Demonwarp (1988)

A minister (John Durbin) reads the Bible to his horse whilst trekking along a trail (his extremely clean “Old West” costume is the only indication we get that this is set before the turn of the Twentieth Century [okay, and the fact that he’s reading the Bible], because a subtitle would have been too tricky to put on screen, I suppose) when he catches sight of a “meteor” which crashes to earth nearby.   Cut to: a bright, sunny day, at a cabin in Demon Wood (duh duh DUUUHHHH!), where Bill (bulletproof check casher George Kennedy) and his doting daughter Julie (Jill Marin) are playing a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit™ when a Bigfoot-ian creature bursts through the door, roughs Bill up, and kills his daughter before dragging her corpse off into the unknown.  Cut to: a van full of idiots, including Jack (David Michael O’Neill), nephew of the owner of the aforementioned cabin, wending its way through the woods to investigate (unbeknownst to all but Jack and his girlfriend Carrie [Pamela Gilbert]) the expanding circle of weird goings-on in the forest (including the disappearance of said uncle).  Horror wants to ensue!

And so we come to Emmett Alston’s Demonwarp, an interesting premise in search of a good execution.  It’s set up initially as a slasher film with an animal (even though we can call the Bigfoot an alien, considering the prologue, but it still acts like an animal) as its villain (most precisely, the one we see the most).  It has the group of horny young people going out to a remote location to be killed in gory fashion.  It has bare female breasts galore (including two belonging to the lovely [and wasted, unless you count her boobs, though it could also be argued that they are the long and the short of her, if one were inclined to be a bit mean about it] Michelle Bauer).  It has a crazy old coot, trying in vain to warn the youths away from the area.  It has POV shots from the monster’s perspective (and I’ll get back to this later) as it stalks its prey.  And this got me thinking.  In many ways, a creature feature isn’t all that different from a slasher movie.  Both have antagonists who pop up at the worst possible times to dispose of irritating characters.  Both have antagonists who represent unknown quantities.  Both have antagonists who are non-verbal in the main (characters like Freddy Krueger and the more charismatic baddies notwithstanding), and in this way are even more inscrutable.  After all, if you don’t know why bad things are happening to you, they seem more tragic (this being based on the notion that most people believe that they are, at heart, good people).  The thing that should separate them is the human psyche, yet the way characters like these are regularly portrayed, there is little indication that such exists outside of the impetus for their individual geneses.  The Bigfoot in this film is not going to answer questions and develop a relationship with Jack like Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling.  The Bigfoot is irrational, animal, primal.  So, the Bigfoot (or something like the bear from Grizzly, let’s say) are essentially the same as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, and both types can then be viewed as universal/natural forces.  They do what they do, they do it very well, and they are inescapable because their victims exist in the villains’ world.  

Another aspect that the film plays with is the concept of fanaticism.  Jack is fanatical about solving the mystery of Demon Wood.  Bill is fanatical about killing the Bigfoot.  The two characters are identical in this way, but they don’t trust one another, fanatics tending to be a bit paranoid.  This fanaticism reduces Jack and Bill to the goal of their myopic quest, and it removes them from the normal world.  They become loners, and, distanced from humanity, they become a bit deranged.  Of course, Kennedy is about ten times (maybe more) the actor that O’Neill is, so it’s possible that Alston and company were trying to delineate the interior conflict between Jack’s crusade into the Bigfoot’s world and his desire to escape from it with his friends and return to the ordinary one.  It doesn’t work, because O’Neill plays Jack as so intense and unlikable (he snaps at Carrie and Cindy [Colleen McDermott] no matter what they say, no matter how much sense or nonsense they talk) that not only do you not want to follow him to the culmination of his journey, but you kind of wish the monster would just appear and rip his head off so that the film would just end.  There is also the fanaticism of the minister, but his fanaticism is purely religious in nature, though, like Jack and Bill, his narrow world view allows him to be lulled in by what he believes to be an angel, though the alien villain (hint: not the Bigfoot) is in actuality a “devil.”  The zealotry of his believer’s mind ultimately makes the minister do evil, because he has essentially met God (to his mind), and since he was devoted to this deity before it asked him to sacrifice human beings (and, of course, there is at least one story with sacrifice at its center in the Bible), it is just a short trip from faithfulness to maleficence (a theme which feels all too easy to believe in the face of what we know about and learn more of in our non-cinematic reality).  All this said, that Jack is allowed to live, even though he doesn’t come to any revelation about his shortcomings, makes no attempt to change himself, and is still a grade-A peckerwood by the time the film ends, makes the film less satisfying than it was already.  His arc is a flatline.  

I’ve said often that POV handheld camera shots do not work all that well when used for an extended period of time (Dark Passage and The Lady in the Lake being the two notable exceptions that always spring to my mind).  In horror films, they tend to work even less, since we know that they are either going to be false (a cat jumps onto a character’s back or whatever) or exactly what they appear to be (yet still somehow unsatisfying in their predetermination).  The effectiveness of this technique varies by filmmaker, and I can confidently say that Emmett Alston is not a director who should employ POV very often, or even at all.  That’s the problem.  Just about every two minutes of Demonwarp, we get either shaky handheld POV shots or shaky handheld shots of legs running or walking (sometimes both).  You may think I’m exaggerating this.  I’m not.  In fact, I may be underestimating the frequency of these occurrences.  I’m guessing that the filmmakers thought this would keep pacing up and build some tension in the stalking scenes.  Instead, it becomes swiftly redundant to the point that I actually groaned every time I saw yet another of these shots (though it does give us Kennedy swinging an ax in direct address, so that’s one in the plus column).  This level of (what I can only surmise is) naiveté, which can be charming even in junk movies, is herein merely annoying, and worst of all, boring.  This is yet another example of a film that has everything I like (mashing up pulp horror and science fiction and revenge and survival genres, amongst other things), but is so breathtakingly dull, it’s a chore to sit through.

MVT:  The Bigfoot costume (and other creature effects), courtesy of John Carl Buechler, are solid fun.  Unfortunately, like a twig placed under a hunk of pig iron, it just can’t hold up enough of the picture to make any of it worth one’s time. 

Make or Break:  The scene where Tom (Billy Jayne of the late, lamented Parker Lewis Can’t Lose television series) goes full Jack Nicholson not only made the large vein in my forehead begin to throb, but it also made me want to grab my television and stomp it to death for showing me this travesty.  Thankfully, the latter never came to fruition.

Score:  3/10

The Phantom Empire (1986)

One of my favorite legends is the tale of the Iron Door (the other one is Spring-Heeled Jack, but that’s a discussion for some other time).  Reputedly located in the Samaria Mountain range, the story begins at its end.  A couple of homesteaders were sitting outside their cabin one day, when they noticed a horse and rider drawing near.  The rider was wounded (shot, in fact), and the homesteaders hurried him into their cabin.  As he lay dying, the rider stated that he was a member of a trio of stagecoach robbers who had menaced the area for a long time, and they had amassed quite a stash of precious metals and assorted booty.  According to the moribund highwayman, the ill-gotten gains had been placed in a cave south of Samaria which was sealed with the eponymous door.  During an argument, the man shot and killed his two partners and sealed them behind the door as well before dragging himself away.  Since the description of the cache’s location is imprecise to say the least, no one has been able to find it (though you’d think the door would give it away) to this day.  When I initially heard this story, I was told that the door’s location would mystically change from day to day, though I believe it was just imprecisely explained to me, as well.  So, anyone who wants to take a trip to the wilds of Idaho with me, let me know.  I’m always up for a treasure hunt (actually, that’s a lie; I hate the outdoors).

One lovely day, an albino-ish monster (actually a guy in an Alien Hitbeast mask from The Last Starfighter and a blonde/white fright wig) scurries out of Bronson Cavern and kills some random guy (Michael Sonye) and his dog before being clubbed with a Coleman cooler by his wife (Victoria Alexander).  Enter hoi polloi/rich bitch Denae Chambers (Susan Stokey), who hires loser salvaging duo/drunkard tag team, Colt Eastman (Ross Hagen) and Eddy (Dawn Wildsmith) to help her trek back into the caves to find the wealth of precious gems with which the obviously non-high-class monster was adorned.  Joined by the inexplicably “hunky” Andrew Paris (Jeffrey Combs) and the dandy-esque Professor Strock (the late, great Robert Quarry), the team wend their way into the well-lit subterrane and peregrinate for about an hour or so.

Fred Olen Ray’s The Phantom Empire is actually the second (quasi) remake of the 1935 serial of the same name.  The first was on the 1979 NBC series “Cliffhangers!” (which is bafflingly unavailable on [legit] DVD; Hell, even “Tales of the Gold Monkey” received an official release).  There, the story title was changed to “The Secret Empire,” but the heart of the story remained the same.  Part of a portmanteau show, it shared its time spot with “Stop Susan Williams,” a conspiracy story which was an update on the old Perils Of Pauline serials and the Michael Nouri-starring “The Curse Of Dracula.” But the Weird Western story was my favorite, and the show did what it was designed to do; It kept me coming back every week.  I haven’t seen the television show since it originally aired, but I did recently view a condensation of the original version of the “Empire” story, and aside from the plot device of making sure Gene Autry made it back to the Radio Ranch every episode to do his live show and the natural structure of the serial format (all peaks, no valleys), it’s not bad.  Thankfully, Ray does acknowledge his influences with a passing line from the only cowgirl in the film, Eddy.

And since Mr. Ray clearly loves women (or certain parts of women at the absolute minimum), let’s talk for a moment about gender in this movie.  The film exists in a man’s world.  Eddy, Colt’s partner is masculinized almost to the point of actually being a man (I’m actually sort of surprised she never flatulates, eructates, expectorates, or micturates standing up).  The same can be said of Sybil Danning’s Alien Queen, but she at least expresses a sexual interest in Andrew, despite her being physically superior to every man and woman in the cast.  Yet as a sexual being, the Queen is dependent on machines, thus she is a direct threat to masculinity but is incapable of fulfilling her own sexual needs without artificial assistance and ergo, is incomplete.  On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Cave Bunny (Michelle Bauer), who is a sexual submissive in every aspect.  She is busty, partially clothed, and cowers, constantly hoping to make the men (or at least Andrew) happy.  Plus, she can’t speak, so there is no doubt left as to her fetishization as a perfect sexual receptacle for men.

Denae’s sexuality is closer to having an actual arc throughout the film, and I actually found it sort of interesting to follow it through.  She begins the story as an ice queen, literally wearing furs.  She is remote, controlling, and is only included in the male-dominated expedition because she has the money to fund it (in essence, a form of solicitation for sex because she cannot attract a man).  Once she meets Andrew and enters the caverns, her sexuality is ignited.  She still is unworthy of a man’s love, but she has been instilled with the desire to be so.  The further into the Earth (read: womb) she travels, the hotter she literally becomes, until she reaches the center, where there is even an active volcano spewing lava into the air, the pinnacle of sexual release imagery in the film.  The center of the Earth is also a prehistoric throwback, a complete delivery from the modern/society-enforced sexual norms and mores which have constrained her up to this point in her life.  When she re-emerges from the vaginal cave opening and seals it with an orgasmic, climactic explosion, she is reborn in a more sexually normative (but not necessarily progressive) form.  You know, if you’re looking for that type of thing in a film like this.

But let’s be honest with each other; I don’t believe anyone has ever watched a Fred Olen Ray film, nor do I believe that Mr. Ray has ever produced a film, with any intention other than to pass the time staring at the exploitable elements.  This is cinema heaven-sent for the beer-and-pizza set, and there’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself.  However, a film needs to be entertaining, and the one thing this movie isn’t, at its heart, is entertaining.  The characters seem to act however they have been written to in order to get any given scene from Point A to Point B (and the scenes themselves typically linger on for far too long in an obvious attempt at padding the runtime).  Consequently, their behavior vacillates from being likable and heroic to being boorish and irritating at various points.  You can argue that this sort of inconsistency provides the verisimilitude of greater depth, but really it’s just time passing by that you feel, and who wouldn’t prefer to be knocked out for a root canal?

MVT:  the best thing about the film, aside from the pulchritude and tight jeans on display, is the stop-motion dinosaur effects which Ray lifted from the (equally drab) Planet Of The Dinosaurs.  But at the very least, that film had the benefit of the skills of Doug Beswick and Jim Danforth.  Fred Olen Ray apparently had a Starlog catalog and access to this stock footage.

Make Or Break:  The Break is the monotony of the characters walking and running through the caverns ceaselessly.  Not only does it make the whole affair drag on, but I literally started to recognize certain sections of the caves.  It’s like a bad porn set, but made by nature rather than carpenters.  Plus, the rocks have more personality than any of the characters standing next to them.

Score:  4/10           

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