Color Out Of Space

Color Out Of Space (2019)

Dr. Richard Stanley

Written by Richard Stanley, Scarlett Amaris, based on "The Colour Out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft

Starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Brendan Meyer

I was dreading this one just as much as I was looking forward to it, which is always the way I approach a career resurgence by an artist like director Richard Stanley, i.e. an ambitious wunderkind who produced two good-bordering-on-great early works and then dramatically vanished from the scene. That’s about as surefire a recipe to end up over rated as has yet been conceived by man. Nothing drives up an artist’s stock like unavailability; it’s how Jeff Buckley went from being a guy who made a decent folk album to a legendary romantic genius, or how LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT went from a critically panned matinee flick to the holy grail of lost cinema. Rarely does such a sudden and lengthy departure from the artistic scene reverse itself,* but that is precisely what Stanley has managed, by seizing on his unexpected reemergence in the cultural zeitgeist (brought about by the 2014 release of the documentary LOST SOUL, which depicts Stanley’s disastrous attempt to make THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU back in 1996) to mount a comeback. And so it is that Richard Stanley returns from the elite ranks of artists whose legendary status was largely built on unrealized potential, to the more Earthy realm of artists who have to justify their hype by, you know, actually making art.

That’s a dangerous thing for an artist who has quietly built a rather enviable reputation largely around the promise of unrealized projects, which will always remain perfect and pristine, safely locked away in our imaginations. There are any number of ways this can disappoint you. You can discover that, after all this time, the promising young artist was just that – promising, not fully formed, all hype and no delivery. You can discover that the promising young artist really did have something once, but lost it somewhere along the way – lost the fire of youth, lost the touch, just lost interest. Or, even worse, you can discover that the promise was legitimate and the talent is still there, but the time has passed, and something that would have seemed boundary-pushing and exciting in the artist’s heyday now feels dated and played-out. I must admit that I absolutely assumed Stanley’s return to directing** was more likely to fall into one of those many pitfalls than it was to represent a triumphant return to a long-denied cinematic wunderkind.

 Actually neither turns out to be the case, but I'm surprised and happy to report that it's closer to the latter than the former. COLOR OUT OF SPACE*** is not a great movie, but it is quite a good one, demonstrating some real moxie and craftsmanship which mark it as the undeniable work of someone with some real talent, even if a few missteps are made along the way. And frankly that shocked the hell out of me. I was all but certain that three decades in the cold would have left Stanley diminished and rusty if not out-and-out broken, and that’s even that takes for granted his two early-90s successes weren’t a fluke to begin with. I was expecting a latter-day Argento-style disappointment, but COLOR OUT OF SPACE reveals a director as ambitious and gifted as he's ever been. Which is not to say it's a work of untouchable genius or anything, but his two 90's movies were the work of a genre director with real promise. Thirty years later, he's still promising. That's better than I thought I could reasonably hope for.

As the 500 word of preamble make obvious, then, this movie comes with some baggage by virtue of its director, and that's before we even add the extra weight of its star (one-time Oscar winner and beloved internet meme Nic Cage, deep in his direct-to-video rampage) and its source material (H.P. “The Sauce” Lovecraft's genre-defining classic short story of the same title). It buckles under all that weight, of course –it’s hard to imagine any movie that wouldn’t-- but manages to keep from ever completely collapsing, and that in itself is kind of an accomplishment. As a Stanley comeback, it proves he was worthy of our interest, if not our hyperbole. As a Lovecraft adaptation, it's astonishingly good, although in a large part by virtue of the miserable company that descriptor places it in. As a Nic Cage movie... well, that's a little more up for debate, but at least he’s always gonna give you your money’s worth.

Before we get to that, though, we might as well talk about the actual plot. Amazingly, though the story is updated to the present day, this turns out to be a broadly faithful riff on the original Lovecraft story, which recounts the tale of the rural Gardner family, whose lives are thrown into escalating madness by the arrival of a meteor which brings with it an “unknown color” that gradually subverts and distorts the environment, and the bodies and minds of the people in it. You know Stanley really gets Lovecraft because he mimics the author’s characteristic style of writing a story-within-a-story (the original is actually a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, the gripping saga of a guy who interviews another guy about a third guy, but Stanley is content with merely one framing device). The details vary, especially as the movie progresses and gradually pivots towards Cronenbergian body horror, but the essence of the original story is clearly still here, along with most of the major incidents. It is, I would hesitate to say, one of the most faithful Lovecraft adaptations I’ve ever seen, not that it has a great deal of competition in that regard.

Of course, Lovecraft adaptations, even generally faithful ones, are practically preordained to be garbage. But COLOR OUT OF SPACE draws its unusual strength from its atmosphere, cultivated with great care by Stanley, DOP Steve Annis (a music video guy til 2019's I AM MOTHER), production designer Katie Byron (BOOKSMART, FINAL GIRLS) and composer Colin Stetson (HEREDITARY). It adds up to a look and feel which neatly captures Lovecraft's sense of creeping, insinuating wrongness. This is absolutely essential to any prayer of meaningful adapting Lovecraft, and it’s the one thing that virtually every other film version of his work fumbles miserably (including the previous adaptations of this very short story, a 1965 Boris-Karloff-starring AIP production under the dubious title DIE MONSTER DIE and the 1987 Wil Wheaton movie THE CURSE). Even RE-ANIMATOR, arguably the only legitimately good Lovecraft movie ever made, can’t claim that; it doubles down on goopy effects and campy humor instead. Capturing the classic Lovecraftian sense of cosmic, incomprehensible unease is a tough thing to do, but Stanley and company manage it beautifully here, and without even a trace of the pretentious self-consciousness that has defined a lot of modern "post-horror" movies with similar ambitions. In a world of THE VVITCHes and HEREDITARYs, I’d almost forgotten that “heavy on atmospheric dread” does not have to mean “gloomy” and “glacial,” but Stanley keeps things colorful and spritely while managing to work up quite a head of anxiety. It’s Lovecraft distilled through the mind of a distinctly oddball auteur**** (I doubt ol’ H.P. would have thought to introduce our protagonist in the middle of a white magic ceremony as a cute little character detail, or clarify that the hippie holy fool who squats on their property as a cat named “G-Spot”) but it is still very recognizably Lovecraft, a virtue which, despite the virtual cottage industry his work has inspired, almost nothing else can boast.

The movie is also helped quite a bit by a surprisingly fine cast, who vividly portray the family’s gradual slide into dreamy madness while still crafting sharply-defined, likeable --and often quite funny!-- characters. In the Q & A that followed the screening, Stanley mentions that he worked with the actors on their characters’ backstories, which makes sense; even though we get only tiny glimpses into what their lives were like before the events of the film, they feel unusually fully-formed. Even as things get weird, the family dynamic feels complex and lived-in; they seem unusually genuine for a genre movie, convincingly reading as an existing family unit rather than a bunch of body count whose existence is entirely defined by the circumstances of the plot. Madeline Arthur (BIG EYES) as the Gardner family’s teenage daughter and our protagonist, is especially great, managing a character who feels very lively and specific in a way which the movie absolutely does not require, but definitely benefits from. Brendan Meyer (THE GUEST) and Joely Richardson (EVENT HORIZON) do equally nuanced, likeable character work with the older brother and anxiety-fraught mother, respectively.

And of course, you’ve also got the father, one Nicolas Cage. He’s, um, a real character, possibly a little unhinged, given to doing a verbal impersonation of his own father, who all visual and audio evidence suggests was born in, like 1885, despite the movie taking place in modern times. IMDB trivia claims that “Richard Stanley's favorite Cage Movie is Vampire's Kiss (1988), [and] he asked Nicolas to use the same style of performance,” a claim I was initially rather dubious of, until I discovered that Stanely mentions VAMPIRE’S KISS by name in at least two distinct interviews. The finished film mostly doesn’t pitch Cage at quite that level, but it’s definitely a weird performance. And not entirely to the movie’s benefit, in my estimation; he matches, in some ways, the charming eccentricities of the rest of the family, but Cage's now-expected eagerness for full-on mega-acting turns out to be sort of an unhelpful distraction here. It's not a bad performance (it was made worse by my audience, a bunch of hipster douchebags who appear to consider any line that Cage speaks in any movie, regardless of context, inherently hilarious) but it's noticeably a bit broader and more cartoony than the rest of the cast, who are not exactly going for underplayed minimalism either, but who keep their escalating madness a little more grounded and wind up equally impactful but more emotionally effective.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Cage, and you hire him for his mega-acting superpower, obviously. But I think Stanley should have kept a tighter leash on him in this case. It feels like Cage is trying to go over the top, rather than just responding naturally to the insane situation the movie puts him in. It’s an entertaining performance, and Cage is terrific with the script’s dark --but slightly goofy-- humor, but I worry he’s turning into a bit of a parody by this point in his career. Those dipshits laughing at every single thing he said are definitely morons, but I feel like he’s been encouraging them. Of course, this is also his first film in a long time which is actually good enough on its own merits that it becomes a problem when he tries to hijack it with his manic weirdness, rather than a saving grace. So I get where he’s coming from. Still, given how well Stanley does pushing the other actors to equally extreme but less excessive and silly psychological states, he might have been better off finding a normal actor and pushing them out of their comfort zone to go a little mega, as opposed to Cage, who by this point seems like he’s barely able to hold his craziness in check even before the plot starts to take a turn towards the weird.

Anyway, Cage’s performance is an illustrative example of where the movie starts to go a little wrong. Stanely, like Cage, seems maybe a little bit too eager to please for his own good, and towards the back half starts to overplay things a bit. It’s nothing derailing, just a few miscalculations: an eerie scene where the “color” affects a family member is diminished by adding an aggressive lightning strike where a subtle implication would have had more impact, for example. Or a surreal, otherworldly tableau is blown into a gaudy light show, pushing the movie’s special effects a little past their budget for no real advantage. It wouldn’t really be that big a deal –in fact, I’d usually commend a low-budget film like this overextending itself a little in the name of whammy—but the frustrating thing is that, for once, the movie doesn’t need it. It does such a fine job with its eerie insinuations and little glimpses that the more standard effects movie razzle-dazzle actually lessens the impact. The more concrete things get, the smaller the movie feels.

Still, all things considered it's kind of a miracle the movie works as well as it does. The hardest part –the inevitable visualization of Lovecraft's famously unseeable color-- is handled with a nifty effect, a kind of shifting, shimmering pink that looks suitably unnatural. The short story described the titular color as “shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum,” a pretty tall order for any primarily visual medium (even one with Yog-Sothoth rooting for it), but the flickering, ever-shifting character of the effect suggests, if not a never-before seen color, at least some kind of inexplicable visual phenomenon which is only partially perceptible to the human senses. What we see crucially suggests that there is much more we don’t see, which is a legitimately clever way to tackle this difficult problem with the adaptation, and is, overall, the guiding philosophy behind the whole movie’s strengths, and indeed, of the original story’s strengths, too. Of the dozens of Lovecraft adaptations I’ve seen, this is perhaps the only one that seems to really understand that, and that’s reason enough to be pleasantly surprised.

 It takes ambition to commit to capturing that kind of tone, and that ambition permeates the whole film. Stanley, who is surely more aware than almost any living director that whatever film he’s currently making might easily be his last, isn’t playing safe for a single second here. Not everything pays off (as I’ve said, at times the film might actually benefit from more restraint), but it’s kind of incredible how many dangerously unexpected choices --the stunt-casting of Tommy Chong, the weird pivot to body horror, the flirtation with psychedelia, filming in sunny, semi-tropical Portugal rather than the expected austere New England-- all somehow manage not just to keep from derailing the movie, but to actually strengthen it. All these disparate strengths don’t necessarily cohere into a unified, architecturally strong framework, though many of them do (the film’s pervasive oddball humor, for example, makes for an unexpectedly effective compliment to its lurking anxiety, rather than setting up the tonal clash one might expect), but strengths are strengths, and COLOR OUT OF SPACE has plenty of unexpected ones. Ol’ Richard Stanley might or might not be the great lost genre auteur his legendary rep has made him out to be, but on the strength of this movie, I’d say the possibility is still on the table. And that alone seemed about as impossible as non-Euclidian geometry and unknown colors a few weeks ago. Sometimes raising the elder gods turns out to be a better idea than you might think.

 *One obvious example would be that of Terrance Mallik, who was hailed as one of cinema’s untouchable geniuses during the 20-30 year hiatus between DAYS OF HEAVEN and his resumption of regular releases in the mid-2000s, only to find an increasingly skeptical critical establishment as his body of work grew.

** To be fair, he did do a short segment in the 2011 anthology film THE THEATRE BIZARRE, but it’s so brief (one of six segments in only 114 minutes) that it was hard to tell much from it. He’d also done two well-regarded documentaries –THE SECRET GLORY and THE WHITE DARKNESS in 2001 and and 2002—and gotten a couple screenplay credits in the intervening years. But still.

***

****IMDB trivia: “Director Richard Stanley and Swedish filmmaker Henrik Möller apparently performed a ritual to the Lovecraftian god Yog-Sothoth while in the Pyrénées to get the film made.” Probably not gonna find that one on Spielberg’s page.

Scream and Scream Again

Scream and Scream Again (1970)

Dir. Gordon Hessler

Written by Christopher Wicking, based on The Disoriented Man by Peter Saxon

Starring Alfred Marks, Michael Gothard, Vincent Price, Christopher Matthews, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing (cameo)

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN would be more accurately called SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN AND THEN SCREAM A THIRD TIME, because it’s all about threes. First, its three producers: Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky of the venerable also-ran British horror house Amicus studios being joined in this case by the equally venerable Louis Heyward of American exploitation house AIP. Second, its three “stars” – Amicus regulars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, along with AIP go-to Vincent Price, probably the three biggest marquee names in horror at the time, together for the first time, no less! And finally, its three plots, because it begins by introducing us to three seemingly unrelated storylines. In the first, a jogger who runs with an unimpressively floppy form (prolific British bit player Nigel Lambert) has a heart attack, only to wake up in a mysterious, sinister hospital where they slowly amputate his limbs. In a second, a sadistic military officer (Marshall Jones, CRY OF THE BANSHEE, MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE) steadily rises through the ranks in an unnamed European dictatorship. And in the third, a no-nonsense police superintendent (Alfred Marks, THE FRIGHTENED CITY, VALENTINO) and, I guess, an assistant coroner (Christopher Matthews, SCARS OF DRACULA), who sort of gradually turns into the protagonist through a process of attrition and the need for this sort of movie to have some blandly handsome British youngsters, seek a mystery killer in a series of apparently vampiric rape-murders. How on Earth could this all fit together?

Indeed, how could three sets of such unusual triplets fit together? Well, the answer is that they don’t entirely, because the movie’s a weird mess. But I confess to rather enjoying the messy, confounding, winding journey it takes. I’ll be damned if I know what to do with it, but give SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN credit for this, at least: it’s probably not what you’re expecting. First of all, it’s really more of a science-fiction thriller than a horror movie, despite the presence of Price, Lee, and Cushing (and they’re not much of a presence at that; Price eventually gets a bit to do, but Lee is a minor character and Cushing has just one throwaway scene). But second and most importantly, it’s a pretty wild --practically deranged!— ride, but for all the insane convolutions it takes, it turns out there really was a discrete destination in mind the whole time. It’s going somewhere. I’m not saying it makes sense, exactly, but somehow the movie does sort of tie everything together at the very end. But I do mean the very end; for the vast majority of its none-too-hurried 95 minutes, it seems like we’re watching a bunch of utterly unrelated lunacy, three paranoid, surreal plotlines playing out completely parallel to each other with no obvious connection of any kind.  

Like many movies of the period, it feels a bit dawdling when it would probably benefit from a breakneck pace, and also like many movies of the period, it gets painfully bogged down in groovy pandering to the swinging youth (two lengthy club scenes prominently featuring a trendy British-invasion rock group --in this case Welsh soul outfit Amen Corner). But unlike many movies of the period, it also features the credit “police chase arranged and executed by Joe Wadham,” and for a 1970 British B-movie, this thing’s a real doozy. It involves a diabolical vampire date-rapist (Michael Gothard, THE DEVILS, LIFEFORCE[!!], FOR YOUR EYES ONLY) in a red convertible sportscar (apparently a 1955 Austin-Healey 100/4) tearing around London and the surrounding Surrey countryside with dozens of expendable police cruisers in hot pursuit, and ends up blossoming into a lengthy --in fact, almost comically extended-- foot chase capped with several bouts of superpowered fisticuffs. It isn’t exactly jam-packed with jaw-dropping stunts or eye-popping spectacle, but clocking in at close to 15 minutes of screentime (pointedly beating BULLITT’s 10 minutes, a point of reference clearly on its mind), it ends up building momentum out of sheer moxie. Normally this sort of action spectacle is death for a horror movie, which thrives on tension rather than excitement. But a few touches of grotesque weirdness --the killer rips off his hand to escape a handcuff, and can crack a human skull with his punches— help resolve the disconnect here. It’s classic action cinema, but with a touch of the genuinely weird, both exciting and a little disconcerting. It honestly makes me wonder if these two genres aren’t as mutually incompatible as I’d always assumed.

As a fifteen-minute chase scene tangent might suggest, the three plotlines are all a little shaggy, which makes a little more sense when you learn that the credited author of the novel which became the basis for SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (originally titled, appropriately, The Disoriented Man), one “Peter Saxon,” is actually a pen named most frequently used by Irish journalist, pulp author, and editor W. Howard Baker, but, the novel itself was apparently written primarily by fellow pulp author Stephen Frances, with additional possible input from Martin Thomas. All three men were veterans of the Sexton Blake detective stories which are said to number over 4,000[!] entries, and it’s unclear which of the three, if any, was the dominant creative force here. Several websites –all unattributed, I’m afraid—suggest the novel was the result of a “round robin” type writing exercise, which would obviously do much to explain its otherwise befuddlingly unconnected trio of storylines. But whatever the explanation, each tangent affords at least a few oddball pleasures. There’s not exactly a surplus of whammy (the gore is infrequent, though impressively gnarly and clearly shot when it does happen), so with Price, Lee, and Cushing only rarely on-screen, the movie must primarily rely on its pervasive strangeness to keep engaging. Fortunately, it is indeed very, very strange, so that works out.

How strange, you ask? Strange enough to feel completely comfortable removing the novel’s explanation –BOOK SPOILERS it turns out the villains are aliens! END BOOK SPOILERS —and replacing it with… nothing. No explanation at all. It’d be pretty weird to just throw extraterrestrial conspiracies into the mix of a movie which already contains a vampiric car chase, but it’s even weirder to just leave it unexplained, and that’s the kinda shit we’re rolling with here. SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN doesn’t give a fuck about your pathetic need for explanation. It’s just gonna let its freak flag fly, and you’re gonna have to deal with it. Some may find this intolerable; me, I was kinda disappointed to hear there ever was an explanation. I prefer the film’s satisfaction with the vague, uneasy ambiguity of it. So the movie is definitely weird, but obviously I’m on its wavelength.

Well, mostly, anyway. One weird thing which is less effective is the jazzy, sunny score by David Whitaker (VAMPIRE CIRCUS) which is, one can’t help but notice, monstrously inappropriate for such a bizarre, unsettling thriller, and does a great deal to undermine whatever tension director Gordon Hessler (MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE) might be building up. Not that the movie strikes one as being impeccably planned by a master craftsman or anything, but there’s weird which is productive, and weird which is counterproductive, and the groovy Bond music knockoff soundtrack is probably the latter. I might be more inclined to tolerate this kind of tomfoolery in an Italian flick, but it’s an ungainly and awkward look for the British. Italian genre films are the cinema of pure sensation, content to luxuriate in any sufficiently evocative artistic element; British films, especially from the 70’s, have a stiffer and more calculated feel, making an inappropriately funky soundtrack feel less like an indulgence in extravagant overstimulation and more like a misjudged attempt to feel hip. But no matter, few 70’s horror flicks, and especially British ones, feel as wildly out-of-control and unpredictable as SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN manages, and if that blurs its focus, it rarely blunts its impact. And that’s enough to recommend it all by itself.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	TRIPLE DISTILLED HORROR... as powerful as a vat of boiling ACID! I should probably mention that yes, there is a vat of acid in the movie.
TITLE ACCURACY	Completely meaningless, but that just add to its weirdo vibe.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from the pulp novel The Disoriented Man by “Peter Saxon” (actually some combination of W. Howard Baker, Stephen Frances, and Martin Thomas).
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK/USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Boy, um, gosh. Vampire, I guess? Sci-Fi Horror?
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, though none are especially prominent and Cushing in particular only has one throwaway scene.
NUDITY?	My teenage self would never have believed it, but I swear I don’t even notice anymore. Those creeps on IMDB do include “Frontal female nudity” in their keywords, so I’ll bow to their superior collective horniness.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None.
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Gosh, um. I dunno, man, “don’t go jogging because you’ll look like a dork and then have your limbs cut off” is about the best I can do for you. Otherwise…

Time Walker

Time Walker (1982)

Dir. Tom Kennedy

Written by Tom Friedman, Karen Levitt, story by Jason Williams and Tom Friedman

Starring… it’s kinda an ensemble. Brian Murphy, Kevin Brophy, Austin Stoker, James Karen...

THE DARK KNIGHT is not the fourth-best movie of all time.

That should go without saying, just like saying that THE MATRIX is not the 18th best movie ever made, nor SE7EN the 22nd best movie ever made. There is no universe where THE LION KING is a better movie than ALIEN, nor one where INCEPTION is better than SEVEN SAMURAI, or INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE is better than THE THIRD MAN. And LOCK, STOCK, & TWO SMOKING BARRELS should not even be in the same sentence as CASINO, let alone ranked higher than it. And I’m not the world’s biggest Fellini fan, but even comparing 8 ½ to THE FORCE AWAKENS demeans us all, let alone claiming it’s 20 rungs down the ladder (in between the two, we also inexplicably find THE TRUMAN SHOW, DONNIE DARKO, and MONSTERS INC).

These things should go without saying. And these things would go without saying, if it were not for the IMDB star rating system, which somehow manages to make every one of those absurd claims. Normally, making that kind of embarrassingly idiotic statement in public would justify, at an absolute minimum, a tearful public apology followed by history’s most enthusiastic act of seppuku. But this is Trump’s America now, and with the dawn of that era, so too die our last vestiges of hope that sanity --or, that failing, at least dignity-- would preclude people from paying much heed to such mortifying nonsense. And so I am forced to say, on the record, in print: No, THE DARK KNIGHT is not the fourth-best movie of all time, Jesus Christ IMDB, you’re drunk, go home, get your shit together.

The problem, of course, is not that anyone seriously thinks SNATCH (#98) is a better movie than RASHOMON (#110). (Yes, I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in). The problem is that SNATCH is the kind of movie that will be watched a by hordes of ignorant adolescent boys who don’t know any better. They have no idea what’s good, but they do internet like it’s their fucking job, which artificially boosts the movie’s rating with piles of unconsidered 10-star scores and rambling, vaguely racist all-caps comments about SJWs, capped off with five or so exclamation marks. Poor RASHOMON can’t compete with that.

A list of movies which are all worse than INTERSTELLAR, according to IMDB. (Not to mention worse than THE DARK KNIGHT, all three LORD OF THE RINGS films, a couple STAR WARSes, THE MATRIX, FIGHT CLUB, THE USUAL SUSPECTS, INCEPTION, for some reason AMERICAN HISTORY X, and fucking FORREST GUMP.)

But that doesn’t surprise you; you know that. No one takes the IMDB rating seriously on any movie that might have made it onto the radar of the great unwashed. We as a society know to ignore what the internet thinks about things, and to ignore even more that silly star rating sitting at the top of the IMDB page. It might as well be a youtube comment on a video with more than 40 views for all the likelihood that you’ll be glad you took note of it.

Except, that’s only really true for movies these doofuses have seen. That covers most big modern releases, which they have strong opinions about even if they’ve never seen them. And it also covers a lot of offbeat movies which still feature a famous actor that might trick casual filmgoers into thinking this was the kind of thing they would be capable of enjoying (witness ONLY GOD FORGIVES’ 5.7 rating, foisted upon it by furious, misled souls who loved THE NOTEBOOK and clicked on the next movie they came across which starred that cute little white boy).

But the more obscure the movie is, the more immune it is from the influence of over-opinionated teenagers and angry old people. In fact, as you really start to get into some ultra-obscure genre movies, something rather wonderful happens: the type of people who see them becomes so incredibly self-selecting that suddenly an IMDB rating actually means something again. 1982’s alien mummy opus TIME WALKER did not force itself upon anyone who shouldn’t have seen it. It did not saturate the entire culture with an inescapable, endless, broad-based marketing campaign. It did not trick your poor grandpa into thinking it would be something he would like because it put Gene Hackman or somebody on the cover. Nobody even saw it when it was new, and now it’s 35 years later. If you watched TIME WALKER, you almost certainly did not do so by accident. You sought it out. Which means, at least on some level, this must have been the kind of movie you thought you might enjoy. And normal people do not seek out Z-grade Roger Corman productions from the 1980’s. If I’m reading comments on TIME WALKER on IMDB, I’m finally looking at genuinely kindred spirits, people whose opinions might actually be germane to my enjoyment of this particular artwork.

Except not in this case, I guess. Honest to God, TIME WALKER turns out to be not as bad as I was expecting from its miserable 2.9 IMDB rating. 2.9 is low. THE DEADLY BEES has a 3.4. ISHTAR has a 4.2. Fucking TRANCERS 5: SUDDEN DETH [sic] has a 4.9! How bad do you have to suck to get beaten by a fifth Full Moon Video DTV sequel starring Tim Thomerson? Jesus Christ, there are, like, four phrases in that sentence which would each individually be disqualifying. And yet TIME WALKER somehow managed to do even worse. 2.9 is bad even by mummy movie standards, which are the lowest standards yet devised by science.

Happily, that 2.9 rating seems uncharacteristically harsh. TIME WALKER is not remotely close to the most worthless or boring Mummy movie I’ve seen, although of course, as a mummy movie, it is both worthless and boring. But it has several advantages over its brethren. For one, it’s all set in America and only baaarely about Egypt in any explicit way, which means less racism. That’s a plus. For another, the “Time Walker” quickly turns out to be some kind of pissed off space alien infected with a fatal goo that quickly eats humans alive, particularly when exposed to X-Rays (which happens more often than you’d think, apparently). Also an obvious advantage. Third, because he’s an alien, he doesn’t have to rely on being conjured by some modern day stereotype and he doesn’t give a shit whether or not some lanky 70’s blonde co-ed with big tits looks exactly like an ancient Egyptian princess. Instead, he just wants his fuckin’ crystals back, and he doesn’t care who he kills (or doesn’t kill) to get them.

Allow me to explain. Or, at least allow me to explain to the extent that any explanation is offered in the movie. The “Mummy” in question is discovered in the tomb of 13th century BCE Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun (“King Tut” to those SNATCH fans we talked about earlier), which is inexplicably being discovered in 1982 by “California University of the Sciences*” professor Doug McCadden (Ben Murphy, “Shaving Student,” THE GRADUATE, uncredited). I remember that event happening pretty differently, and I especially don’t remember an earthquake revealing a secret room with a secret mummy and a lot of secret skeletons, but who am I to question TIME WALKER?

Seems legit.

Professor McCadden brings the secret mummy back to campus to be thoroughly probed and gawked over by a gaggle of socially akward grad students, including the nefarious Peter (Kevin Brophy, HELL NIGHT, whose last name really sounds like an annual prize awarded to the fraternity member who managed the most keg stands that year). Peter recklessly X-rays the mummy and discovers, when developing the photos, a secret compartment within the sarcophagus containing five mysterious crystals and a strange mechanical device.

Now, he’s just made one of the greatest scientific and archeological discoveries of all time, so he does exactly what any of us would do: He pockets the crystals and tries to pawn them down the street. When he’s told by the pawn shop owner that they’re worthless, he protests, “but they’re 3,000 years old. They’re ancient, man!” apparently not at all concerned about raising suspicions regarding why a dorky grad student is pawning five 3,000-year-old jewels. Unmoved, the jeweler sends him on his way, and after eviscerating the man with a perfectly honed bon mot (“Clown!”), he comes up with another plan: just sell ‘em to fellow students for 20 bucks a pop.  

This is problematic for two reasons. First, it means we have to be introduced to five or six hundred identical cracker ass college kids who come into possession of the crystals and will assume the role of victims in our film. Second, it mean the original owner of those crystals, awakened from his 3,000 year slumber by all those devil-may-care rounds of x-rays, must rise from his tomb and float around in mummy-vision, finding his stolen property and either brutally murdering or completely ignoring the current owners (it apparently makes no difference to him either way; he's not out for revenge or anything, so if getting his crystals and not murdering their current owners is even slightly easier, he's perfectly happy with that).  

That makes our title character a little more active than the usual mummies, and also makes it slightly more plausible for him to be a physical threat, since his very touch is deadly and so he doesn’t have to resort to punching like most mummies do (remember, he sports some kind of killer radioactive fungus which melts you). The mummy suit is pretty good, too, giving you all the classic wrappings you’d want, despite his extraterrestrial origin. Plus, he hovers and has a headlight in his chest, which is obviously a staple on Pimp My Mummy, and always makes it look like victims are about to be menaced by a floating motorcycle (I can neither confirm nor deny that the Wallflowers’ 1996 alt-rock standard “One Headlight” is based on this movie). Unfortunately even with all that going for it, most of the movie is pretty boring and time-wasting, with waaaay too much stupid meaningless horsehit with the students and their subplots and way too little Time Walker attack. The acting and production are, in general, actually much more competent than you’d imagine, but that doesn't make them good or interesting either.

Still, the movie is generally affable enough to never end up completely dead in the water. There’s some goofy lines (“this conversation isn’t going the way I hoped,” laments an unfortunate student as his would-be girlfriend rejects his offer of free space crystals) and some of the baffling characterization you’d want in a movie like this. Most notable is Peter’s ridiculous plan to hawk the priceless crystals to frat brothers (who he really has to browbeat in order to rouse any interest), but there's other stuff too. There's this guy Parker (Robert Random, TV’s Iron Horse, VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS), a mysterious engineer who’s in nearly every major scene, but for some reason never seems to say a fucking word (very rarely he’ll mumble something so he definitely can talk, he just chooses not to.) I don’t know what his deal is, but it’s that sort of oddness which provides a movie like TIME WALKER some much-needed piquancy. And of course, it goes without saying that our heroic professor is banging one of his students, and the movie doesn’t find that odd or unappealing at all. What can I saw, it was an age of innocence.

Infrequently but occasionally, a couple legitimately good scenes or ideas also slip in there. Most of these involve the mummy’s deadly body-melting goop (though not enough -- too expensive?), but there’s a smattering of good mummy images, and a couple intentional chuckles here and there (that idiot piece of shit Peter goes to a mummy-themed frat party, which is pretty funny and yes, does cause at least one case of mistaken identity). Oh, and I like the concept that the jewels actually have secret information engraved in them, which gives their blatant McGuffinness a little more color.

It still needed a little less filler in between that stuff, though. It’s never unbearable, but it is pretty uneventful, which is a pretty big sin in a movie with such modest highs. If you can make it to the final minutes, though, things get appreciably outrageous and it ends with the ballsiest “to be continued” cliffhanger in cinema history (alas, history does not seem to have taken them up on their offer of more adventures in Time Walker land) and the one truly magnificent burst of bad acting in the film. It’s hardly a pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, but at least it does make some gesture towards paying off the unusual setup (undead space alien mummy just wants to go home, and doesn’t care who he has to melt to make that happens). I don’t know if that adds up to “worth it,” but for a movie which does not exactly inspire confidence in its ability to stick the landing, it’s a lot weirder and more memorable than one could realistically hope.

Director Tom Kennedy (Post Production Editorial Department, US Version, ADDIO ZIO TOM, Editor, SILENT NIGHT BLOODY NIGHT) was mostly an editor (this is his sole directorial feature), which makes it kind of strange that the movie is perfectly acceptable scene by scene, but is, as a whole, a disjointed mess. Or anyway, it seems strange until you learn from the special features that when New World Pictures president Roger Corman saw the film, his only comment was to cut 15 minutes to save $25 in print-shipping costs. That might have resulted in some of the oddly fragmented narrative, although going by what they left in, the world didn’t really lose a lot by saving 15 minutes of screentime. Also worth mentioning: the story was co-written by Flesh Gordon himself, Jason Williams (producer here and director of NUDE BOWLING PARTY, whose career probably peaked in 1989 with his acting role as “Jason’s Friend” in SOCIETY).

One thing I don’t understand: why link this to King Tut? Our Time Walker is supposed to be found in “King Tutankhamen’s Tomb” (as the on-screen titles but not the dialogue inform us), and we later find that he actually killed the boy king (hence his long internment by vengeful Egyptians). But, uh, wait, King Tut is a real thing, and none of that happened. Why not just make up your own ancient Egyptian? Is this an alternate universe where they opened Tut’s tomb in 1982? It’s clearly set in the present. It’s like if they made a movie about the sinking of the Titanic, but then set it in 1969 and claimed a bigfoot was responsible. I mean, it's just such a well-known (I think?) cultural event that fictionalizing it so completely is a perplexing experience. I’m OK with stupid --hell, I’m paying for stupid-- but that’s just confusing.

Anyway, my point is that TIME WALKER ain’t good at all, but it’s also no 2.9-star wasteland. I’m obviously far too busy and important to get bogged down rating movies on IMDB, but if I were the type to do so, I’d give it a 5.5: worthless and time wasting, to be sure, but tolerable enough for the only kind of person who would even consider watching a movie like TIME WALKER. And to put my money where my mouth is, I’ll add one more challenge: if anybody ever took these guys up on their adorably misplaced offer “to be continued,” I’d watch the shit out of TIME WALKERER  or whatever.** I’m serious kids, let’s do this Time Walk again.

*played on-screen by California State University Northridge.

** Hey has anyone ever made a movie about Pod people invading upper-crusty WASP-y churches? It would be Called EPISCOPALIENS, and I think it would be pretty good.

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CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	Nothing Can Stop Him. Not Even Time.
TITLE ACCURACY	Uh… well, like all beings who experience time in a linear fashion, I guess our boy goes technically walk through time. Just in one direction, and at the same rate as all the people around him.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No, good God no. Although with all the unnecessary characters and subplots here, you might be tempted to wonder. But no, it was based on a story co-written by the guy who played Flesh Gordon (that’s Flesh, not Flash)
SEQUEL?	No, although the ending openly invites one.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Mummy / Alien
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	James Karen is in there somewhere, he was in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD and THE WILLIES and stuff. And Austin Stoker and Darwin Joston from ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 are also around. None of them does anything interesting or good though.
NUDITY?	Yes, a quick scene where a sleazy perv peeps through a window at a woman taking her shirt off, and guess what, the camera does the exact same thing.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	There’s a Mummy, but I think he’s just a real old alien, I don’t think he’s undead in this case
POSSESSION?	No, which is a welcome break in mummy-movie tradition
CREEPY DOLLS?	Some Egyptian statuary, but nothing too creepy.
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Flesh-eating goo, Mummy turning into alien
VOYEURISM?	Yes, that fucking piece of shit Peter peeps on his girlfriend’s roommate changing through her window. Get this, his girlfriend catches him! But she quickly forgives him when he gives her a pretty necklace, and seems to think that makes everything fine. And yet this worthless fuck never gets what’s coming to him (maybe that’s what will “be continued”?) Also, later, the Mummy does the same thing with the same girl, in a scene where she confusingly puts on her alien necklace in order to get naked and take a shower.
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you’re going to steal priceless ancient alien artifacts and try to hawk them, you should really have a better plan in mind than “sell them to your frat brothers for $20”