Night Visitors (1987)

... aka: Fröhliche Weihnacht 2 (Merry Christmas 2)
... aka: Nocni goście (Noctural Guests)
... aka: Ongewenst bezoek (Burgled)
... aka: Visitantes da Noite
... aka: Visitantes Noturnos

Directed by:
David Fulk

Night Visitors is one of those ultra-rare low-budget American films that was released in seemingly every other country except for its country of origin. The late 80s and early 90s saw VHS releases in numerous South American (as either "Visitantes Noturnos" or "Visitantes da Noite") and European (often under its original title but sometimes not) countries. In the Netherlands it was issued with Dutch subtitles as Ongewenst bezoek (meaning "Burgled" or "Burglarized"), in Poland it was Nocni goście (or "Nocturnal Guests") and in Germany it was released as Fröhliche Weihnacht 2 ("Merry Christmas 2") to be a sequel to Fröhliche Weihnacht, a re-titling of the sleazy, mean-spirited holiday slasher DON'T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS (1984). IMDb also claims it was released in Finland, the UK, Brazil, Portugal, Iceland and Italy. Here in America? Well, we got... nothing. A similar fate befell BLOOD NASTY (1989), which incidentally featured several of the same actors seen in this one. While the presence of both cult Scream Queen Linnea Quigley and washed-up former star Troy Donahue have led some to seek out copies of Nasty over the years, Visitors doesn't really have any Z grade star power that would prompt anyone to seek it out. The biggest name here is actually Richard Gabai, who starred in and co-directed Nasty, was a frequent presence in films by David DeCoteau and Fred Olen Ray and would go on to numerous other projects over the years. But let's face it: Gabai is even less-known than Quigley and Donahue and the two of them aren't exactly household names themselves.

Essentially a black comedy that utilizes a common horror sub-genre - the home invasion thriller - in telling its story, this isn't really a horror film in the traditional sense despite being marketed as such in some quarters. What it really is is a series of darkly comic psychological games played out for specific character revelations; a nightmare scenario where all of the participants will learn, grow and ultimately change for the better by the end of the film. I know. It wasn't what I was expecting to see either. 

Things center around the uptight, upper class Whitmore family of the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Shaker Heights, who are gathered together for the holidays to celebrate Christmas Eve. Father Lloyd (David Schroeder), an engineer who uses words like "gosh" and "dandy" and refers to blacks as "colored," and stuffy homemaker mom Carolyn (Rochelle Savitt), have presided over a very strict household over the years; attempting to instill both good manners and an appropriate amount of Catholic guilt into all three of their children. Their eldest son, 26-year-old Tad (Joe Whyte), does well for himself as an accountant in Cincinnati... but he's a socially inept virgin. 19-year-old Robbie (Gabai) is a shy and introverted college student at Holy Trinity College who has withdrawn from his peers to focus on his ham radio hobby. Youngest child Katie (Jeralyn Fabre), a high school senior, is also expected to carry on the family tradition of a Holy Trinity education, but she's secretly having second thoughts. Granny Ardis (Billye Ree Wallace) is also on hand to complain about dust and treat the kids to a "dirty joke" about, uh, stinky socks.

Everyone knows a Whitmore family. Some are even part of a Whitmore family. You know; sweaters and buttoned-up dress shirts and bow-ties for the guys; ankle-length, ladylike skirts for the girls. Censored games of Trivial Tidbits. Turkey. Tree. Individuality and dissent are stamped out. Fake smiles. Repression... and, of course, lots of bitterness and resentment stewing underneath the entire façade just waiting to boil over. The catalyst for change finally arrives in the form of a quarter of carolers who show up on their doorstep, sing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and then gain entrance to the home after claiming they need to use the phone because their car has broken down. Instead of the good church-goers they initially claim to be, the carolers are actually dangerous thugs who want to rob the place. At least at first. 

Ringleader Travis (Daniel Hirsch, also the associate producer), slutty Lucy (Michele Winding), manic, bearded junkie Earl (Richard Rifkin) and black klepto Reerah (Gregory Carlton Battle), all decide to have a little fun first. They're loud, vulgar, crude and obnoxious, ruin the family's dinner, unwrap all of their presents, hold them hostage at gunpoint and try to spur them into violent retaliation. The demented Travis' primary objective is actually to get one of the passive family members to kill him so he can fulfill his obsession with going over to the great beyond. In films similar to this, there's usually a lot of violence and rape, but this film plays the scenario entirely for story and character development. In other words, don't go in expecting thrills because there's very little of that here.

I didn't dislike this. It's fairly well-written and acted, there's some amusing satire and a few isolated moments of insight, it managed to keep my attention and its put together competently. However, there's also a bland lack of cinematic quality to the proceedings in what is essentially a talky filmed stage play. It's extremely heavy on dialogue, there's minimal action, minimal location change (95 percent of the film takes place in one home) and it fails to generate any real tension or suspense, which would have helped to strengthen and accentuate its themes. I can now fully understand why this never gained a VHS release here in America. Distributors probably realized this hard-to-pigeonhole, minimal-interest low-budget film would have been a nightmare to try to successfully market during the video era. 

It was filmed in Sharon, Pennsylvania and features music (including an original Christmas song) by Ernest Troost, who'd go on win a Daytime Emmy Award for his TV work and also did scores for Dead Heat (1988), Tremors (1990) and many others. There's no DVD release and, with just 8 votes currently on IMDb, it doesn't appear that many people in the foreign market bothered watching it where it was available.

★★1/2

Les possédées du diable (1974)

... aka: Exorcism
... aka: Exorcisme
... aka: Linda
... aka: Lorna the Exorcist
... aka: Lorna... the Exorcist
... aka: Possédées du démon, Les
... aka: Possessed by the Devil
... aka: Sexy Diabolic Story

Directed by:
"Clifford Brown" (Jesus Franco)

Either under its original title (which roughly translates to "Possessed by the Devil"), its American release title ("Lorna... the Exorcist") or one of its other common aliases ("Exorcism"), one may assume this is just another of those European Exorcist clones. The fact it was released the year after Friedkin's landmark film along with a spate of wannabes like Beyond the Door and The Antichrist may further that suspicion. However, despite technically having a possession (though no exorcism), this is absolutely nothing like any of those other films and the misleading titles are most likely just an attempt to cash-in on the craze. So now that that's out of the way, on to the film... 

Successful, wealthy, happily married businessman Patrick Mariel's (Guy Delorme) privileged life is about to be threatened when his past literally comes back to haunt him. A strange woman Patrick met nearly two decades earlier has recently resurfaced and has been calling his home, prompting suspicion from his wife Marianne (Jacqueline Laurent), who begins to suspect he's having an affair. Strangely, Patrick seems to be at the mercy of the caller and even agrees to switch his family's vacation plans from St. Tropez to Camargue at the last minute specifically to meet up with her. This doesn't sit too well with Patrick's teenage daughter Linda (Lina Romay), who's recently been having weird sex dreams about a strange woman with outrageous eye makeup she's never met before.

Upon arriving in Camargue, the family check into their hotel and go to a dance club, where dad's former fling Lorna Green (Pamela Stanford), the same woman who's been calling his home and the same woman who's been haunting Linda's dreams, shows up and makes her objective known: "I want your daughter." And she wants his daughter because she was promised to her 19 years earlier by a then-struggling Patrick when the two struck up an unholy bargain: success and wealth for the girl on her 18th birthday. Now he doesn't want to pay up, but he soon realizes he may not have a choice in the matter. Lorna has a nasty way of making her presence known. She has her henchman Maurizio (Howard Vernon) beat Patrick up with a seashell, keeps turning up in Linda's dreams and terrorizes mum with a severe case of pubic crabs. And no, not the itchy little buggers, but the kind you crack open and dip in butter at Red Lobster. Meanwhile, at a mental hospital in scenes that for all intents and purposes really could have been scrapped, a doctor (Franco in a cameo) is seeing to a disturbed patient (Catherine Lafferière) who's just came out of a coma and also is haunted by the memory of Lorna; a former lover of hers. These scenes very well could have been filmed for another project all together and have little to no bearing on the primary story.

As with nearly everything else Franco made in the 70s until his death last year, much of the running time is eaten up by extensive sex and nude scenes. The film opens with a slow-mo lesbian scene between Stanford and Romay that runs nearly ten minutes in length. The sex and nudity sometimes even briefly cross over into the pornographic and, without getting too raunchy here, I'll just say that no female orifice is denied camera coverage and the film certainly earns its X certificate, albeit on the softer end of that spectrum. 

There's a genuine absurdity to the scenarios Franco devises to showcase the erotica that are not unlike most straight hardcore films. Both the mother and the daughter sleep in the nude and have no issue parading around naked in front of each other or the dad / husband. At the "nuthouse," which appears to have been shot in just a regular house with floral print wallpaper, the female patient is hilariously clad in just thigh-high stockings and a flimsy shirt so that her ass and vagina are almost always exposed. The zoom work is also so insanely sleazy and inappropriate at times it's downright hilarious. After the mother character is killed during a second vag-crab attack she's spread out on the hotel bed nude and the camera quickly zooms directly onto her pussy before the scene suddenly cuts away. During other scenes featuring close-ups of female genitalia, the camera wildly jerks around and goes in and out of focus so much that it's almost like the director is so excited about what he's filming he can't even keep still.

Lorna is light on plot, technically uneven (sometimes downright inept) and burdened by too much extraneous material and numerous scenes that unnecessarily go on for far longer than they need to... but it still manages to capture that uniquely hypnotic quality prevalent in most of the director's finest work, which is all further enhanced by André Bénichou's interesting experimental score. Yes folks, this is a strange one. Sometimes I was laughing, sometimes I was cringing, sometimes I was bored and sometimes I was quite drawn in by the film. The actors are all game for whatever Franco throws their way, with particular positive nods going out to the complete uninhibited Romay (in one of the best performances I've seen from her) and especially Stanford (who is equal parts creepy, mysterious and seductive in her ambiguous role). There's no comic relief and some sequences, like when Lorna "initiates" (possesses) the virginal Linda by breast feeding her and then raping her with a big wooden dildo (which she then licks the blood off of) are among the nastiest things I've seen from this director.

Franco made this one for French producer Robert de Nesle (who also contributed to the score). The two men also collaborated on numerous other films including The Perverse Countess (1973) and A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD (1973). It was remade (by Franco) in 2002 as Incubus. The editor was Gérard Kikoïne, who went on to make many porn films, the weird Jekyll & Hyde / Jack the Ripper mash-up Edge of Sanity (1989) starring Anthony Perkins and the weak Poe-influenced Buried Alive (1990) starring Robert Vaughn, Donald Pleasence and John Carradine. The version I watched ran just short of 100 minutes, but other versions omitting the more explicit nudity have been released, some shorn of as much as 20 minutes total. In 2010, Mondo Macabro released a DVD.

★★★

Phone Call, The (1989)

... aka: Super Polar (Super Thriller)

Directed by:
Allan A. Goldstein

Married computer salesman Michael Henderson (Michael Sarrazin) goes away to a weekend seminar with his co-worker Ben (Vlasta Vrana). Bored and lonely in his hotel room, Michael decides to call up a phone sex hotline Ben introduced him to and begins chatting with the husky-voiced Carey. Not long into their conversation, Michael discovers he's been redirected to the wrong place and is actually on "The Man Line" talking to a dude. Disgusted, he calls Carey (Ron Lea) a "sick bastard," hangs up the phone and goes about his business. Unfortunately for him, Carey turns out to be a down-on-his-luck ex-con (and psycho) who doesn't take lightly to being insulted. He uses Michael's name and credit card information to track him down at the hotel and then shows up in person demanding an apology. Michael refuses, calls hotel security and has him dragged away, but not before Carey leans in and gives him a nice wet one on the lips, which his co-worker sees. When Michael returns to work, it doesn't take long for him to realize that Ben has spread it around the workplace that he's gay, which causes problems with his homophobic boss (Harold Ryshpan) and others. And that's just the beginning of Michael's problems when Carey begins to stalk and terrorize both him and his family.

This psycho-thriller owes a huge debt to Adrian Lyne's massively popular Fatal Attraction (1987), which starred Michael Douglas as a successful, happily married businessman whose no-strings-attached weekend fling with a mysterious woman (Glenn Close) backfires when she reveals herself to be a clingy psycho who won't go away. It's been awhile since I've seen Attraction but I do recall specific scenes from the film and many of those have been carbon copied here by writer Donald Martin. In Attraction, Close's character shows up at Douglas' house pretending to be interested in buying their home just so she can meet his wife and daughter, kills their pet rabbit (helping to coin the popular "bunny boiler" phrase), vandalizes his car and swipes the young daughter, buys her ice cream, takes her to an amusement park and scares her with a roller coaster ride before dropping her back off at home. In this film, Lea's character shows up at Sarrazin's home to paint their fence just so he can meet his wife (Linda Smith) and daughter (Lisa Jakub), kills the family's pet cat, vandalizes his car and swipes the young daughter, buys her candy, takes her to a park and scares her by pushing her too high on a swing before dropping her back off at home. It's pretty much straight down the line with this one.

The only truly interesting thing about this otherwise derivative, routine effort is the whole gay angle. There's the shell of a good, thought-provoking film in here, but the content is not explored thoroughly enough and it resorts to generic thriller clichés by the end. Things begin interestingly as Michael's prejudicial taunt and refusal to simply apologize to someone he's unnecessarily degraded comes back to haunt him. He then gets a good taste of what it's like to be gay at the workplace (circa 1989) when his "friend" Ben stops talking to him (and hopes to capitalize on the water cooler gossip by swiping his accounts out from under him), his pregnant secretary (Dannette McKay) makes a passing barb about his sudden lack of masculinity and his boss insists he take a long holiday (suggesting he's planning on firing him despite him doing good work for the company). Michael is also treated poorly when he finally decides to come clean and go to the police for help; who pretty much just assume he's a closeted gay man and write him off as a pervert. 

The film seems to be setting up something of a cathartic experience for the Michael character: forcing him to walk in someone else's shoes and experience what someone he initially mocked may have gone through in his own life that led him to a dark place, but it doesn't follow through with this at all. By the end, one never gets the impression Michael is truly sorry (though he does finally apologize for it... after strangling and beating Carey up!), nor does one ever get the impression he has learned anything from the experience. Like most of the rest of the film, the finale - which features both men facing off with their phallic weapons until one "penetrates" the other with a knife while they're caught in an embrace - is interesting and seems to be hinting toward something deeper, but they don't quite pull it off either. The addition of some incredibly stupid one-liners are completely out of place and don't help matters any.

Another major issue I had with the film is that I could never discern a focused point to all of this. Neither Michael nor Carey are painted in a very sympathetic light; though audience allegiance is clearly steered toward Michael and his family, leaving Carey to be a generic maladjusted gay psycho threatening Michael's "normal" existence as straight married man and father. One could stretch and say that Carey represents repressed homosexuality in the Michael character, but I doubt that was the intention since the filmmakers constantly reassure us of Michael's heterosexuality with PG lovemaking scenes with his wife. Carey, an ex-con who spent years in prison for robbing a video store, is depicted in a pretty one-dimensional light. His mother wants nothing to do with him and his former lover from prison has moved on with his life and has married a woman. One wants to feel sorry for Carey but there are never any moments where he seems genuinely sad, lonely or anything of the sort. If the filmmakers had set aside a few minutes to humanize him (or even made him pitiable) this would have been a much more compelling film than it is.

A French / Canadian co-production filmed in Quebec, The Phone Call debuted on TV and has long since been forgotten. It received an American VHS release by Monarch in 1991 but hasn't been revived since then, probably because of the combination of a generic title, the gay subject matter and the fact it just isn't a very good movie. Still interesting, though.

★★