I thought it would be a good time to congratulate all the folks involved with LONGLEGS, as they jumped over the $50 million mark last week after only 12 days in theaters. Damn, way to go, guys! I guess this has taught us one thing–never underestimate the power of Nicolas Cage.
With no concrete streaming date announced yet, it should bring in another few million before getting lost in the latest onslaught of pre-Labor Day family blockbusters, including (deep breath) DESPICABLE ME 4, INSIDE OUT 2, THE GARFIELD MOVIE, a re-re-re-release of THE LION KING (seriously?), and SAVING BIKINI BOTTOM: THE SANDY CHEEKS MOVIE (okay, that one does sound pretty bitchin’, actually).
Don’t worry, fright fans, Halloween is only three months away. Our time is nigh!
A long 36 years ago today, George A. Romero’s MONKEY SHINES debuted. Here’s a full page advert I saved from all those years ago.
Despite some solid marketing of the film by Orion, it ultimately floundered at the box office. Even Romero’s then-wife, Christine, went on record saying it was the “toughest shoot” the Romero camp had encountered up to that point. Was it too idiosyncratic for audiences? Possibly. I’m willing to bet it was the title that killed it, though–it was a cute pun, but ultimately a bad choice for an adult thriller.
Somehow, the news of Dario Argento having a television show in the early 1970s fell outside the range of my horror radar. I may have heard about it many years ago in passing, but availability for the series here in the US was scant at best until after the turn of the 21st century.
DOOR INTO DARKNESS (or “La Porta sul Buio” for you purists) was a four-episode lark produced by Argetno for RAI – Radiotelevisione Italiana back in September 1973. Chronologically, it filled the horror maestro’s genre sabbatical that fell between FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (1971) and his magnum opus, DEEP RED (1975).
The show aligned perfectly with Argento’s giallo sensibilities but, because of the limitations put on small-screen violence, the show leaned heavier on crime drama aspects. That’s not to say the show wasn’t suspenseful, as evidenced by “The Tram”, the first episode filmed (and second broadcast), which sports an efficient, nail-biting conclusion to a murder mystery set on the titular form of public transport.
However, the series’ premier offering, “The Neighbor”, injects an even higher dose of terror. The audience willingly tags along as we watch a young couple slowly realize their new neighbor is a murderer. Sure, there are egregious mistakes made by stalker and victims alike–we gotta wrap this up in under an hour, folks!–but it all leads to a nicely understated ending that seemed perfect for a bite-sized, prime-time giallo. Naturally, Argento’s fingerprints are all over the production, but this episode was actually helmed by Luigi Cozzi, fellow countryman responsible for the noted ALIEN rip CONTAMINATION (1980), and who also worked on later Argento flicks such as PHENOMENA, TWO EVIL EYES, and THE STENDHAL SYNDROME. Cozzi turns in some of his most disciplined writing and directorial work here, anchored by a windy seaside setting and serviceable performances all around.
After languishing in the grey-market shadows for years, MYA Communications issued a DVD release for DOOR INTO DARKNESS back in 2009. However, Severin Films is queuing up to include the entire series as part of its DARIO ARGENTO’S DEEP CUTS release slated for the second half of 2024. If you’re an Argento completist, or just want to dive a little deeper into the giallo pool, this ain’t a bad place to start.
I went back and caught the fully uncut version of this recently. Since I originally didn’t take to it the way I had with Stuart Gordon’s other bangers such as RE-ANIMATOR (1985), DOLLS (1987), THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1991), and DAGON (2001), I’m pleased to report it’s growing on me with age. I’ll watch damn near anything with Ken Foree, so that helps, too.
If you’re going to infringe on someone’s copyright, go big or go home.
Horror is one of art’s oldest genres. It also happens to be one of the most lucrative ones. There’s an incredibly simple reason for this: For every original success story within the genre, there are a hundred copycats just waiting to dig their claws into the coattails of their inspiration and ride their way to a quick buck.
Though it’s been largely forgotten in the wake of a newer crop of devilish thrillers, BEYOND THE DOOR (also known as THE DEVIL WITHIN HER internationally) will ultimately endure for a number of whacky reasons. Its original surprise success was very likely the reason for its notoriety–namely that it ended up being one of the only films you’ll ever see that had its ass sued off by the rights owners of the “inspiring” source material.
Warner Bros. took one look at the head-turning, vomit-blasting, profanity-filled possession romp and immediately phoned their attorneys. Sure, they had a point (and won the case, to boot), but let’s look at the two real reasons BEYOND THE DOOR made more than 20 times its budget in the US alone.
First, let’s talk marketing. You gotta admit director Ovidio G. Assonitis worked fast, getting his “tribute” into theaters less than a year after THE EXORCIST first exploded onto the horror scene. Even more admirable were its original TV spots. These should have won some kind of early Clio Award for destroying the minds of an entire generation of American children. Just imagine the shitstorm this created when it popped up in the middle of something like “The Waltons”.
Next, we’ve got to take a peek at the casting. Just a few years earlier, Emmy Award-winner Juliet Mills was playing a proper, yet keenly intuitive English nanny on TV’s “Nanny and the Professor”. Here, both her head and her career take a 180-degree turn. When she’s not having violent mood swings and eating discarded bananas, Mills is levitating and doing kooky things with her eyes (trust me, you’ll know it when you see it). Talk about going against type!
But if we’re going to talk about casting, there’s no way we can ignore Mills’ two kids, who are hands-down the best thing in the film. These tots are barely out of kindergarten, but they curse like they’re already enrolled in the Samuel L. Jackson School of Technology. Also, the film’s seven writers pulled their collective genius to give these little semen demons arguably the most entertaining dialogue of the mid-70s, which, in hindsight, might be more normal than you might think if you have to endure a devil-possessed mother. The line “Man, if you don’t quit crying, you’re gonna have a real bad trip!” is so righteous, I hang out with unstable people just so I can work that ripper in conversation.
To celebrate a half-century of all this nutty bullshittery, go treat yourself to the Code Red or Arrow Films release of BEYOND THE DOOR on Blu-ray. Why? Because it not only contains the original cut of the film, but also the extended European versionsuitable for all of you who have absolutely no shame (and that’s basically 93% of the people reading this article–bless all of you and your perverted little hearts).
Here’s something amusing to get your Monday started off right.
If I’m remembering correctly, this is a review of William Lustig’s grindhouse classic, MANIAC, taken from People Magazine back in early 1981. We’re going back over 40 years here, so forgive me if I’m wrong.
The poor reviewer who was saddled with this assignment didn’t seem to find the entertainment value in scalping people and then letting your mannequins take first crack at modeling them. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all. As Alan Thicke once sang, “It takes different strokes to move the world, yes it does”.
Suspenseful and intense, DEAD CALM is Australia’s buried treasure just waiting to be found.
It’s an age-old story: entertaining and well-constructed films that flounder at the box office. Even horror’s great directors couldn’t escape this phenomenon in the 80s. Carpenter’s THE THING was indeed too much of a good thing for audiences. Cronenberg’s prescient VIDEODROME might still be ahead of its time. The walls of Tobe Hooper’s THE FUNHOUSE fell in on itself in the face of stiff competition, and even Argento’s razor-sharp classic, TENEBRAE, couldn’t get asses in the seats. They were flops one and all in their day before finding their audience in later years.
Though it was a highwater mark for 1980s Australian filmmaking, DEAD CALM is still awaiting its renaissance.
Later making bank with the Tom Clancy adaptations PATRIOT GAMES and CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER, director Phillip Noyce opts to open his story with a stark, near-wordless exposition. We’re witness to a shattering car accident that takes the life of John and Rae Ingram’s young son. Afterward, they set sail on the open sea, taking refuge in the vast isolation of the Great Barrier Reef in an effort to finally heal from the tragedy.
Everything seems placid, even hopeful, until a desperate man named Hughie shows up in a rowboat begging for help. His friends have died of food poisoning on a nearby pleasure craft and, in the wake of their recent trauma, the Ingrams are at first reluctant to believe or investigate his story. Eventually John checks out the dilapidated craft, only to find all of Hughie’s friends have been hideously murdered, not poisoned. This jumpstarts a nail-biting and artfully-balanced game of cat-and-mouse that finds Rae using all her cunning to survive the loony and devilishly persuasive Hughie while her husband fights to stay alive on the madman’s ship, a floating blood-stained murder scene bloated with corpses and slowly beginning to take on water.
Few films of its era are able to sustain suspense better than DEAD CALM, and there are numerous people to credit for its success. Noyce and editor Richard Francis-Bruce keep both settings hopping as Graeme Revell’s score huffs and puffs in the background. Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman (in one of her first major roles) breathe humanity and tenacity alike into their roles as the Ingrams, while a pre-TITANIC Billy Zane chews the scenery admirably as Hughie. The smart, kinetic screenplay was written by Terry Hayes and adapted from the novel of the same name by Charles Williams, who took inspiration from the Bluebelle, a Florida-based ketch that was the site of multiple murder in the early 1960s.
Another of the film’s most interesting footnotes is that it was slated to be made 25 years earlier by none other than Orson Welles. The project, initially entitled THE DEEP and similarly adapted from Williams’ novel, unfortunately fell during the CITIZEN KANE auteur’s lean 60s era, which found him continually plagued by hubris and bad business decisions as he became an aging, fading star.
Though Noyce’s project fared better than Welles’, its box office receipts were underwhelming on both sides of the Pacific–it barely made back its AU$10 million budget at home while only eking out a US tally just shy of $8 million. Though critics have been historically fond of the film, and in recent years The New York Times even tagged it on their best 1,000 films list, DEAD CALM still floats out there on the horizon as a treasure waiting to be found by international terror film fans.
Ah, the dog days of summer in the 80s always remind me of sprinklers, camping, box fans, tight suntanned bods, and of course…ELM STREET 2!
My stepsister and I must have watched this about 500 times during the summer of 1986. I remember her saying years later that she still can’t watch it because over our Freddy overindulgence back in the day. I guess you *can* have too much of a good thing.
Yes, it’s probably the least essential entry from the first three Freddy flicks, but it’s full of you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it moments. The exploding bird. The bare-assed gym teacher getting towel-whipped. The Limahl poster. That “Touch Me All Night Long” dance. They’re all here–just as tacky and wonderful as you remember them.
This is a full-page Media Home Entertainment advert I saved from that memorable summer trumpeting Freddy’s home video return.
And remember, you may have the body, baby, but Krueger’s got the brains.
UNBOUND HORROR BLOG 