Don't Go In The House

 Don’t Go In The House (1979)

Dir. Joseph Ellison

Written by Joseph Ellison, Ellen Hammill, Joseph Masefield

Starring Dan Grimaldi, Colin McInness, Robert Osth

DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE is a specimen of horror film from a peculiar sub-subgenre: slasher films which take place from the perspective of the killer, rather than the victims. Such films are rare, but not unheard of; a few examples would be PEEPING TOM, HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON,  ANGST, AMERICAN PSYCHO, MANIAC (1980) and its remake MANIAC (2012), the latter of which goes so far as to not just exlusively adopt the killer’s perspective, but his point-of-view. This distinct narrative arrangement slightly alters the usual stalk-and-chase dynamic of the slasher movie, substituting a strange and queasy mix of anxiety at watching the killer stalk unsuspecting victims (almost always women) and, paradoxically, simmering suspense that he’ll be caught. Because after all, no matter how repellent, standard cinema rules apply: if you give us an interesting protagonist, we agree to forgo our usual sense of morality and emotionally invest in their well-being, at least on some level.

 We can comfortably trace this conceit back at least back to to 1931’s M, in which significant portions of the film (though by no means all) place Peter Lorre’s depraved child killer at the narrative center, and dare the audience to feel sympathy for him. But for my money, the most remarkable example is the famous sequence in Hitchcock’s boundary-pushing FRENZY where the execrable killer must try to recover some damning evidence from the corpse of a victim he has stashed on the back of a potato truck. This killer has absolutely zero redeeming qualities, even by the standards of movie serial killers, and yet Hitchcock sadistically places the onus of the suspense on whether or not he’ll be able to beat the odds and escape (just to leave no doubt whatsoever that this was his intent, the fiendish Hitch places that sequence in context with the the framed main character’s attempt to do basically the same thing).

Turning our sympathies (or at least our conditional sympathies) towards the villain’s perspective can be accomplished even with openly despicable, unrelatable monsters like the one in FRENZY or HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON. But the strength of DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE goes a little beyond the amoral manipulation of audience expectation. In fact, it employs --indeed, rests the focus of its suspense on-- a surprising sensitivity to its... shall we say protagonist?, Donald “Donny” Kohler (Dan Grimaldi, the long-running minor character Patsy Parisi on The Sopranos). As is traditional for cinematic slashers going back to Norman Bates, Donny’s problems originate with his mother. Unlike most cinematic slashers, it’s not that he saw her have sex with a sailor, it’s that she was an ultra-religious fruitcake who reacted to the departure of Donny’s father by exerting total control over her son, dictating every aspect of his life and horrifically abusing him for the slightest infraction by forcing him to hold his arms over a hot stove (see also: ED GEIN and DERANGED). So we have a certain sympathy for his eccentricities as an adult, which we first notice in the opening scene at his job at the fire factory, when he unhelpfully stands by and watches with a worrisome psychotic expression as a co-worker explode into flames.

Already not exactly a picture of robust mental health, Donny really goes off the rails when his mother, to whom he’s devoted apparently every waking moment of his entire life, up and dies one day. His reaction, predictably, is to go on a killing spree. Less predictably, the details of that killing spree entail him constructing a steel-plated fireproof torture room in his dilapidated family mansion, luring innocent women there, stripping them naked, tying them up, suiting up in a custom-made heat-resistant murder ensemble, and torching them with a flamethrower. And then, more predictably, recovering their heat-mummified charred corpses and dressing them up in his mother’s old clothes and seating them in an increasingly crowded upstairs sewing room.

            OK, so maybe not the best possible method of working through psychological trauma (although it’s better than the one other method he tries, which is going to his childhood priest and confessing the whole thing, only to have the amiable clergyman tell him to chill out and stop living in the past so much. Yeah, real helpful there, padre). I do not approve of burning women alive (currently more mixed on men, but still overall bearish) or retaining mummified corpses, but it’s still pretty difficult to completely hate Donny, simply because Grimaldi performs these actions with such a sense of miserable hopelessness that you get the sense he might actually be having a worse night than his victims. Much like the title characters in 2012’s MANIAC, poor Donny knows this is not a sustainable or productive lifestyle, and makes a real honest, good-faith effort to try and stick to sanity. But like most people attempting to make a serious change in their behavior, there is some, ah, backsliding.

            Still, it’s Grimaldi’s tortured, hangdog performance which anchors the movie and makes it feel unique and even somewhat affecting. Part of that is his simple appearance; traditionally, this sort of psycho killer tends to be frail, perhaps somewhat effete (again, we likely have Norman Bates to thank for that), a recluse, an outsider. But Grimaldi is the very picture of blue-collar schlubbiness, with a simple, unaffected sort of beaten-down masculinity to him (he looks more like Dustin Hoffman than Anthony Perkins). He has no apparent trouble holding down his physically taxing industrial job, he’s not dirty or disheveled or incoherent; his co-workers think he’s a little weird, but certainly not abnormally so. He’s no one anyone would suspect of being a homicidal lunatic, which puts the theoretical prospect of some kind of normal life tantalizingly within sight, but cruelly out of reach. He can fool the world into thinking he’s relatively normal, but he can never escape from himself. He’s lived an absolutely dismal life through no real fault of his own, and now that he’s finally free of his tormentor, he’s still not really free. He hears voices (not his mother) urging him to purify with fire, for one thing, which is extremely unhelpful given the circumstances. But more than that, everything about his bearing and manner suggests how completely hopeless he is about his life. He’s in the horrifying position of being functional enough to be completely aware of how utterly broken he is, but powerless to do anything about it.

That’s the real horror of being stuck with Donny; he’s just as horrified by his behavior as we are. But he can’t help himself. While most of us don’t have his particular vice, I think his situation is one that almost everyone can relate to. There’s things we all hate about ourselves, weaknesses we always seem to be fighting a losing battle with. Everyone knows the horror of watching ourselves careen towards disaster and somehow being unable to stop. Mostly it’s little things: god damn it, why am I smoking this cigarette, I’m trying to quit; why am I still scrolling through facebook when it’s 2 AM and I have work tomorrow? But it can be big things too: Why am I going through with this this marriage, I know I’m not really in love?; Why do I keep showing up every day at this soul-sucking job I swore I quit?; why am I having this last drink when I know it’s just going to lead to me hooking up with that guy at the office and creating a huge mess? These problems are all predictable, the consequences inevitable, and you know it even as you’re in the middle of making the mistake. A part of you is screaming for you to stop, but some other part of the brain is sitting at the steering wheel, some part that doesn’t respond to rationality, doesn’t respond to threats or shame or begging. And so you watch yourself in horror as you go through with it, watch as your own body and mind betray you and refuse to heed your pleading for sanity. It’s that kind of slow-moving, inevitable train wreck which provides the most potent horror here, though the corpse-collecting and flamethrowing help considerably to find focus for that horror.

Still, for my money the best sequence in the film isn’t about murder at all, it’s about Donny’s desperate, doomed struggle to not murder. A work buddy (Robert Carnegie, credited here as Robert Osth, roles on Knight Rider and Street Hawk) invites him out to the disco for a double-date, and he knows this can only end badly, but it’s clear he also sees it as his one last shot at being a functional human. If he can just maintain, if he can pull this off and be normal for just one night, maybe there’s hope for him. With that much riding on the outcome of his big disco debut, the movie pauses a little to consider the details. This leads to an odd, awkwardly sweet scene where he goes to buy a proper suit for the occasion from a very fashion-conscious clerk (who has some overtly homosexual characteristics which the movie presents in a impressively non-judgmental way). The clerk first seems annoyed by his complete ignorance about what he's looking for, but then suddenly seems to take pity on him, and commits himself to the task of making Donny look sharp with something resembling real kindness.

On the surface, this is a completely extraneous scene; we don’t need to know how he got his suit, no one would ever wonder about that. But both actors do such top-tier character work that they make it seem like the crux of the whole movie. David McComb (no other credits) effortlessly takes his nothing salesman role through a complete character arc in a single scene, and really, how could he not when Grimaldi is so good? Without speaking a single line of dialogue of any real import, he creates a complex, tangled portrait of confused acquiescence, simmering excitement, and abject terror, all buried deep under his mask of pliant schlubbiness, but never entirely hidden. It’s a remarkable bit of acting, and it perfectly establishes the stakes for this transitional moment for the character in a barely perceptible, but enormously effective, way.

Needless to say, this is not going to end well, but the cruelest irony is that this would be the perfect setup to humiliate Donny by sending him to his big date with some kind of ridiculous getup, or having his date spitefully reject him. But that doesn’t happen; his fashion consultant steers him true, and his date turns out to be really nice, makes an earnest effort to help him come out of his shell and relax. It’s all going so well, until it suddenly it’s not. Just as he allows himself a glimmer of hope, it’s ripped away.

The finale, which is far too good to spoil, has plenty of excellent horror beats of a somewhat more conventional variety. But lots of movies have good horror beats; it’s a somewhat rarer movie that has a clothes-shopping scene that really sticks with you. Sensitive performances and a genuine investment in drama are rarely things which meaningfully improve a horror movie; mostly, I suppose, because most horror films are centered on outside dangers, rather than the more intimate horrors which bubble up from human drama. DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE is a fine example of a film which successfully plumbs both. And remarkably, these two strengths work not in parallel with each other, but in tandem. Nowadays, you see something of a trend towards horror movies which place a high priority on believable acting and human drama, but often those aspects of the film are only tangentially (at best) related to the real horror (see, for example, the lamentable DARK WAS THE NIGHT, a gloomy tale of loss and grief… until at the end they fight a killer lizard-man). But not so here; our understanding of Donny’s psychological state is absolutely crucial to the impact of the more traditional horror elements, and, conversely, the more visceral horror elements help put a palpable sense of fear into the nebulous anxiety of the psychological horror.

This role should have brought Grimaldi a lengthy and robust career, but instead it seems like he mostly ended up in smaller supporting roles (“Con Man Ed” in CROOKLYN, “Hot Dog Vendor” in NORTH). His wikipedia page says he’s now a professor in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, though obviously he still acts, having a role in a short film on IMDB as recently as 2017. Director Joseph Ellison would direct only one other movie, 1986’s little-seen rock-and-roll drama JOEY (likewise his co-writer Ellen Hammill, though third co-writer Joe Masefiled would go on to be a sound editor on EVIL DEAD [!] and a handful of other films). It’s a shame we didn’t get to see more from this team, but at least they can claim one really genuinely unique, thoughtful and sensitive genre movie which can also hold its own on the whammy. That’s more than some directors with dozens of finished films can boast.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	If you do, then don’t say we didn’t warn you! True, but unfortunately I don’t think the poor ladies who get torched in there were privy to the movie’s title, so this seems a little victim-blaming.
TITLE ACCURACY	Yeah, definitely shouldn’t go in there.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None, which is weird, since the ending even sets up a possible next installment.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	Yes, but not in a context you’re going to enjoy
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Obviously there’s some kind of sexual angle here, and the freudian implications are quite staggering. But as far as the text of the movie goes, he just strips ‘em and burns ‘em.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None… or is there? We assume that the voices Donny hears are just in his head, but the ending possibly suggests otherwise.
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	Most certainly
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None.
VOYEURISM?	Not really.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Hey, it’s right there in the title!

The Night Brings Charlie

The Night Brings Charlie (1990)

Dir. Tom Logan

Written by Bruce Carson

Starring Kerry Knight, Aimie Tenaglia, Joe Fishback, Monica Simmons, David Carr, “and Chuck Whitings as Charlie”

Let us pause, friends, to consider the beauty of simple things. A pint of stout on brisk Fall evening. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE. No matter what changes in this crazy topsy-turvy world, some things will always stay the same; pure, simple, uncomplicated. I mean, hell, I just like saying it: THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE. It’s the kind of phrase you can tinker with the emphasis to create new subtle layers of meaning. The Night... Brings Charlie. The Night Brings... Charlie. The Night Brings Charlie. It’s like a haiku.

Now, if this was just another 80’s slasher, I wouldn’t bother to tell you it was simple and pure and old fashioned as momma’s apple pie, you would just assume it was, and you would be right. But THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE isn’t an 80’s slasher. It’s from fucking 1990. And it’s not like it was shot in 1986 and sat unreleased for years or something. This is 1990 through and through, and you can even tell from the ugly, overlit photography. I don’t know specifically what happened, but sometime between sundown on December 31st, 1989 and sunrise on January 1, 1990, the knowledge of how to light a film so it doesn’t look like the inside of a Wal-Mart vanished collectively from human memory, and remained gone for almost a full 20 years. Even in Italy! It was a dark time for film (or, actually, an overlit time).

This matters a great deal for civilization, and it certainly serves to ensure that THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE stays far away from any possibility of being the kind of primal, amygdala-punishing, adrenaline-soaked crucible that defines the slasher genre at its best. But somehow I don’t think that was really what the makers of THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE were shooting for anyway. I started to form this theory right around the four-minute mark, when Charlie’s first victim is discovered (by the way, Charlie gets his first kill within a minute of the credits ending; The Night may bring Charlie, but he shows up ready to work) and the paper-deliverer who finds the body looks directly into the camera and screams like this:

And so, within the first five minutes of screentime, THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE tells us what it’s all about: being a simple, straightforward goofy slasher with no ambitions whatsoever other than to chop up as many horny teens as possible and maybe have one crazy twist just so you don’t get too comfortable. It knows the score, it knows you know the score, it merely wants to sing the old song one more time with feeling. This is what CHARLIE sets out to do, and this is what it accomplishes, in a sleek hour and fifteen minutes (and considering director Tom Logan's other 1990 movie was the unbearable SHAKMA, these otherwise modest goals seem altogether audacious in context). If you would like that, you would probably like this. 

The details make it pretty funny, and sometimes even intentionally so. There’s a minor Shelley-esque character who jumps out of the bushes to scare his friends literally the day after their mutual friend was beheaded. There’s a merry mixup where a group of girlfriends decide to go spend the night in the killer’s evil abandoned hideout, but then they all call each other at the last minute and flake out, only they can’t get in touch with their one friend but figure what the hell, she’ll figure it out when she gets there alone in the dead of night. And most notably, there’s a sequence where the killer stalks one of those young women who like to shower at night on the ground floor of their home with all the windows (including a window which is actually inside the shower!) wide open. Granted, all that sounds pretty standard and easy to relate to, but the funny part is that she’s drinking a Pepsi from a can in the shower (Pepsi: the official drink of shower murder victims!) and she spills it and the pepsi spirals down the drain like in PSYCHO. It’s pretty amusing to see what at least appears to be a completely earnest Hitchcock homage in THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE, but obviously it would be better if she were drinking chocolate syrup. If you think that would strain credulity, you obviously drink a lot more Pepsi in the shower than I do.

As you can tell from the title, there’s not really a lot of doubt as who the perpetrator is; we know that it’s a heavily-built guy wearing overalls and a burlap sack over his head with goggles, who kills people with tree pruning tools. Coincidentally, there happens to be this guy around town who works as a tree pruner, and he’s a heavily-built fellow who wears overalls and a burlap sack over his head with goggles on the job, which would not be especially noteworthy except that due to a hideous disfigurement (a “terrible chainsaw accident” is mentioned) he wears the same get-up off the clock as well. And he arrived in town right about the same time as the murders started. Also, his name is Charlie, and the name of the movie, which I never miss an opportunity to restate, is THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE. So I’m thinking this is probably the guy. The night is when he kills people, but now that I think about it, he’s also around during the day, and he dresses exactly the same. During the day, though, he’s able to direct his violent, psychotic rage towards plantlife, so I guess the title works.

Charlie’s not exactly an instant icon as a killer, but his vigorous approach (he likes to remove his victims’ heads as souvenirs) and distinctive headgear ensure he has what it takes to get the job done. But even the most iconic killer is nothing without some victims, so THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE brings us Jenny Parker (Aimee Tenaglia [here spelled “Aimie” for some reason] ASYLUM OF TERROR), a rebellious young teenager who just wants to party so goddam much that even the threat of a rampaging serial killer who just decapitated one of her friends not two minutes after they parted company can keep her from immediately scheduling a slumber party. This comes as something of an unhappy turn of events for her straight-laced sister (Monica Simmons, [no other credits] putting in some commendable effort at keeping the “spoilsport goody-two-shoes” sister grounded enough to be tolerable) and her dad (Joe Fishback, the as-near-as-I-can-tell-never-released-on-video LANI-LOA) who happens to be the town coroner. Jenny, who, in point of fact, does not seem very much to want to remain alive, will ultimately walk alone to an abandoned barn in the dead of night with a serial killer on the loose, and it will be up to her sister to save her.

That’s the skeleton of our story, but mostly THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE is content to just fuck around and introduce a string of colorful random characters for Charlie to kill off, which suits me just fine. Charlie claims his first victim almost immediately, and his next by minute 15, so things are going pretty well. But Charlie’s enthusiasm for the job seems likely to prove his undoing, because he’s not exactly keeping a low profile, and cuts a pretty identifiable figure, even attracting the attention of history’s dumbest witness:

COP: “So you saw nothing else?”

WITNESS: (frustrated) “How many times do I have to say it…” (suddenly, he stops and looks thoughtful). “Wait a minute… I did see… someone was watching from behind a bush... I think he was wearing a mask…. His face was covered, and he was kinda creepy. Like evil, ya know?”

Yeah, you know what son, that seems like it might have been worth mentioning.

The acting in this is uniformly horrible, but I do sort of like Joe Fishback's schlubby, grouchy Mr. Parker. He's a very New York character actor, and makes for a funny fit with the sunny, chipper LA suburbs. 

Anyway, the cops are onto Charlie so quick that we as filmgoers immediately suspect something is up. And, SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER that brings us to the one real twist here, which I am about to spoil. See, it seems like everything with Charlie is a little too cut and dry, and by minute 42, something unexpected has happened: the cops actually put two and two together and arrested Charlie. Jenny’s Dad, Mr. Parker, is hauled in to try and get a confession out of Charlie, who it turns out is an old war buddy who has returned to town on his invitation. When he comes out of the interrogation room, he hands the cops a long confession which Charlie has related to him. Well, that wraps everything up in a neat little package… [starts to walk away, then thoughtfully turns around] just one more thing:

Everyone knows Charlie can’t talk after his face got chainsawed off, you moron!

Yes, it seems that it is, in fact, harmless old Mr. Parker who has been dressing like Charlie and offing local teens, and he invited his old comrade to come back to town as a cover, with the intent of framing him. For a psycho serial killer who constructed an elaborate plan to frame his disabled fellow brother-in-arms, he turns out to be a real nice guy about it, confessing to everything and explaining that he’s just glad the madness is over. He doesn’t even get mad when the police investigator (Kerry Knight, KING’S RANSOM) starts to smugly explain how he figured out the ruse as though it took the world’s greatest detective to find the hole in the claim that a mute guy confessed to the whole thing (or maybe he’s just embarrassed that he fucked this plan up so badly in the most obvious way possible right at the last minute).

Anyway, once Mr. Parker’s got this big secret off his chest, everybody’s real friendly about it, they don’t even handcuff him or make him take off his Charlie disguise, they just have him sit in the police station waiting room while they file the necessary paperwork. But something’s not adding up here, because the movie’s still got 25 minutes to go. So as the manipulative serial murderer and the detective who could hardly fail to catch him sit chatting amiably at the police desk, Parker offhandedly mentions that he’s just glad Charlie is off the streets. The cop chides him mildly for pointing the finger at an innocent man who just happens to look and act exactly like a serial killer in every way. But what’s this? “Charlie, innocent?” Parker huffs, “hardly!” “I thought you knew the whole story! Don’t you understand? Charlie’s like me! Only worse!” Sure, I killed two people, but the real unstoppable killing machine is still out there!

The cop says nothing and looks down shamefacedly. Oh, what’s that you glorified traffic cop, you just let the guy who was obviously a serial killer walk free, with a sincere apology for wasting his time? Not feeling so much like Columbo now, are we?

Correctly realizing that the cops in this town couldn’t find a serial killer if he literally wore a mask and goggles around every day in broad daylight, Parker escapes custody (basically just by standing up and walking back outside, so now this police department has just lost two serial killers in one night. Hopefully sheriff isn’t an elected position in this town!) and hunts down Charlie at his secret barn hideout for a final showdown. It's weird that this Machiavellian serial killer gets to be the hero at the end, but since Fishback is far and away the most entertaining actor in the movie, I'm OK with it. Oh, and he’s also still dressed as Charlie, so it’s pretty funny when the two Charlies finally have to duke it out. 

END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER

Anyway, that’s the single, solitary unexpected thing that happens in the entirety of THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE, but that’s OK. I like that one little spot of weirdness for flavor, and I like that the rest of it is just one Charlie or another butchering random people with various garden tools. It particularly rises to the occasion for the climax, when a gang of never-before-seen bikers make the mistake of following Charlie back to his hideout (yes, I believe the filmmakers here might have seen FRIDAY THE 13th PART III), and he finally has cause to bring out that chainsaw you already assumed he had stashed somewhere. His lair is a barn, but for some reason the inside is bathed in eerie red light. I don’t know why that would be (maybe he’s developing film in there?) but it’s the movie’s only attempt at atmosphere, and it gives the finale a little extra punch. Charlie’s all about the little bit of extra punch. I’m not going to sit here and claim that THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE is good, or scary, or even baseline competent; in many ways, it’s uglier and cheaper and the acting is worse than the already pretty bottom-of-the-barrel BLOOD FRENZY. But it’s definitely trying harder to entertain, and that counts for a lot around these parts.

Also I think it’s commendable that they have a character named Charlie who went crazy in Vietnam and is usually found up on ladders trimming trees, and they never make a “Charlie’s in the trees!” joke. I mean, it’s not something I’d be able to resist.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	None, oddly.
TITLE ACCURACY	Oh, 100%
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None yet, but Charlie absolutely deserves a couple of hacky DTV sequels or even a gritty reimagining by Rob Zombie.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Absolutely not.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None.
NUDITY?	Yes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	Just in the usual slasher sense.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None.
VOYEURISM?	Yes, Charlie watches a woman shower and we get his POV. Oddly, I’m not 100% sure he actually kills her.
MORAL OF THE STORY	This town needs