We howl at the moon as August 1981 continues with an American Werewolf and an elephant on water skis
Plus an under-the-radar home run from Sidney Lumet
There are certain issues of this newsletter that I am positively frantic to write when I finally get to them, and this week is one of those. I love An American Werewolf in London a ton and I’ve got a lot to say about it.
Other movies came out on these two weekends, and I’ll give them all full consideration, but sometimes, you just know what the star of the show is, and this time, that is painfully obvious. There’s another film this time that I might argue is a forgotten gem, but ambition and serious intent don’t matter. You love what you love, and in this case, it’s the monster movie that has my heart.
Let’s kick it off, then, with a film from a filmmaker I like enormously, even if in this particular case, there’s nothing I like about the film we’re discussing. To be fair, I don’t know anyone who goes to bat for this movie, not even Wes Craven’s hardest of hardcore fans…
AUGUST 14
Deadly Blessing
Maren Jensen, Sharon Stone, Susan Buckner, Jeff East, Colleen Riley, Douglas Barr, Lisa Hartman, Lois Nettleton, Ernest Borgnine, Michael Berryman, Kevin Cooney, Bobby Dark, Kevin Farr, Neil Fletcher, Jonathon Gulla, Chester Kulas Jr., Lawrence Montaigne, Lucky Mosley, Dan Shackleford, Annabelle Weenick, Jenna Worthen, Percy Rodrigues
cinematography by Robert Jessup
music by James Horner
screenplay by Glenn M. Benest & Matthew Barr and Wes Craven
story by Glenn M. Benest & Matthew Barr
produced by Patricia Herskovic, Max A. Keller and Micheline H. Keller
directed by Wes Craven
Rated R
1 hr 40 mins
Three women are terrorized by an extremist sect of a local Hittite community.
Wes Craven frequently made movies that seem so much less intelligent than Wes himself, and it is baffling. I was lucky enough to meet him a few times, both professionally and personally, and just talking horror with him was a thrilling experience. I think Craven was a wildly sharp person, and in conversation, you constantly felt like he was both engaged and engaging. He wanted you to be just as sharp as he was, and he almost had an educator’s way of making a point. There was something very generous about his intelligence.
That’s what makes a movie like Deadly Blessing confounding. I don’t see any of that in the script for this movie, even if there are flourishes in the direction that feel like no one else could have done them. There’s a shot in a bathtub that is used almost exactly, and to much more iconic effect, in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and you can almost feel Craven filing away the idea since this scene doesn’t work at all. Craven’s early films were almost confrontationally ugly, which doesn’t surprise me since he cut his filmmaking teeth on hardcore pornography, working under pseudonyms. He made the jump to horror with 1972’s The Last House on the Left, an exploitation riff on Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, and The Hills Have Eyes is an equally grim and grimy exercise. Deadly Blessing feels like he’s making an effort to move into a more mainstream mode. He was always conscious of how people viewed those early films, and he was determined to find a way out of what he saw as a filmmaking trap.
How frightened you are by this movie will largely depend on how scared you are of Amish people and/or Ernest Borgnine. While they are referred to as “Hittites,” the religious cult members in the film basically look like they’re Amish or Mennonite coded. That’s an odd choice for a movie about religious horror, which is certainly fertile ground in the right hands. A married couple (Maren Jensen and Douglas Barr) live on a farm in the middle of an intensely private religious community. Jim used to be a believer, and maybe the hardest part of the film to buy into is his decision to bring his completely secular wife back to live completely surrounded by the people he intentionally chose to separate from, people whose religion completely forbids interactions with outsiders. Once you see the whole film, Jim seems like he must be a complete dunce to put himself so directly in harm’s way, but oh, well. That’s the film.
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