The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976)

The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976)

Dir. Charles B. Pierce

Written by Earl E. Smith

Starring Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, Dawn Wells, Charles B. Pierce

No getting around it, THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN (1976) is a strange film. It’s part true-crime docu-drama (complete with grim-voiced narration), part legit white-knuckle slasher, part goofy comedy, part affectionate travelogue of its Texarkana* locale. It’s an odd beast, but it’s exactly what you’d want from director Charles B. Pierce, who spent the 70’s as an indie genre auteur long before that kind of thing had a name --let alone a business plan-- grinding out southern-fried ultra-low-budget DIY films which seamlessly blend charming amateurishness with some indisputable genre thrills, and many of which managed to actually end up a bit ahead of their time. He’s most known for his first film, the 1972 bigfootsploitation fauxumentary THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, but by TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN he was already four years and four movies into his directorial career, and still finding time to work as a set dresser for stuff like COFFY and BLACK BELT JONES in his downtime. Does this guy need a congressional medal of valor or what?

TTtDS mimics the format of BOGGY CREEK, with its quasi-documentary structure complete with narration and references to specific dates and crimes (apparently with near-zero accuracy), but is also slightly more assured and intermittently competent. It’s certainly a strange film, but it wouldn’t, for example, pause for minutes on end while an off-screen voice sings a laid-back folk song, like BOGGY CREEK does. It’s a little more normal than that. Basically, it’s a ZODIAC (2007)-style chronicle of a series of slayings which occurred in and around Texarkana in 1946 (colorfully dubbed “the Texarkana Moonlight murders”), with a plot loosely tied together by the efforts of the law enforcement officers trying (and failing**) to crack the case. It doesn’t exactly have a traditional narrative, it’s more like a series of vignettes related to the case, though gradually some story shape takes form around the out-of-towner police captain J.D. Morales (Ben Johnson) loosely based on the real-life M. T. “Lone Wolf” Gonzuallas.

Let’s pause and take a second to consider just how god damn great Ben Johnson is. Here’s this guy, the son of a rancher, who arrived in Hollywood because he was delivering a carload of horses to Howard Hughes for THE OUTLAW (1943). While in the area, he took a few stunt jobs here and there in between horse gigs before heroically saving three men in a runaway wagon during a unexpected horse stampede on the set of John Ford’s 1948 FORT APACHE. Ford said he wanted to reward Johnson for his actions, which Johnson thought might mean another job as a riding double or an extra -- instead, he gave him a seven-year acting contract (Johnson signed it immediately after reading up to line 5, where the words “$5,000 a week” appeared). He went on to appear in a ton of classics, including SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, RIO GRANDE, SHANE, HANG ‘EM HIGH, THE WILD BUNCH, and THE GETAWAY, and even won a god damn Academy Award for THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. Did he let success change him? Fuck no, he stuck to what he knew, kept himself humble, and was apparently not above appearing in zero-budget way-outside-hollywood THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN a few short years after his Oscar win. But it’s not just that he had an interesting and successful film career that makes him great; it’s that he brought such a strong sense of authenticity to his roles. I mean, this is not some John Wayne frat boy phony cowboy movie star; this is the guy they brought in because he actually knew how to do real-life badass things, not just pretend to do them in the movies. He lived a real life, had real experiences, instead of just acting like he could. And you can see it on his face every minute he’s on the screen; there’s a calm confidence and (dare I say?) true grit that just radiates from those sharp eyes. Here, he doesn’t always give the most convincing line readings in the world (not that the lines themselves are exactly convincing), but he is absolutely convincingly grizzled, and that matters a whole lot more. Words are important, but you can’t fake this kind of gravitas. They don’t really make ‘em like that anymore, so every movie you get to see with Johnson in it feels like a nostalgic look into a bygone era.

Speaking of bygone eras, one reason Johnson fits right in here is because the movie has a surprisingly strong sense of time and place. It’s possible that by 1976 Arkansas still looked pretty much the same as it did in 1946, but whatever the reason, even with its strange structure and low budget the movie has an authentic feel of the 40’s, which makes it pretty unusual for a slasher pic. Is there any other slasher movie set so far back in history? I guess the millions of Jack the Ripper movies, but those are almost a genre unto themselves. Seems like Slashers are almost exclusively a modern phenomenon, so setting one in this era has a distinctly different feel to it. The cops don’t really know what to do, they don’t know how to act when there’s something crazy like this.

The movie doesn’t exactly know how to act either, because it preceded the Modern American Slasher Period a bit. I mean, there had been a few stabs (heh) in that direction -- SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT in 1973, BLACK CHRISTMAS in 1974, and of course PSYCHO and a bunch of giallos before that-- but HALLOWEEN, the one which really started the American Slasher wave and established its rules, was still two years off. Left without much to model itself on, TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN finds itself without the usual rules and tropes, exploring new territory. Pierce seems to have a natural feel for the kill scenes, which are startlingly effective and seedy, complete with invented gimmick kills (one particularly inspired touch finds the killer murdering a band student by strapping a knife to her trombone and using its slide to stab her) and lurid (though not explicit) sexual suggestion. He struggles with the plot a little, however, mistakenly focusing on the police investigation, which is by definition in this genre going to be ineffective and the least satisfying story thread. Later slashers would mostly dump the law enforcement angle in favor of the “final girl” model, which suits the material a lot better. Fortunately you got Johnson in there, and he’s nicely assisted by Andrew Prine (THE LORDS OF SALEM) as a competent but overwhelmed local cop and Pierce himself as a (for my money) pretty funny deputy named “Sparkplug.” So even if they don’t have the best story, they’re enjoyable to watch. Oh, and Dawn Wells (“Mary Ann” from Gilligan’s Island), is one of the victims, so if you ever wanted to see her terrorized by a sadistic masked killer, I bet this is your only chance. Although to be fair I haven’t seen every episode of Gilligan’s Island, maybe one of those has a masked killer too.

The sequences with the killer are really intense, particularly since whoever’s behind that mask has a frightening physicality; he’s not a supernatural boogyman, and his victims aren’t always totally helpless, leading the murders to be prolonged, messy affairs highlighted by the hooded phantom’s perverse heavy breathing under his burlap mask. It’s a real person under there, not some mythological figure -- but who he is and what he thinks he’s doing, we’ll never know, making him all the more frightening. There's such a bizarre, incomprehensible sadism to this guy that it's hard not to feel genuinely unnerved. These scenes sit a bit uneasily with the other subplots, of course. A lot of reviewers have complained about the occasional goofy humor and inconsistent tone, and technically, they have a point. But I don’t know, for me it kind of adds both to the charm and to the horror. It’s charming because it highlights the homemade, DIY vibe here; even in 1976, no studio would ever let you get away with something like that, but Pierce thought it would be a good idea and he went with it. It helps with the horror too, though, by juxtaposing such repugnant brutality with wacky hijinks and broad mugging, resulting in something kind of grotesque and shocking, like if an episode of TAXI had a series of tangentially related scenes with the Son of Sam brutally murdering people, peppered throughout a normal sitcom plot. It’s an extremely odd balance, though, and I don’t blame some people for thinking that the movie would be better if it was as consistently serious and unnerving as the scenes with the killer manage to be. Fortunately by the movie’s climactic scene, the various plots and tones somehow manage to kind of, if not exactly meld, at least braid together for a seriously exciting chase scene between the cops and the killer. The final, ambiguous ending is perfect, though the “Captain Morales went on to…” intertitle text that follows it is perhaps unnecessary, since, uh, none of these characters are actually real people.

TTtDS is mostly remembered today for what it predicted: the iconic image of the bag-headed serial killer which would return in FRIDAY THE 13th PART II, the gimmicky killer, the rise of the true-life-serial-killer fad which is still going strong today, the idea of epilogue text describing what happened to fictional characters in a movie based on a true story (which Michael Bay revived for his nightmarish but semi-watchable PAIN AND GAIN), the cottage industry of non-Hollywood local indie film artisans that it inspired. But the charm to me is what it is: a true American original by a guy who decided to just up and try and make movies his own way, on his own terms. Pierce would make a few more movies (including the excellent and underseen THE EVICTORS with Michael Parks) but never quite broke into the mainstream again. His legacy, though, is a whole generation of young indie auteurs for whom he blazed a trail, who are even now making their own ill-advised, ungainly, amateurish, but authentically personal films about serial killers and bigfoots and whatnot. In fact, this very year a kind of meta-sequel remake of TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN was produced, with actor Denis O’Hare (21 GRAMS, MILK, DALLAS BUYER’S CLUB) portraying Pierce himself.*** Evidence enough of the enduring legend of one of indie cinema’s great originals.

*Man, that CCR song about the cotton fields really left out the whole part about the psycho slasher with a trombone fetish. Maybe the song was running long or something?

**Not a spoiler, the poster informs us that the killer “still lurks the streets of Texarkana, Ark,” apparently to the consternation of the local government there, who asked Pierce to remove the tagline.

***Edit: actually he's playing Pierce's fictional son, although another actor does portray Pierce himself in a brief flashback.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No, (loosely) based on a true story
• SEQUEL: Yes, one of those weird meta-sequel/ remakes came out this very year
• REMAKE: Apparently the sequel is also kind of a remake
• FOREIGNER: Nope, home-grown American
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No, even though it's using a documentary format it doesn't attempt anything like that.
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Academy-award winner Ben Johnson
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Uh... Andrew Prine was in LORDS OF SALEM?
• BOOBIES: None
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: None, just stabbing
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: No
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No
• SLASHER/GIALLO: Prototypical slasher. The format doesn't quite fit, but there's no mistaking it.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: No
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: No
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Fairly high, out of print until recently.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Play the harp or something instead, a trombone is just asking for a serial killer to use it to ironically murder you.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Accurate! The murders were committed at night.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

I enjoyed it, your mileage may vary depending upon how much you can stand weird comedy juxtaposed with brutal violence. Basically, the TUSK ratio test. 

The Maze

The Maze (1953)

Dir. William Cameron Menzies

Written by Daniel Ullman

Starring Richard Carlson, Veronica Hurst

They spent so much money on the tagline "The Deadliest Trap in the World" (and they would have had to, because there's nothing deadly and no trap and it all takes place in one location) that they couldn't afford the "S.'

So, I’ve been watching some of these pre-60’s B-horror films, like DONOVAN’S BRAIN, THE APE, THE BLACK SLEEP, THE GHOUL and so forth, as well as some of the Universal Monster acknowledged classics that I hadn’t seen like THE WOLF MAN, INVISIBLE MAN, and CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. And I’ve come to a conclusion about them that I suspect will come as a surprise to people who know I’m a horror buff but who haven’t really watched these movies themselves. They’re not very good. Oh, I know they’re remembered fondly by the critical establishment, and maybe even more so by the crop of horror geek directors who grew up watching them on TV. They have good things about them, obviously; who doesn’t love seeing Boris Karloff ham it up, and who can resist the awesomeness of the early monster makeup and matte painted castle backdrops. I’m not saying they’re completely worthless. But honest to fuckin’ god, they’re mostly tepid exposition scenes, stilted melodrama, goofy comedy, and cheap castle sets. A lot of them never even get around to any actual horror until the last few minutes, and a lot of the time even when it comes it’s just some big guy waddling towards a screaming woman and then getting shot.

To be clear: it’s not because they’re dated, it’s because they’re bad. You think old film can’t be scary? Try THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, or M, or the end of FREAKS, or THE SEVENTH VICTIM, or THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, or NOSFERATU, or the utterly one-of-a-kind HAXAN. Two scoops of nightmares in every bowl. These are movies which feel utterly compelling and horrific even to this day because they utilize the power of cinema to create more than just a lumbering menace; they create an atmosphere of lingering dread which hints at the disturbing, unknowable darkness which pervades their every shadow. They follow in the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft, guys who never shied from conjuring a woman-snatching monster or two, but knew that true horror lives in the human psyche, not in some rubbery suit.

The ladies enjoy smoking a bowl or two to calm their jangled nerves.

OK, not every director is going to be a Fritz Lang or Murnau. But it seems like a lot of directors who got into the horror game later on learned the wrong lessons from their predecessors, i.e. that a monster by itself made it horror. Bullshit. Sesame Street has monsters. Horror films are about atmosphere, about perversity, about the things we can’t see and can’t understand, sometimes out in the world but more often in ourselves. They’re not tangible things you can just point a camera at; they’re something you have to evoke by carefully manipulating the basic tools of pure cinema in concert with each other. In so many ways, it’s a shame that the horror genre seems to have ended up the least reputable of all film genres* because the success or failure of horror films probably relies on the strength of the direction more than any other type of film you could make. Other genres can get by on the strength of their acting or the scale of the spectacle...  but a good horror film is going to need to draw you into it’s world using the most basic tools of cinema: sight, sound, music, and editing. Many great horror films are amateurish in ways which would doom any other kind of film; they may have weak scripts, stilted action, poor production values. But they have something else: a cinematic artistry which reaches past your logical brain and stirs up the amorphous sludge of your fears lying deep below the surface.

This is a long way of saying that I didn’t have much hope for THE MAZE, a gimmicky B-movie from 1953 by a director I didn’t recognize. It has many things that would make you suspicious: an early use of 3-D (the words “3 Dimension” [sic] appear as large as the title), another dreary castle set, a lackluster-sounding mystery with a plucky female protagonist, that guy Richard Carlson from CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (who I described as “generic modernist handsome” in that review). It gives you every reason to expect it will be yet another excruciatingly dull drama shot mostly in generic drawing rooms that have fires and gas lamps but for some reason are lit like a Wal-Mart.

But, as we’ll learn by the end of the movie, looks can be deceiving. Turns out not everything is what it seems, and all those warning signs actually turn out to not quite signify the abject lack of entertainment that they usually would. Director Menzies doesn’t have too many famous movies under his belt as a director, but that’s because he was a pioneering art director/production designer, so pioneering in fact that the very title of production designer was created specifically for him by no less an authority on cinema than David O. Selznick. Selznick was so confident in Menzies that he specifically sent a production notice to the crew of GONE WITH THE WIND that “Menzies is the final word,” and had Menzies personally direct the famous sequence where Atlanta gets the torch. As if that weren’t enough, Menzies also (re)directed the Salvador Dali dream sequence from Hitchcock’s SPELLBOUND, worked as a director on the 1940 THIEF OF BAGDAD (uncredited) and directed the eyeball-popping partially-lost H.G. Wells adaptation THINGS TO COME. If you’ve seen even one of those, it becomes obvious that Menzies was a guy born to work in “3 Dimension,” which he uses not as a gimmick but as a way to enhance the layered, deep focus approach he takes to framing his scenes.

True story.

Likewise, other aspects of the production work out better than you might think. The castle set, which looks pretty much identical to any number of similar movies (is it the same one from THE BLACK SLEEP?), is much more artfully lit and photographed and hence feels genuinely imposing and isolated, rather than obligatory. Menzies knows that just like monsters, castles have a good reason to be in horror movies; you just have to do more to actually make them work for you than simply point the camera at a bunch of rooms with fireplaces. Even boring old Richard Carlson is actually pretty good here. His particular brand of distracted nonacting suits his remote, tormented character quite nicely.

What really works best here, though, is the mystery. Here’s the setup: Our plucky heroine Kitty (Veronica Hurst) has it all: a rockin’ 1950’s body, “honey blonde hair” according to wikipedia, financial security such that she seems to spend all her time picnicking and laying poolside, a wacky aunt sidekick, and, most importantly, a handsome Scottish fiance played by an American. Things seem suspiciously idyllic, and sure enough, out of the blue her husband-to-be Gerald MacTeam(Carlson) discovers that his old uncle has died and he has inherited a mysterious castle in the Scottish highlands, which he must attend to personally. As the days pass and MacTeam doesn’t return, Kitty gets suspicious and heads up to investigate things for herself. She finds MacTeam a changed man, visibly aged and obviously concealing a dark secret from her. He wants her to leave and forget about him, implying that she’s in terrible danger is she stays. But as I mentioned, Kitty is a plucky gal and won’t take no for an answer. She digs in her heels and tries to investigate the mysterious goings-on in the castle, particularly its sinister hedge maze.

Unfortunately, there is no tiny version of this inside.

The great thing about this setup is that it lets a production guy like Menzies go to town on the atmosphere. Since Kitty’s ability to investigate is limited, it offers him ample opportunity to do exactly what I was talking about 650 words ago: forgo showing us exactly what’s happening and instead imply, evoke and hint, and let our imagination do the rest. Menzies is a top-notch scene-builder and has a gift for conjuring stark, nightmarish black and white images that recall Robert Wise’s keen eye for deep blacks and ghostly pales. And as a production guy, he knows how to use sets and subtle mise-en-scene to communicate the deep unease that permeates through this weird place without ruining everything by ever showing us too much (until the very end, anyway; more on that later). That, along with the imaginative details of the mystery and a fine, classical score by Marlin Skiles, allow something as simple as watching the light under a door vanish as something large groans by in the hallway to bloom with veiled menace. The movie has an almost Lovecraftian sense that something genuinely bizarre and beyond experience is happening.

Unfortunately, the reason this movie is not better remembered today is the reveal of what is actually happening. After a genuinely fantastic buildup and the creepiest hedge-maze chase this side of you-know-what (which I bet looked awesome in 3-D), we finally get a full-on look at the reason behind all this secrecy and weirdness, and it is laugh-out-ludicrous and hilarious. Once the mystery is solved, everything wraps up neatly in about 5 minutes in a way which begs the question of why this was not done sooner. Obviously, the mystery is always gonna be better than the solution… but this is one of the worst (and goofiest-looking) solutions I’ve ever seen, and it goes a long way towards completely undoing all the good will that the movie’s built up before now. It makes you retroactively angry at the movie for wasting your time and energy making you care about something that turns out to be so silly. But you know me, man, I love a great movie, but I can still really like a movie which has a ratio of greatness to shittiness as low as 1:8. And this one pretty much reverses that number. It’s a genuinely great movie that completely blows it in the last 5 minutes. Imagine if at the end of THE INNOCENTS the big reveal was that Deborah Kerr was actually Santa Claus in disguise.** It’s nearly on that level.

In 3-D, that guy would have looked really far away.

Even so, I can still heartily recommend this one for it’s excellent atmosphere and impressive direction up until the very end. The movie has only itself to blame for missing it’s opportunity to be an acknowledged classic, but I think it's equally unfair to dismiss something which is otherwise so strong on the basis of a silly climax (after all, NIGHT OF THE DEMON has a pretty silly looking monster too!). This is a fine example of the best 50’s horror had to offer, and deserves to be celebrated as such. Even if it is also, maybe, a lesson about why it’s always better to reveal too little rather than too much.

You thought I was troubled, didn't you? Acting.

*(I was gonna say other than porn, but actually I think more classy, respected directors have made sex flicks than horror films. At least Kubrick did both. Was he the only one?)

**Or if the end of SHUTTER ISLAND was just that he was crazy and nothing in the film really happened or meant anything. Yeah, wouldn’t that have been annoying?

The Evictors

The Evictors (1979)
Dir. Charles B. Pierce
Written by Charles B. Pierce, Garry Rusoff, Paul Fisk
Starring Michael Parks, Jessica Harper, Vic Morrow

Love the poster, although of course this doesn't actually happen. Poster guys back then really thought we'd get off on seeing creepy guys carrying women off, I guess just like now when they assume we'll go for any old cover showing a woman being unwillingly dragged off camera. What, are guys just more in the mood for a challenge more these days? I guess maybe that's a victory for feminism?

    Somewhere around the turn of the century in rural Louisiana, three unbalanced residents of a modest farmhouse are being evicted by the local cops. They refuse to go quietly, and instigate a typhoon of gunfire that riddles the house and the cops. Now, in 1940, a nice young couple has moved into the long-vacant former abode of the anti-evictors, only to find ominous signs that they, too, are not wanted here.

    It’s a classic rural siege movie in most ways, playing expertly on that fear that takes you in the middle of the night that maybe someone is in your house, and gradually building that creepy paranoia into a full-on panic. There are lots of elements here which play on your fears: the remote, vulnerable location, away from anyone who might help. The incoming residents, outsiders in a local community which seems to have dangerous secrets that they aren’t in on. The attractive, educated city folk feeling judged and ostracized by the country bumpkins who don’t think much of their high-falutin’ ways. The uncomfortable inner conflict of wondering if your fears are justified or just a product of your own anxiety.

    These are the ingredients to many horror movies, and particularly this kind of rural siege tale, wherein our protagonists are isolated and threatened by unknown, aggressive, unreasonable forces (for instance, CAPE FEAR, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, THE MIST, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, even non-horror stuff like STRAW DOGS or FORT APACHE). But the difference here is that director Charles B. Pierce is focusing on the aspects most often forgotten by horror directors: acting, atmosphere, motivation, time and place. The little things that happen in-between the big scare scenes. THE EVICTORS is rated PG (obviously it would be PG-13 now) and is small-scale and almost tame by the standards of something like THE HILLS HAVE EYES, but packs a punch because what it lacks in elaborate setpieces and crowdpleasing monsters it makes up for by making you care enough that the small stuff matters more.

For fucks sake, we just let you out, and now you want to come back in?!

    I mean, aren’t you supposed to cast James Marsden and Julia Stiles as your besieged couple? You know, attractive, bland white people in their early 30s who make a living being professionally victimized and looking attractive and unmemorable? Their job is to be white and sympathetic, it’s the killer that’s gotta be interesting. That’s where you’re gonna get your Klaus Kinski or Michael Ironside, maybe even a slumming De Niro or Jeremy Irons. But EVICTORS has it all backwards. We hardly get to see the killer, but the couple in question is (are?) Michael Parks and Jessica Harper, both easily interesting enough to qualify for a role as a teen-slashing psychopath, but here playing very sympathetic and relatable characters.

    They’re a young couple, but they’re not kids and they’re not disposable victims. Instead, they’re a believable and endearing couple of adults trying to make the best of a somewhat tense situation (the subtext is that husband Ben needs this job fixing cotton gins in order to avoid being drafted). Ruth (Harper) --home by herself all day and trying to stay positive about it-- is obviously the first to notice something is strange. But when Ben tries to console her by telling her that the creepy guy trying to get through the back door was probably just a drifter who didn’t know that the long-abandoned house was now occupied, he doesn’t sound like the typically obtuse horror movie boyfriend; he sounds like a guy who’s trying both to console and convince himself that everything is going to be OK because he’s up against a wall and trying to make things work. I think we’ve all been in the position of trying to comfort someone when a small part of us is pretty sure it’s actually not OK. But there’s nothing to do but hope.

Happiness is a warm gun and being married to Michael Parks. Also being in SUSPIRA.

Parks, of course, if forever a hero of American cinema for his unbelievably good turn in RED STATE, but he’s done a million things (Twin Peaks, KILL BILL, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD, ARGO, DEATH WISH V, THE BIBLE: IN THE BEGINNING [where he played Adam at what I must assume was literally the beginning], and heck, he even played Josey Wales in the much-derided sequel THE RETURN OF JOSEY WALES). So we knew he was gonna be great, but I’d forgotten about Jessica Harper, (SUSPIRIA, STARDUST MEMORIES, LOVE & DEATH, THE PHANTOM OF PARADISE, MINORITY REPORT) who may give the very best performance in a role like this that I’ve ever seen. She’s fine with the terrorized stuff, but also unexpectedly great at everything in-between, finding a way to still seem sane, rational, and capable even as she has to stay alone in a house under assault by unknown forces. The direction keeps things getting ever-tenser without ever lapsing into complete historics, so it’s key that both the protagonists and the world feel equally believable.

    Director Pierce (primarily a set decorator for films like COFFY, THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH and whaddaya know, THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES) was something of a indie horror auteur, setting out on his own to make the ground-breaking (and still endearing, if also dated and silly) LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK and the early serial-killer classic THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN. Piece, a native of Arkansas since childhood, has a keen eye and ear for portraying his Southern locations in all their Southern Gothic glory. It’s funny, because it’s not exactly a realistic portrayal; just a better evocation of of that dreamy eerieness you want out of spanish moss and long country roads than most of those Hollywood goofballs can manage. A couple cast members even have genuine southern accents, how bout that? But even though Pierce is himself a Southerner, he still knows that our heroes are city folk, and hence any one of these shifty corn-fed confederates is suspect. Should we be worried about the traveling tinkerman, whose Louisiana accent is so authentic I can barely understand him? What about the too-friendly crippled old lady next door? And what about Ben’s Colonel Sanders-costumed boss? And what about their shifty real estate agent? Should we be worried about him just because he’s played by Vic Morrow (who gets top billing even though he’s hardly in it) and seems both sleazy and like he’s always on the verge of telling them something important?

    I suppose THE EVICTORS is too small-scale and tame to really resonate with most genre fans, but as far as I’m concerned this is one of the best stalker/slasher films I’ve watched in a long time. There’s a richness to the setting and relationships which lends unexpected beauty and weight, and even when it strains credulity it can back it up by playing surprisingly rough, even going for a genuinely blood-chilling grim ending. In most horror movies, you want a bleak ending to reinforce the horror that came before and make sure that audiences leave unsettled and disturbed (or, in the case of SINISTER, to make sure that they leave having had a juggalo unexpectedly yell at them one last time). Usually I’m all about that, but here you like the protagonists so much that the ending is actually kind of a downer, legitimately downbeat even as it works as a good horror twist. Pierce, who clearly has a lot of affection for his characters, even expressed regret at going for such an unforgiving finale. It pays off, though, as one of the most surprising and affecting parting shots I’ve seen in a horror movie in quite awhile. Lots of movies can say they scared or disturbed you. How many can genuinely say they made you sad? Pierce would go on to do a few more films (and even write the story for SUDDEN IMPACT) but to me this stands as his best work, a dreamy and melancholy evocation of the South as a impenetrable riddle where the violent past can unexpectedly lash out at the mundane present. 

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No, "based on true events"
BOOBIES: None.
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: A little blood, not really gore.
SEQUEL: the Bobby-McFerrin-starring sequel "THE MAY HAVE TO LITIGATORS" was a little tamer.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: Extremely high. Little-seen, out-of-print for years, somehow skipped DVD and went straight to Netflix streaming.
MONSTERS: No.
SATANISTS: No.
ZOMBIES: No.
VAMPIRES: No.
SLASHERS: Much of the slashing was done before the events of this film, but definitely a serial killer/stalker/stabber, so I'll say yes.
CURSES: None explicit.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

Ruth and her creepy neighbor talk about the house's violent past.

The Woman In the Window

The Woman in the Window (1944)
Dir. Fritz Lang
Starring Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, Dan Duryea

What we got here is one of the early Film Noirs to hit (along with MALTESE FALCON, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, and LAURA, to name a few) before the term had even been coined, directed by one of cinema’s all time great masters (Fritz “M” Lang) and starring one of the most iconic actors of the era, Edward G “SOYLENT GREEN” Robinson. That’s a lot of pressure to live up to, and it’s not quite the classic that it ought to have been, but it’s still a damn good reminder of just how good these early film noirs were, before they had exactly solidified into a genre.

    
           Robinson plays Richard Wanley, bespectacled professor of criminal psychology who has just sent his family away on vacation and is, in some small way, lamenting his highly domestic life with his friends over literally dozens of cigars and old fashions. Besotted by a painted image of a beautiful woman in a store window, he ignores the advice of his friends that “adventure doesn’t suit old men” when he unexpectedly meets the young woman in person. One thing leads to another, a wealthy interloper gets murdered with a pair of scissors, and suddenly the professor and his young consort Alice Reed(Joan Bennett) are trying to fend off the police and a mysterious blackmailer before the murder can be pinned on them.

It’s a simple setup, but with a few twists I really appreciated. For one, the whole murder thing was really a misunderstanding. This guy bursts in on Wanley and Reed and Wanley stabs him in clear self-defense. They could have just gone to the police and been done with it, but they’re afraid of the embarrassment of being caught together (they’ve just been sitting on the couch, of course, because this is 1944) and decide to try and hide the body instead. So as the whole thing spins out of control, there’s an unspoken desperation over the fact that now they’ll definitely look guilty even though they’re not.

Another great twist is that one of Wanely’s drinking buddies is none other than the DA who’s investigating the case (Raymond Massey). He happily babbles on about the fabulous new forensic techniques the police have been using, and even takes his friend on a tour of the crime scene itself to show just how much evidence they can glean from a few small details. So you’ve got several great scenes of Robinson trying not to look overwhelmingly sick as he gingerly pries for more details. They keep joking how Wanley perfectly fits the profile of the killer, and it’s hard to tell if they’re trying to make him crack or just unaware of his sudden, profuse sweating.

I also love the relationship between Wanley and Reed. Bennett is, of course, utterly delectable as the femme fatale here, but unlike many actresses who came after her in this mold she has a great sweetness and decency to her. It’s 1944 so they can’t come out and say she’s a prostitute, but come on, you can put two and two together. Even so, duplicity isn’t in her nature, and she and Wanely have a genuinely sweet rapport. It’s interesting because of course we know that Wanley’s a married man, but he seems like he’s definitely toying with the idea of cheating on his wife with this young woman before everything goes wrong. It’s probably the production code that stops him more than the requires of the narrative, but it makes for a surprising dynamic. These two were drawn together by sex which never materializes, but they’re bound together by their unfortunate predicament -- and yet, they end up being very loyal and supportive of each other anyway. The tentative way they grow to trust each other and care for each other in an (apparently) purely platonic way is one of the film’s real graces. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a film relationship quite like it.

 

                                       You're god damn right I would.

But the cops aren’t their only problem. The final piece of the puzzle is the mysterious blackmailer, played by Western staple Dan Duryea. Duryea’s a low-life thug, but a devilishly smart one. He’s physically intimidating and prone to violence, but sharp enough to easily dismantle any attempts to trick him. The way he bemusedly walks around Reed’s apartment, demolishing every argument she makes piece by piece while simultaneously searching the area for material to use against her is genuinely chilling. Duryea’s not an actor I ever noticed in anything else (he’s in SCARLET STREET, CRISS CROSS, and the 65’ FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX too, but I can’t say I remember him in any of those) but he’s dynamite here. He so easily outmatches Reed in every way that he almost has a Hannibal Lecter quality to him, manipulating her for his own amusement as much as for monetary gain. The way he allows Reed to think she’s got the drop on him, only to suddenly turn things around on her, is simply dripping with grinning sadism. It’s pretty awesome.

Not everything is quite as effective as Duryea’ performance, however. Fritz Lang --arguably the biggest luminary here-- is kind of coasting on this one, making a straightforward but not especially stylish picture mostly set in unimaginatively photographed apartment rooms. It’s not bad work by any means, and he and editor Gene Fowler Jr (who also worked with Sam Fuller and John Cassavetes and directed I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF) do successfully cultivate an atmosphere of crushing paranoia, where every side glance seems like it might have sinister implications. But I feel like he could have tried a little harder to make it as visually striking as his earlier work.   

Still, it’s not lack of style which has kept this one from being regarded quite as highly as the legendary company it keeps -- it’s the ending. Lang and writer Nunnally Johnson (THE DIRTY DOZEN, a ton of other legendary scripts) obviously set up the perfect tragic ending, tease you with it, pull the trigger, give you reason to believe they’re going to resolve things, and then fucking have the balls to go all the way with it. It’s a perfect ending. And then out of the blue they rescind it and turn the whole thing into a joke. I’m going to spoil it for you, because better you find out from me and go into this thing knowing what to expect. Basically, after the film ends exactly the way it needs to end, they suddenly reveal it was all a dream. The whole movie. He fell asleep after his friends left, and dreamed the whole god damn thing, even the multiple scenes which he is not present for. He leaves the club to find that, WIZARD OF OZ-style, the characters in his dream were all faces he’d seen on the street. And when approached by a young woman a la the start of his dream, he bolts off accompanied by cheerfully whimsical musical cues assuring us that he’s learned his lesson about not being adventurous at his age.

What a fucking tease. Obviously a concession to the production code to offset any ruffled feathers over the danced-around but still somewhat scandalous sexual nature of the film, but still. It’s so maddeningly counter to all the film’s obvious good instincts that you almost have to wonder if it was Lang’s “fuck you” to the production code, intentionally terrible and obviously tacked on just to demonstrate how their Puritan oppressiveness was stifling great art. Other than that, though, you’ve got a real good one here. Lang, Robinson, and most of the cast would reunite a year later for the probably slightly better SCARLET STREET, but WOMAN IN THE WINDOW stands out as a unique and formative film noir which lacks the rigid genre structures of later entries and thus is full of sublime surprises.