It's a Carpenter Hush: SOLE SURVIVOR, IT FOLLOWS

I love the ominousness of October, the seasonal gloom wiping the world away with a deep HD black eraser, saving me for last, pale in the TV reflection. Hurrying like a napping sunbather woken by the first cool breeze of evening; relentless the tick-tock approach of Halloween, as if the entire month was rolled up into a cone, draining the hours like peanut M&Ms. Neighbors in the distance raking leaves take on a sinister shadowy shimmer in the dimming day and the black decorative window shutters of suburban houses seem like cartoon eyebrows fronting a devil's skull. House interiors become extra dark as increasingly early twilight tricks us into into not turning on the table lamps til after the deadly vapors have infiltrated. Pumpkins and wood panelling, orange shag rug and black witch hats, talking low and quiet to as not wake the sleeping behemoth in the basement: I love when eerie horror movies capture all that. If they can find the ambiguity in autumn leaves swirling around under gnarled bare trunks in the Magic Hour +1, I am theirs. So few movies get that feeling right, that mood of giddy doom, the inexorable looming.

Halloween (watching The Thing)

It Follows (watching Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women)
Note: black and white TV atop dead floor console -like we had in the early 80s

Carpenter's original Halloween (1978) most assuredly captured it, maybe even defined it, the uncanny suburban home familiarity of being creeped out alone in the house with just a distracted babysitter who tries but can't keep the nervous trill out of her voice when you all hear a strange noise upstairs. Even though it's probably nothing, she'll... take the fire poker with her before she goes up to --- no on second thought she won't go upstairs. She's sure it was nothing. The kids watching old horror movies on TV more for comfort and protection from bigger scares, like a fading camp fire keeping the wolves at bay.

SOLE SURVIVOR 

(1983) Dir. Thom Eberhardt

***1/2

In the annals of the modern horror/sci fi genre auteurs there are recognizable names (Argento, Craven, Carpenter), up and comers (West, Fessenden, Wingard) and then... well... no one. But with DVD making it impossible for them to fully disappear, also-ran auteurs--those who only made one or two genius films, are ready to be exhumed and dusted: Herk Harvey and his unconscious poetics (Carnival of Souls); Michael Almereyda's double mid-90s dip into reflexive homage (The Eternal, Nadja); and Thom Eberhardt, who made two 80s sleepers that have stood the test of time: 1984's Night of the Comet, and q 1983 bit of crafty low budget bit of Final Destination-in theme / Fog in moody Carpenter vibe ominousness called Sole Survivor.  

After a schismatic opening with some psychic TV actress (Caren Larkey, who also co-produced) on the phone trying to find out about a plane crash she just dreamt of, we have the heroine Denise or "Dee Dee" (Anita Skinner) sitting in her plan passenger seat (in the upright position) amidst the best looking plane wreckage a low budget film allows. The sole survivor of a terrible plane crash, she's lucky to be alive, the handsome young doctor assures her. But something's not right and beginning with her release from the hospital the recently dead seem to be following her around, or maybe it's that she's mixing alcohol with her discontinued antidepressants.

ask not for whom, kitty-kitty

The dead are moodily presented, but all in all it's more the clever masterful use of Carpenter-esque momentum, 70s sexual casualness and the sense of being alone in a world slowly disappearing around you as night falls, that works to make it such a precious October find. Weird shots of Denise's empty kitchen, living room, stairs, 70s faux exposed brick and panelling and deep red walls, only the cat's yes and tail moving (left), but something there - just by seeing it, we're bringing some 'seer' into the house.

What I like too is the Hawksian pro-feminist assertiveness in the warm romantic exposition with her cute doctor, Brian (Kurt Johnson) who worries she's suffering from 'survivor's syndrome', or at least that's his excuse to call her up. In a cool little scene we see their back and forth phone conversation, the way she moves to the bedroom phone to lie down, canary-swallowing grin on her face, as she prepares to focus in on her seductive phone stratagem. She's confident and in charge, unafraid to tell the man she's seducing "I'm nine months older than you!" Alternating shots of her in bed on the phone and he at his kitchen making sauce or something are very well done. And then the camera becomes like that friend who, once they sense their pal has it in the bag, as it were, gives them a quiet congratulatory smile and heads downstairs to get a drink or something.

But the thing is there's nobody there, and the stillness is broken only by the roving eyes of the pink cat clock.

It Follows (my clock radio at middle right)

DeDee also has the exact 70s clock radio I had as a kid (from which I listened to The Shadow and Suspense reruns every night on local PBS radio) and which is also in It Follows. A dripping faucet, and a pre-Twin Peaks realization that nothing is more profoundly creepy than a traffic light in the dead of night, still changing from green to yellow to red, even though there are no cars in sight. (Was that poetry?) During the long nights, the ominousness of the action shuffles back and forth between Denise's house and Cristy's (Robin Davidson) house next door --where Deedee presumably babysat Cristy when a lot younger and now they're just kind of neighbor/pals.

 Both houses are great relics of the 70s style, very cozy, with all the exposed faux stone and dark wood panelling, the deep reds and dark oranges shag carpets and walls offsetting Denise's red hair and blue vein pale skin look. I can relate to hanging out with younger people; going over and drinking Cristy's parents' booze and falling asleep on their couch while she sneaks off to a party, because you're too squirrelly to be home alone -- another uniquely real relationship in this quietly amazing low budget little film. We never actually see either of Cristy's parents, either, another eerie similarity with our next film.

As with Carpenter's best early work, it's all very Howard Hawks right down to two lines of dialogue lifted wholesale (along with her hip beret) from To Have and Have Not: "it's even better when you help" and later Cristy's "what are you trying to do, guess her weight?" at a strip poker game (with a special early appearance by future scream queen Brinke Stevens)--indicating the two may have seen the film together one night earlier. The strip poker game isn't in It Follows or Carnival of Souls, the two films that sort if act as intertextual timeline bookends to this one (more so than, say Final Destination) but that they follow similar courses illustrates the potency of the pattern, one borne I'm sure in old horror pulp stories or Twilight Zone style twists, though this in its elemental mix-and-match has something you won't see anywhere else, an undead gun usage.

"read the label - maybe you'll believe me then"

Hey, it doesn't have to break new ground, as long as it does what it does with a certain amount of atmosphere and taste -- big rarities in horror films of any time frame, let alone the early 80s. Dee-Dee and Brian's budding pair bonding and her cool Cristy relationship are both very well etched in a very short time.  And with all that evocative 70s dusky decor and the hushed October magic hour mood, as far as I'm concerned the film doesn't even need to go anywhere to become one of my favorite 80s horror movie discoveries. There might be Xmas trees lurking in the corners of rooms but hey-it's California so it doesn't matter--there's an autumnal vibe that makes each formed or renewed bond, each drink and playful touch feel precious with fading warmth, fires all the warmer and brighter for the encroaching darkness.

And above all what makes this such a gem is the confident of Eberhardt's vision. Hindsight is everything, and between this and Night of the Comet he could surely have been a horror auteur like Carpenter or Stuart Gordon if he cared to.

Instead... well, he made Captain Ron. 

Eddie was a good man on a boat once.

IT FOLLOWS
(2015) Dir. David Robert Mitchell

****

I used to wonder why filmmakers didn't do more adapting from the golden book of universal childhood nightmares -- the ones we all remember but usually move past once we learn the 'turn and face your fear rather than trying to run' trick. Until then, the terrible powerlessness we feel as young asleep post-infants, bodies still hungering for the sense of safety we used to feel sleeping with our parents, translating into nightmares of trying to escape relentlessly approaching figures only we could see -- the adults around us ignoring our pleas for help, like they could see neither us nor our pursuer;  stuck in a slow motion drag as we try to run away, the monster slowly advancing. For me it was an old woman, evil eyes, hunched over and staring right at me and smiling laughing but making no sound and extending her hands towards me as she tottered closer, not unlike a clothed version of the crone in The Shining's room 237.

Such an image, that slowly pursuing creature is at the core of horror, yet very seldom used to the full uncanny shiver extent we find in It Follows. In the Universal days there was the Mummy--not the Karloff original (we never saw him shamble in his wrappings), but the Chaney sequels where he stayed in his bandages and lumbered slowly but relentlessly forward, mute and easily outpaced, yet--like the tortoise vs. the hare, bound to catch up to you through sheer relentless, unstoppable, methodical forward shambling. The 'Shape' as Michael Myers was billed in Carpenter's Halloween, was this nightmare figure's ultimate modern expression... until now. Even the immortal Michael Myers is outgunned for raw uncanny primordial dread by the 'thing' in It Follows. For this and countless other reasons, I might go on a limb and say It Follows is the greatest horror movie ever made, certainly one of my top ten favorites if not the favorite (we'll have to see how it ages over time). It is beautiful to look at, eloquent, sweet, and true even as it floats deep into a reverie that fully captures the mortal dread that sexual awakening brings with it like an inescapable shadow. Set in a middle class suburbia outside abandoned Detroit. It's a world where the sweet shyness of late afternoon plummets into the sweet nighttime of adulthood's sexual jolts; in a flash we're exposed to the evil sickening core of life, the eternal footman's snicker like a 'test positive for STD' report; and a closed community center pool in a rain storm conjures Corman Poe mattes.

I'll forgive Mitchell's film any dream logic inconsistency for here is a movie that distills the purity of October, of teenage angst, the side effects of seasonal change, of the inevitability of not just old age and death, the husk of a dead city after even the crime has gone, the horror of public nudity and the oblivious crowd.  Alone amongst all horror filmmakers (Kubrick, Polanski aside), Mitchell realizes the shocking power of old people in hospital gowns, and of nudity--as terrifying as anything ever conceived of by any modern horror auteur.

“I am Lazarus, come from the dead..."

One of the insidious aspects of this killer is its ability to assume the shape of its past victims: thus we see, in prime STD warning film style, the way unprotected sex means exposure to the germs of a whole vast capillary system of past lovers of lovers, stretching back to now elderly old lechers. This is the unspoken question hovering over the nudity we see too, implies some kind of past victim catalog as well as of lover, the curse's sexual history and possible origin, like the drowned obscene often naked forms the thing adopts, moms with breasts exposed, sopping wet girls peeing themselves, old men on roofs, (did some skeevy carrier temporarily shed the stalker by balling his comatose mom's hospital roommate?). The idea that only the victim can see these images, evokes the uncanny suburban nudity of Eric Fischl's paintings (below), wherein everyday suburban Americana is rendered instantaneously perverse, hostile, uncanny. 

This uncanny element mirrors too way American auto manufacturing has been abandoned and left to wither where it fell like a dead tree, and the way an enterprising Michigan filmmaker like Mitchell might utilize the city's abandoned look as effectively as the Italian neo-realists used the bombed-out Roman streets in the late 40s. Some maybe nods to modern J-Horror with darkened eyes and hissing and people getting yanked off their feet aren't as successful (too obvious). But with its subtly disturbing scenes of sexual display, the sick flash of what Todd McGowan might call the traumatic real, or at any rate, the signifier of the gaze, we have something truly worthy of the Freudian defintion of uncanny. In itself alone, that's more precious than gold.

HOW "THE FANTASY SCREEN BREAKS DOWN"

Blue Velvet (naked figure middle left background) / compare w/below from It Follows

"[Dorothy in Blue Velvet] seems to appear out of thin air, appearing at first as indecipherable blot that no one--including the spectator--initially notices. When the other characters do notice, they become completely disoriented. Her intrusion into the fantasmatic realm rips apart the fantasy structure.... Her body has no place in the fantasmatic public world, and the fantasy screen breaks down... She doesn't fit in the picture, which is why we become so uncomfortable watching her naked body in the middle of a suburban neighborhood" (McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch, p. 106-7)

It Follows

The Shining (my infinite trans-time-space collage version)

Eric Fischl - Birth of Love (2nd Version)

But there are other rare riches here too: I love how the kids choke slightly when they talk, confident in themselves, but still coltish with their adult voices, as if trying to reign and shape some kind of limitless volume. I relate hugely. These kids are on the sweet side of teenagerdom, the not the strident grating character played by PJ Soles (not that she's not great and perfect for the film and the era) in Halloween or the general volume of obnoxious waggery in a film like Scream. Rather is an awareness of the gorgeous magic that happens when a cute girl everyone kind of crushes on isn't a bitch, but is also nice, like Jay (Maika Monroe) is to little sister Kelly (Lili Serpe) and her bookish pals Annie (Bailey Spry) and Paul (Kier Gilchrist). It's that sweetness that makes it understandable they all want to help her, for when pretty girls who are nice to their little sister and her friends and the other kids in the neighborhood, the result is like a reassuring lantern in the darkness, a Guinevere to unite Camelot, evoking the bond between Curtis and her babysitting charges in Halloween; Curtis and Tom Atkins in The Fog; or Mike and older brother Jody and pal Reggie in Phantasm) (and most recently in my docket, Dee Dee and her neighbor in Sole Survivor -above)

A key aspect too, in my mind, is the use of old black-and-white horror films on local TV as a kind of modern equivalent to a protective fire. Those of us who were kids in the 70s certainly remember staying up all night watching old black and white films on local TV (I recognized the two films Paul has on: Killers from Space and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women), and how it paradoxically lessened our fear, and it's the familiarity of the set-up that makes the use of TV monster movies so unforgettable and meta-creepy real in Halloween and (more overtly) Scream. 

Jay's constantly exposed cute legs represent a more socially acceptable form of the grotesque nudity of the above; marking the semi-magical/semi-horrific transference point--as does the film as a whole--where childhood innocence gives way to the disturbing real of adult sexuality.

Mike Gioulakis' beautiful cinematography bathes each shot in amniotic swimming pool light turquoise and early two-strip Technicolor pinks. Disasterpiece's great retro synth score pulses with amniotic analog electronic music. God it's so good. Excuse me while I have a quick rant about how much I hate Keith Emerson:

God, let there be no more orchestra scores for retro horror movies, and let first and foremost  Keith Emerson's shitty score for Suspiria follow-up Inferno stand as a warninf that busier big name musicians don't always have the same genius as more balls-to-the-wall raw players (like Goblin). Fuck Emerson, man. And fuck classically trained wankers trying to shoehorn their master's thesis into every stab of the knife. It's like if some music theorist said "hey everything's great about Halloween  except the score, why not swap it out with some grand concert piano and a busy bunch of jazzy nonsense from, say, Howard Shore?" Or Kubrick got rid of Wendy Carlos' Shining score and replaced it with some micro-managerial John Williams orchestral pomp and swirling--self-satisfied they'll be incorporated into Oscar medleys for decades to come--melodies that seem to celebrate our every emotion like we're goddamned George Washington being led by the nose through the Delaware. 

Instead of that hack mickey mouse shiite, Richard Vreeland's AKA Disasterpiece's electronic score both evokes its dream era (70s) and looks forward and into the moment to become true myth, conjuring primordial nostalgic aches for moments of dream longing-first crush-reverie so intertwined with pop culture it would be foolish to separate them from our 'actual' memories.

For me I've seen It Follows thrice already. I listen to the soundtrack nonstop while walking my Brooklyn streets, and it always seems like someone's following me; it's instant paranoia but of the delicious October kind. It's the rosy glow of nostalgia, of remembering the way safety in a group allows indulging in ominous hushed dread, campfire ghost stories, we might avoid were we alone. Thus like the dialogue of Hawks' To Have and Have Not figures in Sole Survivor, so too the esprit de corps of Hawks' The Thing plays out in It Follows. And so it is that America has finally produced a horror film it can be proud of. Amidst the myriad worthless zombie sieges, found footage asylum investigations, and torture/abduction (even Carpenter's last film fits that bill to an extent), here at last is the real deal, a thing of real beauty and urban legend potency. So a quick prayer: Mr. Mitchell, please become our new Carpenter and stay in the genre and don't go anywhere.

Lastly, forget about Ryan Murphy-crowned final girls and strident scream queens like the new Sarah Michelle Gellar, Emma Roberts. Let the lamplighter in the Detroit dark affix his beam: Maika Monroe is the Empress of October.

From top: It Follows, Halloween -- Note odd camera placement - neither in the street or on the sidewalk, the 'impossible' POV of someone standing near the curb, neither close enough to the actors that the POV becomes 'invisible' or friendly --neither hiding from a distance like other shots, nore 'with' the actors like a Hawks shot. It's the POV of eerie dissipation - as if it could cohere into a figure and rush onto the sidewalk and attack the person as they pass, but is, at the moment, disincarnate. 

See also: A Clockwork Darkness: Subjectivity, Hawks, and Halloween

October Capsules: OCULUS, SHIVERS, DETENTION, HOWLING, MIMIC 2: HARDSHELL

OCULUS 

(2013)  Dir. Mike Flanagan
***1/2

A brother and sister reunite at the house where, as kids, they watched their dad and mom lose their shit, thanks to a haunted mirror. Now they've returned to the empty house to sort that mirror's shit right out. To prove it;s haunted, sister's got the whole joint wired for sound; cameras are set up and timers are set to keep the siblings from drifting out of reality, because the mirror has a habit of causing hallucinations, flashbacks, and homicidal insanity if there's no one or thing to jar you out of it.  The younger brother, having been in an institution ever since 'what happened' to them as kids, explains away the happenings as stress-born cover memories, to which his his sister says "they really did a number on you in there, didn't they?" And if nothing else, it's pretty awesome to hear rote psychiatric skepticism blasted open in such a direct and intelligent manner. With great creeping camerawork that services the slow-ride suspense instead of just the usual 'sudden' shocking and mickey mouse telgraphy, this is one spooky, cool film, the best since last year's THE CONJURING. Turns out you don't need a big empty hotel in Colorado to convey the ease with a sensitive family can dissolve into cabin fever psychoses, you just need a big spooky mirror that can distort reality. And when the children in the flashback even begin to notice their future selves watching them like ghosts from the future, and the horrific encounters in both past and present reach a fever peak, you know OCULUS is onto something genuinely new and creepy. Haunted house 'past crimes' have never seemed more immediate; the idea of four walls holding in psychic trauma and malevolent forces seems palpable, as if the image on a videocassette has left the tape, shimmied back along the spindle and is now and watching itself in reverse order.

Director Flanagan also avoids the whole 'hallucination-or-was-it?' schtick, delivering some pure monster moments along with the madness, effectively (and correctly) illuminating the futility of ever knowing what's real even when evil spirits aren't fucking with you. DR. WHO fans will appreciate seeing 'companion' Karen Gilan stars the older version and Annalise Baso as younger is harrowingly raw and viivd -her cute little redhead alien face and orange hair are perfectly lit and she could teach a master class on showing every step involved in channeling terror into adrenalin-spiked courage (you can feel every turn of her courage being screwed to a sticking place). Heartbreaking, exciting, and genuinely spooky all at once, OCULUS gave me a literal spine tingle. And it doesn't need a dram of cheap shocks or torture porn trauma to get there. Filmed, for some ignoble reason, in Alabama.

SHIVERS 
(1975) dir. David Cronenberg

***

This weird first Cronenberg feature hasn't been available on DVD for awhile, but it's been on both Netflix and Amazon streaming recently and mustn't be missed, despite its cheap, grimy look. Far more disturbing than an outbreak of flesh eating zombies (which are too abstract - very few people think about cannibalism all day at work), is a contagious parasite that delivers inhibition-shredding insanity that converts the infected almost instantly into lewd sex-crazed maniacs. It's like if someone spiked the water supply with incredibly high levels of MDMA so everyone who had even a sip went crazy and started rubbing up on every passing person, be they family members or complete strangers. Not just pretty people in their 20s-30s, but the elderly, 'normal' types, and even children, the bulk of the real world we see (and are seen) by every day.

It's not MDMA (or ecstasy) in this film - that drug didn't even exist in 1975-  but an ugly free-roaming parasite that looks like an uncircumcised kidney, created by a doctor who wanted to turn the world into one large orgy. Taking to heart that (beloved of Cronenberg) med school adage that sex is the invention of a very clever STD, this parasite pays off in flooding the host's brain with inhibition lowering / libido elevating / clothes shredding / wife alienating insanity. Since it's breeding by traveling between sexual partners and it has a whole vast modern Montreal apartment high-rise to roam around in (each with a mail slot on the door), people can bedroom hop around without ever stepping outside. The eventual habit of everyone to run up and down the narrow halls in a big groping pack, knocking on random doors and taking over and turning on those who answer the door, or coming onto strays down in the laundry room or the foyer, reminds me a lot of my when someone would show up with a bunch of acid, ecstasy (called 'x' in those days) or shrooms to sell in my old dorm of Flint Hall in Syracuse, circa 1985. One well-stocked visitor could reduce the whole building to a mass of writhing, breathing, groping arms and tentacles. With no one having a car, or even a parking spot, we could roam the vast hallways like it was all one big crazy open house, everyone's door open and different drugs or weird sites in each room. As we say in AA, I really related.

Spiked with livid, funny gross outs as the kidney things hop from mouth to-locked-in-willing-or-unwilling mouths, the film's a 'careful what you wish for' example of 70s singles swinging rather too successfully. It takes a minute to get started, but once the two doctors get on the scene, and Lynn Lowry shows up as the nurse (Lynn, you rock eternal!), and a thing crawls up Barbara Steele in the bathtub, well, things get great, I mean, Romero's CRAZIES-level great, which came out two years before SHIVERS and it's a film I think Cronenberg acknowledges as an inspiration by casting Lowry. Eventually the paltry budget and sometimes harsh lighting even work to the film's advantage: the performances are deceptively brilliant, more and more so as the circumscribed roles are shed to reveal the true chthonic uncivilized wild savages we all are generally only in our deepest subconscious. And Cronenberg really gets what it's like to be inside 'the hot zone' of an outbreak, where just getting to a phone across the hall can take hours as one interruption and calamity builds on the next. Eventually the paltry budget and harsh lights even work to the film's advantage, giving it a flat 16mm instructional film feel (it really should be shown in every high school health class - teen pregnancy would drop off to zero).

There's only a few familiar faces in the cast, but the two doctors (Paul Hampton and Joe Silver) are cool--you believe they really are doctors (and admire the way the Hampton just shoots people and beats them to death with a crowbar) and the scene were Steele and the emotionally overwhelmed wife (Susan Petrie) of the giant-lipped patient zero+1 (Allan Kolman -- a kind of a Sid Haig meets Jamie Gillis, i.e. perfect casting) hook up may curl your toes as it did mine. Other atrocities include incest, kids being led on leashes (a nod to that memorably disturbing shot in Go Ask Alice?), elevator groping, rapes, terrible catering, homosexuality, all sorts of crazy orgy scenes and an eventual indoor pool party that would shock Mae West. A real trendsetter, it made a lot of bread in the US under AIP as They Came From Within. And cinema as we know it would never be the same. If any film should be remade, and probably never will be, this is it. As Chris Rodley put it

"One experiences a tremulous sensation that suggests one might have reached the end of the unconscious. There it seems to be, thrown up on the screen in all its perverse and truly repulsive splendour, unmasked and unashamed." (40)

DETENTION

 (2011) Dir. Jospeh Kahn

***

Sharp wit and slashing rejoinders are not dead in this post-modern high school deconstruction comedy for the 'Twitter generation.' This hybrid of CLUELESS and SCREAM 2 proves itself the SCARY MOVIE for the smarter kids, zipping by in layers too fast for a single viewing (though in presuming repeat viewings it perhaps presumes too much). The presence of diminutive HUNGER GAMES "hunk" Josh Hutcherson should lure enough girls to at least give it a few hits, though, and tomboy Shanley Caswell is refreshingly wry as the 'second biggest loser at Grizzly High' with whom Josh has a long shared connection. But now she's upset that he's going out with the alpha hot chick Ione (Spencer Locke), angering her ex-boyfriend the big dumb jock Billy (Parker Bagley), who wants to fight Hutcherson but keeps erupting into FLY-like symptoms. See, he touched a meteorite as a child and spent most of his elementary school life with his hand in a television. You heard me!

I can see Godard and Antonioni loving this movie, especially the scene where the kids watch a bootleg copy of CINDERHELLA 4 while in detention to see how to survive their situation, resulting in the best screen-within-screen infinite chronosynclastic infindibulum meltdown since SPACEBALLS. Stunt casting includes Dane Cook as a dickhead principal and... no one else, but there's a time-traveling bear mascot and enough cheerleaders to make this a bizarro sister to the other semi-self aware Netflix high school horror comedy, Lucky McKee's ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE, and enough trans-dimensional portal usage to make it the callow tweaker cousin to JOHN DIES AT THE END. Writer/director Joseph Kahn's previous feature was 2004's TORQUE which I also liked a lot for its gonzo over-the-top deadpan in-on-its-own-joke dumb comic product tie-in momentum.

MIMIC 2: HARDSHELL
 (2001) Dir.  Jean de Segonzac
***

Most direct-to-video sequels aren't worth a damn, but here's one with a cute redheaded badass high school etymology teacher (Alix Koromzay) navigating treacherous urban streets and fending off insect suitors by using sewing scissors as mandible talons to rend their exoskeletons in twain. Koromzay clearly decided to treat this like A-list material and the result is a great example of a director and star using producer indifference to wiggle past the patriarchal groupthink that sinks so many sequels before they start. Instead, Koromzay goes all out in depicting a super strong woman still so sexy she has a whole coterie of devoted, smitten inner city students with whom to hole up in the high school while giant insect mimics hunt them and a cabal of governmental agents seal off the building with plastic tarps. So what if there's a smudge of direct-to-video sequel cheapness? It's the ideal third or fourth entry of any all-night horror binge, one where your defenses are down and your pheromones are at peak between-shower pungency.

THE HOWLING 

(1981) Director: Joe Dante
***1/2

For my money this is the best lycanthrope study since WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1934), the one with Henry Hull and Warner Oland fighting over a Tibetan flower, not the one with David Naughton arguing with a decomposing Griffin Dunne in a Piccadilly cinema. Maybe I just don't care much for werewolves that get hung up on the letter of the law, like Landis' AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, which came out the same year as HOWLING and there was much to-do in the press at the time about which make-up artist did the better transformation. Rick Baker is a genius, sure, but he and Landis makes Naughton's transformation unbearably agonizing, the moon inescapable, the beast itself a real wolf puppet on all fours--he takes it all way too literally. Joe Dante and Rob Bottin on the other hand know it's a goddamn metaphor so don't get hung up on the 'real' parameters. The HOWLING wolves move way beyond such hang ups, looming tall like monster gargoyles. Following in the shoes of Dante's patron saint, Roger Corman, HOWLING taps into the lupine side of 1970s sexual swinger and EST-ish energy, it's funny and scary and trashy and witty all at once, and then adds De Palma meta-refraction and audio mimesis procedural delirium, Carpenter ominousness, Cronenbergian clinical immediacy, and a plethora of great bit roles by folks like Dick Miller, John Sayles, Kenneth Tobey, Kevin McCarthy, John Carradine, Slim Pickens Forrest Ackerman, and Corman himself (below, waiting for the phone).

The story grabs you from the start: pre-E.T. Dee Wallace smoldering gamely as a TV reporter / newswoman heading off to interview a possible serial killer at a downtown SF adult book store while her crew monitors her every move worriedly from the warm safety of the station, or tries to--but then they lose her signal. Some bad shit goes down before it's over and she ends up with amnesia prompting a pop culture therapist (Patrick Macnee) to send her to 'the Colony,' his Northern California Pacific beachfront encounter group, where patients/residents make beach bonfires and grill lots of meat. A combination of sinister swinging couples and shady locals, including John Carradine howls at the moon and Elizabeth Brooks is a major smokin' badass as the wolf mother elemental nymphomaniac who comes onto Dee's mustachioed husband (Dennis Dugan) after he's separated from his hunting party. You may find yourself questioning your loyalty to the non-lycanthropic human race when she cooks Dugan's shot rabbit. Later they get it on by the bonfire, the powers of desire and orgasm shifting and churning their inner wolves while Dee Wallace nightmares it up alone in their cabin.

Lifelong Dante fans are born in these weird moments, especially once the entwined lovers switch to animation.

Like Cronenberg's films of the same era, the sex and the horror entwine in deep Jungian-Freudian knots, and as I said, these werewolves aren't running on all fours or just a guy with some fur --they're freaking big, vicious, unstoppable killers who can regrow limbs. They're more like "skin-walkers" than than the traditional full moon brand, and far more interesting, and even scarier despite LONDON's smoother snout grow and superior overall make-up (HOWLING uses one too many inflatable gas bags under cracked latex--perils of HD).  But instead of all the dated too-on-the-nose "Moon" pop songs, HOWLING rocks a great moody Pino Donaggio score, almost none of the usual trite 'dismissal of the supernatural as poppycock' stuff, and no sudden unsatisfying ending or Peter Grant-style dream sequences. Instead there's prodigious use of the gorgeous misty old growth forest, Northern California coastline, and great womanly rapport between Dee Wallace and fellow Colony guest Margie Impert (and in the city, Belinda Belaski as her producer/assistant), the kind of maturely sexy sisterly rapport that just doesn't seem to exist in movies anymore, not since Mary Tyler Moore ended... for all of us. 

And--despite LONDON igniting my then-crush on Jenny Agutter--HOWLING is sexier. Brooks is like the creepy older sister of GIA-era Angelina Jolie, proving that--in late 70s/early 80s horror films--(unprotected) monster sex with a genuinely creepy carnivorous wolf lady could still be guilt-free. And even E.T's future mom Wallace displays a great carnal immediacy that enhances rather than detracts from her courageous intellect, non-bitchy authority, and (unfortunately poodle-like) nose for news. If she had more roles like this in horror--not mothers but sexually experienced competent professionals of the 70s encounter group liberated vein--she'd be a genre favorite unrivaled. If only these types of films kept on being made, and the cultural zeitgeist that spawned them still in action. But life goes on, or facsimile thereof. Even now... for all of us. Cut to commercial.