STUCK IN SCAMITYVILLE

Special to PollyStaffle.com

It’s not just that I left the world of literature and art in NYC. I feel less and less like leaving my apartment in Las Vegas. Granted, it is a beautiful place. And I have discovered a new literary medium... a literary medium yet unexplored... a virgin territory. That is the medium of horror film reviews. My principal forms of entertainment are not literature but rather 1. Right-wing extremist radio 2. PI Magazine, the only real trade publication for PIs and 3. Horror films.

As you can tell, I am a psychologically well-adjusted person. The right wing radio, well, Ron Paul had two problems during his 2008 run for office - his association for conspiracy guru Alex Jones and a check from Don Black of good ol’ white nationalist stormfront.org, so those are excellent places to get started on the right wing extremist side of that. I was checking a little bit of Derek Black’s new show on there, watch out for the new white nationalist A3P political party. The surrealism of white supremacists attempting to do political talk radio comedy like their own version of Imus, Rush and even Howard Stern is pretty ineffable. The comic delivery of National Socialists leaves something to be desired. Let’s just say Don Black’s comedy skills are suspect, his being more well known for holocaust denial. Wacky! Alex Jones, less racist and more paranoid is always classic. I wouldn’t put too much in any of his theories, although he is connected to Ron Paul, the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party, and far more reputable sources of information. That’s not always as fun though. I’d like to be a private investigator those are some sharp, sharp people I’ve meet at PI conferences and through my coverage of the United States Vs. Pellicano. That’s even easier there’s only one PI trade publication, and it rules.

The horror/cult films here are trickier. Writing these reviews here, I have to really pick and choose which films are even worth writing about at all. These are just horror films, but I am trying to do as much with them as possible. New horror films don’t do much for me, in general. The final period of low budget horror filmmaking that grabs my attention at all is the straight-to-VHS period of the 90s. Charles Band’s Full Moon put out some cool stuff. Ghoulies 4 is an amazing film even without Charles Band on board. There’s one or two Wishmaster and Leprechaun sequels made on tiny budgets for video only in the 90s that I haven’t seen that would be most likely at least fun to laugh at. After that it starts to drop off quickly.

I know folks involved with making the new low budget horror films so I’m going to try and avoid naming names. The primary problem with larger budget ones that sticks out immediately is CGI, which never looks at all real and always looks like CGI. CGI hasn’t gotten to the point of mimicking the physical universe in any way at all convincing. The problem of newer low budget horror films seems to be also technological - digital films makes them cheap, expanding the base of who can make them, Myspace and other online sites provide forums where anyone can promote them. But as with bands, the problem more often then not is that no one fucking cares. Across the board it seems to have evolved into a diminished standard of quality. I don’t really care there are more then enough old ones to get through. And then more recent low budget horror films shot on digital and promoted on Myspace can float around in the magical land of no one fucking cares eternally. There’s no reason to get upset about them. I’ll watch straight-to-VHS films, but if it’s shot on digital, promoted on social networking and looks like some dudes excuse to get a Suicide Girl to take off her shirt, I’ll pass. When I commented recently to Polly Staffle’s own Chad Clinton Freeman that I thought newer horror films are all making the same mistakes, I will admit I had trouble responding to the next obvious question, which was “what are those mistakes?”

It might be easier to frame in the positive, to examine a film from a previous era and speak of what went right. Despite weak sequels and an ending I find faulty, the original House from the eighties is a damn near flawless horror film in my opinion. The original House is tightly constructed. It opens with the discovery that a woman in an old house has hung herself. The main character comes in immediately after, the nephew of the woman who has hung herself. Here we meet Roger Cobb, a horror writer uncomfortable with his fame that has his own very authentic feeling set of psychological problems.

Cobb is a Vietnam vet whose marriage has ended after the abduction of his son. Against his agent’s wishes, he has taken to the notion of writing memoirs of his experiences in Vietnam. (A good part of the film is flashbacks to Vietnam). The house of course is haunted, and monsters come out of the closet, but you’re left to wonder if the haunting is not Roger Cobb’s own madness. The actor that played Norm on the sitcom Cheers appears in this film as a comic relief neighbor that comes in every once and a while. The Vietnam subplot and the haunting of the house do come together in the end where it is revealed that the house is haunted by one of Cobb’s fellow Vietnam soldiers who was then captured and tortured by the Viet Cong. The haunting is simultaneously a literal haunting and the haunting of the character’s psyche by trauma. The actor looks traumatized, the trauma and fear escalate and therefore it works.

The part that doesn’t work for me is the son is being held captive in the house by the ghost of the dead solider, and there is the happy ending when Roger Cobb is reunited with his son. Roger Cobb is batshit - and he really does feel unhinged - this film can’t have a happy ending, but they slapped one on anyway. That’s not what the film is about! There’s also a part in the film that is an illusion where Cobb has shot his ex-wife. He goes to hide the body and then the police respond to the shotgun discharge. He looks crazed when the police show up. There is no reason for a film that bleak to have a happy ending.

Other then that, the film works. It has a happy ending that feels incongruous with the bleakness of the rest of the film, and House 2 and House 4 (there was only a House 3 overseas in the UK and Australia, the same film was released domestically as The Horror Show) have little or nothing to do with House beyond being about haunted houses and having the same producer. House 2 is almost more so an attempt at comedy then a horror film, having cute creatures, dinosaurs and the old west in it. House 4 the kooky stepbrother tries to sell the old house buried on an Indian graveyard to the mob, and well, I turned it off. Fuck that. At that point the franchise is completely divorced from anything in the original House that worked. The original House is about a writer trying to exorcise personal “ghosts” or “demons” of plausible trauma in his family home. Even if in the film the ghost or demons manifest themselves, the film is still about the tormented psyche until the last few minutes. That’s one mistake - one mistake in the entire film. That puts the film way ahead of a lot of films.

Speaking of haunted house films, you know what actually was not a good horror film? The original Amityville Horror. Problem number one with that film is that it’s something like two hours long. That is often the kiss of fucking death with a horror film.

I think the studios back in the 70s wanted something to compete with The Exorcist and quickly, so they found Scamityville Horror - this supposed haunted house story with Satanic overtones - and went with it. The supposed accounts of this haunted house are less then convincing, but that shouldn’t be important. The scariest part of the movie is when the catholic priest shows up at the house because the family has two young boys. It’s a very dull film.

The best part - so un-scary, but so funny - is when the walls start bleeding.

Ah, ah, the walls are bleeding! Get out of the house! Get out of the house the walls are bleeding! The walls are bleeding!

Ah, its so fucking scary! The walls are bleeding! Watch out for the Scamityville Horror!
There’s red colored corn syrup coming out of the walls! Get out of the house!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

- William Wheaton, May 2010

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