Stream a Little Stream: The Baby

I expected to hate TV veteran Ted Post's 1973 horror-thriller, which dares the audience to suspend disbelief with a ferocity as yet untapped. Granted, it has hateable elements; but I was very surprised at its success as a (mostly) well-acted, "John Waters gets serious" freakshow.

 Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) finds out that several fellow social workers have successively visited the Wadsworth family, which is composed of Mama (Ruth Roman), daughters Germaine and Alba (Marianna Hill and Susanne Zenor), and a twenty-one-year-old son known only as Baby (David Manzy). The only social worker who appeared to be making progress with Baby, who has behaved like an infant all his life thanks to some no-holds-barred negative reinforcement from Mama (who has issues with men and abandonment) and his siblings (Alba uses electric shocks to discourage him from trying to stand), has mysteriously disappeared. Ann scrambles to take over the case. From the moment she meets Baby, who is a caterwauling, repulsive character played with eye-shielding badness by Manzy, she is overcome with affection that borders on possessiveness.  She makes no secret of her determination to help Baby blossom into a fully functioning adult. His family is not amused.

He gets a C for enthusiasm, I guess.

The Wadsworths, with the exception of Baby, are endlessly fun and far more humanized than the usual horror villains.  Mama is a brassy, nicotine-voiced nut who pimp-smacks the crap out of the babysitter when she discovers her letting Baby, um, try to breastfeed (?).  Alba is a bratty, petulant tennis instructor who would have made a great bully in Carrie. Then there's Germaine, my personal favorite. A wonderfully creepy, tonsorially gifted character who enjoys standing at a distance and staring with intense disapproval like the forgotten bride of Dracula, she could easily carry a film on her own.

Are we seeing this party 'do? Germaine rocks.



The Wadsworths eventually try to murder Ann for her efforts, but she escapes from their basement and abducts Baby. The ladies somehow find out where Ann lives (They used those huge books to find people in the seventies, right? Some pages were white and some were yellow.) and invade the house Ann shares with her mother-in-law and, according to some cryptic comments she makes throughout the movie, her husband (as yet unseen, except in photos Ann tearily stares at before bed).

I wish they had made a Golden Girls-esque sitcom with Ruth Roman, Juliet Mills, and Susan Tyrrell.

From this point, the movie starts to twist like a Rold Gold until the genuinely suprising ending.  The discovery of what Ann really wants with Baby made me want to cringe, cackle, and throw a coffee mug at the screen all at once. Despite its neglect of logic and straight-faced tastelessness, The Baby is worth checking out. Grade: B





Stream a Little Stream: Tales that Witness Madness

Thanks to the 1973 British horror anthology Tales that Witness Madness, I no longer have to refer to this lovely method of transportation as "that bicycle with the big front wheel":

It is called a penny farthing bicycle, FYI.

Also thanks to this Freddie Francis-directed movie, I know that Freddie Francis has directed at least one idiotic movie.

It has a strong opening story, "Mr. Tiger", that involves a boy of about six who is apparently so troubled by his parents' near-constant fighting that he becomes obsessed with the imaginary titular figure, who the boy describes as a red-meat-craving, bedtime-storytelling, parent-loathing best friend.  Mr. Tiger turns out to be quite real, and dispatches of the boy's annoying family in a delightfully nasty sequence that shows the boy providing musical accompaniment to the bloodletting on his toy piano.

If Schroeder had been created by David Cronenberg.

Any sense of foreboding that was stirred up by "Mr. Tiger" is forgotten when we get to "Penny Farthing"...

...which has the audacity to believe that shot after shot of the expression of the subject of a portrait changing from blandly crotchety to aggravated to grumpily inquisitive (complete with side-eye as it observes someone's actions) is going to scare the audience. Everything about this segment, from the overbearing evil spirit of a hapless antique store owner's uncle, to the ludicrously constructed flashback scenes, to the fiery poltergeist blowout at the climax, is unintentionally funny.

"You kids get off the grass!"

Now the wheels are greased (pun intended) for the offensively stupid third segment, "Mel".  Mel is a possessive (and possessed?) felled tree that attracts the attention, and I mean ATTENTION, of Brian Thompson (Michael Jayston), who comes across as a fourth-rate Michael Caine. 

This is just depressing. 

 He stands the tree in his living room and calls it art, then inappropriately dotes on it, to the chagrin of his affection-starved wife Bella (Joan Collins). For all its faults, this movie has the distinction of being the (I assume) only film in which a man caresses a tree's boob. 

"There's a ribbon in my hair, for Christ's sake. You can't give me ten minutes?"

Bella eventually loses the meager patience she had with Mel and tries to lay the smack-down on her with a machete, but is killed for her effort.  One might expect a "death by evil tree" scene to be Evil Dead 2-riffic, but all carnage takes place offscreen, in silence.  Not one drop of blood appears. If an ending sucks in the forest and no one is there to hate it...

The fourth and final segment, "Luau", is about two Hawaiian-god worshipping gentlemen who kill the virginal daughter of a literary agent and serve her roasted corpse at a luau as part of a ritual. The god's name is pronounced "Mammaloo" and hearing actor Michael Petrovich (sleepwalking through his role) passionlessly announce it again and again is a scream.  

"Can I get some extra pineapple with my stabbed teenager?"

The wraparound story involves Donald Pleasance as a psychiatrist trying to convince a colleague that the aforementioned stories are real, and failing miserably. The doctor is declared insane and dragged away, right before his colleague is killed by Mr. Tiger. Tales from the Darkside, this isn't.  Grade:  D+

 

Stream a Little Stream - The Executioner's Song

Norman Mailer wrote the Emmy-winning screenplay for the gritty 1982 Southern drama The Executioner's Song, adapting his true life novel of the same name. Emmy voters may have had a soft spot for schizophrenia in the early eighties, considering that this film and its characters shift attitude and tone so often that viewers may think they've stumbled into a Utah desert full of Sybils.

Tommy "Alleged Jim Carrey-Hater" Lee Jones stars as career criminal Gary Gilmore, who ends a twelve-year prison sentence and is released into the custody of his cousin, Brenda (Christine Lahti). Gary, who was sentenced for armed robbery, has a hard time adjusting to life outside the pen (stuffing sliced tomato in his mouth as if he's rushing through lunch in a prison cafeteria, trying to make out with his cousin while her husband watches in annoyance through a window), but is soon constructively employed and tooling around in a Ford Mustang supplied by his boss.

"Damn straight we cray."

He soon meets Nicole Baker (Rosanna Arquette, with her magnificent bazooms in a key supporting role), who is sixteen years his junior and implies that she has reached Blanche Devereaux-esque heights of sexual experience. All of her partnerships, she tells Gary, have been rooted in simple crushes, not love. This bit of disclosure makes it all the more confusing when she is deeply, all-encompassingly in love with Gary within perhaps twenty hours of meeting him.
From this point, relationships between characters start to twist and flip-flop. "Wow, Gary and Nicole sure do love each other. Look at the nakedness of emoti-Wait, why is Nicole French-kissing a mutual friend at a backyard party while casting Gary spiteful glances?" At first, it is suggested that Nicole and Gary find refuge in each other, both products of an unfeeling world that has no desire to understand them. Suddenly, Nicole is lobbing insults and Gary is belting her in the face and threatening her with a butcher knife. Through the gobbledygook, it is revealed that both Gary and Nicole abuse drugs, but the viewer needs to backtrack to try to establish a clean link between the drug abuse and their unpredictable behavior.






















Director's Cut: Fifteen Percent More Rosanna Arquette Boobage

The head-scratching continues as Gary falls back into his prior criminal habits. The dual armed robberies that he commits before his arrest are not odd, considering what the viewer already knows about his character; the fact that he punctuates those crimes with the murders of those he robs, however, is. His second-act bloodlust appears unprecedented, and the reactions of his family members are disdainfully irritable when they should be shocked and horrified. When Gary and Brenda are in Brenda's backyard discussing his strained relationship with Nicole and Gary says, with utmost sincerity, "Maybe I'll kill 'er," Brenda all but rolls her eyes at him as if he said he was considering shoplifting a box of Yodels from the Piggly Wiggly.

Spoiler Alert (do you care?): Gary is sentenced to death for the murders, and lobbies for the sentence to be carried out ASAP so he doesn't have to deal with the abusive, stifling atmosphere of prison again. In the scenes leading to those of his execution by gunfire, Gary's family members roll over to the prison for some good old-fashioned clownin' and dancin'. Nicole reads a letter from Gary riddled with emo platitudes and realizes that, no, she doesn't hate him after all, she really really LOVES the sumbitch and needs to commit suicide so that they can be together in their next lives. Her suicide attempt, like most of this off-putting mishmash of a film, fails. Grade: D-

Stream a Little Stream - Hellraiser

It's the holiday season, and nothing complements the softly colorful lights of my Christmas tree and the scents of vanilla and cinnamon in the air like a 1987 British horror film about an attic creeper with no skin.

Frank, the skinless gentleman in question, has been held in a state of eternal torture by a posse of sadomasochistic demons called the Cenobites as payback for messing with a supernatural puzzle box. Frank's doofball brother drips blood onto the attic floor one day, and Frank is incompletely reborn. He enlists Julia, his brother's wife (and his former lover) to lure unsuspecting schlubs in business suits up to his lair so he can suck them dry.

The way this movie is shot and edited freaked me out. When Frank and Julia first meet in the attic, she backs herself against the closed door and stares in horror as quick cuts show gooey demonic Frank scuttling across the room toward her. At the climax, the attic door slams shut on Frank, caught by the Cenobites, just after the audience gets a glimpse of his body getting torn apart by hooks. A wild-eyed vagrant who bothers Frank's niece also factors into the story; his purpose is revealed during the "surprise" (i.e., wtf) ending.

Last but not least, look out for that hallway monster (featured here in an accurate 30-Second Bunnies summary of the movie)!