Three Films Make A Post: One Man's Quest is Another Man's Destiny

Innerspace (1987): Remember when they were still giving Joe Dante quite a lot of money to make his films? In theory, this one’s a pretty mainstream SF comedy starring the always excellent Dennis Quaid and the surprisingly un-annoying Martin Short and a pretty wasted in the role Meg Ryan, showing off a lot of neat effects. In practice, Dante lets things increasingly drift from mild wackiness into outright insanity (with slapstick) until an incredible scene of Kevin McCarthy and Wendy Schaal being shrunk to half size and trying to operate a coin phone becomes rather par for the course. It’s also so well timed most of Dante’s flights of craziness (of course all swathed in a big yet never intrusive dollop of movie quotes and film love because this is Dante, after all) are outrageously funny, and I say that as someone who has only a marginal tolerance for slapstick.

And by the by, hidden under what looks like a film that’s about an effeminate guy finding his inner macho, this is rather a movie about a guy breaking out of a grey life to find what he loves. Among other things.

Fright Night Part 2 (1988): At the time, Tommy Lee Wallace’s sequel to the rightfully beloved horror comedy didn’t get too much love as far as I can remember, but from my chair in 2017, it does look rather good. I like how much it works as an actual sequel that often cleverly plays with elements of the first film instead of just repeating them; I also love the cast with William Ragsdale and Roddy McDowell returning to their roles with relish, guys like Brian Thompson and Jon Gries getting space to do their respective things; how Traci Lind’s girlfriend character actually turns into the heroine of the piece for half an hour or so; how bizarre – and probably totally normal for the late 80s Julie Carmen’s outfits and hair are; how many silly and fun ideas are packed into the film. And last but not least, how good the film is at being funny (and damn, is it ever funny) while still keeping the horror parts of the film exciting.


Mind over Murder (1979): This is a very neat little thriller/horror film made for US TV in the prime era for this sort of thing. It starts like an Eyes of Laura Mars style clairvoyant versus killer movie, with vision sequences that make creative and pretty trippy use of slow motion and frozen images but turns into something that feels as close to a 70s exploitation horror movie as you probably could get away with on TV in this era, with secret horror hero Andrew Prine making great, creepy use of his experience playing crazy people in some of said exploitation films, suggestions of a nice bit of depravity (with charming moments like Prine asking the heroine if she wants him to “make love” to her or kill her first while shirtlessly preening in front of her). It’s tight, features the obligatory asshole boyfriend for our heroine Deborah Raffin, and shows its director Ivan Nagy as doing really inventive work in the aesthetic framework of a 70s TV movie.

In short: Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

When a patient of emergency room doctor Daniel Challis (Tom Atkins being Tom Atkins, which is to say, awesome) is murdered by a man in a suit in an improbable, head-crushing manner, and said man then proceeds to burn himself to death in his car, Challis can't help but ask himself questions about the murdered man. What horrible things was he raving about? Why was he grabbing a Halloween mask made by Silver Shamrock, whose hellish TV and radio jingles running up to the great day are enough to drive even the mild-mannered rude?

Soon enough, he teams up with the dead man's daughter, the excellently named Ellie Grimbridge (Stacey Nelkin) to investigate Silver Shamrock's very own company town. Does Silver Shamrock's boss Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy) have some sort of horrible plan?

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time to follow up on the genre-building Halloween and the ultra-generic Halloween 2 with a movie that has nothing whatsoever to do with Michael Myers; too bad nobody not involved in the production seemed to agree with the decision. People, after all, do not want sequels to be any different from what came before. With the hindsight of a quintillion later Myers outings, I by now think Halloween III was absolutely the right idea, only calling it a sequel wasn’t all that commercially viable an idea.

However, as someone who really doesn't care about continuity and the rules of sequels, I can enjoy the film for what it is, namely, one of the most well-made examples of batshit insanity I have ever encountered coming from the US. Really, this is a film about a warlock who uses modern technology (particularly in form of androids in nice suits), the horrors of mass communication (oh, that jingle!), and magico-technical Halloween masks which make your head turn into an insect- and snake-ridden mess and shoots lasers, to create a mass sacrifice to the olden gods as represented by a Stonehenge menhir he has stolen! Spoilers, come to think of it. Even better, director Tommy Lee Wallace tells this tale about a plan that sounds better fit for a children's movie in a surprisingly gory manner, while never deigning to wink at its audience through all the ever increasing silliness.

In fact, if you can - and you should - get over the "oh no, no Michael Myers" blues, you might even find the film just as creepy as it is strange, with many a scene (as shot by the brilliant Dean Cundey) feeling as if it came directly out of the nightmares of somebody who has read too many (or is that just enough?) EC horror comics, or just hasn't forgotten some of his childhood nightmares.

That Cochran's plan doesn't really make logical sense (and its execution seems doubtful as well) is rather a feature than a bug in this regard, enhancing Halloween III's weird nightmare qualities because there's no way to anticipate what moment of ickiness or strangeness (or of icky strangeness) the film will come up with next.

Halloween III is glorious in its focus on the bizarre, and beautiful in all the right ways.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,wtf,tommy lee wallace,tom atkins,dan o'herlihy,stacey nelkin