Calling Home for the Holidays: BLACK CHRISTMAS

Well, kids, it’s time for my favorite annual media stunt.  Yes, every December 25^th, TBS plays a 24 hour loop of the Bob Clark holiday classic, BLACK CHRISTMAS.  I don’t tune in, I have the movie on Blu Ray, and who watches cable anymore, but I appreciate the gesture.  So, if they can devote an entire day to the groundbreaking 1974 film, I can at least devote a blog post to it.

The Capsule:

It’s Christmas break at a small town Canadian university, and the sorority house is empty aside from a few stragglers, like frumpy housemother, Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman), acerbic tongued lush, Barb (Margo Kidder), drowsy Phyllis (Andrea Martin), and no-nonsense Jess (Olivia Hussey).  Oh, and Billy, the psychotic prank phone caller who has moved into the attic, unbeknownst to anyone except the cat.  While Jess is busy ending her relationship with her remarkably incompatible boyfriend, Peter (Keir Dullea), and everyone else is distracted by a missing girl, Billy slowly makes additions to the corpses decorating his hiding spot.  By the time dogged cop Lt. Fuller (John Saxon) puts things together, will there be anyone left to warn that the calls are coming from inside the house?

Even though BLACK CHRISTMAS is not as well known as the big franchise names of the ‘80s it's largely thought of as the first slasher. It predates HALLOWEEN by four years. Yes, PSYCHO and PEEPING TOM both came before it, but though they share several elements, neither film fully embraces the kind of disreputable fun that the subgenre is known for.   

Like the other horror milestone released the same year, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, BLACK CHRISTMAS is surprisingly light on the red stuff, but can be incredibly disturbing none the less.  This is mostly thanks to the shadowy killer, Billy, or more specifically, his voice.  Billy’s giggling, horrendously obscene phone calls contain some of the most unsettling dialogue ever written, but the delivery seals the deal.  I don’t think I have ever heard a voice that sounds as authentically insane as his (or theirs, as the vocal work was a mix of actor Nick Mancuso, Ann Sweeny, and Clark himself). 

The other element that makes Billy such an effective villain is his mystery.  Unlike most horror movies prior or since, Billy just shows up with zero fanfare.  There are no news reports of an escaped mental patient, no desperate doctor warning the police to be on the lookout, no forewarning whatsoever.  If he had anything to do with the dead girl found in the park halfway through the movie, no one makes the connection.  The only backstory we get comes from Billy himself, a ghastly bit of family drama revealed in fragments—and through separate personas—during his calls.  Billy is not what we’d call a reliable narrator, so there is no telling how much, if any, of it is true.  Masks would become a prominent feature of slashers to come, but Billy takes it a step farther.  We are shown no face, disguised, disfigured, or otherwise, only an eye through a crack in the door.  He could be anyone.  He might be lurking in the shadow of your house right now. 

All the terror and gloom can’t cover up Clark’s impish sense of humor, though.  From a cussing Jewish Santa, to Barb getting a grade-schooler sloshed on champagne, to the constantly ridiculed simpleton cop, Nash (Doug McGrath). Clark uses a few moments of inappropriate levity to keep the story from becoming relentlessly bleak.   Marian Waldman’s performance is the most outlandish.  Her boozy housemother, Mrs. Mac, is straight out of a vaudeville routine.  She’s the kind of loving but crusty broad who keeps little bottles of hooch stashed throughout the sorority house, like hidden in a cutout book or bobbing in the toilet tank (a drastic hiding place, in my opinion).  I’m not sure why she couldn’t just keep them in her private room.  Perhaps she just had a compulsive need to be within five feet of booze at all times.   In addition to humor, she also provides the horror movie staple of the wandering cat.  Rather than being used for jump scares, Claude the cat’s primary function is luring people to their deaths.  Pretty sure he’s an relative of Jonesy from ALIEN.  

Clark is backed up by a solid cast.  John Saxon is great as always playing Lt. Fuller, perhaps the only competent cop in town. I wonder if this is the case that made him settle down for a quiet life on Elm Street?  Margo Kidder steals every scene as the foul mouthed, socially inappropriate lush, Barb.  She meanders seamlessly between being hilarious, sad, feisty, and cruel.  I’m pretty sure Barb could have kicked Billy’s ass if she hadn’t been passed out drunk at the time.  Special mention must be given to Art Hindle as a hockey-playing hunk who takes no shit and has enough swagger to casually rock a full length fur coat.  

Olivia Hussey may have played the genre’s first “final girl”, but she isn’t a typical one.  Jess is reserved, resolute, and analytical.  She certainly doesn’t fit the mold of a scream queen.  She is, however, the worst girlfriend ever.  At least, she is the worst girlfriend for a hyper-sensitive, emotionally needy artist like Peter.  I’m not sure if she’s supposed to represent an overly harsh version of the liberated woman, or if she just doesn’t suffer fools (human empathy) lightly.  In any case, Jess does need to work on her sense of timing.  Did she have to have a heart to heart with Peter an hour before his career defining piano audition for the music department heads?  “Peter, I’m pregnant with your child, and I’ve decided to get an abortion.  And no, I’m not going to marry you, because I don’t love you.  Anyway, good luck at your recital!”

My favorite bit with Jess is when she is on the phone with the cops after they learn that “the calls are coming from inside the house” (suck it WHEN A STRANGER CALLS, BLACK CHRISTMAS said it first).  The long suffering Officer Nash, who has thus far failed to do a single thing right in the entire movie, literally pleads with Jess  to leave the house immediately.  Jess promises to… as soon as she goes upstairs to get her friends.  Maybe grab a few essentials, pack an overnight bag, then she’ll totally leave the house.  It’s a common horror trope for the target of a killer to run upstairs instead of out the front door, but it’s usually due to stupidity, not stubbornness.  

BLACK CHRISTMAS has another notable departure from most slashers in that the movie ends on a wickedly ambiguous note.  One could view the resolution as Jess surviving the night of terrors and getting a well deserved rest, or that she is still in danger and in a far worse position than when she started.  Clark leaves the answer up to us, but I have the strong suspicion that the holiday season is not going to end well for Jess.

 In addition to birthing the entire slasher genre, BLACK CHRISTMAS has spawned two remakes itself, one in 2006 and another just this year.  I haven’t seen either, since I highly doubt they have any fur coat wearing hockey players badgering the police.  For the sake of mixing things up , though, I am willing to break from my annual tradition slightly and watch the original on the TBS all day marathon.  Let me just check the schedule to make sure it starts at midnight…

Oh, fudge.

C Chaka

Dream On - PHANTASM

             

Horror movies can mess up a young, impressionable mind, mostly in good ways.  I’ve written about how movie related childhood trauma can mutate from terror into curiosity into obsession, but it doesn’t have to be such a psyche bruising experience.  As a wee tyke, I vividly remember flipping through the TV dial, alone in the den, and finding something wholly inappropriate on HBO.  Now, this was the same channel that left me curled into the fetal position from the overwhelming sights and sounds of MAD MAX, so I should have been smart enough to leave it alone.  This time, though, it didn’t send me screaming to hide in the corner.  Quite the opposite, I was mesmerized.  Nothing overtly scary was happening on screen, no monsters or chainsaws or blood spraying, but I knew something wasn’t right.  The scene was a boy looking around in a graveyard.  That’s all.  My unease wasn’t about what was happening on screen, but what could happen.  The anticipation was both dreadful and fascinating.  A few seconds later, someone came in and changed the channel, denying me my release.  I had no idea where this scene of delicious tension came from, and for years it existed only in reoccurring dreams.  Which is fitting, since the scene turned out to be from Don Coscarelli’s delirious 1979 nightmare, PHANTASM.

The Capsule:

Mike (A. Michael Baldwin), is a typical kid growing up in the ‘70s California suburbs.  He rides a dirt bike, he spies on his older brother, Jody (Bill Thornbury) when he scores with chicks, his best friend is a guitar playing ice cream truck driver (Reggie Bannister).  A lot of people in his small town have been dying lately, though, and when Mike witnesses something strange at Morningside cemetery, life becomes much less typical.  Soon he’s being stalked by hooded growling dwarfs, swatting at giant monster flies, and dodging a cranium drilling silver sphere.  Worst of all, he’s got the attention of The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), the otherworldly manager of the Morningside mausoleum, who seems to be harvesting corpses to make pint sized slaves.  Can Mike convince his brother and Reggie that this isn’t just a dream before The Tall Man swallows up the whole town?

PHANTASM was part of the horror crop of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, like HALLOWEEN, FRIDAY THE 13^TH, and EVIL DEAD, that was destined for franchise.  It had those indelible, signature elements that you could hang a series on: a standout villain and a unique weapon.  As with Michael and his butcher knife, Jason and his machete, and later, Pinhead and his S&M gear, Phantasm had The Tall Man and his sphere(s).   Out of all the classic horror franchises, PHANTASM had the strangest trajectory.  Fitting, because the original is a serious fucking oddball.

Even among its fellow ‘70s horror movie, PHANTASM is excessively ‘70s,  specifically West Coast ‘70s.  While other movies had their shadowy old houses and shady suburban lanes, PHANTASM  is blasted in glorious Californian sunshine for much of the running time.  Everyone looks like Lief Garrett or a Hardy Boy, except for Reggie, who looks like Reggie Bannister.  All the young women in the movie are blonde and indistinguishable from each other.  It often looks more like a sweet coming of age film or a sex comedy, until the weird shit starts happening.

Even during the weird shit, it’s still a hard film to peg.  There is a strange, meandering, dreamlike tone that doesn’t fit traditional structure.  This wasn’t Coscarelli’s first film.  I think he knew how to do things the conventional way, he just didn’t want to.  There is an anarchistic feel to the movie, it goes where it wants to, and doesn’t have to answer to you.  The opening has a very “we now return our movie, already in progress” vibe.  We know that something nefarious is going on, but Coscarelli takes his sweet time showing you the big picture.  None of the jigsaw pieces seem to fit.  The ultimate revelation of why the Tall Man is crunching down corpses to make zombie dwarf slaves is nuttier than anything we could have expected, and it opens up even more unanswered questions (as far as I can remember, the series never completely explains just what the hell is going on).

As for the franchise’s hallmark murder weapon, the silver sphere makes its appearance just as inexplicable.  It is suddenly just there as Mike is wandering the mausoleum halls, screeching through the air.  No reference, no foreshadowing, just there.  When Mike dives out of the way, it goes for some unlucky schmo coming through a door (a funeral worker? Dad looking for his missing daughter? Homeless guy?) and pegs him right in the forehead.  All questions take a back seat once it starts to do its thing, though, because the Phantasm sphere is the most unique, craziest, and most badass death dealer in horror history.  Elegantly excessive and impossibly complicated, the sphere is essentially a supernatural Rube Goldberg execution machine.  It spikes, it drills, it shoots a fountain of blood out from an opening in the back.  There is no need for it to go through all that trouble to kill someone, but it is awesome that it does.  I can completely understand why Mike just stands there watching instead of running.  That murder ball puts on a show!  One of my gripes with the series farther down the line is that it explained what the spheres really were, and they lost a bit of their magic.  There shouldn’t be an explanation for something so out there.  All you need to know is that it’s a flying brain juicer, and it is glorious.

  

The most bizarre scene in the whole movie, though, is when Mike goes to an old, blind psychic looking for answers.  The old woman only communicates through her young, blond granddaughter.  Even stranger, she seems to be a Bene Gesserit sister, because she puts Mike through the Pain Box scene from Frank Hurbert’s Dune.  When Mike calmly puts his hand in the box that magically appeared on the table in front of him (perfectly reasonable reaction), the granddaughter encourages him to overcome his fear and not to pull out when he feels excruciating pain.  And though we never learn the deal with the old woman, her proxy warning, “Fear is the killer,” does come up later.  Note, this is five years before David Lynch filmed a virtually identical scene in the movie DUNE, only his wasn't set in a dark living room in California.  I believe this is the only time a director has come up with something stranger than David Lynch. 

 

Another great, weirdo moment occur when Mike finally has the proof to convince Jody he isn’t just dreaming.  It comes in the form of one of the Tall Man’s severed fingers, still wiggling in a pool of yellow blood.  Mike keeps the purloined finger in a box that rattles around all night, until he is about to show his dubious brother.  As expected, the finger isn’t there anymore, because it somehow turned into a giant, razor toothed monster fly that attacks Mike until they shove it down the garbage disposal.  Mike’s Tall Man/killer dwarf stories don't sound so far fetched after that.

 

The movie absolutely nails the disjointed, illogical feel of a dream.  Even without the killer dwarfs and haunted hearses, the story jibes with preteen boy subconscious.  No parents, hanging out with his cool older brother, getting to drive a sweet Hemi Cuda muscle car, fighting off monsters with a knife and a gun.  It also plays into a common kid fear of being abandoned.  Mike already lost his parents, and he is terrified that his brother will ditch him for the bitchin’ life of feather haired troubadour.  

The real star of the movie (and series) is The Tall Man.  He is an incredibly unsettling and memorable horror villain, which is something considering he is, as his name indicates, just a tall man.  Supernatural, probably alien, possibly unstoppable, yes, but still just a dude.  With no creepy mask or gruesome makeup to hide behind, the Tall Man’s power is 100% in the performance of Angus Scrimm.  His deep, gravelly voice booms with total authority, like a sadistic middle school principal.  Though he has a grand, otherworldly mission to perform, Scrimm puts a little twinkle in the Tall Man’s eye that shows he gets a real kick out of his work.  He’s the guy at PhantasmCorp who was eager to stay in body crushing duty, instead of angling for a better paying job like Executive Sphere Manager or Chief of Dwarf Labor.

 

In the end, [Spoiler] it all turns out to be a dream.  Mike was just trying to process his grief over losing his brother in a car accident.  This would normally be a cop out, but when you consider how the movie is staged, it does make sense that…oh shit, the Tall Man just showed up and got him!  So, it wasn’t a dream after all!  Or, the events of the movie were a dream, since Jody is dead and Reggie is still alive, but the underlying evil forces are real.  Or maybe the part where Mike woke up from the dream is a dream, and the Tall Man is just fucking with him.  Maybe it was all because of that crazy, blind psychic?  We may never know, until nine years later when the sequel explains it.  Sort of.

The original PHANTASM stays very true to its name.  Dreams are weird.  They aren’t supposed to make sense.  They are supposed to fill you with dread and fascination.  You are meant to feel discombobulated and unsure.  All these years later, I still get a shiver watching Mike walk through the graveyard in absolute silence.  Don Coscarelli left a scar on my little boy brain than lingers to this day, and I am grateful.  A heightened taste for the surreal can be just the thing when the real world gets too depressing.

C Chaka

Post Script:  Perhaps the strangest thing about PHANTASM is not in the movie at all, but on the IMDB page.  The displayed plot keywords, out of 255, are: fellatio, hot woman, breast, and c cup.  These words do not accurately describe what to expect from this movie, in my opinion.  Has “c cup” ever been a prominent search keyword for a movie?  What kind of perv is running IMDB?  PHANTASM’s dreamlike pacing would alienate casual viewers to begin with, can you imagine how pissed someone would be if they watched it based solely on IMDB’s weird, modest boob obsessed suggestions?  

Pretty (Horrible) Woman - MALIBU HIGH

You find gems in the weirdest places.  Take oysters, for instance.  They look like ugly sea rocks inhabited by a living lugy.  It’s mystery enough why we ever decided to eat these things, but who the hell would have ever expected a pearl to be lodged inside one.  False advertising all the way round.  The feeling of discovering a gem of a movie in equally unlikely places can be even more exhilarating that finding pearls.  Well, no, not really, but it can be pretty gosh darn exciting.  Allow me to share one of my favorite discovers.  With its generic title and wildly misleading cover, it would be easy to write it off MALIBU HIGH as a typical bubbled head ‘70s sexploitation hogwash, but trust me here, this movie is a diamond in the rough.

The Capsule:

Kim (Jill Lansing) his having a shitty year.  She constantly fights with her mom (Wallace Earl Laven), she is flunking out of school, she’s broke, and her boyfriend Kevin (Stuart Taylor) dumped her for a stuck up rich honeypot.  Fed up, she decides to turn her life around.  Not by putting forth the slightest bit of effort and hard work, that’s strictly for losers.  Kim plans to get ahead the old fashion way, through sexual blackmail and prostitution.  Naturally, it works out excessively well for her.  Soon Kim is tooling around in her own sports car, getting straight As, and has scored a rich new boyfriend/pimp.  Once Kim makes the jump from hooker to hitwoman, though, the rewards really start rolling in.  The only thing holding our amoral heroine back is that she is still hung up on her ex.  Kevin’s about to find out that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, especially when she is a self-centered, murderous sociopath.  It’s all part of the kooky fun happening at Malibu High!

Warning: I cannot overstate how amazing this movie really is.  It starts off as a cynical, sleazy teen sex romp and ends as a trash noir.  It's more than the sum of its grimy little pieces, though.  Even knowing exactly what happens in this movie will not prepare you for exactly what happens in this movie.  

This poster certainly didn't prepare anyone for what they were in store for.  It might not be as bad as marketing John Carpenter’s THE THING as a family Christmas movie featuring The Muppets, but it's pretty close.  The poster gives the impression of a light hearted, rolicking sex comedy, with pretty people getting it on in the California sun.  The cute little surf bunny seems raring to have some naughty fun.  Maybe she is, who knows?  That woman isn’t in the movie.  Neither is sun, fun, nor comedy, at least not the intentional kind.  Unless director Irvin Berwick was secretly a satirical genius.  I’m betting it was unintentional.  

There is plenty of sex, though, and if you like your sex depressing and gross, you are in for a treat.  Kim goes through a whole stable of oily men, most of whom have more back hair than real horses.  There is no serious action, thank god.  It mostly amounts to people rolling around in their underwear, feigning enjoyment, and boobs.  So many boobs.  



Well, mostly just Jill Lansing's boobs, but they are around so often they might as well be given their own credit.  She's an attractive woman, but as far from a frisky sex kitten as you can get.  Her first scene sets the tone.  After her long-suffering mom wakes her for school, Kim drags herself out of bed, topless, and immediately lights up a cigarette, looking like the hungover cop in a '80s action film.

To the uninitiated, the first act of the movie would seem like the origin of every after-school special ever made.  You have teen drinking, teen drug use, failing grades, suicide, and, of course, teen prostitution.  I’m amazed they didn’t manage to get some teen pregnancy in there somewhere.  I swear, they even use an actual after-school special music sting from time to time.  The brilliance of this movie, though, is that while after-school specials were morality plays showing the terrible consequences of torrid behavior, Kim is continuously and exponentially rewarded for her bad decisions.  It’s the anti-after-school special.  

I don’t think I have ever seen a movie as tone-deaf to the subject matter as this one.  If you thought PRETTY WOMAN misrepresented the glitz and glamor of prostitution, it’s handled like a Ken Burns documentary compared to this beauty.  I’m not sure that writer John Buckley even understood what prostitution really was.  “Getting paid to have sex?  That’s sounds fabulous!  I wish somebody would pay me to have sex!  Now where’d I leave my bourbon?”  

The sentiment is echoed by Kim when she announces to her best friend/doormat, Lucy (Katie Johnson), that she is going to going to get both good grades and extra cash “in the nicest way I know.”  This crazy disconnect from reality is present even though the situation is objectively horrible.  She starts at the very bottom working out of the van of her lowlife pimp Tony (Alex Mann, resembling a sleazier version of Schneider from One Day at a Time).  In one scene, there is literally A LINE of construction workers waiting for their turn in the van.  Not only does Kim remain fresh, limber, and in good spirits, she eagerly offers extra sex with each guy to skim more cash for herself.  

The movie keeps throwing in moments where it looks like the end of Kim’s gravy train, but it never happens.  She just does worse and worse things.  When Kim’s elderly school principal turns out to be the only male at Malibu High who can resist her bewitching boobs, she just pushes him into a heart attack.  Graduation with honors!  Suave, Rolls-Royce driving Lance (Garth Pillsbury) lures her away from Tony’s sex van with the promise of making her a high-class call girl, only to completely fulfill his promise!   When one of her kinky new clients gets too rough and ends up with an ice pick in his back, Lance takes one look at the mess and—wait for it— apologizes to her!  It’s such a pimp cliché, I know.  

Then, sensing her latent natural talents, Lance offers her a career upgrade to professional assassin.  Her first target is, of course, Tony the Douchebag.  It’s only after she awkwardly shoots Tony in a parking garage she realizes that violently snuffing out a man’s life is just as satisfying as she hoped it would be.  Prostitution was great and all, but killing people for money is really where it’s at.  

Karma eventually catches up with Kim at the very end [spoiler].  Ducking out after a contract hit, Kim runs into Kevin’s new girlfriend, Annette (Tammy Taylor).  This is not such a coincidence, because the guy she was hired to rub out was Annette’s dad.  Kim plugs Annette, but can’t bring herself to put down Kevin.  The movie turns into an episode of Starsky & Hutch at this point, with Kevin chasing Kim down a beach to a canned funk soundtrack.  Kim turns the gun on Kevin, and after a wonderful speech that is both apathetic and nihilistic, she is suddenly shot by a couple of cops on top of a distant cliff.  Her body hits the sand and cue credits!  The moral seems to be less “crime doesn’t pay” and more “crime is awesome, just don’t wuss out when it’s time to shoot your ex-boyfriend.”

It’s a shame that this was Jill Lansing’s one and only movie, because Kim is one of the most thoroughly despicable human beings in cinema history.  Not a villain, mind you, just a horrible person.  She sneers her way through the movie, barely containing her contempt for her mother, best friend, authority figures, or society at large.  The entire movie rests on her resentful, reprehensible performance, and Lansing pulls it off beautifully.  At least, I hope it was a performance.  

This was also the last directorial effort for Irvin Berwick, though he went out on an incredibly high note.   It takes a special kind of director to make a movie so thoroughly and hilariously misguided.   Just imagine the possibilities if he were still around today.  His tale of an unpleasant, undeserving brat who continues to succeed despite an ever-growing string of flagrantly awful behavior would have made him the perfect director for the inevitable Trump biopic.

Anyway, stay in school, kids!  And don’t have sex with your teachers!

C Chaka