Long before the internet, “Terror in the Aisles” offered up a very uneven but very satisfying compilation for fright fans.
Kids nowadays have no idea what we had to do to catch our favorite horror films in the ‘olden days’. Sleepovers at your rich friend’s house. HBO free preview weekends. Swiping your grandfather’s video store card. Hell, my generation put as much effort into seeing verboten movies as we did into getting laid.
Forty years ago this month, Universal Pictures was putting some real muscle behind the release of TERROR IN THE AISLES, a scattershot documentary highlighting some of the most suspenseful and violent moments from more than 50 years of film. From straight-up horror offerings such as PSYCHO and JAWS, sci-fi terrors like ALIEN and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, and even uber-violent action films like VICE SQUAD, MS .45, and NIGHTHAWKS, TERROR IN THE AISLES promised heart-pounding scares in spades.
Universal seemed to pump a lot of money into the release, probably because acquiring all the rights to make the damn thing undoubtedly cost a pretty penny. Its accompanying TV spots featured everyone’s favorite pair of horror boobs, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and, in one of my geekiest horror fan moments, I actually sat by the VCR for over six hours to tape those commercials. I can’t believe I just admitted that. (Yes, I think I still have the tape.)
My mother was famous for fainting at the sight of blood. When cleaning, she would duck into my bedroom to give it a quick dusting, keeping her eyes down so as not to catch sight of its gore-plastered walls. As you might assume, she wisely opted out of being my chaperone for TERROR IN THE AISLES. (That head explosion from SCANNERS alone would have sent her screaming for the exits.) Therefore, one of her co-workers was drafted in her place, and off we went for one of the more memorable horror outings of my childhood.
The film worked on a clever albeit lowest-common-denominator level in that its droll hosts, Nancy Allen and Donald Pleasance, offered all their snarky comments in narrative bumpers from inside a packed movie house. It was a neat little juxtaposition for the audiences of TERROR IN THE AISLES to watch our onscreen proxies call out characters for their bad choices (“Don’t drop the knife, asshole!”) or get busted by ushers for toking on joints. This set-up gets even more interesting when we see Allen sex it up in clips from Brian De Palma’s DRESSED TO KILL, or Pleasance give his spiel in HALLOWEEN about Michael Myers being the personification of evil.
One of the most amusing things about TERROR IN THE AISLES was the fact that, even though every single clip featured had been granted nothing more severe than an “R” rating by the MPAA (now known simply as the MPA), the documentary was initially slapped with an “X” rating until the producers pared down some of its more intense sequences.
When the dust from its opening weekend had settled, the film ended up being inched out of the top spot at the US box office by a mere $10,000. The winner? Just a little film you may have heard of called THE TERMINATOR, which debuted in theaters the very same day.
Despite its surprise success, TERROR IN THE AISLES fell into obscurity in the wake of the internet’s era of instant gratification–suddenly, anyone could go to YouTube and make their own damn version of it. However, for fright neophytes and hardcore horror fans alike, I highly recommend the awesome Shout Factory blu-ray release. Not only do you get a fine transfer of Universal’s theatrical version, you get as a bonus the radically different ‘television cut’ of the film, which is ironically over ten minutes longer!
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