Film Review: Strait-Jacket - 2008

Yet another horror film review, written for one of my now-defunct blogs. This time we've got an actual movie star, not a malevolent car or overgrown animals...

This month's selection is Strait-Jacket, legendary movie star Joan Crawford's first collaboration with shock-meister William Castle.

The film opens sans credits (fairly unusual for 1964) and we see a man, Frank Harbin, as he picks up a floozy in a local bar and brings her back to his two-room shack.

In the main room, lay his daughter, asleep. That doesn't stop him though from getting it on with the girl, with the bedroom door open:

...ewww! Boundaries, Frank! Boundaries!

(Fun Fact: Frank Harbin is played by an uncredited Lee Majors, in his first film role).

Anyway, we soon learn that this woman is not Frank's wife! His actual wife, Lucy, played by Joan Crawford, comes home from a trip and finds his husband in bed for another woman!

This drives Lucy coo-coo for cocoa-puffs. She wanders around, grabs a nearby axe, and:

...bang!

As if the sex wasn't bad enough for the kid to see, the little girl gets to watch this too. We see the kid scream as the axe flies, over and over. Welcome to...

...that episode of Night Gallery with Joan Crawford?

Nope, it's Strait-Jacket!

Over some simple yet creepy paintings, we learn that Lucy has been committed to a mental institution.

We pick up the story in the modern day, and we see the young girl Carol--now a full-grown woman played by Diane Baker--as she's about to pick her Mom up, after twenty years of being institutionalized.

After an awkward hug, Carol brings her Mom home, and gives her the lay of the land. Carol is engaged, and along with her Uncle and Aunt, they run a small farm.

Unfortunately, within just a few minutes of arriving, Carol has dropped the words "slaughter" and "butcher" (in relation to the farm's pigs), which clearly sets Mom on edge.

A dinner party isn't any better:

Lucy is having a hard time being normal, despite her daughter's cheery disposition.

"Strait-Jacket, brought to you by Pepsi!"

Anyway, the meeting with Carol's fiancee is awkward, and Lucy keeps touching the knives in the house. She also has a "dream" where she sees the two severed heads of her husband and his mistress in her bed.

The family is concerned, and eventually Lucy's psychiatrist comes to visit. Lucy is brittle and tense, and wanders off.

The doctors makes his way into the barn, where it does not go well:

Hours pass, and the family starts to freak out, because the doctor's car is still outside. Where did he go, and where's Lucy?

Oh, she's in the barn, with their creepy farmhand, played by a combo of George Kennedy and Rudy Giuliani's comb-over:

Lucy keeps having more problems, and her behavior becomes erratic. We get a glimpse into Lucy's mind and her seemingly escalating dementia:

Despite all this, Carol sets up a dinner date with Lucy and her finacee's well-to-do parents, who know nothing of Lucy's past.

Lucy doesn't show, and later on the fiancee's father goes upstairs, where he is attacked by...an axe-wielding Joan Crawford!:

...or is it?

There's something...wrong about this, and we are shocked to see Lucy walk into the room! She grabs the axe from the other woman, and we see that this is just a mask. Lucy rips the mask off, and we see its...

...Carol!

They struggle, and the fiancee shows up to see how dinner went! Lucy tries to explain and shows him who Carol is:

"...the engagement is off!"

Carol is stopped, arrested, and eventually committed. We find out that watching such horrible events as a child drover her slowly crazy. When she learned that her mother would be released, it caused her to snap.

She decided to frame her mother for the murders, so she would be recommitted, and she could marry her fiancee and live a happy life.

We're left with Lucy, her brother, and his wife, wondering at how things went so wrong. The ever-lovin' end!


Strait-Jacket has a weird pedigree--it was written by Robert Bloch, who wrote Psycho, so the guy knew scary. But William Castle was, at best, a mediocre director who tended to make everything he shot look like a three-camera TV show, with sort of drab, over-lit sets. I wonder what someone like Hitchcock might have done with a script like this.

Joan Crawford is well suited to this role, because, from what we know about her real life ("No...wire...hangers!!"), she was kind of brittle too, and it suits the character.

The one troubling aspect is that this started a run of movies where Crawford played a woman well past her sell date, but kept throwing herself at young bucks, trying to seduce them.

I don't have any idea whether Crawford was simply playing a lot of characters like this, or she thought this about herself. There's a scene where she creepily flirts with her daughter's fiancee--if you can call drawing your hands around someone's body and cooing at them merely flirting--and its really unsettling.

All in all, not a bad film--it doesn't aim to be much more than an hour and a half of creeps, but it hits its target.

Film Review: Food of the Gods - 2008

This was another horror film review, written for one of my now-defunct blogs. As you'll see, it didn't quite work out as intended....

This month's film is Food of the Gods, an uber-cheapie production with a bit of a deceptive pedigree--its based on a story by H.G. Wells. That sound you hear is the little Englishman rolling in his grave, still, thirty or so years after the film was made.

Ok, let's get started:

...oh, MGM, you've done better!

...oh boy, we're already in trouble. Bert I. Gordon? Bert War of the Colossal Beast, Beginning of the End Gordon?

..."based on a Portion of the Novel"? Yeah, the page numbers! (Bada-bing!)

"Special Visual Effects by B.I. Gordon"? You're not fooling anybody, Bert!

Anyway, this film stars...Mac Davis from North Dallas Forty? No, it's Marjoe Gortner, an...unusual choice as leading man, let's say.

Marjoe plays a football player who goes off hunting with some friends in the woods. While Marjoe is fine with just trapping the deer and letting it go, his dickish friend wants to kill it, and runs into the woods. While there, he encounters a weird bunch of really big bugs:

The giant bugs going a-stingin', leaving the hunter all puffy and blotchy. And, oh, dead:

Marjoe ends up investigating, for no good reason, and discovers a small farm. Inside a barn is a giant, killer chicken!!:

The farm is run by two old-timers, one of them played by Ida Lupino (oh, the sadness). Turns out they have been feeding their animals from this weird goo that's bubbles up out of the ground, which makes everything that eats from it grow big--real big. Giant killer chicken big.

But as a break from all the gripping drama, Bert I. Gordon gives lots and lots of footage of Marjoe and a friend as they travel back and forth on a ferry, featuring riveting shots like this:

...seriously--this is movie about 85 minutes, and at least a third of it is watching people board and disembark a ferry in excruciating detail.

Anyway, back at the farm, we see that farmer woman Ida Lupino is not immune to what she and her husband have been doing. You see, everything grows big and angry, even worms:

...this is a long way from High Sierra. The great Ida Lupino should not have had to share a movie screen with a giant bloody worm puppet.

At the same time, her husband is attacked by giant rats, and its in moments like these where we can see the "special" effects:

...no, no, that's not a bunch of friendly rats climbing on a toy car and Bert I. is passing it off as a special effect. I can see how you'd be confused.

Anyway, Marjoe and his friend decide to get involved and hunt down the giant animals, instead of, you know, alerting the authorities. What can the Army do that a Nose Tackle and a football team's Road Manager can't?

At the farm, they meet up with an older man and a younger woman. The man owns a pharmaceutical firm who has bought up the land and wants to market the goo, while his young charge takes an interest in Marjoe:

...is that a 12-gauge in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

Meanwhile, a young couple are on vacation in the woods. The man goes outside their RV, and sees a giant rat on the roof. So what does he do? Well, he does what any of us would do when you see a giant, man-sized rat: call your pregnant wife to come out and look at it with you!

Of course, this awesome plan goes all kerflooey, and soon Mr. and Mrs. Mensa are trapped by a horde of giant rats and have to run for it:

Eventually all our characters are holed up in the cabin, in Bert I.'s tribute to Night of the Living Dead I guess.

Our heroes are only stocked with guns, so they start shooting at the rats, and its at this moment that the movie stopped being fun for me, at all:

...up until this point, the movie's special effects had been laughably lame. But what I thought at first were F/X I realized are not F/X at all--the rats in the movie were clearly being shot at, for real, by probably bee-bee guns, in a horrid attempt to make it look realistic.

Look, I'm disgusted by rats as much as the next man, but shooting a bunch of them for a God damn movie? That is absolutely disgusting and morally repellent.

I stuck it out the rest of the way, but then Bert I. moves onto drowning the rats, as well, and I got so disgusted I gave up. Torturing and murdering animals to make some shitty movie is inhuman.

You know, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the films of Bert I. Gordon--sure, they were cheesy, but they were inoffensive fluff so what's the harm?

But after seeing this disgrace, I want Bert I. Gordon arrested. He can have Michael Vick's old room.

Film Review: The Car - 2008

Over 2008 and 2009, I did a bunch of horror film reviews on a now-defunct blog of mine that were tied in to another blog called Final Girl, which is run by a very funny woman named Stacie Ponder and is all about her love of horror movies--good, bad, or ugly.

The handful of films I covered--most of which I'd never seen before--were a blast to watch, and I thought the reviews I came up with were pretty funny and keeping in the spirit of the whole endeavor. Since the blog of mine I originally posted them on has come and gone, I thought I'd metaphorically dust them off and post them here. Here's the first one.

This month's selection is the 1977 classic The Car, starring James Brolin, Ronny Cox, and R.G. Armstrong, and is about a killer...car. In the wake of Jaws, Hollywood was pumping out as many "killer [fill-in the blank]" movies as they could...so why not a killer car?

Anyway, The Car was directed by Elliott Silverstein, who directed A Man Called Horse and Cat Ballou. As far as I can tell from his imdb profile, this was his last theatrically-released film. Make of that what you will.

Anyway, the film opens up promisingly:

Starting your movie with a quote from Professional Satanist Anton La Vey? Man, the 70s were awesome.

Anyway, we meet two young, freshly-scrubbed bicyclists, who are probably on their way to an Up With People audition. Life and all its promise stretches out before them:

But there's trouble on the horizon--literally. We see an ominous black sedan tearing down the highway, and its here we get to see the first of many shots from The Car(caps from now on)'s POV, what I call Car-O-Vision:

The two bicyclers notice this car is revving up behind them, and as they hit a part of the road that hugs a mountain's edge, it starts ramming them, sending Polly Pigtails over the side into a ravine:

There's lots of shots like this one, of the expressionless car. Man, and you thought a shark's face was fairly inscrutable:

The Car hits the other cycler, sending him off a bridge, plunging to his death below. We get a shot of the results of the tragic events of the day:

Now we cut to the film's star...Doc Holliday!

No, wait, it's James Brolin, actually. He wakes up in bed with his girlfriend Lauren (played by Kathleen Lloyd, whose previous credit was The Missouri Breaks, with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson--wow!).

Turns out Brolin's character, a highway patrolman named Wade Parent (awesome), is a single dad who is having a relationship with his young daughter's teacher. Lauren is not too sure about letting the kids in on in yet, so she sneaks out the back while he gets the kids up for breakfast.

Meanwhile, in the small town of Santa Ynez, a DFH waits for a ride as he hitchhikes across the state:

His incessant horn playing(!) drives the owner of the nearby house, a crusty old guy named Amos Clements (played by R.G. Armstrong), into a fit of rage. In fact, he takes time out from beating his wife to tell the DFH to get the hell out:

...feminism has not yet come to Santa Ynez.

Anyway, he tells the kid to hit the road, and after going back inside, the DFH hears the promising sound of a car approaching. This means a ride!

Here we are treated to about a full minute of the DFH vamping for the camera, making faces and trying to be funny. He's sure the driver of the car will be a Groovy Chick, who no doubt adhere to the "Ass, Gas, or Grass" policy of 70s hitchhiking.

Of course, the car is The Car, and it tries to ram right into our Young Man with a Horn!

It misses, but then the stupid kid starts trash-talking The Car, causing it to skid to a stop, back up, turn around, and plow right into him!

If that wasn't cool enough, it backs up a few times and runs over him again and again:

...so far, The Car has killed two innocent people and this guy. In my book, The Car is down -1.

Anyway, back to Wade, as he takes his kids to school--on his motorcycle, making him the coolest Dad ever:

Anyway, he then responds to a call, along with his fellow police officers Ronny Cox (Beverly Hills Cop, Robocop, probably other films with the word "Cop" in them) and John Marley, the guy who woke up with the horse's head in his bed in The Godfather!

Marley notices Mrs. Clements' bruises, which Mr. Clements doesn't take too well to:

Meanwhile, we find Lauren at her job as a schoolteacher, where we see she's pretty popular among her students:

Lauren thinks its cute, much to the consternation of the severe-looking Principal-type lady. Her flat delivery and clenched-teeth delivery suggests to me this woman was a honest-to-gosh real schoolmarm, not an actress:

...wow, when was my grandmother Nan in a movie?

Anyway, Lauren and teacher friend Margie confer, and they get excited when they're respective cop boyfriends, Brolin and Cox, arrive. Margie says this is a call for celebration, since Luke has been off the bottle for two whole months!

Oops, not so fast, Margie--Luke is doing the old "secret drinking" thing:

After being questioned in the murder of the DFH, Mr. and Mrs. Clements are sent home, but not after Everett (John Marley) tries to get Mrs. Clements to tell the truth about where she got those bruises. She refuses.

While outside, Everett gets to meet our title character, The Car:

Now that The Car is feeling his (her? its?) oats, it starts to ramp up the carnage. It shows up at a Pep Rally-style celebration run by Lauren and Margie's school, and starts mowing people down left and right:

A whole gang of kids, Lauren, Margie, and some other teachers find themselves pinned down in a beat-up old cemetery. Hiding behind various tombstones, The Car waits outside the gates, surveying its options:

Lauren decides to try and use herself as a decoy, so Margie can escape and call for help.

Its here that director Elliott Silverstein runs into some of the inherent problems of having a car be your main villain--its expression never changes, and there's only so many ways to show the car and try and wring emotion from it.

Case in point, during Lauren's extended solo scene, where she taunts The Car by calling it names. We get repeated shots of Lauren mouthing off:

Then to The Car:

Then back to Lauren:

Then back to The Car:

...and so on, for several minutes.

Anyway, the plan works, Margie gets away, and calls the police for help. They all hop in their squad cars and head for the cemetery.

As two squad cars race down the one road leading there, they see The Car coming the other way. Oh man, how are those Gol-darn' Duke Boys gonna get outta this one?

Easy--The Car flips itself over and rolls right over the cops, in a truly spectacular stunt:

Several cops are killed, and The Car gets away. Wade comforts Lauren, and has another deputy drive her home.

The sequence with Lauren at her home is well staged and well lit, and is genuinely creepy. Lauren gets on the phone with Wade, and you can see trouble coming up the road:

The Car then drives itself right through her house, in one side and out the other, smashing everything in its path!

Lauren is killed, and here is what I think is the movie's best shot--a static shot of the demolished house, lights flickering on and off, sans any background music, that runs for about a full minute or so:

...you know, up until this point as I had been watching the movie, I kind of found the whole thing pretty silly. And of course the notion of a car driving itself right through a house is pretty silly. But if you can get out of your mind that the monster in this sequence is a car, its a very well executed scene and one of genuine horror.

Plus, the main hero's girlfriend generally didn't die in movies like this, so her death was, to me, fairly shocking. It gives the rest of the movie a really grim tone, because even if Wade destroys The Car, Lauren is still gone.

Anyway, the cops ask Mr. Clements--who runs an explosives company--to help and set a trap for The Car. Wade sets out on his motorcycle, hoping to capture The Car's attention.

He does, and he leads The Car to a ravine, where he and Luke use themselves as decoys, while the other police officers rig the area with explosives:

They jump out of the way in time, and The Car flies off the edge, into the rigged canyon:

The explosives are set off, causing a massive conflagration. The cops watch the giant fireball escaping from the canyon, and after a few seconds they seem to see something like a face:

...cool!

The men stand there, knowing that even if, somehow, The Car is still "alive", its buried under many tons of rubble.

The menace is over, and a new day dawns:

We fade to black, and the credits roll.

But, interestingly, we see footage of The Car tearing down the highway, past a major metropolitan city, something we never saw in the film itself:

...are the filmmaker trying to tell us The Car isn't really dead, and its back on its reign of terror? Or is this another Car, possibly to be featured in The Car 2? We'll never know... (Hey, check it out--Car Customizing is by George Barris, who also did the 1960s Batmobile!)

You'll notice I don't mention why this car is doing all this evil stuff. There's a few half-hearted attempts in the movie to explain it (something having do to with a cursed burial ground), but overall it doesn't really matter why--it's an evil car, that's all you need to know.

(Of course, if they remade The Car today, it would be all backstory, giving all kinds of explanation as why the Car does what it does, and it would star Josh Brolin, and it would take all the fun out of an evil car movie)

Over all, The Car is a pretty silly movie, but not without its moments. The photography is beautiful, and it does have a couple of good chills. Plus, its probably The Pep Boys' favorite film.