Bloodbath & Beyond: DARKNESS

It may come as a shock to those familiar to this site, but I have my limits.  There are some movies so amateurishly bad even I can’t sit through them.  I have a natural aversion to shot on video (SOV) stuff, because video is such an ugly, flat, and lifeless format (even untreated HD video).  DIY horror can also be hard to take.  Often, it’s just a bunch of bored gorehounds whose idea of a movie is stitching together a bunch of repetitious, blood drenched murders over a skeletal plot.  You can only see fake intestines pulled out so many times before it loses its impact.  On the other hand, I’m a sucker for an ambitious, creative story, no matter how cheaply done or successfully accomplished.  A shining example is the late ‘80’s vampire splatterpunk epic, DARKNESS.

The Capsule:

After witnessing a violent slaughter at a convenience store (which extends into his family’s trailer park), Tobe (Gary Miller) hits the road to track down Liven (Randall Aviks), the bloodsucker responsible for the carnage.  Along the way, he must wipe out all the goth metal vampire dens Liven leaves in his wake.  Things may be a little more than this shotgun toting teen can handle when he catches up with lord vamp.  Liven has created a small army of the undead, and Tobe must team up with a batch of aimless stoners in order to survive the night.  For in this small, unnamed Kansas town, Death walks the streets in acid-washed jeans.

I first heard about Leif Jonker’s DARKNESS in the mid ‘90s in the pages of Film Threat magazine.  It wasn’t a review, just a blurb in the back with a single, phenomenally gross picture.  The movie had the legendary cult status that came from inaccessibility.  A “I knew a guy whose brother’s friend had seen this tape…” kind of thing.  Various crappy looking VHS cuts floated around the horror underground since 1993, but it was finally made widely available (and viewable) when the restored DVD special edition was released in 2006.  This is when I finally saw it.  It lived up to the hype.

For those who watched Kevin Smith’s first film, CLERKS, and thought everyone looked too Hollywood, this movie is for you.  It is dead on in its portrayal of small town suburban teens in the late ‘80s (it was shot in ’88 and 89).  If I didn’t know it was shot in the Midwest, I would have been sure some of those kids went to high school with me.  I owned the exact same Hard Rock Café tee shirt that one of the main characters wears.  If you were a teen in those years, so did you.  One of the kids actually looks (and acts) like a prototype of Jay of Jay and Silent Bob fame.   One of the advantages of this totally average looking cast is that there is no guessing who is going to be a survivor.  The playing field is wide open.  It also avoids the standard horror movie caste system (the Jock, the Nerd, the Party Girl, the Nice Girl, etc.), making it really feel like anyone could go at any moment.  

A lot of the undead hoard is taken from Kansas’ apparently abundant pool of goth metal Fangoria readers.  They saved a lot of money on make-up, since most of those kids were trying to look like vampires to begin with.  I counted at least three different people in Iron Maiden tee shirts.  Some of these guys went all out, looking absolutely thrilled to be covered in fake blood.  There is also a wide selection of distinctly late ‘80s suburban punk/industrial hairdo to be seen.  It is interesting on an anthropological level.

Aside from few adult exceptions, this is solely a teenaged opera.  It’s almost like CHILDREN OF THE CORN, except that they try to pass off kids in inappropriate professions.  The girl playing the cop in the opening looks like she is just out of middle school.  The story also has that kind of romantic, “us against the world” feel that only a teenager would write.  When Tobe’s family is killed, he hits the road, alone, looking to take down the vampire responsible.  I don’t think it ever occurs to him to tell the cops, or perhaps just stay the fuck away from the vampire who slaughtered dozens of people in front of his eyes. In the end, when [SPOILER] Liven gets away, the traumatized survivors who just barely escaped death load into a gun filled Civic hatchback and head after him.  There is zero consideration given to school, jobs, other family, money, or perhaps going to the hospital.  I think they changed clothes, at least.  I know the adults aren’t going to believe their crazy vampire story, but they should at least leave a note.  The entire town was wiped out.  That’s going to raise questions.

Also, no one seems that broken up over the death of their parents.  They get more emotional over losing someone they just met an hour ago.  Kids today, or 30 years ago, such ingrates. 
 

The movie plays fast and loose with the vampire rulebook.  Vampires can be killed by sunlight, holy water (carried in a two liter Coke bottle), or normal bullets (or machetes) to the heart.  Also by having their heads explode.  People who are bitten will turn into vampires in anywhere from several minutes to 30 seconds after the bite.  These vampires have no interest in subtlety or deception.  They are practically zombies, running straight towards any warm body.  Most of them don’t have fangs, so they compensate by using guns, knives, and power tools.  They also don’t have much regard for self-preservation.  None of them seems to realize they should avoid sunlight until they are all melting in a field.  This is why there needs to be vampire orientation classes.  Liven is the only one smart enough to burrow into the ground to avoid being cooked.

Another great thing about this movie is that all the time of day text counts down to sunset (11 Minutes Until Sunset, 28 Minutes Until Sunrise, Three Days Later and 1 Hour Until Sunset, etc.).

Like everything in DARKNESS, the gore effects are amateurish.  They make up for it in sheer volume.   It doesn’t hit the dizzying heights of DEAD ALIVE, but it comes close.  Every penny of the movie’s $5,000 budget must have gone to fake blood, squibs, and latex.  The climactic vampire melt down must have used a pumper truck worth of blood.  

Calling these practical effects is a bit of an understatement.  It’s not to say they aren’t impressive, though.  The director had an ingenious method for achieving the exploding head gags (it held the record for the most exploding heads in a movie at the time).  They built a model head, filled it with blood, and shot it with a shotgun from off screen.  Again, this is a testament to the dedication, ingenuity, and stupidity of teenage filmmaking.  It didn’t stop there.  One scene has a vampire chasing the hero down a flight of stairs with a working chainsaw.  I’m astounded this didn’t turn into an accidental snuff film.

This was director Leif Jonker’s only film, which is a down right shame.  DARKNESS cannot be considered high art, but compared to what a bunch of teenagers normally come up with on a $5,000 budget, it is pretty remarkable.  Jonker has a good eye for dramatic staging.  The shot of Liven rising from the earth at sunset is intercut with the chilling stare of a lifeless girl’s unblinking eye.   It’s surprisingly effective.  Jonker gives nods to his cinematic influences.  Bits of sound design and camera work have a Sam Raimi feel, some locations echo Argento, the minimalist score (when not pelting out death metal) sounds a bit like Luci’s ZOMBIE.  Alas, it took all his efforts just to get DARKNESS out to the world, and his proposed sequel, VAMPIRE FEROX (!), never materialized.  The cast grew up into regular non acting people, though judging from the DVD special features, everyone seems to have very fond memories of running around town at night, covered in blood and shooting guns (hopefully with blanks).  I’m glad to have this one, at least, but I’ll always be curious to know if Jonker could have topped himself.  

Worse yet, it means that Liven is still out there somewhere.  I can only hope there will group of angsty, reckless teens around to take him on.      

C Chaka

Brunch with H.G. Lewis – BLOOD FEAST

Last week the world lost a true visionary, Herschell Gordon Lewis.  He wasn’t the most well-known, or prolific, directors.  He wasn’t the most talented director.  In truth, he was pretty terrible at directing.  He was a brilliant marketer, though.  More than Roger Corman or Russ Meyer, H.G. Lewis was the embodiment of exploitation cinema.  He knew what the audience wanted, sometimes before the audience itself knew, and he delivered in full.  Known as The Godfather of Gore, Lewis was the first director to drench the screen with blood and usher in a new era of horror with 1963’s aptly named BLOOD FEAST.

The Capsule:

There is a killer on the loose in Miami who is leaving a trail of hacked up women in his wake.  The police are baffled because they are complete idiots.  Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold), a local caterer of indeterminate age and accent, is responsible for the carnage.  He plans to resurrect the ancient goddess Ishtar by creating an Egyptian Feast; a cannibalistic spread of random body parts and organs.  Victims are easy to find, but Fuad needs a special sacrifice to finish the ritual.  He gets a lucky break when oblivious socialite Dorothy Fremont (Lyn Bolton) hires him to cater her daughter Suzette’s (Connie Mason) birthday party.  Can Suzette’s 40 year-old cop boyfriend, Pete (William Kerwin), put together the incredibly obvious clues before his young honey is offered up to Ishtar?   

Even compared to other regional, low budget indie horror movies, BLOOD FEAST is a bit of a mess.  For instance,  there is the old-standard cost cutting trick of shooting day for night, but this is the only film I’ve ever seen that shot night for day.   When one character says “we’ll leave when it gets dark”, it’s clearly the middle of the night.  Other characters talk about—and gesture to—things that are not there.  They were just as loosey goosey with the sound effects.  There is a pool party overlaid with the sound of the surf.  Close enough.  At least the actors don’t flub their lines, though the dialogue is so bizarre it would be hard to tell.

You have to hand it to Lewis for coming up with a more ambitious plot for his shoe-string budget splatter film than “psycho killer likes to chop up women.”  Fuad Ramses is on a lofty mission to resurrect a goddess, by way of chopping up women.   Mal Arnold has the honor of playing one of the greatest terrible villains ever.  With every weird line delivery and wild eyed stare, Fuad practically shouts “I want to play with your organs.”  I’m surprised he doesn’t end each sentence with maniacal laughter.  How he is perceived by the townsfolk as charming and exotic rather than “escaped mental patient,” is a testament to the peculiarity of Florida.  It is never explained why he is so fanatically devoted to Ishtar, or the golden spray painted mannequin that is supposed to represent Ishtar.  He might be an immortal acolyte, or he might just be a blithering nutbag.  Since he [SPOILER] never finishes the ritual of the Egyptian Feast, we will never know.

Side note:  Ishtar is a Babylonian goddess, not Egyptian.

Additional side note: Wouldn’t it be funny if this was a prequel to the Kim Cattrall movie MANNEQUIN?  

Suzette’s mother, Dorothy, is one of the peculiar Floridians Fuad charms – and hypnotizes.  You would think hypnotism would be an incredibly handy skill to have when you are stalking ladies for ingredients, but this is the only time he uses it.  He didn’t even need to use it in this case.  Dorothy is already enthusiastically on board with Fuad’s idea to serve an Egyptian Feast for her daughter’s birthday party, even though he practically admits it’s made of people. She is so lost in her own world of genteel Southern manners that in the end [SPOILER] she is only mildly disappointed to learn her daughter was almost sacrificed and her party guests nearly became cannibals.  She’ll just have to serve hamburgers, instead.  

Luckily for Fuad and his ham fisted killing spree, the entire Miami police department (consisting of two people) is stunningly incompetent.  Frank, the police chief, talks about the killer like he is a mastermind who leaves no trace of evidence at the murder scenes.  It seems like an inappropriate description of Fuad, whose M.O. is usually just to tackle women and chop them up where they fall.  Perhaps Frank’s idea of evidence is the killer’s driver’s license and selfies of him committing the murders.  Det. Pete Thornton is also having a hard time sorting out the case, even though he just went to a lecture on ancient Egyptian rituals that basically spells out exactly what is happening.  

In addition to being half the police force, Pete is also Suzette’s boyfriend.  The attraction is obvious.  What young woman can resist a puffy, oily middle-aged guy?  He’s a like a dreamy sebaceous cyst in a sports coat.   

The one truly notable thing about the movie is the gore.  Looking at it now, it is laughably amateurish and obvious.  It is composed almost entirely of animal organs, cuts of meat, and gallons of dime store fake blood.  When Fuad pulls a woman’s tongue out of her mouth, it is clearly two times the size of a human tongue.  They are not exactly concerned with anatomical accuracy, either.  Eye sockets are filled with raw steak rather than eyeballs, and I think Fuad pulls a heart out of a woman’s head at one point.  It’s all so ridiculous.  At the time however, it was astonishing. No one had ever done anything like it before.  There were moments of shocking violence on the screen before BLOOD FEAST, but they were quick and mostly suggested.  There is absolutely nothing suggestive about BLOOD FEAST.  It is awash in bright red splatter.  Lewis’ gimmick worked.  BLOOD FEAST made four million dollars (an unheard of amount for a cheap, independent feature) and single-handedly ushered in America’s bloodlust for gore.  

The effect wasn’t immediate.  The only films to follow soon after with comparable splatter were Lewis’ own (2000 MANIACS in 1964 and COLOR ME BLOOD RED in 1965).  Once NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD came along in 1968, however, combining gore with a compelling script, marvelous performances, and talented cinematography, graphic violence was a recognized draw in cinema.  Plenty of people did it better, but H.G. Lewis was the first director with the guts to throw guts in the audience’s face.

BLOOD FEAST also ramped up horror’s uncomfortable relation with the mingling of sex and violence, especially as directed against women.  Again, it wasn’t the first movie to introduce this concept.  Movies had put women in danger since the silent era, tying them to the railroad tracks, making them helpless and prone below a menacing, moustachioed bad guy.  The titillation became more overt over time.  It was common to see women tear their blouses and have their bras revealed at strategic moments while being attacked by killers or monsters.  Even world renowned classics like PSYCHO used this tactic.  No one can watch the infamous shower scene without acknowledging the not too subtle sexualized violence.

Lewis was no Hitchcock.  His approach to the shower scene (or bath, in this case), was as hilariously clumsy as it was blunt and (at the time) disturbing.  His secret weapon was excess.  Routine scenes of murder where turned into grizzly blood drenched spectacles, almost always involving women.  I doubt he had any malicious intent.  Listening to his commentaries, it seems like he was a genuinely friendly guy with no animosity towards women.  I don’t think he meant to ratchet up the misogyny in horror movies, he was just looking for (and found) the next big thing.  BLOOD FEAST was as evolutionary for Lewis as it was revolutionary for cinema.  He came from directing Nudie Cuties; silly, innocent little “adult” films that were really just an excuse to see bouncing boobs.    In transitioning to horror, Lewis simply tried to replace the boobs with gore.  Even though there is very little nudity in the film (very slightly concealed nipples in the bathtub scene), Lewis’ salacious focus on women’s bodies is still up front.  This is most evident in the scene where he does a slow pan down the length of a dead woman’s body.  All the butcher shop gory bits are around the torso, her legs are just haphazardly smeared with red, but the camera continues down.  It’s neither shocking nor erotic, it’s just habit for Lewis.  Linger on the skin.  In this context, though, it’s creepy.  Whether it was the intent or not, BLOOD FEAST set grisly new standards on how women were treated in horror, and those standards were quickly topped.

On a positive note, I think the trend is on the decline.  In the early days of horror, sex and violence were two societal no-nos.  Mixing them together could create a giddy, transgressive thrill, especially on a subconscious level.  I don’t think very many (sane) people ever thought dead girls were sexy, but sex and violence have similar elements.  Both have a buildup and a release.  Since this is the very nature of suspense (and excitement), it’s easy to see how all the elements could get twisted together.  As sex became more acceptable and the status of women in society rose, the depiction of women in horror, especially as victims, has become more complex.  Women in horror today are often the (much abused) heroes, or at least one woman out of the batch will be.  The male to female victim ratio is still skewed female, especially sexy female, but the bloody playing field is starting to level off. It’s this progress that allows me to stomach the less positive depictions of women in horror.

H.G. Lewis ground out dozens of movies after BLOOD FEAST, ranging from horror, drama, crime, sexploitation, and kids films (seriously).  Pretty much all of them were terrible in different ways, and in many of the same ways.  All of his movies (the ones I’ve seen, at least) were filmed with a sense of humor that made the gruesome pill easier to swallow.  He was mostly out of the movie game after 1972, but returned in 2002 with BLOOD FEAST 2, and he remained active until his death at 90.  His films may have been goofy, crude, and disreputable, but horror would not have been as much bloody fun without him.

C Chaka 

Soundtrack Cinema: Hard Ticket to Hawaii

I am fascinated by movies that use songs that describe the movie. Let's talk about one of those.

Hard Ticket to Hawaii is a gem among the "this exists?" set of b-movies that are making the rounds again, thanks in part to the many great rep theaters bringing attention to these forgotten films (Alamo Drafthouse, Cinefamily). It features not one but TWO songs about the movie, and both are amazing.

Written and Directed by Andy Sidaris, Hard Ticket to Hawaii has a pretty standard through-line - a couple of special agents encounter a diamond delivery on its way to a drug lord, leading to a clash between the two groups. What makes the film magical are the incredible sub-plots and genuinely unique methods employed to dispatch the bad guys. The film is fairly sleazy and has copious amounts of rampant 80's nudity that you might expect from the classic Cinemax days. It is certainly sexist at times as well, though also presents the female leads as the real heroines of the movie.

Skip the trailer if you can, this one plays best without any pre-knowledge of the plot points and great moments. You can safely check out this amazing opening sequence to give you a taste of the barely-held-together but incredibly imaginative nature of the film, though:

Now, onto those songs!

First up is the spectacularly 80's "Hard Ticket to Hawaii", written by Kevin Klingler, John Brainard and Bill Schreiber. Jay Molina tells us how it really is - although it's like a dream, it's not how it seems, that's for sure. I love the incredible squealy guitars on this track. This one comes in at around the 15-minute mark and sets our expectations that Hawaii isn't the shining paradise we all think it is. Consider the stage set.

The second track, "Hard Ticket", runs during the film's closing credits sequence which is covered in spoilers and completely NSFW. I won't post the link to the video sequence here to avoid those things, but someone kindly created a spoiler-free and SFW version. The synthesized horns! The tropical feel! The sweet crooning of co-songwriter and singer Gary Stockdale! (let's not leave co-songwriter Bob Moore out of this, either). Where "Hard Ticket to Hawaii" established our expectations of the seedy underbelly of the tropical paradise, "Hard Ticket" tells us that it was all worth it - the price is high, but nothing good comes for free. Stick with it!

Hopefully these songs have you super pumped to check out the film - you can find the whole thing on Youtube or very cheaply in a set of 12(!) films by Sidaris on Amazon.

Jimmy Reed