Star Crystal (1986)

1986
Directed by Lance Lindsay
Starring C. Juston Campbell, Faye Bolt, John W. Smith, Taylor Kingsley and Marcia Linn

Here's a review that I've been saving up for a long time.  I've mentioned Star Crystal a few times in passing as one of my favorite bad movies of all time, and if you're looking for a flick that is bad in pretty much every way that a movie can be yet still be watchable just for the pure train wreck eye-bleeding quality of it all...look no further.  The sheer level of stupidity on display in this flick is really something to behold, not the least of which is the fact that it pulls one of the most truly bizarre, unnecessary 180s in any horror movie that I've ever seen.  If you can't tell, this is some movie.

Released in 1986, I'm not entirely sure whether or not it had a theatrical release.  There ain't a whole lot of information to be had about this movie on the interwebz, and since I really don't feel like spending thirty minutes scouring the globe for this precious information that my scores of loyal followers are clamoring for, I'm just going to stick with the mysterious approach.  I like to think that this movie just appeared one day at some producers' doorstep, deposited like an unwanted child as the sound of the director's sad weeping was heard as he ran away, to be unleashed on video store shelves across the great fruited plain.  The real story was probably 76% less dramatic.

Anyway, the movie.  Essentially, we've got an Alien ripoff that ends like a kind of spacified version of "Why Can't We Be Friends?" between the villain and his human would-be victims.  Given that information, it's still waaaay weirder than you would ever expect.  We spend the first 15 minutes with a group of astronauts (in the year 2032, no less) on an expedition to Mars who find a strange egg and bring it aboard their ship.  Note to astronauts in science fiction films: this is never a good idea.  The egg soon hatches, the baby alien scampering away and hiding somewhere on the ship, only for the astronauts to run out of oxygen and all die.  So ends the introduction.  And boy, was it fun.

After this lovely little diversion, we meet the real group of main characters - ANOTHER group of astronauts on a rescue operation for the first group.  We've got Roger (C. Juston Campbell, who is nowhere near as cool as C. Thomas Howell) and Adrian (Faye Bolt), the two lunkheads in charge who are the only people in the group who don't immediately stand out as future alien fodder.  There's also Cal (John W. Smith), the resident ladies' man, and his two would-be conquests, Sherrie (Taylor Kingsley) and Billy (Marcia Linn).  Fortunately, we don't spend much time with any of these characters with the exception of Roger and Adrian, but that's both a blessing and a curse.  At least the other three are such ridiculous characters that they're laughable; Roger and Adrian are like even more boring love children of Randy Orton and The Miz.

It isn't long before the alien starts to off the three disposable characters, covering them in a translucent slime (which is shown in all of its slimy glory) and skeletonizing them.  We don't see much of the alien in these sections of the film, as the take the "less is more" Jaws style approach to building the suspense.  Either that or the $10 creature budget couldn't bear showing the creature in these stages.  Considering that we're about to see a LOT more of him, who knows.  At any rate, sooner or later, it's down to Roger, Adrian, and the alien...

Whose name is Gar, and dig this, he's not really the villain.  It turns out that Gar (who has taught himself to speak English after reading about human evolution and the Bible - no joke) is a really nice creature, and only killed the other astronauts in a Three's Company-esque misunderstanding.  The rest of the film consists of Gar attempting to help Roger and Adrian repair their ship and make it back home safely, leading to a truly Titanic-style tearjerker of an ending.

If you can't tell, this is some bad movie.  The switch that this movie pulls off is one of the more hilarious things I've seen in any movie, horror or otherwise.  The voice that Gar speaks with is something that is annoying at first, yet somehow becomes a little more endearing once you've heard him talk for what seems like 15 minutes straight.  Not to mention his appearance.  Gar LOOKS unlike any kind of alien I've seen in any "space horror" film, and his bizarre appearance is the fact that he is always - and I mean ALWAYS - accompanied by about seventeen layers of slime.  The characters are absolutely terrible, and the fact that we're left with two of the most boring characters around played by a couple truly terrible actors, is just icing on the cake.

Strangely enough, I actually DO recommend this movie.  Star Crystal is worth watching just for the sheer weirdness; I can't fault Lance Lindsay (who also directed the movie) for phoning it in when it came to penning this screenplay, because we've got a lot of head-scratching moments here that have nothing to do with questionable production values.  More than anything though, it's just loads of fun to watch in a crowd setting, which I have done on a few occasions to a very good, MST3K-style result.  The only bad part about having a viewing party for this flick is that it's pretty hard to find, as the DVD is out of print and thus fairly expensive.  However, those of you who aren't stubborn assholes like me and actually subscribe to Netflix (which is probably about 95% of you) could probably have a lot easier time.

* out of ****.  A truly bad film, but fuck me if it isn't fun to watch.

Night Gallery (1969)

1969
Directed by Boris Sagal, Steven Spielberg (really), and Barry Shear
Starring Roddy McDowall, Ossie Davis, Joan Crawford, Barry Sullivan, Tom Bosley, Richard Kiley and Sam Jaffe

First things first - I've done plenty of lazy things here on the blog.  One thing that I HAVEN'T slept through, though, is some kind of Twilight Zone retrospective/top 10 list.  Maybe it's because it's been so ingrained into the pop culture, maybe it's because they replay all of the best episodes every July 4th and New Year's Eve on the SyFy channel, but, really, any kind of top 10 list for TZ is redundancy for redundancy's sake.  All of the episodes that I would list are pretty much the exact same episodes that anyone else would, so it's pointless.  Kind of like my "Top 10 horror villains" list from a few Halloweens back.

Which brings me to Night Gallery.  Rod Serling's sophomore series, and while everyone's milage varies, I love the hell out of the thing.  As opposed to Twilight Zone, this series - while dealing with much of the same when it came to presenting thought-provoking morality tales - was much more horror and suspense-oriented.  To say nothing of the style.  I don't know this for a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me in the last bit if Serling instructed his directors to smoke, inhale, inject and absorb rectally every foreign substance on the planet before filming, because there are times when this can be one damn trippy show.  In the good way.  There's this bizarre, surreal, dreamlike quality to the show, the kind that can make some of the twists and final freeze-frames crop up in your mind at some inopportune moments.  Verbal orgasm over.

No, folks, we're not doing a top 10 list, although I WILL be doing some kind of retrospective on the series sometime in the future.  What we're looking at today is the 1969 TV movie that pre-dated the series by a little over a year.  I'm not sure if the original plan was for the TV movie to turn into a series, but it certainly set a good precedent.  It begins with a great title sequence, followed by Serling introducing viewers to three different paintings representing three different stories (all written by Serling himself), making this officially an anthology film.  This was the motif of the series, by the way, as these bizarre, abstract paintings served as the intro image before the story would start.

It kicks off with a vengeance in Story #1 - "The Cemetery."  Roddy McDowall is Jeremy Evans, black sheep of a wealthy family who needs only for his old man uncle to croak off before he inherits a fortune.  Well, wouldn't you know it, soon enough the uncle turns up dead, and Jeremy is left in the creepy country house along with family servant Osmond Portifoy (Ossie Davis).  Folks, McDowall just owns in this segment.  Everything about his performance, from the overly flamboyant gestures to the vocal inflection just screams Douchebag with a capital D, and by the time the climax of this segment rolls around, you REALLY want this dude to get what he has coming to him.

See, there's a painting of the house and the surrounding grounds on the main staircase.  And as the days tick by, Jeremy notices that the painting seems to be changing.  First, his uncle's tombstone is added to the family graveyard (and I always love family graveyards in these types of stories).  Then, it opens.  Then, a specter emerges.  And I think you know where we're going from here.  It's also a got a slam-bang double-twist at the end that surprised the holy fuck out of me, so three cheers on that front.

Story #2 - "Eyes," where we get the directorial debut of one Steven Spielberg.  It starts Joan Crawford as a woman who has been blind her entire life and has what is truly one of the more insidious schemes that I've seen in any movie of this type.  For the mere price of $9,000, she is going to steal the vision of some sad-sack gambler, bamboozling and blackmailing her doctor in the process as well.  The catch?  She will only have vision for 12 hours, but she doesn't care.  In her own words, she will be taking enough pictures with her eyes to last a lifetime.

Reportedly, Crawford - an old-school actress all the way - wanted a more experienced director and was very wary of Spielberg, but Universal backed their guy, and it shows in just how well-handled this segment is.  Despite how unlikable Crawford is here, fate plays truly one of the most cruel pranks that I've seen in any movie, and the way this handled from a visual perspective is disorienting and invigorating at the same time.  Oh, and if anyone wants the ending to the Crawford-Spielberg dilemma, they got along famously on the set to the point that they actually stayed in contact for the remainder of Crawford's life.

Story #3 - "The Escape Route."  This one takes us to South America, where former Nazi war criminal Joseph Strobe (Richard Kiley) has been hiding out since high-tailing it from Germany in 1945.  A chance meeting with a Holocaust survivor (Sam Joffe) is the lynchpin event that sets the plot in motion as all kinds of bad memories begin cropping up for Strobe, and the dialogue clues us in on just how much this guy enjoyed some of the atrocities that he had a hand in at Auschwitz.

As opposed to the later TV series, the actual paintings that Serling introduces actually play a part in the stories themselves, and this one is no different as Strobe escapes from his reality by visiting a local art museum.  This leads to an appropriately wicked ending twist that, while maybe a little predictable, is very good poetic justice and gives us one of the better ending-shot stills that the series would become famous for.  And it's got a really funkadelic sequence where Joffe runs away from pursuers utilizing some pretty unintentionally hilarious freeze frames.

I think it's pretty apparent, but I was a huge fan of this flick on the whole.  I've seen the vast majority of the Night Gallery episodes in syndication, but these stories never crop up on the rotation, and seeing them for the first time in pristine quality was a real treat.  The three stories compliment each other very well; you've got your eerie ghost story stuff, your wicked human evil and your internal mindfuck horror all rolled out in a convenient row.  The stories themselves might be a little individually lacking in certain areas, but as a collective, they're awesome.  If you've got eighteen bucks to spare, the first-season DVD of Night Gallery is worth picking up just for this movie alone.

**** out of ****.  For the record, that's the first perfect rating that Dave Meltzer has awarded since Punk-Cena at Money in the Bank!

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

1997
Directed by Jim Gillespie
Starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Ryan Phillippe

I've been on a big '90s kick lately, and there is definitely no movie that represents the late-'90s horror boom for me than I Know What You Did Last Summer.  Sure, Scream came a few months before it, and horror scholars write all kinds of...uh...scholarly (read: long-winded and boring) essays about it, but this flick was mine, baby.  Not in the least bit because of Jennifer Love Hewitt and the amazing clothes that the flick's wardrobe people managed to stuff her in for the vast duration of the running time, I probably watched this movie a good 25 times during its initial run on HBO, and I can still go back and revisit it every so often.

Like Scream, the movie was scripted by Kevin Williamson, and was massively successful.  Even better, it's based on a novel...one that I sought out back when this movie was new, and one that I found infinitely less interesting than what I got in the movie.  If I remember correctly, the body count in the book is criminally low, and might have even been zero.  Suffice to say, I've never felt compelled to go back and check.  I've read more than a few comments from people online who napalm Kevin Williamson, and a lot of the points are justified, but his updating of an admittedly dated suspense novel from 1973 is a textbook example of how to take source material and make it better.  Insert derogatory Rob Zombie comment here.

Since the film has been parodied and referenced numerous times, I don't know if I have to get into the plot, but hell, here goes anyway.  We're introduced to four perfectly happy and perfectly hot high school seniors - Julie (Hewitt, who radiates likability and girl-next-door charm in the role), her best friend Helen (Sarah Michelle Geller, in a performance that actually predated Buffy by a few months), Julie's boyfriend Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Helen's jocky boyfriend Barry (Ryan Phillippe).  Sex is had, alcoholic beverages are shared, and within short order Ray accidentally hits and kills a pedestrian on a middle-of-nowhere road.  After the obligatory close calls where they are almost found out, the four friends dispose of the body in the lake to avoid the incident mucking up their idyllic lives.

Flash forward a year.  Now a college freshmen, Julie returns home.  The incident has stuck with her and, again, Hewitt really does do a fantastic job in these scenes that establish her character's moral compass.  I've said this in passing a few times, but it really is a shame that she didn't do more horror flicks besides this and the amazingly craptacular sequel.  Just imagine if, say, there was no Halloween H20, and we got a non-Rob Zombie and non-suck reboot at THAT time when horror was white-hot.  With Love as Laurie Strode.  Cue fireworks and confetti.  Anyway, Julie's three friends are still in town - Helen, in the final week or so of her reign as the town's beauty queen, is still with Barry, while Ray works at the docks.  Cue the random, unmarked note in her mailbox that reads "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and take your best guess as to where we're going from here.

Unlike a lot of horror movies, I remember this flick for how much I genuinely enjoyed the characters, then and now.  The scenes where they're doing things other than getting killed actually manage to hold my interest, and that's more than I can say for some films in the big three franchises.  Gellar and Phillippe are the movie's beefcake couple, and it's Phillippe in particular who really dives into his role and turns Barry into one of the more memorable douches in horror.  Secondly...I don't know why, but I've always been a sucker for horror movies that have a romantic subplot that is more than just window dressing, and the whole "Ray trying to get back with Julie" plot in this movie is done really well.  It's one of those things that could have been suicidal if the acting was subpar, but both Hewitt and Prinze do their damndest to give the story emotional resonance. 

Quick aside - I've always been a HUGE mark for Freddie Prinze Jr., even back then when I was in junior high/high school and he did that string of crappy movies aimed at the teenybopper crowd after this flick became a huge hit.  I've always been mystified that he never made the major leagues despite being both talented and handsome enough to do so.  I always felt like he was just one good role away from hitting that big time.  Then again, this movie is where he met his future wife whom he gets to bang to this day, so it's not like the guy failed at life.

Where was I?  Oh right, the escalating body count.  While Julie and Helen go about piecing together the mystery of both the person they accidentally killed (on this newfangled thing called the internet) and the potential killer (in the backwood swamps), the mysterious, cloaked, hook-wielding killer is busy going about his business, and this movie does indeed have its share of money scenes.  Admittedly, it does tread into Dark Knight territory at times with the villain's ability to predict exactly how people will act in given situations, but it's a minor complaint this time.  The flick's two "main character" deaths don't disappoint in the slightest.  You know, for a guy who wrote a slasher flick that seemed to sneer at other slasher flicks, Kevin Williamson certainly wasn't shy when it came to scripting the red stuff flying himself.

Since I'm guessing the vast majority of people reading this have either seen this film or the numerous movies that make fun of it (the original Scary Movie being the most prevalent), my guess is that you've got your mind made up whether or not this is a good flick.  Good is a relative term.  I've got plenty of nostalgic love for I Know What You Did Last Summer...to say nothing of the sequel, which makes the story fifty times more unrealistic, turns the characters (including the ones left over from this film) into a bunch of unlikable doofs, and slathers on the manufactured hipness to the nth degree.  You know, the annoying one.  But enough about that.  Of all the things that work in this movie, it's the performers that I like the best, and it does indeed make me a little sad that this time period featured such a good, talented, charismatic crop of young actors while today's stable of cardboard cutouts have left me so numb that I seriously don't even go to movies anymore. 

Oh, and it had an awesome soundtrack with a rocking version of Deep Purple's "Hush" by Kula Shaker.  Youtube it.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  That's probably a higher rating than just about anyone else would give it, but f**k it.  Joe Bob says check this one out.