Chill Factor, The (1989)

... aka: Demon Possessed

... aka: Fator Calafrio

Directed by:

Christopher Webster

The pain begins almost immediately in this amateurish regional production as inappropriately lighthearted fantasy music spills out over the opening credits and unnecessary opening narration from one of the lead characters, which not only telegraphs her fate but also the fates of every other person in this film, plays over grainy slow-mo shots of snowmobiling. Our six primary characters are lead by insecure blonde whiner Jeannie (Dawn Laurrie), who complains about everyone being "smarter than me" and can't believe she's lucked out in dating the equally dull Tom (Aaron Kjenaas), "a college boy so handsome I could have died." Tom's future brother-in-law Chris (David Fields) is in his final year of medical school (something at odds with his affinity for drunken snowmobile riding), while Ron (Jim Cagle) has just been drafted for training camp by the Minnesota Vikings. 

As for the females, they apparently have no real aspirations aside from acting jealous and catty over these eligible bachelors they've sunk their claws into. Karen (Connie Snyder) is Tom's sister and engaged to Chris, but that doesn't quite explain the flirting and sexually-charged banter between the siblings nor the fact he casually rubs his hand up and down her ass in broad daylight... in public... in front of everyone else. Another character later observes that this behavior is "a natural brother / sister thing." The hell it is!

As for the third female character, this is where we get into even more problematic territory indicative of both the era and the place (rural Wisconsin) in which this was filmed. Before we even meet Lissa (Eve Montgomery), the narrator alludes to her by noting that Ron "got engaged to a black girl." When the three couples then stop by a bar for a beer, they get harassed by a local slob who refers to her as Ron's "nigger girlfriend." A character later refers to her as "dark meat" and then her own fiancé listens to her humming and sighs, "I'm in love with the only black girl who sings off-key!" You may be wondering why they'd even bother casting a black actress if all they were going to do was shine a spotlight on the fact that, yes, she is indeed black, but it all makes sense later on when the film needs someone to explain voodoo to everyone else.

After the competitive brothers get into an argument about who's the better snowmobile driver, barmaid Bessie (Bekki Vallin) suggests they go to a two-mile-long frozen lake bed called Black Friar Lake to have a race. There, Tom is seriously injured when he's thrown from his vehicle and hits his head on a tree. Knowing he'll die if they can't get him out of the 20 below temperatures soon, they look around and manage to locate an abandoned, boarded-up old lodge. After breaking inside, they're forced to spend the night due to the weather, nightfall approaching and the unconscious Tom, who's suffered a severe concussion in addition to possible spinal damage and internal bleeding, cannot be moved. The fact he's lost so much blood prompts Ron to make a go at leaving on one of the snowmobiles.

Further exploration of the old building reveals it was a former church camp. The are pews, crucifixes, bibles, an altar, multiple bleeding Christ statues and black-and-white photos of previous campers from way back in the 1950s with an ominous scroll saying "Keep the beast in the field." Apparently at some point, Satanists infiltrated the camp and took over. Not that these people seem to care all that much.

Karen finds a strange "game" with a circular board and a pointer. A OUIJA? Not exactly. Lissa explains it's actually a "Devil's Eye;" a tool commonly used by voodoo practitioners to communicate with the dead. So, yeah, basically a OUIJA. To work this one, everyone has to sit in a circle, put two fingers on the board and touch hands together with the person sitting next to them in order to talk to the spirit. Even though they're in a dire situation dealing with their dying friend in a very creepy setting, they're so bored they decide to give the device a whirl and unleash an evil force that sets in motion a series of supernatural killings.

Someone gets possessed, a cloaked figure prowls around and people are killed off in ways that include a neck slashing via barbed wire, a hanging, getting chopped up by fan blades in a walk-in freezer and an icicle through the eyeball. There are also a couple of hilariously inappropriate PG sex scenes. Would you sneak off to a bedroom and bang your boyfriend with your brother on his death bed in the very next room? And would you have sex with your significant other if they were almost dead one minute, had all of their wounds miraculously and inexplicably healed the next and then was acting extremely weird and saying all kinds of inappropriate things right after you've been trying to summon the dead? Well, the folks in this film certainly don't seem to mind!

There are a couple of OK things here, namely the setting and a somewhat amusing finale featuring a human vs. demon snowmobile chase that ends in someone getting blown up after being crushed under an ATV's snow tracks, but the film is pretty forgettable otherwise. The characters are all bland, the plot is thin and predictable, the pacing is slow, there's limited gore / fx work and both the dialogue and the acting are awful. The only other thing worth pointing out is the film's bizarre aversion to nudity despite the filmmakers' insistence on constantly showcasing the actresses in various states of undress. All three of the lead females strip off multiple times and we get gratuitous cleavage, side ass, side boobs, smooshed boobs, silhouetted boobs, bare backs and shoulders, bras and panties and close-ups of asses in skin tight pants, yet the film amazingly somehow manages to not have a stitch of actual nudity in it.

Director Webster had produced the first two Hellraiser films prior to this and would go on to produce two additional genre films; Trapped Alive (1988) and The Inheritor (1990), for the same short-lived production company (Windsor Lake Studios) out of Eagle Rock, Wisconsin. Afterward, he moved on to the film production wing of Fangoria magazine to produce Children of the Night (1991), Mindwarp (1991) and Severed Ties (1992).

Most reference books and many websites list this as a 1993 release (the same year it made its VHS debut courtesy of AIP under the new title Demon Possessed), but it supposedly received a brief limited / regional theatrical release in 1989 first. In 2019, Arrow Video released it on Blu-ray, which comes with commentary and / or interviews with stunt coordinator Gary Paul, line producer Alexandra J. Reed and special effects artists Jeffery Lyle Segal and Hank Carlson.

★1/2

Lubię nietoperze (1986)

... aka: I Like Bats

... aka: Mám ráda netopýry

... aka: Szeretem a denevéreket

... aka: Wenn Vampire lieben (When Vampires Love)

Directed by:

Grzegorz Warchoł

Izabela (Katarzyna Walter) has been raised from a young age by her weak-hearted aunt (Malgorzata Lorentowicz) and works at her curio shop. Though she's attractive, of age and certainly wouldn't be short of options, the virginal Izabela has thus far resisted dating let alone settling down, despite her auntie's insistence that she needs to get married before it's too late. Izabela claims to prefer her life of solitude and living alone and doesn't care what anyone thinks about that nor about the threat of one day becoming an old spinster. The attentive Marceli (Edwin Petrykat), who's recently been pursuing her to the point of her needing a restraining order against him, frequently visits the shop, waits outside for her and keeps asking to walk her home at night, only to be rejected time and time again. Sometimes persistence is rewarded, but with Izabela it appears to be a lost cause.

Izabela declining something even as simple as an escort home is especially curious considering there's a serial sex predator / killer roaming around the city who's thus far raped and murdered eight young women nearby. Nevertheless, Izabela insists she can handle herself and leisurely walks through a dark park every single night by herself; the same park where numerous victims have been discovered. Does she have a death wish or something? Nope. When she says she can handle herself she really means it. When the killer tries to attack her, she's easily able to turn the tables on him and kill him. That's one perk of being a vampire.

The roles are reversed when distinguished Rudolf Jung (Marek Barbasiewicz) enters the shop one day and shows an interest in Izabela's hand-made bat-themed tea set yet zero interest in her. That doesn't sit too kindly with the vampiress, who's used to getting attention showered upon her. She's the rejector, not the rejectee. He even passes on her sexual advances. Slapping on a dark wig, sunglasses, heavy make-up and a sexy dress, Izabela stalks Rudolf to a pub and attempts to proposition him again, only for her dream man to inform her that he's not into women. Though he's clearly lying, she leaves with an old pervert who thinks she's a hooker and kills him in his van instead.

Izabela ends up killing her wannabe suitor Marceli after he breaks into her home and attempts to kill her for continually turning him down. Then, seeing a news story about Rudolf on TV and learning that he's a famous psychiatrist, she goes to his massive, luxurious castle-like clinic (really the grand Pałac w Mosznej) and checks herself in as a patient. While she openly confesses to the professor and a few other staff members that she's a vampire, nobody believes her, so she starts telling other patients she's being treated for nymphomania instead. Some of the other nuts being treated there include a painter working on a gigantic canvas who's paranoid that everyone is spying on him and a frantic guy who believes x-rays cause AIDS.

Dr. Schulz (Wiktor Grotowicz), whose specialty is hypnosis, is unable to ever put Izabela to sleep, while an attempt at an x-ray has her turning up invisible. Eventually, she seduces, kills and feeds on the man-whore gardener, who's been sleeping with all of the nurses at the facility, and then hides his body in a pile of manure. Once it's discovered, she confesses to the professor that she murdered him yet he still won't take her seriously. She then willingly just leaves the hospital.

While this maintains interest up to this point, unfortunately the film completely falls apart in the third act. After leaving the clinic, Izabela makes an over-the-top jovial (and extremely annoying) gag prop salesman in a toupee keel over from a heart attack by flashing her fangs at him at a costume ball. She then attempts to commit herself to some kind of experimental psychiatric clinic run by Professor Wolf (played by the director), where criminally insane patients are kept caged out in the open air on the beach (?) Finally, we zip through Izabela's "cure" when the psychiatrist decides to finally have sex with her (I suppose that's a unique enough treatment method) and she's finally able to settle into a "normal" life.

This particular vampire has no issue with daylight, garlic, crucifixes, stakes, silver, holy water or anything of the sort. She also doesn't possess great strength, nor can she turn into a bat (though she has pet bats at home), nor can she turn others into vampires, nor is there any indication she's ageless or immortal. She's simply among us drinking blood from time to time. Like many film vampires, she's sick of actually being a vampire but, unlike other doom-ridden vamps who seem to hope for death to end their curse, here she simply wants to change her ways so she can blend into society and experience normal humanly pleasures like sex, love and motherhood.

On the plus side, the film is well-shot, the acting (particularly the female lead) isn't bad and there's some visual style. As a warning to horror / vampire fans, much more of an emphasis placed on the drama and comedy here than on the horror. In fact, this is almost entirely blood, violence and action free. Most of the time, it doesn't even attempt to be scary or suspenseful.

I've no issue with vampirism being used metaphorically, and I always welcome deviations from standard vampire lore, but the characters here are all unlikable, hideously self-absorbed and not really all that interesting. We get approximately zero backstory on the protagonist and little more on the male lead. The fact we could care less about any of these people renders the dramatic elements ineffective, as does the fact any serious content is constantly being undercut by hit-or-miss humor. Also having a "feminist" heroine who spends the bulk of her screen time pestering / stalking a guy and trying to suppress who she truly is, and her individuality, to ease herself into a housewife position to a wealthy career husband, is bizarre to put it mildly. Of course, this also could be an attempt at commentary about how women - even bloodsucking ones - feel compelled to change to fit into a certain expected societal mold, but it's too muddled and missing the kind of sharp, insightful satirical edge that could have made it memorable.

In addition to Poland, this was also released theatrically in Czechoslovakia, Germany and Hungary. It was made widely available here in America for the very first time in 2022 thanks to the 4 disc Severin Blu-ray set "House of Psychotic Women Rarities Collection." The set also includes Identikit aka The Driver's Seat (1974) starring Elizabeth Taylor, Footprints aka Primal Impulse (1974) starring Florinda Bolkan and the British experimental film The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), which is yet another feminist offering, this time from a female director.

★★