No es bueno que el hombre esté solo (1973)

... aka: Chiodo nel cervello, El
... aka: It's No Good for a Man to Be Alone
... aka: It's Not Good for a Man to Be Lonely
... aka: Nail in the Brain, The

Directed by:
Pedro Olea

From all outward appearances, middle-aged Martin Freire (José Luis López Vázquez) seems to have a pretty good life. He has a large home filled with expensive artwork and a nice view of the sea, a good job in the shipping industry (and is about to get a major promotion), plenty of money and a loving and beautiful wife named Elena. So why is he so secretive? Why does he have three industrial strength locks on his front door? Why does he make sure to lock his garage behind him every time he takes the car out? Why are the shades always drawn? And better yet, how come no one has ever met Elena and why does she never seem to leave the house, even to accompany her husband to important business dinners? Martin claims she's been ill, but watching her interactions with her husband and listening to her speak, nothing appears to be wrong with her. One could assume Martin is so insecure that he's keeping her prisoner there, but that doesn't appear to be the case either. He's kind to her, buys her flowers, carries her to bed every night and buys her stockings just like his sexy secretary Mónica (Helga Liné) wears. So just what gives? Well, if I said Elena was actually a doll, I'd be meaning it every sense of the word...

Yes, Elena is a doll. A life-like, life-sized mannequin to be precise. Martin had lost his wife years earlier in an auto accident (on their wedding day no less) and never quite recovered from the shock, so he's had a custom-made doll fashioned after her. Now he lives in an unhealthy fantasy world where the doll speaks to him, he speaks to it and the two can continue on their marriage. Elena even comes with pre-recorded cassette tapes he can put into a player built onto her back to make her speak when he takes her for car rides. Because Elena has to spend all her time inside, Martin imports another doll in; her "sister" Paula, to keep her company. He carries on the charade at the workplace, but it's about to be exposed by his new neighbors. Lina (Carmen Sevilla) has just moved in next door and is of, shall we say, loose moral character. She spends her nights drunk at the bar where she works (and sometimes prostitutes herself) and much of her free time tending to a tumultuous relationship with her bisexual, abusive pimp / con artist boyfriend Mauro (Máximo Valverde). Caught up in all that mess is Lina's lonely young daughter Cati (Lolita Merino), who is usually sent outside to play by herself. Cati starts snooping around Martin's home, manages to get inside and discovers the doll. Martin tells her that he'll buy her a gift if she keeps this a secret. She doesn't.

After Lina catches Mauro and her (male) boss getting cozy, she slaps them and gets herself fired. Now desperate for money and a place to stay, she finds out about Elena at just the right time and decides to use the information to blackmail Martin. Since he's alone and she's now alone, she wants to move in to his place and have access to his money. In exchange, she'll do all of the wifely cleaning and cooking duties and impersonate "Elena" for public appearances so his co-workers don't get suspicious. Martin doesn't want them there and tries to pay her off but she refuses and he feels he has no other choice but to cave in to her demands. After all, his career will be ruined if his wife's true identity gets out and that's just what Lina threatens to do if he doesn't go along with the arrangement she's proposed. Lina and Cati move in, but the little girl is forbidden to go upstairs where Martin keeps his dolls. It isn't long before the new house guest starts crossing the established boundaries. Mauro manages to weasel himself back in to her life (and Martin's home) and Lina destroys Paula and then demands he get rid of Elena. It's all just a little too much for the already very unstable man to handle.

This fascinating, seldom-watched psycho-drama certainly deserves a better fate than the utter obscurity it's fallen into. It's well-made, well-written by José Luis Garci, has an eerie score courtesy of Alfonso Santisteban and some wonderfully stylish moments and takes the subject matter very seriously; throwing in a little welcome black humor along the way. There are definite shades of Psycho here, with the doll solemnly sitting behind a sheer curtain in an upstairs bedroom window and the fact Martin carries on conversations with it, but this saves its shocks for the very end and slowly builds to them. Perhaps best of all, this boasts a truly excellent central performance from Vázquez as the lonely, disturbed, friendless man who's clearly lost the ability to be in normal relationships with real human beings. The character is certainly bizarre and creepy, but the actor manages to make sure we sympathize with him regardless. By the end of the film, we pretty much want his unwanted house guests to just get out and leave him alone. Sevilla is also great in her (very unlikable) role. One wants to feel sorry for her character; being a single mother who's fallen on hard times and all, but it's made pretty clear that she's an inept, self-centered woman and mother who hardly has her daughter's best interests in mind. Little Cati would probably have a better chance in life with her out of the picture.

According to IMDb, this was also released in Greece (as Kourdisti koukla gia ores monaxias) and Italy (as Il chiodo nel cervello = "The Nail in the Brain") in addition to Spain, but not here in America. The version I watched, which is available online, was in Spanish with fan-made English subs. I recommend it.

★★★

Demon Cop (1990)

... aka: Curse of Something Bestial, The

Directed by:
Hal Miles (uncredited)
Rocco Karega
Fred Olen Ray (uncredited)

It doesn't happen too often, but I actually had to stop this film 15 minutes in and take a deep, mind-emptying breath. "How in the hell was I going to write this thing up?," I wondered. That was soon followed by "How in the hell am I going to watch 70 more minutes of this crap without pouring bleach into my eyeballs?" Nothing, and I mean nothing was making a lick of sense. I was overwhelmed by the vast amount of characters, the constant hopping around from scene to scene, close-ups of eyes darting around and mouths talking about murders and gang-bangers and AIDS and black men giving other black men a bad name and this and that, shots of people's backs as they talked, shots of buildings as random people inside talked and multiple voice-overs from multiple characters. A tacked-on pre-credits intro of special guest star Cameron Mitchell sitting behind a desk chain smoking didn't help matters and neither did the seemingly random shots of a monster face inserted here and there. Were these flashbacks, flash-forwards or were they currently going on? Well, it seemed to be a little bit of everything. I just couldn't tell what was what, who was who or what the hell this was even about. Thankfully, it starts making a little more sense after the first 20 or so minutes. Even better, it also becomes absolutely hilarious.

I suppose right now's about as good a time as any to point out that - despite the title - this film has no demon cop. Nope; no demon cop anywhere to be found. It was originally filmed under the title The Curse of Something Bestial and this new moniker was just an enticing bogus re-titling for the home video release. Then again, I guess an honest title like "Demon Former Probation Officer" may not have roped in much of an audience. At some point, Fred Olen Ray got his hands on it. I'm not sure if he had anything to do with the hatchet-job editing, but he did add all of the footage of Mitchell to bookend the film. As he often did, Ray hired a formerly known star on their last legs for a day's shoot and filmed generic footage of them that could be used in later projects. He did it with John Carradine, who shot scenes as a mad doctor speaking in very vague terms that later popped up in EVIL SPAWN (1987), and did the same thing with Mitchell here, who plays a doctor at the Ravenwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane. In his brief scenes, Mitchell smokes cigarettes, opens a "file of the damned" and then says that this will be "...the type of tale that would drive Edgar Allan Poe to the brink of madness." Indeed! Interestingly, leftover footage from this same Mitchell shoot also ended up in the Steve Latshaw directed / FOR produced pumpkin-head-killer slash flick Jack-O (1995) years later, which also featured generic footage of Carradine sitting in a field talking. Ray's quite thrifty like that.

Of what I could make of the plot, someone is going around the Denver suburb of Aurora Hills killing gang members. A pair of cops; Logan (Ray Klein) and Spence (Tony Zotta), are put on the case and start interviewing possible suspects. Meanwhile, Edward Thurman ("R.M. Anthony"), a Vietnam vet and former probation officer who'd been wounded by a drive by a year earlier is showing strange signs of not being himself. After getting shot, he was given a blood transfusion and ever since has developed quite the murderous streak. Testing for various diseases has turned up nothing in the process. Thurman's girlfriend Kelly (Julia M. Westland) knows what's going on, but she's intentionally withholding information from the cops unless they can help cure him. Maria (Theresa Fenneaux), a wheelchair-bound pathologist with a bleached poodle perm who is given a ton of dialogue and can't stop flubbing her lines, helps in the investigation. Interpol agent Horst Steinfeldt aka "Bloodhound" (Duncan Larson), who also seems to have difficulty remembering his lines and forgetting he's supposed to be from Germany, shows up in town and seems to be tracking Thurman.

As it turns out, our sickly-looking killer has been the unlucky recipient of the 500-year-old "demon of retribution;" which he received during his transfusion. The donor was a Jewish immigrant who'd been infected himself and was wiping out Nazis. Now that the demon is inside a man who was gunned down by thugs, he's drawn to killing the "mother fuckers who are the cause of my suffering" (i.e. other gang-bangers). The curse is activated by cycles of the moon and turn him into a barrel-chested, deep-voiced, rubber-faced demon. During one hilarious sub Troma-esque scene, he takes on three gang members; two male and one female, armed with chains, baseball bats and a Tommy gun. But nothing prepares one for the big taser gun finale, which is a laugh riot of almost unparalleled proportions. I had a strong hunch that leading man "R.M. Anthony" was director Karega before I actually verified it online. Why? Well, once you see him in action, the answer will be pretty obvious. Not content with subjecting viewers to his laughable anguished over-emoting, he shows a genuine cruel streak by also forcing us to look at his scrawny ass naked. I know nudity is supposedly a selling point but that rule doesn't apply when it's being provided by some balding, bug-eyed troll who looks like he just spent a year in a crack house.

IMDb lists three directors: Karega (the only credited director on the print I watched), Ray (who released it through his company American Independent Productions) and Hal Miles (though he's listed in the credits as just being the producer, makeup designer, photographer and 2nd unit director). Ray Harryhausen, Dick Smith and Forry Ackerman are all thanked at the end.

SBIG

Sleepstalker: The Sandman's Last Rites (1995)

... aka: Sandman, The
... aka: Sleepstalker
... aka: Sleep Stalker

Directed by:
Turi Meyer

If you asked a sample group of dedicated horror fans, "What has been the worst decade for the genre thus far?," chances are the majority would tell you it was the 1990s. Not that all 90s horror films were bad; there are actually many good ones from this time... Sleepstalker just doesn't happen to be one of them. In fact, this is the exact type of gimmicky, one-idea film that ran rampant throughout the decade that gives the 90s horror haters their case in the first place. Slasher films in particular had gone incredibly stale by this point. Jason, Freddy, Michael, Pinhead, Chucky and Leatherface had literally bled the sub-genre dry throughout the 80s and early 90s. By the time the mid 90s hit, desperate filmmakers were coming up with some of the dumbest and most absurd concepts imaginable to try to keep the ball rolling. It wouldn't be until the following year that Scream (1996) revitalized things. Only Scream ultimately ended up having an even more disastrous effect on these kind of movies (crippling the second half of the decade) when everyone started annoyingly trying to copy the smart-ass characters, constant "clever" film references and self-aware humor. But that is another story for another day... Now back to Sleepstalker...

A serial killer known as The Sandman (Michael Harris) has already killed five families. As he's busy slaying mom and pop from Family #6, young Griffin manages to escape. The police, led by Detective Bronson Worth (William Lucking), show up and finally apprehend the psycho. Seventeen years later, The Sandman is on death row awaiting execution. Luckily for him, the man assigned to give him his last rites is a Satanic, white- eyed preacher (Michael D. Roberts) who offers him a chance at revenge. He's given an upside down cross, uses it to cut his hand, bleeds into the sand and then - after his execution in the gas chamber - returns to life. Now a monstrous-looking supernatural entity who has the ability to transform into sand at will (to sneak under doorways, through keyholes, etc.), The Sandman has three days to hunt down and kill a now-grown Griffin (Jay Underwood), who's working in L.A. as a freelance journalist. If The Sandman is able to track down and dispose of his target, he will also gain immortality in the process.

After establishing its premise, we are then treated to... Well, not a whole lot actually. The Sandman (who is given an utterly predictable childhood trauma back story told in brief flashbacks) kills a few people in surprisingly tame ways. Someone's thrown off a balcony. Another is drown in sand. A head is knocked against a wall. There's nothing memorable or clever going on here despite ample opportunity for both, and there's also a curious absence of blood and gore; almost as if they were trying to avoid an R rating (which the film got, anyway). Though the makeup design on the killer is actually really good, the other fx; a mixture of simply reversing the film (for the sand fx) and primitive and dated early CGI; are quite poor.

"Super Special Effects" indeed.

The absolute worst thing about this one though is its complete lack of logic and how stupid the characters are. Our heroes learn early on that water is an effective means of fighting off the reanimated killer (who is - of course - made of sand and easily dissolved), so what do they do? They run from him, attempt to shoot him, heave a Molotov cocktail at him and fight him in other silly ways. If I were around to help, I'd be yelling something like, "Hey, go stand in the shower!" or "Why not take a relaxing dip in a hot tub until this guy's time runs out?" Speaking of time running out, the killer is given his three days to kill our hero and has ample opportunity to do so throughout the film. During one scene, Griffin is even behind bars when The Sandman pays him a visit. Instead of just killing him then and there, the killer decides to taunt him and waits until the last minute of the last day to really make his move.

I really do have to give some credit to the cast, though, for at least trying. Despite being given some extremely corny dialogue, Harris gives an effective performance as the killer, and Underwood and Kathryn Morris (playing the obligatory love interest) are as appealing as possible under the circumstances. Cult horror star Ken Foree (DAWN OF THE DEAD), looking atypically dumpy here, gets a few scenes as one of the detectives, but it's a forgettable, throwaway part.

★★