Cat's Eye (1985)

... aka: Stephen King's Cat's Eye

Directed by:
Lewis Teague

The unstoppable Stephen King scripted this uneven trio of tales, with a young and ever-so-cutesy Drew Barrymore (who'd just starred in the mediocre King adaptation FIRESTARTER) specifically in mind to play several roles. The framework involves a cat named General who weaves in and out of all of the stories and uses up about eight of his nine lives trying to get from point A to point B. After surviving being chased by CUJO and almost being run over by CHRISTINE, General is abducted off the streets of New York City and taken to "Quitters Inc.," an extreme anti-smoking clinic, to help demonstrate Dr. Vinnie Donatti's (Alan King) patented electric shock room. At a friend's recommendation, Richard Morrison (James Woods) shows up at Quitters to try to kick the habit. Before he can back out of the four-step program, he's informed that if he doesn't quit smoking immediately, his wife and daughter face torture, rape and bodily mutilation (!) Donatti sends out a henchman to spy on Richard to make sure he doesn't light up, and it just takes one relapse for Morrison to stick with the program. This black comedy features a nightmare party scene making use of The Police's Every Breath You Take and electro-shock scenes where Twist and Shout and 96 Tears are played. Barrymore shows up briefly in thick glasses as Woods' (retarded?) daughter and there's a clip of THE DEAD ZONE (1983) on a TV set. It's pretty silly.

General escapes the clinic and takes a ferry to Atlantic City, New Jersey for our next tale. Caught in between a busy intersection, mob boss Cressner (Kenneth McMillan) and a few friends make a bet on whether the cat will get run over trying to cross the street, which results in several of the participants trying to coax the cat into traffic just for a few thousand bucks. General manages to make it across safely, so Cressner takes him back to his high rise penthouse apartment where a nasty wager is about to take place. Because he's sleeping with his wife, tennis instructor Johnny Norris (Robert Hays) is forced at gunpoint out onto a ledge surrounding Cressner's flat. If he can make it all the way around the building without falling, Cressner promises he can have his wife plus some money. Johnny faces high winds, the sadistic mobster using various tactics to make him fall (including a fire hose) and a pesky pigeon who keeps pecking at his ankle. General manages to foil the bad guy's plans before he runs off and hitches a ride on a train.

Arriving in Wilmington, North Carolina (where most of this was filmed), General has finally reached his destination: the home of young Amanda (Barrymore again). A tiny troll (designed by Carlo Rambaldi) shows up at around the same time and is intent on stealing Amanda's breath while she sleeps. After the troll kills their pet bird, Amanda's awful mother (Candy Clark) blames General and sends him to the animal shelter to get euthanized. Can the kitty escape and make it back to the house in time to save Amanda? The climactic cat / troll showdown features scale sets, the troll floating around the room on balloons and spinning on a record player (while Every Breath You Take plays yet again) and lots of hokey early green screen work. With James Daughton as the father and an ending right out of a Purina Cat Chow commercial.

Executive produced by Dino De Laurentiis and co-produced by Milton Subotsky (formerly of Amicus films), with an appropriately whimsical score from Alan Silvestri, Cat's Eye never makes it up high up on the list of favorite King films and for good reason. Despite the presence of Woods, the first story seems like a complete throwaway, and the final one (the only authentic horror story in the bunch) is juvenile, unscary and hokey. Only the second manages to generate any actual suspense. Being a cat lover, I really wanted to like the scenes with General, but the treatment of the cat throughout is surprisingly mean-spirited; with animal cruelty being played up for cheap comedy throughout. That aspect leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. The end theme song is sung by Ray Stevens.

Director Teague had previously made the cult hit ALLIGATOR (1980) and the King adaptation CUJO (1983); two solid and successful genre offerings. Cat's Eye seemed to stop him dead in his tracks. The DVD is from Warner.

★★

Black Christmas (1974)

... aka: Noël tragique
... aka: Silent Night, Evil Night
... aka: Stop Me
... aka: Stranger in the House

Directed by:
Bob Clark

Depending on whether you believe "slasher," as a film categorization, applies only to post-HALLOWEEN films or not (many do), Black Christmas can either be seen as one of the most important slasher films of all time, or one of the most important proto-slashers (non-slashers that clearly influenced the later subgenre, i.e. Mario Bava's BAY OF BLOOD). Regardless of how you want to class it, it's well deserving of its reputation as a very good, highly influential film. The premise set down by writer Roy Moore is a rather simplistic one. Young women in a sorority house around Christmastime are harassed by an obscene phone caller who seems to be speaking in multiple voices and makes scary pig noises / crying sounds. Over the course of the next few days (while most of their house mates are gone on break), the caller gets inside, hides out in the attic and periodically sneaks downstairs to pick them off one by one. Just like with Carpenter's aforementioned genre-defining classic (which Christmas predates by four years), it's really the execution that makes the difference, not the plot.

Olivia Hussey (who was well-known for playing the female half of Franco Zefferelli's ROMEO AND JULIET [1968] at the time) gets star billing as nice sorority sister Jess. However, bucking the moralistic trend of later slasher flicks, this nice girl happens to be sexually active and plans on getting an abortion because she wants to sever ties with the potential father; intense and possibly unhinged music student Peter (Keir Dullea). The attempt to set up Peter as a possible suspect (the obscene caller makes abortion references and a silhouette of the killer has a similar hairstyle) is one aspect of Christmas that doesn't really work all that well. Since it's more of a mood piece than a traditional mystery, it's not even really important who the killer is; something the ambiguous ending just further accentuates. That also means we don't really care much about the multiple scenes set at the police station (where genre legend John Saxon oversees a rather inept investigation), as well as the parallel crime of a high school girl raped and murdered which may or may not be the work of the sorority house killer. Both of which just seem to distract attention away from where it should be.

There's a surprising amount of comedy here, which is effectively used to lighten the mood. Hussey and Dullea are adequate in their roles (though the way Hussey answers the phone [HELLO!! PARDON!! WHO!?!] has always driven me up the wall!), but the two most memorable characters are the ones used to provide much of the humor; ones played by Marian Waldman and Margot Kidder. Waldman's character Mrs. Mac is a drunken, vulgar house mother who hides bottles of booze throughout the sorority house in the strangest of places, including in a hollowed-out bible and in the back of a toilet! Kidder gives perhaps the film's best performance as a nasty, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking bitch who gives little kids alcohol and decides to tell a grieving father (James Edmond) whose daughter may be dead a story about going to the zoo to watch animals hump. Andrea Martin (then known for her comedic skills as part of SCTV but playing it completely straight here), Art Hindle (who later appeared in such highly-regarded genre films as the excellent remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and Cronenberg's THE BROOD), Lynne Griffin (from the slasher CURTAINS) and Nick Mancuso (who provided some of the telephone voices) round out a solid cast.

Director Bob Clark manages to provide several wonderfully-timed jump scares (particularly one where the killer's hand emerges from off-screen to grab Hussey by the hair), but much of the scare factor here actually comes in the form of eerie individual shots. Cinematographer Reginald H. Morris hardly ever seems to get credit for his work and for providing some of this film's very best moments. One of the key images here is one of the victims; mouth gaped open in shock from under plastic, sitting in a rocking chair in the attic and positioned in front of a window. The image is iconic not so much in what it technically is, but the way it looks because of how it's lit and photographed (using several different viewpoints from both inside and outside the home). Some of the film's creepiest moments are ones where only the killer's eye can be seen; before he makes use of a glass unicorn on a sleeping Kidder and peering from behind the door at Hussey right after she's discovered the bodies of several of her friends. These shots were obviously inspired by a similar shot in the suspense classic THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1945) and they're used very well here. Cameraman Albert J. Dunk also did a great job with the killer POV shots, utilizing an over-the-shoulder harness to capture a jerky, creepy effect.

Some may feel my rating should be a notch higher, but this does miss the mark on true excellence by just a hair for me personally. Too many extraneous scenes - and too many unnecessary detours along the way - bog it down a little bit. They also don't help matters when it comes to re-watch value. Once you've seen the film a time or two and know where it's going you'll probably realize it. Still, the creepy moments retain every bit of their potentcy all of these years later and that's something to really be commended.

First released to U.S. theaters under the title Silent Night, Evil Night, the film underperformed at the box office until the title was changed back to Black Christmas. Bette Davis, Gilda Radner and Malcolm McDowell were all offered roles but each turned them down. Edmond O'Brien had to drop out of the role Saxon ended up playing due to illness.

The 2006 "remake" of Christmas (directed by Glen Morgan) didn't even bother trying to be suspenseful, atmospheric or scary and just went straight for gore and camp. It's already forgotten.

★★★1/2

Brainsucker, The (1988)

... aka: Brain Sucker

Directed by:
Herb Robins

Sitting through this entire video (distributed by bottom rung label Raedon) hurt my soul. And it didn't hurt so good either. First off, I need to confess that I had tried watching this at least three times in the past and found the first ten minutes so insufferably annoying I kept turning it off. Since then it has spent over 2 years hibernating on my computer's hard drive. I was finally sick of skipping over it. Sick of looking at the title all of the time. Sick of knowing deep down in the back of my mind it was there... in my life... No matter what I did or where I was at, a nagging voice in my head kept reminding me... "The Brainsucker is still with you... waiting to be watched... hogging up valuable space... making your computer run just a little bit slower..." I needed to finally rid myself of it. Instead of calling in an exorcist, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, grabbed some ibuprofen, bit down on my lip and pressed play... I was going to do it this time, dammit! I was going to finish The Brainsucker if it killed me. If for no other reason, the world deserves a warning. And hey, maybe it would actually improve after the first ten minutes. Stranger things have happened.

Max (Jonathan Middleman) is arrested for shoplifting for the fifth time in a week and taken before a screaming judge who has just sentenced a Rastafarian to probation for publicly passing gas. He calls Max an "amoeba" and a "cockroach" before a disfigured hunchback named Kutz (Dan Bush) comes to his aid. The hunchback slobbers, sticks out his tongue, speaks in a highly irritating and often unintelligible accent and offers the judge an arrangement: let Max go into his custody so they can perform behavior modification experiments on him and he'll never have to deal with him again. Since this film doesn't take place in the real world, the judge agrees. The hunchback then drugs Max's drink, wraps him in a rug and drags him back to his mad doctor boss Professor Klotz's laboratory. Klotz (Ralph Farrar) wants to create the first "completely positive super human being." His cardboard machine (which has a Frisch's Big Boy head on it) has two settings: "Good" and "Evil." He sets it on "Good" and leaves the room. The hunchback enters and turns the knob to "Evil" instead.

Soon after, Max lapses out of his very good and very evil personas. He steals some clear tubing and a corkscrew from the lab and runs off, swearing vengeance on the whole city for his predicament. He finally comes to the conclusion that he wants to suck out everyone's brains and starts with a couple of bikers who harass him. Max then pays a visit to his loving mother (Gay Nathan), who blames him for driving the love of her life away. She tells him "I should have killed you at birth!" and adds "I should have let them help make antitoxin for hook-and-mouth disease out of you or something!" (??) Max moves on to a hotel. Since he's saved up a few hundred dollars, he's able to rent out the Presidential Suite and he poses as a psychiatrist named "Mr. Suck." He lures a hooker, an old woman and her priest son back to his room, sucks out their brains and then hangs their bodies up in the closet. An actress named Joanna (Marjorie Morris) stops by and Max decides he likes her enough to let her live and begins dating her.

Max drags Joanne to a party, where he de-brains a slutty socialite (Judith Cameron) while she gives him head in the hot tub. He then takes Joanne to a drive-in theater and kills a virginal teenage girl in the bathroom while she sits on a toilet. Perplexed by the sudden outbreak in murders, Inspector Peugeot (Dave Stevens) calls in Detective Howard Kropotsky (the director) to help solve the case. The finale takes place at an airport, where the movie suddenly and desperately tries to convince of its deeper meaning! Oh, I'm sure it all made sense in Mr. Robins' mind.

Shot with a camcorder around the Santa Fe, New Mexico area by the director of THE WORM EATERS (1977), who had also acted in several Ray Dennis Steckler films, this is amateurishly made, horribly edited and acted, has what is probably the most irritating theme song ever ("Brainsucker Rap"), is full of continuity errors and has sets and costumes so tacky they'd have been rejected by John Waters. Some lines of dialogue are repeated for no good reason, boom mikes are visible several times and during one scene I swear you can hear the director or cameraman talking in the background. The untalented cast flub their lines, overact, talk directly at the camera, scream all of their dialogue at the top of their lungs or speak in often unintelligible fake accents. But as stupid, technically inept, annoying and terrible as this whole thing is, I guarantee you won't see another movie quite like it. This thing is weird and then some.

Now into the dark abyss of my recycling bin you go, Brainsucker. Never to be seen again.

NO STARS!