Remember when Facebook used to be enjoyable? You’d log in, and your feed would be nothing but what your friends had posted in real time and in chronological order. These days, it’s nothing but ads, viral posts from people you don’t know, and stuff from groups you don’t belong to. Every once in a while you’ll see something from an actual friend, but it’s usually a post from two weeks ago.
I hate it, but yeah, I have to admit I still log in. I look at Facebook on my phone when I’m at the doctor’s office, or waiting on my wife, or just bored before bed. I’ve started following lots of different groups that spark even the smallest amount of my interest. I figure the more stuff I follow, the more likely I am to get at least some of it in my feed. That way, it is at least something I’m interested in instead of something I’m not.
It has mostly worked. My feed is now filled with movies and music posts. I still don’t see my friends much, but at least I’m not throwing my phone across the room like before. A lot of my movie groups just post stills from different films. Today I saw some stills from this film, something I’d never heard of before.
But it looked interesting. Well, it looked like a cheesy early 1980s horror film, but there was some nice blocking in those stills and good lighting. But mostly I was interested in it because it starred John Cassavetes. He, of course, was a titan of independent cinema in the 1970s. He directed award-winning films that are beloved by critics and cinephiles. He starred in movies like Rosemary’s Baby, The Dirty Dozen, and The Killers. So, what was he doing in this thing?
I don’t really know the answer to that question. My guess is he needed the money. He often financed his own films, so presumably he used the paycheck from this film to make something he was really interested in.
Wikipedia notes that it was financed through some sort of Canadian tax shelter, so the whole endeavor seems to have been about money. They did hire real filmmakers, though. Besides Cassavetes, you have John Ireland and lots of other working actors, and it was directed by John Hough, who made films like Twins of Evil and Escape From Witch Mountain.
It was based on a book and had a complete screenplay by Sandor Stern, but they say Cassavetes rewrote something like 80 percent of it, causing Stern to remove his name from the picture. You can feel Cassavetes’ hand in the script. You can see where he was trying to make it a more human picture, trying to give his character some real depth. But you can also see where the final cut was out of his hands, and the director and likely the producers/money men pushed it into more provocative territory.
As such, the script feels very truncated, and there are numerous dropped threads. It never quite decides whether it wants to be a mystery, a supernatural thriller, or a slasher. Still, I quite liked it.
It begins like the low-budget horror that it is, with a young woman in a bikini bathing by a quarry pond. She jokes around with her boyfriend, and then he’s brutally murdered, and she’s horrendously raped. At the same time, Tim Galen (Duncan McIntosh) experiences a terrible nightmare where a woman is tortured by a mysterious figure.
Dr. Sam Cordell (Cassavetes) is the small town’s surgeon and head doctor. He’s prone to talking about things like dry intercourse, ruptured uteruses, and the massive amounts of sperm the rapist is leaving behind. Yeah, the dialogue seems to have been improvised by Cassavetes and is very weird.
More rapes and more murders occur. Some of these are staged quite well. There is one murder inside a gothic museum that is particularly well done. Cordell does most of the investigating. I love it when movies have doctors, or journalists, or anyone who isn’t the actual police do murder investigations. There are cops, but the local sheriff tends to bring Cordell into the crime scenes and lets him ask lots of questions.
There is also a journalist/love interest. Laura Kincaid (Kerrie Keane) is new to town, and she doesn’t like it much. She does love journalism, though, and she used some inheritance money to buy the local paper. She’s also invited into crime scenes and the like. Cordell also has a daughter, Jenny (Erin Noble), who is dating Tim.
There is a slight inclination toward incest between Jenny and her father. He’s jealous of Tim. In an early scene, he walks upstairs, and Jenny has left the bathroom door open while she showers. Later, she’ll give him a kiss that is slightly more than a peck. But the film doesn’t really do anything with this; it’s just weirdly hinted at. Similarly, Sam has a backstory about a dead wife and how he basically ignored Jenny when he remarried a much younger woman. But then that whole thread is dropped.
It rushes toward its conclusion in the last fifteen minutes, picking up some goofy supernatural pieces. I’m making it sound terrible, but it’s not that bad. Cassavetes gives it some grounding, and he really does seem to be trying hard. Hough’s direction is also quite good. So, it is a very watchable early 1980s horror film, but also plenty dumb and a bit goofy.
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