Post by No Personality on Apr 10, 2010 8:10:40 GMT -5
I have been trying to write about this movie for a long time. In detail. I coughed up a couple silly things back in 2000, one for IMDb and one for Amazon.com. Back when I was just messing around as a 'reviewer.' I'm not all that much better now. But it's still hard to write about this movie. To put into words how terrifying it is. First impressions make it look cardboardy, of course that's because the acting is very wooden and the actors are pretty much complete unknowns. But these are both hallmarks of almost every and any low budget horror film. And this is, I've noticed years later, a film born from a love of horror. I've finally noticed several of the film's influences - The Shining, The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Amityville Horror. It's got a real thing for Lucio Fulci especially, and you'll see The Beyond and House by the Cemetery if you're looking.
This movie is a year too early to have known about Pet Sematary, which it most closely resembles (minus the animal deaths) but the best way to describe it is a cross between The Evil Dead and Pet Sematary. It's ruled by tone and this tone is depressing, dark, and cold as ice. Only the actors playing the undead are having any fun, and that's what ends up making the movie so damn compelling. It's something you get drawn into whole-... I can't say hearted. This movie has no heart. No drama. No realism, apart from an attempt to portray death as really, really painful. No character arcs. It's all just Friday the 13th isolating of victims one-by-one, usually through a series of haunted house devices (self-locking doors and windows, then later a few are suspiciously left open) and a parade of ultra-bloody, ultra-gory Lucio Fulci-esque death set pieces.
Yes, folks- this movie is nothing like the impressions some may get from its' ridiculous House Party-inspired title. Or from the parade of hip white-people movies to follow after the rise of Vanilla Ice in 1991, also the year this movie was first released on video. As: The House on Tombstone Hill (obviously inspired by William Castle's spooky 1958 classic, The House on Haunted Hill - another influence for this one?). There is no comedy here. And other than the fact that the "old lady" who starts it all - Abigail Leatherby - is played by a man (the first victim, Douglas Gibson) in drag, no huge doses of 80's kitsch either. Unless you think people singing or whistling old fashioned tunes like "Jimmy Crack Corn" was more an 80's thing than any other time in history (although, when I was a kid in the 80's, I used to have an old record of people covering quirky classic folk tune hits like that and "It Ain't Gonna Rain No More").
What's really scary about the movie is that it delivers on what a couple fans of The Evil Dead thought that movie was all about (and maybe what that movie couldn't - or wouldn't - have tried to tackle back in 1980): how can you trust your friends when they're dead? How does being dead change their personalities? And how do you know they're dead if they still look and talk like they're your friends? In this case, we're dealing with a lot of people being hurt and having blood on their clothes after being separated from each other. But just because they look dead doesn't necessarily mean they are. So, were you one of them in this situation, you might not be able to tell whether they're dead or alive. They could claim they were only attacked and not killed; they're very convincing. In this movie, everyone who dies comes back to life. And coming back from the dead after being killed sadistically fills them with the desire to hurt and kill anyone they find who's alive. But not before they lie to you and try to trick you.
In short: friendship means nothing in this movie. But unlike The Evil Dead, which chose to have its' demon-zombies run around in an almost comic-like fashion, this movie has them actually terrorize and torture other characters to death. After seeing this movie, I started to wonder why Sam Raimi's zombie films didn't try to be as incredibly dark as this. Of course people like myself who found The Evil Dead to be one of the scariest movies we've ever seen should know by now that Raimi was never a director of extreme films. That seminal 1981 classic was more gory than just about anything that ever graced the big screen for years afterward and up to that point. And also, more freaky in a realistic sense than the special effects in Fulci's movies would allow them to be. The Beyond's tarantula scene may still inspire cringes and the movie remains edgy (as most of Fulci's flicks do) but only for its' high gross-out quotient. Evil Dead's gory moments packed an honest wallop (the pencil scene- 'nuff said).
I don't wonder about things like that anymore. Now I know that - scary or not - it would just be too much of a downer. Not the sort of thing audiences could easily sit down for, stomach, and then walk away from with a feeling of 'hey, wasn't that something?' And horror, even of that time, was either bound to be lighter because of goofy trends or couldn't go this dark within the mainstream because directors felt a sense of social responsibility. I say all this because watching the film even now carries a kind of burden with it. There's just no other way to take, for example, the window scene in this movie than to look at it as being what it is. Not like anything you've ever seen in Friday the 13th-territory. Prolonged, uncut, ultra-gory, sadistic suffering. People suffer and scream onscreen for a long time during their deaths and the movie feels as real as almost anything you were likely to see in the 80's.
I'm not suggesting this film will drive you mad or anything. If only one movie ever had that much power. But I've watched this movie at least one time each year for the last 15 of my life and it still gives me chills. It's playing on my Windows Media Player now and about 30 minutes ago, I had to look over my shoulder because I heard something. If this thing doesn't scare you, it will at least make you paranoid as hell (when watched under the right circumstances)! I don't know what really gets you, but to me these are the scariest zombies in cinema history. In more than concept, the movie has a damn creepy way of bringing what they could suggest right out into the open. It may be a slight cop-out that the actors here act less like they're actually dead and more like they've lost their mind. But it's how the filmmakers had the idea to change the personality of each victim just-so when they return from the dead that makes this movie so deeply scary.
In this, the movie's aided immeasurably by how the actors were instructed to behave when they're playing dead as well as the fact that their skin is now whiter than a guy in a vampire Halloween costume. That pale white I've noticed also reflects the glowing blue of the atmospheric lighting that drips over every frame. Usually, that's the only source of light throughout the movie. They play cunning and scheming, and like a vampire they work overtime to try gaining your trust as well as verbally taunting their intended victims. Actors John Cerna and Naomi Kooker are absolutely bone-chilling in their turns as the undead, where before they might have (him especially) come off as stiff (no pun intended). Would this be a better movie had it been more character-driven? No way. Less violent? Had the music been less repetitious? I doubt it.
It's never been widely available on DVD (so who here is going to see it who hasn't already?). Nor was its' one go-round on region-1 that good of a try. Brentwood just kinda copied the Troma VHS. I don't know if that's where the problems began with the transfer being WAY too dark and colors being incredibly off (especially in the scene with the girl taking off her bra). Of course, the orange-maroonish quality to that and a couple other scenes kinda screams "sepia" which was the color the opening of Fulci's The Beyond was made to be lacquered in. Then the DVD went out of print, it's floating around in oblivion- only to be found on eBay, and Troma never seems to've cared about it enough to ever resurrect it. Which is a shame. This deserves to be seen.
