Released and Abandoned: The Podcast

There's more to me than just words on a page!  There are also words in your ears, which I provide via the "Released and Abandoned" podcast below.  Feel free to click play, sit back, relax, and listen to my dulcet tones discuss the issues with video store nostalgia.

Music: "Betamax Defender and the Vinyl Kid" at freesoundtrackmusic.com.

Schroedinger's VHS Tape and the enigma of STORM

I’ve owned a copy of STORM, a thriller that started filming in 1986, was completed in 1987, released to theaters in 1988 and finally issued on VHS in 1989, for years.  The label indicates that it once resided at Hollywood Video, so my guess is that I picked it up when that franchise was getting rid of all of their VHS tapes, allowing customers to fill a grocery bag of the bulky medium for twenty bucks.  My bizarre fascination with the film, however, dates back before that, as we carried the film amongst our thousands of other titles at my aforementioned workplace, Video Visions.  There’s nothing remarkable or noteworthy about the movie – it’s got a no-name cast, and outside of some decent cover art, there’s nothing in particular that would draw someone to the box in order to rent it.

That is, except for Patrick.

Patrick was a co-worker at Video Visions, and one of my favorite people to work alongside.  An eternally cheery person, Patrick could always be counted on to talk movies, and he had a wealth of knowledge about the store’s huge inventory.  And for some reason, he kept trying to get people to watch STORM.

It may not have been intended as a sincere recommendation.  It may have been a running joke that started long before I became employed there – Patrick may have watched the movie once out of curiosity and he may just mentioned it at first sarcastically, as though replying to a request for a recommendation with the most generic response possible.  If this was the case, this line had been long-since blurred, and any sense that the choice of STORM was meant ironically had been distorted.  As a result, Patrick would bring up STORM on several occasions, mildly suggesting that I watch it, without any real sense that the movie was either some unseen classic or that the recommendation was meant as a joke.  It was simply there, instilling in me a sense that STORM was a movie that was, in some way or another, worth seeing.

The whole time I worked at Video Visions, I never actually watched STORM.  I never gave in to Patrick’s advice, as I could never really tell if it was serious or not.  Part of this was out of uncertainty – what if I hated STORM and Patrick was being sincere in his recommendation?  Or worse, what if I loved it and Patrick had meant pointing out the film as an example of what not to do in a thriller?  There could be no guaranteed correct answer, so I never took the plunge.

I never even took the plunge years later, after I acquired the movie on VHS, long after I’d ceased working at Video Visions.  I purchased the film, sure, but just to have a copy, in case I ever wanted to take the plunge into knowing what this mysterious film was about.  (This proved to be a good idea, as the film has never surfaced on DVD or on any streaming service – the 1989 release via a struggling Cannon Films may prove to be the film’s final resting place.)  It would take up space in my collection for years, a Schroedinger’s VHS Tape that was both a great, underrated thriller and a bland, unremarkable footnote in my eyes, the tape itself untouched by VCR heads for decades.  The tape itself looked brand new, so it’s certainly possible that even when available for rental at Hollywood Video, it never left the shelf.

Until last night.

Yesterday evening, I decided to end the mystery.  I popped the VHS copy of STORM into my VCR and let it play.  And I understood.

Patrick was messing with me.

STORM is an unremarkable Canadian thriller directed by David Winning, who would later helm TURBO: A POWER RANGERS MOVIE.  The plot concerns a pair of college lads who decide to go camping, only to have their truck break down in the middle of the forest, where they spot a trio of elderly men digging up the score for a bank heist made 40 years ago.  The rest of the film features the former robbers facing off against the two teenagers, running around the forest and occasionally having hallucinations.

That’s all there is to the film, and when I discovered thatit’s based on a short that the director had made in 1979, I wasn’t the least bit surprised, as it feels like a 30-minute film stretched out to feature length.  There are long dream sequences that establish nothing.  There is lots of running around in the forest.  There’s a set-up involving the two kids being into a simulated hunting game that doesn’t really amount to anything.  (The VHS box, in fact, compares the movie to the paintball-espionage thriller GOTCHA!, which it’s nothing like.)  It’s a slow, if not particularly bad, film – I wonder what the original 79-minute cut was like before the producers made the director tack on an extra 20 minutes for no good reason.

There’s nothing, however, that really makes STORM particularly noteworthy, leading me to believe that Patrick’s strange obsession with it was merely a long-term personal gag.  I completely understand this – I’ve got a bizarre fascination with 1991’s horror pic DEMON WIND even though there’s basically nothing special about it. 

Of course, I could still be missing something.  Or maybe the secret to STORM was relegated to that particular incarnation of VHS tape, the one that gathered dust in an east side Milwaukee video store for over a decade before vanishing to parts unknown, and another copy of the cassette, maintained by a giant conglomerate of home video, could never hope to recapture its magic.  Or maybe, just maybe, STORM is just a boring movie with some decent cover art that happened to strike a co-worker’s fancy for no discernable reason.  

Patrick, if you’re out there, send me an explanation.

THE HOUSEKEEPER and the close relationship thrillers of the '80s and '90s

The ‘80s and ‘90s were a time of thrillers, and one of the most prominent subgenres of thrillers in the era were those in which a person with whom an audience member may have normal contact with on a regular basis was secretly a psychopath intent on killing everyone around them.  These thrillers were usually given a minimalist title, describing the association to our leads – THE STEPFATHER started it all, but the likes of THE TEMP, THE PAPERBOY, THE CRUSH, THE SECRETARY, THE SISTER-IN-LAW, THE EX and THE BANKER soon followed.  (The genre soon petered out with the desperate THE GREENSKEEPER and THE CATCHER, thankfully sparing us the sight of a latte-slinging murderer in THE BARRISTA.)  Sure, some films in the genre had slightly more imaginative titles (witness SINGLE WHITE FEMALE and THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE), but the formula was the same: A stranger inserts themselves into our hero or heroine’s life, they become a trusted confidant, and soon dead bodies start showing up whenever someone comes between our titular character and the protagonist.

1986’s THE HOUSEKEEPER would fit neatly into this mold, had it not originally been shot under the title A JUDGMENT IN STONE, taken from the Edgar Award-winning Ruth Rendall novel on which it was based.  Produced in Canada  by Castle Hill productions (whose output regularly lined the video store shelves in VHS form, but has mostly been relegated to obscurity), the film certainly features several standard thriller tropes, but there’s enough intriguing twists and commentary on social constructs in order to set it above the standard straight-to-video fare.  It’s not too surprising that the same material was used again less than a decade later, when French thriller director Claude Chabrol adapted the story in 1995 for the significantly artier LA CEREMONIE.  

THE HOUSEKEEPER stars British ‘60s icon Rita Tushingham as Eunice, an embittered woman who suffocates her abusive father via pillow in the opening scene.  Feigning ignorance as to his death, she’s soon on her way from Great Britain to America (the Canadian setting is never specified nor hidden) to work for an upper-middle class couple with two children, both from the couple’s previous marriages.  The family, however, is not aware of Eunice’s secret – due to undiagnosed dyslexia, she never learned to read, and becomes increasingly frustrated when confronted with her own limitations.

While continuing to be aloof with the family in order to hide her illiteracy, she befriends local postal shop employee Joan, played to the hilt by Canadian character actress Jackie Burroughs.  Joan is a reformed prostitute, who has struck back against sin to the extent of religious zealotry, and her slow influence of Eunice preys on her already-fragile psyche.  After a slow build, the film climaxes in a scene of brutal violence, in which “class warfare” takes on a very literal meaning.

Most reviews of the film weren’t quite sure what to make of the film, and it’s true that it’s a bit of a mess.  The directorial debut (and, to date, swan song) of well-regarded cinematographer Ousama Rawi , the film has a very “made-for-television” feel to it, one that New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby mentions.  The plotting, however, is sound, and the performances of Tushingham and Burroughs make the film rise above your standard THE BLANK-styled thriller.  It’s no surprise that the film ended up being a mid-afternoon basic cable staple for years – it’s exactly the sort of film that’s perfect to fold laundry while watching.

And honestly, that's perfect for exactly the type of movie it is.  I love the "close relationship thriller" genre partially because it sticks with convention to the point of familiarity.  There's something deeply comforting about a genre whose staples you know so well that it almost lulls you to sleep - and that you don't feel like you missed anything if you dozed off for a moment or two.

Recycling Corman and 1995's A BUCKET OF BLOOD

In the 1960s and 1970s, Roger Corman established himself as the king of drive-in cinema, producing a seemingly endless stream of genre flicks made for minimal budgets and jump-starting the careers of future luminaries like Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, and Ron Howard.  By the 1990s, however, the titan of tightwads was losing relevancy.  The theatrical market for genre films was fading, and the video market was emerging with countless new competitors that looked the same as a Corman production to the customer on a video store shelf.

Corman’s New Concorde pictures was certainly prolific in this era, churning out innumerable erotic thrillers, Philippines-lensed action pics, family comedies and quickie horror franchises for the direct-to-video market.  While none of them became genuine classics like DEATH RACE 2000 or BOXCAR BERTHA, there were points of interest that stood above the standard product if only due to Corman’s hands-off policies that stated that as long as a film contained the prerequisite violence and T&A, a director could basically do what they wanted.  

Corman also took a curious tactic during this time period – revisiting proven hits in an attempt to bring them to a new audience.  Theatrically, this took the form of sequels, with unwanted revisitings of well-received Corman offerings like ROCK’N’ROLL HIGH SCHOOL FOREVER, SATURDAY THE 14^TH STRIKES BACK and HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD II getting minimal theater playdates before being dumped to video and being ignored.  When Corman struck a deal with pay-TV channel Showtime to produce a series of “Roger Corman Presents” films, he took the opportunity again, this time making direct remakes of the marketable would-be franchises PIRANHA, HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP, WASP WOMAN, NOT OF THIS EARTH (already remade by Corman a few years earlier) and A BUCKET OF BLOOD ostensibly for the television market but soon indistinguishable from any of the straight-to-video product of the time.

(This wasn’t the limit of Corman’s recycling.  Even ‘80s titles were fair game for the remake mill, under the idea that viewers wouldn’t notice the same script being used again.  Katt Shea’s 1990 film STREETS was remade as 1996’s RUMBLE IN THE STREETS, 1994’s ANGEL OF DESTRUCTION is a gender-swapped remake of 1992’s BLACKBELT, the script for 1989’s gothic romance DANCE OF THE DAMNED was back in 1994’s TO SLEEP WITH A VAMPIRE, and 1982’s FORBIDDEN WORLD became 1991’s DEAD SPACE.  I’d roughly estimate that at least half of Corman’s 90s films were created from screenplays that had already been made into films.)

The decision to remake A BUCKET OF BLOOD was an especially questionable one.  The original 1959 film, featuring Dick Miller as a dim-witted busboy in a beatnik bar who becomes an sensation of the hipster art world when he accidentally kills a cat and immerses it in plaster, is one of Corman’s cleverest films, but it’s one very rooted in the beatnik era.  While it’s highly entertaining as it pokes fun at artist clichés, it’s very reliant on the dialogue and the performance of Miller to make it work.

The remake, directed by future “Mad TV” regular Michael McDonald (and, at the time, a Corman film staple), changes the setting to the early ‘90s coffee house scene, but otherwise doesn’t tamper with the plot.  Some minor nudity is added, and there’s a bit more gore, but for the most part, the basic structure of the original classic is left intact.  Heck, even some of the dialogue is done verbatim, including an opening beat poem this time read by Shadoe Stevens, in fine form as one of the coffee house’s regular patrons.

Missing, however, is Miller’s entertaining Walter Paisley, whose affable loser persona is replaced by Anthony Michael Hall as a more grim, aloof Paisley, a character that’s not nearly engaging enough to carry the film.  It’s a strange decision, and one that keeps the 1995 A BUCKET OF BLOOD from being more than a pale shadow of the original.  While the original feels like a satire in which a likeable oaf finds himself in an increasingly hard-to-pull-off lie surrounded by over-the-top characters, the remake just feels like a bitter, angry, and rather dumb frustrated artist getting revenge on the clearly satirical characters around him.  It’s a role that’s meant to be played for comedy, or at least sympathy, and Hall plays Paisley as though he’s ten minutes from writing a manifesto against those who wronged him.

It’s even more puzzling as virtually everything else about the film seems to be on a satirical page.  From the Wurst Brothers’ jazzy score to goofy “avant-garde” performance art to the minor characters played by the likes of David Cross, Will Farrell, Jennifer Coolidge, Paul Bartel, Mink Stole, Alan Sues and Patrick Bristow (this aired the same month that SHOWGIRLS, featuring Bristow yelling at Elizabeth Hurley’s pelvis, was released) to co-star Justine Bateman’s ridiculous German-Italian accent, everyone involved seems to be aware that A BUCKET OF BLOOD is supposed to be a comedy.  Unfortunately, nobody let Hall in on the joke.

Box art courtesy IMDb.com

After airing on Showtime, the film was released to video by Corman’s own New Concorde films.  Curiously, the film was retitled THE DEATH ARTIST, with a cover eschewing any reference to the original film or the fact that the movie itself is a satire.  Bereft of any context for its existence and indistinguishable from countless erotic thrillers, the film, like most of Corman’s other remakes of the era, vanished into cultural oblivion, never even getting a DVD release.

It’s not even particularly memorable to the cast.  In a 2012 interview with David Cross, he mentions that he “never saw it” and dismisses it as “another kind of L.A. crowd all working with each other. I imagine there were other people that I know there.”  It’s a shame, as the 1995 A BUCKET OF BLOOD is on the verge of being a good film, but never quite gets its tone together to be more than a cult movie footnote.

OUT OF ORDER and the Up and Down World of Elevator Thrillers

I am a sucker for the elevator thriller genre.  I realize this sounds like an incredibly tiny field – it may seem like the cinematic equivalent of saying “I’m a sucker for the ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ sequel genre” – but it’s turned into a surprisingly robust grouping over the years.   Starting with the 1974 made-for-television film THE ELEVATOR, there have been more than a half-dozen feature-length films in which a group of disparate characters are confined to a single location whose vertical traction seems to have come to a complete halt.  In the past decade alone, we’ve seen the release of 2008’s BLACK OUT, 2011’s ELEVATOR, 2008’s DARK FLOORS and 2010’s DEVIL, produced and co-written by M. Night Shyamalan.  This doesn’t even count the Japanese-made 2004 film HELLEVATOR or ski-lift thrillers like 2010’s FROZEN that rely on similar aesthetics, or films that contain elevators as a cause for terror among many other factors, like 1993’s NIGHTMARE ON THE 13^TH FLOOR or 1994’s SPEED.   

Prior to DEVIL’s major theatrical release, the best-known elevator thriller was most likely Dick Maas’s 1983 film DE LIFT, a Netherlands-lensed tale of an evil elevator that received plenty of attention when it hit video stores in the United States in a dubbed form under the English title THE LIFT.  THE LIFT, it’s fair to say, isn’t a great film.  Most of the reviews of the film from both genre and mainstream critics are tepid, with Classic Horror’s Brandt Sponseller mentioning that “long segments… are veryboring” and the New York Times’ Janet Maslin commenting that “the execution is too tepid and controversial to amount to much.”

No, THE LIFT didn’t become a video hit because it was good.  It’s a strange, muddled film pitched halfway between horror and satire and unable to commit to either.  This, however, didn’t matter to the horror fan of the mid-1980s, who was desperate to rent anything that was eye-catching enough to stand out from the pack of similar-looking slasher films lining the shelves.  This is where THE LIFT shined, because whoever was designing the cover art for Media Home Entertainment, the company that distributed the film in the U.S., was certainly on point that day.

(Cover art courtesy scifi-movies.com)

THE LIFT’s gimmicky cover art and ridiculously alarmist tag line (“Take the stairs, take the stairs, for god’s sake, take the stairs!!”) made the film into something of a cult favorite, with horror fans over the next decade renting it under the idea that if it’s a killer elevator movie, it has to at least be interesting.  The film was successful enough that Maas even remade it in English in 2001, casting Naomi Watts and a number of well-known character actors.  Sadly, with more generic cover art, the film didn’t make as much of an impact – despite the well-known names, the remake still hasfewer votes on the IMDb than the original. 

THE LIFT, however, wasn’t the only European-lensed elevator thriller of the mid-‘80s.  ABWARTS, released in the United States under the title OUT OF ORDER, was a German-made thriller released the following year directed by Carl Schenkel, an up and coming filmmaker now best known as the director of crime thrillers KNIGHT MOVES and THE MIGHTY QUINN.  OUT OF ORDER, however, lacked THE LIFT’s supernatural component, campy feel and, most tellingly, lurid cover art, instead ending up promoted to video store customers as a generic thriller in which star Renee Soutendijk’s face peers out from an unidentified blackness.  It’s as though they took everything that made THE LIFT a commercial success and ignored it completely.

(Cover art courtesy Monsterland Movies)

I’ve yet to locate a trailer for the English-language version, but the film did get a brief theatrical run, as evidenced by Walter Goodman’s New York Times review.  The film was soon quickly released to video, where it vanished into obscurity.  The original German-language trailer is below.

It’s a shame, as OUT OF ORDER isn’t a bad little film, and it’s certainly more tonally coherent than its Dutch cohort.  Unlike THE LIFT’s reluctance to settle on one genre and wavering awkwardly between horror and satire, OUT OF ORDER is a very straightforward thriller, setting up a simple premise (four characters are trapped in an elevator) and letting the results play out as the characters bounce off of each other naturally.

The four characters in the scenario are two co-workers (Soutendijk and Götz George), a young delivery man with an anarchist streak (Hannes Jaenicke) and a quiet bookkeeper with a suitcase full of stolen cash (Wolfgang Kieling).  After the elevator breaks down, the quartet starts bickering amongst themselves as to what to do, as tensions, both cultural and sexual, begin to rise.

OUT OF ORDER doesn’t really have a heck of a lot to say, though there is some half-hearted attempt at social commentary with one employee’s Lenin pin, the anarchist’s disregard for business culture and the bookkeeper’s tale of woe.  When the film is stuck in the elevator itself, it’s a bit stagnant, suffering from mediocre dubbing and conversations that go on for a few minutes longer than they need to be.

When the characters start trying to escape, however, OUT OF ORDER shines.  Schenkel does a fine job with the actual thriller aspects, instilling every moment where the characters leave the elevator itself and get into the shaft with tension.  Sure, you could argue that watching tension wires slowly come apart and break may get old after the fifth or sixth cutaway, but the film is edited well, meaning that the actual thriller portions of the thriller are well-made.

Granted, even at 83 minutes, OUT OF ORDER’s limited premise and character set wears a bit thin.  (You could easily shave ten minutes off of the running time without losing anything of value.)  It’s still a solid, relatively captivating thriller that satisfies the “elevator thriller” niche in a much more solid way than THE LIFT.  

Was there ever a subtitled version of this film released in the U.S.?  What are your favorite elevator suspense scenes?