamp where he’s eaten by his own gator. Or crocodile — the movie is never sure.
I’ve always joked that Rob Zombie is continually trying to remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. After watching this, I get the feeling that this is the movie he wants to make. It’s covered in a layer of filth from beginning to end, with characters coming and going, people getting killed horrifically and style triumphing over coherent plot. Even better, there’s a mix of actors that you instantly recognize playing some great roles, particularly Neville Brand, whose muttering insanity is total perfection. There’s also a great electronic score that really sets the mood — even ending in a crash after the final credits.
True to his promise, Hooper delivers a film that feels like a nightmare throughout. Its dream logic makes for an occasionally funny, often grotesque movie that is never boring.
Here’s the episode of the podcast about this movie.
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