8th October 2009

A Month Of Malevolence Part 2.

October 8th “Blue Steel” (domestic psycho): the tragedy that befell Eric Red in recent years -- an alleged psychological breakdown resulting from a rather nasty traffic accident that left people dead and his psyche more scarred than any fictional encounter with a bogeyman could ever do -- is only marginally less dramatic than the ones he routinely ascribes his troubled main characters in a short but impressive CV of sharp, high concept shock-shows from the mid-1980s to the present day. Two of these we co-authored with one of the premier action directors working today, Katherine Bigelow, whose career has been stunningly revived recently by the palm-sweatingly tense “The Hurt Locker”. Their “Near Dark” is an otherwordly masterpiece where one man’s everyday farm boy existence is rolled, via one brief romantic liaison, headlong into an unreal netherworld of shadows, bloodsuckers and dust-flecked nocturnal violence involving sharpened spurs and ex-Confederates.

A few years later they unleashed “Blue Steel”, a terrific, ultra-fetishised fusion of Sidney Lumet, Sam Peckinpah and Bill Lustig, a “real” world cop thriller, where one woman’s regimented NYC cop existence is hurled, via a decidedly pedestrian encounter with a common-or-garden armed robber, into an unreal world of shadows, a psychotic yuppy intent on unwelcome romantic liaisons, blood-lust and gender-straddling nocturnal procedural power struggles involving sleek, heavy duty firearms.

It’s the cop thriller meets ‘American Psycho’ minus ritual torture and safety net of ironic commentary on Huey Lewis & The News’ back catalogue. It’s a stark pinnacle of the domestic thriller, a genre shaped films from Adrian Lyne’s “Fatal Attraction” to Curtis Hanson’s “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle” to Tom Holland’s “The Temp”. But instead of an hysterical examination of middle class, affluent guilt or fears of social responsibility -- God forbid our hired help should turn lethal on us like the economy and communist terrorists -- Bigelow and Red took a very diligent, hard working female hero and threw at her, not an easily identifiable, demented madman, but Ron Silver’s quiet, decent-looking stock broker who steals the gun he’s seen her so seductively discharge and, with twisted, self-justifying logic, decides he must possess its owner..

Innocuous enough at first, Silver is in fact the twisted reflection of the aspirational, successful super-mate, the sort that 1980s wish-fulfilment was predicated upon, the sort that Harrison Ford would play in “Working Girl” and the sort that “Sex & The City” would, 10 years later, decides, mixed messages of self-empowerment be damned, is every woman’s ultimate accessory.

Despite being a superficially tough, stylish and vibrant New York thriller, like the ones Bill Lustig ripped from the socially responsible arms of Lumet post-“Serpico” and “Prince Of The City” to show a hyperbolised underbelly of street-rat crime and amorality, the exceptionally sharp and intelligent Bigelow’s seemingly routine thriller mutates quickly into the kind social horror movie Kim Newman would label ‘tales of ordinary madness’. “Targets”, “Ms. 45” and the less salacious end of the rape-revenge cycle: these are the kinds of terror you find on your doorstep; what Newman calls ‘close up crazies’. There are no guilty secrets, drunken misdeeds or hushed-up predispositions. There is only madness in the streets bleeding from every pore of modern society. You can be the most upstanding, altruistic member of that society, but someone can, and will, target you for termination. Or worse.

Like “Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer”’s marketing mantra explicated, what’s truly scary in contemporary society is not the masked bogeyman himself, but the fear that that maniac could always be, and most likely is, the person sitting next to you. All you have to do is say “no” or neglect to return their smile to tip them from affable to enraged.

With the stoic, confident poise of a Joel Silver action picture (the picture is produced by the sensitive but none-more-macho Oliver Stone), Bigelow and Red shove those fears down the throat of thrill seeking viewers, forcing them to examine the wave-like repercussions of the most “socially-repsonsible” and lawfully sanctioned violence: a cop, doing her duty. When Jamie Lee Curtis spends the last of her slugs in a frenzied, hypnotically shot, almost phantasmagorical final shoot out on the streets of New York, it’s an apocalyptic evocation of the action hero’s victory.

“Blue Steel” is chilling, bloody and devastating, proving Bigelow one of our finest directors and Red a sadly underused genre talent.

Shock That Rocks: gleefully tipping himself over the edge from controlled, creepy stalker into abject madness, Ron Silver’s cracked broker bathes himself with a hooker’s blood-stained angora sweater, his precious weapon at his feet. No, not his actual penis; a gun. It’s a metaphor, see?

Would Go Well With…: ”The Silence Of The Lambs”

October 9th “House Of The Long Shadows” (parody): Peter Walker

In Peter Walker’s “The Flesh & Blood Show” there’s an experimental performance piece that the doomed actors perform with little-to-no irony and which seems to cement erstwhile actor himself Walker’s distaste for the whole pretentious business of play. In Michael Armstrong’s “The Haunted House Of Horror”, he casts teen idol sensation Frankie Avalon as a kind of quintessentially glib, egocentric hipster leading a band of similarly spoiled young gababouts to certain doom inside the titular mansion of murder.

It seems these two mischievous gentlemen of British exploitation were born to create a mighty piece of sardonic, riotously camp cheese together. This seldom seen picture is it: a connoisseur’s piece that puts Desi Arnaz, Jnr, a polished, beaming playboy writer with no pretensions or preciousness of the world of creativity and play, through the wringer for a night of cruel, sadistic pleasure at the hand of horror’s elder statesmen. Arnaz makes a bet with his publisher that he can write a pulp novel in a single night and retreats to a secluded mansion to play out the bet. The house and a series of hitherto unseen occupants and visitors, however, have other ideas and seek to scare him from the house for good.

Peter Walker remains one of cinema’s great -- and cunning -- cynics. As was his trademark, Walker uses a quintessential setting, but rather than the quaintly puritanical Britain he often favoured, he grounds this film in the world of cinema from which his generation sprung: Hammer, James Whale’s old dark house and the gothic trappings that cemented a vision of the horror genre in the public consciousness to begin with. The delight is that you can never be entirely sure if he and screenwriter Armstrong are being reverential or increasingly back-handed about the picture’s warmly recognizable, yet all too familiar, conceits.

In Walker’s world, the young are usually the lovingly admired purveyors of the lusty delights and the provocateurs of sharp, shocking violence. But it’s a violence that is the reprimand of an older generation, driven to bloodlust by this liberal, libidinous and entirely new way of living. Throughout his pictures, Walker appears to treat the elderly with a devious distrust that belies either a mischievous childhood or a dismayed and disgruntled acceptance of impending maturity. It’s a delicious irony, one almost dulled by years of faux puritanical horror pictures that don’t really get the joke: the joke being that the older generation is utterly and often conspiratorially capable of being maddened to murder by youthful dissent. The “have sex and die” mantra isn’t some intellectual subtext recently discovered by filmmakers and the elderly characters in Walker’s films are not merely there to wag fingers in warning. In Peter Walker’s “Friday 13th”, Crazy Ralf would be unmasked as Pamela Vorhees’ bloody accomplice and Jason his love child.

Here Walker and Armstrong, in a slight but reference-filled tale from real aficionados, delight in taking four immovable icons of horror (Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and John Carradine) and mocking almost every convention they have come to represent. From ennobled yet tragic and horrible family histories, as stoically endured as a supernatural curse, to the very theatricality of their characters’ entrances on screen, the quartet embrace the parody with full-bloodied vigour and sincerity, selling it as if were Chekovian tragedy, with Arnaz, and possibly a good portion of the audience, buying into this throwback gothic mystery as if it weren’t the most arch and creaky old stage-play it so patently is. In fact, the whole screenplay is modelled on one of those original pot-boilers so beloved of b-movies, “Seven Keys To Baldpate”.

On one hand, the film seems so extraordinarily old fashioned, even as a gimmicky homage, with jokes hardly post-modern and parody as long in the tooth as the story on which it is based. Yet in an era in which the satirical benchmark is a tired parade of, not “Scream” knock-offs, but *post*-“Scream” knock-offs like “Scary Movie” and “All The Boys Love Mandy Lane” which have the ineptitude and short-sighted ignorance to try and mock films which are already mocking other films quite obviously in the first place, there’s a gentle naivety in “House Of The Long Shadows” which is entirely endearing. Its worst excess may be to impertinently undermine a legacy of horror cinema already undone by the exploitation era. But it also acknowledges the trappings of that era in a cannily, literately and adroitly, proving its creators are as intimately versed in the film’s forebears as its fans, rather than simply being superficially familiar with a couple of the genre’s greatest hits as is too often the case today.

Shock That Rocks: the self administered acid-bath by an underwear clad young lady who has come to the house seeking shelter from a very theatrical storm is, as Price would no doubt say, “an exquisite agony”.

Would Go Well With…: “The Cat & The Canary”…or “Clue”

October 10th “The Exorcist Part III” (sequel): George C. Scott is a beast. A snarling feral presence in most any picture he appeared, be it the kindly, shattered music teacher of “The Changeling”, the vengeful best friend in “The List Of Adrian Messenger” or the dogged army svengali “Patton”, his manner, stature and screen magnetism are truly iconic. It seems fitting , then, that in William Peter Blatty’s much maligned, but furious, witty and genuinely terrifying sequel to his world dominating “The Exorcist”, Scott’s uniquely world-weary truculence should be pitted against Pizazu himself.

Ignoring the events of “Exorcist II”, Blatty adapts his own follow-up novel “Legion”. The mysterious Patient X at a Washington hospital begins, after years of incarceration, to exhibit vivid traits and memories of an occurrence he could not possibly have witnessed: the exorcism of Regan McNeil. When a killer begins targeting associates of the original cop on that case, Bill Kinderman (then J. Lee Cobb, now Scott), all avenues lead to a cramped cell in the heart of the medical institution and a confrontation with, perhaps, more than one old friend.

The conceit of the picture might seem, for any other franchise, as corny as “A Better Tomorrow II”s identical twin or any “it was all a dream” cheat. But the use of Jason Miller’s Damien Karras is both a smart, genuinely invigorating extension of the original narrative without recourse to another simple possession and a fascinating psychological wringer through which to put his lead character. And importantly, for tortured Catholic Blatty, to test a man’s faith as much as God tested Job or Abraham.

The result is part b-movie cop thriller, part existential demon theology and part Pinter-esque serial killer stage play. For the average horror fan, that may sound either unacceptably bonkers or simply grim and tough going. That couldn’t be further from the reality of this truly mesmerising horror film: the theatrical fireworks engendered by simply sitting premier thespians Scott, Miller and at various points Brad Dourif (as another face of the psychologically tormented and tormenting Patient X) in a room together, blasting through tumultuous tracts of disturbing theological and quietly apocalyptic thunder is some of the most matchless dramatic material to emerge from a horror movie since Polanski or Kubrick were making serious-minded scare fare

Of the more generic thrills, there are many: Blatty’s trademark gruesome forensic detail and deeply uncomfortable explication of the reality of horror and death is in full effect; the film’s surreal vision of heaven is like an outtake from “Brazil”; and the body swap serial killer plotline defies accusations of imitation with some exceptionally creepy moments involving wizened old ladies, ceilings and an enormous pair of surgical shears. And of course it contains at least two set pieces guaranteed to knot your nerves around your trachea and leave you gasping.

It remains, too, almost unique in its tonal audacity. Never forget this is a cash-in sequel to one of cinema’s most famous terror pictures, yet the way it pitch-bends from mordant comedy as Scott relays the story to a priest of why, because of a carp, he hasn’t had a bath in a week (Blatty’s association with Blake Edwards is never more visible than here) to impeccably played devastation of the priest relaying, in stark detail, the distressing murder of a young boy known to both men, all in a single sequence, is stunning. It’s a tour de force for Blatty as writer, if admittedly odd and unnerving for the unsuspecting horror fan awaiting the power of Christ to compel something.

Which is the main issue critics have with the picture; there was never meant to be an exorcism. Blatty’s intentions were undone by the studio imposed decision to tack on an entirely unnecessary casting out of the demon by a dramatically superfluous priest (Father Morning, returning from a marginal mention in the original “The Exorcist”). Though his sequences have a hammy but eerie and effective quality, they cement the notion that they’re an awkward diversion in a picture which should have remained as “Legion” (though it’s obvious why the cachet of the ‘Exorcist’ name would be alluring). The rapturous indignation of Scott’a cynical, ferocious tirade at the climax -- an outburst that proves he possesses some kind of faith, be it in God or in a humanity destined to remain drawn to things evil and despicable -- is far more satisfying and memorable than any second rate sound and light show.

Somewhere, there exists Blatty’s original vision and many have called it one of the most yearned for missing Directors Cut in the genre. After all, the same studio were behind both ill-fated Harlin/Schrader “Exorcist” prequels and each of those interesting but rather poor films saw the light of day. Perhaps one day we’ll see the full version of this strange, frustrating, unnerving and quite remarkable picture.

Shock That Rocks: a simple hospital corridor and a series of lengthy, unassuming static shots culminate in the most effective scare since the Central Park bus stop in “Cat People”. Utter genius.

Would Go Well With…: “Shock Corridor”

October 11th “Faceless”(remake): the last time I approached this type of list, I elucidated upon a number of classics of mid-century horror. It was a period of narrative and technological development, sharing with the 1970s a bold, innovative and somewhat radical take on the established aesthetics and ideology of “thrilling” cinema. One of these picture was the, at the time, rather controversial “Eyes Without A Face”, the chilling story of a father so consumed with grief at the disfigurement of his daughter, that he would stop at nothing to recreate her lovely features once more, be it from live or dead, willing or unwilling donors.

It’s a story that has been remade a number of time down the years, from Michael Pataki’s “Mansion Of the Doomed” to Jess Franco’s “The Awful Dr Orloff”. Ah, Jesus Franco, the Sultan of Sleaze, The Grand Poo-bah of Guignol and Purveyor of Preposterous Perversity for more than 50 decades, colleague and confidante to Orson Welles and the only man who would think of remaking Georges Franju’s masterful psycho-thriller TWICE! And so we come to his priceless “Faceless”.

Less concerned with the murky, guilt-ridden underpinnings of a father’s psychologically damaged devotion with his daughter than it is in exploiting the neon-hued razzamatazz of a decadent Eurotrash club scene where life is cheap and flesh is for the taking, in more ways than one, this is one of Franco’s more well-rounded portrayals of time and place. The story unfolds in a gaudy hellhole of chic superficiality and egotism, swinging Paris, the perfect setting for the diabolical Dr Frank Flamand to strip the idle rich’s skin-deep beauty. He buries his crimes in the self justification that these facile playbunnies perpetuate, with their wanton debauchery, a society that allows such random violence as the acid attack on his daughter: deserve everything they get. It doesn’t matter if they haven’t actually done anything wrong.

Not only is the mindset behind “Faceless” as ironically puritanical as the decade’s most high profile slasher pictures, it manages to challenge any one of them as grisliest shocker the decade produced outside of the Italian exploitation boom. Alongside Euro-genre icons Brigitte Lahaie, Chris Mitchum, Howard Vernon (reprising his role from Dr Orloff), Telly Savalas and radiant victim Caroline Munro are a series of gruesome f/x sequences that wouldn’t be out of place in the earlier Italian school. A particularly nasty incident with an eyeball in particular tastes just like classic-era Fulci and the surgery sequences would make Gino De Rossi proud. Surprisingly for a Jess Franco picture, it’s the attitude to cranial mistreatment via a variety of implements, rather than gratuitous nudity and sex that is the main draw. This is doubly ironic if you’ve ever had any experience of co-star of Brigitte Lahaie’s usual brand of movie.

Perhaps the most exquisitely hideous creation of the picture though is the main title song. Sounding like an unholy alliance of Al Jarreau and Stephen Bishop, it’s a truly execrable piece of 1980s disco-ballad tack from never-was Vincenzo Thoma. There must be no less than half a dozen times it pops up at opportune, inopportune and entirely random interludes throughout the picture. It’s also maddeningly catchy and emblematic of all that is unfalteringly alluring about late-20th century exploitation cinema. Don’t take it from me though, listen for yourself;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW3PkfjUQIk

Franju could never have imagined such a cack-handed charade of his sensitive, intelligent and alarming adaptation of Jean Redon’s novel. We lucky souls don’t have to imagine, we need to only press play and marvel at the ever-audacious Franco, the madman of Continental cinematic chaos at his jaw-dropping best.

Shock That Rocks: as blithely purloined from Gary Sherman’s genuinely masterful “Dead & Buried” (a GITS favourite and previous column’s subject) as it is reverent to Fulci, the syringe to the eyeball is a particularly juicy piece of simple and effective trickery.

Would Go Well With…: “The Dentist”

October 12th “The Men Behind The Sun” (torture): I might lose you with this one, so please, if you’re a bit queasy about genuine grindhouse exploitation, jog on to tomorrow’s entry which is much more jolly..

Like the questionable Nazi-sploitation genre, The Men Behind The Sun” is hard to wholly recommend. It and pictures like it are, however, difficult to ignore. An off-shoot of the ‘mondo’ movie, this breed of war-sploitation is a tradition that, essentially, exists only to contextualise a series of grim gross-out f/x gags. But instead of the “found” documentary footage of an “Africa Addio” or “Savage Man, Savage Beast”, these films place these moments of extreme gore in an historical framework designed, I suppose, to shed some humanitarian light upon the horror of atrocity as it really happened

Or *allegedly* happened.

The dichotomy of course -- if you even for a moment buy into the benefit of doubt that allows you to take that justification at all seriously -- is that “The Men Behind The Sun” might be vile, but it’s also “great” schlock shock. It represents an era of filmmaking which, if the BBFC’s recent rejection of “Grotesque” is any indication, is quite firmly in the past. Of course, it’s also very doubtful that this tale of the last days of a brutal Japanese concentration camp in WWII would pass the censors of Soho Square unscathed today. Especially the scene with a bag, a cat and a host of rats. Yes, I’m afraid it’s that sort of affair. Yet, however abhorrent you may find the content, and there are moments that are repugnant to even the most jaded horror fan, the fascinating thing about T. F. Mous’s exploitation gem, why I find it hard to keep it off a list that tries to spread as wide a net across the genre as possible, is the banal, almost vacant stance it takes upon each cruelty it envisages for it cast of victims.

The cast play guards and prisoners in a, one suspects, not particularly out-of-the-ordinary military institution. They just happen to be undergoing some excruciatingly uncomfortable forms of experimentation: a Japanese variation of the type of search for the ‘superhuman’ for which Joseph Mengele received his despicable infamy. But where modern torture pictures like “Saw” and “Hostel” purposefully wring the build-up to the violence to almost pornographic heights of frenzy (in as much as the term ‘torture porn’ is glibly misapplied, the simple mechanics of the sex film are there in the modern horror film, plain as day, and it is in *this* way that the sub-genre’s naming is at all appropriate), a few awkward moments of atrociously pained acting aside, for the most part, “The Men Behind The Sun” seems as dispassionate as an Errol Morris documentary.

Because for all it’s grim outrage, “The Men Behind The Sun” is ostensibly a “serious” war movie. As you’re watching, it illustrates, with some level of detail, specific military and political machinations, locations and campaigns which are, purportedly, historically accurate. One assumes such veracity is to cement the filmmakers’ ethical revulsion at these war crimes and generate genuine sympathy for the victims, to shame a military that carried out such atrocities and to visualise a savage indignity that remains shameful to this day. But, as is by now obvious, it’s also incredibly insensitive about doing so. How does one explain the historical context of the scene in which an elderly lady’s limbs are cast in ice until frost-bitten, after which pans of boiling water is poured onto them, thawing them so rapidly the flesh of her forearms slips off like a silk evening glove as the arms of a rickety plastic skeleton are waved by an over-enthusiastic prop man in front of the wild-eyed actress’s face. To misquote Quentin Tarantino: “This isn’t your daddy’s morally indignant ‘howl of outrage’ message movie”. “The Killing Fields” it is not.

Shock That Rocks: in “License To Kill”, Anthony Zerba is locked in a decompression chamber to meet his bloody doom, puffing up like the last of the Storms at the end of “Big Trouble In Little China”. Nothing so cartoonish here as a prisoner is locked inside a pressurised room, screaming from one end while his guts emerge in sickening slow motion from the other. The most unsettling thing is that you’re never entirely sure if they used a real dead body or not. Like I say, it is “that kind of picture”. You have been warned.

Would Go Well With: The equally outrageous “Ebola Syndrome”

October 13th “Tremors” (hybrid): some prefer 1993’s “Jurassic Park”, I prefer Ron Underwood’s unassuming western/horror sleeper hit of 1990. Sure, Spielberg’s f/x were more sophisticated, the scale more awe-inspiring and his sense of carnival ride attraction more frenetic but, Jeff Golblum’s Ian Malcolm, aside, “Tremors” wins out by sheer force of wonderful, warmly played character and charm.

Where you couldn’t wait for “Jurassic Park”’s smarmy lawyer or one of those cloying wide-eyed kids to get their last glimpse of planet earth from the back of a T-Rex’s throat, you feel for each and every deftly drawn citizen in “Tremors”’ town of Perfection as they go up against the imaginatively grotesque ‘graboids’, ancient, unyielding creatures from beneath the desert floor who are hungry for flesh and blood. Only local ragtag garbage men Val and Earl (a dynamite comic pairing of Kevin Bacon and the indefatigable Fred Ward) have the misplaced machismo and brazen stupidity to square off against them and save a town populated by, among others, John Carpenter regular Victor Wong, Michael Gross, country music star Reba MacIntyre and a pre-“Jurassic Park” Ariana Richards, coming even closer to being prehistorically carved carpaccio than she would on Isla Nebular three years later.

Replaying the classic siege set-up beloved of every great genre director from Romero to Raimi to Carpenter as a spry, audacious homage to “Jaws”, Underwood and the unlikely monster movie duo of “Short Circuit” series and “*batteries not included” writers SS Wilson and Brent Maddock, take a dozen archetypes and parade them through the desert with the skill and precision of action veterans. Not at all surprising then, the project was shepherded by veteran heavyweight producer Gale Anne Hurd.

With the skill of, yes, an early Spielberg or Cameron, Underwood’s smart, deceptively light tone and dove-tailing comedy thrills culminate in some truly outrageous moments of low-budget invention and mayhem. This is a picture of simple ideas, milked for every drop of cunning, economical storytelling. Each character beat leads to the next story development., brilliantly effective P.O.V shots of the ‘graboids’ keep the momentum of the threat effortlessly rocketing along as Val and Earl, trying to escape the dusty purgatory of Perfection, are drawn back to become everyday heroes of the town in the classic American mould. Set-piece after set-piece cleverly ratchets the suspense, manoeuvring the characters, and a believable community of relationships, into position for a protracted showdown with the monsters as they finally burst from the ground to greet characters both rounded and rooted for by a dramatically satisfied audience.

Like the classic creature features of the 50s, of which this monster movie has as much affection as it has for Howard Hawks’ “Rio” westerns, “Tremors” takes time to build terrific empathy for the eclectic township. Then, as on the ocean off Amity Island, it’s left to the wits of men to tool up against the voracious appetite of one of nature’s annihilating machines.

Shock That Rocks: the first glimpse of one of Alec Gillis and Tom Wodruff’s fantastically revolting mutant worms, spurting noxious orange goo from its ruined body.

Would Go Well With…: “Screamers”

October 14th “Strange Invaders” (aliens): Strange invaders, strange movie. Exquisite proof that the sly small-town lampooning-by-genre of America’s conservative kernel didn’t begin with ‘Gremlins’, this eccentric hybrid of AIP, Larry Cohen and ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’ is a dreamy, lyrical picture, directed by Michael Laughlin, from a screenplay by Laughlin and name familiar to most genre fans: Bill Condon. Before this Academy Award-winning screenwriter hurled himself into his alternate obsession, musicals, he was a benevolent son of the genre, writing the Oz-sploitation picture “Strange Behaviour” with Laughlin, tinkering with a few minor cult oddities like “Sister, Sister” and the sequel to “F/X Murder By Illusion” (where the remake of THAT?!) before becoming a protégé of Clive Barker, taking the helm on “Candyman II” before making his mainstream mark with the truly astonishing “Gods & Monsters”.

Yet early exploitation parody “Strange Invaders” is infused not only with the spirit of “The Blob” and “I Married A Monster From Outer Space” but with a with the deceptively anarchic attitude of the early Beach Party and Frankie Avalon comedies and juvenile delinquency pictures of the 1950s that were practically a youth-baiting subgenre of the musical at that time, what with all their rock ‘n’ roll ‘n’ rebelliousness. The music was in Condon from the start, perhaps.

In Laughlin and Condon’s story, one of cinema’s great never-quite-was schlubs Paul Le Mat (hugely recognisable to us nerds from “American Graffiti” and “Puppet Master” but who was never quite good looking enough to be the Bill Pullman-style cuckold he’d play in these cult favourites) discovers that his estranged wife has gone missing on a trip back to her Norman Rockwell-style hometown. Unbeknownst to anyone outside of that town, it appears the town was the site of some sort of benign alien invasion 30 years previously. When Le Mat goes in search of his wife, he discovers that in this timewarped town built out of 1950s clichés, they’re not lying dormant for much longer, itching to take a trip to the big city, see some sights, take over some bodies and perhaps the human race as we know it.

Though it’s more affectionate and surreal than Fred Dekker’s later, more straight up horror-comedy “Night Of The Creeps” “Strange Invaders” shares with that film the feeling of being a mischievous love letter to that long lost post-war naivety when we trusted our parents, our neighbours, our teachers, our town officials and our government to keep us out of harm’s way, no matter what secrets they were hiding from us. No matter if they weren’t “us” at all.

Like “Gremlins”, it’s the baby boomer’s version of “Scream”, their affectionate skewering of both a beloved, outmoded cinema culture and all that was wrong with their generation’s no-questions-asked conformity at a time they were too young to ask them even if the thought had occurred (or hadn’t been sucked from their brains buy aliens probes).

It would also be remiss of me to finish without mentioning the brilliantly witty and quite beautiful music by John Addison, one of the finest genre scores of the decade.

Shock That Rocks: in a New York hotel room, the true face of one of our alien compatriots is finally revealed to gloopy, very messy effect. The creators of “V” were watching.

Would Go Well With…: “They Live”

Next time: sequels, satanic cults, psychotic composers and the first horror movie ever made. And less words!

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