Berserker (1987)

... aka: Berserker: The Nordic Curse

... aka: Ôkami Otoko Basâkâ (Werewolf Berserker)

... aka: O Vale Assassino (The Killer Valley)

Directed by:

Jef (Jefferson) Richard

"A true pioneer of the independent film movement..." opens the late director's self-penned IMDb bio. He goes on to state his credentials as a graduate of the Cambridge School of Broadcasting and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, frequent collaborator of Matt Cimber and George "Buck" Flower, employee of Park City Utah's Sunn Classic Pictures and top indie film producer. While patting oneself on the back, especially when most people have never even heard of you before, can come off as delusional and arrogant, this guy more or less has the credits to back himself up. Usually as a production manager, assistant director or line producer, Richard worked on a whole host of films over a 30+ year period, starting with sleazy 70s offerings (ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS, The Witch Who Came from the Sea), then moving up to medium budget genre films (Maniac Cop, Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat) and finally graduating to to bigger budgeted productions starring the likes of Kevin Costner, Sylvester Stallone, Benicio del Toro, Jack Nicholson and Kurt Russell. He also mentions meeting and working with Orson Welles, whom he considered an inspiration, and being part of Flower's touring repertory company The Inspiration Players, who put on "morality-based classical theatre in churches and schools;" a far cry from all of the exploitation film work the two men would later find themselves involved in!

Listed almost as an afterthought toward the bottom of the bio are his two directorial credits; the PG-rated family adventure In Search of a Golden Sky (1984), which he co-wrote and co-produced with Flower (who also stars in the film) and this one, described as a "campy horror cult classic," which has become a synonym for "shitty" as of late. Flower is, unsurprisingly, also in this one and is pretty much the closest thing to a name draw in the mostly amateur cast.

You know the supposed horror movie trope that black people always die first in older slasher films? Well, let's put aside the fact that isn't even true (I personally think the real issue was black people being underrepresented in the genre) and focus on another group: Old folks! If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that far more seniors, regardless of skin color, died first in 80s horror / slasher flicks than any other group. Why? Well, there's probably more than one correct answer here...

I'd say the most obvious reason would be that producers usually wanted teenage or early 20-something leads because they assumed the primary audience was also going to be teenagers and early 20-somethings. And then there's the eye candy factor, as a lot of these films were expected to showcase photogenic, younger, up-and-coming actors. Older folks may be used as early cannon fodder so often because they're viewed as being weaker, more fragile and more physically compromised (poor mobility, hearing, eyesight, etc.), which makes them easy early targets. And then, granted the audience was indeed typically younger, they may get a laugh out of seeing an older person, perhaps a generic stand-in for a repressive authority figure or one with an outmoded or uncool way of thinking, die first. I'd say it's most likely a combination of all of the above.

So the moment we see ol' Homer and Edna (played by real-life couple Oscar Rowland and Beverly Rowland) trudging around at a campsite, we pretty much know they won't last too long. Celebrating their 40th anniversary with a camping trip, the two take a wrong turn while out walking, get lost in the woods after nightfall and are then slaughtered by what appears to be a bear. This 4-minute scene perfectly illustrates why experienced older performers should have been given more to do in these things. There's a moment when Mrs. Rowland breaks down into tears because she's so scared at being lost that's the single best bit of acting you'll see in the entire film. And then she's gone. And then they cart in a bunch of unlikeable, untalented younger actors we're stuck with for the rest of the film.

Trust me when I say that no cliché is left unturned in the introduction of the teen characters. There's awful hair metal music, lots of "dude" this and "dude" that, discussions about beer, pot and "humping" and the same stock teen characters we almost always see in these things. Receiving the most screen time is Josh Winter (Greg Dawson), a cocky, smart ass, obnoxious, jag-off-jock who counts belching, drunk driving, suddenly blaring his radio to startle others out of their sleep and losing his shit over the dumbest, most insignificant things among his favorite pastimes. Mike Stone (Joseph Alan Johnson, who was also in the slashers ICED and THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE) is the nice, level-headed, popular one, while Larry Fishman (Rodney Montague) is the nerdy "bookworm" who naturally brings along a book about the history of the place they're about to spend a week at. Someone needs to relay important plot information when the time arrives, eh?

As for the girls, let's just say 80s slashers got a reputation for being sexist for a good reason. And no, it's not because women were often victims (they were also typically the heroes), nor is it because women often appeared nude (what's wrong with showering?), it's because women were often not given actual characters to play. While that's fine in films where their male counterparts are also treated like slabs of meat, it's not fine when a lot of time is set aside defining every single male cast member while every single female is a piece of cardboard. The ladies here may as well be named Blonde #1, Blonde #2 and Brunette but, for the record, they're called Kathy (Valerie Sheldon), Kristi (Shannon Engemann) and Shelly (Beth Toussaint). This even resorts to having the last surviving female literally having to be told what to do and getting yanked around the forest by the guys.

Adventures on their way to their remote destination of Rainbow Valley (also called "Little Norway" because it was settled by the descendants of Norse Vikings [!?]) include getting pulled over by a cop after throwing a beer can out of the truck window and trying to understand what Buck Flower, playing grumpy Scandinavian caretaker Pappy Nyquist, is even saying. After setting up camp, they throw a football, drive a three-wheeler around, pour beer over each other's heads, go swimming and then settle down around a campfire for marshmallows and scary stories.

The nerd plucks an appropriate tale out of his book about vicious Viking warriors called "berserkers," who not only were the most feared of all Vikings but were also rumored to have cannibalized their victims. Typical attire for one of these warriors was a bear-skinned robe with a bear snout mask fashioned from a bear the men killed with their own bare hands as a way to prove their mettle. The warriors who became too unhinged to handle due to their bloodlust were chained, caged, fed raw meat scraps (including human meat) and essentially treated like rabid dogs to unleash upon enemies. Good thing rampaging Vikings are no longer a thing, right? Well, not so fast. Due to all of the massacring and flesh-munching, berserkers don't get to enjoy a peaceful afterlife. Instead, they sit in limbo and occasionally return to Earth by possessing the body of one of their ancestors.

Someone or some thing then starts going around killing the teens, starting with those dumb enough to wander around outside at night alone despite being explicitly told about animal attacks and mysterious deaths in the area. One girls dies after walking a mile into the woods just to take a dump and another is killed after participating in a nude sex scene, yet her boyfriend is allowed to walk away unscathed. As for the presentation of the death scenes, well, you can only see a woolly paw reach into frame to maul a shrieking victim to death so many times before the tedium sets in. And, while we're on the subject of tedium, there are seemingly endless scenes of people walking around in circles in the woods tripping over the same dead bodies over and over again that would be almost comical if they weren't so boring.

From the title and the fact a large chunk of dialogue is dedicated to its mythology, I'm sure you've already guessed by now that a man possessed by a berserker is responsible for the killings, yet each time there's a murder this cuts to an actual bear lurking around doing menacing things like standing up, huffing and growling. Alas, the ferocious forest creature is simply being used as an all-too-obvious red bearing. A scene where Pappy sits down for a chess match with his police officer buddy, Walt Hill (John F. Goff), and they discuss how the father of one of the teens comes from a Nordic bloodline and disappeared in the same area years earlier, is yet another sloppily done diversion attempt. There's a bear vs. berserker wrestling match that should have been a high point but somehow isn't and, while the berserker costume actually looks pretty cool, we bearly (sorry) even get to see it.

I'll give this a little credit where credit is due. There are nice Utah shooting locations and the nighttime scenes are sometimes atmospherically shot (by Sunn Classics vet Henning Schellerup) thanks in part to lots of added fog, but that's about it as far as the good is concerned. Well, the super-hot Toussaint sans clothing isn't a bad thing either. Though it's admittedly not saying much since her co-stars are all dreadful, she's by far the best actor of the younger cast, which also probably explains why she was able to land some roles on known TV shows and films after this.

The biggest star to emerge from the abyss also happens to be the youngest: 10-year old Bart the Bear. This 9-foot-tall brown bear would go on to become something of an animal celebrity soon after, appearing alongside top stars like Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt and landing credited starring roles in The Bear (1987), Walking Thunder (1995), The Edge (1997) and many more. His other roles include Bear, The Bear, The Bear, Bear, The Kodiak Bear, The Bear, The Bear and The Bald-Headed Bear. He was clearly a victim of typecasting.

This was given home video releases in the U.S. (well-distributed on the Prism label), the UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, Brazil and Germany. In 2019, Vinegar Syndrome released it on Blu-ray and DVD, which includes on-camera interviews with the director and stars Johnson and Engemann, as well as an audio interview with Mike Riley, who plays the title character. 80s slasher enthusiasts should probably still check this out regardless of my comments. Everyone else can safely give A Norwegian Cannibal Viking in Utah a pass.

★1/2

Man Beast (1956)

... aka: El hombre bestia (The Beast Man)

Directed by:

Jerry Warren

One person's filmography I was decidedly not in a big rush to get back to was Jerry Warren's. He holds the distinction here of being one of the only directors to make multiple NO STAR-rated films not even fit for bad movie connoisseur consumption. Furthermore, Warren himself flat out admitted he had zero interest in making good or entertaining films, which I guess makes him a cinematic charlatan of sorts. He was in the business solely to make money, which required cheap as possible investments on what he hoped would be big returns. That's his entire dispassionate career in a nutshell. While I'll never begrudge anyone trying to make an honest living, what Warren was doing ventured more into the realm of hucksterism. Any filmmaker who's worth a damn is either an artist or someone at least attempting to make enjoyable product for consumers. Warren was neither. His usual routine consisted of buying the distribution rights to unreleased-in-the-U.S. foreign films, having them hacked up and re-dubbed (or simply narrated over) and adding cheap, talky scenes featuring American actors so he had names to put on the poster to lure in unsuspecting genre fans. In doing so, he simultaneously destroyed the original director's work, showed genuine contempt for his target audience and became quite possibly the laziest director to have ever walked the face of the Earth.

Though most of his work was pilfered material, Warren did make a handful of his own films. These included the God awful bore TEENAGE ZOMBIES (1959), the almost tolerable THE INCREDIBLE PETRIFIED WORLD (1959), Frankenstein Island (1981), which I've not yet seen, and this one, which was also his directorial debut. Still, even most of these "original" works depended strongly on recycled stock footage to fill in the budget gaps and boost the running time, and this barely hour-long effort is no exception.

 

After a strenuous hike through the Himalayan mountains, determined blonde Connie Hayward (Virginia [Asa] Maynor) and her sourpuss friend Trevor Hudson (Lloyd "Cameron" / Nelson) arrive at a remote outpost. They're there because Connie is searching for her missing brother, Dr. James Hayward, who'd taken an "experimental injection" back in the states and now may die due to a side effect caused by high altitudes. Along with a small team, James had set out to explore the area ten days earlier and hasn't been seen or heard from since.

In the same area, there've been occasional Yeti sightings going back decades. More recent Yeti footprints have been discovered, which merit further investigation. Four previous expeditions to find the fabled creature have turned up nothing though, and every expedition had lost at least one man. Connie manages to sweet talk reluctant expert climber Steve Cameron (Tom Maruzzi) into escorting them to where he believes the brother has set up camp.

From there, it's a dangerous ascent up the mountainside and then a long trek through the snow-covered, rocky terrain. They finally catch up to famous anthropologist and evolutionary scientist Professor Erickson (George Wells Lewis) and his two local guides, who are on their way to meet up with Connie's brother at base camp. Everyone decides to do the rest of the journey together. Like the brother, Erickson's ultimate goal is to try to locate and capture a live Yeti, which he believes to be the missing link. Coming across the previous expedition's camp, they find it wrecked, abandoned and in total disarray. Setting up there for the night, they awaken the next morning to find Erickson's hired help have run off and left them.

Eventually turning up at the camp is the "half-Mongolian" Varga (George Skaff), one of the best and most requested local guides in the area, who's so experienced at what he does that he never runs out of breath and seems almost immune to the freezing temperatures. Varga had brought Connie's brother up to the mountain and claims to have been out scouting for tracks when whatever happened back at the camp went down. Still, Connie and the others are skeptical of his story and find him to be shady. There's a ludicrous, though amusing and, I must admit, original, plot twist here involving the species of Yeti attempting to incorporate themselves into our society. That involves killing human men so they can kidnap and then knock up human women to produce human/Yeti hybrids. Naturally, we never actually get to see anything of the sort in the film itself!

All of the impressive mountain climbing footage and aerial shots seen here have been snatched from an unfinished film of unknown origin (some sources claim it's Mexican). Having that footage in his possession, Warren then had a script fashioned specifically around it, attempting to match up his new footage, using the same amount of characters, trying to dress them all similarly to the climbers, etc. Surprisingly enough, he actually does do fairly good job of splicing it all together! If one were to nitpick specific details they can certainly find discrepancies between wardrobe, gear, locations, cast appearance, etc., but very few things really leap out as being extremely obvious either. And, in a way, this approach is really not all that dissimilar to how major studios work, where they'll send a 2nd unit director and crew off to shoot location footage with stunt doubles while the primary director handles all of the close-ups and actor stuff.

Warren has also lucked out that the footage he acquired is actually excellent and features some thrilling moments, imaginative camera shots and beautiful locations. That said, most of what Warren himself brings to the table is, as expected, not very good. He's shot mostly dialogue scenes here but, unlike some of his other films, at least he put some effort into finding snowy / rocky outdoor locations to use instead of filming scenes of people sitting around on some porn-grade set talking to each other as he'd later do. The Yeti suit, which is (supposedly) the same costume used for White Pongo and The White Gorilla (both 1945 releases), also isn't too bad.

Most of the performances are pretty lousy, with the actors sometimes randomly looking off to the side as if searching for cue cards, stumbling over lines or even looking directly at the camera as others are speaking. The sole standout here is Skaff, who puts in a good campy turn as the mysterious guide. His hilarious facial expressions alone almost make this one worthwhile all by themselves. Skaff would go on to a decent career as a character actor and later appeared in some good movies, like Michael Ritchie's Smile (1975) and John Carpenter's Someone's Watching Me! (1978). Warren's soon-to-be wife Brianne Murphy, who'd go on to a respected career as a cinematographer, plays the Yeti in some scenes and was also the script supervisor. 

Top billed above everyone else in the cast is one "Rock Madison," who plays, well, nobody! This was a fake name added to the credits for some reason, though I'm not exactly sure what that reason was. Perhaps attempting to confuse fans of Rock Hudson and Guy Madison?

This was, I believe, only the third genre movie made about the Yeti / Abominable Snowman. It was preceded by the dreadful THE SNOW CREATURE (1954) and the decent Japanese BEAST MAN SNOW MAN (1955), which later became the basis for an "Americanized" version called Half Human (released in 1957). Amusingly, Man Beast wasn't even Warren's only Yeti movie. He also purchased the rights to a 1959 Swedish / American co-production called Rymdinvasion i Lappland (given many English titles like TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN), did his usual butcher routine on it (adding boring new scenes and narration from John Carradine) and released it as Invasion of the Animal People in 1962.

 

In theaters, this played on a double bill with Prehistoric Women (1950). There were numerous VHS releases here in America, two from Rhino in 1985 (paired with 1948's Human Gorilla / Behind Locked Doors for their release "Saturday Night Shockers: Volume 2") and 1988, and another from Acme (a subdivision of Rhino) in 1996. Rhino also released a DVD in 2002. In 2013, Kit Parker Films released three multi-disc DVD sets of Warren's work. Man Beast is included on the first volume along with Curse of the Stone Hand (1965), which was mostly bastardized footage from several 1940s Chilean films, and The Wild World of Batwoman (1966).

★★