Once they arrive and deal with Nash’s wound, Frank confronts Sarah about why she has a suitcase packed and they hash out their relationship problems while Nash is unconscious in the next room and the streets outside are overrun with flesh-eating undead. Frank decides to run a recon mission to see if he can find any more survivors and/or supplies, and Nash wakes up alone in the house with Sarah. While Frank is forced to hole up with the sort of creepy Jeffrey (Lew Temple) in an attic, Nash and Sarah get drunk and their real feelings for each other come to the surface. Clearly, things are going to be awkward when Frank gets back.
One of the main problems with Silent Night, Zombie Night is the characterization of Frank. He is supposed to be a tough guy with a good heart, but mostly he just comes across as a hateful jackass. He has a hair-trigger temper and is verbally abusive to virtually everyone around him. His scenes with Sarah where they try to work out their relationship issues are pitched at entirely the wrong tone, stopping any comedic momentum the film may have built up with dialogue that is entirely too serious. Even worse, the film gets dragged even further into depressing territory with the tragic backstory of creepy neighbor Jeffrey late in the game.
Silent Night, Zombie Night isn’t really bad, but it is very frustrating. The filmmakers seemed to be at a loss when it comes to establishing a tone for the film. It’s way too serious and dour to be a real comedy, and it’s just a little too smartass to be taken as a straight-faced horror film. There are some solid practical effects and makeup, but also some truly embarrassing CGI blood effects. Some of the acting is pretty good, and some is genuinely horrible. It seems every positive aspect of Silent Night, Zombie Night is perfectly balanced with a negative counterpoint, and the end result is a middle of the road direct-to-disc zombie flick: not horrible, not great, and certainly not too memorable.
Simon, King of the Witches (1971)
Originally published on Film Monthly 3 July 2008
One of the great things about the advent of DVD is the number of small companies willing to dig up lost films and finally give them a new life on home video. Dark Sky Films has become one of the best of these DVD houses. Their “Drive-In Double Features” discs are a great way to experience some lost “classics,” as well as a wide variety of other features, such as the special edition of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and obscurities like The Gay Deceivers, a Vietnam-era comedy about two guys who dodge the draft by pretending to be a gay couple. Simon, King of the Witches is one of the most recent Dark Sky releases. The distributor has given the film its first home video release ever.
It’s 1971, and “male witch” Simon Sinestrari (Andrew Prine) finds himself living in a storm drain, hassled by police as a vagrant and scraping by selling magical charms and amulets. One night, Simon gets picked up by the cops and ends up sharing a cell with young hustler Troy (Lee J. Lambert), who introduces Simon to Hercules (Gerald York) and the wild parties Hercules hosts regularly at his mansion. Hercules makes Simon a centerpiece of his shindigs, and things start looking up for Simon until a doubting partygoer cheats Simon out of his payment for reading the man’s Tarot. Hercules wagers Simon that his powers can’t exact revenge, and Simon sets out to prove him wrong. Soon, the entire city is swept up in a major magical working that will either give Simon the powers of a god or destroy him in the process.
While marketed as a horror film, Simon is actually more of a straightforward hippie drama with magical elements. Andrew Prine is amazing as the title character, by turns charismatic, deadly serious about his craft and sometimes surprisingly vulnerable. Prine had a long career of television work before Simon and has worked steadily ever since, but it’s not hard to imagine that he might have been a bigger name if more people had seen his excellent performance here. The film uses minimal special effects, and relies mostly on the character of Simon to carry most of the fantastical elements, which is good since the special effects are primitive at best.
Simon, King of the Witches is an entertaining film and an interesting time capsule of very early 1970s culture. The hippies and the squares in the film mingle uneasily, most notably a pair of bumbling drug dealers who keep Hercules’s parties swinging while police officials play parlor games. It’s great that Dark Sky has given the film a proper release, and it’s worth tracking down for Andrew Prine’s performance alone. It might not be a lost genre-defining masterpiece, but it is a gem that deserves to be seen.
Sinister 2 (2015)
Originally published on Film Monthly 8 January 2016
Sequels are always a tricky thing to get right, and horror sequels have their own unique demands. Stray too far from the things that made the first film a success and people will be confused; stick too close to formula and they might get bored. It’s a tough balancing act that only gets more difficult as a franchise continues into multiple sequels. It’s no coincidence later sequels are so frequently inferior to the earlier entries in a franchise. Scott Derrickson’s Sinister proved to be a solid hit back in 2012, so a sequel is not a surprise. What is somewhat surprising is what a sharp drop-off in quality the franchise had made between its first and second entries. In relative horror franchise terms, this is like jumping from Hellraiser to Hellraiser: Inferno.
Courtney Collins (Shannyn Sossamon) and her twin sons Dylan (Robert Daniel Sloan) and Zach (Dartanian Sloan) are on the run from her abusive husband Clint (Lea Coco). They’ve holed up in a remote farmhouse, but Clint’s lackeys are on their trail and it’s just a matter of time before they have to move again. Meanwhile, Deputy So & So (James Ransone) has been fired from the police department and is now on a crusade to stop Bughuul (Nicholas King), the demonic entity that he encountered in the Oswalt house in the first film, from killing again. Mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts lead Ex-Deputy to the house where Courtney and the boys are hiding, which he plans to burn down. He’s surprised to find the house occupied, and he may already be too late. Zach has been having nightmares and visits from a boy named Milo (Lucas Jade Zumann) and other children who show Zach the home movies of how they killed their parents in service of the demon. His behavior becomes increasingly erratic and violent, and Dylan becomes jealous that Bughuul has chosen Zach over him. With Clint closing in and the threat of Bughuul looming, Ex-Deputy and Courtney have to act fast before one or the other destroys them all.
Like many horror sequels, Sinister 2 spends a lot of time delving into the history of Bughuul. This is somewhat frustrating, as a big part of what makes any good horror villain is the things about them which are unknown. The more the audience knows about the villain, the less frightening it is. What’s even more frustrating is the nature of the creature as described in the film opens the doors for any number of unique possibilities for the return of the monster, but the film settles for replicating the “home movie” approach from the first film instead of doing something different. Zach is really the main character of the movie this time around, and this focus on the kids is interesting but flawed. The Sloan brothers are solid as the Collins twins, but the other child actors playing the ghosts mostly overact obnoxiously. James Ransone is fine reprising his role, but it says a lot about his character that he didn’t even have a name in the first film. Screenwriters Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill would have been better off starting with a whole new cast of characters this time around and creating a more compelling lead character than using him to tie back to the first film.
Probably the biggest issue with Sinister 2 is that it’s so oppressively unpleasant that it feels much longer than it actually is. The first film had some comic relief thanks to Deputy So & So, but the subject matter here is considerably more bleak than the first time around. Ethan Hawke’s Ellison Oswalt may have been pulled into a web of supernatural evil, but at least he had a more or less intact family to interact with. The exhausted single mother and her traumatized kids at the center of Sinister 2, their violent bully of a father, and the relentless pursuit of a demon fond of jump scares makes the film a dour slog. By the time it reaches
its inevitable conclusion–which includes a character being hit by a truck that inexplicably causes him no physical distress at all–most audience members will have probably long since checked out. The best thing about Sinister 2 is its incongruously great score by tomandandy, a worthy follow-up to Christopher Young’s score from the first film. If you feel like you need to have any kind of opinion on Sinister 2, I’d suggest just buying the soundtrack.
The Sister-in-Law (1974)
Originally published on Criticplanet.org
The title The Sister-in-Law is a bit of a fake-out: there is a sister-in-law in the film, and although we do spend the first half-hour or so of the film watching her in the pool and/or naked, she’s not really the main character. Of course, The Biggest Asshole in the Entire World, which would be a much more appropriate title for the film, is perhaps not as commercial. So score another one for the Crown International Pictures marketing department, who no doubt made The Sister-in-Law look like a provocative thriller about seductive sister-in-law who makes trouble for a pair of already distant brothers, instead of a sort of generation-gap drama with mafia stuff thrown in for good measure.
After bumming around America for a while, Robert Strong (John Savage, who also performs the film’s soundtrack) returns home to find himself in the midst of a volatile situation. His brother Edward Strong (Will MacMillan), a former best-selling author, has moved out of his home and is living with his young mistress Deborah Holt (Meredith Baer). This leaves Edward’s wife Joanna (Anne Saxon) home all alone when Robert arrives, and soon the sexy intrigue promised by the film’s title seems inevitable. Joanna repeatedly appears nude in the early part of the film before the story takes a hard turn into a drama about the relationship between money-grubbing Edward and hippie Robert, leaving the sister-in-law of the title to fade completely into the scenery before the movie is half over.
Writer/director Joseph Ruben (who also directed Crown International’s The Pom-Pom Girls (1976), and went on to direct the original film version of The Stepfather (1987)) seems to think this older brother/younger brother conflict isn’t spicy enough, so he adds a crime element to the story that initially feels somewhat out of place. It seems Edward’s success went to his head and he spent all the money from his best-selling book, so now he makes deliveries for a local crime family. How exactly he went from making tons of money on a book to getting involved in this small-time criminal activity is never made clear. Edward is never shown doing drugs or doing anything else remotely illegal, and his only justification for it is that he needed the money. This leads a great bit of dialogue between Edward and Robert, in which Robert reasonably asks Edward why he didn’t just write another book. “What do you think I am,” Edward spits, “a machine?”
This leads us to the real strengths of The Sister-in-Law: overheated dialogue and a storyline that ends up being surprisingly prophetic. I don’t know if Edward is supposed to be a sort of intellectual anti-hero, but he comes off as a pompous bastard who says some genuinely bizarre things. He happily reminisces about how swimming in the public pool used to make his eyes burn, and he “never knew if it was from the chlorine… or from the piss!” Later, when the brothers finally have their “hippies and rich people are different” confrontation, Edward makes the stinging observation that Robert has “more shame over a dollar bill than you have about your own penis.” Will MacMillan really sells Edward as a completely amoral lout, and seems to be having a great time with his role.
I’m not going to spoil anything about the ending, but I will say that until the last ten minutes or so, The Sister-in-Law was hovering between a 3 and 4-star rating. Unlike Crown International’s Tomboy (1985), however, the ending of The Sister-in-Law pushes it up onto a whole different level. Even though The Sister-in-Law was released in 1974, the way it portrays the fate of the former hippie versus that of the greedy older brother seems like a clear prophecy of the transition out of the 70s and into the Reagan 80s. The final shot of the film basically confirms this concept, and gives the film a surprising weight that must have seemed unspeakably depressing at the time, although now it seems like the only appropriate ending.
Sixpack Annie (1975)
Originally published on Film Monthly 2 August 2012
The 1970s was a great decade for exploitation film, and virtually no subject was off limits to enterprising filmmakers looking to make a quick buck on the drive-in circuit. The big studios rarely dipped their toes into most exploitation subgenres until they had proven to be profitable for the little guys, and sometimes they kept their hands off entirely– Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS might have made some money for its producers, but the majors certainly weren’t in any rush to hop on that particular train. One exploitation genre that had been around for some time before being refined by H.G. Lewis and Russ Meyer’s 1960s hits such as Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) and Lorna (1965) is popularly known as “Hicksploitation” (or “Hixsploitation”).
Lewis and Meyer raised the profile of Hicksploitation by making consistently profitable films in that genre in the 60s, and exploitation legend Bethel Buckalew made nearly an entire career from it in the early 1970s with films such as Country Cuzzins (1970), The Pigkeeper’s Daughter (1972) and Tobacco Roody (1972). As usual, the major studios were late to the game: American International Pictures produced Sixpack Annie, which was picked up for release by MGM in 1975. It makes sense that the studio would take the chance on Sixpack Annie, which features plenty of exploitable content (most notably Miss USA 1972 Lindsay Bloom in the title role), but is much less outlandish than some of its down-and-dirty drive-in contemporaries.
Annie Bodine works at a diner owned by her Aunt Tess (Danna Hansen) and spends most of her time carousing with her best friend Mary Lou (Jana Bellan) or her boyfriend Bobby Joe (Bruce Boxleitner) and being chased by lovesick Sheriff Waters (Joe Higgins) and sleazy local Bustis (Larry Mahan). When banker Mr. Piker (Donald Elson) informs Aunt Tess and Annie that they need to come up with nearly six thousand dollars in a week to stop the bank from foreclosing on the diner, Annie decides to head to Miami and ask her sister Flora (Louisa Moritz) for the money. Or, failing that, finding a “sugar daddy” of her own to pay off Mr. Piker and save the diner.
Once Annie and Mary Lou reach Miami, though, they find that Flora has hardly “made it big”– she’s barely scraping by as a hooker with a clientele mostly made up of nervous out-of-town businessmen. Worse, Annie is averse to any “weird stuff,” and not being all that bright, she’s susceptible to being duped by guys pretending to be rich. Mary Lou gets a job at a bar where she’s inexplicably dressed as a rat (a Playboy Bunny-inspired rat, but still) and Annie takes advice from Flora and career drunk Jack Whittlestone (Richard Kennedy) while she searches for her “Sugar Daddy” to no avail. Still, it comes as little surprise when the girls return home for a convenient Deus Ex Moonshine Still finale that puts the Sheriff and the villainous banker in their place.
Sixpack Annie has plenty of the distinguishing marks of the Hicksploitation genre: beer, booze, bar fights, boobs, ridiculous accents and pickup trucks. The character of Annie herself is a pretty hilariously unappealing heroine for modern audiences. Not only is she a bit dim and pretty clearly an alcoholic, she’s ready to ditch her boyfriend for anybody who has the money to pay off the banker and save her Aunt’s diner (including the Sheriff!). This is to say nothing of Annie and Mary Lou’s casual homophobia– after picking up a couple of hitchhikers Mary Lou hopes will give them some “action,” the girls kick them out of the truck after it turns out they’re gay. “They must have some Yankee blood in ‘em,” observes Annie with some gravity. “Can you imagine a Southern boy acting like that?”
Needless to say, anyone who is easily offended will want to steer well clear of Sixpack Annie, or pretty much any Hicksploitation movie, really. However, as a look back on what sort of thing even the major studios would release in the 1970s, it’s a fascinating time capsule and potentially a serious guilty pleasure. And for exploitation fans, this new MGM Li
mited Edition Collection DVD is a no-brainer. Previously only available on VHS, this new transfer is presented in the correct widescreen aspect ratio, with bright colors and sharp detail. The DVD is completely bare bones, but it’s still well worth having the film in a version that looks and sounds this good. Score another one for the MGM Limited Edition Collection!
Ski School (1990)
Originally published on Film Monthly 26 May 2015
Olive Films has been making some interesting choices in films to distribute recently. Their new partnership with Slasher Video, for example, means they’ll be distributing some truly obscure shot-on-video horror films from the 80s and 90s. They have also been steadily releasing some films from that era that seemed unlikely candidates for Blu-ray like Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle and Arthur Hiller’s Teachers. While it’s great that so many films are making their way to the format, it’s also somewhat baffling when certain films get the high-def treatment. Like, for example, Ski School.
Dean Cameron stars in Ski School as Dave Marshak, a “folk hero” who can party all night and still be a competent competitive skier the next day. His rival Reid (Mark Thomas Miller) is determined to get Marshak and his whole crew kicked off the mountain and out of ski school forever, not just out of malice but to help cement a deal to sell the mountain to a new owner. When John (Tom Bresnahan) arrives at the resort to compete, Reid puts him on Marshak’s team, giving them a shot at winning it all. But Reid isn’t afraid to play dirty, and soon Marshak and his group of wacky misfits find they need to start taking this skiing stuff seriously. Or maybe not, if they can win over the mysterious Victoria (Ava Fabian). That would sure be a lot easier than winning.
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 63