The Early Prime of Nancy Savoca, part 2 - DOGFIGHT (1991)

After True Love was a big winner at Sundance Nancy Savoca was given a shot at making a move for Warner Bros., a pretty big deal for a novice director.  That doesn't mean that the studio really gave her a shot, though - her second movie, Dogfight, was only released in two theaters (!) in the US and went direct to video in the UK, part of a long tradition of studios bungling a slightly off-centered movie's distribution and then calling the movie a failure as if they had nothing to do with it.  It's pretty unfortunate, as Dogfight is one of the best movie romances of the 90's and among the best performances for Lily Taylor and River Phoenix, the latter more precious due to his untimely death.

Set in San Francisco in the early 60's, Dogfight stars Phoenix as Eddie Birdlace, a listless young Marine about to be sent to Vietnam whose friends like to partake in "dogfights", group dates where each boy finds the ugliest girl they can ask out and take them to a dance club so they can vote on who's the biggest "dog".  The "winner" gets a pot of money and usually the girl gets a cut, so there are a few regulars to the "fight".  Eddie isn't one to back down from a challenge, so after running around for a while he comes across Rose (Taylor), a lonely, pacifistic coffee shop clerk, and sweet-talks her into going with her, though she has no idea about the fight.  She finds out about it from another "contestant" in the bathroom and is understandably angry.  However, during the course of the night Eddie has actually taken a liking to her.  After some awkward flirting they go on a long, winding date through San Francisco that same night, and as they grow closer their bond becomes deeper and stranger, revealing aspects of their personalities and stations in life that are both impossible to ignore and heavy with symbolic weight.

Whereas True Love was brash and bawdy, Dogfight is enormously tender.  Written by the unprolific Bob Comfort, the film uses the backdrop of Haight Ashbury at the cusp of Vietnam to explode a microcosmic romantic encounter to a hugely enveloping experience.  The conceit of Eddie having to leave the next day allows for events to play out almost in real time, and each new locale they visit is more wonderful than the last but another inch closer to a devastating departure.  The period reconstruction is unbelievable, as SF landmarks like City Lights Books rub shoulders with magical nooks and crannies, such as a basement filled with antique mechanical toys.  The performances by Phoenix and Taylor are stunning, arguably the best of their careers (but with Phoenix that's a hard claim to make, as there's about four or five "best" performances to choose from), each actor totally inhabiting their roles and creating fascinating opposites.  Savoca's direction lovingly draws out every detail from the sets, lighting and action without being overbearing, allowing the setting and story to take on a magic realist quality where anything can happen, and the magnified timeframe only helps that cause.  The mood has shifted from True Love to be both funny and quite sad, as the story is driven not only by circumstance but by its characters' deep-set insecurities and star-crossed worldviews, and it isn't afraid to follow the pair towards a quietly surprising, poignant conclusion, and leave it open-ended, to boot.  It's a brave and creative sophomore effort from an artist growing more and more into what could have been a modest icon in American cinema on par with what Alexander Payne would become later in the decade.

And the worst part of it is that nobody saw the thing.  Two theaters?  That's not enough to recoup expenses for a modern TV pilot, especially with an off-centered, small-scale movie like this.  But at least Dogfight got multiple DVD rereleases, which can't be said for Savoca's most daring and thought provoking film, Household Saints.  Stay tuned, Women's History Month.

~PNK

The Early Prime of Nancy Savoca, part 1 - TRUE LOVE (1989)

In my preparation for Women's History Month this blog cycle I realized that I couldn't think of too many female career movie directors.  There are a few big names, of course, most notably Kathryn Bigelow, Julie Taymor, Liliana Cavani and most hilariously Doris Wishman, but that's a pretty small list, especially considering that I can't stand to include Barbra Streisand in that list.  Other multi-film female directors have found fame but their careers have either crashed and burned (like Elaine May) or never really saw consistent fruition (like Jennifer Chambers Lynch).  In fact, there seem to be fewer women in film direction than in any other artistic field (aside from orchestral conducting, it would seem, as I could only think of one female conductor of international repute, Marin Alsop, and Wikipedia's list is only seven names long).  There's not a savory reason for this, especially considering that the rise of independent cinema in the 80's and 90's should have opened the door to a whole generation of female auteurs.  A couple of names did rise to the surface in that optimistic time, one being Allison Anders, whose Gas Food Lodging was a Sundance darling and her film Border Radio made it into the Criterion Collection.  Another, and the one I'm more familiar with, is Nancy Savoca, who won big time at Sundance in 1989 and made two more striking character dramas before fading into TV-directing obscurity.  This month V-f-t-P is going to celebrate all three of her early films, starting with the most financially successful of them, True Love.

Donna (Annabella Sciorra in her big-screen debut) and Michael (Ron Eldard in his big-screen debut) are getting married, and while they seem to be enthusiastic it's clear that the problems of modern marriage are both more present and more subtle than anything they could have imagined.  And that's pretty much it - True Love understands that the mounting frustrations and secret failings of young people hurtling into lifelong commitment is drama enough, as Donna and Michael's romance is threatened by nothing larger than themselves.  As it turns out, the hardest problems to overcome are the ones you consider essential parts of your character, and whether or not Donna and Michael are up to the challenge may be impossible to determine.

Starting out with the engagement party video (a somewhat recent invention at the time), True Love is as naturalistic and sympathetic as I've seen from a wedding movie since Rachel Getting Married.  Savoca uses the everyday problems of working-class New York Italian-Americans as a backdrop for a drama of modesty, not shying away from the combination of money problems, bad fashion choices and general crudeness (such as the side character who calls a rude driver both a "dicksuck" and a "suckhole").  Their culture, much stereotyped in movies but expertly dissected here, is as much to blame for Donna and Michael's problems as themselves, as Michael's malaise at the prospect of responsibility is both created and encouraged by the "boys will be boys" attitude prevalent amongst his circle of friends and, by extension, his male community.  Donna is no less problematic, as she is too quick to fall for gimmicky wedding concepts (like mashed potatoes dyed blue) and lets men use her as a doormat without coming up with alternatives.  The ingenious part of this is that Savoca is too smart to let either one of them be the "right" one in any given argument (aside from the ending), such as Michael turning down the idea of the ghastly dyed potatoes and Donna interpreting this as him being a backward drip, or Michael's reasonable request that Donna not meet him after the bachelor party lead to him making the colossal mistake of squealing off to Atlantic City to gamble away as much of his savings as he can get his hands on.  Their friends are no improvement - Donna's wear awful clothes and make jokes about sticking Michael's head in the oven, while Michael's are heinous enablers who seduce him into terrible decisions.  On top of this there are a number of hilarious scenes with odd side characters, like the guy who sells them the rings  and "Christ heads" wearing a bizarre v-neck sweater/t-shirt combo and a bachelor party filled with guys in their 60's falling asleep to ancient 8mm stag movies.  The writing manages a difficult feat in featuring wacky, cynical characters while still treating them with real respect, and as such True Love stays afloat where other movies would sink our hearts.

Annabella Sciorra would go on to prove herself an interesting and intelligent film presence in movies such as the dreadfully underrated What Dreams May Come; the close-examination material here requires acting of that caliber and she does a fine job for her big screen debut.  Simultaneously street-smart and woefully unprepared for life, Donna is a hard-edged modern woman with a mother's heart and over-tired eyes.  She spends the whole second half of the movie deeply embittered and is notable for movie couples in that she's the one who hits first in their fights, daring Michael to hit back.  Ron Eldard has had a bit less success but has remained versatile in small roles in movies like Super 8 and the frustrating near-success Delivered, and he's almost unrecognizable here as Michael, severely babyfaced and utterly oblivious.  Both actors take full hold of the comic and dramatic possibilities of the material, bouncing along the script and greatly aiding the flow while keeping your attention at all times.  The same can be said for every actor in the movie, featuring small-time icons like Aida Turturro and Vincent Pastore as well as a whole host of people I've never seen before but can't take my eyes off of.  This is all captured with Savoca's expansive and richly colored frame, showing a lot of confidence for her first time out and amplifying the emotional punch of every scene.  The cinematography allows colors to pop and flood the scenes and there's a lot of engaging tracking shots and fresh angles.  And the most essential win for her is the pacing, both measured and eager to follow the story wherever it may go.

I remember when The Break-Up came out and Vince Vaughan mentioned that any break-up has enough drama to carry a whole movie.  While I didn't like that movie too much I applaud the concept of really going for a seemingly simple story like that and proving that a movie can be engaging in simplicity.  True Love is a pretty simple story but it's so entertaining and wise that you couldn't care less.  It's no surprise that this was an audience and critic favorite at Sundance that year (winning the Grand Jury Prize) and it's a great movie to launch careers with - it has all the audience appeal and intelligence of a movie like High Fidelity well before the fact.  The best audience favorites are the ones that show us truths that we might not have considered but accept unhesitatingly, and True Love is wise enough to focus more on young love's hangovers than its celebrations, and the fact that, when it comes to love, we just don't know when to quit.

"You know, there's times when he does things like what he did last night and I wanna fuckin' kill him...then I see him." ~Donna

~PNK

Short-Order - MR. HUMPHREYS AND HIS INHERITANCE (1976)

After I did my article on Whistle and I'll Come to You I rewatched the first of the M. R. James adaptations I'd seen, A Warning to the Curious, which was excellent, and decided that if one of them can be great they can all be great.  This led me to checking out the only one of the BBC James adaptations to get an official DVD release in the states, 1979's Casting the Runes.  It blows.  That is, aside from a hilariously fake giant rubber spider and the worst floating head effect I've ever seen.  If those things float your boat, that is.  Fortunately, a special feature on the DVD put things back on track; it was a true short film adaptation of a James story I'd never heard of, Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance.  Presented as part of a beautifully dated 70's music show called Music Scene, the short was introduced by Philip Wilby, the man who wrote the score, urging viewers to consider how the music was written to aid the horror and furthermore to discuss it in class or work or whathaveyou.  While that intro might be the best thing ever broadcast I can safely say that the film itself is pretty dang good, only taking 16 minutes but sticking in the viewer's dreams for much longer than that.

The eponymous Mr. Humphreys has just inherited, quite unexpectedly from a distant uncle, a semi-grand old country house.  His uncle was apparently a strange man, strange enough that his body isn't kept in the family vault, and the property features a large hedge maze, the gate of which features a plaque reading "SECRETUM MEUM MIHI ET FILIS DOMUS MEUM" (MY SECRET TO MYSELF, AND THE SONS OF THIS HOUSE).  Mr. Humphreys is as naturally curious as every other James protagonist, so he goes in, and at the center finds a pedestal with a metal orb on top*; the base reads "TERRITORY OF DEATH", which is enough to get Humphreys to temporarily retreat.  He investigates further in an attempt to get the maze cleaned up enough for general use (as his uncle forbade visitors from using it), but despite Humphreys's insistence that mazes are easily understood he can't begin to predict what might be preventing him from mapping the maze...or what lies beneath its center.

Working on a more modest scale than Whistle and Warning, Mr. Humphreys is just right.  As with Whistle and Warning, the key to good James adaptations appears to be Location, Location and another dose of Location for good measure (I can't wait to see what could be done with "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook"), as the country house is both properly old but also eerily unkempt.  Once again James's ideas are engaging and unique, drawing the reader/viewer in with elements that surprise in how creepy they are in his hands.  As per the much-hyped music, it's actually pretty good, created in that brief window when horror scores could be somewhat Avant Garde.  It's a lot like Gerald Busby's score for Robert Altman's 3 Women, and much like Busby Wilby little to nothing else to his name as a composer, which is a it unfortunate as I'd like to hear more from him.  It's also quite a bit like the classical music Frank Zappa wrote in the 60's with its heavy emphasis on winds and thick harmonic scoring.  If anything is wrong with the short it's its pacing - too much wandering around for this little time, and an ending rushed enough that the narrator can't even finish his sentence before the end credits start rolling.

Perhaps there's virtue in not overstaying one's welcome, and at a scant 16 minutes there's really no time, or reason, to complain.  I found an upload and included it below, but if you don't like watching a TV short being played by an outmoded video player on a new video player (with a bit of lag and missing the Music Scene intro) you might want to hunt down that Casting the Runes DVD, if only to laugh your ass off at floating heads and funk-music intros.  Either way Humphreys is a quick-'n'-satisfying way to get your James fix and a worthy interlude to its larger cousins.  And remember, if a hole mysteriously appears in a map you're making, don't look in.

~PNK

*The spiderweb budget for this short must have been through the roof, let me tell you.

Happiness Month Finale - PAPERHOUSE (1988)

When I first started going to college in Tacoma I knew film only by the big and biggish names, and my deep love of uncovering filmed obscurities was merely a gleam in my eye.  It was around this time that I discovered some local video stores and, finally being away from my parents' cinematic tastes, decided to widely experiment with my rental choices.  While there was a Blockbuster not far from my house my most frequent rental stop was Backstage Video on Procter St., now the only video store in Tacoma as that Blockbuster and the mighty Stadium Video have both fallen.  What's so neat about Backstage is that they have a large VHS selection not only to rent but for sale, and one of the first videos I checked out was this brooding-looking and intriguing tape:

For those who can't read it, the review at the top of the box says "Paperhouse is the thinking person's Nightmare on Elm Street."  That logline, combined with the scary eyes and flaming house, would lead most renters to think that Paperhouse was a horror movie, especially when combined with the salacious back image of a seeming madman wielding a claw hammer like John Hurt attacking a prostitute in From the Hip.  Yes, I know this is the British VHS but the American tape looked almost exactly the same, so shush.  It was certainly enough to catch my eye, so into my player it went.  I was immediately floored, not by horror but by one of the most ingenious, haunting and insightful movies ever made for children, a stunning exploration of the relationship between dreams and childhood whose power is only matched by how infuriating it is that there's no American DVD.  It's time to finally tackle this blog's namesake, and I can't think of a better time than the close of the year than to vindicate the name of arguably the best kid's psychological fantasy film ever.

Preteen Anna (Charlotte Burke) is a problem for her mother (Glenne Headly) and her school teachers.  Upset that she wasn't allowed to skip school on her birthday*, she immediately picks a fight with another student during class and, when sent out in the hall, is struck down by a fainting spell.  She uses this to get her mother to pick her up, only to admit that her illness was partially made up.  The next day she ditches school with a friend only to collapse again, finding herself more drawn into a mysterious dream landscape and stuck down with glandular fever.  Confined to her bed, Anna takes to drawing paper and draws a house - and upon entering her next dream she sees the house from her drawing on the horizon.  Her dream world expands as she continues drawing, and after drawing herself a friend in the window she returns to the world to find Marc (Elliott Spiers), a boy about her age, also traversing the dream world but without the use of his legs.  As it turns out Marc is another patient of Anna's doctor who is suffering from a far more debilitating disease, and their dreaming worlds are linked by their incapacitation and things left unexplained.  While the two of them find a kind of expansive freedom controlling their private landscape they may not realize its full power, especially when Anna's estranged father comes into the fold.

For those who don't know, my two favorite movies are Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Videodrome, two astonishing films that intelligently and realistically explore unbelievable worlds of the human mind, and Paperhouse is the greatest attempt to achieve their brilliance on a young adult level.  While the actual causes of the surreal situation are never revealed, Paperhouse is concerned less with cosmology and more with relatable human reactions to being thrust into the unknown and what it reveals about ourselves.  It's plot is one of the most creative examples of the "wonderland" plot, wherein an inexperienced, usually troublesome child enters a surreal landscape and emerges a different and wiser person, and Anna's journey lets her imitate a god only to end up a better human.  Rather than saddling her with whimsical natives to guide her, Anna's counterpart in Marc is a sobering and intimidating presence, entirely sympathetic, even more mature, but a constant critic of Anna's misuse of her power.  If these performances fell flat the whole film would be little more than a 90-minute design exercise, but thankfully one-time actress Charlotte Burke and the tragically departed Elliott Spiers (dying only six years after filming this)** turn in mature and highly empathetic performances that nail every varied emotion the story calls for.  The film also wisely avoids the "idiot parent" cliche of fantastic stories wherein a child encounters the Unknown and a skeptical parent assumes lying or insanity in spite of evidence right in front of their faces - Anna's mother is completely unable to understand what her daughter might be going through but sincerely does her best to help her.  And trust me when I say when Anna's father shows up he creates an utterly unforgettable screen presence in young adult film.


The most astonishing thing about the film is the production design by Gemma Jackson (Finding Neverland, Game of Thrones), which accomplishes the seemingly impossible feat of reproducing a child's crude drawings of objects exactly in three dimensions.  The house is crooked and molded from lumpy clay, all straight lines are wobbly as if drawn with crayon, and mechanical objects barely work due to their kid design.  At one point Anna uses a black crayon to scratch out an upstairs window and when she visits it later there are huge, terrifying swaths of porous black scored into the windows, an awful amplification of her worst qualities.  All of this is captured with an extraordinary depth of field and lighting design, courtesy of the passionate vision of director Bernard Rose.  Rose is an acutely underrated director, part of a generation of filmmakers who came of age in music videos, and would go on to direct Candyman, Immortal Beloved and the highly underrated Chicago Joe and the Showgirl as well as two acclaimed Tolstoy updates, Ivans XTC and The Kreutzer Sonata (neither of which I've seen).  Paperhouse is without question his best film and its underexposure is a crime to his name, and the sad thing is that its death was strictly a business decision.


While you wouldn't really think it, the demographic range of children aged 9-12 is pretty tricky to market to, as older pre-pubescents are thirsting for darker, more complex material but have no interest in works that cater to the squirming, shrieking hormone vortexes of the few years just around the corner.  As such, filmmakers aiming for the age bracket feel compelled to increase the levels of tension and violence but find themselves facing a PG-13 rating, and in 1988 that rating was so new that consumers didn't really know what to make of it and the MPAA didn't know how to wield it.  Paperhouse has nothing particularly objectionable for 10-year-olds but was deemed to frightening for them, and the distributors must have panicked at the prospect of a kids movie unable to be freely viewed by kids and decided to market it as a horror movie - and if there's one thing horror fans hate it's a movie clearly made outside of the genre that gets passed off as a fright flick.  I should probably be thankful that the movie has a following at all, a testament to its own greatness and having nothing to do with Vestron Pictures' marketing decisions.  And once again, I tip my hat and lift my glass to the internet and its infinite capacity to celebrate the undeservingly obscure and Backstage Video for facilitating my discovery of one of my all-time favorite films.


Bernard, you're a good egg.  And all of my readers are good eggs for sticking with my digital ramblings as far as they've annoyingly stuck around.  Paperhouse is a wonder and is a fitting final gift from me to you at Eve's Eve.  Lion's Gate has finally made the film available on demand on Amazon and YouTube for those who like shelling out bucks for HD, but for the rest of us a couple different users have uploaded the movie in 10-minute chunks.  I'm giving you the start, but much like Anna's journey your film viewing experiences are entirely of your making and hopefully leave you enriched.  Paperhouse never fails to make me faithful in movies as well as supremely happy, and with my recommendation I wish everyone a Happy New Year and look forward to 2015 with many more articles on the way.

~PNK

*Certainly a better use of that setup than Meet the Deedles.


**Spiers's last film was the utterly insane-looking Taxandria, so it looks like I'll have one more Armin Meuller-Stahl film to admire before I'm through.

What is Dreamt and What is Coming - WHISTLE AND I'LL COME TO YOU (1968)

"There are more things in philosophy than are dreamt of in the Heaven and Earth.

There are more things in the Heaven and Earth that are dreamt of in your philosophy."

While Americans tend to think that Christmas is owned and operated by the US of A, England has a great many Christmas traditions all its own, very few of which have made it across the Atlantic.  Among them is the Christmas cracker, a tube pulled at each end which makes a loud bang and holds small toys and candy inside, as well as a terrible joke.  Another, and one I wish we would adopt on these shores, is the telling of ghost stories on Christmas Eve.  The Victorian era and the early 20th century was a golden age of the old-school ghost story, with British authors such as J. Sheridan le Fanu, Oliver Onions* and the Benson siblings reigning supreme, as well figures like Ambrose Bierce, Robert Chambers and H. P. Lovecraft on our side of the pond.  Arguably the most revered British ghost story writer was M. R. James, an antiquarian and Medieval scholar who wrote stories as a sideline and as a way to explore the dark possibilities of his antiquarian interests, many of them written specifically to be read aloud at Christmas Eve.  A favorite of British filmmakers, a number of his stories were adapted for television by the BBC, largely as part of a series called A Ghost Story for Christmas which adapted a different story annually from 1971 to 1978.  I've seen one of these, A Warning to the Curious, and it's a damn creepy horror experience that excels far beyond its time constraints and budgetary limitations.  The main precursor to this series is the teleplay I'm talking about today, Whistle and I'll Come to You, based on James's "Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come To You My Lad".  Lasting barely more than 40 minutes, Whistle knocked me on my ass, an unnervingly effective ghost yarn best approached with little foreknowledge and an acute lack of lighting in the room, and considering that it was broadcast on Christmas Eve I can only assume all of England was gripped by an endless, sleepless night.

A man walks on a windswept beach towards the camera as a narrator tells us of M. R. James and the story in question, pitched as his darkest and promising a tale of hubris and internal destruction.  The man is Professor Parkin of Cambridge (played by the veteran character actor Michael Hordern), a simultaneously fastidious and out-of-sorts man who has come to stay at a seaside hotel during the off-season. Bumbling in the face of a largely empty resort, Parkin eats his breakfast loudly on his first morning and goes for a seaside stroll, eventually reaching an old graveyard.  Approaching a grave on a cliffside he sees a bone sticking out of the cliff face, seemingly belonging to whoever was buried there hundreds of years ago, and puts it in his satchel, saying "Finders, Keepers".  That evening he inspects the bone to see it is actually a primitive flute which bears an inscription; he makes a rubbing of it and translates it to read "Who is this who is coming?"  He says "We shall blow it and see," and does just that.  A strange wind begins to howl, putting Parkin to bed in an uneasy state.  In conversation at breakfast the next morning he insists he doesn't believe in ghosts, raising the point to the man who brought the subject up that ghosts should be subject to the same scrutiny as any scientific enquiry and that there isn't a real consensus on what a ghost is anyways.  He thinks little of ghosts and the flute until bedtime, when he is once again dogged by the inscription, only to dream...dream of running on the shore, running from his own heartbeat, running for his life, running from something ancient, unreal, and hungry.  Only the next day knows if he will have to run for real.

If producer/adapter/director Jonathan Miller should be commended for anything at the start it's his ability to induce claustrophobia in the viewer.  Very little dialogue is spoken for quite a while at the start and the viewer is treated to the sounds of stuffy rooms and amplified human scrabblings, their sight forced into long diagonal framing.  Shot in pristine B&W, Whistle looks gorgeous and foreboding, its hotel nearly choking in its lack of customers and crushing in its insistence on making every microscopic noise Parkins makes overwhelmingly present.  This meets Hordern's performance as Parkin head on, as Hordern's turn here is one of the most hypnotically eccentric and precisely realized performances I've ever seen in a horror film.  Every little head turn, speech hiccup and emotional curl is beautifully embellished, painting a picture of congenial self-absorption specific to career scholars and strangely rare in horror cinema.  Whether by script or improvisation Parkin utters many subtle, yet baffling, phrase peculiarities, such as when he finds the flute and says "Give the dog a bone" to himself.  If all of this sounds funny to you, keep a grip on the arm of your chair, as Whistle makes sure the terror is both present and uniquely gripping.  Trust me when I say you'll never look at late-60's audio tape distortion the same way again.  What is so remarkable is just how memorable an uneasy an experience the 41-minute film is in spite of its short length and rather simple story, and when it comes down to it not much really happens - it's just that what happens is undeniably disturbing, and then that open ending...that ending...

Whatever you're doing this Christmas season, you've probably got a spare 41 minutes to check out this spare, creepy little gem.  I may visit the proper A Ghost Story for Christmas series in time (especially A Warning to the Curious), but this will more than suffice for the time being.  Forget whatever image you have in your head of a mild-mannered made-for-TV horror short and just let Whistle and I'll Come to You sweep you away.  That is, if you can handle things dreamt outside of your philosophy.

~PNK

*Yes, that's his real name.

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 Redemption, Dolores Claiborne, The Dead Zone) to the entertainingly mediocre (Needful Things, Maximum Overdrive) to the bottom of the barrel (Bag of Bones, The 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.

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 Nosferatu - The 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