80's American Horror Part Two

DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE
(1980)
Dir - Joseph Ellison
Overall: MEH

Joseph Ellison's Don't Go in the House is both one of the many "Don't" movies out there, one of the many to liberally borrow narrative tropes from Psycho, and also one of the many unapologetically ugly and lurid, independent video nasty that is made to shock its audience first and foremost.  A modernized and more gruesome version of a disturbed Mama's boy-gone-cuckoo-in-a-homicidal-manner story with "people doing dumb horror movie" things aplenty, it is at least set up and delivered in an off-kilter way.  This makes it easy to buy into its illogical universe where a character that is clearly unstable can also get away with such unwholesome things, let alone the amount of such unwholesome things.  That said, the film seems rushed at several instances with a jarring ending and a big reveal which implies that several scenes are missing.  It all becomes as increasingly one-note as it is unpleasant and could easily be skipped by anyone besides the most steadfast of trash enthusiasts.

EYES OF A STRANGER

(1981)

Dir - Ken Wiederhorn

Overall: MEH

 

Few could award Ken Wiederhorn's Eyes of a Stranger with many points for originality, but it still manages to pull-off a halfway decent final act and features an impressive performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh in her theatrical debut.  The tired tropes here go all the way back to giallos from a decade or more prior, with the killer making repeated, pervy phone calls to his victims, wearing pantyhose over his face as well as a black trench coat and a hat, and with a headstrong pedestrian trying to track him down when the police are having no such luck doing so themselves.  Tom Savini does the gore effects for what it is worth, yet none of them are particularly clever or memorable and the kill scenes are few and far between anyway.  Eventually though, Lauren Tewes' protagonist follows through on her suspicions and is actually proven right, something that keeps the viewer on edge during the final cat and mouse sequence involving her mute/blind sister, (Leigh).  Everything before the last fifteen or so minutes is poorly paced and barely worth paying attention to though, ultimately making this one of countless forgettable slasher movies from 1981 alone.

THE STUFF
(1985)
Dir - Larry Cohen
Overall: WOOF

To best articulate how incredibly inept The Stuff is, one could realize that if writer/director Larry Cohen submitted the finished result to his film class, he would have gotten a big, fat, very deserving F in every basic film structure category.  To be fair, Cohen's shtick has always been left-of-center, but here he displays a Troll 2 level of incompetence with a nearly complete abandon of basic scene arrangement.  From the very first shot, the camera cuts and moves haphazardly around and one can lose count of how many scenes abruptly take place that appear to have huge chunks left missing from the editing room.  Michael Moriarty is by far one of the most obnoxious protagonists of all time.  His very first scene is so bizarrely staged, (not at all helped with how badly everyone's voice is ADRed in it, something that is not isolated to just this segment), and his persona so aggravatingly smug that his heroic charm is impossible to fall for.  He is but one of many problems though.  By the time that we meet Paul Sorvino as a cartoon character, right-wing, randomly racist for one second, beyond conveniently and geographically located ex-Army Colonal with a giant compound and his own arsenal of soldiers, the movie is so off the rails that throwing one's hands up in disbelief is the only fitting response.  Spending the entire movie going "wait...what now?" followed by wanting your eighty-seven minutes back is to be wholly expected.