The tropes of We All Scream For Ice Cream, Tom Holland’s installment in the Masters of Horror series, are well-worn. We’ve got the communal guilt and childhood temptation, not to mention the creepy clown, of Stephen King’s It and the unwieldy power of children, straight out of John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos, the novel Wolf Rilla used as the basis for his brilliant 1960 film, Village of the Damned. But here Holland, director of Fright Night and Child’s Play imbues his subject with enough creepy camp and nostalgia to turn a fresh twist on that old adage that you can’t go home again.
Adapted from John Ferris’s short story, We All Scream For Ice Cream follows the mysterious disappearances of a group of middle aged men, once known as the West End Bunch, who are now paying for a horrible crime they committed when they were very young. Buster, a dim-witted clown, who sells Cheery Time ice cream to the town’s children, has returned from the dead to exact vengeance on the West End Bunch, and he’s using Cheery Time ice cream and the appetites of children to do it.
Honestly, Holland’s job making Buster into a terrifying lure of temptation for the West End Bunch’s children is no accomplishment. Clown’s are scary, plain and simple, but the delight that modest treats like ice cream brought to an American suburban childhood through the second half of the 20th century, is easily manipulated and combined with a child’s resentment for his or her parents into a guilt-ridden paranoid trip through the past.
The real terror comes not from the children who wield the power to destroy their parents, but the ghost of Buster, who represents the regret we all feel for our own childhood indiscretions. The death Buster brings is almost a sweet release for Big Joe, who as a kid didn’t even directly participate in the crime against Buster, but who still feels wracked with guilt. Do we submit to our painful memories like Big Joe, or fight back?
Since Tom Holland’s at the helm here, all this deep stuff is delivered with a spoonful of schlock and kitsch, including a righteously redneck old bully flexing his muscles in a barrel full of suds, and plenty of lukewarm sexual tensions between the protagonist and his wife. Still, I’d recommend this for fans of Tales From the Crypt, both the HBO series and the old EC comics, for its great ironic imagery and fun morbid twists.
William Forsythe delivers an awkward but arresting performance as Buster, a mentally retarded clown, who has an endearing and annoying shtick, overshadowing most of the other bland actors in this low budget production. But when the lives of your characters are so expendable, in such a short period of time, you don’t want to make your audience fall in the love with them. So, Buster’s death is, rightly, the only one here that makes an impact, the rest just melt into oblivion and out of our minds.
William Castle, sometimes thought of as a low-budget Alfred Hitchcock, went to great lengths to give audiences in the fifties and sixties a reason to get excited about going to the movies. Whether this involved outfitting theater seats to vibrate (as he did for The Tingler) or issuing life insurance guarantees in case one were to “die of fright” during screenings of his film Macabre.
Indeed, the fifties, with the advent of 3-D (albeit bad 3-D), and CinemaScope, provided a number of things people hadn’t seen before. It’s hard to imagine a more energetic, crafty showman than Mr. Castle, who employed all sorts of gimmicks to get people in the theater.
His 1961 Psycho-inspired, rarely discussed film, Homicidal, entertains a subject matter somewhat more serious and less fantastical than those of his previous successes (The House on Haunted Hill, Thirteen Ghosts, etc.), and is virtually gimmick-free, until the end.
The gimmick Castle used this time around for this otherwise “serious” film is a warning delivered via voice over approximately forty-five seconds from the climax, in which the theater audience is told that anyone “too scared to see the end of the picture” may get up and leave. The voice then, with the aid of a clock superimposed over the paused scene, lets the audience know they have twenty-five . . . fifteen . . . seconds to leave.
It is said that when one percent of theater attendees actually did request a refund, Castle became angered and set up a “Coward’s Corner,” along with yellow footprints leading out of the theater, in order to shame those who dared not stay for the ending. It is also said that Castle may have had “plants” in some audiences, in order to add to the spectacle, give the gimmick some feeling of legitimacy. I can’t help wondering how effective, how feared, and how jokingly, audiences took some of these Castle tricks.
There are at least two scenes, and many elements, of Homicidal which will remind the viewer of the far superior Psycho; the film’s influence is obvious from beginning to end. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie, though. Castle manages to create some genuine tension and excitement, and even a few scary moments (that kid at the very beginning—tell me somewhere on this planet there’s another kid that creepy-looking).
I found this one on Netflix’s Instant View. A good choice if you’ve seen Psycho a million times and wouldn’t mind something relatively derivative but fun.
With some quick online investigation, I've learned that while Jonathan Levine's All the Boys Love Mandy Lane received a theatrical release in the UK roughly two years ago, an American release has not been scheduled. It seems certain the few horror fans that once held their breath for this film are no longer doing so--and the real hardcore folks out there have already figured a way to view a copy of this movie. Mandy Lane was finished in 2006, played a number of festivals, horror and otherwise, was set for release by the Weinstein Company, and was subsequently sold, after the Weinsteins saw their horror-fest Grindhouse take a beating at the box office. The company it was sold to either couldn't, or wouldn't, give it a proper release, and now it is available overseas on DVD but still hasn't made its way to its country of origin.
And that's too bad, because, while not exactly a great film, Mandy Lane is intriguing and very stylish, with a strong early 80's vibe. It shares that retro style with the other film I'd like to talk about here, The House of the Devil. This film, a true "auteur project" by filmmaker Ti West (writer, director, editor), is very obviously inspired by the haunted house and satanic shock films of the 70's and 80's. Such an effort went into making the film appear older than it is (2009), that 16mm film was employed, the setting is 1983, and attention to detail in this regard is very high. Devil fared a bit better than Mandy Lane, receiving a limited theatrical release in the States, as well as being available through video-on-demand (this, incidentally, is how I came to view the film, which was made available for rent via the XBox). It received a DVD/Blu-Ray release this past month.
Neither of these films are spoofs of their subjects, and there is no winking at the audience. Actually, I don't think there's a single laugh between the two movies. They each take their subject matter seriously, and, particularly in the case of Devil, seem to be made in their respective styles for no reason other than the tastes of the directors. I appreciate the long shots in these films, the fact that the filmmakers are confident in their actors and their story, so that they don't feel the need to cut every two seconds and distract the viewer with fancy camera moves, like so many horror films do these days.
Amber Heard is someone to look out for here. Her character, Mandy Lane, is quiet, often passing scenes with little or no dialogue, and yet she's endlessly intriguing. I had ideas where the story was headed, but could never be sure of either her motives or the direction of the story. Likewise with House of the Devil, which one could safely place next to Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant on the horror shelf.
I haven't seen any of Ti West's other films, though his resume looks promising, and I'm happy to see that he's the director, writer, and editor on most of his projects. Although I couldn't help but cringe when I saw his name listed under the direct-to-DVD sequel to Cabin Fever. But never mind that--further investigation reveals that West hated that project and even attempted to have his name withdrawn from the credits. Good for him. This guy seems smart. I don't know how he got involved with a Cabin Fever 2, but I'm confidant he's still got more good movies to make.
Jonathan Levine directed the enjoyable pot-themed comedy-drama The Wackness a couple years ago, and has two more coming up this year.
This collection of early short stories is startlingly different from anything else I've read by Bradbury, though some of the stories share a bit of the small town sentimentality of Dandelion Wine. None of these tales are truly classics, but the sensibility and the subtle horror that Bradbury brings to each of the many stories here, shows that even from a young age (for a writer) Bradbury's imagination was quite fertile and capable of quite elegant leaps. Many of the conceits in these horror tales have been done to death since the writing of these stories in the 40s and 50s, so I'm sure the impact would have been considerably more powerful at the time. These are great precursors to Stephen King's short stories and should be read by any true horror fan.
In the very first sentence of "The Dwarf" Bradbury shows that he is a master of the perfectly chosen detail, when he points out "the colored lights over the wooden emptiness" of the boardwalk. The story, a sort of mirrored infinite reality that turns everyone into what they fear they are deep down inside, asks the question about dwarves and children that we are thinking. Are they out to kill us? Yes, probably.
In "The Next In Line" a perfect, clean dialogue driven Hitchcock tale of paranoia in an exotic, scary, Mexico without American magazines, Bradbury draws parallels between mummies and enchiladas in a subtle, stomach turning way, and shows Marie's fear in a creeping, claustrophobic crescendo. Joseph is an unfeeling schmuck hiding behind his camera, a red blooded Cortazar's "Peeping Tom".
"The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" is a sort of Elkin tale of the infinite and average boring, subverted into a taste-making industry, a crass denunciation of the avante-garde pretensions and co-option of the mainstream. G. Garvey is a great everyman with a flair for mutilation and style.
"Skeleton" is a sort of Thinner where Harris's body, his skeleton specifically, turns on him. But this is a psychological curse, not supernatural. Munigent is an evil chiropractor (aren't they all?) dwarf who eats bone marrow. The most powerful conceit is that the skeleton is its own legacy, not at all identifiable with the person it once was.
In "The Jar" a Tales From the Crypt redneck story, gruesome and perfectly tragic, with a slight Cormac McCarthy flavor, men mark off the passage of time by Thedy's bare hips, and the mystery in the jar represents all the regrets and fears, and brings a small town together, as regrets and fears are wont to do.
In "The Lake" a Dandelion Wine of the dark side, the weak, trite metaphor of the train bringing us back in time, the past rots at the bottom of a lake and must be buried for the narrator to move forward. Gross, but tired.
In "The Emissary" a great boy sickness story, a Peter Pan, living vicariously through Dog, there is a great freeing of the paralyzed boy with his wild and gregarious Dog, and an awesome zombie lurch of the dead teacher down the hall that makes for a classic horror moment, if not necessarily a classic story.
In "Touched With Fire," which is much like the old men betting on death, like in Calvino's "How Much Shall We Bet?" some anti-feminist tones leak in to a creepy tenement scape and the pig butcher, a domestic master, with a pork face and bloody t-shirt is just the most vivid of the dream-like images in this story.
In "The Small Assassin" a perfectly constructed paranoia rant, centering on a sort of post-natal depression which transfers down the line from the mother to the father to the doctor, the final scene with the doctor holding a scalpel, saying "I've got something pretty, something shiny" is a precursor to Child's Play, or maybe Omen or Rosemary's Baby but in a nice clean 50s SoCal.
In "Jack-in-the-Box" a prototype of Shyamalan's The Village skewing towards the child's perspective, the horror of a completely insular world, where mother is literally God, is wiped away by the joy of the little boy's freedom. 'I'm glad I'm dead!'
In "The Scythe" an agrarian Grim Reaper fable, the main character's reluctance to reap is humanity's attempt at peace, but he loses this reluctance and kills indiscriminately, as mankind does, in massive broad strokes.
In "Uncle Einar" the fantasy of a winged man held back from his potential, barred from flight, and reduced to domesticity, achieves some middle European fairy tale patina in its particulars - the cows, tent wings, and especially Brumilla.
In "The Wind" an angry nature tale told through the telephone, very Hitchcock again in that you can't actually see any of the frightful action, the possibly stupid Himalayan climber Allen deserves to be winded to death.
In "The Man Upstairs" the freshest vampire story I've read in years, a war era boarding house is presented from a child's perspective, a sort of Woody Allen pastiche with sinister overtones. Douglas's "dressing" of the vampire boarder, and Grandma's obliviousness provides some classic comedic moments.
In "There Was an Old Woman" a refusal of death that turns into a very practical struggle with the mortician, some connection between sex and death is drawn, but since it's Bradbury, this lies deep below the surface. This is another comedic performance, especially when the old lady's ghost threatens to ruin the funeral home's business by haunting the shit out of it.
"The Cistern" the most abstract story in the collection is basically a woman's daydream about all the dead folks waiting in the sewers for their loved ones.
In "Homecoming" like blond Marilyn Munster, Timothy is a pure white shining misfit in a family of goths, vampires and telekinetics. He benefits from the wealth of a family full of immortals, but is alone in that none of his family can relate to his feelings about his impending death.
In "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone," Stone, a sort of Salinger figure in his legend, having dropped off the map in the 30s, tells a story that shows that if he hadn't dropped out, then he'd have imploded. We wonder if the same is true of Salinger. Of course, it's Bradbury so there's a gunpoint hold up and the real morphs into fantasy from sentence to sentence.
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