Screams of a Winter Night (1979)

... aka: Howlings of a Winter's Night

Directed by:
James L. Wilson

Lake Durand doesn't have the best reputation in the world. The Indians nicknamed it "Coyote Lake" because of the weird and unexplainable howling noises the wind seems to make there. A family who lived there decades earlier all met gruesome fates; corpses were found scattered about, heads were ripped off, bodies were pulled apart... Because their home was completely demolished, the deaths were written off as a "natural disaster," but an Old Indian claimed the family had actually been killed by "Shataba;" an ancient and very evil spirit that only comes to life during the winter time. The same force may have also been responsible for a freak accident that killed several lumberjacks during the 40s, and may have had something to do with an entire family disappearing in the late 50s, and so on. Having heard about the legend and those accompanying stories, John (Matt Borel) decides to test his luck and drags nine of his friends there for the weekend... during the winter, of course! He only lets Cal (Patrick Byers) in on the Shataba legend and even shows him the remains of the home once owned by the dead family, as well as their graves. That evening, everyone grabs a beer and cozies up by a fireplace, where different scary tales are told; three of which are then visualized for us.

Our first story is "The "Moss Point Man;" which is a play on that old urban legend about a hook-handed fiend who hangs out at Lover's Lane (as well as another popular urban legend about a date gone sour). After leaving the school dance early, Roger (Ray Gaspard) and his girlfriend Estelle (Brandy Barrett) run out of gas on a back road. He decides to walk on ahead and get some gasoline while she stays behind in the car. A barely-seen Bigfoot-like creature is lurking about. It chases Roger around and then kills him. Back at the car, Estelle hears the sounds of something dragging along the roof... This only runs for a few minutes. Steve (Gil Glasgow) next offers up the story "The Green Light;" about a trio of fraternity pledges having to spend the night in an old abandoned hotel rumored to be haunted. Geeky Ron (Borel again), tough guy Parker (Glasgow again) and fraidy cat Billy (Gaspard again) show up and have been instructed not to leave the first floor. Parker does anyway and doesn't return. After an hour, the other two decide to explore the upper floors and get more than they bargained for. Both of the above tales are pretty lame.

After an almost completely useless first hour, this finally starts to improve a little bit. Rich snob Elaine (Mary Agen Cox) narrates the third and by far best of these stories about a girl she knew from high school named Annie (Beverly Allen). Because she's so shy and quiet, some people who feel sorry for her and set her up on a blind date. It backfires when the slob (Glasgow again) attempts to rape her. She stabs him to death, claims to police they were attacked by someone else and gets away with it. Now off to college, Annie is unpopular, uptight and "crazy as a jaybird." She calls her roommate (Robin Bradley) "trash" because she dates guys and destroys all of her belongings because she borrows her shawl without asking. The two get into a heated argument which ends with "Crazy Annie" moseying on down to the kitchen and getting herself a big butcher knife. Back at the cabin, a couple of the guys try to scare everyone with gorilla masks and the wind has really started to pick up...

The PG-rated low-budgeter was shot on 16mm in Louisiana and is tame, usually dull, predictable and highly uneven, though it does boast a pretty effective ending. I also liked how the actors in the framing scenes are also the stars of the various stories. It's not been released on DVD and the distributed VHS copy through VCI is a heavily damaged, worn print. A young William Ragsdale (later to star in the big budget vampire hit FRIGHT NIGHT [1985]) appears in one scene as a gas station attendant who tries to warn everyone about all the "weird stuff" that's happened at the lake.

★★

Apartment Zero (1988)

... aka: Apartment 0

Directed by:
Martin Donovan

Adrian LeDuc (Colin Firth), who's been raised between the UK and Argentina since he was a child, runs the revival-house theatre Cine York in Buenos Aires, which specializes in classic and art house films. His offbeat, eclectic choices haven't exactly been packing the house, just as his offbeat, eclectic personality hasn't won him over any friends, let alone any romantic relationships. Adrian absolutely lives for the cinema. It's his entire life; his obsession. Instead of framed photos of close friends and family members, his flat is decorated with portraits of classic movie stars because they are the people he feels kinship with. The cinema has been his escape from the world; a place to hide and a distraction from the things he deeply dislikes about himself and his life. A loner who finds it nearly impossible to connect with other people, Adrian has instead opted to shrug off the company of others; confiding all to his mentally-ill, institutionalized mother because she's not in the right mind to question or condemn. He even goes so far as to pretend he doesn't know Spanish just so he can avoid casual conversations. As for the neighbors in the apartment house where he lives, they might as well forget it. Adrian doesn't want to get to know them. He doesn't want to let them into his life, and figures a simple hello or goodbye in passing is more than sufficient. Needless to say, his standoffish nature has him branded a rude and unpleasant man to everyone around him.

But the deeply lonely and repressed Adrian is ready for a change. With his mother's health quickly spiraling down, Adrian yearns for a friend and a companion. He puts an ad in the paper for a roommate to share his flat and immediately gets numerous responses. Most of the people who show up don't seem like they'd be a good mesh, but that all changes when the handsome Jack Carney (Hart Bochner) appears at his doorstep. All it takes is for him to stand next to a picture of James Dean to have Adrian sold. He's found his movie star; your prototype mysterious bad boy who can afford to dress simply (t-shirts, jeans and a leather jacket) because he knows he wields all the power he needs in his winning smile. Jack claims to work for a local computer company, but Adrian is so instantly smitten that he unwisely doesn't ask too many questions. At least at first. He's much too busy trying to live out a married couple scenario with his new boarder; offering to do Jack's laundry and cooking him breakfast every morning before work. All that's really missing is a kiss before heading out the door.

Jack turns out to be a master manipulator. He's a good listener, his magnetic stare is almost hypnotic and he possesses such a dark charm and intense, effortless sexual prowess, that he's able to seduce both men and women alike, regardless of their sexual preference. People feel at ease with him; like they can open up to him and share their deepest, darkest secrets without fear of judgment. For strictly selfish reasons, Adrian demands he not associate with any of the denizens in their apartment building, but Jack does anyway. It takes him no time at all to wrap every single person he comes into contact with around his finger; something Adrian's been unable to do all the years he's lived there. And not coincidentally, there also happens to be a serial killer running amok in the city.

Apartment Zero is an intelligent psycho-drama very much in tune with films like Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976), with its apartment setting and psychological components, as well as Bergman's Persona (1966); with its vastly differing personas feeding off each other and ultimately beginning to blur together. Donovan and co-writer David Koepp intentionally establish a reference point here in Richard Fleischer's classic Compulsion (1959), which was based on the famous 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder case. Leopold and Loeb were two wealthy young men (and lovers) who killed someone just because they could, hid the body in a trunk and then invited various guests over to their apartment where the trunk was kept in plain sight; as a way to enhance the thrill of getting away with the murder. At one point in Apartment Zero, Adrian and Jack actually attend a screening of Compulsion, and a corpse hidden inside a trunk eventually makes its way into the film. The Leopold-Loeb case had also been the basis for Hitchcock's experimental film Rope (1949), as well as the later Swoon (1992). While both Rope and Compulsion could only hint at the more intimate relationship between the killers, Swoon delved directly into the relationship. Apartment Zero sits somewhere on the fence. The gay content is obviously here, but done with subtlety and restraint. Firth's character is so deeply repressed that he's unable to act on his desires, even with his more-than-likely willing object of affection right at his disposal.

The interplay between Adrian and Jack is brilliantly handled and really what makes this movie. These men; sexually-repressed, antisocial, awkward and stuffily mannered Adrian, and sexually adventurous, outgoing, charming and spontaneous Jack,  couldn't be any more opposite, but in some strange way they actually complement one another. Jack tells Adrian at one point that they gel because they're both "special" and misunderstood; the ways in which they're special is a moot point. It's certainly no coincidence that The Odd Couple is mentioned; Adrian and Jack are an odd couple; albeit a rather disturbed one. The various denizens of the apartment building add additional flavor to the film. 

Dora Bryan and Liz Smith plays a pair of eccentric, talkative old spinsters (Brit expatriates themselves) who are more than happy to welcome Jack's company, Fabrizio Bentivoglio is a macho guy who feels enough at ease to confess a sexual secret from his past to the new tenant, James Telfer is a mistreated transvestite and Mirella D'Angelo (from Argento's TENEBRAE) is a lonely, neglected women in a tumultuous relationship.

★★★1/2

Day of the Reaper (1984)

Directed by:
Tim Ritter

Florida native Timothy Gordon Ritter began making a name for himself toward the end of the decade (at least to fans of low-budget regional productions) with such gory efforts as TRUTH OR DARE? A CRITICAL MADNESS (1986) and KILLING SPREE (1987); both of which received decent distribution deals during the VHS era. Before any of those, Ritter had sharpened up his skills with a Super 8 camera; making many shorts and finally this 75-minute slasher flick that's been inspired by Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Hills Have Eyes and numerous other then-popular films. Reaper was filmed while Ritter was still a teenager and, needless to say, the cast is comprised of non-actors (most are the director's friends), the budget was nonexistent (around 1,000 bucks), the photography and editing couldn't possibly be any worse and all of the sound was ineptly dubbed in later on. Supposedly the original video transfer was made by videotaping the projected image out of a shoe box! That all said, this is pretty much only of interest for completists and fans of this director to see how much he's improved over the years. The folks who distributed it (Sub Rosa) were at least kind of enough to add trivia about the production throughout the movie to keep us distracted.

At the Sunnyville Mental Institution in Sunnyville, Florida, a pair of orderlies have to transport a prolific serial killer nicknamed "The Reaper" (Todd Nolf) somewhere to get his just dues in the electric chair. While on a back road, the killer jabs a pen in one's eyeball and slits the other's throat with a razor blade (where did that come from?) then escapes into the woods. I will stop right here and add that the psycho is already clad in black boots, black gloves, a flannel shirt and has a black hood over his head as he's being escorted out of the mental institution. Ha! We then get a long and tedious scene of a survivor of the psycho's previous killing spree walking around as her voice-over wonders if the killer could possibly escape and come looking for her. Nah! She goes to take a nap on her couch and then we're in flashback mode that explains what happened over a year earlier to her and some of her buddies.

In the flashback scenes, our heroine Jennifer Morgan (Cathy O'Hanlon) and four of her friends; Heather (Cristy Carrington), Cheryl (Sheila Hudson), Julie (Colleen Foley) and Jill (Sherry Gibson), are driving home from a day at the beach when their car breaks down. They're then immediately ambushed by the bloody-apron-wearing killer, who's already killed 40 people and then cannibalized their corpses. Jill gets killed when her arm is ripped off. After hitting the psycho with their car (one girl wants to kill him but another hilariously says "Don't do it. That's going down to his level!"), the others manage to escape. One of the girls goes to see Detective Rosenberg (played by the director), who doesn't do much of anything. The Reaper decides to then slaughter all the rest of the girls. One goes back to the beach all by herself and gets a machete through the neck in a shot so blurry it's even harder to make out than the rest of the film. Next up is a hacksaw to the neck. Another of the girls tries to hide out in a hotel with her husband Don (Brian Todd), but the killer shows up there to gut the guy with a knife while he showers and then strangle her. The detective decides to then use Heather as bait. The ridiculous "trap" they set up in an alleyway is somehow pulled off successfully.

We're then brought back to the present day; 15 months after the original murders, and The Reaper pops back in to chase Jennifer around in the woods with an axe. She gets away again, goes to the detective again and he tells her the psycho didn't actually escape and sends her to see a shrink (Patrick Foster) who turns out to be after the (now we learn) supernatural killer himself. The detective gets dismembered with a machete, someone is stabbed in the crotch, some guy with a white sheet tied over his head does battle with the killer and we learn that The Reaper's heart must be cut out of his chest in order to stop the madness. If you make it all the way to the end you deserve a medal.

Not many will be able to watch this boring, senseless and thoroughly inept amateur video. Even the running text track (written by Ritter himself), which admittedly helps soften the blow some, keeps saying things like "ZZZZZZ. Are you asleep yet?," "This movie is a good cure for insomnia!," and "Can anyone make sense of this plot???" Somehow using this and its follow-up, the shot-on-video anthology TWISTED ILLUSIONS (1985), Ritter was able to secure a 250,000 budget to shoot Truth or Dare? (one the best-selling made for video horror films of all time according to the trivia). VHS and Beta copies were distributed to independent video stores primarily in Florida. This currently has a rating of 8.1 out of 10 on IMDb. Oh, please.

NO STARS!