In short: Terrorgram (1990)

This anthology movie directed by one-time filmmaker Stephen M. Kienzle start each of its three episodes off with the off-screen voice of James Earl Jones, out to earn some pocket money by uttering nonsensical variations on “Twilight Zone”-style spooky tale introductions. The actual stories are rather more in the style of “Tales from the Crypt” than of the Serling joint, with terrible things happening to people who deserve it. Each of these arseholes gets a visit from a “mysterious” delivery man (Steven Field), who, in a plot twist one really doesn’t see coming, delivers a package to them, instead of the telegram the title pun suggests (but then all the puns here are terrible anyway), making the care and craft that has gone into the writing pretty clear.

Said packages do of course lead to more or less terrible fates. To wit: a misogynist director lands in the world of one of his films, only that here, classical male and female B-movie roles are reversed, which of course does not end well for him; a bitchy TV anchor woman runs over a little kid and flees, and learns how a Jack-in-the-box feels; an alcoholic shitheel who abuses his family and denunciated other kids to get them shipped to Vietnam when he was young makes a trip into an appropriately nightmarish version of the ‘Nam.

When it comes to cheap, shoddily made anthology movies in the immortal style of “Tales from the Crypt” and other EC comics (and their TV versions), one could do worse than Terrorgram. Sure, the film falls into the usual EC-alike trap of believing that because this style’s surface nastiness is so easy to copy, it’s actually easy to do it well. It isn’t, and consequently, the film at hand never manages to get the more subtle points of the style down.

It is, however, pretty fun – using the word good oversells things a wee bit – because there’s a nasty bit of pleasure to derive from nasty things happening to nasty people at most times, even if it is unpleasant to admit. And the film really does its best to make its victims as despicable as possible, and their comeuppances as weird and nasty as the filmmakers’ strange imaginations can go. The first episode is the film’s best there, Jerry Anderson making the director as grotesquely sleazy as possible, and the actresses torturing him clearly having a whale of a time doing all the stuff only men are allowed to do in most movies of this style. Which helps make up for everyone’s dubious acting, as does the conscious broadness of everything going on. And hey, it’s a more subversive story than you’d expect from an ultra-cheap early 90s anthology movie.

The other two tales never reach the heights of absurdity and fun of the first one, though number two does have a delightfully bizarre ending (even if you see it coming, as you will), and the third one recommends itself with scenes of a badly made-up undead doing really bad sarcastic dialogue.


So Terrorgram delivers rather more than the nothing I expected from it, being fun in a pleasantly trashy manner while keeping in the traditions of American low-brow horror. That’s a compliment.

The Ambulance (1990)

While mullet-crowned comics artist Josh Baker (Eric Roberts) is accosting some poor woman (Janine Turner) on the street  - though I’m pretty sure he thinks he is flirting, an interpretation of his behaviour even a 70s Bollywood hero would raise an eyebrow at – his victim suddenly breaks down into some kind of fit that may or may not be caused by her diabetes. Very quickly, an absurdly old-fashioned ambulance arrives and carts her away. But hey, at least the woman we now know is called Cheryl asks Josh to come visit her and see if she’s alright. When our hero – you better get used to the idea that this is what Josh is – tries to follow through, he can find Cheryl in no hospital in New York. The thought she might have given him a false name to get rid of him obviously never crosses his mind, so off Josh goes to the police.

Alas, eccentric to outright crazy – with the hospital record to prove it – cop Lt. Spencer (James Earl Jones) thinks Josh is a nut – he’s a comics artist after all! Ironically, later on, Spencer will actually turn out to be one of the more competent cops around.

Josh is not easily dissuaded by little problems when he’s hoping to get into the pants of a really hot woman – the film’s finale really suggests that this is his main or perhaps only motivation for all the crap he’s going to pull from now on – so he starts his own investigation. Soon, his potential breakthrough at Marvel is threatened (and that “just because of a girl”, as Stan Lee repeatedly emphasises – I kid you not), as is his life, and his ability to stay out of a mental institution. On the plus side, he makes friends with the only police in New York actively trying to solve crimes (Meghan Gallagher) – who also happens to be a perfect fit for a replacement girlfriend should his main victim not work out – and an elderly reporter (Red Buttons) from the old muckraker school.

As a thriller, Larry Cohen’s The Ambulance certainly is one of the least successful films of the great New Yorker director but as a character-based comedy that just happens to have a thriller plot, it is insanely enjoyable, at least if you can survive a hero who is quite as much of an asshole – and a casual homophobe to boot - as Josh is in any social interaction not involving him trying to “charm” a woman. Then, he’s outright creepy. He’s basically a Hitchcockian everyman protagonist as written by someone who has actually met everymen; fortunately, as Roberts in one of his most entertaining performances plays Josh, his mouthing off to everyone but Stan Lee and the various ways he gets himself into trouble are incredibly fun to watch.

Roberts is ably – and often hilariously – assisted by a whole bunch of character actors chewing scenery while embodying various New Yorker stereotypes, clearly given leeway for improvisation and farting about. Particularly James Earl Jones – just watch the incredible business with the chewing gum in his death scene – and Red Buttons are a joy to watch. But the minor cop characters – like James Dixon as the cop who really doesn’t like to be compared to Jughead – and the heavies all get their little moments here too, so that the first two thirds of the movie are a series of perfect and absurd vignettes made out of New York, Hitchcock and actors letting loose. Each and every character interaction is a perfect storm of actors, fun dialogue, and the somewhat skeezy charm one expects from a film set in New York in this era.

The final act makes little sense: so why exactly has the evil doctor (Eric Braeden for some probably awesome reason doing his mad scientist as if he were channelling a facial-hair deprived Sam Elliott) put his secret lab into a night club? Is there really a big market in the USA for using kidnapped diabetics in illegal human trials? Why don’t they just shoot Josh? I certainly don’t know. On the other hand, I didn’t find myself actually caring about these questions either, for the final act is still full of awesome and bizarre acting, some decent if absurd action sequences, and whatever it is Roberts does here.


If all this still doesn’t sound wonderful enough to you, imaginary reader: how about the fact that Josh is actually working at Marvel, with Stan Lee in what very well might be his largest acting role, and guys like Larry Hama and Jim Salicrup hanging around. Why, even the great Gene Colan is involved as “artist photo double”! And if that still doesn’t sound quite awesome and fun enough, I  really don’t know what Cohen could have added here.

In short: Grim Prairie Tales (1990)

Somewhere in the Old West, after the US Civil War. City guy Farley (Brad Dourif), and shaggy rider Morrison (James Earl Jones) encounter each other at the former’s campfire right in the middle of nowhere. After displays of nervousness from Farley (probably induced by the corpse Morrison has packed on his second horse), and of sublime grumpiness by Morrison, the two start to bond by telling each other tales of horror.

The first one concerns an old man paying dearly for desecrating an Indian burial ground, while the second tells of a city guy riding through the prairie who encounters a pregnant woman and the rather absorbing turn their meeting will take. Tale number three – the only one told by Farley – is somewhat more subtle fare about a girl having to learn of her father’s Ku Klux Klan involvement. Last but not least, a gunman loses his nerve and is either haunted or going a bit crazy. These tales are interspersed with Farley and Morris doing prairie literature criticism on the them.

As far as horror anthology movies go, Wayne Coe’s Grim Prairie Tales certainly isn’t one of the most brilliant ones, nor is it one of the most complex. However, Coe (who also wrote the script) is clearly very conscious of what a – in this case very literal - campfire tale is supposed to be and do, how much depth it can carry, and what’s a good point to end such a tale on. There’s a difference between simple-mindedness and simplicity, and the film’s tales are most certainly of the latter type and not the former one, with a certain sardonic wryness in the delivery that echoes EC comics, even though, unlike at EC, not everybody who gets it here actually deserves it, and not everyone who’d deserve it, gets it.

Apart from this approach, Grim Prairie Tales also has two not-so-secret weapons in the forms of James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif, both in full-on larger than life modes, though Dourif (ironically) does a larger than life portrayal of a guy who isn’t really all that larger than life. In any case, if there weren’t any horror stories at all surrounding them, it would still be a joy to watch Jones and Dourif play off each other, both men giving their characters intensity as well as basically sparkling with a sense of fun.

That might not add up to the greatest horror western anthology ever made, but it’s a fun time, indeed.

In short: Excessive Force (1993)

Generic cop on the edge Terry McCain (Thomas Ian Griffith) and his partners Frankie (Tony Todd), and guy who dies too early for me to actually write down his name (Mister X) follow Terry’s vendetta against mob boss Sal DiMarco (Burt Young) into a drug deal between some of DiMarco’s men and members of the Irish mob, provoking the devolution from deal into shoot-out. Thanks to McCain’s use of torture on a suspect afterwards, DiMarco escapes another court indictment, leaving Terry quite angry and without shouldering any of the responsibility for something that is absolutely his fault all the way, of course. What only DiMarco and his men know is that three million dollars went missing during the bust, and DiMarco quickly pegs the cops as the responsible party.

Soon, the quite three-million-dollar-less Terry is the only of the three cops alive, and finds himself framed for murder and hunted by cops and gangsters alike. Why, you could think there’s some sort of conspiracy is going on.

Excessive Force’s excessively generic action movie title actually hides a generic cop movie featuring and written by lead Thomas Ian Griffith himself. The script for the whole affair is so bland, obvious and been-there, done-that clichéd even an actor could write it, so excitement, interesting ideas or even just somewhat involving execution of tired old ideas is right out. If anyone goes into this looking for even the tiniest bit of interesting characterization, she’ll be quite out of look, and neither Griffith’s script nor Jon Hess’s competent yet bland direction have much to add to the experience, particularly since neither the action scenes nor the dialogue are delivered with any sort of flair.

The latter is particularly sad in a film with such a fine cast of character actors that doesn’t just include Todd and Young but also features James Earl Jones and house favourite Lance Henriksen. Unfortunately, that’s Jones and and Henriksen phoning it in, Young biting the bullet very early on, and Todd only featuring in a few scenes, so we spend most of our time with Thomas Ian Griffith being as boring and obvious as his script, and Charlotte Lewis being pretty. Even though I do approve of Mother Nature’s work on Miss Lewis, that’s really not enough to keep me awake during a film.

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