Summer of Slash: Silent Rage

No one was immune to the slasher craze happening between 1980-1982. Not even Chuck Norris. Therefore, in 1982 at the height of the slasher craze, we got Silent Rage, an odd amalgam of Chuck Norris actioner and Halloween rip-off (I always found Wikipedia’s classification of the film as a “action/romance/science fiction/horror movie” pretty amusing). This is a movie that makes no bones about how blatantly it is ripping off other popular ideas of the time (you’d think this were an Italian genre movie) — it also has a bit of The Terminator in it and even makes time for a little “Dukes of Hazzard” hillbilly hijinks with the obligatory fat deputy character — which, I have to say, makes for a pretty entertaining 100 minutes.
 
The film concerns itself with a former mental patient, John Kirby (Brian Libby), who we’re introduced to on a hectic morning filled with telephones ringing, children screaming, and all sorts of little annoyances that would cause Kirby to further lose his grip on reality. As he wanders around the noise-filled house, he places a phone call to his doctor informing him that he’s “losing it,” and doesn’t think he can keep it together much longer. Well, “much longer” is about two minutes. After failing to distract himself with cutting wood and gathering some chickens, Kirby just decides to take an axe inside and murder two people.

Enter Sheriff Dan Stevens (Norris), who with no help from his incompetent and chubby deputy Charlie (Stephen Furst), takes out Kirby who is transported to the hospital where he is expected to die from his wounds. However, in a secret experimental wing of the hospital, three doctors work on Kirby using powerful drugs that regenerate cells. The head doctor, Spires (Steven Keats), utters lines like, “As beautiful a creature created by nature” so that we know he’s the evil doctor who has no problem experimenting on humans as long as it gets him his Pulitzer Nobel! While Doctor Halman (Ron Silver) says things like, “And as grotesque as anything created by man” so that we know he’s the humane doctor. All of this leads to the inevitable: Kirby’s wounds heal at a rapid pace, turning him into an indestructible monster a la Michael Myers or the T-800. So what could possibly bring down this indestructible monster, you ask? Well, some tight-jeaned roundhouse kicks from Chuck Norris, of course!

And that’s essentially what Silent Rage has up its sleeve: it pits Chuck Norris versus Michael Myers. All of the film’s stalking scenes are just rehashed bits from Halloween and Halloween II; all of the film’s action scenes are just rehashed bits from previous Chuck Norris movies like Breaker, Breaker; and the film’s ending is just The Terminator with its take on the indestructible monster. There’s even a scene at the end — after Norris has hip-tossed the Kirby a well stating that "it's over" so that we know that it for sure isn't over — where the film can't help but milk one last cliche as the camera pans over to the well and then down into the well, and...yeah, you know where this is going. The monster emerges from the waters of the well, springing up into frame before the shot freezes. End credits. It wouldn't be a slasher in 1982 without a retread of the Friday the 13th ending (itself a retread of the Carrie ending...I love horror movies).

Silent Rage is goofy, harmless cheese (I mean just look at that poster...how can you not have at least a little affection for this movie), and it should be seen as nothing more than that. There’s absolutely nothing offensively awful about the film. It’s kind of hilarious to watch the film stumble its way through so many genres (especially the Halloween “dead bodies arranged in a room” scene). The film shoehorns in so many awkward scenes in the hopes that it will appeal to both Chuck Norris fans and slasher fans. Between the typical hillbilly sheriff/deputy interactions, the stupid barroom brawl that feels like it’s from a totally different movie, the hilariously anti-climactic ending, the late Ron Silver's glorious overacting, and the bizarre interlude where Norris seduces an ex-girlfriend (I suppose this is where Wikipedia gets off calling the film a “romance” movie), Silent Rage goes down easily enough. And for a slasher flick, let alone a Chuck Norris slasher flick, that’s all I ask for.

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John Frankenheimer: All Fall Down

John Frankenheimer had an incredible run of films in the 1960s. He would release some of his most visually and thematically ambitious films during this decade. In 1962, Frankenheimer would release three films, two of which were to be his most admired (The Birdman of Alcatraz and The Manchurian Candidate). However, it is this third film, All Falls Down, that often gets lost in the shuffle, and it’s easy to see why with its resemblance to films like East of Eden and Splendor in the Grass, All Fall Down doesn’t feel like a John Frankenheimer film. And even though that may seem weird to say considering we’re only three films (and just two of those that I’ve seen) into his filmography, All Fall Down certainly sticks out due to how ordinary the whole thing feels.

All Fall Down’s familiar story concerns itself with 15-year-old Clinton Willart (Brandon De Wilde) who arrives in Florida with some money for his older brother, Berry-Berry (Warren Beatty). Clinton idolizes Berry-Berry, an searches for him so that they can take the money he’s brought and invest in a business together. However, upon his initial search for his brother, Clinton finds that the money his brother asked for wasn’t ever intended for a business deal, it was, instead, intended to bail as bail money. You see, Berry-Berry is in jail for beating up a prostitute, and his name is something you don’t want to utter around town. Clinton, regardless of the rumors surrounding his brother, eventually finds him and pays his bail. Once free, Berry-Berry gives a false promise of visiting for Christmas before sending Clinton back home to Ohio.
These initial moments are pretty straight forward, and it was at this point that I was feeling pretty bummed about having to sit through the rest of this film for another 80 minutes or so. But when Clinton returns home, we begin to find out more about him and his family life, and it is at this point that All Fall Down, albeit familiar territory, becomes a much better and tolerable film with an emphasis on showcasing its extraordinarily good performances from Angela Lansbury and Karl Malden. 

So when Clinton returns home, we meet his prodding, talkative mother Annabel (Lansbury in a performance that Frankenheimer showed Frank Sinatra in order to convince him that she was right for her role as Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate) and Ralph (Malden), his likeable but alcoholic (and emasculated) father. The characters are your typical clichéd mom and dad figures in these types of movies, but Lansbury and Malden elevate them beyond cliché and certainly beyond caricature. Anyway, to the surprise of nobody familiar with how these types of films go, Clinton views his parents’ life as a prison — a monotonous existence when held up to his brother’s life. So instead of engaging in conversation with his parents, Clinton spends most of his days sleeping or hiding out in his room, eavesdropping on conversations and then jotting them down into his notepad; meanwhile, his dad constantly retreats to the basement to drink and to get away from his wife, who paces around the house picking every nit there is to pick.

Just as things can’t seem to get any more boring for Clinton, Echo O’Brien (Eva Marie Saint) comes into his life, shattering the dullness that surrounds Clinton and his family. Echo's beauty and charm beguiles the entire family, especially Clinton. Along with Echo’s arrival, the hopes that Berry-Berry will return for Christmas seems to re-energize the entire family. Berry-Berry eventually does end up returning, and, of course, he falls in love with Echo. Or he at least falls in as much love as a narcissist like him can. And when the inevitable happens (Berry-Berry not reciprocating Echo’s love), and Echo falls in love with Berry-Berry only for him to break her heart once he learns that she is pregnant (for he cannot be tied down), she takes her car and drives it off a cliff. Clinton is aghast at the turn of events and goes from idolizing his brother to plotting to kill him.

Outside from a few aesthetic choices and the focus on a seedy milieu, All Fall Down just doesn’t really feel like a Frankenheimer film. Frankenheimer loved the source material, though, and when asked by producer John Houseman to direct the film, he was really excited to make the film (he was also excited to work with William Inge, who Houseman hired to write the script). However, he had to put it on the backburner in order to finish post-production on The Birdman of Alcatraz. So Houseman went about casting the film without him and All Fall Down just feels like a project that Frankenheimer enjoyed making, but one that got the least amount of his attention between The Birdman of Alcatraz and The Manchurian Candidate.

And I think Inge’s script (based on on James Leo Herlihy, author of Midnight Cowboy) is the biggest thing keeping the film from being anything more than a showcase for some great acting. As alluded to earlier, the film feels too much like Inge’s previous Splendor in the Grass — especially in the way the two films deal with, as Stephen Armstrong says, “a love affair between two beautiful neurotics” — and other films of that ilk released around the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. All Fall Down is different in the sense it deals with establishing characters before tragedy punctuates the film whereas Splendor is about characters deal with a tragedy that starts the film.

The few aesthetic touches that Frankenheimer and his DP Lionel Lindon insert into the film — a few canted angles and the Frankenheimer’s favorite, deep focus, pop up here and there — aren’t enough to make the film any easier to get through, as much of All Fall Down plays out in a pretty straight-forward, melodramatic manner, highlighted by some really strong supporting performances. And I’m not trying to suggest that these stories need the kind of aesthetic touches that Frankenheimer and Lindon implement in some of their more showy efforts, but it does make a film like this easier to get through.

As mentioned earlier, Lansbury and Malden are fantastic as the parents. Lansbury’s role is the kind that lends itself to the kind of showy performance that would earn any actress an Academy Award nomination these days. And although Malden doesn’t play “emasculated husband” as well (or over-the-top) as, say, Jim Backus, his role as the father always retreating to the basement for a drink is reason alone to give All Fall Down a try. And Beatty is alright as Berry-Berry. He’s certainly got the right look and the screen presence for the type of character Berry-Berry needs to be. Frankenheimer hated working with him, and what should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, Houseman mentions what an arrogant ass he was on set. In his memoir, Final Dress, Houseman recalled what it was like working with Beatty:

From the start, our most serious problem was young Mr.Beatty. With his angelic arrogance, his determination to emulate Marlon Brando and Jimmy Dean, and his half-baked, overzealous notions of “Method” acting, he succeeded in perplexing and antagonizing not only his fellow actors but our entire crew.

I’m surprised he didn’t mention that Beatty tried to tell Frankenheimer how to direct the film.

Despite the problems on set with Beatty, the filmmakers were pleased with the final product. However, the way the film was received crushed Houseman. MGM’s biggest film that year was Four Horsemanof the Apocalypse, but it was a critical and commercial flop. A panicked MGM scrambled around to find another title to release as their flagship film, but realizing that they didn’t have anything else to release aside from Frankenheimer’s film, they released All Fall Down — what is essentially a small, black-and-white art film — into big moviehouses. And when you think about the kind of mainstream American films audiences were clamoring for in the early ‘60s, the characters and the environment those character inhabit in All Fall Down (or The Young Savages for that matter) were not the kinds of worlds audiences were wanting to escape to. Film’s like King of Kings or West Side Story or Disney films like The Absent-Minded Professor were the types of films topping the box-office charts. So, yeah, audiences were not too enamored with this small picture, and the film bombed.

Despite the commercial failures of All Fall Down, Frankenheimer’s film career was just getting started, and his other two films released in 1962 would go a long way towards cementing his status as a true auteur (although Frankenheimer hated that term) and one of the best (and most underrated) filmmakers of his time.

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Summer of Slash: Boogeyman II (aka Revenge of the Boogeyman)

Two summers ago when I reviewed The Boogeyman, I failed to mention who wrote and directed it. Perhaps I was so in awe of the film’s wackiness that it just totally slipped my mind, but don't you worry, dear reader, I won’t forget to mention the name of this brilliant auteur this time around. For, you see, Ulli Lommel is the man responsible for not one, not two, but three versions of The Boogeyman! Yes, there is Boogeyman II (more commonly referred to as Revenge of the Boogeyman), a film which ended up on the Video Nasties list right alongside the original for the sole reason of using about 40% of the footage from the first film. But there is also another version of Revenge of the Boogeyman that Lommel released in the early 2000s: Revenge of the Boogeyman: Redux. Think on this for a moment...

...

...It takes a special kind of person to make a Revenge of the Boogeyman: Redux, so let’s talk about this person. Ulli Lommel is kind of an interesting story. He was an AD for Rainer Fassbeinder, worked with Warhol, and then went to America and made the first Boogeyman, which was at least wacky and weird that it went down easily enough as an off-the-wall horror entry. He seemed to be paving the way for at least a semi-interesting career in the horror genre. But then he either got lazy or just wanted to be someone that worked a bunch because his career doesn’t mirror at all someone that worked with such unique and eccentric creators, nor does his career after The Boogeyman even suggest a filmmaker that was capable of making that movie. He’s somewhat of a known thing — a lesser Uwe Boll, if you will — on Netflix; he’s known for making awful modern horror movies that center around serial killers like Richard Ramirez and the BTK Killer, and almost all of his films come with reviews that bear the warning: “Beware: this is a Ulli Lommel film!”

Much like the later-released and favorite amongst horror fans (for all the wrong reasons), Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, Revenge of the Boogeyman is essentially a rehashing of the first film, using a lot of the footage from the first film to pad out its already short 79 minute runtime. That premise: the shard of glass from the broken mirror (the cause of all the havoc in the original Hallo...oh, sorry, The Boogeyman) returns...this time to Hollywood! Lommel pops up as the director of a horror film whose wife keeps nagging him to make commercial films because his experimental, arthouse films just aren’t bringin’ home the bacon. So he sets off to make a horror movie (which according to this film, making a movie in Hollywood amounts to nothing more than a pool party).

The movie crew in Hollywood is now being stalked by the shard of glass as they try to make a film about the events of the first Boogeyman movie. So there’s lots of exposition about how making horror movies affects people, and there’s all kinds of attempts made to make Revenge of the Boogeyman some kind heady, postmodern horror picture (points for pre-dating more popular self-reflexive horror films like In the Mouth of Madness and New Nightmare...I guess). There’s also just tons of scenes of these wannabe Hollywood-ites sitting by the pool pontificating about random shit like the leaves changing in Autumn or the types of things that are only interesting to people who live in LA (my favorite being two aspiring actors talking about the roles they're up for, and the male actor mentions that he’s being considered for a role in the a film that’s a combination of Smokey and the Bandit and Star Wars, which sounds a million times more interesting than anything going on in this movie). But it doesn't take long for the viewer to figure out what’s really going on here: padding. And lot’s of it. I think after the first Boogeyman, Lommel genuinely was frustrated that he couldn't make weird, experimental films like his mentors, but his attempts here at horror are just beyond lazy.

Most of the film is lit so shoddily that it’s almost impossible to make out what’s happening on screen —  not that it matters though since most of the film is just rehashed footage from the first film. But I will say this for the sequel: they chose the best parts of the original film to showcase once again. The original Boogeyman was such an odd mix of supernatural horror, mean-spirited slasher, and wacky dead teenager slasher movie— and it seemed to gleefully content to allow all of these scenes to bounce from one to another, coming off as nothing more than bizarre non sequitur after bizarre non sequitur.

Unfortunately, we're subjected to the horribly cruel violence-to-children opening from the original (a scene I really disliked, and the primary reason the film ended up on the radar of the DPP), but thankfully we get the original film's cheesier scenes: the death-by-medicine-cabinet scene pops up again, and, best of all, we once again get the brilliant hot dog cooking scene! The latter which, as I mentioned in my initial review, seems so out of place with the rest of the film because it introduces four teenagers that do all of the things they're supposed to do as teenagers in a slasher movie — but nothing about The Boogeyman suggests that it’s going to be that kind of slasher movie. But there it is, a type of mini-Bay of Blood smack in the middle of a random supernatural horror movie that begins with an opening setpiece that is nothing more than an extremely cruel ripoff of the opening of Halloween.

So there ya go. And if it seems like I'm reviewing the first film all over again when I'm supposed to be talking about the sequel...well, it's because most of the sequel is the first film. All of the best scenes of the first film inserted into the second, so there's really no reason to see the original, I guess. Once the sequel’s story truly kicks off, there are about 20  minutes of the film left, and the setpieces are just as asinine as they were in the first film: shaving cream, electric toothbrushes, corkscrews, and ice tongs all become instruments of death in Revenge of the Boogeyman. And it’s all made more horrible because of how awful and lazy it all comes across as — a cop out, for sure, by Lommel who is certainly trying to pass it off as some kind of heady, meta take on making movies (horror movies in particular) by having his characters talking about how stupid it all is, and that horror movies are only good for “making money.” Ugh.

But it doesn’t stop there. 20 years later, Lommel and his handheld camera returned to re-edit Revenge of the Boogeyman as a kind of director-gone-insane version of the film. So instead of a story surrounding the making of a horror movie, Lommel essentially takes key bits of dialogue and plot and attaches them to himself, claiming that he went mad making that movie (which was about the making of the first movie), and that all of the deaths from the second film (shown in fast forward all Benny Hill like...I’m not joking) were the cause of him going mad. Or maybe he was the one doing the killing. I honestly couldn't keep it straight. What I do remember is that we’re supposed to believe that Lommel, in 2002 (still wearing a horribly dated purple ‘90s Starter brand cap), is being interviewed by the police (the set is just him at a desk in what his probably his house) about some murders that have happened. So we get re-edited footage of the first film again. Only this time it’s about 80% of the first film, 10% of the second film (which maybe is less because it's all in fast forward), and the final 10% is of Lommel sitting in front of the camera being “interrogated.”

Basically, Lommel lifts some elements of the story from the second film as he talks about how he and his wife were in bed one evening, and she told him he needed to start making money due to the fact that his arthouse films weren’t making the kind of money she needed to live on.  He was hesitant to do this, but he agreed with his wife that they did need some money coming in. That’s pretty much all I get out of the Redux version: his wife drove him to make the movie which in turn caused him to murder a bunch of people. So is money bad? Are we to blame his wife? The movie industry? Violence in horror films? Nothing is made clear, and that's what is so hilariously awful about the Redux version (if you're insane and curious like I am, this version of the film is, I believe, available on Youtube).

Of course, in the hands of a legitimate filmmaker, this kind of material could turn into an interesting horror movie (again, I’ll invoke the titles In the Mouth of Madness and New Nightmare), but Lommel isn’t interested in any of that. In fact, Paramount wanted to make the sequel with Lommel, giving him a bigger budget to work with (the first film was profitable as it had the fortune of coming out the same year as Friday the 13th), but Lommel declined, stating that he didn't want to work for a major studio. Because, you know, artistic integrity and all. In fact, he underlines, bolds, and puts into italics this point about not wanting to work with a studio budget with a moment of dialogue in Revenge of the Boogeyman that sticks out like a sore thumb; it goes something like this: one of the characters rips into Brian De Palma’s Blow Out because De Palma spent 17 million on making the movie, but audiences hated it, to which Lommel's character responds, “You could make 17 movies for that price!” I don't know what ultimate point he's trying to make, but it made me laugh; I felt compelled to share with all of you one example of the things that are inside the mind of Ulli Lommel.

Nothing about this man’s subsequent career suggests that he’s capable of making anything other than a quick buck on recycled footage. Both The Boogeyman and Revenge of the Boogeyman are decent pizza and beer movies if you’re with the right group of people, but be warned: stay away from the Redux version. It’s so bad it makes the editing of Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 look like inspired filmmaking.  There is an interview on the Hysteria Lives site where Lommel talks about how anyone can use footage from his Boogeyman films as long as they pay, and that the payment could be as little as a dollar depending on his financial situation. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at that statement. Oh, he also mentions that as he gets older he wants to leave a legacy and aspires to make great, memorable films that are not safe or mediocre or part of the status quo, citing the likes of Buñuel and Pasolini as examples of filmmakers that were making “subversive” and “rebellious” films late into their careers. And that he hopes to be making those kinds of films well into his 90s. Okay, I think I’ll laugh now.

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John Frankenheimer: The Young Savages

Note: Some of Frankenheimer’s films are pretty hard to come by, one of those being his debut film, The Young Stranger, so I had to start this retrospective with his second film. There’s about a handful of films I couldn’t get a hold of; I will try my best to fill in the blanks as I go.


After a less than thrilling experience shooting his feature film The Young Stranger, John Frankenheimer returned to television (where he got his start) for four years (a practice he would continue throughout his career — proudly showing that he was always a man of television that could bring cinematic ambitions to the small screen) before returning to theatrical filmmaking with his second feature, The Young Savages. Frankenheimer didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for The Young Savages, and it shows in certain scenes, particularly the final 30 minutes of the film where the ambitions of he and his star, Burt Lancaster, pretty much derail the film. But the way he imbues just his second feature with so many stylistic flourishes (a definite sign of things to come for him and his DP Lionel Lindon) keeps one intrigued enough despite the film’s well-intentioned but ultimately flawed narrative.


The story of The Young Savages is really no different than the countless other “juvie” films released around the ‘50s and early ‘60s. In New York’s Spanish Harlem, a 15-year-old blind boy is stabbed to death by three Italian thugs. The street toughs are eventually arrested, and the politically ambitious DA, Dan Cole (Edward Andrews), pushes hard for the death penalty. However, the crime isn’t as cut-and-dry as Cole thinks it is, and his assistant, Hank Bell (Lancaster), who himself was a product of the slums before changing his name from Bellini to Bell while pursuing his career, tries to convince his boss that further investigation in the matter is needed.

Throughout Bell’s investigation we come to find that the onus he has put on himself to uncover the truth is a little more complicated than just hitting the streets and asking questions. Bell’s former fiancée, Mary (Shelley Winters), is the mother of one of the three thugs accused of the murder. In addition, Bell’s wife, Karin (Dina Merrill), takes on the voice of the liberal who is anti-capital punishment. So there are many voices of influence swirling around Bell as he investigates the murder and struggles to uncover the truth and do the right thing. What he ends up finding out is that the boy was actually the head of a Puerto Rican gang (using his guise as a blind kid to hide drugs and weapons since I guess cops would never suspect a blind kid of being mixed up in a gang), and that he was the pimp for his 13-year-old sister.

When Bell uncovers this truth, he is beaten down, stomped to a bloody pulp, by some thugs in the subway. This is the catalyst for Bell to embrace the Bellini within him and see that these kids didn’t murder by choice—it was a product of the environment they’re from. He also begins to feel a strong urge to protect his fellow Italians from the “menacing” Puerto Ricans (who proceed to harass Bell’s wife) even if it means self-sabotage for his political career. Feeling compelled to tank the case in order to stay true to his convictions, Bell argues for the trio of murderers by film’s end.

Surely this kind of material was a bit shocking at the time with its use of a 15-year-old blind kid pimping out his sister and acting as the head of a gang (nothing at all shocking to us now as it would probably pass these days as an episode of “Law and Order”), but I don’t think that the film’s ambitions as a socially conscience message picture mix well with the film’s trappings rooted in exploitation “juvie” pictures, especially since the latter is just so much more interesting than the former. I will say this about the film’s ambitions as a message picture though: The idea of leaving behind who you truly are to get ahead (The whole internal dilemma surrounding Bell/Bellini) and the portrayal of the Italian thugs as a product of a twisted society (in one scene, one of the thug’s tells Bell that his father was a drunk, his mother takes in boarders and then goes out with them, and that he isn’t even sure his sister is his sister) causing them to be the way they are, is a commendable one.

So, kudos go to Frankenheimer for broaching such important sociological issues as race and geography and poverty, but the execution doesn’t match the well-intentioned effort, for what truly stands out in the film — and the only real reason to still see it today — are those aesthetic flourishes that seem rooted in exploitation — the very thing that keeps the film’s narrative from truly resonating. It’s a dilemma, fir sure, but man does Frankenheimer make the film look way more interesting than your run-of-the-mill “juvie” exploitation film. Which shouldn’t come as a shock since the director would meld exploitation with loftier, aesthetic ambitions frequently throughout his career; but here, with The Young Savages, it is interesting to see those ambitions at their gestation.

The opening credits sequence which leads to the stabbing that acts as the catalyst for the film’s story is a doozy. It’s the highlight of the movie with its close-ups of "juvie" iconography (boots, rolled up jeans, et al) found in films of the late '50s, handheld work, stylized shots (I like the shot of the chaos of the opening stabbing reflected in the lens of sunglasses, another bit of "juvie" iconography), on-location shooting, deep focus (a favorite of Frankenheimer’s), and Dutch angles. In other words, if The Young Savages tells us anything, it’s that the opening credits portend everything that Frankenheimer would refine over his career. Credit most definitely also goes to Frankenheimer’s DP, Lionel Lindon, who collaborated with Frankenheimer on some of his most visually memorable films like The Manchurian Candidate and Grand Prix. The Young Savages is an impressive looking film for something that traditionally comes off as B-grade level.

More about imagery in the opening: I like what Frankenheimer is doing by opening the film with an innocent enough shot of a child buying an ice cream: simplistic and relatable. Who hasn’t, as a child, reveled in the small joy of an ice cream cone on a hot summer day? The image seems simplistic enough, but in reality — as the film’s procedural uncovers more and more about the truth of those opening moments — as we think back on this image we realize that this is the blind boy’s sister, who we’ve also come to realize as the film progresses is being pimped out by her 15-year-old brother. Now the image takes on a whole new meaning, and once again Frankenheimer has taken a simple bit of iconography from countless other films of this ilk, and twisted it just-so to make it much more disturbingly ironic image than first suggested.

The acting is good but not great. I’ve never been the biggest Burt Lancaster fan, but he’s fine and all here; however, as previously stated, the convictions of the actor and the director to make this a message-heavy film really bogs things down in the second half, especially with the stomping scene and the revelation that he’s still “one of them.” Lancaster was somewhat known for thinking that films should really say something (speaking to the widest audience possible) but also be of high quality (speaking to cinephiles). It’s a nice idea and all, but the execution of the narrative, especially the courtroom scene (which takes up about 20 minutes of the film), is all askew and comes off as rather hokey. It's something that, according to Stephen B. Armstrong in his book on Frankenheimer, Pictures About Extremes, states was a problem with some of their collaborations, especially their subsequent picture, The Birdman of Alcatraz. Shelley Winters and Telly Savalas (10 years before he played Theo Kojak) also star and are quite good in their small roles.

Despite the narrative failings of the film, it must be said that early in his career, Frankenheimer was interested in doing something different by making movies about the marginalized as characters to focus on and center the action around. And not for simplistic reasons of exploiting those character types, either. I’m sure we’ll return to this idea throughout this retrospective, for it is one of the traits (along with his visual style) that defines much of Frankenheimer’s work. The following year was a busy one for Frankenheimer, who would have three (!) films released, two of which were, arguably, his most popular and famous films of the ‘60s: The Manchurian Candidate and The Birdman of Alcatraz. But we’ll first look at the less popular of the three, All Fall Down, starring Warren Beatty and Eva Maire Saint and adapted for the screen by William Inge.

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Carpenter Ranked

As I'm working on the finishing touches for my first Frankenheimer post, I thought it would be nice to get some content on the blog today. So I offer this little list (something I've wanted to do for other director's in this series but have just completely spaced on doing) of what I think are the best Carpenter films. I know we all love lists! So have it. Make fun of me, list your own rankings, or be boring and agree with me. Anyway, I'm hoping my first Frankenheimer post will be up sometime tonight or, at the very latest, tomorrow morning. Thanks to all of those that have been following along!

1. Halloween
2. The Thing
3. Big Trouble in Little China
4. Assault on Precinct 13
5. Prince of Darkness
6. Ghosts of Mars
7. They Live
8. The Fog
9. Dark Star
10. Escape from New York
11. Vampires
12. Body Bags
13. In the Mouth of Madness
14. Escape from LA
15. Masters of Horror
16. The Ward
17. Christine
18. Starman
19. Village of the Damned
20. Memoirs of an Invisible Man

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John Carpenter: The Ward

Warning: this review will read like that of a man who is at the end of a retrospective and feels like there isn’t really anything more to say. I apologize for the lack of reviewing that’s going on in this review and for the lack of enthusiasm surrounding this piece. But, hey, some of that is the film’s fault.

When The Ward was released in 2011, many fans of the genre — and of Carpenter especially — must have been thanking the heavens that the master of horror was returning to theatrical filmmaking in order to rescue the horror genre. Alas, this is not the case. This feels like the John Carpenter of Christine more than the John Carpenter of Prince of Darkness, and that's a shame, too, because that means we get the detached Carpenter rather than the Carpenter that truly loves the horror genre. In fact, The Ward felt an awful lot like his work for Masters of Horror: professionally made, easy to get through, but on the whole uninteresting and disappointingly average for Carpenter.

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Summer of Slash: Satan’s Little Helper

Fans of the slasher film will recognize the name Jeff Lieberman. Director of the fun and goofy Squirm (notable for being featured on MST3K, which Lieberman was none too pleased with) and the really great (and not goofy) Blue Sunshine and Just Before Dawn (the best of the backwoods slashers), Lieberman disappeared from the horror genre, claiming that the right project never came up. After Just Before Dawn in 1981, he made only one film (Remote Control in 1988) before finally returning to filmmaking and to the horror genre with 2004’s oddball black comedy slasher Satan’s Little Helper. No, this direct to DVD release is not nearly as cheap looking or awful as its horribly executed cover art would have you believe (just look at that poster. Awful.). I’m tempted to say that the film is even good. But then I would have to ignore the horribly conventional final 20 minutes of the film and the fact that Lieberman's pretty interesting idea loses steam rather quickly. A shame, too, since the first 1/3 of the film is evidence that Lieberman still has a knack for taking banal slasher premises and fashioning them into something much more interesting.

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