Film Club: Deadly Blessing

I'm...not exactly sure how to write about Wes Craven's 1981 shocker Shocker Deadly Blessing. It's kind of a seven-layer dip of a movie: all these different flavors competing with each other but trying to work together, turning into a big mess that sits in your stomach like a gelatinous lump of regret. Mind you, the regret comes later; while you're eating it, your eyes focus on some distant, imaginary point and you find yourself saying a little too loudly, "I don't know what's happening to me and I'm not sure if I entirely like it, but I might and so I'll just keep going." Yes, in this way Deadly Blessing is exactly like a seven-layer dip.

So you've got Jim (Douglas Barr) and his wife Martha (Maren Jensen, who was Athena on the original Battlestar Galactica and what more do you need to know) tending to their farm in a young, carefree fashion. To one side of their land they've got the Hittites, a wackadoo religious sect led by Isaiah (Ernest fucking Borgnine). On t'other they've got Louisa (Lois Nettleton) and Faith (a pre-nosejob Lisa Hartman), a wackadoo mother and daughter.

And then stuff happens.

I mean really, it's true- a bunch of stuff happens and I swear, I was scratching my head trying to connect the dots to basically no avail. Stuff. Just. Happens.

• In the dead of night, Jim gets run over in his barn by his tractor. Was someone driving the tractor? We don't know.
• Hittite Michael Berryman lurks a lot, and for a while you think "Okay, so Deadly Blessing is about this creeper..." but then he's stabbed and killed by someone. BUT WHO, DEADLY BLESSING? BUT WHO.
• Isaiah calls all the non-Hittite women "incubus". What? Does he mean "succubus"? Does he mean anything? We don't know.

Isaiah about to slap the Satan right outta dat William Katt-alike

• Lana (Sharon Stone) and Vicky (Susan Buckner), old pals of Martha, show up to help the young widow ease into young widowhood.
• A dog gets a blast of mace to the face!
• "You are a stench in a nostril to God." - Isaiah
• Lana starts dreaming about a guy and spiders and a guy who is a spider, and everyone is like "Shut up, Lana."
• Sharon Stone, amirite? I mean, in this movie a spider goes in her mouth! She did a shit ton of work before 1992, when a simple flash-o-vagina brought her stardom in Basic Instinct. I am just saying, let's give that broad some credit. If not for this, then for 1984's Calendar Girl Murders.
  
• Ill-timed, overblown music cues turn ordinary moments into big exciting movie moments, like, say, Martha putting her hair in a ponytail.
• Lana has a run-in with some spiders and maybe a guy in the barn and she cries a lot, and everyone is like "Get over it, Lana."
• Someone is killing people! Sometimes by practical means, like stabbing or setting a car on fire with the driver inside...and sometimes by nonsensical means, like putting a snake in a bathtub. And I'm going to pretend that the shot of Nancy in the tub in A Nightmare on Elm Street was Wes Craven saying "Hey guys, remember when I had this same shot in Deadly Blessing? What the heck was with that movie, anyway? That was some seven-layer dip shit!"

• Lana goes to pour some milk only to discover that someone has replaced the milk with Folgers Crystals blood! She screams and makes a mess everywhere, and everyone is like "Lana, GO HOME."
• There's a coffin full of chickens.

Y'all, this movie is really as all-over-the-place as I've made it out to be. Deadly Blessing is a hot mess, a bunch of storylines competing for dominance and making practically no sense.

But then...the last ten minutes. I'm not going to give away anything here, because...the last ten minutes of this film should not be given away. Let me just say that it's jaw-dropping. It is women punching, shooting, flying around due to punches and/or gunshots, and making crazy faces. It is a big pile of total what-the-fuckery, and it completely redeems all that came before. And just when you think it is over, it is not. And then your jaw- still dropped!- will say "fuck this" and throw itself out your window. It's amazing.

So for that and also this production still of Martha, Lana, and Vicky? I will certainly regret you later, Deadly Blessing, but for now...you win. You win.

Totally lezzed out together in college.

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By: Unknown On 12.16

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those wacky old ones

No, HPLHS does not stand for Howard P. Lovecraft High School, although that would be awesome. It stands for HP Lovecraft Historical Society, and they're the enthusiasts behind The Call of Cthulhu (2005), a 45-minute silent adaptation of the short story of the same name.

Upon the death of his great-uncle, The Man (Matt Foyer) inherits an estate that includes a box full of research into a series of bizarre events that occur in March, 1925 and something called the "Cthulhu Cult". The Man takes up the investigation and quickly becomes obsessed with the cult and their god, who sleeps and waits beyond the stars.

Eerie statues, weirdo swamp cultists, stylized dream sequences...Call of Cthulhu gives us a story previously thought "unfilmable" by Lovecraft fans thanks to, oddly enough, the film's limited budget. Largely restricting themselves to techniques available during Lovecraft's time- expressionist set design, stop-motion animation, forced perspective- presents the fantastic world in...well, in a fantastic way. The stylized conceits of silent storytelling serve the plot well and certainly recall the work of Murnau, Lang, and other filmmakers from the era. 

While the world it presents is wildly imaginative, there are times when Call of Cthulhu gets bogged down under its own weight; however, this is how I tend to feel about the work of Lovecraft in general. Try as I may, I fear I'll never be a true HPL nut. I hope we can still be friends, you and I.

The last 10 minutes of the movie really pick up, though, and when we're finally introduced to stop-motion Cthulhu...well, I'd describe him to you, but even to think on it is enough to drive me mad with insanity! But here's a picture.

Are the Elder Gods still resting out there, waiting only for some wackadoos to dance around in a swamp before they'll come back?  The film says so, and it's a fun notion to entertain: "We hear its call and await our inevitable doom". Hey, that totally describes my relationship with pizza. Maybe I do get this Lovecraft thing after all!

By: Unknown On 10.58

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oxymoron ahoy!

I hate to say it, but Silent Scream (1980) is essentially the filmic version of that old "she was hot until she turned around joke"- you know, where a woman, shown from behind, has a great body but then turns around and is- GASP- not beautiful (or worse, actually a dude- GASP AGAIN). I believe this phenomenon has its own special term now: butterface, as in "(all) but her face". Whee, making fun of the way people look is...fun!

In case you couldn't tell, I don't actually find it to be fun, and "butterface" is fairly well abhorrent. However, I forgot to wear sunscreen yesterday and as such, I got a bit of a sunburn. I'm using this dehydration and pink skin tinge as an excuse for my poor choice of metaphor with this film. Had I ess-pee-effed it up yesterday, my words would be so beautiful right now that you'd be puking out of your eyes.

See? Dehydration.

Anyhoo, Silent Scream tells the tale of Scotty (Rebecca Balding), a college student desperate for housing. She finds a gloomy old manse on the beach with rooms available; sure the owner is never around and her teenage son Mason (Brad Reardon) is a bit weird, but there are other students living there as well and the place is cheap enough. Before long, however, Scotty's new-found dreamworld is rocked to its very core when a wackadoo living in the basement/crawlspaces/amongst the insulation starts giving tenants a bad case of The Deaths. Okay, "rocked to its very core" might be overstressing things, but there is a lurker and people do die and the hands and pointy implements of said lurker.


Silent Scream truly has it all, even if the film's title promises an unpossibility. Why, get outcher peepers and gander at these attractions:

The aforementioned creepy manse, all looming and foreboding and chock full 'o cobwebs!

The proliferation of oversized sunglasses!

The proliferation of bowl haircuts!

Yvonne DeCarlo and Barbara GD Steele!

The sweet sweet memories of The Boogens one gets when The Boogens star Rebecca Balding appears!

The orchestral score that...mmm...borrows heavily from Psycho!

So with all these checkmarks in the "fuck yeah!" column, why does Silent Scream end up...well, a butterface? It's because these lovely trappings fool you into thinking you're watching a great movie. "Oh, but there's Avery Schreiber playing a detective!" you say. "And Cameron Mitchell! Why...there are a lot of interesting shots here, and clearly director Denny Harris was trying to make an ambitious gothic slasher movie!"...and, you know. You'd be right. Unfortunately, all of those elements- the lurker, the foreboding house, the Psycho score- have been utilized in much better films (Bad Ronald, umm...Psycho). Silent Scream is fine. Serviceable. Enjoyable, even. It's trying to be something more than it ends up being in the end, which is a fairly standard "crazy family" tale. It all sort of meanders along and sometimes some stuff happens. Sometimes it's creepy. Then it's over and you give it a "Huh. Well, I watched that."

I'm not really holding anything against it, it just wasn't as great as I thought it was going to be. You know, when it turned around.

Silent Scream is available from Boulevard Movies. Click here to see that I'm not lying about it!

By: Unknown On 14.51

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