The Friday Night Horror Movie: Special Effects (1984)

special effects movie poster

There is a question that, I suppose, needs to be asked here. What, exactly, is a horror movie? Sometimes that’s easy to define. Horror movies have ghosts or monsters in them. Vampires, blobs, werewolves and other creatures of the night fill the screen of many a horror film. But what about more pedestrian horror? Movies in which the villain is human.

Jason Vorhees is just a man in a hockey mask with a machete (at least in the early films, he later becomes superhuman and virtually unkillable). But there are lots of crime movies with higher body counts. No one would argue that the Friday the 13th movies are anything other than horror, but serial killer movies are often called thrillers.

Maybe that’s because there usually isn’t a police detective trying to solve the case of the Jason killings. But then there are a lot of Italian horror films, giallos especially, that plotwise are basically police procedurals.

Maybe horror movies are more gore-filled. But that doesn’t always track either because some cop flicks concentrate on the extreme violence of their killers. And plenty of horror films have very little gore or none at all.

I don’t have an answer here. It is a big debate that I won’t solve in these pages. I mention it because tonight’s Friday Night Horror movie could be considered more of a thriller than a horror, but it does carry the horror genre label on IMDB and that’s what I thought it was coming into it, so that’s what we’re gonna keep calling it.

Andrea Wilcox (Zoë Lund) left her husband Keefe (Brad Rijn) and small child in Texas to go to New York City and pursue an acting career. Though she’s willing to sleep with producers and directors and anybody who will give her a part she’s only able to find jobs doing nude modeling and the like.

When Keefe comes to get her back and bring her home she lies and says that her career is starting to take off. Why, she has a meeting that evening with Neville (Eric Bogosian) a famous movie director. She does in fact go to his house that evening and literally begs him to at least take a look at her.

He does look at her, then sleeps with her, and secretly films the encounter, and strangles her to death. He cleans her up, puts her inside Keef’s car, and dumps it at Coney Island.

The cops immediately suspect Keef and arrest him. Neville hires an expensive attorney and gets him free on bail. He then decides to make a movie about Keef and Andrea. He gets Keef to play himself and finds an amazing Andrea look-alike in a woman named Elaine (also played by Zoë Lund) to play Andrea.

Things get weird from there.

B-movie auteur Larry Cohen mixes Vertigo (1958) with Body Double (1984) and bits of Peeping Tom (1960) into a sleazy cauldron of awesome. He has Brian DePalma’s flair for taking Hitchcockian ideas and amping up the sex and violence, but very little of either director’s sense of style. Though he does create some really interesting sets, especially Neville’s giant apartment filled with mirrors and water.

The film really is more thriller than horror as Neville takes his movie ideas to extremes and is more than willing to kill again to maintain his cinematic goals.

Special Effects wasn’t at all what I was expecting when I put it on, but I found it to be quite enjoyable.

Awesome ’80s in April: Night Game (1989)

night game poster

Jaws (1975) is one of my all-time favorite movies. It is practically perfect in every way. It is a film I’ve seen dozens of times. It is a film that I put on when I’m sick and miserable. It cheers me up every time. I love Roy Scheider in that film and he’s only my third favorite character in that film.

Scheider was an interesting actor. He starred in many movies through the 1970s and 1980s and was by all accounts a big film star (he made lots of movies up until his death in 2008 but these two decades saw him as a big movie star). But I feel like outside of Jaws, and maybe The French Connection, he’s mostly been forgotten.

He’s about the only thing that makes Night Game interesting. He plays Mike Seaver a Texas cop who might just love the Astros more than his (much younger) girlfriend Roxy (Karen Young). Somebody is slicing and dicing hot blondes on the oceanfront and it is up to Seaver to figure out who.

Given the title and his fondness for the Astros you know the killer is going to have something to do with baseball. If you are a fan there is quite a bit of gameplay on-screen and parts of it are filmed in the Astrodome. If you aren’t, well there is still Scheider doing his darndest to make a limp script exciting.

I didn’t hate it, but it is definitely forgettable. I watched it this weekend and I had to brush up on the plot via Wikipedia to write this review. It feels like a made-for-TV movie but with more violence and naked parts.

Awesome ’80s in April: Dead Calm (1989)

dead calm movie poster

When I was a young teen, probably sometime in the late 1980s my mother’s friend Beverly had a satellite dish and all of the premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. We only had basic cable at the time so I was in awe of all the movies she had access to. She was kind enough to allow me to send her requests of films I was interested in watching and she’d record them for me onto VHS tapes. I used to scour the TV Guide looking for movies for her to record.

When I got older and was living on my own I used to set the VCR to record old movies off of TCM and other cable channels. I had quite a collection of films dubbed off onto VHS tapes.

One film in that collection was Dead Calm. Unlike Firestarter this was a film I didn’t really know much about. Nicole Kidman was not yet a star and I didn’t know who Sam Neill or Billy Zane was. It is an Australian film and I don’t remember how much publicity it received in the USA. But at some point, I must have seen a trailer or read a synopsis and decided it sounded interesting. Thus I recorded it onto VHS tape.

But I never did watch it. It sat in that collection of tapes for years and years. When I’d go looking for something to watch I would see it, think to myself “I should watch that sometime” and then skip right past it. Many years later I got a digital copy of the film and yet I continued to put off watching it. One of the things I’m loving about this Awesome ’80s series is that I’m finally getting around to watching those sorts of films.

I should have watched this one much sooner as it is pretty terrific.

Kidman and Neill play Rae and John Ingram, a married couple who recently lost their only son in a terrible accident. They have taken off in their sailboat to sail the Pacific Ocean and forget about their troubles.

One day they spy a schooner that seems to be in some distress. They hail it to no accord. Before they can make their way over to see what the trouble is they see a man, Hughie (Zane) furiously rowing toward them in a dinghy.

He says that his boat is slowly sinking and that all the other crew is dead of food poisoning. But something seems off about him. When John indicates he’d like to sail over and check out the boat, Hughie becomes very agitated. He generally seems over-excited and behaves somewhat erratically.

When he finally crashes and falls asleep, John takes the dinghy over to the boat to investigate. What he finds is disturbing. But before he can come back to his boat, Hughie has knocked Rae unconscious and taken control of the boat.

The film becomes a tight thriller with Rae trying to escape from Hughie and John trying to survive the sinking boat long enough to be rescued. I loved the gender reversal of that. Typically in movies like this, the woman would be trapped helplessly by the villain and the male hero would rush in to rescue her. But here John must be saved by his wife after she subdues the villain.

Director Phillip Noyce keeps things moving briskly and the tension held tightly. The two boats, thousands of miles from anything but the ocean create a wonderful setting where the characters must survive on their own cunning and wits.

This was Kidman’s breakthrough role and she’s terrific. She gives her character confidence rarely seen from female characters in this type of movie, but she never loses her femininity. Sam Neill is great as well. He spends a great deal of the film alone on that sinking ship and he allows his character the fear that comes from such a situation but also a determination to survive. I’m not a huge Billy Zane fan and he doesn’t quite have enough crazy menace here, but he’s still effective.

I’m surprised this film hasn’t received more love. I’m really glad I finally decided to watch it.

Flightplan (2005)

flightplan movie poster

In the previews for Flightplan they show Jodie Foster on an airplane claiming she has lost her daughter. They then show one of the flight crew explaining to Jodie Foster that her daughter was never on board the plane. And with that, there are no surprises in the film.

Her daughter not being on the passenger list/flight manifest might have made for a good surprise ending à la The Sixth Sense or something, but if they are using it in the commercials then you know it isn’t the surprise ending but a twist found somewhere between the opening and the end credits. But if it is not the surprise ending, then you automatically know the daughter is real.

Mental psychosis plays well for an ending, but in the middle, it has to be a ploy to divert the audience’s attention so that they can again surprise us with the daughter having really been taken. And if someone took her then there must be some kind of terrorist plotting.

And really if I can figure this stuff out by the previews, anybody can. Because I’m totally not the sort who figures stuff out on my own.

Unfortunately, those surprises are all the film has going for it. In a film where you know where it’s going to wind up, it’s the getting there that has to be good, and this film never quite makes the ride interesting. It’s more like a real transatlantic flight – long, tiring, and your legs feel all tired out by the time it ends.

Jodie Foster and Peter Sarsgaard are fine actors and they do their best with the material, but there just isn’t enough there.

It is the kind of film where I found myself yelling at the television over the extensive amount of plot holes, and stupidity of the characters until I fell asleep from exhaustion.

Cape Fear (1962)

cape fear poster

Gregory Peck is so linked in my mind to the simplicity and grace of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, that it is always surprising to see him in anything else. To find him in the gritty, dirty piece of film noir that is the original Cape Fear is something of a shock. Yet, as always he does a marvelous job, and some of that grace manages to shine through the grime.

The story is a pretty basic noir plot. Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) is an ex-convict who just got out of prison. He has come back to town to haunt Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) who testified against Cady for attacking a woman. Cady has spent his time in prison studying the law. He manages to terrify Bowden and his family and still remain within the confines of the law.

Though Peck gets top billing, this is truly Robert Mitchum’s film. He plays Cady with a swagger and menacing smile that is simply magnificent. We can see inside his swarthy confident charm and see the evil, menacing psychopath. The brilliance of the role is that we rarely see the violence that hides just behind the mask. Yet it seethes and oozes out, ready to strike at any time.

Director J. Lee Thompson keeps the tension pumping throughout the 105-minute film. There is hardly a moment to relax before something else occurs to tense us right back up. Yet the tension doesn’t come from boogie men jumping out from behind closets. It is a slow, boiling tension that tightens as we imagine just what might happen. When the climax finally does occur it is almost a letdown.

The censors wouldn’t allow the bloodbath one might expect at the end of such a film as this, and so what we do get feels less exciting that I wanted. Still, getting to the end is well worth the watching.