By the of the 1980s, everyone who was anyone on the cult cinema scene would know the name Troma Entertainment, the brainchild of Lloyd Kaufmann, and the name would carry certain assumptions. Mother’s Day, released in 1980 when Troma was just one of (too)many upstart companies looking to get in on the exploitation cinema boon, to test the intersection of cinematic dissent and commercial success, both fulfills and disfigures those expectations. Expecting a broad, try-hard, somewhat over-baked work that announces itself repeatedly as a travesty of serious cinema, director Charles Kaufmann (Lloyd’s brother) and co-writer Warren Leight instead offer a cruel, tetchy, unsettling crypto-slasher that manages to probe quite viciously into various currents of its time-period’s psyche while technically retaining the surface texture of a silly comedy.

Mother’s Day wastes no time confusing us, trading one set of cultural signifiers for another within minutes. It opens on alien scene that eventually clarifies as refuse from an alien past that is still with us: Ernie’s Growth Opportunity, a frisky, cutting parody of a distinctly ‘70s brand of New Age individualism, a pitilessly brutal take-down of the degradation of collective resistance into individualized forms of personal “integration”. “Don’t stop to think what you feel, cause then you won’t know it,” the resident Ernie tells us, before he invites us to perform a mind-meld with each other called a hug.

One of the attendees is Beatrice Pons (billed as Rose Ross), an elderly, deeply enthusiastic woman who offers to drive two deeply twitchy, insinuating hippie types home after their capacity for collective resistance has been wrung out to dry. Kaufmann ratchets up the instability, offering two nerve bundles who seem to tangle the cinema itself. But the real culprits arrive more unceremoniously in Mother’s Day: Ike (credited as Holden McQuire, but actually Frederick Coffin) and Addley (credited as Billy Ray McQuade, but actually Michael McCleery) emerge like wildfire and decapitate one of the hippies and then proceed to abuse and rape the other, all while Pons looks on in amusement and something resembling pride. These two killers are her children, they all love each other, and unlike us suburban or urban types, they are positively dying to kill to show their love for one another. Yes, the name of the game for the evening will be that other ‘70s breed of horror, the flip side of the introduction. Rather than the over-lit atriums and strip malls of suburban America, we get the country-fried cruelty that so famously contoured the decade’s fear of that increasingly marginal space something called “civilization” was supposedly exhausting.

Update: I did not know at the time of posting this review that Roger Corman had passed the day before at the age of 98. Although any review of a positive object is always intended as a tribute to its creators, I hope that this piece provides, in however minuscule and unformed a way, a eulogy for Corman and a celebration of the spirit of wry, unadorned, knowing simplicity and disobedient innovativeness he represented. RIP

The first time we meet Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), the protagonist of Peter Bogdanovich’s debut directorial film, it’s from his own line of sight. The film takes his perspective, the camera through his gun-scope, aiming at aged movie actor Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff). The gun store owner selling Thompson the rifle comments on being in the vicinity of the faded star with the enthusiasm of a fan vaguely amused at realizing he actually exists in the same time as a dim memory of yesteryear. Thompson, though, has already clocked him, another old haunt down the scopes of a new generation of (extra)cinematic terror.

There’s no two ways about the cinematic subtext, and no way to miss it. It is thoroughly apparent that Bogdanovich studied Peeping Tom as well as the next guy, and he understood Rear Window in more or less the same way many of the young scholars of his generation did. Like those critics and scholars, Bogdanovich was reborn in the first film school generation, when an increasing fascination among young filmmakers with the history of cinema itself took hold. He also shared with the mid-century French film critics an intrigue about workaday American types and journeyman filmmakers like Anthony Mann and Howard Hawks, figures able to keep their perspectives dimly alive in the belly of the beast. This was the same spirit of personality within machinery, of adapting and allowing oneself to be adapted, which many of the new American directors would fascinatingly and beautifully lose by the end of the 1970s as their films got bigger, bolder, and more unrestrained. Like many of these fellow upstart filmmakers, all trying to figure out how to penetrate the Hollywood studios with their self-reflexive knowledge of film history, Bogdanovich also got his start in cheap, grimy independent pictures, worms feeding on and wriggling new life out of the decaying carcass of Old Hollywood. Targets, which emblematizes this meeting of high and low brow, of conceptual rigidity and corporeal immediacy, is suffused with cinema on many levels, and by the film’s end, cinema will have its way with Targets.

A bewildering comic crystal of a Western that doubles as a narrative void, My Name is Nobody is certainly one of the stranger desert dispatches you’re liable to see. If Sergio Leone’s 1968 Once Upon a Time in the West was a gorgeous bed-time story for the genre, and if the early ‘70s were filled with nightmares, My Name is Nobody is more like wetting the bed. And I’m not only referring to the truly grueling bathroom scene late in the film, an absurdist mockery of a debased high-noon standoff where one character uses a thousand-yard stare to intimidate a person while peeing. Little of this scans as uproarious, but it is certainly bracing. This is a stone-faced, brittle comedy, as cold-blooded and ironic as Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles from the same year was wily and hot-tempered. A bit like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye from the same year, it’s a playfully curdled travesty of its genre.

It certainly doesn’t take long for My Name is Nobody to announce what it is doing. It opens with an acerbic repetition of the famous waiting game from Once Upon a Time in the West, with Henry Fonda now in the hero position as Jack Beauregard. Yet even in showing all its cards in the first scene, My Name is Nobody still manages a poker face. There’s no way around recognizing this as Leone’s sillier variation on his earlier, more famous film’s sober, somber opening, but what, precisely, the joke is, and even if it really is a joke, remains fuzzy throughout the scene. All the more so when Beauregard immediately stumbles past Nobody (Terence Hill), posing and posturing with silent ruffian sangfroid in a river trying to bludgeon a tiny insect with a big stick, a screwball Teddy Roosevelt and a peculiar mixture of understatement and overkill that arguably summarizes the film as well. 

With From Beyond, H.P. Lovecraft firmly joined Edgar Allen Poe in the canon of horror writers whose cosmic meditations on the limits of sight proved finally unadaptable to cinema. Or, at least, not adaptable directly. Quite amazingly, From Beyond is even less connected to its Lovecraftian source material than its immediate cinematic predecessor, 1985’s Re-Animator. With Lovecraft, at least, this is thoroughly unsurprising. The moonless prophet of the incalculable and unseeable would, presumably, struggle to find any light in cinema, one of the more naturally representational of all mediums. How, of course, does one visualize the limits of visualization?

Thankfully, writer-director Stuart Gordon and writer-producer Brian Yuzna seem to have responded by running in the opposite thematic direction. While the narrative content of From Beyond superficially explores the limits of human vision and the consequences of potentially megalomaniacal attempts to overcome those limits – “five senses weren’t enough for him,” one character remarks on the ostensible antagonist– the style of the thing is saturated with cinema’s capacity to visualize. Like many great horror films, From Beyond is essentially about the ability of humans to comprehend the totality of having been forced into a film world, which plays the role of a diviner, creating a catastrophic shadow play that doubles as, and threatens to become, a genuinely dark art. Rather than asking whether cinema can see, as many Lovecraft films would likely be inclined, Gordon’s film asks what cinema shouldn’t see but will anyway, and what the consequences of its vision might be for the souls trapped in it.

After spending the better part of a decade running riot with the works of Edgar Allen Poe, H.P.  Lovecraft’s chthonic short stories seemed like the obvious next step for American International Pictures, another textual canvas to scrawl on and fascinatingly deface. Unsurprisingly for any connoisseur of low-brow, high-aspiration mid-century horror, this is a decidedly untethered adaptation of Lovecraft (which befits AIP’s extremely loose orientation toward Poe as well). Rather than a paean to celebrate or altar to worship, Daniel Haller’s The Dunwich Horror appropriately figures the author as a portal to channel or an opening to explore, a cosmic constellation of images and suggestions to tease out rather than submit to.

Haller’s film opens with a kind of precis for the texture of the whole film: a tableau of static figures locked in time, a fully ordered, barely moving presence, that is nonetheless cut up and disfigured by the editing, never fully clarifying into a clear vision or a pierceable image, something at once obvious and misleading, manifest yet ephemeral. The scene seems to give us everything and nothing: a woman seems about to give birth to a demonic entity, marking this as a Rosemary’s Baby pastiche, but the bit ends before we can fully grasp it. In this tension, The Dunwich Horror disorients itself but also finds a mode of expressing its theme, a battle between order and chaos in which the delineation between the two may not be so easy to divine, and the forces of societal control may not be what they seem.

I won’t say that Escape from L.A. wasn’t working for me from the get-go – the first diegetic image is pretty stellar shot of the Sam Fuller school, a quick-fire slug of Nazi-adjacent American soldiers lined up against the camera, as though blockading it from access to some dark secret behind them – but the moment where John Carpenter’s fifteen-years-later sequel clicked for me is the one where it seems to completely collapse. When our resident eye-patched libertarian outlaw Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is tasked with rescuing a black box containing US satellite codes from post-apocalyptic prison-colony Los Angeles, he takes a one-man submersible into L.A., which is now separated from the rest of the U.S. and only accessible via air and water. We, however, take a roughly 60 second slalom through some of the roughest mid-‘90s CG you can imagine, Snake’s comically sleek submarine hurtling through an abstract void that is meant to connote “water”, passing by a toxic garbage plate of pixels registering ever-so-briefly as a “shark”. Finally, in a split-second, we rush past the drowned Universal Studios sign, now a lost relic from a forgotten age. The shark suddenly clarifies as a CG travesty of Universal’s great hit Jaws, itself a famously iffy effect thoughtfully used in only privileged moments, and Escape from L.A. clarifies its own status as one of the great Hollywood piss-takes, a mockery that is also a howl of frustration aimed at what Hollywood had done to Carpenter’s medium of choice. The title is not a not a statement of fact but a genuine wish, not a declarative claim but a plea for help.

Judging from the rest of the film, its deeply caustic ambivalence and jovial nihilism, its playful absurdity and nasty cruelty, it is impossible to read this as anything other than a vicious take-down of the idea of a CG action sequence, a curdled critique of the limits of Hollywood, even the idea of making a sequel to 1981’s Escape from New York. The consequence of this ferocious, even callous brazenness is that the film’s vision of redemption is reduced to apocalypse, and that Carpenter’s vision of anything like politics essentially consists of an empty void, but the beauty of the film is that it registers the sadness of a director reduced to that position. If Escape from New York was a caustic scalpel, Escape from L.A. is a libertarian broadside aimed at society writ-large. Gone is the sense of impromptu, even thorny, community in New York, or Carpenter’s The Thing, with its paranoid ruminations on humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, or Big Trouble in Little China, with its comparatively convivial reflections on the inadequacy of Hollywood male archetypes, or Prince of Darkness’s mercurial meditations on the potential for science and religion to work together. The possibility for human salvation through collectivity has no place in Carpenter’s mature brand of nihilism. While his deeply underrated Christine implicitly assaulted Hollywood’s acts of cinematic necromancy, its inability to fashion anything new and need to feed off the corpses of earlier visions of youth and coolness, Escape from L.A. is his most full-throated bite of the hand that feeds.

In that sense, the cosmic uncertainty of Carpenter’s wonderfully underrated 1994 film In the Mouth of Madness was a pivot point. With its harrowing and sublime investigation of the limits of directorial control and the disturbing psychic and cosmic forces unleashed by the intersection of art and corporatism, Madness seems to have opened a portal from which humanity may have no return. Escape both explodes outward – into a brutal, deliberately un-subtle burst of savage playfulness – and implodes inward, into a cloacal vision of Hollywood’s intestinal tract. When Snake’s submarine lands in L.A., the ground immediately gives out from under it, as if it can’t bear physical soil or withstand real concrete, can’t exist outside the false machinations of a Hollywood CG sequence, but also as though the film is plea-ing for Snake to stay on the island, to not return to a world that has no place for him anymore, to appreciate what Hollywood has to offer. In the vortex of chaos, he has found grace, has located the possibility of home.

From there, we’re off to the races, a transparent, scabrous mockery of Hollywood that is also a celebratory account of Hollywood’s genre-hopping excess, from a simply breathtaking absurdist surf interlude where Snake hangs ten with Peter Fonda, washed ashore from another genre entirely, to a hang-glider ride that ends in Disneyland’s “Happy Kingdom,” now turned into a haven for potential leftist revolt that, the film can only suggest, is another illusion of Hollywood radicalism, a fantasy of immediate satisfaction and sudden solution. Stranded in the middle of all this, we start one sequence where Snake is about to punished passing by several scenes of gladiatorial combat, Carpenter teasing a replay of the same set-piece from Escape from New York, before we learn Snake’s fate, a hilarious undercut: a basketball sequence, five shots without missing, ten seconds for each shot. It’s the mid-‘90s, Carpenter seems to suggest, and we need a basketball film in our map to the stars.

More generally, Escape from L.A. film is a work obsessed with the fabrication of Hollywood mythology, from the obvious (Bruce Campbell as the Surgeon General of Beverley Hills, who collects bodies to recover skin to keep his scions perennially beautiful) to more subtle remarks, such as the continual refrain “I Thought You’d Be Taller” that becomes a sort of needling chorus throughout the film for characters who meet Plissken. Snake twice attempts to assault or kill his U.S. government captors early on, reminding him that they know more tricks than he can muster, and that he, and we, will have to learn that we are being manipulated and may have to play the same game to get our revenge. Snake finally learns this in his phenomenally disastrous exit from the film, a blast of cosmic nihilism rarely seen in any film, let alone a blockbuster.

In many ways, Snake has to learn what, and if, Hollywood manipulation has anything to offer him. In a stellar sequence, he sets the stage for an Old Hollywood standoff against his enemies and then devastates the very rules he sets up. Shooting before he says he will, his opponents ae too locked in their Hollywood idiom, in the L.A. vision they still, however loosely, assent to, to know what hit them. The tensions are deep here. There is remarkable ambivalence within the film: for all that the film posits L.A. as the last vestige of possible freedom, L.A. itself is also a transparent theme park, a self-conscious Hollywood vision of absurd that is both celebrated and lamented by Carpenter, who seems to suggest that no other freedom may be possible other than that afforded by Hollywood, that the only forms of freedom we’ve been reduced to are those proffered by American movie fantasies. From here, Carpenter would return to collectives in Vampires and Ghosts of Mars, but both of those films offer little possibility of escape.

It’s not a subtle film, you can probably tell, but it isn’t dumb. When Snake tells the feds that he’s lost his hologram projector, for instance, we’re meant to intuit that he’s lied to them when he achieves a devastatingly mischievous coup with it at the conclusion, even though the film never explicitly reminds us that we’ve been lied to by our protagonist an hour earlier. The film knows that we’re watching, and maybe not watching well enough. When we first meet Steve Buscemi’s “Maps to the Stars Eddie,” he sidles into the frame behind Snake as the latter is resting in placid repose, quietly frustrated to himself, yet also posing in classic Hollywood bearing. He too is a star charting his course, the film seems to say, but he is also being charted, both by others around him and by decades of Hollywood archetypes he cannot fully shake off, and that this film cannot escape from. How else to explain the final shot. Having shut down the world, Russell interrupts his own final moment of solitude, only to catch a stray suspicion and stare at the camera, striking a cheery-nasty pose for the viewers he now acknowledges. Snake, the film seems to know, simply can’t exist as a real person. The only home he can know is an assemblage of smoke and mirrors. In his quest for escape, he comes to realize that he was always-already a cinematic type. He isn’t our savior, and he doesn’t want to be, but Hollywood cinema can’t actually posit a kind of hero useful for everyday life. The best thing the film can do is conclude, to turn this film’s end into a thesis on film’s end. We, the film says, can only be left to our own devices.

Score: 9/10

Motel Hell opens with an absolute pip of a silent sequence, a seemingly offhand shard – as though the film started too early, or we’re watching things sidle into place – that ultimately becomes the lens through which the whole film might be viewed. As the camera fades in, Vincent (Rory Calhoun) slyly and somewhat laconically smokes his pipe on the porch of his mostly defunct roadside motel Motel Hello, the “o” flickering out and the red bathing him in a warm but hellish glow. It’s a remarkably casual, easy-going, even lethargic bit of filmmaking – nothing is really happening, except another moment in this random person’s day in anywhere U.S.A. – and yet the texture of the scene folds us into a milieu and a mood. The font of the credits itself mimics the Motel font in a simple but effective means to suggest that we, ourselves, are now entering the headspace of the hotel itself. I have to say, readers, I was instantly smitten. Motel Hell is like that: it accomplishes more than most films, yet it barely does anything at all.

Before watching Two Evil Eyes, you would be forgiven for assuming that director Dario Argento was the hanger-on. Originally planned to include sequences by Argento, John Carpenter, and writer Stephen King, Argento certainly seems like the odd man out. Carpenter and Romero seem like an obvious match, and King and Romero had already collaborated on the phenomenal Creepshow, a deliriously kooky anthology horror film that fully recaptured the spirit of the EC Comics horror tales. (Carpenter, too, had already directed an adaptation of King’s Christine). The obvious impetus for this film is Creepshow and Romero’s subsequent, lesser Tales from the Darkside show (also adapted into a 1990 film whose best segment also features a fiendish feline), and Argento, who didn’t usually sign on for this sort of thing, may have just been along for the ride.

The script for 1990’s The Guardian was finally credited to William Friedkin, Dan Greenburg, and Stephen Volk , but, watching the monstrosity, it is immediately obvious how many unmarked hands touched and tore the film to bits before its release. This slapdash production is transparently the work of many eyes and voices working at cross purposes, a cinema born of unfulfilled expectations and necessary compromises. While loosely based on the novel The Nanny by Greenburg, the film’s producers invested heavily in director William Friedkin’s history with supernatural horror and insisted that the film incorporate Exorcist-like cosmic tendrils absent in Greenburg’s book (which I have not read). Rather than Phil (Dwier Brown) and Kate (Carey Lowell) Sterling being threatened by Camilla (Jenny Seagrove) – your everyday local duplicitous nanny with a penchant for stealing human newborns – they are the victims of Camilla, a malevolent cosmic force and eldritch, Druidic forest demon who needs to sacrifice babies to her God. Rather than a parable of domestic fear, The Guardian assaults the senses with a thoroughly supernatural account of Christian theology’s Other. Sometimes things just go like that.

The bandages of the film’s construction are plainly apparent watching the finished film. Scenes end too early, last too long, or seem to be missing completely. Ideas are brought up and dropped within the span of a scene, the tell-tale sign of a film scrambled in the editing rhythms either to rush to the proverbial “good stuff” or to recover from a lack of coherent footage. It’s difficult to tell whether this happened prior to filming or during the process, but Friedkin seems palpably divested from the main currents of the story or the emotions of the characters. If, say, his The Exorcist is an exquisite diamond of a horror picture calculating every scene for maximum effect, The Guardian is much closer to that film’s famously tortured, unfocused, misbegotten sequels.

Guillermo Del Toro’s pet fascinations seem to have emerged almost fully formed in Cronos, his debut feature. Despite its less ostentatious sensibility, this is very much the work of the man who would make Pan’s Labyrinth.  But it is no mere prologue. While Del Toro’s later films lather on either special effects or themes which increasingly seem like special effects, they also risk monumentalizing themselves. Despite its eminent craft, Pan’s Labyrinth feels like less than the sum of its parts nearly two decades on, as though it might collapse under the weight of the themes that signal its importance and the somewhat overworked narrative parallels that strive for conceptual relevance. Perhaps it spoke to its moment, but it also feels too strained to work as anything more than an antique to a particular flavor of Oscarbait cinema. And that’s saying nothing of his actual Oscarbait picture, the nearly somnambulant The Shape of Water.

Pan’s Labyrinth might have learned from a thing or two from Del Toro’s first film, in that regard. For all its resonance, Cronos is a decidedly spry, suggestive affair, never taking three metaphors to say what a brief glance or a hesitating pause might reveal. Indeed, the actual metaphor of the film is somewhat opaque, slowly – and without any obvious “twist” – sauntering into a slantwise vampire story rather than plunging in from the beginning. Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi), the protagonist of Cronos runs an antique shop, until he is “bitten” by one of his antiques. Suddenly, slowly afflicted with an almost-unstated craving for blood, the film plays loose with vampire mythology, but it is very much Del Toro’s exploration of the craving for infinite life that turns the body itself into a deadened machine. As one character says of his rich uncle’s desire to find the creature, “all he does is shit and piss all day and he wants to live longer?” That the wealthy uncle De La Guardia (Claudio Brook) hardly figures in the film, and that his conniving nephew Angel (Ron Perlman) who hardly cares about the metaphysics of lineage and simply wants to succeed, ends up figuring as a more central villain says something about Cronos’s general vibe, its appreciation for the deflationary and the quasi-comic, the gesture that undercuts even in the act of incanting.

Released during the nadir of horror cinema as a popular and creative outlet, the early 1990s, when the decade was still in the midst of withdrawal from the slasher film high that quickly turned into an addiction, Cronos slips its fang into the moribund genre’s neck to reveal subliminal life.The creature itself is a clockwork insect, a vampiric inversion of the mechanical and the organic that suggests pulsing life dormant beneath objects that might be curated and controlled for display. The desire eternity is an inhumane way of absolving oneself from the complexities of existence, the film suggests. Rather than hiding death under life’s mask, as most vampire films do, Del Toro finds life dormant in an emblem of machinery, a golden antique that suggests a grotesque parody of immortal life encased in an armor of riches.One can trace the tendrils to Del Toro’s recent magisterial Pinocchio, which certainly portends his upcoming version of Frankenstein, another story of a modern Prometheus in search of transcendence who only discovers his own inability to cope.

That could also be a metaphor for the film itself. This deceptively simple story of the boundaries of life and the limits of death is all the more touching for how surreptitiously and even straightforwardly it leeches thematic resonance out of its story-world, how casually it feels attuned to everyday rhythms and, well, life. Indeed, life masking death is an unfortunately apt description for several of Del Toro’s later films, which too often seem frisky and deranged but ultimately reveal hollow cores (although his Pinocchio is a peach). Vaguely pleasing though it is to watch Del Toro given 100 or even 200 million dollars to aestheticize the lingering traces of our pasts, Cronos alone feels alive to its present. When Jesus gets his first taste of blood in the bathroom at a party, an angry partygoer wipes it up from the counter, leading an undeterred Jesus to lap up what little remains the floor, a moment that radiates even more lethargic sadness due to its casually offhanded manner. When a shoe walks past him, it briefly registers as a comment on the casually uncaring cruelty of the wealthy before it returns to the labors of the story-world. Crimson Peak, with its gothic manse literally sitting atop a field of blood-red dye, a gloriously baroque image that is also a crudely pandering, if amusingly self-amused, metaphor, ain’t got nothing on this tiny pool of blood and one man’s sudden, insatiable craving for it.

All of Cronos’s best moments are quietly insinuating like this, morbid incisions of quiet, quirky malevolence rather than meat-cleavers of meaning. After the “villain” Angel (Ron Perlman) attempts to murder Jesus without recognizing the implications of his affliction, Del Toro lovingly lingers on the work of a morgue attendant preparing the body for a funeral that never arrives. “It’s your best work yet,” he’s told, to which the attendant responds, lovingly exploring the nooks and crannies of the corpse, that there is “a technique to this. I’m giving it shape, texture, color. You have to be a fucking artist.” Del Toro gives himself the perfect metaphor for his own career, and then immediately mocks it. The widow has decided to cremate. Some people, Del Toro muses, just don’t appreciate the craft of death, and the of art of life.

Score: 8/10