Retro Review: AMERICAN GOTHIC (1988)

AMERICAN GOTHIC
(UK/Canada - 1988)

Directed by John Hough. Written by Burt Wetanson and Michael Vines. Cast: Rod Steiger, Yvonne De Carlo, Michael J. Pollard, Fiona Hutchison, Sarah Torgov, Mark Lindsay Chapman, Janet Wright, William Hootkins, Mark Erickson, Carolyn Barclay, Stephen Shellen. (R, 89 mins)

Recently released on Blu-ray by Shout! Factory, 1988's AMERICAN GOTHIC is a demented gem of a horror movie with a small cult following of fans who have largely kept it to themselves. The film has fallen off the radar somewhat even though the Vidmark VHS was a ubiquitous presence in every video store in America back in the day. Made at a time when horror was defined mostly by special effects and Freddy Krueger, it's something that probably would've gotten more attention a decade earlier during the post-TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE era or a couple of decades later circa THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, a time when its deranged family of homicidal, inbred religious zealots could've allowed for more sociopolitical satire. AMERICAN GOTHIC was directed by veteran journeyman John Hough, whose hired-gun filmography ran the gamut from British horror (1971's TWINS OF EVIL, 1973's THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE) to American car chase actioners (1974's DIRTY MARY, CRAZY LARRY) to Disney (1975's ESCAPE FROM WITCH MOUNTAIN, 1978's RETURN TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, 1980's THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS) to drive-in horror sleaze (1982's THE INCUBUS) and terrible DTV sequels (1988's HOWLING IV: THE ORIGINAL NIGHTMARE). Retired since the 2002 DTV Patsy Kensit thriller BAD KARMA, Hough was always a director who took whatever gigs came his way, but with THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE and DIRTY MARY, CRAZY LARRY, he's got a couple of legitimately great films to his credit. AMERICAN GOTHIC is one of the better works from the inconsistent, clock-punching latter half of his career, sandwiched between the time-travel misfire BIGGLES and the dull HOWLING IV.

Just released from a mental hospital following a breakdown after her infant son drowned in the bathtub while she was on the phone, Cynthia (Sarah Torgov) is looking to rebuild her life with sympathetic husband Jeff (Mark Erickson). To keep Cynthia occupied and to show support, Jeff has arranged a weekend getaway with two other couples, chartering a small plane for a camping and fishing trip in the northwest, off the coast of Washington state. Engine trouble forces the plane to land at what appears to be a deserted island. The three couples--Jeff and Cynthia; Rob (Mark Lindsay Chapman) and Lynn (Fiona Hutchison); and Paul (Stephen Shellen) and Terri (Carolyn Barclay)--find an old cottage with the door unlocked, the inside a luddite fantasy land with no TV, phone, or electricity, looking frozen in time 50 years earlier. They mock the decor and old-fashioned clothing and generally act like assholes until the homeowners return. Ma (Yvonne De Carlo) welcomes the obnoxious strangers but Pa (Rod Steiger, in a brief exploitation B-movie phase after 1987's THE KINDRED and CATCH THE HEAT) isn't pleased, though one can hardly blame him considering the condescending tone of his uninvited guests.

Pa insists a local mechanic can't look at the plane until morning, so the three couples reluctantly stay the night, though Pa refuses to let the couples share a bed under his roof. There's also Ma and Pa's three children, mentally-stunted adults who look 50 but still dress and behave like little kids: daughter Fanny (Janet Wright), who's endlessly chipper, wears a little girl's dress and is "mom" to a mummified infant. The two sons are snotty, bratty Woody (Michael J. Pollard) and oafish Teddy (William Hootkins), both of whom are jealous of the men, especially when horny Fanny sets her sights on Jeff because she's tired of having sex with her brothers. It isn't long before Ma and Pa (probably brother and sister), and the kids start killing off the guests, with final girl Cynthia, already in a fragile state of mind, ultimately submitting to their will and becoming an adopted member of the family and someone to join lonely Fanny when she wants to play with her "big dolls," skeletons of past victims kept hanging in the basement.

Hough and screenwriters Burt Wetanson (a writer on the Saturday morning cartoon series THE SMURFS, of all things) and Michael Vines wisely keep things relatively restrained, considering the inherent parade of grotesqueries that make up the plot. A lot of it--the incest, the necrophilia--is implied rather than shown which, if done right, can make it even more disturbing and icky, and Hough is more concerned with suspense and dark humor than in-your-face gore and grossout. Pa, Ma, and the kids are perfectly cast, with a seething Steiger doing his Steiger thing, overacting even as he's saying grace. The kids are creepy as hell, though Pollard (an Oscar-nominee for 1967's BONNIE AND CLYDE) made a career out of playing weirdos and Hootkins (Porkins in STAR WARS) would explore further pervy depravity in his legendary performance doing the Wibberly-Wobberly Walk in Richard Stanley's 1990 classic HARDWARE. The standout is De Carlo--in a great late-career role for Lily Munster herself--giving her dialogue a folksy, homespun delivery (exclaiming things like "Land sakes, child!" and "You're not so growed up you don't need your 40 winks!") that's as unsettling as it is funny. Canadian actress Torgov, best known for 1979's MEATBALLS and as the wife of blind musician Tom Sullivan (Marc Singer) in 1982's IF YOU COULD SEE WHAT I HEAR, more or less gets lost in the shuffle given the five batshit performances going on around her, but she's quite effective as a shattered woman trying to cling to some shred of sanity. She does have one great moment, brainwashed and in a matching dress given to her by Fanny, where she flashes a maniacal grin after finishing her dinner, beaming with pride as she asks "Am I a clean-plate clubber now, Ma?" As good as she is here, Torgov nevertheless retired from acting after AMERICAN GOTHIC, married TV producer/writer Douglas Steinberg (PSYCH, BOSTON PUBLIC), and became a painter and children's book illustrator. Now that it's out on Blu-ray, perhaps AMERICAN GOTHIC's day has finally arrived. It's a forgotten late '80s treasure deserving of a bigger cult than it has, and it's held up very nicely over the last 30 years.

Retro Review: BIGGLES (1986)

BIGGLES
(UK - 1986; US release 1988)

Directed by John Hough. Written by John Groves and Kent Walwin. Cast: Neil Dickson, Alex Hyde-White, Peter Cushing, Fiona Hutchison, Marcus Gilbert, William Hootkins, Alan Polonsky, Francesca Gonshaw, Michael Siberry, James Saxon, Daniel Flynn. (PG, 93 mins)

Based on Captain W.E. Johns' long-running series of Biggles adventures for young readers, published from 1932 until several years after Johns' death in 1968, BIGGLES had a strong foundation in British pop culture, even though the books--nearly 100 altogether--were largely unknown in the US. Focusing on the ongoing adventures of WWI fighter pilot James "Biggles" Bigglesworth, the books moved ahead with the times (Biggles would later fight in WWII, and so on), and remained popular throughout its publishing run. There was a short-lived British TV series in 1960, but wasn't until the mid-1980s until someone attempted a movie adaptation and by then, Biggles had grown passe and British youth had moved on. To make it more commercially appealing to the savvy, video-game kids of the '80s, the producers of BIGGLES decided to add sci-fi and time-traveling to the script since BACK TO THE FUTURE was a huge hit at the time. Now, before we get to Biggles himself, we're introduced to this film's Marty McFly in Jim Ferguson (Alex Hyde-White), a rising TV-dinner executive in NYC who's repeatedly sucked back in time to WWI France, where he keeps meeting Biggles (Neil Dickson). Ferguson is informed by elderly Col. Raymond (Peter Cushing), who was Biggles' commanding officer in the war, that he and Biggles are "time twins," with one summoned through holes in time to help when the other is in life-threatening danger. Ferguson eventually travels to London to be instructed in the ways of time travel by Raymond, and goes back to 1917 to accompany Biggles and his pals Algy (Michael Sibbery), Bertie (James Saxon), and Ginger (Daniel Flynn) on their mission to thwart evil German pilot and recurring Biggles villain Eric Van Stalhein (Marcus Gilbert), who has created a lethal sound weapon whose intensity is such that it can burn and melt flesh.

Though competently made and inoffensively watchable, BIGGLES is an almost total misfire. It's never able to overcome the black hole at the center that is Hyde-White's bland, boring shrug of a performance. Ferguson is a passive observer throughout the film, so much so that the time travel element is completely superfluous and comes off as exactly what it is: an obvious, desperate attempt to collect some BACK TO THE FUTURE table scraps. Ferguson never really serves a purpose once he's back in 1917 with Biggles other than functioning as anachronistic comic relief, such as when he hurls an electric razor at some German soldiers and they think it's a bomb. And humor's really the only reason for Biggles to eventually go through a hole in time and end up in present-day London, where he flies a high-tech helicopter back through to 1917 and promptly freaks everyone out with what they call a "flying windmill." British kids weren't reading Biggles adventures by 1986 anymore and the sci-fi and time travel elements come off as cynical ploys to cash in on a recognizable brand name. Someone like Terry Gilliam probably could've made a fun BIGGLES that was true to the stories, or at the very least, made the time-travel angle work, but John Hough, a journeyman who's made some revered cult classics over his career (TWINS OF EVIL, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY), is in total yes-man, director-for-hire mode here. It looks pretty cheap, too, with some stock footage shots of NYC followed by an obvious London backlot that looks even less convincing than the NYC neighborhood of DEATH WISH 3, and the "lightning bolt" time travel visual effects are rudimentary at best. While Hyde-White is a complete blank as Ferguson, Dickson, who went on to a busy career in ADR and video game voice work, has some fun as Biggles, and the iconic Cushing, in what would prove to be his final film appearance (he retired from acting after BIGGLES and died in 1994), lends some authoritarian gravitas and genuine emotion to his few sporadic appearances as Raymond.

The film kicks off in the most 1986 way imaginable, with a rarity in the theme song "Do You Want To Be a Hero?" by then-Yes frontman Jon Anderson. There's also contributions from Deep Purple ("Knocking at Your Back Door") and Motley Crue ("Knock 'Em Dead Kid"), and the closing credits song "No Turning Back" ended up being the entire output of The Immortals, a one-off supergroup assembled just for the soundtrack, featuring Queen bassist John Deacon and occasional Alan Parsons Project vocalist Lenny Zakatek. BIGGLES tries to be a hip adventure epic for '80s audiences, but the dated source material just doesn't gel with the hard rock, special effects presentation. It was also another in a brief craze of wartime aviation adventure stories being made at the time: in addition to BIGGLES, there was SKY BANDITS and the John Hargreaves-starring SKY PIRATES, all of which bombed at the box office in 1986. Even boasting a tie-in video game, BIGGLES was an expensive flop in its native UK and it took two years before the short-lived New Century/Vista dumped it in a few US theaters with no publicity at all in early 1988. Running 108 minutes in the UK, the film was cut down to 93 and rechristened BIGGLES: ADVENTURES IN TIME for America, since no one in the States knew anything about the Biggles stories. Upon a cursory mention, the goofy name "Biggles" might've even led people to think it was another GREMLINS knockoff along the lines of GHOULIES and MUNCHIES. While it never really comes together as far as purpose and storytelling are concerned, BIGGLES does earn a little cred for some spectacular aerial sequences and some effective use of the ruins of the Beckton Gasworks, a location memorably featured as Hue City in the second half of Stanley Kubrick's FULL METAL JACKET. BIGGLES was recently rescued from obscurity by Kino Lorber, who released it on Blu-ray in its 93-minute American cut (the packaging erroneously lists it as the 108-minute version), with new interviews with Dickson and Hyde-White, both of whom have fond memories of the shoot and working with the legendary Cushing, even if the movie wasn't a success. The genre-hopping Hough, who enjoyed a brief tenure in the late '70s and early '80s as a go-to guy for Disney live action (he directed ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, RETURN FROM WITCH MOUNTAIN, and THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS), next helmed a pair of 1988 horror films--the underrated AMERICAN GOTHIC and the dismal HOWLING IV: THE ORIGINAL NIGHTMARE--before mainly focusing on TV movies. Now 76 and apparently retired, he hasn't directed since the low-budget 2002 Patsy Kensit horror movie HELL'S GATE.

New on Blu-ray: OUTLAND (1981), ALTERED STATES (1980), and TWINS OF EVIL (1971)

OUTLAND
(UK - 1981)

Conceived by writer-director Peter Hyams (CAPRICORN ONE) as an outer-space western, OUTLAND finally gets a worthwhile home video presentation on Blu-ray.  The long out-of-print DVD was one of the first issued in the format and was utterly abysmal in quality.  OUTLAND did generally well at the box office in 1981 and has always been held in high regard by genre fans, and despite a couple of dubious effects shots late in the film, it's aged very well.  Sean Connery is O'Niel, a Federal Marshal assigned to a one-year tour heading the police force on Io, the third moon of Jupiter, where Con-Am runs a very profitable titanium ore mining facility. Sheppard (Peter Boyle), Con-Am's manager on Io, is very proud of his operation's increased productivity and profitability and politely tells O'Niel to just go with the flow.  O'Niel senses something fishy when two miners have psychotic episodes resulting in their deaths.  Sheppard orders the bodies sent back to the space station off Jupiter but O'Niel manages to get a blood sample from one and with the help of curmudgeonly, hard-drinking Dr. Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), finds traces of a powerful experimental drug that allows users to stay up for days on end, thus increasing their furious work output.  The side effects, Lazarus says, are that continued use can cause complete psychotic breaks after 10 or 11 months.  Sheppard and some associates are running the drug operation into Io, and as long as productivity, profits, and bonuses are high, everyone, including O'Niel's deputy Montone (Hyams regular James B. Sikking), is content to look the other way.  When O'Niel doesn't back down, Sheppard and Con-Am execs decide to bring in three hit men from the space station to kill him, and it's here that OUTLAND turns into essentially a post-STAR WARS variation on HIGH NOON, complete with a large digital clock in a sleazy Io bar showing the countdown to the next shuttle arrival.  Like Gary Cooper's Will Kane, Connery's O'Niel is forced to face the killers alone (with a little help from Lazarus), as an entire work force of minors and even his own deputies prove unwilling to help him. 

OUTLAND is a top-notch sci-fi thriller and the miniatures and matte work still look superb and are more convincing today than most CGI.  The cast is terrific--Connery and Sternhagen make an unlikely and very likable team, and Boyle is memorably smug, telling Connery to "go home and polish your badge...you're dealing with grown-ups here."  It's a film that's fallen through the cracks over the years, but hopefully this proper HD presentation will allow it--and Hyams, a very underrated director and wonderfully snappy writer who was unstoppable in his 1974-1990 prime--to find a new audience.  Hyams provides a newly-recorded commentary that covers all elements of the production (he wanted to call it IO, but everyone kept mistaking it for 10), with a lot of interesting Connery stories (they also worked together on 1988's THE PRESIDIO).  Also with Clarke Peters (THE WIRE, TREME), Steven Berkoff, and John Ratzenberger as a freaked-out miner whose head explodes in the opening scene. (R, 109 mins)

ALTERED STATES
(US - 1980)

It's a testament to just how much filmmaking, marketing, and audiences have changed over the last 30 or so years when one considers that Ken Russell's surreal, philosophical, challenging, jargon-heavy, sensory-deprivation, devolution sci-fi/horror mindfuck was not only bankrolled by a major Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.) with an unknown (William Hurt in his debut) in the lead role, but it was released in theaters on Christmas Day 1980. ALTERED STATES tells the story of psych professor Eddie Jessup's (Hurt) search for the Ultimate Truth via isolation tank and a hallucinogenic mushroom-based solution concocted by an indigenous Mexican tribe that's purported to take one back to "first soul" and be "propelled into the void."  The more time he spends in the tank with himself as the experiment, monitored by a colleague (Bob Balaban), an endocrinologist (Charles Haid), and later, his estranged wife (Blair Brown), the more Jessup's genetic makeup devolves with horrifying results.  Written by Paddy Chayefsky (NETWORK), who fought with Russell and took his professional name off the finished film (going by his real name, Sidney Aaron), ALTERED STATES is pretty deep and heady stuff, filled with stunning (though a bit dated today) imagery and visual effects and room-shaking sound (which got an Oscar nod).  As ambitious and thought-provoking film as it is, it probably ranks as one of Russell's more strangely commercial films, and the one-sheet depicting Hurt upside-down in the flotation tank immediately became an iconic image.  The film (also featuring Drew Barrymore, in her first film as well, playing one of Hurt's young daughters) instantly put Hurt on the map as an actor to watch and he'd have an Oscar within five years for 1985's KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN.  Hurt is so familiar as a reliable character actor in supporting roles these days that it's easy to forget he was an A-list star in the 1980s.  The new HD transfer for the Blu-ray release is crystal clear and absolutely beautiful.  The only extra is a trailer, but at a relatively low price, this is the best ALTERED STATES has ever looked.  (R, 103 mins)

TWINS OF EVIL
(UK - 1971)

Hammer's box office appeal may have been in decline by the early 1970s, but some of the studio's best films were being made in this period, as evidenced by John Hough's TWINS OF EVIL, just out on Blu-ray from Synapse Films.  The third in the studio's "Karnstein" trilogy (after 1970's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS and 1971's LUST FOR A VAMPIRE), based on the works of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, TWINS OF EVIL has twin Playboy playmates Mary and Madeleine Collinson as orphans sent to live with their puritanical, cold-hearted uncle Gustav (Peter Cushing), a local witchfinder who leads a group of religious fanatics called The Brotherhood, finding presumed witches and burning them at the stake.  One of the twins falls under the spell of Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas, who has a strange resemblance to Jimmy Fallon), a wealthy, well-connected Satanist whose activities have awakened undead vampire Mircalla (Katya Wyeth).  Written by Tudor Gates and featuring David Warbeck and Dennis Price, TWINS OF EVIL is a highly enjoyable cult horror classic that showcases elements of the newly-explicit vampire genre (Hammer was taking advantage of the increasing demand for gore and nudity) and gave Cushing an opportunity to take part in the then-trendy "witchfinder" films popularized by 1968's THE WITCHFINDER GENERAL (with Vincent Price), 1970's THE BLOODY JUDGE (with Christopher Lee), and 1970's MARK OF THE DEVIL (with Herbert Lom).  Cushing turns in one of his all-time great performances here, showing the complexities of noble intentions gone horrifically awry.  Cushing's wife died unexpectedly shortly before filming began, and he's bringing a wide range of emotions to his role here as his Gustav is ultimately both terrifying and tragic.  Synapse's Blu-ray transfer is absolutely impeccable, and it's loaded with bonus features, including the feature-length documentary THE FLESH AND THE FURY, which explores the works of Le Fanu, the "Karnstein" trilogy, and the making of TWINS OF EVIL, with appearances by genre luminaries and historians like Joe Dante, Kim Newman, Tim Lucas, Ted Newsom, David J. Skal, and Sir Christopher Frayling, in addition to TWINS co-star Thomas and director Hough.  One of 2012's best Blu-ray releases.  (Unrated, 87 mins)