Alone In The Dark (1982)

Alone In The Dark (1982)

Dir Jack Sholder

Written by Jack Sholder, Robert Shaye, Michael Harrpster

Starring Dwight Shultz, Jack Palance, Donald Pleasance, Martin Landau

  

            ALONE IN THE DARK opens with a strange man (Academy-award-winner Martin Landau, THE BEING, WITHOUT WARNING) walking into a very strange, very empty diner. It’s called MOM’s, and he greets the waitress at the counter as “Mom,” in a strange, stilted, dreamlike way. And that sense of dreamlike strangeness is, ah, heightened by the fact that his order of “the usual” results in a plate with a single whole raw fish on it, which is quickly joined by a frog that hops into view from off-frame. And then to make matters worse, the cook (Donald Pleasance, THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS) starts shouting at him that he is supposed to cleanse the Earth with fire and blood, and it starts raining indoors, and then he gets chained up by his feet and sliced in half. “Service good, but food underdone and ambiance terrible, two stars.” –Yelp reviewer DinerGuy6969. Alas, this kind of greatness is impossible to sustain; it turns out to be a dream. But it’s a damn great opening sequence, far and away the best thing in the movie. It’s hella crazy, but it turns out to be a smart way to open this particular film, which is very much about crazy people. This will be our sole direct glimpse into the crazy mind of the weirdos with whom we expect to eventually be ALONE IN THE DARK.* We’ll never see things from their perspective again, but this gives us a good hint of just how frighteningly far from reality it is.

            Indeed, it is in this break from reality that we locate the horror. The diner sequence is more surreal than out-and-out terrifying in its specifics –and it is a dream in any case. But the implications for the dreamer are more sinister: what kind of twisted mind, we wonder, would produce this bizarre fantasy? No healthy, rational one. The villains in this movie are not supernatural beings, not particularly stronger or faster or smarter than the average person. What makes them frightening is that they’re driven by thoughts and motivations which are unknown and unknowable to us, motivations we can’t predict, can’t reason with. We have no power whatsoever over a reality which is closed to our influence. They will be impervious to our attempts to convince, threaten, cajole, bargain. In fact, what we do will only matter to them through the warped filter of their madness; we are less real to them than whatever demoniac forces from unknown subconscious depths have constructed the fractured mental world they inhabit. And that makes the anxiety they provoke metaphysical, even beyond the very real material threat of bodily harm.  

This is why what we now call mental illness remains an unsettling topic to explore, even if we (hopefully) know by now that people who suffer from mental illness are far, far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. (We do know that by now, right? Right?) Although ALONE IN THE DARK will, as a slasher film, eventually hinge on our (unrealistic) fear that mentally ill people will enact violence on us, there’s a little more to it than that. We fear the mad not so much because of their capacity for violence, but because it frightens us that we don’t share their world. So much of our comforting assumptions about life are nested in our sense of solid, fixed, and broadly shared reality. Severing that link to a consensus reality results in a deeply unsettling sense of uncertainty. So much classic horror --first and foremost the work of Poe-- locates its fear in the loss of reality which comes from a slipping mind. If we can’t know reality, we’re as good as dead, just senseless dreamers stumbling randomly through a meaningless void, impotent to control a world which we cannot understand. And if someone else doesn’t share our reality… who knows what they’ll do?               

            And, for better or worse, that’s what ALONE IN THE DARK is interested in. Even though the premise is not exactly enlightened, the movie is surprisingly nuanced in its portrayal of mental illness and the treatment thereof. (At least as far as 1980s slashers go). One might fairly ask if “thematically incoherent” might be a better description, but I’m feeling generous enough to think it’s trying to genuinely explore the topic. At the very least, it takes the question of treatment seriously, and spends a surprising amount of time addressing different professional approaches to it. After having seen what the inside of Byron 'Preacher' Sutcliff’s (Landau) mind looks like in the opening, we will spend the remainder of the movie looking in from the outside, through the efforts of Dr. Dan Potter (Dwight Schultz, The A-Team, Star Trek: The Next Generation, FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY) a psychiatrist who has just been transferred to the psychiatric hospital run by Dr. Leo Bain (Pleasance). Potter seems skeptical of Bain’s permissive, hippy-dippy attitude towards his patients, but also rejects ignorant stereotypes casting the mentally ill as dangerous boogeymen. In fact, his sister, Toni (Lee Taylor-Allan, woah, STARGATE!) has recently been released from a similar institution after recovering from a stress-related mental breakdown, and he neatly diffuses the social stigma that background might impart: “She’s probably better off now than before the whole thing happened… breakdowns can sometimes be very cleansing. Why don’t you give her a chance, she’s a great girl now.” Still, he has some anxiety about the lax security afforded to so-called “third floor patients” at the hospital, four men with violent criminal psychoses. That would be paranoid former POW Frank Hawkes (Academy-Award-Winner Jack Palance, SHANE, but also Joe D’Amato’s BLACK COBRA WOMAN), pyromaniac preacher Sutcliff, obese child molester Ronald Elster (Erland Van Lidth, THE RUNNING MAN), and homicidal maniac John "The Bleeder" Skagg, who refuses to let anyone see his face.

            The hospital prides itself on its humane, unrestrictive treatment. “We don’t lock people up here and fry their brains with electricity,” Dr. Bain proudly tells Potter, and frankly that sounds like a pretty good idea to me. He isn’t in denial about his patients’ need for care and treatment, he just doesn’t think it necessitates that they’re treated as objects of fear and suspicion when they can get by with just a little understanding. He considers their mental illness to be a “journey to the inmost psyche,” and huffs, “I’m running a haven here, not a jailhouse.” In a startling depiction of the faith he has in his patients, he happily lends pyromaniac Sutcliff a matchbook; when minutes later Sutcliff has set own coat on fire, Bain just hurries over to him and calmly talks him down, and then asks somebody to get him a new coat.** He seems like a real caring, progressive guy, and even the skeptical Potter has to admit “he gets results.” In fact, when the “third floor patients” are convinced by the ultra-paranoid Hawkes that Potter has murdered and replaced their former doctor, Potter takes a page from Bain’s empathetic approach and points out that this is a perfectly natural, and even common, coping mechanism for mentally fragile men used to consistency. Their floor monitor, Ray (Brent Jennings, RED HEAT, MONEYBALL), is not comforted by Potter’s measured, calm appraisal of the situation, though. And his point of view is somewhat backed up when a days-long blackout shuts down the hospital’s security system, releasing all four psychopaths, who promptly murder him and escape. Why yes, he is a black guy, why do you ask?

            Now on the lam, the deranged foursome stalk Dr. Potter, swinging by his house to menace his infuriatingly precocious daughter (Elizabeth Ward, two ABC Afterschool Specials)*** and surreptitiously hack up the babysitter (Carol Levy, an episode of Tales From The Darkside), who has unwisely taken this opportunity to have an extended hot naked sex scene with her boyfriend (Keith Reddin, THE DOORS, TO WONG FOO THANKS FOR EVERYTHING JULIE NEWMAR).**** The remainder of the film, then, is essentially a home-invasion/siege thriller, with the Potter family trapped in their house, cut off from the outside world by the blackout, and surrounded by a quartet of deranged maniacs. It takes itself pretty seriously, with Schultz and his wife (Deborah Hedwall, Jessica Jones, unnecessarily authentic in a typically unrewarding “threatened wife” role) feeling natural and grounded enough to make the home-invasion angle tense and weighty, with the extreme genre elements pushed right up to the point of ridiculousness but not quite across the line.

Unfortunately, this part, which would usually be known as “the good part” in a genre movie, is the least interesting thing here. It’s perfectly functional as far as home-invasion thrillers go, but without much to distinguish itself from a million other similar movies. Credit where it’s due: the final ten minutes get pretty intense, and include a brazen twist which actually managed to catch me off guard. But mostly the climax is disappointingly boilerplate, which is kind of a shame given the unusual premise, and the movie’s interest in the specifics of the “third floor patients” and their treatment beforehand. These villains mostly behave like any generic home-invasion gang, and the fact that they’re acting on these bizarre paranoid fantasies doesn’t really come into play. You could see that as a missed opportunity, with a potentially interesting backstory petering out into a routine slasher. But I prefer the glass-half-full approach: it’s a predictably average slasher, but with a surprisingly rich backstory. Obviously you don’t need Jack Palance, Martin Landau, and that big fat guy from THE RUNNING MAN to play murderous psychotic goons (and more or less generic ones at that; their individual delusions don’t even play a particularly pivotal role in their mayhem, which mostly just involves them attacking the family with edged weapons of various sorts), but since they got ‘em here for some reason, they add a little extra spice.

            Still, you do kinda need actors like these to create complex portraits of delusional, mentally ill people, and at least Landau and Palance actually do that, kinda. Their psychiatric issues, if not their slasher predilections, are treated more realistically and seriously than you might expect. These are not Hannibal-Lecter-style insane geniuses. As that opening scene very evocatively tells us, these are genuinely troubled guys living very much in their own heads. They’re not necessarily evil or sadistic, though their conditions sometimes make them do things which are both. But they really can’t help themselves. Co-writer/director Jack Sholder (THE HIDDEN, and, of course, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREE 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE a.k.a THE GAY ONE) says he was partially inspired by Fritz Lang’s M(!) in writing the script. ALONE IN THE DARK is arguably not as good as M, but it does have a similar sense of conflicted sympathy for the villains’ compulsions. They’re bad, but it’s not their fault, exactly. It all makes sense in their heads. Landau does a great job of depicting Sutcliff as a guy only barely aware of the world around him, shuffling through much of the movie in an inward-facing haze until he suddenly bursts out with tantrums of rage which seem to boil up from nowhere to anyone who can’t see the inevitable, internally logical train of thoughts which led there. He doesn’t want to be evil. But, I mean, what would you do if you got served a raw fish and then bisected by your psychiatrist at your Mom’s diner? Could you honestly say you wouldn’t want to stalk and murder Dwight Schultz and his family if you were in his shoes?

             Palance does even better with Hawkes, a Jack-Palance-style tough guy for whom the vulnerability inherent in his mental illness is intolerable. He doesn’t say as much, but there’s a wounded pride in his performance; this was a solider, a guy who obviously prided himself on his macho toughness and self-reliant individualism, and now he’s humiliated and emasculated by his confinement and the embarrassing focus on his disturbed emotional state. Real men don’t have to talk about their feelings, and here he’s being forced by the state to do just that. This is an intolerable insult, a suggestion that he is incapable of controlling himself and his emotions. No wonder he prefers a persecutorial fantasy to reality; looking inward threatens to shatter his entire sense of himself, but shifting the problem outside himself feels infinitely more comfortable. Strategy, aggression, and conflict are areas where he can feel capable, confident. It’s a rather neat, and understated, little parable about the temptation to see the world in a way which is convenient, rather than allow painful reality to change us. Which is a point especially driven home in (SPOILERS SPOILERS) the end, where he is forced into a sudden realization that he’s been wrong. Rather than a vigilante avenger, he’s just been a delusional psychopath all alone, and suddenly he can see that, and it just breaks him. He stumbles out into the night, a wreck of a man, his fury now turned inward. But the very end of the movie curiously offers him some flicker of hope; he winds up with the punk rockers Potter and his family had encountered earlier (at a show by a band called The Sick F*cks, who absolutely slay and seem to have been unfairly ignored by history*****). They seem crazy, half aggressive, half suicidal, and suddenly there’s a moment of strange, half-understood simpatico between them. All right, they’re crazy. Isn’t everybody? Bemoans Dr. Bains. We all go a little mad sometimes. And maybe we don’t need to be completely sane, or even completely understood, to get by in life. Maybe that old hippie Bains was onto something after all. (END SPOILERS)

            Anyway, I’m probably making this movie sound more interesting than it actually is, because when it comes down to it as a genre film it ain’t any great shakes and as a dense psychological portrait it probably leaves a little to be desired in the ol’ realism department. Still, it’s watchable enough, has two lengthy scenes at a rockin’ punk show, a (hallucinated) zombie by Tom Savini, a funny bit part for Lin Shaye, and some solid meat-and-potatoes siege thriller crap. I can’t say it’s some forgotten gem, but I enjoyed it, and I think it has some unique merits, even if they’re not necessarily merits which much benefit its adequate but undistinguished genre cred. It is historically important for one reason, though: it was the first film ever produced by Robert Shaye and New Line Cinemas, which had previously been exclusively a distribution company. It wasn’t a huge hit, but it got their feet wet, and then it was on to XTRO, POLYSTER, and, of course, Freddy. So without ALONE IN THE DARK, there is no NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2. And we’d never have this:

            And that’s a sobering enough thought to make anyone crazy.

                *Spoiler: No one is ever alone in the dark at any point during movie. I don’t know what that title means but it’s obviously not meant to be taken literally.

                ** Jack Sholder has said in interviews (for example, in Twisted Visions: Interviews with Cult Horror Filmmakers by Matthew Edwards) that Bain is a parody of Scottish philosopher and psychiatrist R.D. Liang, and it’s pretty on-the-nose; Bain’s explicit rejection of retainment and forced electroshock therapy, and his description of psychosis as being a reasonable and valid reaction to a violent and chaotic world, are almost verbatim Liang. Though Liang is hardly above criticism, I’m not sure I care to hear any parody of psychotherapy from the guy who directed NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2 without realizing he had made the single gayest film not personally directed by Kenneth Anger.

                *** With the threat of child rape, since Elster is a child molester! Yikes! Fortunately for some reason he’s just not feeling it this time (possibly because the kid is so intolerable) and just contents himself with murdering the babysitter.

                **** IMDB offers an unsourced bit of trivia that “Matthew Broderick was auditioned for the role of [the boyfriend], however Jack Sholder thought Broderick was too talented for the small part.” Probably true, although I bet Broderick wouldn’t have minded being insufficiently artistically challenged considering the whole role consists of making out with a topless blonde nymphomaniac. I guess things worked out OK for him in the end, but imagine a world where both Broderick and Tom Hanks had early roles as pointless boyfriend characters in early 80’s slashers?

                ***** According to IMDB, they were originally called Nicky Nothing And The Hives, but liked their ALONE IN THE DARK moniker so much that they kept it. Apparently they put out and EP in 1982 under the name Sic F*cks but other than this single fanzine article I can find nothing else about them. Anyway, the song they play in the movie “Chop Up Your Mother” is a big sloppy freight train of punk rock, and I’m in fucking favor of it.

               

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	They’re Out… For Blood! Don’t Let Them Find You… ALONE IN THE DARK.
TITLE ACCURACY	Inaccurate, even after the power goes out, no one is ever alone in the dark.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher, siege-movie, home invasion thriller
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Jack Palance, Martin Landau. Shultz would go on to a leading role in The A-Team the following year.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Martin Landau, Lin Shaye
NUDITY?	Yes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Two teens get murdered while having sex, and there is the lingering threat of “child molester” Elster, but nothing comes of it.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Yes
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	The psychos stalk their victims for several days, though not much is made of this..
MORAL OF THE STORY	We should all be more accepting and empathetic of people with mental illness but at the same time you should probably never keep a gang of homicidal psychopaths in a locked room which will automatically open in the event of a power outage. But JURASSIC PARK hadn’t come out yet so there was no way they could have known that.

American Gothic

American Gothic (1988)

Dir. John Hough

Written by Burt Wetanson, Michael Vines

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

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

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

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

A representative image from this movie called "AMERICAN GOTHIC"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

  

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

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