Three Films Make A Post: A Blood Chilling-Gut Spilling Challenge To The Death

The Strange And Deadly Occurrence (1974): Totally solid mid-70s TV thriller by totally solid TV (and otherwise) director John Llewellyn Moxey. Lawyer Robert Stack (still using his Eliot Ness voice like in the old days), Vera Miles and her teenage daughter move into their dream home in the country. Strange (and later deadly) things occur that suggest the family's house may be haunted. Or is human interference behind everything?

Despite using one of my least favourite tropes in all of cinema as if it were an Old Dark House movie made in the late 30s, Moxey's film is still pretty entertaining, if not particularly exciting. You can see how it could have been much more effective if it hadn't gone all Scooby Doo on its audience, for the seemingly supernatural moments are clearly playing to Moxey's strength the most, but it's a nice enough way to waste 70 minutes of one's life.

I, Desire aka Desire, the Vampire (1982): Ironically, this later attempt at being all-out supernatural by Moxey is less successful than the older movie. A female vampire working as a hooker and as a nurse (and how's that for mixed signals and/or fetishism?) collides with overly nosy law student and morgue attendant David Naughton. It might be the fact that the script is often rather clumsy and obvious where it seems to think that it's clever and subtle, or that Moxey makes more than one directorial decision that hints at self sabotage (wildcat noises for the vampire? Really?), or that the whole affair just drags a bit too much; in any case, while it's certainly not a horrible effort, the film is nothing to write home about in its inoffensive TV movie way.

The film does, however, contain a bit of choice scenery chewing by good old Brad Dourif, so Dourif completists (I know you're out there) will need to have a look anyhow.

The Attic Expeditions (2001): I can see why and how this film has gained a certain amount of cult traction over the years, what with it playing like a homemade horror film version of David Lynch adapting Philip K. Dick with eternal fan favourites like Jeffrey Combs, Ted Raimi and Wendy Robie in the cast. Unfortunately, the whole affair never really gels for me and seems to assume that being weird for weirdness' sake while pretending to be clever and profound is enough to make me overlook less than elegant direction, an atrocious lead performance by Andras Jones, and the fact that the film really isn't as clever and profound as it would like to be. Of course, even in its state of not being very good at all, The Attic Expeditions is at least trying to be different and clever instead of - say - going the ultra-generic gore route, which makes it difficult to be all that annoyed about it.

 

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In short: Skinner (1993)

When Kerry Tate (Ricki Lake), the wife of truck-driving never home douchebag Geoff (David Warshofsky) puts their home's spare room up for rent, she seems to hit the jackpot as far as tenants go. Dennis Skinner (Ted Raimi) looks like a shy, sweet, nice if a little strange guy, exactly the kind of person a girl could really take a shine to.

Little does Kerry know that mild-mannered Dennis has the rather unpleasant hobby of hunting women, skinning them and wearing their skins on his next hunting outing.

But there are also some things Dennis doesn't know - Heidi (Traci Lords), a victim who somehow got away from him with a good half of her face missing, has become obsessed with finding him and punishing him for what he did to her. Heidi has somehow managed to trace Dennis and now diligently trails each of his steps. Well, when she's not sitting in her hotel room, in her underwear, shooting up what I suppose is meant to be morphine.

Skinner's director Ivan Nagy is probably better known for the fun facts about his sexual life we learned through the Heidi Fleiss scandal some years ago. Well, when this is a director's best work, he can't complain all that much.

There are really only two words necessary to describe this film: sleazy and seedy. Friends of early 90s neon blue sleaze will have quite a time with the blue and seedy hotel rooms, blue and seedy streets, blue and seedy factories and blue and seedy studio sets the film takes place in.

Apart from this very special time capsule effect and a sometimes quite outrageous unpleasantness, the whole mess hasn't too much to recommend itself for more quality oriented viewers. Or was that less depravity oriented?

Everything is just a little bit off in the wrong way. Raimi's performance is a little too pouty to be menacing or believable, the rest of the actors (yes, even Lords) may do their best to bring a dramaturgically sloppy script to life, but get no help at all from a director who on one hand takes his time to show us a long and pointless sequence of Raimi dressed in the skin of a black man prancing through the urban wasteland doing his abominable ethnic stereotype shtick that's just in there to offend, and who on the other hand just doesn't bother even with the simplest attempts at plotting, or the thirty seconds of characterization that would make Lords' character at least two-dimensional, and therefore vaguely interesting beyond her neat style and her absolute ineptness as a vigilante. And don't get me started on the idiotic ending.

Still, it is interesting to watch in its own unfriendly way. It's just too bad that you can sometimes nearly see the minor classic this could have become with a little more care taken in its writing and a better director, or with the truly terrifying identification with its killer that films like William Lustig's Maniac bring to the table.

 

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