DAY 20. SUNDAY DINNER: From exceptional eating scenes to full on foodie fodder. Come hungry!

After a viewing of this movie at a very young age, I decided that I’d never have chaffing dishes in my house. That may never come true just because I doubt I’ll ever have the money to spend on such luxurious accoutrements, but also because the moment where Baby Jane Hudson (Bette Davis) serves her sister Blanche (Joan Crawford) her parakeet — and later a rat — on a silver platter, I was put off on silver serviceware for the rest of my days. This is not a meal fit for Ms. Crawford!

Robert Aldrich had the idea of bringing together two of America’s most enduring screen icons in one film where they’d bring their long-rumored rivalry to the story of two sisters who had been used up by show business.

Baby Jane was once a vaudeville star who held her family under her thumb, using her stardom to get whatever she wanted. That all changed once movies took over and she couldn’t adapt, so by 1935, her sister Blanche is the toast of Tinseltown while she’s a shell of her former self, her movies seen as failures. One night at a party, an accident leaves Blanche paralyzed from the waist down and it’s all blamed on a drunken Jane.

Flash to three decades later, as residuals from Blanche’s films are enough to keep the sisters in house and home, as the two former stars live in the shadows of their past glories. Jane has become a raging alcoholic, trapping her wheelchair-bound sister within their home, denying her even basic sustenance — hence the pet and vermin meal scenes described above.

Although Jane has gone far into middle age, she still wears the pancake make-up and outfits of her Baby past. She’s hired Edwin Flagg (Victor Buono) to play piano for her, preparing an entirely new show to take on the road. And to get there, she’s using her sister’s money.

Only madness and murder can follow, as well as the revelation that Blanche isn’t the innocent victim that she aspires to be. Both sisters have been forced into roles that they’ve played way beyond typecasting. As both sisters find themselves on a beach, with Blanche dehydrated and near-death, Jane’s plaintively sad question “You mean all this time we could have been friends?” cuts through this film, which ends before giving any resolution to the fate of either character.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was a cultural force, changing Hollywood so that older actresses didn’t have to fade into the role of the matron. It’d be followed by other so-called psycho-biddy films like Aldrich’s follow-up Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, as well as movies that also asked questions like What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?, What’s the Matter with Helen? and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?

The feud between the two actresses — which began years before this movie and would extend to their deaths — is so legendary that books and even an entire FX series was created to document it. From allegations that Crawford backed out of a publicity tour because she didn’t want to share the stage with Davis to Crawford accepting Anne Bancroft’s Best Actress statue for The Miracle Worker in a successful attempt to overshadow her enemy, this war was just like the movie — only 100% reality.

I mean — this is the movie where Bette Davis installed a free Coca-Cola machine on the set for the cast and crew for the sole reason of drawing the ire of Crawford, who was on the board of Pepsi.

There are also plenty of personal touches by both actresses. Davis did all of her own makeup, saying “What I had in mind no professional makeup man would have dared to put on me. I felt Jane never washed her face, just added another layer of makeup each day.” And Crawford, who was an avid collector of Margaret Keane’s “sad eyes” paintings, made sure that the paintings appear in next door neighbor Mrs. Bates’ house, inclduing the famous Big Eyes piece.

While Ingrid Bergman, Susan Hayward, Rita Hayworth, Katharine Hepburn, Jennifer Jones and Ginger Rogers were all rumored for Baby Jane and Tallulah Bankhead, Claudette Colbert, Olivia de Havilland and Marlene Dietrich were all in the running to play Blanche, only Davis and Crawford’s maniac energy — and downright hatred of one another — could make this film work as well as it does.

I truly believe that is Ms. Davis could have served Ms. Crawford a rat on a fancy tray, she would have done so. This is a film I’ve returned to time and time again, even if I’ve made sure to never eat a meal that has a silver cover on it.

DAY 19. VIDEO STORE DAY: This is the big one. Watch something physically rented or bought from a video store. If you live in a place that is unfortunate enough not to have one of thee archival treasures then watch a movie with a video store scene in it at least. #vivaphysicalmedia

I grew up in a small town about an hour north of Pittsburgh. Despite being a dying mill town of around 8,000 people, we still had three unique video stores to serve our movie needs — although eventually even the Uni-Mart and 7-11 would expand to have movies (the only ones I can remember getting from either are Death Bed and Gotcha!).

College Hill Video was a satellite store of the larger location in Beaver Falls, located on three spinner racks in a Giant Eagle grocery store. Their horror section was mostly new releases, nearly all mainstream.

Hollywood Video offered more video game rentals but didn’t have much selection. I can barely remember ever renting a movie there.

But Prime Time Video?

I haunted the horror section there, alternatively afraid of the lurid clamshell foreign horror and obsessed by their contents. They promised such foul delights! And of all the VHS boxes there, one cover promised the absolute bottom of the barrel. Somehow, in a small town where you had to verbally ask for adult films after looking through a gigantic binder of their covers, the forced embarrassment keeping you from every seeing something that filthy, this piece of sheer exploitation junk somehow ended up in my 16-year-old hands.

There’s really only one mom and pop rental place left that I can think of in Pittsburgh — Jack’s Discount Videos in Millvale — and three Family Videos which are located well out of the city in Moon Township, Lower Burrell and Greensburgh. Outside of Redboxes, we are sadly out of luck. So I’ve gone back to my childhood to look back at a movie I probably shouldn’t have been watching.

This is not the video store of my youth, only my dreams. Scarecrow Video in Seattle.

Bloodsucking Freaks is the kind of movie that — if it wasn’t so ineptly made — would make you think that anyone who watched it more than once certainly a maniac. And maybe I was back at that age, obsessed with Fangoria and heavy metal and trying to always find something heavier, louder and grosser.

Well, I found it.

This movie became the torture test for anyone that wanted to watch movies with my friends. We became fascinated with it, taking its villains into our roke playing games, drawing photos of the gore scenes and endlessly discussing how a movie like this could have ever been made.

We didn’t know that it ripped off Herschell Gordon Lewis.

We didn’t know that it was junk.

All we knew was that we had to watch it again.

While it was shot under the title Sardu: Master of the Screaming Virgins, it was retitled The Incredible Torture Show during its original run through grindhouses and drive-ins. By the time it made its way to the mom and pop video stores, it’d been purchased by Troma and retitled Bloodsucking Freaks.

We didn’t have an internet to teach us what this movie was about or spoilers to warn us of the content we were about to be barraged with. We just had ourselves.

What unspooled was a movie all about Master Sardu (Seamus O’Brien, a one and done actor who died shortly after making this movie, a victim of a burglar’s knife), who runs a Grand Guignol-style theatre with Ralphus, his demented little person. He’s played by Luis De Jesus, who was famous in Times Square for a loop he’d shot entitled The Anal Dwarf.

Yeah look — if you’re going to get offended easily, perhaps skip to our next review.

This is the kind of actor who just randomly would decide to gather all the other principals and stage an orgy. While he continued to act in adult films until the 1980’s — he’s Mr. Big in Let My Puppets Come, which Vinegar Syndrome just re-released, as well as appearing in movies like Fantasex Island, where he played Pu-Pu in an obvious send-up of Herve Villechaize’s famous role as Tattoo — he also tried to break into the mainstream, playing in Under the Rainbow and as an Ewok in Return of the Jedi. Yet in the very next year after he appeared in a Teddy Ruxpin video, he was back in adult before dying two years later.

Basically, just like Wizard of Gore, Sardu and Ralphus torture people for real on stage in front of an audience that thinks that what they are seeing is art. Then, they sell their victims into slavery.

The film unfolds in a loose collection of scenes, such as the two wiping out theater critic Creasy Silo — based on critic Clive Barnes — who made the mistake of giving them a bad review. I kind of love that the same actor who plays Creasy, Alan Dellay, also shows up as a judge in one of the junkiest mainstream films of all time, the utterly reprehensible — and fully awesome — Amityville II: The Possession.

Then, our evil duo abducts the ballerina Natasha Di Natalie and seek to break her will. She was played by Viju Krem, who is also in the aforementioned Let My Puppets Come, as well as Eros Perversion, a softcore send-up of Shakespeare, and an adult ripoff of M*A*S*H* where she appeared alongside Annie Sprinkle. Adding to the strange history of this film, she’d die young too, a victim of a hunting accident in 1983.

Football hero Tom Maverick (Niles McMaster, yes, the father from Alice, Sweet Alice) is seeking to save her before it’s too late. Speaking of that film, Alphonso DeNoble — who so memorably played the obese neighbor Mr. Alphonso in it — shows up here as a white slaver.

There are also a fair number of New York City-based adult actors of the era cast as female victims, such as Jenny Baxter, Ellen Faison (who is also in the British video nasty Dawn of the Mummy), Juliet Graham (who dated the previously mentioned Mr. Gillis) and Arlana Blue.

Basically, all of them are tortured, whether by being turned into a human dart board or being attacked with a vice, bone saws, thumb screws, meat cleavers, forced dental surgery, a drill, a guilotine and so much more. It’s still the only film I’ve ever seen where someone uses a straw to sip blood out of a person’s skull or throw darts at a naked woman’s rear.

Director Joel M. Reed — who would make Blood Bath the same year — didn’t want to make this movie. He had another script about a rock star haunted by a groupie, but he never got the money to make that one. He’d also make 1981’s Night of the Zombies, starred gonzo pioneer Jamie Gillis as CIA special agent Nick Monroe.

With good reason, this film was decried by Women Against Pornography. None of its female victims are named and they only show up to be maimed and decimated. Is there art and humor under the surface? Sure, but man, you need to crawl through an ocean of scum to get there.

I’ve always wondered how today’s internet-plugged in generation will handle life, as they’re not held back from adult materials at any time. They can basically jump right into the deep end when all we had was random issues of Playboy thrown into the woods. Then I remember that somehow, in the middle of comparatively chaste slashers, Bloodsucking Freaks was on the shelves of the mom and pop video store in my cozy and safe hometown. It made it’s way from the fecund streets of 1976 end of the world New York City to the same VCR we watched birthday parties and cartoons on. And we all watched it, over and over again.

The absurdity of it all amuses me to no end.

DAY 18. ONLY ON VHS Day: Watch something on true psychotronic format. If you don’t have access to a VCR then watch a movie with a VCR/VHS theme in it. 

Thanks to the Found Footage Festival, so many people have gotten the chance to see a lost part of the VHS era — board games that relied on your VCR.

Nightmare was chief amongst those games. Released in 1991, the game took place on The Other Side, a place of six Harbingers who claim authority over a region while dreaming of taking over the entire dark dimension and escape into the human world. When you play, you become one of them — Baron Samedi the zombie, Gevaudan the werewolf, Hellin the poltergeist, Khufu the mummy, Anne de Chantraine the witch or Elizabeth Bathory the vampire — and follow the rules of the Gatekeeper, whose wants to ensure that you don’t escape The Other Side.

The game was part of the Atmosfear series, created in Australia by Phillip Tanner and Brett Clements. It even came back in the 2000’s with two new games released on DVD.

To win the game, each player must use their opponents’ greatest fears against them in order to collect six keys. Over multiple versions and booster tapes, the game stayed more popular in Australia then it did in America, even getting its own music video and Pepsi-branded drinks.

Two brothers, Gordon (Graham Skipper, who wrote and directed Sequence Break) and John Hardesty (Chase Williams, John Dies At the End) have reunited at their father’s video store, sorting through the mountains of unwatched VHS tapes as they prepare to sell it. Dad’s been missing for seven months, Gordon has left town long ago and John’s life is going nowhere.

The next day, after finding a key to their father’s office, they discover a VCR board game entitled Beyond the Gates. The tape is still in the VCR, which means it may be the last thing their father ever watched. The boys play the video and a woman’s face appears. Her name is Evelyn (Barbara Crampton, who also co-produced) and she asks if they’re willing to wager their souls. After a flash of light, the two discover that they’re lost hours of time.

Later that evening, Gordon’s girlfriend Margot (Brea Grant, Halloween II) joins the brothers for another game, which tells them that if they want to save their father, they must play the game and locate the four keys. Soon, the time 3:13 will wake each person up to a TV showing only static.

Inside the box is a receipt for an occult store run by a man named Elric He tells them that they must play the game once it starts. On their way out, John steals a dagger.

As they continue playing, actions in the game world impact real people, like their friend Hank being disemboweled by unseen forces. Even when they try to throw the game away, it soon returns. That’s because they only have two choices left: win the game or die. That said — no one has ever won before.

The game itself becomes a metaphor for the lives the brothers are living, stuck in old empotions and memories of the past. Whether or not they can use that knowledge and escape, well, you’ll have to watch the movie to discover that for yourself.

DAY 17. EVIL IN BROAD DAYLIGHT: Scary stories aren’t just for the night time.

A movie that’s referred to as “a sun-drenched nightmare” on its poster, Robert Fuest’s And Soon the Darkness is nearly forgotten today, which is a real shame. Fuest is probably better remembered for The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Dr. Phibes Rises Again than he is for any other movie, but he also made plenty more, like The Final Programme, The Devil’s Rain! and Revenge of the Stepford Wives to name but a few.

And Soon the Darkness is about a day gone wrong, about being a tourist in a strange land and about how trust isn’t an easy thing to come by. It’s also an incredible film worthy of rediscovery.

Jane (Pamela Franklin, Necromancy, The Legend of Hell House) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice, the wife of The Wicker Man star Edward Woodward who was also in The Blood on Satan’s Claw) are two young nurses from Nottingham. They’ve decided to take a cycling holiday in France.

Jane’s been planning each and every stop on the route while Cathy is more interested in letting life happen. Life ends up being Paul (Sandor Else, Countess Dracula), a handsome man riding a scooter who catches her eye. The girls soon come to an argument and go their separate ways, with Cathy staying behind to sunbathe and perhaps catch up with Paul.

As Jane moves on to the next town, a cafe owner struggles to tell her that she’s in a dangerous area where young girls are often murdered. She decides to go back and find her friend, but she’s gone. A policeman is on the case, but Jane instantly believes that Paul is the murderer, despite him saying that he’s a plain-clothes detective who has taken an interest in the missing girls from this region.

What follows is the sun slowing setting on Jane’s hopes of ever finding her friend again, as she believes that Paul is closing in on her, ready to add her to his list of victims. But was there even a murder? Or is this all in her head?

There are no easy answers in And Soon the Darkness. It was written by Brian Clemens (who wrote See No Evil and Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, as well as writing and directing Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter) and Terry Nation (The House in Nightmare Park as well as the creator of Dr. Who’s Daleks), who had worked with Fuest on the game-changing British crime show The Avengers.

This was remade in 2010 as And Soon the Darkness with Karl Urban, Amber Heard and Odette Annable. I’ve never seen it, but talk about a lot to live up to. Just the end shot of this movie, cast in a rain that isn’t about to wash away anyone’s pain, is brutal in its quiet intensity.

You can buy this movie from Kino Lorber.