American Gothic

American Gothic (1988)

Dir. John Hough

Written by Burt Wetanson, Michael Vines

Starring Rod Steiger, Yvonne DeCarlo, Sarah Torgov, Janet Wright, Michael J. Pollard, William Hootkins

            AMERICAN GOTHIC has been on my radar for very nearly 20 years now, ever since my first girlfriend back in high school told me that it was the absolute, bottom-of-the-barrel, worst movie ever made, in language so uncharacteristically salty that it stuck with me through the better part of two extremely eventful decades. I have a very clear memory of the VHS box taunting me from its high shelf in the horror section of the video store where was employed back then (my recollection is that it was the very first movie in that section, shelved alphabetically; we didn’t have ALICE, SWEET ALICE, and I believe THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES was in the “classics” section, even though it was only 28 years old at the time, younger than AMERICAN GOTHIC is today). At the time I was a budding cinephile with a neophyte’s earnest pretensions for the medium, and, lacking the jaded bemusement which would so endear terrible cinema to me later in life after all meaning and joy had leached from my dessicated soul, I was in no hurry to watch something which was supposed to be so terrible. But even so, I thought I had AMERICAN GOTHIC pretty well pegged. I mean, look at that cheesy box art. This looks like it would be a good companion piece to HEAD OF THE FAMILY or GHOULIES.

            Except, actually not. Because the first two things that happen in the movie demonstrate both why it is very much not in the same vein as those lovable Charles Band joints, and why someone might consider this to be a movie with some serious, perhaps movie-breaking tonal issues. I’ll let wikipedia describe the film’s opening:

“Cynthia [Sarah Torgov, MEATBALLS, in her last peformance before becoming an artist/illustrator] is traumatized by the death of her baby after leaving him in a bathtub, where he accidentally drowned. She and five of her friends, Jeff, Rob, Lynn, Paul and Terri decide to go on a vacation.”

A representative image from this movie called "AMERICAN GOTHIC"

            So right off the bat, we have, 1) holy shit, traumatic baby death, dealt with in a way which very much wants us to understand and take seriously that trauma. Not exactly a fun way to kick off the hacky bodycount slasher which is strongly suggested by the second sentence, which brings us to the more familiar territory of 2) a bunch of disposable white people behaving in an utterly alien manner (‘Cynthia, let’s go on a couples vacation to get your mind off that whole unpleasant business with your dead baby!’) on their way to meet their death in an isolated location. And for better or, --let’s face it-- probably for worse, this is not some kind of embarrassing miscalculation on the movie’s part, this is AMERICAN GOTHIC telling you what it’s all about. And what it’s all about is introducing weird, cartoonish, campy horror movie tropes and then treating them with absolutely dead seriousness that borders on misery porn. It shouldn’t work at all, but it’s so steadfastly committed to its mordant tone that I think it somehow sort of does. Not that it’s the kind of “working” that would necessarily suggest that you or anyone else would enjoy it.

In the cartoonish, campy corner, we find the basic premise: our six vacationing white people get stranded on an isolated island when their plane breaks down, and are surprised to find that the only inhabitants are a family of bizarre, eccentric misfits. “Ma and Pa” (Yvonne DeCarlo, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, SILENT SCREAM, and Rod Steiger, DR. ZHIVAGO) are puritanical religious zealots with three adult offspring (Janet Wright, McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, THE TALL MAN, William “Hoot” Hootkins, STAR WARS, and Michael J. Pollard, BONNIE AND CLYDE, THE ARRIVAL) who all behave like --and appear to believe they are-- prepubescent children. And, uh, not the kind of precocious, perceptive prepubescent children you usually get in movies, more like they smoked an eight-ball of meth and marathoned The Little Rascals and then based their entire personality and demeanor on what they remembered from it.

There is, I think, no denying the silliness of that basic setup. But in the dead serious corner, you have the relatively realistic violence that these nutcases eventually visit on our unsuspecting outsiders, which at some point makes a hard left turn from uncomfortable awkwardness to straight up THE HILLS HAVE EYES sadism. It seems like an insane choice for a premise this loopy, but the movie is absolutely resolute on this point. As absurd as the “kids” are, Steiger and DeCarlo are playing their severe, repressive roles with absolute 100% seriousness, and there’s a grounding realism to the direction which makes the broad, unhinged performances of the “kids” seem unsettling and perverse when it could easily slide into high camp. Most of the victims are not at the same level, and some of their corny hip kid dialogue threatens to sink the whole enterprise early on, but they start dying off pretty quick, and as the direness of their situation sets in it’s increasingly hard to laugh at them. Director John Hough (THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS, THE INCUBUS, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE) seems bound and determined to make this no fun at all, favoring a bleak, hopeless tone matched by the gloomy naturalism of DOP Harvey Harrison (who had just worked with Nicolas Roeg the previous year for a segment of ARIA, and would work with him again in 1990 for THE WITCHES). The craggy woodlands where most of the film takes place are perpetually overcast and full of a wet, sodden sense of decay which feels hostile and wild in the most Hobbesian sense (in fact, it strongly reminds me of another unexpectedly dour wilderness-set slasher, 1983’s THE FINAL TERROR).

The overall effect is a real downer. While creative, none of the kills are very “fun,” and the movie sets its sights on really getting you to understand the depth of these poor victims’ helplessness in the face of these psychotic, self-righteous freaks. This is a task at which is it, against all odds, largely effective; that it is an experience anyone would want to voluntarily subject themselves to is a somewhat different question. Not that it’s exactly wall-to-wall misery porn (though there is at least one incident so shocking it actually elicited gasps from the crowd I viewed it with); it’s just grotesque and miserable, lacking the blind adrenaline rush of THE HILLS HAVE EYES or THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (which it is clearly seeking to emulate) and just resulting in a dismal, hopeless march to the slaughter of characters who are too loosely sketched to care much about, but whose frantic misery is all too clearly articulated.

But again, this is not miscalculation on the movie’s part. It begins with grueling emotional trauma, and grueling emotional trauma is what it’s interested in. This provides no help at all for its anemic bodycount slasher section, but its centrality to the movie suddenly makes sense when it runs out of fresh victims early, leaving time for a thoroughly unexpected final act which changes directions considerably. Despite the unusually sour tone, watching the generic pretty people getting bumped off one by one plays more or less the way you expect of such a thing, which leaves us at around minute 70 with a comfortable assumption that our confirmed “final girl” will rally, confront her tormentors, and manage an unlikely escape. Instead (SPOILERS) she joins them. The trauma of all this is so great that instead of finding a hidden strength and resolve to overcome adversity, Cynthia’s mind simply snaps, and she comes to believe that she is the fourth “child” of the family, dressing in frilly little girl clothes and mimicking the exaggerated childlike affectations of her new “siblings.” You keep assuming it’s an act, that she’s just playing along and waiting for a moment to escape, but no, the old Cynthia really is gone, and not going to return.

(SPOILERS continue) But turnabout’s fair play. Just as “Ma” and “Pa” have honed their other “children” -- who we now learn are victims of the same brainwashing scheme which has now ensnared Cynthia-- into psychotic killers, the now-deranged Cynthia turns out to pose quite a bit of danger to the very people who made her what she has become. The sight of a desiccated baby corpse that Janet Wright is using as a dolly (!) stirs memories of her own dead child. In another movie, this flash of insight might restore her to sanity, but not here. Instead, it churns up her already fragile mental state into something primal and destructive. In short, it transformers her into a Jason-like slasher in her own right, and she wastes no time in butchering her entire adopted “Family” in a pleasingly sadistic manner. Not out of revenge, or desire to escape, but out of pure psychotic frenzy. Hey, you break it, you bought it, you fuck-o's. Cynthia’s tragic past as a baby-drowner is so over-the-top it threatens to get a laugh for much of the film (though actress Torgov is actually quite excellent in the role), but I like that it turns out to be the key to getting her to hulk out and murder everyone at the end. “Worth it” might be going a little far, but “helps redeem what was probably always a bad idea” comes closer.

Now, I’m not really sure what the point of it all is, which is kinda a problem for something this mean, especially when you posit the villains as ultra-religious conservatives haranguing about the debased outside world and all that, and especially especially when your movie is fucking called AMERICAN GOTHIC, for heaven’s sake. It seems like it’s supposed to be some kind of send-up of backwards, evangelical American repression, but the stuff that happens is so crazy and over-the-top that it’s hard to imagine what it’s getting at beyond “wow, conservative religious nutcases sure are scary, huh?” But I do like the implication that this iteration of the TEXAS CHAINSAW family isn’t trying to eat you, it’s trying to terrify and harass you until it breaks you and can subsume you. And in doing so, might turn you into something even worse. It’s interesting that whatever their faults, “Ma” and “Pa” are certainly not hypocrites; they’re true believers, and the film even ends with (SPOILERS) Steiger --upon arriving home to find his family butchered-- raging at God for betraying him after he did everything he was supposed to, which both the film and the actor treat with 100% sincerity and commitment.

Sincerity and commitment AMERICAN GOTHIC has; whether that’s enough to make it worthwhile is a pretty open question. On one hand, I have to admit, it says something that it affected me enough to provoke a reaction. On the other hand, that reaction was “well, this certainly is unpleasant.” So maybe my old girlfriend kind of had a point. Like all the John Hough films I’ve watched so far (including THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS, THE INCUBUS, TWINS OF EVIL and THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE) this one is competently assembled and deliberately paced, but also like all of those, it seems absolutely bound and determined to take a ridiculous premise and ensure it’s no fun at all. It’s not exactly boring, but it’s nowhere near exuberant enough to just get by as a meat-and-potatoes slasher. It has a great cast and some genuinely committed, effective performances, but it’s nowhere near interesting enough for that to do it any good. Fundamentally, it seems like a movie that doesn’t quite understand the reason for its own existence. Writers Burt Wetanson and Michael Vines have no other significant writing credits, and one is certainly tempted to imagine that they simply watched THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE make a bunch of money and figured “sure, I could write something like that.” Like so many other hucksters who were similarly disabused of that notion after their ill-conceived attempt at a ripoff crashed and burned (the miserable ISLAND OF DEATH comes to mind), they seem to have assumed the success of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was due to its sadism and depravity within a family dynamic, instead of its masterful sense of nightmarish intensity. Without that intensity, the sadism and depravity are lifeless objects on-screen, rousing disgust, perhaps, but never much more

Still, gotta give ol’ AMERICAN GOTHIC a little credit for being so fucking crazy hardcore when I assumed it was gonna be a straightforward genre lark. At one point they (SPOILER) rip a baby carcass in half while fighting over it. God damn, honkie. It’s not really very good, but at this point in my death march of horror movies, I’ll settle for “unexpected.”

Side note: Actor Mark Lindsey Chapman (who plays Rob, and, holy cow, was in TITANIC!) once played John Lennon in a biopic of Mark David Chapman called CHAPTER 27. What the everlovin' fuckity-fuck?

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TAGLINE	The Family That Slays together… stays together. Which is solid Horror taglineing at its finest, except that it absolutely does not accurately describe the tone of the movie at all.
TITLE ACCURACY	Meh. They don’t even mention the famous Grant Wood painting, which appears only in the VHS box art.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Nope
SEQUEL?	None.
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	IMDB says UK/Canada. It definitely seems to have been filmed in Canada.
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher, TCSM rip-off, “Evil Town”
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Rod Steiger, Yvonne DeCarlo
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Yvonne DeCarlo
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No.
THE UNDEAD?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	Oh hell yes.
EVIL CULT?	Well, technically these people are subscribers to one of the world’s major religions, but definitely of a sect which could be called cultish.
MADNESS?	Oh, certainly
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Some spying-on
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you suspect God would like you to butcher a bunch of vacationing teenagers, maybe switch to the New Testament for a little bit. (But not Revelations, and I’d stay away from Paul too, now that I think about it.)

Here, I figure you probably deserve a picture of Michael J. Pollard for your troubles.