The Entity

The Entity Directed by Sidney J. Fury, Starring Barbara Hershey (1982).

This movie from 82 has aged well in the era of the #metoo movement. Think about it, a ghost or demon with the power to sexually assault a female, get away with it and because there’s no traces of anyone, it makes the victim look bat shit crazy! It’s terrifying! I’m obsessed with this allegedly true tale so much that I even bought the novel by Frank De Felita and was captivated by it. It's based on Doris Bither case, which happened in Culver City, Ca, which apparently was never solved. Barbara Hershey delivers one of her most incredible acting performances as protagonist Carla Moran, De Felita's pseudonym for Doris. I even found the book at a thrift store and was thoroughly entranced by the source material.

 Carla (Hershey) is not only repeatedly raped by the spectre, while in the bath or in front of her frightened boyfriend played by Alex Rocco, but in front of her kids as well. This movie is ghastly, eerie and fucked up! The sense of dread and fear never lets up, at least for me. From the perspective of the outside, Hershey’s character seems like a wacko and all of these disturbing events could only exist in her mind at first, but the audience witnesses all these frightening attacks as well and we believe the victim. Later on, the entity reveals itself to others around her, but the most frightening aspect of this film is that no one can stop this nightmare. Right now I see it as an allegory of Republicans destroying every facet of normalcy, it continues on with no signs of stopping and it’s sickening. If this were released in theaters now, I’m convinced that the patriarchy, in the age of Trump would side with the sexual predator ghost as the real victim!

if that's what's going on in 2018, leave me in the 80's.

Carla is on edge and helpless to defend herself from an invisible sexual demonic force. I get this unnerving reaction, the Charles Bernstein score really ramps up the tension. In Poltergeist, you buy the laughable premise that a haunted house is dominating a family’s suburban safe haven and its commitment to their ultimate destruction resonates so much so, that it works. You must buy the premise of both films to work.

the vile Orange vagina reminds me of something presidential.

Carla gets bruises all over her body from the vicious sexual attacks. Stan Winston created the indented breasts that rise and appear as if they’re being squeezed against her will. Ron Silver who plays the doctor doesn’t really believe her and chalks it up to hysteria. He does prescribe her anxiety meds and tells her to take a bath, but how can she feel safe, when that’s exactly where the last encounter occurred.

Gawwwd I just shit my britches!

When the demon visits her, there’s a chugging nightmarish guitar chord or banging on piano keys, it’s unnerving. Carla mentions in one scene that she hooked up with a motorcycle riding juvenile delinquent who was abusive in order to get away from the clutches of her religious father, this ex-boyfriend is possibly the demon that’s haunting her now. The most terrifying scene occurs when her family is right next to her and the ghost zaps her son and breaks his wrist. David Labiosa who played the son, later on had a substantial acting role as the busboy who lost his job in that one Seinfeld episode. One of her daughters is played by Amy Ryan, the girl who has the demonic pig ghost imaginary playmate from the Amityville Horror.

Jambi the Genie from Peewee's Playhouse cameo.

None of the white men, smoking cigars who psycho analyze her believe Carla Moran and they think she’s just an orgasm junkie. Yeah that's right, just like that Buzzcocks song!

Ron Silver’s character equates Carla’s insanity to Medieval creatures driven by the fear of sex instilled through her ridged father’s extreme religious values. It’s all so Freudian and the concept of powerful women seen as conjuring up demons goes seems in league with witch burning films at least to me.

Another aspect that this one shares with the aforementioned Tobe Hooper ghostie is the concept of paranormalists (or ghostbusters) horning in and solving problems or in this case making them far worse. They really exploit her and sadly this movie portrays the main character as the perpetual victim. This group of ghost hunters seem very desperate to find a real case of a haunting. I see this as exploiting the wave of psychic phenomenon that was rampant in the 70s. My fav. scene is where they attempt to lure the ghost into a web of nitroglycerin trap with Carla as the bait, so they can freeze it!

the Intelevision version of the Entity had really cool graphics.

This film really strikes a chord with me, it’s freaky, scary and mind blowing. More people should see it and it should be re-released with extras. Sadly, there's only a barebones DVD and it's not available to stream anywhere.

Contraband

Contraband (The Smuggler) Directed by Lucio Fulci, Starring Fabio Testi (1980).

I've been meaning to check out this early Fulci crime flick. Had I known, it was this fucked up and on par with Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man as one of the best in the Italian crime sub genres, I would've watched it sooner! It definitely wins for thee greatest director cameo Fulci has done, I mean I'm sure you've seen that meme of him blasting a machine gun. Usually his Hitchcock style cameo is in the form of a newspaper boss or janitor.

I shoot at your memes, motherfucking millenials!

It kicks off into high gear with a boat chase. These dudes zigzag around each other in choppy waters, it kind of reminded me of when I worked at Alcatraz and there was a boat race. Something is off in the state of Fulci-Land, because none of his trademarks are evident here. The actors are all normal looking, there are hardly any ugos or extreme eyeball shots, plus I have yet to even see a maggot. So we're talking classiness all the way. Fabio Testi is almost handsome and compared to the usual actors we are accustomed to in a pastaland flick, it's downright refreshing. Testi forged his way through Giallos like (What Have They Done to Solange, man did I hate that one) and fun shit like The Big Racket and also a Fulci directed spaghetti west called Four of the Apocalypse (click the link here for my review).

I'm the Fulci Jon Hamm.

This is when Fulci wasn't trying to rip something off even though there are some shades of The Godfather present. The usual goofy dialogue actually seems out of place because of how interesting the storyline is. Usually in a Fulci film the incoherence works with the sleaziness and the ghastliness. This is Lucio's only stab at the Poliziotteschi or Italian Police flick and it's pretty solid.

During a disco dance, the song heard sounds a lot like "Turn It On" by Genesis. We also see Ajita Wilson, the transgendered actress that Skunkape mentioned before in his review of Hotel Paradise. Wilson is a pretty interesting actress, she tragically was killed in a car crash and died at 37. There's bits of info about her online but Blue-Underground should really put out a documentary on her, she starred in tons of Italian Eurotrash Women in Prison films. Her most famous one being Jess Franco's Sadomania aka Hellhole Women (1981), which I used to see at Borders books all the time.

Fuck your couch (in Rick James voice) !

Perlante (played by Saverio Marconi) is a total slime ball, he acts like he wandered off the set of a Joe D'Amato flick, just super abrasive and nasty, so far he's my favorite character. Marcell Bozzuffi, who I know as the creepy French ghost from Altman's Images plays a mob boss character named The Marsigliese but he didn't make much of an impression on me, which is weird.

Eeek, my eyes are watering from the stench of clam.

 The scene when they burn up the stable and real horses scream made me nervous. Fulci isn't one to commit animal violence even though for A Lizard in Women's Skin, he was hauled into court. Carlo Rambaldi had to prove that no animals were harmed by bringing in the special effects of fake dead dogs.  

Lucas' mustachioed partner gets mowed down with a machine gun by a cop played by Romano Puppo, the dude from Escape from the Bronx and about a thousand other Italian Action flicks. His death is so mellow dramatic as Luca  looks on with sorrow. I don't usually complain about dubbing but it's performed in the tradition of bad sounding anime, I'm just not into it.

I kind of wish Tomas Milian was in this as well, but I guess you can't have everything. Ettore Sanzo, who wrote the script also penned Late Night Trains and the Last House on the Beach. The director made Gates Of Hell (aka City of the Living Dead) the same year as this so, he must've just needed a break from brain drilling maggots and the island of Matool. Everyone in this film is so in your face Italian, you never get that impression from his other films, especially during this period where it's all Europeans in Louisiana and wherever Dunwich is supposed to take place. Big mustaches everywhere old country looking Italian men and Grandpa's little kid saying ciao.

mustache rides half price for today only.

The score is all funky bass and it's pretty awkward. Fabio Testi has a Sean Connery quality but is pretty stiff as an actor.

There's some gyno-shenanigans unlike any captured on film. Just watch it to see what I mean but basically girls smuggle things up their cooters. Now I've seen everything in a Fulci flick!
The female violence gets really intense in this one scene, it's really unpleasant and I could just imagine a misogynist like the director baitin' it to those moments. Towards the end is when they really bust out the squibs and blown out brains. The horse race brain extraction scene is bonkers!

AHHHH, Good that cavity was bugging me.

This, The New York Ripper and the Devil's Honey are the most sexually charged out of all the Fulci cannon. The action starts to get off the charts towards the end, so don't fall sleep or anything.
One of my favorite characters gets an impromptu tracheotomy! The gory shoot out at the end is super meaty and up there with this filmmakers nastiest scenes. The priest from Gates Of Hell shows up in a Bruce Campbell ala Darkman style cameo.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, ESPECIALLY THOSE WONDERING WHAT ALL THE FUSS IS ABOUT ITALIAN CRIME.

UCK, I hate it when they use too much marinara!

Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer

Joe Coleman's poster that appeared in The Horror Handbook.

Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer. Starring Michael Rooker, Directed By John McNaughton (1986).

Even though I love this film, I’ve avoided it for several years. It’s extremely depressing, disturbing and generally unpleasant. I decided to revisit it the other night while drunk as a skunk and it’s still a brilliant and harrowing independent film with guts to spare. The violence is ugly, unrepentant and disgusting but for some reason it picked up a buzz from some high-brow critics like Siskel and Ebert. That’s actually where I first saw a clip of it and couldn’t wait to check it out. My dad actually freaked out at me for wanting to see it, years later I taped it off Cinemax. It really resonated with the thumbs up, down guys—they defended it against the tide of irrational censorship and convinced others to watch it. These same critics, who demanded their audience boycott slasher movies in the 80’s, it seems were major fans of this John McNaughton film. They saw it as not exploitation but delivering a message more so than the typical brainless exploitation and it doesn't glorify the violence. Once the ultra- conservative Bush/Reagan era bit the dust in the 90s, it seemed as if these types of gritty realistic horror films were given more of a chance under the context of an artsy film. Of course, now it’s a billion times worse in the current society and political climate but that’s irrelevant to this review.

I'll have you know Amerikkka is great again!

In the Deep Red Horror Handbook, Chas spoke about this film in his chapter “I Spit in Your Face: Films that bite”. Balun placed it among what he categorized as “drano enemas” like Nekromantik, Deadbeat and Dawn and Last House on Dead End Street, all films that were impossible to find at time in 1989 for the average video junkie. They were the kinds of movies that got inside and ripped out your guts. He praised its low tech, high caliber acting and was unsettled by the fact that McNaughton makes Henry so fucking likeable and never indicts him.

all the girls want to know, who's the cutest boy on death row?

The two main characters are based on actual murderers like Florida’s Ottis Toole, who killed and ate Adam Walsh and even had a cannibal BBQ sauce that was listed in Mike Diana’s sick zine Boiled Angel. Also, Henry Lee Lucas and Otis’ sister Becky existed but she was significantly younger. They took these true crime figures and gave them their own spin, even though it’s biographical most of the details are rearranged or fictionalized, like the fact that in reality Henry and Ottis were gay lovers.

See I'm straight, I got a Jesus shirt!

It begins with the aftermath of different murder victims, we hear the disturbing audio of their last moments as Henry (Rooker) goes about his day. Tom Towles is in my opinion the most frightening aspect of this entire film, he’s a pervy, learing sexual predator who constantly is on the verge of a conniption fit over nothing. He doesn’t have the concept of “dial it down” and at one point kicks in a T.V., when he can’t get the rabbit ears to work. I like Siskel's theory about this scene, where Otis equates people as objects and only knows to deal with them thru savage violence or screaming at them until they comply. This leads to one of my favorite cinematic characters possibly ever, the fat-assed television salesman played by Ray Atherton. He looks like a mutant, deformed version of the Comic Book guy from The Simpsons. Atherton was not an actor but a producer of sleazy movies like FART: The Movie and Death Scenes 2, I can’t make this shit up folks!

WORST HAT EVER.

Henry (the film not the character) acts as a scared straight for the dangers of buying pot from some scumbag dealer, instead of going the dispensary route. The scene where Otis, sells dope to a high school kid and tries to molest him was most likely shown to legislatures as a reason to enforce these new pot laws—yeah right!   

The part that was seriously effective and unnerving to me occurs when Henry (Michael Rooker) and Otis (Tom Towles), “go out for a beer,” which is code for let’s go out to assault and murder an entire family in the burbs. That moment, which they capture on a camcorder is played endlessly on a loop as the slobby, perverted sister rapist Otis snoozes in his grundies in front of the boob tube.

SPRING BREAK!

This movie was shot in 1986, but remained unreleased for 3 years because of hypocrisy and censorship. There’s something viciously organic about the mutilation and graphic violence that really turns up the gas on the nightmare fuel. That aspect was why I haven’t revisited it since high school. Even though, the film is very uncomfortable, it is worth re watching and carries the fury that most serial killers movies wish they could accomplish. Rooker of course went onto super stardom with The Walking Dead and Guardians of the Galaxy. Towles played a guy who's dog had rabies and bit Elaine on Seinfeld, he appeared in a few Rob Zombie movies then died tragically from a stroke a few years ago. This director never made a film that impressed me all that much sadly, this however is his finest moment.


BUY IT HERE