January was a wasteland at this point in the ‘80s.
And it’s understandable. The moviegoing season essentially ended the moment the holidays ended and studios were happy to just leave the big Christmas movies in theaters for two or three months before they really started throwing big movies at audiences again. This month is a great example of just how strange the programming for January typically was, although even in a month like this, a cult classic managed to make its debut. It’s fun to see David Cronenberg step into the ring for the first time this decade, and I’m excited to get to his wildly influential oddity in a few.
Let’s kick it off with something a little seedier, though…
JANUARY 16
Fear No Evil
Stefan Arngrim, Elizabeth Hoffman, Kathleen Rowe McAllen, Frank Birney, Daniel Eden, John Holland, Barry Cooper, Alice Sachs, Paul Haber, Roslyn Gugino, Richard Jay Silverthorn, Marianne Simpson, Joyce Bumpus, Patricia Decillis, Chris DeVincentis, Malcolm Hegge, Robert Kuhn, Don O’Neil, Deanie Gordon, Philip E. Roy, Alexandra Cleveland, Jeff Richter, Pam Morris, Toby Gold, Dick Burt, Frank C. Montesanto, Melissa Rodgers, Baby Fisher, Joe Lalogga, Brian Coughlin, Michael Dewind, Gregory Houston, Wolfgang Voise, Paul Volta, Michael Paul Richard, Michael Olivier, Wayne Gaiteri, John Quinn, Howard Fernandez, Mary Tomassetti, Jennifer Sue Brooks, Jeffrey Sanzel, Mike Pascucci, Bill Brown, Marty Lombard, Fred Pari, Eddie West, Frank Montesanto Jr.
cinematography by Fred Goodich
music by Frank LaLoggia and David Spear
screenplay by Frank LaLoggia
produced by Frank LaLoggia
directed by Frank LaLoggia
Rated R
1 hr 39 mins
Two archangels are sent to earth to stop Satan from coming to power on Earth via a high school kid named Andrew.
Frank LaLoggia only made a few films, and he was as independent as you can be for both of them. The difference in how the films turned out appears to be largely due to his level of experience on the first film and the distributors he signed to handle each of the pictures.
His first experience, Fear No Evil, is definitely the lesser of his two films, but there is a degree of promise to the filmmaking that is noteworthy, even if it doesn’t really come together. He and his cousin Charles raised the money for the film and then came up just a little bit short when it came time for post-production. What they made was strong enough to get Avco’s attention, and when Avco bought the distribution rights to the film, they also took control of finishing the film. LaLoggia didn’t like the final film, and it’s easy to see why.
Clearly made to take advantage of the demonic possession/Satan cycle that was supercharged by the success of The Exorcist and The Omen, smashed together with a smattering of Carrie, this opens with a Catholic priest murdering a man outside of a castle. The location was actually baked into the financing for the film. They had to shoot at least part of it at the Boldt Castle in the Thousand Islands in New York, so the film opens and closes there, and there’s a certain degree of production value that LaLoggia gets from the location. The film itself is about Lucifer’s efforts to be born in human form on Earth. The first attempt we see is stopped, and then we cut to a few decades later and the baptism of baby Andrew, which ends, as do all good horror movie baptisms, with blood. We get to watch Andrew grow up in montage and then catch up with him in high school in the form of Stefan Arngrim, a shy honor student who is viciously bullied for being gay. Like Nightmare on Elm Street 2, this is homophobia horror, a film that is as much about the fear of being called gay in the ‘80s as it is about the fear of the Devil.
The reason the film doesn’t work is that it never quite picks a lane. It’s not outrageous enough to be a camp classic and it’s not scary enough to really work as horror. It’s a film that feels too restrained for a story that includes resurrected archangels, truly wild gender politics, and a combination Passion Play and prom dance, and that’s a shame. It feels like LaLoggia could have made something great out of this if he’d had the right support, and even in this hobbled form, there are things to be impressed by here, including the amazing soundtrack and the special effects by Peter Kuran. When we talk about queer horror in the ‘80s (and we will), this feels like one of the first films that can legitimately make the claim that it is text, not subtext, and certainly not accidental. I just wish it worked better as a coherent whole.
Fish Hawk
Will Sampson, Don Francks, Charles Fields, Mary Pirie, Chris Wiggins, Geoffrey Bowes, Arnie Achtman, Karen Austin, Kay Hawtrey, Ken James, Mavor Moore, Allan Royal, Les Rubie, Murray Westgate, Michael J. Reynolds
cinematography by René Verzier
music by Samuel Matlovsky
screenplay by Blanche Hanalis
based on the novel Old Fish Hawk by Mitchell Jayne
produced by Jon Slan
directed by Donald Shebib
Rated G
1 hr 34 mins
An unlikely friendship between an alcoholic older Native American man and a young white boy turns out to be important for both of them.
While it’s nice to see Will Sampson, best known for his work in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, play a leading role in a film, this is a Canadian family film that plays like someone thought live-action Disney adventures were too scary and thrilling, a total sleeping pill that takes ostensibly interesting subject matter and renders it totally toothless.
Donald Shebib was a promising independent Canadian director, and both Goin’ Down the Road and Between Friends were considered significant, thrilling examples of a new voice. Fish Hawk feels like he decided to prove he could also do mainstream family entertainment, but unfortunately, this does not make that case persuasively. The film is told in broad stereotypes, and even if it’s well-meaning, the film is breathtakingly dull. There’s an early moment when Fish Hawk’s dog is killed by a bear, and it’s probably the most thrilling moment in the movie. For the most part, this is a film where cartoonishly terrible white people abuse the sainted Indian until they realize they’re wrong and then they reveal that they were actually good people all along.
There is something well-intentioned about the film, but the execution falls way short of the idea, and we’ve seen plenty of films since that got much closer to this film’s target. Shebib actually directed a film we’ll get to in 1983 that does a nice job of telling a real-life Native American story that feels honestly observed, which only makes this more frustrating. Charlie Fields is a hammy kid actor, and he feels like a kid from 1978, not a kid from 1878. The same is true of the photography. At the very least, a film like this should lean heavily on the production value you get from shooting in nature, but this is bright and garish and ugly. It looks like a TV movie, and there’s something plastic about the entire endeavor. I hate beating up little movies in this newsletter, but there’s a reason you don’t know this one.
Hawk The Slayer
Jack Palance, John Terry, Bernard Bresslaw, Ray Charleson, Peter O’Farrell, William Morgan Sheppard, Patricia Quinn, Cheryl Campbell, Annette Crosbie, Catriona MacColl, Shane Briant, Harry Andrews, Christopher Benjamin, Roy Kinnear, Patrick Magee, Ferdy Mayne, Graham Stark, Warren Clarke, Declan Mulholland, Derrick O’Connor, Peter Benson, Maurice Colbourne, Barry Stokes, Anthony Milner, John J. Carney, Robert Putt, Stephen Rayne, Ken Parry, Lindsey Brook, Eddie Stacey, Jo England, Frankie Cosgrave, Melissa Wiltsie, Mark Cooper
cinematography by Paul Beeson
music by Harry Robinson
screenplay by Terry Marcel & Harry Robertson
produced by Harry Robertson
directed by Terry Marcel
Rated PG
1 hr 30 mins
A young man inherits a magic sword and sets out to avenge his father’s death at the hands of his brother.
Star Wars made everyone crazy. Audiences, sure, but filmmakers, too. Watching people chase that film’s success and attempt to deconstruct how to reproduce it was fascinating, and the most remarkable part is that it’s still happening a solid 45 years later. Hawk the Slayer landed, timing-wise, smack-dab between Star Wars and Conan The Barbarian, another film that absolutely warped the gravity of the film industry simply by existing. Even before Conan hit theaters, it inspired a wave of sword-and-sorcery films as people around the globe tried to cash in on what they saw as the next big thing. In the UK, I would imagine it was the news of John Boorman’s Excalibur that made it possible for Terry Marcel to get this film bankrolled in the short term, but everyone was hoping they might catch hold of that next thing that would drive kids around the world absolutely batty.
Hawk the Slayer is far more Star Wars than Conan and suffers from one of the biggest problems that most post-Star Wars fantasy suffers from, a smothering cascade of exposition instead of character. Hawk (John Terry) and Voltan (Jack Palance) are the brothers who find themselves sitting on opposite sides of the good/evil table after Voltan murders their father, and there are certainly more compelling stories that feature the same basic set-up as Hawk the Slayer. For some reason, most likely budgetary, this epic sprawling adventure film takes place in what feels like about 500 square yards of a forest, even though it takes place over years and years of narrative real estate. Even though the film is only 90 minutes, it manages to meander a surprising amount, dragging ass after an opening scene that basically picks up at the last possible moment. Hawk picks up a fistful of buddies to help him… do stuff… before the film finally lurches into something like a point near the end, and every one of them feels like they are so lazily borrowed from Tolkien and his imitators that the dwarf might as well be named Shmimli. It’s just a carbon copy of a carbon copy of a carbon copy, which is wild considering how early this is in the overall sword-and-sorcery cycle. I liked seeing Patricia Quinn of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame show up as a witch, but it’s not like anyone really gets to shine here. The best you can say about any of these performances is that everyone is in frame and speaking the correct language. Even Palance can’t make his scenery-chewing fun, and John Terry is a block of wood, as dull a hero as we’ll see this decade. No one’s terrible, but in a film like this, with such a thin script and such perfunctory direction, that’s the most anyone’s able to pull off.
Marcel exhibits no natural flair for storytelling here, and under his direction, pretty much every single tech department shits the bed in spectacular fashion. It is an ugly film, poorly lit, and the effects feel like they can’t even compete with the worst of what was happening on Doctor Who at the time, much less with the best of what was being done for movies. Maybe the most cynical thing about the entire enterprise is their dangling threat of a sequel at the end. I know Terry Marcel has attempted to make that threat a reality over the years, but I can’t imagine what purpose it would serve based on just how hollow an endeavor this is.
Lovers and Liars
Goldie Hawn, Giancarlo Giannini, Claudine Auger, Aurore Clément, Laura Betti, Andréa Ferréol, Lorraine De Selle, Renzo Montagnani, Gino Santercole
cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli
music by Ennio Morricone
screenplay by Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Mario Monicelli and Paul D. Zimmerman
story by Tullio Pinelli
produced by Alberto Grimaldi
directed by Mario Monicelli
Rated R
2 hrs
A young American tourist takes a road trip with an Italian stranger and sparks allegedly fly.
When is a Goldie Hawn film not a Goldie Hawn film?
Maybe when it’s shot in Italy and then shelved for a few years, only to be dumped into theaters to try to capitalize on a little bit of heat after Private Benjamin and Seems Like Old Times both did so well at the box office. Technically, yes, Goldie Hawn is one of the two stars of this absolutely comatose romantic trifle, alongside Giancarlo Giannini, but there’s nothing here that hints at the carefully crafted comic persona that made Hawn a star in the first place.
She plays an American who is staying with a friend in Rome. Her friend’s having an affair with a married man, and one day, he shows up at the apartment, evidently all horned up because his father is dying. The friend isn’t interested, but Anita (Hawn) decides to catch a ride with Guido (Giannini) to Pisa where he’s going to see his father. There’s no chemistry between them and no logical reason she’d take a ride from him, but that’s the set-up, and the film is determined to milk whatever tension they can out of it.
There’s a breezy quality to the best European comedies, and clearly, this film wants to be that kind of light and nimble and sexy concoction, but nothing happens. The road trip is a total snooze and there’s no attempt to expand either of them beyond those first impressions of them as characters. Beyond that, it feels cheap and shoddy, poorly dubbed for everyone, and it can’t even offer a surface-level sexiness.
Scanners
Jennifer O’Neill, Stephen Lack, Patrick McGoohan, Lawrence Dane, Michael Ironside, Robert A. Silverman, Lee Broker, Mavor Moore, Adam Ludwig, Murray Cruchley, Fred Doederlein, Géza Kovács, Sonny Forbes, Jérôme Tiberghien, Denis Lacroix, Elizabeth Mudry, Victor Désy, Louis Del Grande, Anthony Sherwood, Ken Umland, Anne Anglin, Jock Brandis, Jack Messinger, Victor Knight, Karen Fullerton, Margaret Gadbois, Terrance P. Coady, Steve Michaels, Malcolm Nelthorpe, Nicholas Kilbertus, Don Buchsbaum, Roland Nincheri, Kimberly McKeever, Robert Boyd, Graham Batchelor, Dean Hagopian, Alex Stevens, Neil Affleck
cinematography by Mark Irwin
music by Howard Shore
screenplay by David Cronenberg
produced by Claude Héroux
directed by David Cronenberg
Rated R
1 hr 43 mins
A homeless man is recruited into a secret program to fight a powerful psychic.
If I’m being totally honest, Scanners might be one of the most directly influential films on my own writing career, and yet I somehow forget that when I haven’t seen the film in a while.
I suspect I’m not alone. You can see the basic shape of Scanners in a ton of pop culture storytelling today, and not just in America. There are anime directors who clearly saw and adored Cronenberg’s movie, too, and there are novelists who have internalized some of the ideas and attitudes of the film. It’s one of those movies that has left an outsized fingerprint in terms of influence, and there is something irresistible about the key imagery from the film even if it’s not Cronenberg’s strongest by a long shot. The film opens with a homeless guy played by Stephen Lack at a Toronto mall. Some women sitting nearby start talking about him, clearly disgusted by him, and he starts to get upset. Something happens, though, and his reaction somehow takes hold of one of the women, causing her to have a seizure. He gets up to leave and some guys start to chase him, eventually tranquilizing him and taking him prisoner.
If you know anything about Scanners, you probably know the most iconic image, a scene that happens about a half-hour into the film. There’s a demonstration for a roomful of people by ConSec, a military contractor that controls Scanners, people with valuable psychic powers. There’s a Scanner who is going to read someone from the crowd, and Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) volunteers to be the test subject. It turns out that Darryl is a Scanner himself, a much more powerful one, and he’s infiltrated so that he can hold a little demonstration of his own. He enters into a mental struggle with the company’s Scanner, and after a bit of back and forth, the other guy’s head explodes in one of the most memorable make-up effects in movie history. In general, Dick Smith’s make-up work is only featured in a few key moments, but the impact it has had on the collective imagination is immeasurable. I love the climactic battle and the weird way Smith uses the bladder effects. There are few things I’ve ever seen in a movie that look more painful than what Darryl and Cameron (Lack) go through.
The film came at a pivotal moment in Cronenberg’s career. He had definitely started to make some noise internationally. People were paying attention, and The Brood in particular had been devoured by horror fans. He took several of his early scripts and incorporated ideas from them into the story of these strange mutations waging a war of psychic abilities in secret. By this point, Chris Claremont’s era of “the all-new, all-different X-Men” was already well underway, so it’s not like Cronenberg’s ideas are particularly revolutionary or unheard of. I have no idea if he was aware of those comics or not, but the ideas were already part of the science-fiction world as well thanks to texts like Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. All of this happens along a sort of pop culture evolutionary ladder, and what makes Cronenberg’s film such a notable and iconic point on that larger timeline is the power of that imagery.
It’s certainly not the lead performance by Stephen Lack, who is a blank. That sort of works at times. When we meet Cameron, like I said, he’s living on the street and confused about where he is and barely able to function. After he wakes up at ConSec, he works with Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) to get a handle on his powers. He was the one who caused the woman’s seizure even if he didn’t understand what he was doing or how he was doing it. Ruth explains that Cameron is one of less than 300 people on the planet who has his kind of abilities, and he tells him that they’ve developed a drug that helps Scanners suppress their abilities. He’s able to help Cameron finally tune out the voices in his head, the voices of all the people around him, and it gives Cameron peace for the first time ever. Ruth tells him that they need his help because Darryl Revok, who we saw attack one of ConSec’s men, is coming for every other Scanner for some reason.
Of course ConSec is full of shit and there’s more going on than they’re telling Cameron, and overall, I think Cronenberg’s script is a fairly lean and nasty little thriller. The problem is that once Cameron’s starting to get better as a person, there’s no difference in the way Lack plays him. Lack has these huge striking blue eyes and I can see why Cronenberg cast him. He’s great as long as he doesn’t have to deliver any dialogue, and a lot of his performance is handled silently. My question is how much of that is because Cronenberg realized that Lack is enormously limited as a performer after it was too late to recast him. It doesn’t help that Revok is played by a young Michael Ironside, and he’s electrifying in every single second of screen time. It doesn’t matter if he’s battling another Scanner or if we’re watching old footage of the tests they did on him or if he’s just in a meeting… you can’t look at anything but Ironside every time he’s onscreen. By the time Cameron and Darryl come face to the face at the end of the film, I always find myself rooting for Darryl, and not just because of Lack’s powerful charisma deficit. He’s one of those movie villains who is definitely wrong but who is also so clearly wronged in the first place and so justifiably angry that it almost unbalances the film.
The film taps into a general distrust of authority and a fear of what Big Pharma is doing to us, and one of the things I love about how Cronenberg tells this story is the way it illuminates the way genre is often a matter of voice, not subject matter. You tell this same story with a slightly different focus and you get X-Men: First Class. Tell it a slightly different way and it’s Akira. Cronenberg has been fairly adamant that he doesn’t want to see a remake, and I ignore all of the tax-shelter sequels that were cranked out without his participation. I do think he created one of his more interesting worlds here, though, and easily could have expanded on the story. We only meet a few of the 237 Scanners that supposedly exist, and thanks to Ephemerol, you’ve got a mechanism to create as many new Scanners as you want. He tells one particular story here, and it feels like an origin point for something larger, but I respect that he didn’t keep going back to the well. He strikes me as someone who is much happier suggesting a larger canvass than actually having to fill in every inch of it. I’ve always loved his ability to imply the apocalypse using nothing more than an apartment building in Toronto, and this might be the best example of that. His regular collaborators Mark Irwin and Howard Shore help define his aesthetic, and their work here definitely feels like everyone’s getting better and better at evoking this particular thing they’re doing. It also feels like the last of his small Canadian films, and maybe that’s part of my outsized affection for it as well. This is the end of what feels like the “original” Cronenberg, and part of me wishes he’d spent his entire career making these miniature epics all over Canada because of just how special and singular they remain.
AND FINALLY…
Five more days and we’ll wrap up this month completely. If you’re not subscribed, you won’t be able to read, so why not sign up now?
There’s one more big title to discuss, a movie I really don’t like, but one that everyone who had HBO in the ‘80s saw repeatedly whether they liked it or not. I sang Lily Tomlin’s praises in last month’s newsletter, but when we wrap up January of 1980, I’ll be singing a very different tune. See you here on July 25th!
Particularly great writing and research/knowledge in this edition, Drew. Your Scanners review is especially compelling...thanks!