80's American Horror Part Seventy-Eight

DR. HECKL AND MR. HYPE

(1980)

Dir - Charles B. Griffith

Overall: GOOD

 

One of the goofiest horror spoofs to remain persistently under the radar since its release was Roger Corman collaborator Charles B. Griffith's Dr. Heckl and Mr. Hype.  Initially pitched to Cannon Film's Menahem Golan as a hippie version of Robert Louis Stevenson's source material titled Dr. Feelgood and Mr. Hype, Griffith wrote, shot, and edited a very different end product in about two months worth of time ,which is noticeable upon watching the slap-dash presentation.  The makeup is crude, the humor hit or miss, (and usually juvenile), plus the plotting is asinine as it relies on characters behaving irrationally as to move things along to the next ridiculous, comedic set piece.  There is a saving grace present though in that none other than Oliver Reed plays the title characters and does so in an appropriately committed manner.  Taking its cue from the Hammer adaptation which skewed the formula by having Jekyll be the physically unattractive one and Hyde the dashing monster, Reed dons an American accent and an almost puppy-dog innocence as the former with a comically absurd wig and cheap prosthetics that look as if they took five minutes to apply to his face.  Then as Hyde/Hype, Reed hilariously just plays himself with his trademark, intimidating, British gentleman demeanor on the verge of fury.  The film itself is a mess, but a laugh out loud mess as well as an utter treat for Reed fans who get to see him indulge in comedy, which he rarely did to such absurd effect.

 

BOURDINGHOUSE

(1982)

Dir - John Wintergate

Overall: WOOF

 

Taking incoherence to a profound level, writer/director/lead slimeball John Wintergate's vanity project debut Bourdinghouse has the unfortunate distinction of being the first SOV horror film to get a theatrical release, be it a graciously limited one.  To be fair, Wintergate certainly goes for it with his $10,000 budget in creating a number of both sleazy and supernaturally ambitious set pieces, loading the screen with naked women and bizarre, nightmarish visuals.  The entire presentation looks and sounds absolutely horrible of course and Wintergate is ultimately more concerned with showing off his lack of body fat in a speedo than figuring out how to frame a single shot competently.  Predominantly though, the problem lies in the butchered edit which was done at  the insistence of the distributors.  Originally running an unforgivingly criminal two-hours and thirty-eight minutes and being shot as a comedy, all, (intentional), humor was taken out to get it to an agreeable eighty-eight minutes so it could fit into the D-rent horror cheapie market.  So most of the scenes just awkwardly end mid-sentence or quickly fade-out before any jokes can be uttered.  Viewing it in its finished form is the equivalent of suffering brain damage though as the barrage of stumbling performances, horrendous visual aesthetics, claustrophobic anti-cinematography, tonal ineptitude, and a hilariously non-decipherable narrative makes it a trainwreck of the highest, (meaning "on drugs" highest), variety.

THE DEAD PIT

(1989)

Dir - Brett Leonard

Overall: MEH

 

Fog, Dutch angles, bloody/moist zombies, eerie lighting, barren corridors, a wide and/or red-eyed bad guy, creepy basements, an incessant musical score, wailing lunatics in an asylum; there are oodles of macabre visual and audio ambiance to go around in Brett Leonard's debut The Dead Pit.  Story wise, it hits some of the usual beats involving a poor Cheryl Lawson spending most of her hallucination sequences in as minimal an amount of clothing as possible, saying "I know it sounds crazy" a lot when she is told that the secrets to her trauma are hidden deep within her subconscious mind and blah, blah, blah.  Fusing this with a rogue, wacko surgeon who is supernaturally back from the dead for revenge, (and raises a horde of walking ghouls with him), merely throws one familiar motif on top of another, but there are at least some memorably freaky moments and crude gore to appease genre fans.  The performances are strictly on the corned-up, melodramatic side, there is unintended doofiness here or there, and the hour and forty-one minute running time could easily lose at least fifteen to twenty of those minutes for a more agreeable flow.  Still, it is better than the schlocky material deserves and the priority to go for relentlessly morbid atmosphere is appreciated.