Strange Invaders (1983)

One day, his ex-wife Margaret (Diana Scarwid) appears in the apartment of entomology docent Charles Bigelow (Paul Le Mat), their little daughter Elizabeth (Lulu Sylbert) in tow. There’s some sort of family problem, and she needs to return to the Midwest small town she grew up in. Charles agrees to take Elizabeth, of course, but when Margaret neither reappears nor phones for days, he and Elizabeth grow restless. After weeks have passed – a time during which all phone lines to the town Margaret is visiting are permanently unusable to boot – Charles decides to make the drive halfway around the country to find out what happened to his ex-wife.

Once he has arrived in beautiful Centerville, Illinois, things become increasingly peculiar. People there are rude, uninformative and  vaguely creepy, while the town itself still carries a heavy whiff of the 50s. More disturbing still is the fact that those people in town actually willing to talk to the stranger claim to never have heard of Margaret’s family. When Charles isn’t leaving immediately and pokes around the place a bit, the situation escalates in a not atypical series of events including a disappearing dog, a broke-down car, and mysteriously appearing and disappearing townsfolk. Eventually, Charles flees the town while a bug-eyed alien guy shoots lightning at his escape car.

Once returned to civilisation, our protagonist has a hell of a time finding anyone to believe him, be it friends, a lady from the government agency tasked with investigating strange occurrences (Louise Fletcher), or even tabloid reporter Betty Walker (Nancy Allen). And that really could be that, but these aliens clearly take security very seriously indeed, so Charles soon finds his home and office ransacked, and is threatened by various weird people. The aliens also start bothering Betty, finally winning Charles an ally as well as a love interest. Clearly, another visit to Centerville is in order.

As most people interested in cult cinema will probably know, what the 80s are to our era, the 50s were to the 80s themselves, with many a film taking heavy inspiration from pop cultural artefacts made thirty years earlier. As it is also today, this fixation can lead to a sort of lazy copyism, or to – often pretty inspired - reworkings that use elements of the old to make something new that uses looks, sounds and feelings of an earlier era and builds something different out of them.

Michael Laughlin’s Strange Invaders certainly belongs to the latter kind of film, using elements of 50s alien invasion movies, casting old school actors like June Lockhart and Kenneth Tobey (who turns out to be rather more excellent at being creepy than he ever was at being square-jawed), and including many an idea that could nearly have been borrowed from the past. At the same time, Laughlin does use many of these elements in ways the stiffer films of the 50s couldn’t have gotten away with, very companionably poking fun at the older films without anything here ever turning into outright satire or comedy. Rather, these moments in the film feel like nods for those in the audience who have seen the same films the filmmakers have.

There’s no heavy deconstruction of traditional genre tropes going on here anyway, mind you, for Laughlin’s really more interested in telling a traditional invasion plot in a slightly more contemporary manner, so if you expect a strong non-conformist subplot or something of the sort, you might be disappointed. Sometimes, an alien body snatcher is just an alien body snatcher rather than a metaphor for communism/anti-communism or whatever else floats your boat.

From a 2020 perspective, the film’s looking somewhat stranger than he will have played at the time, really giving me a bit of a double dose of nostalgia – one dose for the 50s movies the film itself feels a degree of nostalgia for, the other for the kind of mild 80s sf/horror this is, the sort of film made by filmmakers who shared many of the cultural influences and interests of Steven Spielberg or George Lucas but didn’t quite have the talent, or the luck, or the commercial instincts to make movies as accomplished or successful as these big boys of nerddom did.

Which doesn’t mean Laughlin’s a bad director. If you get used to Strange Invaders’ somewhat slow pace and are okay with a certain tendency to pull emotional punches where it would have been more effective to go for the gut, there’s a lot to enjoy here, starting with Louis Horvath’s typical (and very effective) early 80s photography (you’ll know pretty much how this will look if you have seen anything made in the first half of that decade; you’ll also know how pretty it looks), and certainly not ending with Laughlin’s love for tucking away little interesting details about characters somewhere in a scene’s background.

I’m also very happy about a film concerned with a deeply not macho Paul Le Mat as its hero, something that certainly wouldn’t have happened in the 50s (or quite a few parts of the 80s either). Le Mat’s not exactly a charisma bomb, but he plays his characters’ increasing frustration about the world’s disbelief as well as he shoes his deep well of courage when it comes down to it. From today’s perspective, Nancy Allen could really have rather more to do, but she’s also not standing around screaming all the time.

Last but not least, there is some really cool effects work on screen, with the ickily organic human masks in front of the also excellent alien faces as created by James Cummins being a particular high point; though the rest of the effects are lovely too.


All of which really adds up to a fun little film that evokes nostalgia without getting lost in it.

Maniac Cop 2 (1990)

Formerly half-undead serial killer cop Matt Cordell (Robert Z’Dar) is back from his watery grave, now even more dead, and still so angry about being framed for crimes he didn’t commit by THEM and then being murdered in prison, he is still murdering basically everyone he meets. In fact, he seems to put little effort at all into seeking out the political higher ups responsible for his fate and only in the very end of the film gets around to kill off their pawns. As an undead seeker of vengeance, Cordell’s not terribly impressive. He’s great at killing random people, though.

Because he has so much time off, Cordell uses the film’s first act to kill off the heroes of the first Maniac Cop (bye, Bruce Campbell, so long, Laurene Landon!), leaving the audience to the tender mercies of whiny, self-righteous, hard-ass cop Sean McKinney (Robert Davi) and police psychologist Susan Riley (Claudia Christian) as our new protagonists. After the usual dance of scepticism and mutual dislike, these two team up to get Cordell off the street and clear his name. Because that’s important after the dozens of innocents the zombie cop has slaughtered.

Cordell doesn’t want to be left out of the partnering up business this time around, so he shacks up with serial killer of Times Square strippers Turkell (Leo Rossi, wearing some sort of hilarious alien hair mop creature on and over his head, looking for all the world like one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers).

As sarcastic as I may sound above, I really had a hell of an entertaining time watching the second of the three Maniac Cop movies from the dynamic duo of that great New York writer/director/producer Larry Cohen (only writing and producing here), and that loveable, semi-great sleazebag William Lustig. The plot makes little sense – though you can see the vague shapes of the sense it is probably supposed to make – but every scene here is basically written to provide either some intensely goofy shit (the scenes of Turkell and Cordell showing each other their knives, and Landon’s short chainsaw fight against Cordell stand as obvious examples), provide Lustig with opportunity to wallow in by 1990 old-school New York sleaze, or win the audience’s hearts with insane stunts and absurd violence.

As such, the film is a raving success. The goofy shit is indeed goofy as heck, New York has seldom looked more like some sort of crazy nightmare built out of trash and human desperation, and the action scenes are insane and gritty in idea and execution. Because Cohen and Lustig know and love actors, the film also contains a ream of fun performances. Even the in theory utterly unlikeable McKinney becomes great entertainment in the hands of Davi who is after all one of the guys who wrote the book on playing these types of characters in low budget films, and Christian pretty much wins my heart by playing her character absolutely straight even though she’s moving through a world made out of absurd nonsense.

Adding even more value to the whole proposition is Cohen’s patented dialogue that sounds sharp and fun (and often funny) in a way which tempts one to talk of realism; in truth nobody does talk like a character written by Larry Cohen, of course. It’s rather that one feels this version of New York should be populated by people talking this way, so there’s a feeling of veracity to the dialogue. Which beats boring realism any day.


Indeed, all of this adds up so well I hands-down prefer Maniac Cop 2 to the first one by a mile or two, and that even though it uses one of my least favourite horror movie tropes by killing the first film’s heroes off in the first act. But then, Davi/Christian are much more entertaining than the original pair (sorry, Mr Campbell), and the rest of the film clearly sets out to outdo the first one in everything, from grime to explosions, and succeeds wonderfully.

In short: Anguish (1987)

Original title: Angustia

Ophthalmologist's assistant John (Michael Lerner) is losing his eyesight and his mind. Assisted and/or hindered through the hypnotic influence of his mother (Zelda Rubinstein), John begins to remove the eyes of various unwilling donors. His killing spree eventually leads John into a movie theatre where he goes to work with particular relish. However, the mommy's boy and his serial killer habit are only a movie inside of a movie.

Teenage girls Patty and Linda (Talia Paul and Clara Pastor) are sitting in their own movie watching John's, but their mix of popcorn-munching and naked panic in reaction to the peculiar happenings on screen - respectively - is just the beginning, for someone starts killing off the patrons of their cinema, though in a less sexy style than John is using. The borders between movies, or between movie and reality, become exceedingly porous for everyone involved.

Spanish director Bigas Luna's Anguish is a fascinating movie, and one of the most interesting and successful attempts at that whole "horror movie inside of a horror movie" thing. When films go as meta as this one does, they sometimes tend to put too large of an emphasis on the ironic or the satirical elements, leaving any chance of an emotional connection (and I do think a film absolutely needs this kind of connection as much as it needs an intellectual one) with its audience by the wayside.

Anguish for its part works on all levels it reaches for at once. Taken completely at face value, it's two fantastic thrillers at once - the eyeball killer one a giallo style experience in exciting weirdness, the other one a more naturalistic piece made with the same expertise and sense of style. Yet it's also a film which questions even the realism of its supposedly realistic parts, permanently asking questions about not just the nature of reality, the nature of realism, the influence of movies on reality (which of the two movies we see is really mirroring which?), but also the question if the per definition more realistic also is the more real. After all, these borders tend to blur when the murderer of one movie kills for the approval of the mother of the other movie's murderer, even more so once it becomes quite unclear if the first movie's murderer doesn't have the ability to enter the second one, though he might do so only in a character's mind. And that's before we come to the ending titles where another movie audience watches said titles. It's all rather complex, and yet Luna never loses control over his material, with every (stylish, brilliant) shot clearly made for a reason.

On another level, Anguish is also a film about the power of the Weird over mainline reality. This aspect of the movie is perfectly incorporated in Rubinstein's performance. Her character, in all her ambiguous oddness, has no trouble drifting through the movie screen into the minds of the audience (both the real and the imagined one), changing the reality of those she comes in contact with in one way or the other. It is after all the nature of the Weird to infect reality until ideas of order, of cause and effect begin to disappear.

This moment when the quotidian transforms (deforms?), is what Anguish is all about for me; that it's also a great meta-thriller is nearly beside the point.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,in short,horror,bigas luna,zelda rubinstein,michael lerner