Murder Mysteries in May: In the Deep Woods (1992)

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The thing about finding movies on the internet to watch is that you don’t always know where the movies came from. I mean there are the usual bad rips, or hardcoded subtitles, or the audio is the wrong language type of thing to deal with, but what I’m talking about is not necessarily knowing what kind of movie you’re about to watch. Is this a prestige Hollywood movie, or some straight-to-video release? Did it have a sizeable budget or were they working on a shoestring? It if has named actors, at what point in their career was this movie made? Were they famous when they made it?

Obviously, for a lot of movies, this is almost automatically known by me. I watch a lot of movies, I pay attention to movie reviews and news. In the vast majority of the films I watch I have some idea of what I’m getting into.

But not always.

Sometimes it is a surprise. Case in point: In the Deep Woods stars Rosanne Arquette, Anthony Perkins, Will Patton, and Amy Ryan. These are people I know. These are people I like. Those last two might not be household names, but I bet you’ve seen them in something. But Arquette and Perkins were stars.

It was made in 1992 which is a little late in Perkins’s career (in fact this was his last film) and a little early for Ryan (in fact this was her first film), but Will Patton had established himself as a solid character actor and Arquette was at the height of her powers.

Not that I was paying that much attention to the date of release when I picked this movie, I saw those names and some decent reviews on Letterboxd and pressed “play.”

What I didn’t realize is that this was a made-for-TV movie. Made for NBC in 1992. TV is different now. TV gets big budgets, big movie stars, and big prestige. In 1992 movies made for broadcast television were usually pretty lame.

Oh well, live and learn, and all that.

Arquette plays Joanna Warren a children’s book author. There is a serial killer on the loose who is dragging women into the woods, I mean The Deep Woods, and doing terrible things to them. Joanna might be his next victim (well, probably not his next victim because that would build our climax a little too quickly, but it is a safe bet he’ll go after her in the last act.

Perkins is the creepy old dude who might be a private investigator who might have some sort of relationship with one of the victims. He might have been hired by her parents. He lies a lot. The film plays up his potential to be the actual killer.

Patton plays the police detective assigned to the case. He keeps creeping on Joanna, asking her out on dates even though she repeatedly turns him down. The film periodically plays up his potential to be the actual killer.

Amy Ryan is Joanna’s sister, I think, or maybe just a friend. Her husband gets a little play as the potential killer, but mostly she’s just a gal pal Joanna can talk to amongst all the creepy dudes.

My favorite part of the film is that the killer is supposedly some kind of mastermind. He’s brutally killing these girls but leaving no clues, no fingerprints or DNA and there are definitely no witnesses. And yet the film continually shows us his crimes (well shows us as much as a TV movie from the early 1990s was allowed to show us) and it is often in daylight, and in public. One time we see him grab a girl in a busy parking lot. Two seconds before he grabs the lady we see extras walking around. Yet no witnesses.

This is a dumb movie. There are a few noir/Giallo touches that are nice, and Perkins is enjoyable – I mean his character is ridiculous, constantly obfuscating his motives for no reason – but he’s enjoyable to watch.

But watching it got me to thinking about made-for-TV movies from this era. This was before prestige TV. This was when television was considered a lesser medium than cinema. This was before streaming. Thirty-minute sitcoms and hour-long dramas ruled television. Now again they’d make a mini-series or a feature-length movie to show on a Monday night. Sometimes they’d get real celebrities to star in them. Their budgets were usually small and they tended to cater to the biggest possible audience. A serial killer movie fits that bill.

Thinking about In the Deep Woods in that context. Had I watched it at a time when there weren’t a thousand awesome shows in my queue and when I often watched whatever happened to be on. I might not have hated it. It would still be a long way from good, but I bet I’d enjoyed myself.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Psycho III (1986)

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In 1987 there was a made-for-TV movie called Bates Motel (it has nothing to do with the more recent TV series of the same name except for the location and existence inside the Psycho Cinematic Universe). I was 11 when it came out, which seems young to be watching a Psycho movie, but it aired on NBC so it must have been deemed safe to watch by my parents.

I don’t remember anything about it except that I loved it, and that it briefly made me obsessed with all things Psycho. I’d never seen the original Hitchcock film or any of its sequels, but I certainly knew about them as they were part of the cultural zeitgeist. Sometime later Psycho III came on some basic cable channel late on a Friday or Saturday night. I don’t think I started it from the beginning but found it while flipping channels and stayed.

I don’t remember anything about it either, and in fact, didn’t realize it was Psycho III until tonight while watching it. What I do remember is a scene in which a pretty young thing does a sexy dance in a motel room while a young Jeff Fahey watches on. He’s naked while sitting in a chair holding a lamp in each hand, wielding one like a sword, or rather like a giant, misshapen cock.

It was about that time when my mother, who must have been watching the film in her bedroom, called out that I should turn the channel. I guess I wasn’t deemed old enough to be watching that one.

I’m not entirely sure why I decided to watch Psycho III tonight, all these years later except that I recently was surprised by how good Psycho II is, and thought maybe this one might surprise me as well.

It isn’t exactly bad, but it is exactly what one might expect from the third sequel in a 1980s horror franchise. It is darker and sleazier than the previous films but unlike Psycho II it has no interest in really empathizing with Norman Bates (though Anthony Perkins’ performance is still quite sympathetic).

The plot picks up soon after the events of the last film. Norman is still running the Bates Motel, and the corpse of Emma Spool has been preserved and speaks to Norman as his mother. Fahey plays a skeezy drifter who takes a job at the hotel.

The film opens with a woman screaming “There is No God” and then it fades in to Maureen (Diana Scarwid), a nun shouting that line again” while staring up at an icon of the Virgin Mary. She then tries to kill herself by throwing herself off the top of a bell tower, in a scene that resembles a similar moment in Vertigo.

The film was directed by Anthony Perkins and he fills the screen with references to the original film and other Hitchcock movies.

Maureen is kicked out of the convent and finds herself staying at the Bates Motel. She and Norman hit it off while Fahey generally acts like a dick. There’s also a journalist who thinks Norman may still be killing people, or at least probably killed Emma Spool.

Meanwhile, Norman is still killing people. Mostly pretty girls who turn him on. Mother doesn’t like that, you know?

There is no depth to the film, it doesn’t attempt to make Norman’s killings a mystery. It is very much a 1980s horror film with some pretty good kills, some really great lighting, and quite a bit of sex and nudity. As such it is pretty good. As the second sequel to one of the all-time great horror films (and the regular sequel to a pretty darn good horror film in its own right), it is disappointing.

I can’t decide if I want to watch Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990), but I definitely want to track down Bates Hotel now.

The Last of Sheila (1973)

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Rian Johnson listed this film as an influence on Glass Onion, his recent Knives Out sequel for Netflix (which is excellent, I highly recommend it) so I thought I’d give it a watch. Almost immediately the influences come flying right at you from the television screen.

The story involves a group of rich, beautiful, (mostly) young people who have found success in the movie industry. They’ve been invited by their friend Clinton (James Coburn) for a week aboard his yacht where he had prepared some delightfully complicated game.

The game involves revealing select secrets from each person (alcoholic, ex-convict, homosexual, child molester, etc) and will conclude with the revelation of who ran over Clinton’s wife one year prior and didn’t have the decency to stay with her and maybe call for help. Everyone more or less enjoys the game until someone actually dies and then it becomes a very real murder mystery.

Glass Onion is a lot bigger, a lot bolder, and a lot more fun, but The Last of Sheila is rather delightful in its own way. The cast includes James Mason, Ian McShane, Raquel Welch, and Dyan Cannon. It was shot on location in the Mediterranean. It was written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins of all people.

Clinton is a movie producer and he has an idea bout making a movie about his dead wife’s life. He wants everyone he’s invited on the boat to help him make it. They, scriptwriters, directors, and actors all, desperately need him and this movie to help their sagging careers. It is full of twists and turns, mysteries and reveals. The cast is clearly having a good time.

It isn’t quite as punchy as I’d like it to be, and the direction by Herbert Ross never excites. He certainly doesn’t make great use of the beautiful setting. It feels very much of its time. One of the big secrets is the character is homosexual which wouldn’t be a big deal now, but in 1973 could be quite detrimental for a celebrity working in Hollywood. That is more scandalous within the film (as is being an alcoholic and a shoplifter) than the revelation that one of them is a child molester which is shrugged off by the characters and the film. But mostly the film is a lot of fun and if you liked Glass Onion I highly recommend it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Psycho II (1983)

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Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho is about as close to perfection as horror films come. I love it. I’ve seen it probably half a dozen times over the years. Yet, I’ve never had any desire to see any of the sequels. There was no need to, in my opinion. Psycho said everything that needed to be said about Norman Bates. Hitchock never indicated he wanted to make any other films and all of the sequels came about after he had died. The general consensus of the sequels is that they are pretty bad, and so I never bothered with them.

But then the other day one of my favorite critics, Keith Phipps, wrote a piece about Psycho II and it intrigued me, and so it became my Friday Night Horror Movie.

As it turns out Psycho II is way better than it has any right to be.

Set 22 years after the events of Psycho, this sequel follows Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) as he is released from the psychiatric institute he’s lived in since being found guilty of the murders from the original film. He’s been found mentally sound by his psychiatrist (Robert Loggia) and sent back to his (surprisingly still intact) home. The hotel is there too and so is Mr. Toomey (a never-sleazier Dennis Franz), a guy hired by the institute to run the place in Norman’s absence.

The hotel has never been much of a money maker so Norman gets a job as a cook’s assistant at a nearby diner. There he meets Mary (Meg Tilly). They get chummy and when Mary’s boyfriend kicks her out Norman lets her sleep (and shower) at his place. Things go ok until little notes start showing up from Norman’s mother. And somebody keeps calling his house claiming to be his mother, too. Then the bodies start piling up.

Is Norman going crazy once again? Or is somebody else trying to get him locked back up?

What I find interesting about the film is that Norman Bates is a true protagonist. The film takes his side, it makes us like him. Anthony Perkins’s portrayal is sympathetic. It was sympathetic in the original, but here we really like him. Or at least I did. The murders in the first film were due to a deep psychosis. We believe he is cured. That’s a really interesting route to take in this film.

Director Richard Franklin (who had just come off the terrific Australian thriller Road Games) knows what he’s doing. There are lots of visual homages to Hitchcock throughout the film, but he makes it his own. This is a film that didn’t need to be made, but it makes you glad it exists.