THE SHINING - (1980; USA)

When it was announced that film god Stanley Kubrick was going to direct an adaptation of what is generally considered Stephen King's finest novel, horror fans about creamed their jeans. Partly as a result of that anticipation, however, Kubrick's film remains one of the great you-love-it or you-hate-flicks in the genre. King's novel revolves around a writer, Jack Torrance, and his wife and young son. Torrance accepts a job caretaking a huge, isolated Colorado hotel, the Overlook, during the winter months when snowstorms shut down the only road in or out. He settles in with his family, thinking that the complete isolation of the hotel will allow him do some writing and help heal his troubled marriage at the same time. However, it turns out the hotel is a "bad place," tainted by evil, and he falls murderously under its spell. The ‘Shining’ of the title is a physic ability shared by son Danny and the Overlook's head chef. Personally, I think Kubrick's adaptation is pretty good, but nothing to write home about. However, to be fair, I must list some factors that perhaps limited my enjoyment of the movie. One: I had already read the book, and the book is better. Two: I saw the flick on TV (video, actually), obviously shortchanging Kubrick's normally brilliant visuals. Three: Because the film is so well known and often discussed, I knew a number of the plot points and ‘shock’ moments. Even so, I must say that I think the movie is less than a classic, although most would disagree. First of all, Kubrick's epic filmmaking style actually works against him here. His constant dolly shots and the fluid brilliance of the opening helicopter footage tend to distract and distance the audience from the characters, the last thing you want to do in a horror film. He also reduces the power of the film's most grotesque image, a gigantic wave of blood issuing from an elevator, by having physic Danny visualize it a number of times before it really happens. In any case, why an epic treatment of a film that basically revolves around three characters? While Kubrick made the greatest science fiction film ever, 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as a serious contender for the number two slot, A Clockwork Orange, he seems to lack an understanding of what makes horror movies tick. The rather sterile atmosphere of his science fiction films works to showcase the intellectual concepts that drive them. However, if science fiction is ultimately an examination of the intellect, of ideas and knowledge, horror is the opposite - an evocation of primal, elemental fears and emotions. Like many great mainstream film makers who detour into horror, it appears that Kubrick may have approached the genre with a modicum of contempt. After all, arousing emotions requires little more than an ability to manipulate the audience, the reasoning goes. And if any kid, a Carpenter or a Romero or a Hooper, can make a ‘classic’ horror film, well watch what happens when a truly great director makes one. However, when a young newcomer like John Carpenter makes say, a Halloween, they pour everything they have into it. However, big name directors seldom seem to feel that a horror pic requires the same commitment of heart and soul that a ‘serious’ film does. Star Jack Nicholson gives his regulation terrific performance, but since he appears halfway crazy at the beginning of the film (when doesn't he?), his evolution into a homicidal lunatic comes off as less than shocking. This also radically distorts the thrust of King’s novel. Also, there are times when Jack edges into self-parody, aided by Kubrick's extravagant direction. Still, his "Here's Johnny!" entrance remains one of his most indelible screen moments, and the underlying pun of his character going to one of the hotel's unstocked bar and finding "spirits" there is a nice bit of metaphor. Shelly Duval does a solid job as the put-upon wife, and Danny Lloyd gives an unusually unannoying child performance as son Danny. Fans of King's book are among those who generally disliked the film, and King himself famously loathed it. Kubrick screwed around with the source novel quite a bit, for instance killing off the most likeable of the book's characters, who is much more pivotal in the novel. And while that’s his right, there seems to remain a whiff of condescension towards King's ‘potboiler’ fiction. In response, King was later to write a TV mini-series based more directly on his book. To sum up: If The Shining is compared to the average Kubrick film (especially anything he made earlier), it’s fairly disappointing. If it's compared to the average horror film, it's pretty impressive. Fans of the film, meanwhile, should be warned that the currently available DVD (rushed out after Kubrick’s death as part of the half-assed "Stanley Kubrick Collection"), while including a ‘making of’ documentary, inexplicably presents the film in the ‘standard format.’ (!) In others words, as part of a package supposedly honoring one of Filmdom’s greats, they edit out a good 20%-40% of Kubrick’s visuals.

SLEEPWALKERS (STEPHEN KING'S) - (1992; USA)

Touted as King's first original screenplay, Sleepwalkers turns out to be a stew of all the de rigour King film elements: Rock 'n' Roll and cool old cars (Christine), small towns in Maine (pretty much everything), goofy "in" jokes (ditto), and, oddly enough, cats (Cat’s Eye, the "cat-from-Hell" sequence from Tales from the Darkside - The Movie, Pet Sematary). In fact, this ‘original script’ is really just an extended riff on the final story from King’s script for Cat’s Eye. This recounted the tale of a heroic cat who saves little girl Drew Barrymore from a doll-sized gremlin. Said gnome attempts to kill her by sucking out her breath as she sleeps. Our current subject, meanwhile, posits the existence of half-human, half-feline shapeshifters called Sleepwalkers. Living among us, they sustain their eternal lives by sucking the life energy out of the mouths of virginal girls, in an effect extremely similar to the stealing of breath in Cat’s Eye. We open with a shriveled corpse being found in a secluded house. To give us a nod towards the plot, a sheriff looks at it and somehow figures out that it’s the remains of "a little girl." The outside of the house is festooned with massacred cats, and it’s eventually revealed that cats alone can cause the Sleepwalkers harm. When we meet the Sleepwalkers they are revealed to be a mother (Ghost Story's Alice Krige) and son who have a sexually active relationship (pointless, yet tasteless). The son picks on local gal Tonya (Madchen Amick, one of the then ubiquitous actresses from David Lynch's Twin Peaks TV series) as their next meal: he will feed off her life-force and in turn feed his mother. The film starts off slowly, at first attempting to build up sympathy for the Sleepwalkers. We focus on their nomadic existence, living disguised among their prey and fleeing when things get too hot, alone and cut off from any of their own kind that may still exist. However, once the action kicks in, any such nuances are tossed out the window. Then the Sleepwalkers wreak havoc in the town, slaughtering folks in ostentatious ways left and right while avoiding the packs of cats who instinctively attempt to destroy them. One major problem area here is poor scripting. For instance, it turns out that not only can the Sleepwalkers shapeshift, but they can turn invisible. Then we find out they can turn other things invisible (like cars). Then that they can turn things like cars invisible from a distance. And that they can change a big car (a blue Thunderbird) into a small car (a red Camaro). And that you can see their true forms (humanoid, hairless cat-people suits, which, to put it kindly, suck) if you see them in a mirror. And that they can apparently sustain grotesque physical damage without harm, unless inflicted by a cat, which wounds then spout flames. And that they have telekinetic powers. The point is that no ground rules are established at the outset. Therefore, as these powers randomly continue to materialize the audience's suspension of disbelief leaks away. You soon notice that events are occurring merely to advance the plot, while ignoring any internal sense of continuity. After all, shapeshifting your body is one thing, shapeshifting cars another. Later the transformed car spontaneously changes back into the blue Thunderbird, at just the right moment so as to get spotted by a cop who then saves Tonya's life. And why, since you can see their true forms in a mirror, does Krige invite Tonya into their living room, where there's this gigantic mirror on the wall (which Tonya unbelievably fails to notice). And why do the cats let Sleepwalker Krige walk out of her surrounded house to go on a rampage (the film's big set-piece) and later let her kill the town sheriff and menace Tonya in the front of the house for a while before the obligatory mass attack that results in the monster's destruction? And why does the aforementioned rampage include a really silly scene where Krige grabs a revolver and shoots two police car with it, which both proceed to blow up? Are we supposed to believe that she shot the gas tanks, causing the explosions? Maybe so with the first car, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that the second car is facing away from her, so that she's firing into the car's trunk. Plus, the Sleepwalkers are so stupid and show-offy that it’s impossible to believe that they've been able to remain undetected for all these years. The kid not only writes and recites a "fictional" work about his life in English class, but later initiates a high speed, Smoky and the Bandit-esque chase with local cops. Also, both Mom and Son end up killing numerous people in very public fashion before the movie’s over. And how can we believe they captured and killed all those cats from the opening scene when they are shown to be so inept at it throughout the rest of the film? It’s this kind of thing that makes so many of King's films, especially the ones he has a direct connection to (Maximum Overdrive, Creepshow, Cat’s Eye, etc.) so tiresome. The thing is, I think the illogic of these films is purposeful, that King is trying to recreate the charm of the silly horror movies he grew up on. However, what makes those films' silliness fail to injure them, and perhaps even increase their nostalgia value for fans like King (and me) is that the silliness is rooted in, and protected by, these movies' innocence. King's films, this one particularly, are chock full of "sophisticated" elements like explicit sexual content and extremely gory violence. However, one of the functions of such content is to make the films more "realistic." Therefore, by their own nature, such elements diminish our tolerance for the kind of lackadaisical disrespect for logic and continuity that films of the ‘50s and ‘60s thrived on. Unfortunately, King obviously feels free to use less rigorous standards when working on film projects than he uses when writing novels. And I believe that his cinematic body of work proves this to have been an unwise decision. It’s instructive to note that the most effective film adaptations of King's work (Carrie, Pet Semitary, Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redeption) are those that retain more of a sense of what makes the best of King's print work function so well: well drawn characters that act in consistent ways, and stories that have the kind of internal logic necessary to get people to buy into King's bizarre scenarios (vampires in a modern small town, a man possessed by an evil hotel, etc.). King might want to reconsider his overall approach to film work. All this aside, though, I guess if you want to give the brain a rest, and can't find anything better, this is as worth a rental buck as anything else. By the way, the film does have one nicely classy element: Irish singer Enya's (whose work is showing up in an ever more eclectic body of films) Boadicea, which pops up in snippets throughout the film and plays over the end credits. If only anything else is the film were so low-key and proficient.

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SON OF DRACULA - (1943; USA)

Son of Dracula could have been one of the all-time great Dracula films if Bela Lugosi or John Carradine had played The Count (there's really no 'son of' in the movie). However, Universal was trying to fashion Lon Chaney, Jr. into a one-man monster factory, and he got the role instead. Chaney (who dropped the Jr. when his father died) also played the Frankenstein Monster, Kharis the Mummy, and, of course, Larry Talbot the Wolf Man. Set in the swamplands of Louisiana, the movie features Dracula coming to the States for "fresh blood." He seduces a young heiress with a taste for the occult, much to the consternation of her lifelong boyfriend. However, in a twist the makes this pretty much the first film noir vampire flick, it turns out the heiress really seduced Dracula. Now that's she's immortal too, she plans to talk her mortal boyfriend into bumping off The Count (she supplies him with the location of his coffin). After that, she'll vamp him and they'll have bucks and eternal youth to boot. Maybe Dracula shouldn't have come to America after all, since the first American women he meets plays him for a chump. The plot plays like a James Cain novel, kind of a ‘The Vampire Always Bites Twice’ deal, making it uniquely sophisticated and cynical for the time. The film also has several terrific set pieces. For instance, when the heiress consults a gypsy crone early in the movie, Dracula flies in as a bat and claws the old women's eyes out before she can sound a warning. Then there's the scene where Dracula's coffin floats to the surface of the bog and he seeps out of it as fog. Materializing on top of it, the coffin propels through the water to his waiting victim. This is also the first Universal movie where Dracula is destroyed via sunlight. So a really neat film, whose major drawback was Chaney as Dracula. Chaney really had limited range as an actor, and was much better playing sympathetic types like Talbot than trying to convey power and arrogance like he was supposed to here. Perhaps the director told Chaney he was playing 'a big stiff' and he took the instructions the wrong way. This is also the first ever movie to use the not overly bright alias of 'Alucard' for Dracula, though not the last. Good stuff.

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SON OF FRANKENSTEIN - (1939; USA)

Not up there with the all-time classic The Bride of Frankenstein, but far better than any of the subsequent Universal Frankenstein flicks. What a cast! Basil Rathbone is Baron Wolf Von Frankenstein, son of monster-maker Henry from the first two films. Wolf has been reared in America, but returns to his native village with wife and young son to claim his father's estate. The local villagers are none too pleased that a Frankenstein is back in residence - and as things turn out, they have no reason to be. Boris Karloff plays the Monster for the third and last time. The Monster was weakened in the explosion at the end of the last picture, and for the first time was the shambling creature so well remembered by later audiences. He even lost his speaking ability from the last film. Karloff felt the direction the Monster was being taken in was totally wrong, and always regretted that later movies would take their cue from this, his least inspired performance (which is not to say that it isn't head and shoulders above later turns by Lon Chaney, Jr., Glenn Strange, and particularly Bela Lugosi). Lugosi has perhaps his best role ever here as the mad grave robber Ygor, who was hung and pronounced dead, but survived, broken neck and all. He's the Monster's buddy, and uses the Monster as his tool against the jury that convicted him. Lugosi is fabulous here, never better. Also look for B-Movie great Lionel Atwill as Inspector Krogh, the policeman with a wooden arm so memorably parodied in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, which took it's basic storyline from this film. That movie is even funnier to anyone with a knowledge of the first three Frankenstein classics. Though lacking the macabre humor of James Whale, the director of the first two films, this is still one of the best. Lugosi's Ygor would return in the next film in the series, The Ghost of Frankenstein.

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SPECIES - (1995; USA)

A slick, enjoyable chase-the-monster flick, Species doesn't win any awards for originality but provides a hour and a half of quite reasonable entertainment. The opening is the best part of the film: we see a young girl, maybe twelve, who apparently lives in an large isolation chamber in some kind of laboratory. The fact that you can glimpse an exposed toilet in the chamber gives you an idea of how much privacy she lives with. Almost immediately, workers in contamination suits walk in. They attach tanks of cyanide gas to intake valves and fumigate the chamber. The reason for this drastic action? The government had earlier been contacted by an alien intelligence. They first provided an advanced energy source and then data on alien DNA, with instructions to mix it with human DNA. The girl was one of the results. In spite of the lab's best efforts, however, an adult (and gorgeous) woman/alien, code-named Sil, is soon on the loose. The project’s director, actor Ben Kingsley, assembles a team to hunt down and destroy her before she breeds. The team includes a molecular scientist, a cultural specialist, an "empath" who can sense what Sil feels, and actor Michael Madson (who memorably played the psychotic Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, the one who slices off the guy's ear, as well as the dad in the Free Willie movies) as a government assassin. Sil grew at a fantastic rate, and should she spawn a son, he would reach adulthood in short order and be capable of impregnating innumerable women. The alien hybrids could eventually wipe out the human race. Unfortunately, Sil lands in Los Angeles, not the most difficult place for a hot chick with a proclivity for taking off her cloths to get laid. Sil spends much of the movie naked (to the delight of some and the profound annoyance of others), and tends to sprout into a yucky monster (designed by Alien's H. R. Giger) when aroused. However, she's not really evil, merely utterly amoral, intent on achieving her biological destiny. The film's got a lot going for it. The characters are intelligent and mostly stay that way. The acting is strong, particularly Madson's wry ‘problem solver.’ Best of all, the movie skips all the normal ‘scientist’ clichés; the sanctimonious scientists refusing to work with the horrible government agent, the ‘government is using Science evilly’ speech, the I-don't-use-guns-I'm-a-scientist bit. Here, the scientists all appreciate the stakes and waste little time pondering the morality of killing Sil. However, if I don't see another bunch of people in a dark area hunting a monster with weapons with flashlights attached, it will be too soon. I guess there's not too many ways to film such a scene, but after dozens of rip-offs of Aliens, I wish somebody would come up with a fresh approach. In any case, the movie's well worth a rental.

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SPOOKS RUN WILD - (1941; USA)

First of two Bowery Boys-meet-Bela Lugosi films, this was the type of poverty row feature that effectively destroyed Lugosi's career. Still, I grew up on this stuff, and retain a warm spot in my heart for it and it’s skid-row ilk. This one is actually pretty good (as such things go), with the Boys (leaders Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall included) trying to find out if the mysterious caped Lugosi is "The Monster," a maniac on the loose. Dwarf Angelo Rossati, who would decades later co-star in real trash (Frankenstein vs. Dracula; Brain of Blood) for indie director Al Adamson, has one of his more dignified appearances here. But the star, of course, is Bela, whose straight-faced acting nicely complements the goofiness of the Boys. See also Ghosts on the Loose.

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SUBSPECIES (1990; ROMANIA)

TALES FROM THE HOOD - (1995; USA)

As you’d deduce from the title, this is a Tales From the Crypt riff, only with a Black, inner-city, gangbanger motif. And as you might also expect from seeing Spike Lee listed as the film's Executive Producer, the movie isn't shy about positing cartoony white racists as the root cause of most of the character's problems. Although, to be fair, the movie doesn’t let Blacks totally off the hook for their own actions. We start with three gang members invading the rather weird funeral home run by a Mr. Simms. They suspect Simms is in possession of some drugs they had secreted behind his establishment, and are fully intent on reclaiming them, one way or another. Simms, while leading them to their drugs, stops in various viewing rooms along the way. With the flip of a coffin lid, he then recounts the departed’s tale. First we see the story of a black cop who allows three racist, drug-dealing cops (including B-Movie fixtures Wings Hauser and Billy Drago) to kill and then frame an activist trying to clean drugs out of the neighborhood. Wracked with guilt, the black cop quits and becomes a drunk. A year later he receives a vision from the dead activist and lures the bad cops to the activist's grave, where supernatural vengeance is wreaked upon them. The activist then takes revenge on the black ex-cop for standing by and doing nothing. The second story revolves around a teacher with a student who blames his recurrent injuries on a monster who lives in his closet. A visit to the youth's home reveals the monster to be his abusive stepfather, who almost beats everyone to death before the boy takes magical revenge upon him. Next up is the tale of a David Duke-like Klan leader turned politician (Corbin Bernson) who lives on the site of a Civil War era massacre of slaves, and soon regrets it. It seems that an old voodoo woman saved the slaves (kinda) by casting their souls into dolls (yep, another killer doll deal). This segment contains a scene where the Klan Leader assaults the voodoo woman's painted image with an American flag, causing the painting to bleed. Hmm, perhaps this is the filmmaker's metaphor for the treatment of Blacks in America. Pretty subtle, anyway. Lastly, we learn the fate of a homicidal gangbanger taken to a bizarre (to say the least) clinic for a radical procedure that represents his one last chance for redemption. While there he meets a Skin Head type who tells him the he's "OK with me," since most of his victims are also black. This is a powerful scene, though a little disconcerting, since it implies that his actions wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't been preying on his "brothers" and stuck to bumping off white guys. The film on the whole is OK, but nothing special. The politics will probably either excite or annoy you, and one gets the idea that the filmmakers weren't overly worried about annoying white audience members. The one really great element of the film is the performance of Clarence Williams III (pop-culture icon Linc from TV’s The Mod Squad) as Mr. Simms. Williams plays the part so hammily that he comes off as an amusing combination of Vincent Price and Redd Foxx. He's worth seeing the film all by himself.

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THEATRE OF BLOOD - (1973; UK)

This is another Vincent Price camp classic, right up there or perhaps even better that The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Price is hamola Shakespearean stage actor Edward Lionheart, who attempts suicide when he fails to win a Critics' Choice type award. He fails, and decides to knock off the offending critics instead. Said critics are largely a parade of pompous windbags, more or less deserving of their fates. The police are baffled by the bizarre crimes until someone figures out that they're recreations of murder scenes from the plays of Bill Shakespeare. Needles to say, Lionheart has carefully chosen each death scene to reflect the character of the corresponding victim. As well, his acting skills allow him to get to each of them at the appropriate time, police protection or not. As in Phibes, by the time the police get their act together, not many of the targets are left. Price has a great time in one of those roles he was born to play, and watch for genre fave Diana Rigg as his daughter. Good stuff for those who like humor with their homicide.

Though credited to Christian Nyby, this all-time Science Fiction classic is generally acknowledged to have been directed by its producer, film great Howard Hawks. From its very first moments, with its great soundtrack music and classic title credit sequence (recreated by John Carpenter for his 1982 remake), this film zooms off to become of the best and creepiest Sci-Fi movies ever. Air Force personnel and research scientists discover a Flying Saucer buried under the ice of the Arctic. Unfortunately, they promptly destroy it while attempting to get it out of the ice. They then find the body of an occupant encased in ice and take it back to their secluded base. The ice thaws, the creature escapes, and the film really hits high gear. This picture is smart, scary and funny, and you won't find a better one anywhere. It’s a good film to watch with the lights out, and rent or buy it on tape so it isn't interrupted by commercials. Future Gunsmoke star James Arness is the monster, a "Intellectual Carrot" that needs human blood to survive and can regenerate lost limbs. The Thing was first of the classic Science Fiction films of the 1950s, and head and shoulders above almost all the dozens and dozens to follow (Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an exception, and the giant bug flick Them! is close). It was also the first to articulate the Military vs. the Scientist concept. Here the pragmatic Military philosophy (get them before they get us) is given credence over the scientific view point ("There are no enemies in Science, only phenomena to study"). Not all the scientists think like that, though, and those who help destroy the creature are also considered good guys. In fact, even the lead scientist, the one who causes most of the trouble, is taken back into the fold once the menace is defeated. Still, other films took the Scientist’s viewpoint to heart, The Day the Earth Stood Still, for instance. Film ends with the classic line "Keep watching the skies!"

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THE THING - (1982; USA)

John Carpenter did not so much remake the Howard Hawks' classic The Thing from Another World as go back to the source material, Joseph Campbell's Science-Fiction novella Who Goes There? Carpenter's shape-assuming alien follows Campbell's concept much more closely, though one imagines that the special effects necessary to carry off this idea were not available to Hawks in 1951. The original is better anyway, a genuine classic while Carpenter's remains an occasionally astounding gross-out flick with some truly amazing, over-the-top visuals. Carpenter regular Kurt Russell stars as one of a group of men isolated at the Antarctic. There they have the very great misfortune to be preyed upon by an alien organism that can absorb and reproduce the body of any living creature, including man. So who's a monster, and who isn’t? The creatures (any part is a separate entity) hope to get to civilization, where they will be able to assimilate every living thing on Earth in a very short time. The film, while it has its flaws, features some truly awesome visuals that will leave viewers gasping. Carpenter recreated the classic title credit from the original The Thing, and his love for that film was earlier indicated by clips we see of it on TV during Halloween. This is one of Carpenter's few films that he didn’t score himself, leaving that to film composing god Ennio Morricone. A good film to watch with a crowd. Very highly recommended is the DVD edition, which comes with an elaborate documentary on the making of the film, as well as a marvelous Commentary Track by Carpenter and Russell. Top-notch stuff.

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TRILOGY OF TERROR - (1975; TV)

Three terror tales starring actress Karen Black. This made-for-TV'er is pretty average for the first two stories, but watch out for the third one! THE PREY is the all time scarefest with that little African Zuni doll that comes to life and chases Black around with a steak knife. No one who has ever seen this has forgotten it, and a mention of it to any group of people invariably gets a couple of "Oh, yeah, that was so scary!" reactions. So skip the first two stories and watch this one, which is on TV all the time, and also available on tape and DVD. The film was written by genre pro Richard Matheson and produced by prolific TV maven Dan Curtis, the man behind The Night Stalker, Dark Shadows and about 6,000 other hours of television programming. The concept was later reused in the 1988 feature Child’s Play, with Chucky the Killer Doll, as well as in the much later Trilogy of Terror II. The Zuni Doll episode is also available on video as a separate entity, under the title Terror of the Doll.

THE UNINVITED - (1988; USA)

No, this isn't a remake of the 1944 ghost classic. Instead, its one the ‘great’ stupid movies of the 1980s. We open in a laboratory performing animal experimentation. Some scientists are preparing to dissect a cat when it escapes. Scientists and guards chase the cat around. Unfortunately for them, the cat, when angered, turns into a hand puppet containing another, even lamer ‘rat’ hand puppet that comes out of its mouth (is this supposed to be a take-off of the projecting teeth inside the mouth of Ridley Scott's Alien? I hope not, but I'm afraid that it is). This second hand puppet kills them, mostly off-screen because its has a reach of about three inches and couldn't possibly attack people in the some of the ways implied here. After that there's a disconnected (and time padding) sequence where a nice fellow feeds the kitty. He's robbed and beaten by some miscreants, who in turn are slaughtered by the avenging cat. This portion reminds me of one of those TV shows like Here’s Boomer or Run, Joe, Run where an animal (usually a dog, though) travels around Fugitive fashion, helping out people who befriend it before moving on. Only in this case the animal massacres the enemies of its friend, so its really more of a ‘Here’s Doomer’. Finally, though, we get to the main set-up of the movie (Whew!), meeting some boring bimbos and hunks who improbably end up on the yacht of an Evil Capitalist and his cronies. These fellows murder a guy just before setting off, letting us know that all businessmen are pigs, much like scientists who experiment on animals. Finding the ‘cute’ kitty on the dock, they take it with them. This, of course, means that our feline menace is not, in point of fact, "uninvited." So what does the title mean? I guess you can say that the killer rat inside of the cat is "The Uninvited." Still, a good rule of thumb is that if the viewer has to provide explanations for a movie, the film's usually not worth the effort. The rest of the picture is spent following the puss-puss as it munches on various unknown thespians, as well as the desperate, I-used-to-be-in-real-movies George Kennedy and Clu Galager. In an apparent nod to Sci-Fi cheeseball classic The Killer Shrews, the cat's bite contains a poison that makes your blood cells multiply at a fantastic rate (?!). This allows the film makers to ‘showcase’ some terribly lame air bladder effects as the victims’ blood vessels explode. The film doesn't even pay off in the T&A department, so the only reasons to watch this film are to savor the silly premise, see George Kennedy get killed by a muppet, and to gaze in amazement at a candidate for the worst "ship" model in motion picture history. Oh, and the lifeboat sequence in particular is pretty funny. Our beastie is a cute long-haired golden tabby, and I suppose that we're meant to be struck by the contrast between its cute visage and its "horrifying" death dealing abilities. However, the film's so inept that you just laugh and roll your eyes every time they zoom in on the kitty cat and play ominous Ba-Ba-BUM! music. At the end, in a trademark silly ‘shock ending,’ we see a short haired black cat being picked up on the beach by a kid (Ba-Ba-BUM!). How did the tabby cat turn into a black cat?! (If you've got to make up explanations...). I have trouble envisioning the filmmakers' meeting where they pitched this film. I guess someone said "I got this great idea for a movie. There's this cat, see, who's got this little rat puppet in his mouth that kills George Kennedy." Then somebody else said "Yeah, that's great! Here's a million dollars!" Fact is indeed stranger than fiction. By the way, I think animal rights organizations like P.E.T.A. would be serving their furry friends better by keeping innocent animals from appearing in cinematic garbage like this rather than spattering fur wearers with paint. I mean, at least George Kennedy chose to appear in this film. Sure, its hard to believe he did, but I mean, he must have, right? He's in the movie, so he must have. Right? But that poor cat! What did he do to deserve being in this turkey?

WEREWOLF OF LONDON - (1935; USA)

Before their success with lycanthrope Larry Talbot in 1941's The Wolf Man, Universal tried out werewolves in this sometimes interesting flick. A botanist (Henry Hull) travels to Tibet, searching for an extremely rare flower that bloom only under the light of the moon. Upon locating it, however, he is attacked by a werewolf. Surviving, he makes his way back to England with his plant. Then we are ‘treated’ to a long, boring stretch which sets up a rather perfunctory ‘romantic triangle’ between Hull, his wife and her former boyfriend. Thankfully, things pick back up with the introduction of actor Warner Oland (best of the screen's Charlie Chans) as Dr. Yamana. It turns out that Yamana is the werewolf that jumped Hull in Tibet. Furthermore, he’s looking to abscond with the moon flower, which is a temporary antidote to lycanthropy. Each flower of the plant contains a drop of sap that holds off the change for a single full moon. Unfortunately, Yamana had bitten Hull during the attack. Hull's now a werewolf himself, making him exceedingly reluctant to release any of the three flowers. The transformation scenes are glitchy, but fun. In one neat bit, Hull attempts to make the plant bloom with a machine that simulates moonlight. However, it also triggers his transformation! Werewolf of London is filled with similar weird science fictional touches. For instance, Hull has a close circuit security camera set-up (in 1935!) which is operated by spinning a rotary telephone dial (!!). Lots of vampire movie tropes comes from folklore (though vulnerability to sunlight came from the first vampire film, Nosferatu). But almost all of the ‘rules’ that people know about werewolves come from this movie and the later The Wolf Man. Werewolf of London introduced the concept that werewolves change with the appearance of the full moon, the werewolf that walks like a man, the idea that someone bitten by a werewolf becomes one (probably taken from vampire lore), and that werewolves "instinctively kill what they love most." The Wolf Man came up with the invulnerability except to silver thing, and the werewolf seeing a pentagram in the hand of his next victim. Hull's werewolf is really more of a Mr. Hyde figure; it dresses up in a coat and hat before going out, and speaks as well. With the coming of The Wolf Man, movie werewolves evolved into the more familiar feral beings. Hull refused to sit still for a full face make-up, so his werewolf has a pretty much clean shaven lower face. The one time we see Oland as a werewolf, peering over a rock in Tibet before jumping Hull, his round face combines with the make-up to make him look rather like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard Of Oz! The Werewolf of London's not bad, but remains a ‘must see’ only for Werewolf Movie completists.

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WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE - (1994; USA)

Last we heard, Freddy Krueger had permanently bitten the dust in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. Despite this, it’s not too surprising that he came back again anyway. However, it was surprising that his owners, New Line Cinema, managed to bring Freddy back without at all violating the continuity of the previous six films. To do this, they invited Krueger's creator, Scream director Wes Craven, to have a go at him again. Craven responded by going in a completely unexpected direction: The events of this film, it turns out, are real, and happening to the actual people who made the Freddy Krueger film series. Actress Heather Lagenkamp played Freddy's original nemesis Nancy in Nightmare on Elm Street's I & III. Now, on the tenth anniversary of the first film, she’s being harassed by a series of threatening phone calls from someone with a Freddy Krueger fixation. Heather even starts having nightmares like those of her character Nancy. Going to talk them over with series creator Wes Craven, she is shocked to learn of his plans to bring Freddy back again in a new film. Strange things start happening to her young son, followed by the mysterious death of her special effects technician husband (as happened in one of her dreams). Eventually, Heather begins to suspect that perhaps Freddy Krueger isn't a purely fictional character after all. This film-in-a-film is really quite unlike anything else: Lagenkamp, Craven, John Saxon (the familiar character actor who played Nancy's father in the earlier films), Mike Shaye, the real life owner of New Line Cinema, and even Robert Englund, the portrayer of Freddy Krueger, all show up "playing" themselves. From Craven ‘himself,’ Heather learns that an ancient evil force has become trapped by the public’s gestalt ‘belief’ in the character of Freddy Krueger. This evil is now attempting to enter the real world. The only way to continue containing it is to reaffirm the public consciousness of Freddy. Craven intends to accomplish this by making another Freddy Krueger picture. So the movie we're watching isn't just a "film," nor are the events happening to these real life people. Instead, it’s the actual movie that the real life Craven, Lagenkamp, and others made in order to trap Krueger in the land of movie make-believe. This point is emphasized by the fact that at the end of some scenes, the camera will pan to a script detailing exactly what it was we just saw in the "film." Needless to say, this movie is quite a bit more thought provoking than your average horror film, or any other kind of film, for that matter. My favorite bit is when Lagenkamp begins to ask Englund, the actor who played Krueger in the movies, if he's been having nightmares. Englund offers his help, but instead apparently skips town rather than face his own creation. I have to give him credit for being willing to be portrayed in "real" life as a coward, although to be fair perhaps nobody can know just how evil Freddy really is except the man who gave him "life." Also, it’s amusing that John Saxon, playing John Saxon, reacts to Lagenkamp's fears with the same condescending disbelief that the character he played in Nightmare On Elm Street displayed when listening to Lagenkamp's Nancy. Ironically, the film's intelligence and thoughtfulness probably hurt it with the horror crowd: the film's body count is extremely low and Freddy's screen time is quite limited. On top of that, the kind of audience that might enjoy the film's movie-in-a-movie-in-a-movie complexity will also most likely ignore it, since its "only" a horror picture. However, for anyone who likes some meat to chew on in their films, this movie offers quite a lot.

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WOLF - (USA; 1994)

Another in a disconnected series of big-budgeted horror films being made by famous directors (The Graduate’s Mike Nichols) and actors in the ‘90s. Wolf, obviously, is the Werewolf entry. Superstar Jack Nicholson is driving home one snowy night when he hits what is apparently a wolf. However, when he examines the animal, it bites him and jump off to rejoin its mysterious pack. Nicholson is a middle-aged book editor at a prestigious New York publishing firm. However, his job is in jeopardy because he still wants to edit good books rather than commercial ones. Ineffectual and feeling his age, Nicholson is a ready-made victim for slimy yuppie James Spader, whose backstabbing tactics are better adapted to the hard-edged '90s. Spader's played roles similar to this so often that I wouldn't be surprised if the script described the character as a "James Spader type." I have to admit, though, Spader does these parts like no one else, projecting a swarminess so thick it’s like a mist. Spader's even sleeping with Jack's wife, apparently just to further emasculate him. The wolf's bite changes all that though, causing Nicholson to become increasing animal-like. The film's central conceit and joke is that the more feral Nicholson gets, the more successful he becomes. He out maneuvers the unctuous Spader (in the film's funniest moment, Nicholson urinates on Spader in the bathroom, marking him as his territory), and trades in his deceitful wife for the gorgeous Michelle Pfeiffer. Eventually, though, it appears that Nicholson might be becoming a bit too animalistic, particularly after his wife's body is found torn up. Unlike a lot of high-priced horror films, this one works pretty well, maybe because no one here is out to make the ‘ultimate’ werewolf movie. Instead, the werewolf is used as an obvious metaphor for a overly civilized man regaining touch with his ‘animal’ side. In fact the climax, which is the film’s most overt "horror movie" sequence, almost seems to be from another picture. The all star cast is terrific, particularly Nicholson, who receives solid backup from supporting actors like Christopher Plummer and David White-Pierce, the guy who plays Niles on TV's Frasier. The most interesting thing about the movie, especially as a horror film, is that it deals with real adults, complex people who really think about things. A great scene concerns Nicholson's wife, who’s amazed that the ineffectual Nicholson would really leave her after her affair is exposed. Attempting to placate him (now that he's ‘stronger,’ she cares that he's leaving), she tells him that the affair was meaningless, that Spader never meant anything to her. Nicholson's enraged response is that it’s even more insulting that she would cheat on him with someone she didn't even particularly like. Very well done, and recommended.

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THE WOLF MAN - (1941; USA)

ZOLTAN, HOUND OF DRACULA - (1977; USA)