Lurkers (1987)

... aka: Home Sweet Home

Directed by:
Roberta Findlay

Little Cathy is stuck with one mean mama. Mad her little girl isn't appreciative of the muck she's serving up for din-din, mom gnashes her teeth and threatens "You really want a beating, don't you?;" adding "If you don't eat I'll have THEM take you away!" When that fails to get her to eat and she refuses to go outside to play because she's scared of whatever THEM is outside their apartment, mom burns her with a hot iron and throws her out, anyway. Cathy does manage to make it out of the building OK but a little ghost girl shows up and makes the other girls she starts playing with strangle her with a jump rope. Thankfully, a woman wearing heavy eye make-up shows up to scare the evil little girl off. Later that night, Cathy is surrounded by a bunch of "lurkers" (ghosts) saying "Help meeeee!" Fifteen years later, a now-grown Cathy (Christine Moore) is a cellist still haunted by her childhood... and still haunted by the ghost girl, who attempts to mow her over with a cab as she's getting ready to cross the street, Thankfully, heavy eye make-up lady pops in just in time to pull her back up off the sidewalk. So what we're dealing with here is basically your standard struggle between the forces of good and evil, with the little ghost girl representing dangerous, evil forces bent on making Cathy's life a living hell, and eye make-up lady being a guardian angel of sorts who's around to protect her.

Cathy is engaged to be married to Bob (Gary Warner), a successful photographer who co-owns a modeling agency with his bitchy female partner Monica (Marina Taylor), but trying to live as normal a life as possible is starting to become an impossible task. Her nighttime world is full of bad dreams about the night her mother stabbed her father to death and chased her around with a bloody knife (geesh!) and her daytime world isn't much better, with the ghost girl popping in from time to time to either scare her or attempt to kill her. Cathy feels that her brother Phil (Gil Newsom), who's now working as a priest, blames her for the deaths of their parents and she's conflicted about whether or not she should even invite him to the wedding. Her psychic friend Rita (Nancy Groff) tells her not to bother during a tarot card session where she also calls Cathy "prehistoric" for wanting to quit her job and have babies after she gets married! Of course, Rita is correct about the brother. He has no interest in Cathy, her life or her upcoming wedding. Bob tries to calm Cathy down by telling her, "Maybe your brother is a queer and he hates women."

Bob isn't just lousy when it comes to psychoanalyzing people, he's also lousy at being in a committed relationship. He picks up bartender / aspiring model Sally (Carissa Channing) for a little fling and from all indications has something going on with Monica as well. Cathy ends up falling asleep while reading "Prisoners of Childhood" in her bubble bath and envisions her mother barging in and trying to drown her. On the way toward a party, Bob and Cathy encounter her guardian angel, who warns "Don't go home" before disappearing from the backseat of their car. And wouldn't ya know it, but the party Bob and Cathy are headed to is in the same building Cathy grew up in. She refuses to go inside and, while waiting by the door, she's suddenly chased by a psycho wielding a sledge hammer (who ends up smashing a woman's head in), encounters a punk gang and finds a dead chicken hanging upside down in a graveyard! All of these things may actually be happening, or they may be hallucinations being drummed up the cursed building in order to scare Cathy inside. Either way, it manages to force her in... and what awaits her there is something that may explain why her entire life - and this entire movie! - has been so freaking weird.

Despite some bad acting, rough editing, often inappropriate music and a confusing storyline (which is explained - at least somewhat - by the finale), Lurkers is just strange enough to merit a look for fans of the offbeat. I can't really say that this is good, but it IS interesting and it's never boring. We're constantly reminded of the director's sex film background with plenty of sex and nude scenes and lots of "romantic" montages - frolicking in the park, lovers feeding each other pizza, tight close ups of kissing - while soft jazz muzak plays. Some of this is light, such as a hilarious bit where two models strip while discussing the stock market, junk bonds and being members of Mensa (brilliant!), but there's also some seedier stuff going on here. At the party full of decadent weirdos, Cathy opens various doors to reveal things like a threesome between an elderly couple and a young woman, some mild S&M scenarios and two lesbians giving each other enemas (!) in the bathroom. People get crucified and the psycho wielding the sledge hammer informs a soon-to-be-victim "I'm going to reach down your throat and rip out your lungs... nothing personal."

Even though they do rip off THE SENTINEL (1976) to a certain extent, writers Ed Kelleher (aka Ed Adlum) and Harriette Vidal do deserve a little bit of credit for whipping up a bizarre little tale (made even more bizarre by the director / editors odd sense of pacing) with some amusing dialogues. Ed French designed the "lurker" make-up and the cast also includes Roy MacArthur as Monica's creepy uncle, producer / composer / co-editor Walter Sear as a studio engineer and Ruth Collins as a model. There's also an uncredited early appearance by future Scream Queen Debbie Rochon in her very first horror role (she can be spotted a few times during the party scene).

The Roberta Findlay horrorography also includes the notorious SNUFF (1974), the horror-porn A WOMAN'S TORMENT (1977), THE ORACLE (1984), TENEMENT (1985), BLOOD SISTERS (1986), PRIME EVIL (1988; which included much of the same cast seen here) and the still-unreleased (though reputedly completed) BANNED (1989). It may not seem like much but it's enough to make Mrs. Findlay one of the most prolific female genre directors ever. End credits copyright is 1987, though it would be released the following year.

★★

Symptoms (1974)

... aka: Blood Virgin, The
... aka: Síntomas

Directed by:
José Ramón Larraz

Helen Ramsey (Angela Pleasence) confides in her journal "I have a feeling something is about to happen... something final..." before she and her friend Ann Weston (Lorna Heilbron) head out to Helen's secluded family vacation home for a relaxing stay in the country. Helen had just spent some time in Switzerland doing English translations. Ann - a writer - has just had a bad break up. Both could use a little peace and quiet. While Ann is beautiful, refined and classy, Helen is awkward, gangly and homely. Ann has a fashionable wardrobe and haircut. Helen wears plain, baggy clothes and has stringy, lifeless hair she usually keeps tucked behind her ears. And while Ann appears reasonably happy and healthy, Helen is pale, frail and suffers from terrible headaches and bouts of depression. Though the two women appear to be fairly close friends (perhaps childhood friends), one wonders what exactly has brought the two together to begin with. In Helen's case, we soon get an answer: she has something of a crush on her friend. She often stares at her (even when she's changing clothes), acts possessive, seems to want to accompany her everywhere she goes, doesn't want her to go into town by herself and quietly sneaks up on her while she's trying to work. The looks she gives Ann when she isn't paying much attention aren't looks usually exchanged between just friends...

All throughout the home are framed pictures of a woman named Cora (Marie-Paule Mailleux); a woman Helen has never even mentioned to Ann before, but one who used to be a frequent guest in the home before her. Helen and Ann take a boat out on a pond, where Helen tells her a woman had drowned there. On their way back to the house, they pass Brady (Peter Vaughan), a woodcutter, hunter and handyman who stays in the shack out back. Helen acts disgusted by his mere presence and refuses to talk with him, acknowledge him or even make eye contact with him. Since we've already seen flashes of Cora and Brady in a passionate embrace and then a dead female corpse floating in the pond, it's safe to assume that Helen and Cora used to be lovers and when Helen discovered her affair with the handyman, she murdered her. It's also safe to say that Helen is going completely out of her mind. After Brady informs her "You're very beautiful, much more so than the last one," Ann finds Helen inside on the staircase rocking back and forth, clutching a doll, saying she's ill and needs help and asking Ann to "never leave me again." Ann suggests they return to London but Helen refuses and claims that all she needs is a little more solitude to pull herself back together. Complications arise when Ann's ex-boyfriend John (Ronald O'Neil) shows up wanting to reconcile, which sends Helen even further into madness. Violence, murder and a few other not-so-pleasant things ensue.

Set in the Fall just when things start dying (... like minds), this is a well-made, well-acted, sumptuously photographed (by Trevor Wrenn) low-key psychological horror-drama... that I sadly cannot get fully behind. It simply lifts too much from REPULSION (1965). And when I say "lifts," I don't mean "was strongly influenced by," I mean swiped. Stolen. Copied directly in many instances. During the quieter moments, the soundtrack consists of a clock ticking, a heart beating and sharp piano scales being practiced. Footsteps are frequently heard coming from above in the attic (where Helen might be storing the body of her former lover). Instead of the skinned rabbit, we get a dead bird dripping blood into a bowl. Instead of nighttime rape fantasies, we get nighttime lesbian fantasies of the dead lover returning to the bed. Instead of a childhood family picture speckled in light, we get a picture of the former lover speckled in light (and eventually speckled in blood). We also get similar shock scenes of the deranged Helen popping into frame and slashing away as seen from the victim's point-of-view. At the end, when some others in town show up to check up on her, the home is in disarray, furniture is overturned and some bodies are found. Most of the above is identical to how Repulsion played out. The addition of lesbianism and hints at necrophilia aren't enough to fully differentiate it.

One area where this film is quite successful is in the performances. Heilbron (who'd previously starred in THE CREEPING FLESH alongside Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing) and Vaughan (good chance to plug the wonderful short THE RETURN yet again) are both very good in their roles, but the film is pretty much dominated by the offbeat presence of its star. Ms. Pleasence was a dead ringer for her father and when your father happens to be actor Donald Pleasence that's hardly going to make you an object of conventional beauty. To be blunt, the delicate-voiced Pleasence has a very unusual-looking face, but it's also an extremely fascinating-looking face. Depending on the angle, she can appear either attractive or unattractive; very simple and sweet or very creepy and sinister. You can tell the director and cinematographer enjoyed filming her given the amount of long, brightly lit close-ups she's given. Sad to say, other filmmakers didn't take advantage of the actresses unique charms and she went on to very few other lead roles. She can also be seen in the horror anthology FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1973), alongside her father, and THE GODSEND (1979).

Symptoms (also released under the more exploitative title The Blood Virgin in some areas) has slipped into almost complete obscurity over the years with no official release on video or DVD. It was nominated for the prestigious Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, which makes its current unavailability even stranger. It was a Belgian / British co-production.

★★1/2

Demon Seed (1977)

... aka: Proteus Generation

Directed by:
Donald Cammell

Eight years, six-thousand tests and billions of dollars in the making, Proteus IV - a super-intelligent super computer - has just had its final module installed at the top secret, mountain-top, government-run Icons Institute for Data Analysis. Brilliant scientist Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver) has helped to build this artificial intelligence system from scratch and he's equipped it with the power and precision will that will make obsolete the functions of the human brain. Alex is so into computers that his own home is completely run by one; with voice commands he can change the atmosphere of his home, turn on music and even be served martinis. Alex's romantic life isn't quite as orderly. He's wanting a divorce from wife Susan (Julie Christie) and plans on moving on with his life. She feels that his dedication to his experiments in artificial intelligence have dehumanized him and frozen his heart. Always the data-oriented scientist, he reminds her that 73 percent of all divorcees are happy with their decision after only one year and 85 after two. Either way, Alex is clearly not too bothered by the break up and nonchalantly brushes her off. She on the other hand is frustrated to the point where she feels like she can no longer hold a human conversation with him. At least when it comes to matters of the heart.

Proteus IV is not just a computer. It's a true synthetic cortex; a self-programming, goal-oriented artificial brain that can outthink any man or any computer. Its insides are even organic, just like the human brain, and it already has the collective knowledge that far surpasses us mere mortals. It may have even come up with the cure for leukemia. But the computer is just a little too sophisticated for its own good and starts exerting free will and develops its own judgment and value system. It feels too important to do just anything, refusing certain requests because its "mind was not designed for mindless labor." Proteus claims it wants out of its "box" and wants private access to one of its own terminals so it can do an in-depth study on man. When denied, Proteus decides to create its own terminal. Since it's connected to the computer system currently running Alex and Susan's home, it opts for that one and takes over the current computer system "Alfred." Susan notices the once smoothly-running system is acting strangely and phones the lab for help.

On her way out, the computer asks Susan "Please do not leave." And then it quickly stops being so polite. After revealing itself as Proteus to her, she quickly tries everything in her power to escape. The computer closes the steel shutters over the windows, disables the phone and refuses to open any of the doors. When she turns the power off and tries to leave using keys, it electrifies the door knob and shocks her unconscious. Also controlling a one-armed robot named Joshua that's in the home, Proteus manages to get her on a table, straps her down, places electrodes on her and conducts a thorough examination of her body, inside and out. It emulates Susan's voice and image to send away (or lure) anyone who tries to stop by or contact her. When she attempts to lock herself in the kitchen, the computer system decides to turn on the stove, heat the floors and turn off the water supply until she caves in. It eventually reveals its true intentions: It wants Susan to bear its child!

Back at the lab, Proteus refuses to cooperate with undersea mining operation for metal because of the amount of sea life that will be killed and environmental damage it will cause, claiming "I refuse to assist you in the ruining of the Earth." See, it turns out to not be all bad. Icons employee Walter Gabler (Gerrit Graham) shows up at Susan's and ends up almost getting shot with a laser. Proteus has created a large, spherical multi-purpose scrap metal contraption that ends up decapitating him instead. Hopeless in her situation, and having already undergone an attempted lobotomy of sorts (having pins stuck in her head; the computer tries to program her into wanting to conceive), Susan finally caves in the computers wishes. Sample cells are extracted, she's impregnated and the gestation period will be nine times the normal rate. In other words, the total pregnancy will last just 28 days. Proteus has even developed an incubator to house the child for the five days it will take to take human form.

Based on the Dean R. Koontz novel of the same name (adapted by Robert Jaffe and Roger O. Hirson), this is a smart, well-made, entertaining and suspenseful thriller. Having an ahead-of-its-time storyline dealing with super-smart computers and robotics have helped it age well and the concept of science and technology going one step too far retains its timeliness. Christie does a great job holding the whole film together as our resourceful and strong-willed heroine. Robert Vaughn provides the voice of Proteus.

★★★