Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Listen to the Cessnas of the Night - THE NIGHT FLIER (1997)


The universe of Stephen King adaptations is widely varied, from the terrifying (The Shining) to the dramatically excellent (The Shawshank RedemptionDolores ClaiborneThe Dead Zone) to the entertainingly mediocre (Needful ThingsMaximum Overdrive) to the bottom of the barrel (Bag of BonesThe Langoliers).  While I'm loathe to stick too many feathers in the author's cap I'll admit that Kingland ain't a bad place to be and I find myself continuing to inch my way through the 'verse when the mood strikes.  With so many to choose from it's easy to overlook a sizable percentage of them, but the more I watch them the more I can stand to let the poorest in appearance slip by.  Today, though, I'd like to talk about one of the better ones that still remains without a proper fanbase, and it has a particular significance to me as the origin of one of my favorite Halloween memories.

Ever have one of those times when you tune in to a show or movie most of the way through without really knowing what it is, only to have your haunting memory filled in years later?  I've got two of those moments, both horror flicks that turned out to be worth waiting for the full experience.  The first was when I caught the last 10 minutes of Night of the Creeps at a friend's house when I was probably 11 or 12; it was immediately memorable and pretty crazy, and as I didn't catch the name I almost leaped out of my seat when I watched it some 10-12 years later and the recognition slapped me in the face.  The second time I caught the name but still only saw the last act, The Night Flier, and this time it was after I had gotten back from one of my last times trick-'r-treating.  I had moved to a neighborhood with houses too far apart and not enough children, so my candy bucket wasn't particularly full and I felt the spirit of the night was passing me by.  Lo and behold, the film hooked me with a blood-soaked climax involving airplanes and vampires, and I knew I had to track down the flick.  I certainly wasn't disappointed, and after a couple more viewings I can safely say it's in the upper drawers of SK horror cinema and undeserving of its obscurity.

Late one night at a small-town airfield, the night attendant walks out to a Cessna he can't communicate with, only to get brutally killed by the pilot, one with massive claws.  The incident gets the attention of the editor (Dan Monahan) of Inside View, a sleazy WWN-style tabloid, and he tries handing it to his fallen-star reporter Richard Dees (Miguel Ferrer) who scoffs at the assignment.  He suggests handing it to a new recruit, Katherine Blair (Julie Entwistle), who joined the paper partially due to the reputation of Dees.  The advice is taken, but when another airfield controller gets slaughtered Dees steals it back from Blair, aided by the fact that he has his own Cessna and can easily fly to the crime scenes.  As he investigates the killings more and more evidence piles up that suggests the killer is more vampire than man, not only because of his nighttime murders and black plane but also the animalistic wounds, anachronistic dress and plane decorations and seeming ability to hypnotize people.  As he goes by the name of Dwight Renfield, the Dracula connections become to hard to ignore and he's soon labeled "the Night Flier".  Blair is soon offered to step in on the story by the editor after he sees her writing about it during her off hours, and when she meets Dees he admits that his trail has run cold despite Renfield nearly revealing himself in an effort to scare Dees off.  They work together for a bit before Dees locks her in a hotel closet so he can go after the only remaining lead by himself, and Dees finds himself hurtling closer to Renfield in more ways than one.

For those who read my review of Philip Cook's Invader you'll know that there aren't nearly enough movies starring exploitative tabloid reporters, and for the life of me I can't think of any other movie centered around local airstrips, a probably fascinating subculture that I'd love to see more of (I'll freely admit that I've always wanted to have a little prop plane or at least an ultralight...make that especially an ultralight).  King uses these cultures to frame one of his cleverest ideas, a recursive logline that is fleshed out well beyond mere pastichery.  You can't swing  a dead cat in the score recording studio without hitting several Casios, composer Brian Keane does manage to squeeze some fine musical ideas out of his limited means.  The gore effects are excellent and unflinching, the most remarkable of which is a man whose whole neck was ripped out, leaving the head lying back on the thin hinge of the small amount of neck skin remaining.  While the movie looks and sounds much like the many TV King adaptations that littered the networks in the 90's, one-time writer/director Mark Pavia keeps the pace sure and steady and has a good eye for camera placement.  The screenplay features a lot of flavorful rural dialogue and knows to include small fright moments without letting the proceedings go over the top, a risk that King adaptations often find themselves way too far on either side of, such as this scene in Sleepwalkers where a woman stabs a guy in the back with a corncob:

*

Miguell Ferrer as Richard Dees is a phenomenally cynical reporter, and in a better world it would be known as his signature role.  There's never a moment when he isn't bitter and scowling, showing absolutely no regard for other people in his search of the story.  His introduction is when he storms into his editor's office after a photo he took of a dead infant was kept out of the paper.  He goes out of his way to photograph dead bodies, such as a car accident he stumbles across, and laughs at his own quips while dictating into a tape recorder in between analyses of horrifying crime scenes.  A particularly weird moment comes when Dees goes to the grave of the second controller and decides to "jazz up" his photo of the gravestone; he swaps the fresh flowers out for some old ones on another grave, kicks the stone to dislodge it, and even cuts open his hand to smear blood on the stone's face.  The comparison between reporting and predation is an old one but the writing and Ferrer's performance are good enough to keep it from growing stale (even if it is a bit too on-the-nose near the end).  Ferrer was previously in the miniseries of The Stand, playing a washed up hard rocker who gets roped into Randall Flagg's demonic plans; it was King's favorite character from the book and ended up being one of the only saving graces in an extremely overlong, boring and frustrating series.  Julie Entwistle is fine as the chipper, yet increasingly jaded, Blair (who quickly gets labeled "Jimmy Olsen" by Dees), and Dan Monahan channels newspaper editors of classic comics to great effect, especially considering the shocking incongruity between his enthusiasm and the grisly subject matter of his stories ("God, I hope he kills more people!").  His character is left the most weirdly ambiguous, such as the unnerving presence of paintings of a muscle-bound, nude minotaur on the wall of his office**.  Renfield himself takes most of the movie to be fully revealed (as it should be), and the performance by Michael H. Moss and the exemplary makeup and design are well worth the wait, as is the ghastly final act at a large airport filled with corpses of Renfield's biggest attack.

While The Night Flier did get a theatrical release it was delayed heavily and actually premiered on HBO a few months before, giving people the impression that it was a TV movie and most likely inferior product, and even though some elements smack of made-for-TV-isms The Night Flier has bite where it counts and is a juicy Halloween flick to boot, just silly enough to fit in with the spirit of of the season.  While the HBO DVD is out-of-print and expensive three separate people have uploaded it to YouTube, making it a heck of a lot easier to see Miguel Ferrer's finest hour than before.  Drink it all in and you just might regain a bit of faith in Stephen King movies***.


~PNK

*I know that has nothing to with The Night Flier, but how in God's name do you not include that?!

**I'd say it's a Rose Madder reference, but that'd put too little faith in the belief that some people just like hanging anthropomorphic porn on their walls.


***But not too much, lest you try watching Bag of Bones.  Seriously, that's one of the most boring and pointless miniseries I've ever tried watching.

Friday, October 24, 2014

The Threat of Ancient Echoes - THE LOST TRIBE (1983)


New Zealand hasn't come to be a horror powerhouse in world cinema, despite the best efforts of the young Peter Jackson with Bad Taste and the priceless Dead Alive.  Aside from Petey Kiwi the only NZ horror movies I can remember while writing this are the direct-to-video demon flick The Devil's Rock (pretty dang good if you ask me) and that Dark of the Night/Mr. Wrong movie I wrote about last year.  The one's you're thinking of are probably Australian, anyways, and both countries often have their funding held at the whim of national film boards that might not be too into funding chop-'em-ups.  The only reason the similarly Commonwealthy Canada churned out so many B-movies in the 70's and 80's is that directors exploited tax loopholes, an era that went the way of the zombie dodo decades ago.  That being said one little gem did escape into the North American video market many blood moons ago, The Lost Tribe, written and directed by John Laing (whose career slid into TV soon after and held to the small screen with an iron grip).

Anthropologist Max Scarry (John Bach) mysteriously disappears while doing excavation/research of a lost New Zealand tribe on a remote island.  His wife and his twin brother Edward are clueless as to what could have happened, a situation complicated by their city's police suspecting that one of the brothers murdered a local prostitute who was found with a strange tribal charm on her body matching one found in Max's abandoned hut.  What most certainly isn't helping matters is the strange behavior of Max's daughter as she seems to have visions beyond possibility, warnings of a supernatural threat and her uncle's fate - and she's the film's narrator, to boot.  After a suspicious run-in with the cops and another prostitute, Edward decides to go to the island to find out exactly what happened, but the deeper he goes into the mystery the more perilous and unknowable his world becomes, leading towards a shocking fate that raises more questions than it answers.

While The Lost Tribe might sound a bit also-ran on paper - extinct tribe, unexplained psychic visions, identical twins - the execution is extraordinarily brooding and engrossing, burning slow and thoroughly until we can't help but be afraid.  From the very first shot - a fast approach on the water to an arriving boat, a la the cargo ship introduction from NosferatuThe Lost Tribe is incredibly well-shot, full of rich color contrast and noir-ish shadowplay.  Faces are often deftly underlit, echoing old-school horror tricks without sacrificing the deadly serious tone.  Late in the film there is a seeming dream sequence that is one of the most unnerving I've seen in any horror movie, not least because of how strikingly different it is from everything we've seen before.  Key to this film's success is the performance of John Bach as Edward, an unsettlingly shifty, glaring man with secrets both unspoken and possibly unspeakable.  Unlike many horror protagonists who bland along in an attempt to give audiences someone to feel sorry for, Edward Scarry begs the audience to decipher him, and once the final scenes pull the rug out from everything we're left wondering just what kind of men these brothers truly were.  Tribe moves at its own pace and asks its own questions, and once everything is said and done it ultimately might not sound like a horror movie, but damned if I know what else it could be.  Sure, it's a mystery, but plenty of horror movies are structured that way and Tribe lets its unknowns hang in the air so thick they can be cut with a knife, and ultimately this fog trails behind the viewer as they shuffle back to their cars in a state of confusion and subterranean fear.


Only released theatrically in New Zealand, it's not hard to see why The Lost Tribe has flown under the radar for the past thirty years.  It's only North American video release was on the obscure Fox Hills Video label, a small-time cousin to Media Home Video via their parent company Heron Communications, and I so rarely come across any tapes from the firm that I'm not surprised the film didn't make it to too many renters' VCR's.  One can sense panic on the part of the distributors to jazz up what they probably considered DOA, as the poster and box sport the name-recognition-grabbing tagline "ALTERED STATES.  DEADLY FATES."  That's a shame, because it's one of the most interesting takes on the "ancient tribe" subset of horror movies and doesn't need any help from Altered States or any other Hollywood hit.  I can't recommend you pair it with Dark of the Night, though, but I'm sure you guys are industrious enough to think of some way to work it into one of your (hopefully) annual Halloween horror marathons.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any clips of the film on YouTube but there are some pretty cheap copies on Amazon (though none for a penny, sadly), and you can even see an embarrassingly over-the-top review I did for it some years ago when I didn't know what restraint was.  I will warn you that Tribe is paced very slowly, so if you're hoping for plenty of tentpole horror setpieces it'll leave you in the dust.  For those with patience and a taste for a dark, atmospheric horror mystery The Lost Tribe delivers in spades, and it makes me want to uncover more kiwi fright flicks to shake up All Hallow's Eve-athons.

~PNK