Horror Express: Cinta Terlarang [‘Forbidden Love’] (Pitradjaya Burnama, 1995)

Though it dates from somewhat after the ‘70s-’80s glory days of Indonesian horror/fantasy cinema, the opening of Pitradjaya Burnama’s ‘Cinta Terlarang’ certainly makes good on his nation’s proud history of maniacal cinematic insanity, as two women wearing translucent white dress shirts over their sensible white pants descend the steps leading to a cobweb-shrouded, blue fog-drenched subterranean altar chamber.

It turns out that Ratih (Lela Anggraini) and Nita (Welda Hidayat) are here to exact black magickal vengeance upon the father of Ratih’s unborn child, who has refused to claim the child or even marry her (the swine!)

Conveniently, all the gear they need for this task is neatly stored in a box which they extract from inside a smoking, blue-light emitting coffin, including both an ancient grimoire and some rather fetching ceremonial leotards and matching cloaks, which they promptly change into, as the scene is inexplicably intercut with footage of dancers writhing in a neon-drenched night club.

Right on cue, the reverb-y voice of an apparent demonic entity chimes in, telling them, “your spite of love will be the foundation of our alliance”. A black rooster is duly slaughtered (in long shot, and I believe the effect is faked, thank god) and its blood dripped onto a photograph of the witches’ intended victim. (1)

Clearly, this kind of threat to the patriarchal order cannot be left unchecked, and so, outside the witches’ lair, a bunch of men armed with machetes and clubs have assembled, apparently taking orders from Ratih’s shady, white-haired boyfriend, and another fellow who seems to be acting as his occult advisor.

After gaining access to the altar chamber, shady boyfriend belatedly attempts to take the gentlemanly route, apologising to Ratih for his prior conduct and offering her his hand in marriage. Evidently though, it’s a bit late for that, and the girls are having none of it, responding to his overtures with suitably miffed “HMPH!”s, before - brilliantly - they strike martial arts poses and begin enthusiastically beating the living daylights out of loverboy and his henchmen, employing their new-found supernatural fighting prowess in the process.

In the course of the ensuing melee however, Ratih regrettably ends up getting decapitated by the falling lid of the blue-lit coffin. “You’re mean and cruel,” her still conscious severed head spits at the assembled males. “Await my revenge!”

“I will come back after 13 full moons,” Ratih’s now-disembodied voice continues as Nita grabs her bloody noggin and makes a flying, wire-assisted exit, “and I will bring the sacrificial blood of three male virgins! Remember that! Remember that!”

At which point, I sat back and offered praise to whatever unholy deities preside over the unruly world of Indo-horror, for once again allowing the genre’s efforts to hit that perfect sweet-spot of bloody, fantastical craziness I so crave in my cinema viewing.

Meanwhile, at Jakarta’s famed Cleopatra Executive Discotheque (the signage is fucking amazing) - which we have been randomly cutting to throughout the preceding sequence - another, rather confusing, storyline begins to unfold. 

This involves a chap named Andre (Sonny Dewantara, sporting a mighty ‘tache), who is arguing with his girlfriend over the paternity of their unborn child.

As Andre’s girlfriend storms off, never to return, Nita watches pensively from the bar, whilst a woman named Lola (top-billed Sally Marcellina, in a fetish-y combo of lace and leather) reacts to cut-away shots of a black cat, and contemplates a bloody tampon she lifts from a bin in the bathroom. (2)

At the end of the night, Andre (who later turns out to be the son of Ratih’s white-haired boyfriend) goes home with Lola (who may or may not be a prostitute - it’s a little unclear). Before they can get it on though, Lola falls asleep, and - apparently being a more chivalrous soul than his conduct thus far would tend to suggest - Andre gently tucks her into bed and calls it a night.

Back in the witches’ realm however, Nita is now poised over her scrying bowl, as Ratih’s spectral head looms from the shadows pleading for reincarnation. And so, a black cat is dispatched to Lola’s residence, and, we presume, a rather vague form of possession-based vengeance is about to be enacted!

The first fruits of this malediction are reaped the following night, during a truly uproarious scene in which Lola, at the behest of the sleazy, quasi-pimp type guy who seems to control her activities at the night club, goes home with a musclebound dude named Randy. 

At the height of their passion, after she has spent quite a long time sensually rubbing her face around Randy’s knees (which I suppose must be as far as local censorship at the time permitted these things to progress), Lola announces, “now it is time for me to suck your blood”! After transforming into a vision of Ratih, complete with her purple ceremonial garb, proceeds to send Randy reeling with a set of bloody gashes scratched across his face. 

Then, she goes one better by sucking his very life-force (represented by a kind of post-production laser beam) directly out of his brain, before plunging her fist into his chest and eviscerating him with her bare hands. Blimey! 

To western eyes and ears, ‘Cinta Terlarang’ will seem ‘80s to a fault, in spite of its mid-90s release date. Hazy, diffused lighting provided by blinding blue spotlights is filtered through smoke and translucent, billowing curtains, along with gleaming neon and the best chrome / glass / silk interiors the production could manage.

The bedroom sets within which much of the action takes place often look as if they’re under water, such is the quantity of blue light pulsing through their windows, and thumping electro-pop and wistful, Tangerine Dream-esque synth jams dominate the soundtrack.

Though there is no actual nudity (again, presumably due to diktats of local censorship), implied sexual content is fairly strong, and almost every frame of the movie features at least one woman wearing some form of impractical, kinky lingerie. (Seriously, the costume designer(s) must have had the time of their lives on this one, and the results are remarkable.)

In this regard however, it’s worth noting that the ill-fated Randy also strips down to his Y-fronts and does a sweaty erotic dance at one point, whilst a subsequent hunky victim of Lola/Ratih also gets stripped and tied to the bed, so - props are due to the filmmakers for making a rare attempt at equal opportunities titillation, I suppose.


In spite of all the mad supernatural horror stuff I’ve described above in fact, the prime intention here was presumably to ape the style of the then-ubiquitous erotic thrillers emerging from the USA in the wake of ‘Basic Instinct’ - a conclusion supported by the (very sparse) promotional materials for the film which can be found online,  featuring images of clinching couples and nothing to suggest this is actually a horror movie. 

And indeed, this is largely the direction the film takes during its middle half hour, possibly with a side dish of TV soap opera thrown in for good measure. A garish approximation of high gloss eroticism takes precedence, whilst a love triangle plot line develops involving Andre, Lola and… Nita, who, in civilian life, it transpires, is actually Lola’s possessive lesbian lover!

Amidst the lengthy stretches of melodramatic relationship talk which result from all this however, director Burnama at least has the good sense to keep the witches’ cauldron boiling, as Ratih and Nita instigate further occult outrages, claiming that aforementioned pimp guy as Lola/Ratih’s second victim, and also undertaking an unsuccessful spectral assault upon Andre’s Dad’s house.

(The latter, incidentally, fails largely as a result their insistence on utilising billowing silk and flying vases as their sole weapons, leading to Ratih’s spirit being buried beneath a glowing flower pot on the lawn, trapped by an ‘antidote talisman’ which the occult advisor guy has told him Andre’s Dad to bury there!)

Just to further confuse the film’s genre identity meanwhile, there are also a number of decently choreographed martial arts fight scenes, suggesting that perhaps Burnama secretly wished he was helming a full scale action movie. (Perhaps the influence of sexed up Hong Kong action movies like ‘Naked Killer’ (1992) and ‘Robotrix’ (1991) can also be detected here?)

Naturally, this is all to the good in terms of the film’s overall entertainment value, and the scenes in which the thoroughly bad-ass Nita lays waste to gangs of machete-wielding goons in her slo-mo, silk-flowing splendour prove especially awesome, even incorporating some fairly elaborate HK/wuxia style wire-work in places. (3)

In a sense, I can see a similar methodology at work here to that guiding H. Tjut Djalil’s classic of Indo-horror/action insanity, ‘Lady Terminator’ from 1989. 

With that film, Djalil didn’t seem able to simply make a straight rip-off of ‘The Terminator’, instead switching out the sci-fi elements in favour of an insane, quasi-feminist black magickal possession story. By the same token, Burnama seems to have been unable (or unwilling) to make a standard erotic thriller here without spicing it up with… an insane, quasi-feminist black magickal possession/revenge story (and indeed, some kung fu). For this excellent decision making, we can all offer him our gratitude.

Having said that though, in visual terms, ‘Cinta Terlarang’s ultra-garish ‘80s bad trip splatter-horror aesthetic is actually probably more closely aligned with Djalil’s later ‘Dangerous Seductress’ (1992)… but yes, that one also goes pretty big on the insane, quasi-feminist black magickal shit as I recall, so the point still stands.

Though ‘Cinta Terlarang’ is evidently working on a lower budget than Djalil’s films - and is, comparatively speaking, less ambitious in its craziness as a result - all of this helps illustrate why I believe that pre-2000 horror films from Indonesia are always worth checking out, even when, like this one, they don’t quite manage to entirely achieve their potential.

Speaking of which, the pedant in me demands that I state that ‘Cinta Terlarang’ is fairly incoherent in logical, thematic, emotional, and even spatial, terms, but honestly - does it matter, when there is so much pure, wild, diabolical fun here to enjoy?

On a more depressing note meanwhile, the existence and rediscovery of wonderful films like this one also causes me to reflect sadly on the way in which a nation whose popular cinema was once overflowing with unashamed lesbian love, implied oral sex, vampiric flying heads, kung fu battling witches and leather-clad Lady Terminators laying waste to neon-drenched nightclubs, has, in more recent years, regressed to a state in which media portrayals of homosexuality are effectively outlawed, sex outside of marriage has recently been criminalised, and women are increasingly facing harassment for venturing outside without full face-covering.

Oh well. For now, let’s all close our eyes tight and/or cue up ‘Cinta Terlarang’ and return for 80-something minutes to wild and carefree days of… 1995? I know - who’d have thought it, right?

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(1)Curiously, the demonic entity in ‘Cinta Terlarang’ is addressed by the witches as “Eyang”, which the internet informs me means “grandparent” in Indonesian, perhaps suggesting some kind of diabolical ancestor worship is going on here?

(2)It is only after watching the film several times, and writing this review, that I’ve finally realised that, rather than just being totally inexplicable, that bit with the bloody tampon is perhaps meant to imply that Andre’s girlfriend is not actually pregnant, thus excusing him of being an arsehole when he refuses to believe her? If so, this plot point is… not very clearly explained, to put it mildly.

(3)Given that Nita possesses such impressive fighting prowess whilst in her witch-y incarnation, I’m curious why another scene finds her (in her day time / ‘jilted lesbian lover’ guise) hiring a bunch of male goons to beat up Andre whilst taking no part in the assault herself, but… NEVER MIND!

Horror Express 2020 #4: The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty, 1990)

Within the realm of sequel-driven horror franchises, it’s fair to say that the Exorcist series has always been a bit of an outlier. Admittedly, it got off to an earlier start than most of them, and began from a far higher level of critical acclaim and self-serious artistic intent - but still.

In stark contrast to the “iconic/ground-breaking original followed by reams of (at best) entertaining crap” furrow ploughed by ‘Halloween’, ‘..Elm Street’, ‘Hellraiser’ et al, ‘The Exorcist’ seems to have attracted highly strung, artistically-minded filmmakers like moths to a flame, each determined to fight tooth and nail with the studios to bring their own unique visions to the screen. A strategy which, unfeasibly, multiple generations of studio execs actually seem to have encouraged, even after the ridicule unfairly heaped upon John Boorman’s commercially disastrous ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ back in ’77.

Boorman, William Peter Blatty and Paul Schrader may all in turn have lost their battles with the suits, ultimately delivering compromised, imperfect movies which they were never truly happy with, but, viewed with a few decades of hindsight, I believe that these sequels can be viewed as a disparate trilogy of wildly ambitious, unconventional films, each of which I personally find more rewarding than Friedkin’s original (which I’ve never really cared for, truth be told).

All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to the fact that I watched the theatrical release cut of Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist III’ [pedants will wish to note that it had not yet gained the ‘Legion’ sub-title applied to the later reconstruction of the writer/director’s preferred cut at this point] for the first time last month, and, though it can’t hold a candle to the weird majesty of ‘The Heretic’, I nonetheless enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than I was expecting to.

Although Blatty’s high-minded thematic concerns to some extent fall by the way-side here, that’s fine by me, as again, his particular brand of existential Catholic dualism has never really floated my boat. But, when it comes to the more down to earth matter of making a Bloody Good Horror Movie, it’s difficult to watch ‘Exorcist III’ and not conclude that this gentleman had the chops.

In purely audio-visual terms, the writer/director’s approach to this task basically seems to have consisted of throwing in way too much of everything. Every single thing in this movie is creepy and foreboding and upsetting and scary, and every time there's a chance to throw in a jump scare or a disembodied demon growl, you're damn well gonna get one.

Outside of some suitably evocative Washington DC location work, settings here run to lofty, shadow-haunted churches, forced perspective hospital corridors and sombre, steel-shuttered asylums - all photographed by DP Gerry Fisher in a drained, colourless palette which may be tediously familiar to us these days, but must have seemed a pretty fresh approach back in 1990.

(It’s interesting to note that Adrian Lyne’s ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, the other film which immediately springs to mind as a precursor to this now ubiquitous grim-dark, institutional aesthetic was also released in 1990.)

Barry De Vorzon’s score of course also deserves a big shout-out in this regard. Presumably asserting a huge influence upon post-2000 horror movie (and indeed video game) music, the composer’s relentless soundscape of treated, disembodied vocal textures, rusty gate shrieks and bowel-shaking rumbles pretty much defines the kind of thing which would become de rigour for straight-faced horror in the wake of Kenji Kawai’s soundtracks to Hideo Nakata’s ‘Ring’ films a decade later.

THAT hospital hallway scene (if you’ve looked up anything horror movie-related on Youtube in the past decade or so, you’ll know it) is of course the film’s unquestioned cinematic highlight, but viewed in context, it forms part of a steady succession of exquisitely nerve-jangling sequences spread across the opening two thirds of this picture, each executed with a seemingly impossible mixture of Lewton-esque restraint and utter, baroque excess.

In terms of plotting meanwhile, I’m happy that Blatty chose to entirely dispense with the old “possessed little girl” routine here, as the “occult crime story” angle extrapolated from his source novel is a lot more fun all round.

The movie-obsessed Lieutenant Kinderman (previously played by the late Lee J. Cobb) is my favourite character in Freidkin’s ‘Exorcist’, so it’s great to see him return as the protagonist here, and even greater that he seems in the interim to have transmuted into the gargantuan figure of George C. Scott.

As a life-long devotee of the ‘Go Big’ school of acting, Scott has always been a favourite of mine, and he here delivers what must surely count as one of his absolute best late-era performances, taking his usual ‘simmering human pressure cooker’ thing to a whole new level, playing it taut and low key during his character’s most emotionally trying moments, before boiling over and completely losing his shit when we least expect it. As a showcase of repressed rage, hardboiled, craggy compassion and a dogged determination to resist the rigours of age, it’s pretty awe-inspiring stuff.

Opposite Scott meanwhile, our resident demonically-inhabited, body-jumping psychopath The Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif, with a little bit of help from the first movie’s Jason Miller) boasts the most ridiculous collection of show-boating serial killer trademarks I've ever encountered pre-‘Silence of the Lambs’.

Not only does he only kill people whose names begins with ‘K’, but he uses an extremely obscure, specialist drug to paralyse his victims, cuts off a certain finger from each hand, draws astrological symbols on their backs, and replaces pieces of their bodies with vandalised religious paraphernalia! Man is certainly not short of ideas.

In fairness to Blatty though, I suppose this convoluted MO does indeed represent the kind of symbolic cluster-fuck which I suppose might occur should an already thoroughly coo coo killer end up bouncing around the same bonce with a host of demons and the restless spirit of a tormented priest.

As heavy-handed as some of these story elements may seem though - and as ‘on the nose’ as the director’s favoured imagery of mutilated statuary, demonic crucifixions and angelic visitations may be - this is all balanced out to some extent by Blatty’s deeply eccentric approach to screenwriting.

Drawing on his oft-forgotten background as a scripter of screwball comedies, he seems determined to leaven the metaphysical hand-wringing we’d expect of an Exorcist movie with frequent excursions into high stakes, oddball humour and touches of quasi-Lynchian surrealism which I’m surely the studio must have considered totally ‘off-brand’, as well as seeding the movie with a dense tapestry of synchronicitous inter-textural referencing, touching on everything from Conrad’s ‘Lord Jim’ to the Rider Waite Tarot deck to Powell & Pressburger’s ‘The Red Shoes’ and (believe it or not) Mel Brooks’ ‘Space Balls’.

We could perhaps glimpse this trait to a certain extent in the first film via Kinderman’s cinephile banter, and it was given free reign in his directorial debut ‘The Ninth Configuration’, but it’s really turned up to eleven in ‘Exorcist III’. 

The sheer density of Blatty’s dialogue can take a while to get used to, and I’ll freely admit that I was more or less instantly lost by the early scene in which Kinderman obliquely criticises his fellow officers for their racism and lethargy by angrily throwing passages from ‘Macbeth’ in their general direction. Once you get into the swing of it though, it brings a really unique feel to proceedings, adding spice and flavour to what might otherwise have become a pretty po-faced exercise in over-cooked, airport blockbuster bombast.

Speaking of which -- we probably need at this point to address the film’s final act. Shot under duress by Blatty and the principal cast after studio Morgan Creek rejected the anti-climactic conclusion of the director’s initial cut, instead demanding a bit more action and an actual, gosh-darned exorcism, it’s… a bit of a mess, to say the least.

I mean, of all the actors you could have hustled in to play a new character needed for a bunch of pick-up shots for a major studio film with the clock ticking down to release… the legendarily temperamental Nicol Williamson (google up yr own anecdotes) is probably not the man I would have chosen. But, his casting here as hastily parachuted-in bell, book & candle guy Father Morning seems reflective of the sheer level of graft, blundering and back office vanity involved in these reshoots.

Actually, Williamson does perfectly fine work here, adding a certain amount of gravitas to a part that basically amounts to cipher created to satisfy box office expectations, and Blatty directs his scenes with a conviction comparable to the main bulk of the film. Sadly though, neither of them are a match for the risible hullaballoo of snakes, flame-pits, elderly, levitating Oscar winners, glowing gateways to hell, spectral crucifixes, indoor hurricanes and general shrieking hysteria which the producers apparently deemed necessary to provide the punters with the requisite bang for their buck.

Kinderman, had he been able to peel himself off the special effects-drenched cell walls at some point during these proceedings, might well have returned to The Scottish Play and muttered something about “sound and fury” - and indeed, this whole ridiculous finale only serves to confirm my suspicion that, despite Blatty’s noble efforts, ‘Exorcist III’ doesn’t really succeed in saying anything terribly profound about anything (in this cut, at least).

Viewed purely as a horror movie though, for the most part it is absolutely cracking stuff. Imaginative, unconventional, viscerally effective and often brilliantly executed, it now also has the added advantage of feeling extremely prescient, vis-a-vis the ways in which the genre has developed in subsequent decades.

To not put too fine a point on it, prior to 1990 very few horror films looked or sounded like this one. After 2000, they pretty much all did. Coincidence? Just ask all those kids currently at film school who probably spent their formative years watching SCARIEST EVER MOVIE SCENE eight thousand times on Youtube, then consult with Blatty’s restless spirit re: thoughts on Playing The Long Game.

Lovecraft on Film Appendum: Cthulhu Sex Magazine.

In the past, I’ve tried to follow up each of my Lovecraft on Film post with a brief supplementary post, either highlighting some ephemera related to the recently reviewed film or showing off some scans of relevant artefact from my collection. When it came to finding something to compliment the lascivious themes discussed in last week’s discussion of From Beyond however, I’m afraid I drew a blank. Instead therefore, I thought I’d share a few tantalising images and scraps of info concerning a publication whose issues are sadly entirely absent from my modest archives.

Published in New York City from some point in the 1990s up to 2007, the blunty titled ‘Cthulhu Sex’ is notable for the sheer lack of information about its contents and creators which has made its way online.

The image above is taken from an ebay auction archived on the valuation site WorthPoint, whilst all other images and information in this post have been sourced from a series of entries on the zine on the SF/fantasy fanzine database site Galactic Central. Between them, these two links seem to provide pretty much the sum total of extant evidence concerning this publication’s existence.

The earliest issue which I can find a cover image for is Vol. 1, No. 13, published in 1998. This and a few subsequent issues seem to exhibit a raw, photocopied aesthetic, with splattery / grindcore style artwork that certainly doesn't hold back.

(Vol. 1, No. 13 - cover artist unknown.)

(Vol. 1, No. 14 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

Soon thereafter however, the zine seems to have embraced a now very dated looking digital/DTP approach to design, moving toward a gothy/cyberpunky feel which is… less to my taste, shall we say. At least some of the extant cover illustrations from the MS Publisher era are still pretty cool though, nonetheless.

(Still working primarily in the realm of the monstrous to this day, cover artist Paul Komoda apparently went on to lend his talents to the 2012 remake of ‘The Thing’.)

(Vol. 1, No. 16 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

(Vol. 1, No. 18 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

(Vol. 1, No. 18 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

During its second ‘volume’ in the early ‘00s, ‘Cthulhu Sex’ gradually became a somewhat more lavish, semi-pro type affair, even moving into colour, and featuring far less explicit / attention-grabbing imagery on its covers. A few examples follow;

(Vol. 2, No. 13 - artwork by ‘Popeye Wong’.)

(Vol. 2, No. 23 - artwork by Chad Savage.)

As to the actual contents of ‘Cthulhu Sex’, all we have to go on is a partial set of contents lists available on the Galactic Central database. Scanning through these, we learn that the pseudonymous figures of ‘St Michael’ (presumably credited editor Michael A. Morel) and ‘Father Baer’ seem to have loomed large over proceedings, with other contributors to the earlier issues including ‘Racheline Maltese’, ‘Abigail Parsley’ and ‘Oneroid Psychosis’. All of which gives me the pleasant (if likely entirely misleading) impression of some seedy clique of sun-shunning reprobates creeping around the back-streets Manhattan in the late 1990s, knocking on unmarked basement doors and whispering hoarsely to each other of ever more twisted new ideas for their next issue.

Later on, the sense of mystery dissipates somewhat, with a greater number of contributors using what may actually be their birth names (alongside some choice chatroom-era teen-goth alter egos). There are also what appear to be some interviews with bands (none of whom I’ve heard of, but imagine the sheer sense of accomplishment they must have felt when ‘Cthulhu Sex’ called them up to request an interview), along with the inevitable reviews section. More spine-chilling terror than any of the tentacle-sex based material is surely promised meanwhile by a regular column entitled ‘Gothic Nightclub Romance Monthly’.

The official website of ‘Cthulhu Sex’ appears to have been stone cold dead since the final issue hit highly selective shelves in 2007, but Horror Between The Sheets, a collection of writing taken from the zine, was published in 2005, and as of September 2019, a volume entitled ‘Letters to the Editor of Cthulhu Sex Magazine’ can sit proudly upon your shelves for only $16.99 payable to amazon.com, courtesy of e-book/print-on-demand publishers Crossroad Press.

Authorship is credited to Oliver Baer - Father Baer himself no less - whose other credits apparently include “..a history of the Wu Tang Physical Culture Association”. His Amazon biography furthermore informs us that, “he has performed as an unspeakable horror from the depths and his likeness has appeared on film in the documentary ‘Tai Chi Club’ as well as in videos of different sorts.” What a guy.

And, that’s about all the info I can dredge up on this subject for the time being, though of course I’d be interested to learn more about this unique zine and its contents, particularly those elusive older issues whose covers seem never to have seen the light of a scanner. In all seriousness, I hope that ‘Cthulhu Sex’ provided a lively and valued community organ (so to speak) for the select group of readers and writers bold enough to place it on the counter of their local underground bookshop and/or post their subscription cheque to the mag’s Grand Central Station PO Box, and it saddens me that I missed out on the opportunity to at least sample an issue or two.

October Horrors 2019 # 3: Bad Moon (Eric Red, 1996)

So, who’s up for a totally standard ‘90s werewolf movie?

I may not normally have been, but, as any readers who dutifully memorised my 2018 Best First Viewing list may recall, I was completely blown away by Eric Red’s directorial debut ‘Cohen & Tate’ (1988), so, the fact that that guy waded into the midst of American horror’s most boring decade for some lycanthropic hi-jinx certainly piqued my interest.

Ok, so, first off - ‘Bad Moon’, which was adapted for the screen by Red from Wayne Smith’s novel ‘Thor’, isn’t really big on werewolf mythology (cinematic or otherwise), but proably the most interesting thing it does in this regard is to entirely jettison the familiar lore laid down by Curt Siodmak’s script for 1941’s ‘The Wolfman’, and to instead take its inspiration from Stuart Walker’s oft-overlooked Werewolf of London (1935).

Red signals this most obviously by featuring a clip of the latter movie, which is playing on TV in the background at one point (at breakfast time, no less – what kind of wild TV station is this?), but he also echoes Walker’s film by positing the idea of lycanthropy reaching the western world from ‘exotic’ eastern climes when a caucasian interloper has the misfortune to get himself bitten, and also by (briefly) exploring the idea that the victim may try to cure himself using science.

Unfortunately, he also replicates what most critics have deemed to be ‘Werewolf of London’s biggest flaw by short-circuiting the pathos generally expected of the werewolf narrative and instead making the cursed individual an inscrutable, misanthropic ass-hat… but, we’ll get onto that later.

For now, let it merely be noted that things do not exactly get off to a good start. During the pre-credits prologue, we are introduced to Ted (Michael Paré) and his girlfriend Marjorie (Johanna Marlowe), who appear to be intrepid gap year explorer types or something, leading an expedition comprising a bunch of heavily moustached, furry-hatted tracker/guide types who could have come straight from ‘30s Hollywood Central Casting through a back-lot recreation of what I assume to be some unspeakably remote place in Asia minor.

In the midst of a drearily non-explicit hard body sex scene which definitely did not come from ‘30s Hollywood, the couple find themselves interrupted by a bloody, hulking great yeti-like werewolf, which kills the furry-hatted men and rips through the side of their tent. Though Marjorie is torn to pieces in the ensuing melee, Ted, though severely wounded, manages to reach for a rifle and promptly blows the creature’s head off.

All of which, I’ll admit, sounds like a lot of fun on paper, but something about the execution here is just *off*. The film cuts choppily around the werewolf as if worried that the effects simply weren’t up to scratch, and, though the setting and situation is goofy and exploitative in the extreme, it all seems to have been realised in a spirit of mundane, soap opera earnestness. To be frank, for a filmmaker whose earlier work as both a writer and director relied on tightly-wound, hard-boiled drama and careful attention to detail, this is some sloppy, trashy shit right here.

We cut directly to the good old U.S. of A – somewhere in the Great Lakes area I’m assuming, in view of the stirring, National Park scenery and references to nearby Chicago. Janet (Mariel Hemingway) is a high-flying lawyer and single parent, who has recently given up her big city practice, and now lives in an isolated house on the edge of the forest with her young son Brett (Mason Gamble) and the family’s beloved dog, a German Shepherd named Thor.

Shortly after we are introduced to this family unit, Janet receives a call from her estranged brother, who is back in the area after some time away and would like to re-establish contact. It’s Ted from the prologue, of course, and he is now living in a pleasingly retro Airstream trailer parked in a picturesque lakeside beauty spot. When Janet & co visit him, he confesses to his sister that his girlfriend is “gone”, and that he’s “not doing so good”.

Thor, needless to say, doesn’t like Ted one bit, and Brett, whilst snooping around in his trailer, discovers a bunch of mysterious test tubes and lab equipment and…. a big old book about werewolves! (This being a movie of course, he naturally finds this to be frightening and suspicious, rather than just thinking, wow, what a cool book, my Uncle’s into some interesting stuff.)

Before long, the police are cordoning off the area around Ted’s trailer, investigating a spate of mysterious hiker murders apparently involving wild animals, and Ted is once again on the phone to Janet, who invites him to park his trailer out behind her house and come spend some more time with the family.

And thus, the stage is set for an epic territorial battle between Ted’s lupine alter-ego and the protective Thor, who of course is the only family member to initially grasp the nature of Ted’s affliction. Indeed, as the film goes on, Thor increasingly takes on the role of protagonist, with the dog who plays him in close-ups and character scenes (credited as ‘Primo’) delivering a loveable and emotive performance that should have swept the board at the Doggie Oscars, if only they existed.

Not that it is exactly difficult for Primo to overshadow the human cast here, it must be said. Gamble is pretty much yr average Hollywood child actor, but neither Hemingway nor Paré really seem to be able to make anything of the characters they’re playing, or to connect with us in any tangible fashion – which is an issue, given that they’re basically the only human adults in this story.

Paré does his best I suppose, but the inconsistencies in the way his character is written are maddening. In classic Paul Naschy fashion, Ted manfully attempts to keep his wolfen self in check by spending his nights handcuffed to a giant tree, but he also seems pretty careless about ensuring that he actually achieves this before nightfall, and seems dismissive of the accidental carnage which results.

Ted claims that he has moved in with his sister in the hope that, with all else having failed, good old fashioned familial love may cure him of his affliction (and he writes this in his private diary, so we know he means it). But, we never see him reaching out to his sister and nephew or showing any warmth toward them. Instead he remains sullen and withdrawn, and, in the film’s final act, he inexplicably begins acting like a full-on villainous asshole, deceiving and threatening his relatives, goading their dog into attacking him, and triumphantly pissing in the poor mutt’s dog-house to assert his territorial dominance after Thor has been taken away by the police dog handlers.

Why does he do this? Is his “wolf side” affecting his day-time, human behaviour too? Or has he always basically just been a horrible person? Despite being treated to voluminous extracts from his diary, we basically never get into this guy’s head or get a handle on what he’s up to, making it difficult for us to answer these questions, or even to gauge whether he is still fighting, or merely enabling, his own lycanthropy.

As such, it is impossible for us to empathise with him in his plight, as the script – reliant on decades of werewolf tradition – seems to demand. (Actually, Paré’s performance could have worked a lot better if the film had explored the idea that his character may just be a common-or-garden human psychopath, but with the reality of the werewolf always front and centre, thins never really go in that direction.)

In other respects meanwhile, ‘Bad Moon’ seems content to proceed upon what I can only describe as a defiantly unrealistic basis. This is, after all, a film in which an average joe who wants to find out about werewolves in 1996 is forced to resort to a massive, leather-bound grimoire, and in which a local sheriff responds to a case in which a family’s dog is alleged to have torn a man to pieces just outside their driveway not by examining the dog or seeking to gather any forensic evidence, but instead by merely having a quiet word with the owner, suggesting she “might want to think about getting a new hound”. (Small town policing at its finest.)

As if not content with this kind of silliness meanwhile, Red later also gives us a world in which a ten-year-old boy with a pair of wire-cutters can cycle to the local dog pound – whose security arrangements consist solely of a chain-link fence which can be easily scaled by a large dog – and liberate his pet in a matter of minutes.

Of course, such Argento-esque mutations of real world cause-and-effect wouldn’t bother me in the slightest in the context of an exciting, fantastical horror film, but sadly ‘Bad Moon’ struggles too in this regard, and ultimately offers little to distract our attention from its assorted inconsistencies.

Perhaps reflective of its big studio status (the film was backed, and presumably carefully overseen, by Morgan Creek, the production house whose biggest hits included ‘Last of the Mohicans’ and ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ amongst others), ‘Bad Moon’ keeps it slow and steady, carefully adhering to the middle of the road. Photography remains bright and clear, framing and lighting are conventional, and colours are muted. No hint of atmosphere or otherworldliness is allowed to accrue, despite the promise offered by the rural locations.

Likewise, Red’s script is largely devoid of the kind of symbolism or psychological / metaphysical thematics which could bring a story like this to life, and the film’s take on werewolf lore remains just as sketchy and ill-defined as the deeply unsatisfactory character relationships. (Despite Ted telling us that his transformations are not limited to full moons and basically occur every night for instance, we’re still treated to regular stock shots of the moon, which, I’m duty-bound to report, remains full for about six consecutive nights or something. Again, we’re in goofy b-movie territory here, however much the film might strive to achieve a tone of earnest, dramatic sobriety.)

Although I’m not familiar with Smith’s source novel, I can well imagine that, in the grand tradition of post-Stephen King horror doorstops, it must surely have been full of digressions and sub-plots and such, which I can in turn suppose must have been ruthlessly excised by Red in order to ensure the story adheres to his trademark narrative minimalism.

In the process of hacking the novel into shape for a ninety minute three-hander though, he seems to have lost the thread of whatever this story was actually supposed to be about, leaving its human characters feeling empty and opaque, and draining the on-screen events of any wider resonance.

In fact, a minimal amount of research reveals that the novel is actually written from the point of view of the dog, which immediately invites a far more interesting set of conflicts than is presented in the film, and also helps explain why Thor is the only character here who actually manages to establish an emotional connection with the audience. (Did I mention that the scene in which he is taken away by the dog-handlers is more harrowing than all the werewolf stuff put together?)

On the plus side, Red’s insistence on using practical effects to realise the werewolf should be commended (it must have been a hard sell in ’96), even if the transformation scenes are marred by some very dated CGI ‘warping’ effects. The film’s finale meanwhile is staged in impressively brutal and uncompromising fashion, delivering on the promise of a German Shepherd vs. werewolf vs. gun-toting mother showdown in a blood-drenched, bone-crunching manner that many studio filmmakers would have understandably bottled on (I mean, just imagine the complexities of throwing actors, animals, animatronic monsters, gore, guns and stunt-work all into the same shot, and actually making it work), reminding us, for a minute or two at least, of ‘Cohen & Tate’s similarly crazed final act.

But, it’s too little too late. Overall, ‘Bad Moon’ just doesn’t work, in spite what I assume must have been Herculean efforts on the part of its crew and director. Admittedly, it does at least make for a pretty great dog movie, and Primo is an f-ing star, so if you’re, say, a big fan of the Lassie movies who wishes they could have been a bit more edgy and hardcore, well, you’re in luck! If you’re looking for a werewolf movie (or indeed a human movie) though, this one is a bit of a bust I’m afraid.

October Horrors # 2: Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth (Anthony Hickox, 1992)

Say what you like about this much despised second sequel to Clive Barker’s ‘Hellraiser’, but at least it’s consistent. Whereas the more highly regarded ‘Hellbound: Hellraiser II’ sent us on a vertiginous rollercoaster ride of expectation and disappointment, aiming for a tone of serious, proper horror business before crashing and burning in a heap of nonsense, part III by contrast is troubled by no such lofty aspirations.

Right from the opening crawl, Anthony Hickox’s film sets up its stall as a mildly diverting, VHS-era trash horror movie, and, when the credits roll a distributor-friendly ninety three minutes later, that is exactly what it has delivered.

(Hickox, for those who are unaware, is the son of Douglas Hickox of ‘Theatre of Blood’ / Sitting Target fame, and seems to have spent much of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s making medium budget horror films with colons in their titles.)

Of course, much of the fan-ire heaped upon ‘Hell On Earth’ was likely instigated not by the relative qualities of the work in-and-of-itself, but rather a result of the thoughtless and reductive liberties it takes with the pre-existing Hellraiser mythos. So horrendous in fact is the demolition job undertaken here upon the ideas and atmosphere established by the preceding films, it is easy to see why so many franchise followers have found this instalment impossible to tolerate.

With sad predictability, the Cenobite “family” are nowhere to be found here, and, if we’re ever offered an explanation as to how Doug Bradley’s Pinhead ended up encased in some sort of rectangular concrete sculpture offered up for sale in one of those “macabre” art galleries that only exist in horror movies…. well, I must have missed it.

Although there are a few confused attempts to crow-bar the film into series continuity, ‘Hell On Earth’ basically feels as if it must have originated as a premise for a stand-alone horror movie, and the general consensus seems to be that it would have received a far warmer reception if it had been allowed to reach audiences in that form. (Of course, without the Hellraiser brand name, it’s likely such a project would never have achieved the necessary financing or distribution, but hey – that’s showbiz.)

On the plus side however (opinions may vary), the scriptwriters here do at least seem to have latched onto the idea that Bradley had both the chops and fan popularity to make it as a kind of post-Vincent Price horror star, and as such they do at least give the concrete-encased Pinhead plenty of ridiculously fruity dialogue to chew on (“human dreams... such fertile ground for the seeds of torment..”).

Once the Pinhead block/cube/sculpture thing (“Pillar of Souls”, it says here) has been installed in the grotesquely adorned bed chamber of sleazoid “alternative” night club proprietor J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt), the movie essentially settles down into a sort of early ‘90s Hollywood goth riff on ‘Little Shoppe of Horrors’, as Monroe, entranced by Pinhead’s hyperbolic chat, reluctantly begins feeding the souls and flesh of his regular punk-ette conquests to the demonic sculpture, with agreeably messy results.

The tone here remains light and easy-going, streamlined for general audiences both by the near-complete removal of the networks of erotic transgression and emotional suffering that defined the first two Hellraiser films, and by the glossy Americanisation of the settings and characters. What it offers the viewer in return – eg, routine deployment of moderate gore, occasional softcore nudity and alarming musical interludes from late period hair metal band Armored Saint – is unlikely to constitute much of a deal for more serious-minded fans, but as I say, if you’re willing to take it on its own terms, it’s fairly good fun.

One of the things that helped make ‘Hell On Earth’ so oddly appealing to me was its characters, who, happily, are a fairly interesting bunch. Where the traditional ‘Little Shoppe..’ narrative presents a sympathetic figure forced to do the bidding of the immobile monster, Bernhardt’s character by contrast is an utterly despicable creation – a sort of pathetic, goth-a-billy Harvey Weinstein-in-training who lures troubled and impressionable girls to the grim bachelor pad he keeps above his night club, coercing them into (presumably fairly vanilla varieties of) sexual congress whilst all the time imagining himself as some kind of Sadean libertine. When Pinhead eventually makes mincemeat of him, it feels richly deserved.

On the other side of the fence meanwhile, Terry Farrell’s TV-reporter-in-search-of-a-scoop and her older ex-hippie cameraman (Ken Carpenter) make for likeable protagonists, particularly once Farrell gets mixed up with Terri (Paula Marshall), the damaged, scatter-brained punk girl who contacted her after narrowly escaping from a rendezvous with the Pinhead statue over at Monroe’s place.

I mean, it’s not David Mamet or anything, don’t get me wrong, but by the expected standards of a movie like this, the stuff with Terri wondering incredulously at the stability of Farrell’s professional life and tidy apartment, and the uneasy relationship between the two very different women, is conveyed very nicely, thereby putting ‘Hell On Earth’ comfortably over that crucial horror movie hurdle re: ensuring the characters are sufficiently believable and appealing that that we care about their fate when they are inevitably imperilled.

Sadly, it is with all that imperilment that the movie really begins to flounder, as ‘Hell On Earth’s last few reels veer off into the realms of absurdity in a manner that must have put the blood pressure of any self-respecting ‘Hellraiser’ fans who’d stuck it out this far through the roof. There are a few pretty effective moments during this conclusion – I’m thinking particularly of the mass slaughter in the nightclub – but for the most part the FX-heavy grand finale of the movie has dated extremely poorly.

So… let’s put it like this. In Barker’s ‘Hellraiser’, the Cenobites were fascinating and terrifying creations. Avatars of a tantalising, unseen world of extreme bodily sensation, we imagined them to be veterans of deathless centuries of amoral excess; the supernatural reincarnations of human beings who have gone so far into the realm of ecstatic self-destruction that they have long ago since ceased to be human.

In ‘Hellraiser II’, I felt that the stuff tying the Cenobites back to their original, relatively recent, human identities was both reductive and poorly handled, and by the time we get to part III, the Cenobites have apparently been reduced to the level of goofy, action figure-like automatons who stomp about the backlot streets in Frankenstein’s monster poses, throwing polystyrene breezeblocks at policemen.

Helpfully, these new style Cenobites can also be instantly created by taking some supporting characters and jamming the objects most closely associated with them into their faces. Thus, the aforementioned ex-hippie cameraman ends up firing rockets from the lens embedded in his eye socket (!), whilst – most memorably – the DJ from the nightclub witnesses a miraculous, digital vision of some CDs spinning around his head before being transformed by Pinhead-magic into a lethal CD firing Go-Bot.

In the face of such rampaging nonsense, what can you do but laugh? And you know what? I like laughing. It’s fun.

A few thrills and spills, some icky gore effects, a garish period aesthetic, a bit of human interest and some utter WTF bad ideas – what more could you ask of a post-midnight video rental timekiller?

Whether or not this modest result was worth pretty much murdering the credibility of what began as the most potent and inspired horror franchise of the 1980s is questionable, but never mind. As is so often in case in popular culture, we’ve got to make do with what we’ve got rather than playing with “what ifs”, and what we’ve got here scratches that “let’s have another beer and watch a horror movie” itch a lot more satisfactorily than its miserable reputation would suggest.

Also: Motörhead did a song called ‘Hellraiser’ for this movie. It plays over the end credits. This pleases me, and makes me think kindly of the film I’ve just watched. Job well done, cross-promotion marketing guys.

Thoughts on… Phantasm: OblIVion (1998)

Whilst it takes a pretty determined miserablist to dredge up the unsettling sub-texts I have previously identified within the relatively upbeat environs of Phantasms II and III, the awkwardly named 1998’s ‘Phantasm: OblIVion’ is (forgive me) a whole different ball game.

With studio funding long gone, ‘OblIVion’ forcibly returns the series to its independent roots, as Don Coscarelli and his collaborators set about the production with what under most circumstances would be considered a prohibitively low budget.

Thankfully though, it is also clear that by this point Phantasm had become very much a “family affair”, driven on to a great extent by the camaraderie established over the course of the preceding three films. Reggie Bannister and his wife Gigi (both occasional dabblers in low budget film production) were heavily involved in a variety of capacities behind the scenes, whilst A. Michael Baldwin stepped up as ‘co-producer’ and, by all accounts, many veterans of the earlier films’ crew and effects teams waived their usual fees in order to take part.

As such, it makes sense that, whereas Phantasms II and III tried to pitch themselves as solidly commercial, stand-alone ventures - fun Friday night horror flicks for casual viewers, despite the complexity of their ongoing characters and mythos – ‘OblIVion’ by contrast is a film made purely for the fans.

Certainly, anyone who had the misfortune to come to the film cold must have found it absolutely mystifying, and even series followers who had become a bit rusty on the details of its predecessors must have struggled to acclimatise themselves, as Coscarelli shifts gears hard toward the more unsettling and surreal aspects of his 1979 original, detourning even the by now mandatory “setting the scene” flashback introduction sequence into a delirious, near-avant garde montage of old and new footage, far more concerned with obtusely symbolic imagery and general psychedelic disorientation that it is with the expected recapping of plot detail.

This more challenging approach remains consistent throughout the film that follows, and, though we get to enjoy the sight of the ever-faithful Reggie battling his new through a few conventional horror set-pieces, the bulk of the running time is dedicated the strange journey of Mike, who, trapped in the rear of a self-driving hearse, finds himself transported through the apocalyptic wasteland of the American mid-west to (where else?) Death Valley – The Tall Man’s chosen venue for what I suppose we must see as their final confrontation, pushing Mike on into what can only be described as a kind of trans-dimensional ‘vision quest’, as the boundaries of time and space become increasingly unstuck.

‘OblIVion’s ace in the hole when it comes to realising this temporal dislocation is that fact that Coscarelli – oft characterised by his colleagues as an obsessive hoarder of Phantasm-related props and materials – was apparently still in possession of a large quantity of unused footage shot for the original ‘Phantasm’ in the late ‘70s. Comprising a number of complete, lengthy scenes and numerous partial sequences, this allows for something in the region of twenty minutes of archived footage to be worked into the structure of ‘OblIVion’, intersecting with the newly shot footage in a more coherent and thematically appropriate manner than anyone might have anticipated.

So well does the older footage seem to compliment the new material in fact that, when I first watched ‘OblIVion’ a few years back, I assumed that they must have been deliberately re-staged, with lookalike actors standing in for the younger cast members, and thus spent much of the film marvelling at how flawlessly the effect had been achieved.

Returning to the film in the knowledge that the ‘70s footage is genuine however, it becomes clear that the ‘90s footage has to some extent been shaped by the imagery provided by the unused ‘Phantasm’ material, which in turn gains new significance in the context of the new story that now surrounds it, leading to the creation of a very weird symbiotic feedback loop between the two eras that could swiftly make a film theorist’s head hurt pretty badly, should they deign to spend any length of time thinking about it.

Certainly, seeing actors apparently interacting with themselves playing the same role twenty years earlier is a fairly unique prospect in cinema, and watching A. Michael Baldwin ricochet between his early teens and mid ‘30s from scene to scene proves particularly unnerving – especially given that his extended dialogue and metaphysical tug of war with Angus Scrimm’s Tall Man seems to continue, uninterrupted, through both time periods.

To some extent, Mike’s younger self seems to represent his “spirit self”, fighting an astral battle with The Tall Man, just as his older self physically combats his minions in the material world. There is a suggestion here that, in his mind, Mike is still the kid we met in the first ‘Phantasm’ film, still inhabiting the suburban idyll of California 1979. To him, the subsequent years of incarceration, hospitalisation, imprisonment and the occasional fiery show-down simply haven’t happened, as The Tall Man still looms over him, blocking his path to adulthood.

In this context, the disturbing imagery of the famous “hanging tree” sequence – a wisely unused alternative ending for the original ‘Phantasm’ in which the teenage Mike ensnares The Tall Man in a noose and is subsequently sweet-talked into cutting him down – feels far more potent and suggestive than it would have been in its original context, where the fable/fairy tale-like quality of the dialogue would have rendered it a fairly ridiculous conclusion to the first film.

Here though, teenage Mike’s curious decision to cut down/release his antagonist highlights the strange symbiosis that exists between the two characters – especially when the scene is directly mirrored by one in which The Tall Man steps in the prevent the adult Mike from hanging himself in Death Valley.

Throughout ‘OblIVion’ in fact, Mike’s actions seem to echo those of The Tall Man. Not only are both of them hanged, and subsequently saved by each other, but both are pictured holding spheres aloft in a strikingly similar fashion, both turn to the camera, assuming blank and baleful expressions, before stalking through the film’s ever-present dimensional gates, and so forth.

Are we meant to assume that the two characters are becoming closer together, as Mike prepares to merge with, or supersede The Tall Man? Or, is Coscarelli simply reminding us that they have in fact been one and the same all along – The Tall Man drawn from somewhere deep within Mike’s troubled psyche, gradually consuming him, just as he has consumed the American landscape against which their battles take place?

As the “hanging tree” scene demonstrates, Mike needs The Tall Man to fight against, just as much as his enemy needs him. His journey through the ‘chapel perilous’ proposed by the first film has failed, and the shock of facing life without the spectre of a supernatural opponent to take the blame for his troubles has proved too much for him to bear.

Elsewhere in ‘OblIVion’, viewers still hoping for a more conventional “explanation” of The Tall Man and his machinations are granted some imaginative insights into his background, as Mike’s journeys through the dimensional gateways take him, surprisingly, back to the Civil War era (furthering the very American Gothic sense of history that has always underpinned the Phantasm series to some extent), where we learn that our favourite towering ghoul was once a field surgeon and mild-mannered old coot named Jedidiah Morningside, whose Frankensteinian experiments took him through one of the dimensional portals. (Also, he apparently lived with the fortune teller from the first ‘Phantasm’, because… hey, why not?)

Naturally, all this kept as ambiguous as ever; we never learn what happened to poor old Jedidiah when he stepped through the gate, how long he was away, or the nature of intelligence that was seemingly inhabiting his body when he returned – although we may at least assume that, whatever happened, a similar fate is in store for Mike.

Needless to say, ‘OblIVion’ is a rather oblique film to say the least, returning very much to the shifting sands and Poe-esque phantasmagoria that played into Coscarelli’s original conception of the Phantasm series.

Working as much on a purely emotional / imagistic level as a narrative one, the film often feels more like a meditative reflection upon (or extended remix of) the earlier instalments in the series (and the legacy of the first film in particular) than a story in its own right, framing even its remaining action scenes (of which there are, actually, plenty) within a cracked, quasi-mystical framework that purposefully holds back on any kind of answers.

All of this is fully embodied by ‘OblIVion’s ending, which is, I think, my favourite moment in the entire series, bringing us to the end of our characters’ long journey with a curtain call both wordlessly poignant and – as per Phantasm tradition – heroically unresolved.

Like the haunting, unreadable expression Angus Scrimm offers us as he disappears through the dimensional gateway one final time, this is one of those movie endings whose power is difficult to meaningfully convey in words. All that’s left to do really is merely describe it, and hope some of the feeling comes across.

As the adult Mike’s bodily form lies dying on the sand, a sphere-shaped hole in his head, Reggie, wearing his old ice cream seller’s uniform and wielding his quadruple-barrelled shotgun, takes one anguished look back before launching himself through the dimensional gates in pursuit of The Tall Man. Reggie, by this stage, has become an iconic avatar of himself – a deathless video game protagonist, doggedly embarking upon an eternity of fruitless, Doom-style adventures in search of his friend’s stolen soul. “I was an ice cream vendor by trade, but now I am a solider”, he opined during the film’s opening narration, and now he’s ready to play that role to the bitter end.

As we zoom in on Mike’s blank, dilated pupil, we return to 1979. Young Mike, looking despondent as ever, walks down an empty street, until Reggie stops in his ice cream truck to give him a lift. “Did you hear something, partner?”, Reggie asks as they drive along. “It’s only the wind… just the wind…”, Mike replies as he sheds a tear. The ice cream truck is now travelling through a formless black void; the outside world has disappeared. The last thing we see are the truck’s red tail-lights fading into the darkness; then the theme music hits and the familiar writer/director’s credit appears, in the exact same shade of red.

Whilst I don’t begrudge the existence of a fifth Phantasm film (Coscarelli’s creation is by design a never-ending, ever-changing beast), I think most fans can agree that this is the true end to the story we have been following through these four films, and, for me personally, it is also one of the more inexplicably devastating few minutes of cinema I’ve seen anywhere.

Incidentally, during those closing credits, we also get to hear ‘Have You Seen It?’, a Phantasm-themed composition performed by Reggie B & the Jizz Wailin' Ya' Doggies. Keep on rockin’, Regman.

Thoughts on… Phantasm III (1994)

Inevitably, the challenge of weaving the murky sub-texts of death, bereavement and mental illness that underpin the ‘Phantasm’ mythos into the fabric of some fairly light-hearted, good-times horror movies creates a friction that persists throughout the series.

In the case of 1994’s ‘Phantasm III’ (sometimes sub-titled as ‘Lord of the Dead’), more-so even than Phantasm II, Don Coscarelli seems to have chosen to deal with this tension by pushing that uncomfortable baggage so far under the carpet that he seems to be pretty much denying its existence altogether – but all to no avail. The imagery and characters he created for the first film back in 1979 continue to resonate, not only through his writing on each subsequent film, but through the thematic logic upon which the whole Phantasm universe has been constructed.

For some reason, ‘Phantasm III’ often seems to emerge as the least popular entry in the series amongst fans – a reputation I feel is thoroughly undeserved. If the film has a fault, it is that it swings just a little *too* close to hitting the same plot beats as its predecessor, but it nonetheless throws in enough unique material along the way to arguably emerge as an even more enjoyable thrill-ride than the all-singing, all-dancing Part II.

As well as reshuffling the by-now-familiar series elements, III adds a surprisingly likeable ‘Home Alone’-style survivalist orphan kid and a nunchuck-wielding black female vigilante to the ranks of the good guys, and evens out the odds by pitting them against an adorably vile trio of early ‘90s styled zombie sleazebags in a pink Cadillac (venerable character actor John Chandler amongst them) – all of which results in what is by some distance the breeziest and conventionally ‘fun’ of all the Phantasm movies.

Despite working with a significantly lower budget this time around, Coscarelli and his collaborators somehow manage to incorporate an even more impressive array of practical make up effects and fight choreography, some great location shooting (most notably a breathtaking Moorish/gothic mausoleum) and many of the series’ most inspired sphere attacks and show-downs.

In tone in fact, ‘Phantasm III’ puts me in mind of a slightly slicker and more ambitious version of the kind of movie Stuart Gordon might have made for Charles Band in the late 1980s – and long-time readers will realise that, when I say that, I intend it as a pretty massive compliment. It’s just a really kick-ass flick, to not put too fine a point on it, and I think it deserves some recognition for that.

Happily, PIII also sees the return to the series both of Bill Thornbury in the role of Jody – his character from this point on becoming an ambiguous and rather distrustful figure, as befits one who has returned from the dead and/or the realm of The Tall Man for reasons unknown – and, more significantly, of A. Michael Baldwin as Mike.

In the fifteen years separating Phantasms I and III, Baldwin has grown into a slightly haggard and perpetually worried looking adult, but has crucially retained the big, sad eyes that helped define his performance in the first film. Doing his best no doubt to extenuate these qualities as he returns to the role of Mike, Baldwin’s ‘had a tough life’ features and weary, pain-wracked mannerisms add melancholic undertow to both this film and the subsequent sequels, with his character’s identity as a man who has grown up haunted by grief, fear and metaphysical uncertainty always hovering in the background.

Reflecting this, and establishing a pattern that would continue into Phantasm IV, part III sees its two returning heroes separated for much of the film. Carrying the bulk of the screen time, Reggie handles the crowd-pleasing, down-to-earth action stuff in his own inimitable fashion, but for Mike meanwhile, PIII becomes a rather different kind of nightmare – a painful ordeal in which he is pretty much denied any independent agency whatsoever.

As the film opens, we find Mike experiencing a near death experience as he lays in a hospital bed, encountering both The Tall Man and his brother Jody as they intrude upon his walk toward the light and drag him back to the world of the living. Soon thereafter, having been revived and rescued by Reggie, he finds himself snatched once again from what passes as the “waking world”, hopelessly entrapped in the realm of The Tall Man, where he undergoes various horrific and unknowable procedures, carried out by his enemy seemingly in order to permanently alter his body and spirit for reasons unknown.

Indeed, most of PIII’s wider plot revelations are concerned with the notion that The Tall Man places great importance in Mike, deliberately keeping him alive and trying to force him to submit to his will – not only in psychic terms, but by means of a kind of physical/technological transformation.

As ever, The Tall Man’s motivations for doing this remain pointedly undisclosed by the series, and the natural assumption of many fans has been that he is attempting to groom Mike as some kind of successor/inheritor of his inter-dimensional legacy.

This makes a lot of sense, and can certainly be chalked up as our “most likely explanation” in linear story terms. But, in keeping with some of the ideas I have set out in my writing on the earlier films, I also find myself leaning heavily toward idea that The Tall Man is simply *playing* with both Mike and Reggie (note should be made here of his repeated references to their struggle as a “game”). Could he not be keeping them both alive, suffering and struggling, simply because he is aware of the fact that their violent opposition not only feeds him, but actually allows him his continued existence?

As an externalised bogeyman created from the fear and anguish of an adolescent boy, The Tall Man cannot allow those fears to be snuffed out by either maturity or death, and, by taking direct control of Mike – by removing him from the “real world” in which he has the power to change the path of his own life, or end it altogether - he realises that he can continue farming these negative emotions, keeping the “boy” in torment and thus keeping himself in business forevermore.

Needless to say, Mike’s travails, and the speculations that arise from them, serve to add a very dark undercurrent to what is otherwise a straight-forwardly enjoyable horror shoot ‘em up, laying the groundwork for what would emerge a few years later as the most challenging and introspective instalment of the ‘Phantasm’ series.