Monster Capsules: BAD DREAMS, THE ROOST, DAMNATION ALLEY, AFTER MIDNIGHT, TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

This is a film that took a long hard look at the Nightmare on Elm Street box office take and said me too! They even recruit the final girl of Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors, Jennifer Rubin, to play basically the same role in basically the same mental hospital. Instead of Heather Langenkamp though, the patients are saddled with the hunky remotness of Jeffrey (Reanimator) Combs for their group therapist. Instead of Englund as Freddie,  Richard Lynch plays the skeevy cult leader from the 70s, who convinces his flock to burn themselves up in the prologue (Unity Field is the cult's name, and the idea is the flames will unite them forever). Rubin is the only survivor, pulled from the roaring flames, full head of hair intact, and in a coma. When she awakens 13 years later she finds herself in a nightmare called the 80s. Harris' ghost urges her to commit suicide so she can rejoin the Field and skip out on all the pouffy hair and bad clothes. When she refuses, he starts killing all her fellow patients, recruiting them instead.


The creepiest aspect is surely the bizarre skin textures on the face of actor Richard Lynch as the cult leader. It looks like he insisted on having a textured flame retardant gel around his face at all times. Considering how much burning is going on around him, that might have been wise, but it's creepy in a bad way. Lee Strasberg-trained and scary-funny as all hell, he's a fine villain, but not a convincing cult leader. He needs to be seductive as well as creepy. Could you imagine Robert Englund running a cult? It's hard not to imagine how much better a more nuanced cobra-hypnotic like Lance Henriksen or Michael Ironside (the heavy over on Visiting Hours) would have been. Either way, stick through the rocky beginning and just let its gradually slow simmer hallucinatory momentum build and by the crazy climax you'll believe a homicidal doser can fly, even if there's a bit of that old Woman in Green plotting at work.


Sharp-eyed punk rock fans will get excited by the presence of Susan Barnes as one of the patients (she was in Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains and Repo Man!), and the terrifying Dean Cameron will linger in your mind thanks to a bravura freak-out scene where he runs amok in the basement of the hospital, leaping around punching out overhead lights and ripping down shelves. Rubin is very good at wearing her emotions on her sleeve, and the DP is very good at capturing the glisten in her eyes, and the Shout blu-ray is very good at capturing the glisten. So yeah, it grows on you, separating itself from Freddie Krueger comparisons as it matures. A lot of that probably has to do with the pedigree -- Gale Ann Hurd produced, and Andrew Fleming directed - between them there's solid horror crossovers like The Craft and The Terminator. The recently released blu-ray from Shout! is magnificent and also includes another quality hospital horror, this time more of a rip-off of Halloween 2, called Visiting Hours. I remember the commercials scared me as a kid and I've been scared to watch it. I'm still working up the nerve to press play on that one. Here's how I've been building up to it:


Ti West's first film is hampered by his inability apparently to motivate actors into a state of wakefulness (Tom Noonan especially underplays the mellowest horror host in the history of late night UHF) and his reliance on tiresomely music school string quartet passages, but The Roost is a surprisingly fascinating work of straight-faced retro minimalism. The story follows a carload of mumblecore-ists on their way to a wedding. They begin the film in mid shortcut along a mysterious road. A bat flies into the windshield causing a crash! Cue weirdness and think of this as a kind of Jim Jarmusch version of Planet Terror on a budget similar to that of Equinox. 


The acting is pretty bland (with the exception of great newcomer Vanessa Horneff) but the star here is the darkness, and the way it envelops characters like a blanket, swallowing the cast up without so much as a scream or gurgle, and the mostly eerie soundtrack of atonal buzzes and drones. West does weird and wonderful things with the lighting - one ambient flood out somewhere in the night, and then having the actors point at each other with the flashlight as a kind of inter-diegetic spotlight. Problems aside it's hard not to be awed by West's unshakable grasp of what makes horror work -- the tick-tock momentum, deep full darkness, 16mm, droning ambient score, remote location (here the same barn used in Marnie!) --and the way his minimalist tendencies are so poetically integrated therewith. Close-ups of doors slowly opening, for example, presented completely out of context (we have no idea whose opening the door or from whose perspective is watching the door open) don't sound like much on 'paper' but are all the spookier for being so commonplace, as if West is finding a whole new way to make rote horror film connecting shots uncanny again.


Michael "Ajax" Paré as a struggling artist who gets spared by an inner city gargoyle and falls for Rae Dawn Chong; a young Christian Slater, young Julianne Moore, and young Steve Buscemi encounter a shambling mummy (from an Arthur Conan Doyle story); New York scenesters Deborah Harry (as a Hansel-baking cannibal in the framing device) and David Johansen as a cat assassin hired by wheelchair bound William Hickey (the unforgettable old don in Prizzi's Honor) in a segment conceived by Stephen King and scripted by George Romero --all come together to no avail in this odd horror anthology.


 I've never been a fan of horror anthologies -- too many get hung up on the tired old EC supernatural comeuppance bit, the "Where's my cake, Bedilia?" twist (I love that story though, especially how it's the spilled bottle of whiskey that wakes up the sleeping patriarch) and I have the same problems with Darkside. Even Debbie Harry is surprisingly flavorless as the cannibal gourmet.  That said, there's so many essential cult actor favorites  (I always imagine how great Paré would have been as Reese in The Terminator) and future stars that it's still essential viewing, kind of.


At last, a trilogy free of 'supernatural comeuppance' and the only non-aerobics softcore film from 'High Bar Productions'. Underrated fringe weirdo Ramy Zada goes for distance as the psychology teacher who pulls a gun out a snickering jock to teach his class about fear. Said jock is pissed (literally), complains to the dean, and later breaks in to the teacher's house, where he's conducting a ghost story round robin, during a dark and stormy night. And one of the students is a psychic who sense something wicked's coming up from the basement. I dug the gonzo oddity middle segment best, with its looney tunes midnight warehouse dog attack. Most critics like the story where a celeb stalker switches gears to go after his original obsession's answering service operator, played by the always worthwhile Marg Helgenberger. Make sure you stick around for the bizarre finale, that has the heroine fleeing a burnt skeleton chasing her with an axe through all the other sets in a vague nod to the climax of The Terminator. More proof that sometimes budget has little to do with what makes a good horror film: Darkside has the money but can't venture out of its DC Comics House of Mystery vibe, while After Midnight drops any sense of reality and goes straight for the nightmare logic.


Not an easy film to love, but loving Damnation Alley (as I do) depends on your gender and age. If you were a boy in the 70s and read Famous Monsters of Filmland,  chances are you longed to take off in that cool armored cruiser (above) across a nuclear landscape populated by almost nothing except the occasional giant scorpions, or massive deluges of not-quite-giant man-eating ants, some psychotic rednecks, no need for money or homework, freak storms, and no girls gumming up the works (if there is a girl let her be an uncritically nurturing easy Breezy Vegas 'dancer' rather than a bossy mom type).

Directed by Jack Smight, who gave us such other awful bit irresistible films as Midway and Airport 1975, Damnation Alley is a film as wholesome in its fashion as reading Boy's Life magazine at a cub scouts meeting, as American as a voyage to Wally World armed with an M-16. George Peppard is the 'dad' character - identifiable via his terrible fake mustache, faker southern accent, and still faker toupee; Jan Michael Vincent is the starry-eyed older brother who gets the girl and lets you ride his cool motorbike. And dad even lets you learn to drive the cruiser; the girl is a young Meryl Streep-style French beauty (Dominique Sanda) picked up in a deserted sand-swept Vegas; Paul Winfield is the black guy, destined to get eaten alive by killer cockroaches. Vincent plays toreador with giant scorpions on his motorbike and throw them women who miraculously switch from actresses to mannequins at the key moment. It's stuff like that which makes a film great... for, as I say, boys of a certain age.


The film begins in one of the best nuclear war recreations in film history: no drama, no hand-wringing, just by the book monitoring of screens at a remote missile silo deep in the American southwest; women around to wring their hands and bother us with morality and ethics. A few years go by and a chain reaction at their remote facility makes sticking around inadvisable, and trims the survivors down to a handful who take to the road in two big armored party vans - though the budget only allows for one, so we seldom see them together without a mirror. Why even bother having the second cruiser? Just to use the CB radio?

Myriad technical difficulties aside, this has to overall be the mellowest post-nuclear war movie of the 70s or ever - with a bunch of men and one Hawksian woman (Dominique Sanda) driving around through psychedelic electric storms, a strange flood (luckily these vehicles float, too) and only occasionally running into mutations of either the cannibal rapist redneck variety or the mutated insect variety. Even the arrival of a kid isn't cause for alarm, since he's played by the perennially feral Jackie Earle Haley.



I almost never find anything disparaging to say about Shout Factory, who have been cleaning up and releasing to blu-ray a vast host of sci fi and horror titles from the 70s and 80s that would likely be forgotten or bungled otherwise. The blu-ray of Damnation Alley is amazing overall, with groovy deep blacks. But some of the outdoor scenes don't stack up to the Amazon instant video version, wherein the sky is a weird almost psychedelic blue. In the Shout version the sky has been cleaned up to a 'normal' sickly pale normal sky color that's just not as cool. Did the restorers think the intense colors of the original sky (and the action all blurry like your looking through seriously dark shades) was some kind of mistake? Did they not get that the world is over and the outdoors is fucked?

It's a problem for me but otherwise I can't complain --the interior shots have clearly been retouched with deep groovy blacks, and the DVD is the come-true dream of every boy who no longer likes sitting in the lap of his cute babysitter and now wants to hang out and throw rocks with the boys his age.

Top: Amazon Instant Video / Bottom: Shout blu-ray