6/20/15 (Part Two): Leaving the Sunlit World Behind

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'90s films, Alice Drummond, anthology films, based on a short story, Christian Slater, cinema, Creepshow, dark comedies, David Johansen, Deborah Harry, Dick Smith, Dolores Sutton, film reviews, films, gargoyles, George Romero, horror, horror anthologies, horror films, James Remar, John Harrison, Julianne Moore, KNB Effects, Mark Margolis, Matthew Lawrence, Michael McDowell, Movies, mummies, Philip Lenkowsky, Rae Dawn Chong, revenge, Richard P. Rubenstein, Robert Draper, Robert Klein, Robert Sedgwick, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Stephen King, Steve Buscemi, Tales From the Darkside, Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, The Crying of Lot 249, vengeful cats, William Hickey, witches

As eerie music plays, we witness various pastoral scenes: a picturesque country road…a covered, wooden bridge…a heavily wooded area. As the camera continues to show us imagery that should be soothing but is the farthest thing from it, a narrator begins to speak, drawing out his lines with almost ghoulish relish: “Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality.” As the narrator speaks, the image on-screen spins slowly to reveal its negative side: “But there is, unseen by most, an underworld…a place that is just as real but not as brightly lit…a dark side…”

If you were a horror fanatic who came of age in the ’80s, I’m willing to wager that you were more than familiar with the above opening: this, of course, is the now iconic credit sequence to one of the most important TV shows for formative fiends…this, of course, was Tales From the Darkside.

While The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone were always reliable standbys for me, Tales From the Darkside and its successor, the gorier, goofier Monsters, were really where my heart was at. When Tales From the Darkside was good, it could be absolutely astounding, especially considering the era it came out of. They weren’t all classics, of course (even less so for Monsters), but individual episodes and storylines have still managed to keep a summer cottage in my brain, after all these years, proving that the stuff you get exposed to as a kid tends to hang around the longest in your subconscious, for better or worse.

When Tales From the Darkside went off the air in 1988, its legion of horror-obsessed fans must have really had some sleepless nights: lucky for us all, however, that the series’ producer, Richard P. Rubenstein, and several of its creative personnel, including director John Harrison and cinematographer Robert Draper, would see fit to bring the eerie anthology series to the big-screen, no doubt hoping to capitalize on the success of Creepshow (1982) a few years earlier (in a telling bit, Rubenstein also served as producer for Creepshow). While Tales From the Darkside: The Movie (1990) isn’t quite the encapsulation of the series that I wanted, there’s still plenty of good, fun material here, much of which would have fit in quite nicely on my living-room screen.

Tales From the Darkside: The Movie consists of three separate fright tales, along with the standard wraparound story that’s so integral to anthology films. The wraparound involves a modern update of Hansel and Gretel, in which new wave icon Deborah Harry plays a polite, suburban witch/cannibal who plans to fatten and slaughter a young boy (Matthew Lawrence, who could go on to front a bakers’ dozen of kid-related TV shows). In order to forestall his inevitable death, the boy reads the witch stories out of one of her own books. Turns out the book is called “Tales From the Darkside,” so I’m imagining you can guess where this goes.

The first tale, “Lot 249,” is an adaptation of the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mummy tale, “The Crying of Lot 249.” In this version, set in the sort of collegiate environment that might best recall Lovecraft’s Miskatonic U, Edward Bellingham (Steve Buscemi) has just been cheated out of a grant by the combined team of Lee (Robert Sedgwick) and Susan (Julianne Moore, in her feature film debut). When Edward decides to get a little revenge using an ancient, Egyptian resurrection scroll and the mummy he’s just received in a crate (the “Lot 249” of the title), it’s up to Susan’s brother, Andy (Christian Slater) to even the score.

Our second story, “The Cat From Hell,” is an adaptation of a Stephen King story done by none other than George Romero, himself. This particular tale involves a mercenary, old billionaire (William Hickey), a super-cool hitman (New York Dolls frontman David Johansen) and the seemingly invincible cat that he’s been hired to kill. Once the villainous billionaire (who made his fortune from a global pharmaceutical empire) reveals that the cat may be seeking revenge for all of the poor cats that were killed during testing of their newest, hit pain-killer, however, we can see the gleeful comeuppance coming from a mile away.

The final (and most “serious”) story, “Lover’s Vow,” is a modern take on the ancient myth of the sailor who ends up with a beautiful, mysterious bride, yet loses everything because of his inability to keep a promise. In this case, troubled, down-on-his-luck artist Preston (James Remar) comes face to face with a ferocious, living gargoyle. After the monster makes Preston promise never to tell another soul about its existence, he ends up running straight into Carola (Rae Dawn Chong), the woman of his dreams. This being Tales From the Darkside, of course, things don’t go quite as planned, resulting in the most bittersweet, mature short in the film.

All in all, the big-screen version of Tales From the Darkside is a fun, if slight, horror anthology, sort of like the tag-along kid brother to Romero’s much more interesting Creepshow. While none of the stories really pack much of a wallop, although the final one does have a genuine sense of poignancy to it, they’re all well made and well-acted, leading to a nice, breezy experience. One of the biggest joys in the film comes from spotting a rogues’ gallery of future/current stars in their more formative years: Slater, Moore, Buscemi, Hickey and Johanson give it their all and the results make this all but required viewing for fans of any of the above. For their part, Remar and Chong get the most dramatic heavy-lifting and acquit themselves nicely, even if the story, itself, is a bit too predictable.

While many of Tales From the Darkside: The Movie’s elements are top-notch (legendary makeup guru Dick Smith served as a consultant and the equally legendary KNB Effects handled the SFX), the whole thing suffers by comparison with that elephant in the room: Creepshow. In most cases, the film comes off as a pale imitation of its predecessor, right down to the comic book-esque wipe transitions and multiple frames that adorn the various segments. To compound the problem, none of the shorts are either particularly surprising or particularly weighty: in particular, the wraparound is so slight as to almost non-existent, although it’s always nice to see Harry in anything.

Ultimately, Tales From the Darkside: The Movie will probably appeal most to horror fans looking to scratch a nostalgic itch from their childhoods. While the film is fun and well-made (aside from the terribly muddy picture/transfer in the middle tale), it definitely doesn’t earn a pole position in the pantheon of great horror anthologies, although it’s arguably light-years ahead of the fairly rank Cat’s Eye (1985). For horror fans that like their frights bite-sized and tongue-in-cheek, Tales From the Darkside: The Movie has plenty to offer. It might not be the kind of car that ages into a classic but it still turns over when you put the key in and that, my friends, has to account for something.

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6/10/14 (Part One): The Men Who Make the Nightmares

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behind-the-scenes, blood-button effect, Bob Kurtzman, Day of the Dead, Dick Smith, documentaries, documentary, Donna Davies, Elijah Wood, Frank Darabont, George Romero, golden age of special effects, Greg Nicotero, Gross Anatomy, Howard Berger, Jack Pierce, John Carpenter, John Landis, KNB Effects, Kurtzman, Lon Chaney, Nightmare Factory, practical effects, Quentin Tarantino, Ray Harryhausen, Rick Baker, Robert Kirkman, Robert Kurtzman, Robert Rodriguez, Sam Raimi, special effects, special effects pioneer, Tom Savini, visual effects, writer-director-producer

When one is discussing the most influential special effects/make-up/visual effects artists in the business, there are a few names that always seem to come up: Tom Savini…Rick Baker…Stan Winston…Ray Harryhausen (RIP). Look closely, however, and you’ll notice another trio of names that seem to pop up in every other end credit scroll for the past several decades: Greg Nicotero, Howard Berger and Bob Kurtzman. Although they have plenty of individual credits to their name, the three would go on to form KNB Effects, one of the most influential and omnipresent effects studios to emerge since Lucas’ groundbreaking Industrial Light and Magic. Donna Davies’ fun and informative documentary, Nightmare Factory, takes an up-close-and-personal look at KNB Effects, with particular emphasis on co-founder Greg Nicotero, sfx godfather Tom Savini’s protegé.

Kicking off with a “greatest-hits” highlight reel that amounts to a fan-pleasing gore clip show (complete with pounding metal soundtrack), Nightmare Factory makes one thing abundantly clear: this one is aimed right at the genre fans who geek out on fantastic monsters, severed limbs, spurting blood, explosions and puppetry. We go through the history of KNB, which begins with the history of its key players: Greg Nicotero, Howard Berger and Bob Kurtzman. While we don’t get a whole lot of Kurtzman, who left the company a decade into its existence, we do get a whole lot of Nicotero and quite a bit of Berger. Luckily, Nicotero is an absolutely fascinating person, a life-long film and genre fan who’s devoted his entire life to making the impossible real. Long before KNB Effects was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, Nicotero and his younger brother, Bryan, were making their own movies, perfecting stunts, devising effects and props and, in general, being pretty amazing. A chance encounter with George Romero (during a family vacation in Rome, no less) led the 16-year-old Greg to a tour of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) shopping mall set and an offer to work on his next film, Day of the Dead (1985). This, in turn, led to Nicotero meeting effects god Tom Savini and the rest, as they say, is history.

After meeting and becoming friends on the set of Day of the Dead, Nicotero and Berger ended up moving in with a friend of Berger’s named Robert Kurtzman. The three became fast friends on the set of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 (1987) which led to the realization that they might be able to make something bigger of this. KNB Effects was born and, within short order, became a powerhouse in the world of movie special effects, particularly in the effects-heavy era of the late-’80s and early-’90s. KNB Effects reach was so widespread, in fact, that it extended to decidedly non-genre offerings like Gross Anatomy (1989) and Oscar-winner Dances with Wolves (1990). In fact, you’d be pretty hard-pressed to find a film with any kind of practical effect within the past 30 years that didn’t bear the mark of either KNB Effects, Nicotero, Berger or Kurtzman: the guys were just that ubiquitous in the industry! Some of the best parts of the film involve the footage of KNB Effects heyday in the late ’80s, where the studio had a wild, rock ‘n roll, party-hard attitude: most of the effects artists were also in rock bands, hung out together constantly, partied the night away and made monsters during the daytime. For a guy like me, this looked like pretty much the best place to work in the entire world. Fuck crazy Wall Street firms: the shenanigans at KNB looked like a whole lot more fun!

Although KNB Effects is just about as important as effect studios get (they even created the “blood-button” effect that has allowed generations of indie filmmakers to create gunshots on the cheap), the times are always changing and we feel the effects of this within the doc. Studios now want effects as quickly and cheaply as possible: there’s no longer time to lovingly craft effects in the same way that the artisans did twenty years before. While computer-generated imagery is a valuable tool when used hand-in-hand with practical effects, the tendency these days is to heavily rely on CGI, which can be much quicker and cheaper to utilize than practical effects but tends to have a disarmingly glossy hyper-reality that is no patch on the oftentimes rougher practical effects of bygone eras. It’s certainly a devil’s dilemma: filmmakers are always in a desperate need to save money, which makes CGI the only feasible reality for many low-budget productions, yet cheap CGI makes any film look bad, regardless of the general quality of the production.

There’s also the sad revelation, late in the film, that Nicotero doesn’t really think anyone will come around to replace them: no one has a burning desire to just make monsters these days, he says, at least not like in the days of Famous Monsters of Film Land, Ray Harryhausen and Tom Savini (at 68, Savini is now the elder statesman who used to be the infant terrible…he even has his own special effects training school). We do get to see a few members of the younger generation who were influenced by the ’70s-’80s pioneers, such as Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Robert Rodriguez, although we don’t really get to meet any of the new generation to whom Nicotero and the others will be passing their torch.

While Nicotero certainly has a history and perspective on the situation that I’ll never possess, I can’t help but feel that he’s dead wrong in that aspect: there will always be kids around who want to make monsters. As long as there are geeky outsiders who spend their childhoods reading monster magazines under the blankets, there will be special effects people. As long as there are kids who create backyard zombie epics featuring the contents of their fridge and an ocean of passion, there will be special effects people. We may very well come to a time when practical effects are no longer utilized in mainstream cinema, where CGI has become the all-encompassing cinematic creative force and where model-makers are as quaint as town criers. Hell, we may already be there. As long as there are still kids who grow up with the burning desire to make the magic themselves, however, to mold the clay and set the fuses and paint the models, to bring life to dead objects in the same way that Dr. Frankenstein once did…as long as these kids are still around, there will always be someone to carry on the flag. Nightmare Factory serves as a wonderful reminder of just what an important tradition this really is and a truly loving salute to those who continue to keep the tradition alive.