A parliament of murderous owls traps a disparate collection of people inside a small town’s public library. To try and keep the children calm and distracted, as well as pass the time, a fantasy story is read aloud to them…
“Its The Birds meets The Princess Bride” might be a terrific elevator pitch for The Parliament, but it also creates an anticipation, or hope, for a very different kind of reading experience than what the book actually delivers.
Then again, maybe my own disappointed expectations are to blame here. Because both The Birds (film) and The Princess Bride (source novel and film adaptation) were seminal influences on me, I think my own idiosyncratic experiences with them colored my expectations of what The Parliament was going to deliver.
The first third did have the kind of apocalyptic dread that saturates the latter half of The Birds, but the mood is fractured and diluted whenever the book within the book, a fantasy novel titled The Silent Queen, interrupts and takes the narrative stage.
For the first half of the book I was zipping through chapter after chapter, eager to find out where each story was heading and how they would play off of each other. But as the siege dragged on, and the fantasy trek went through the standard “Hero’s Journey” tropes, I yearned for some of the darker, more biting commentary that made William Goldman’s novel so memorable.
But Aime Pokwatka is not William Goldman and The Parliament is not The Princess Bride (novel, not film). Which is a good thing.
While I do appreciate the thoughtful examination on how trauma, loss, grief, and healing impact different people in different ways, I also must admit that The Parliament was a chore to finish. Not because it was bad or boring, it just did not meet my own weird expectations of what The Birds meets The Princess Bride should feel like. So it goes.
I have a clearer memory of flipping through the paperback tie-in for Coma than I do of the film’s actual theatrical release. The first time I would see Coma would be when it made its debut on network television. So it goes.
By the time that happened I knew who Michael Crichton was, which is why I watched the film. I did not manage to crack open the actual book and read it until after well after that. I am pretty sure that I had actually read Sphinx, Robin Cook’s third novel, before Coma. I bounced off of Brain, Cook’s fourth, yet I did read Fever, his fifth, in a single sitting. Back when I was capable of such things.
In 1987 or, perhaps, 1988 I did manage to read the entirety of Brain and then chased it with Mindbend. I have not read anything by Robin Cook since.
Crichton was a different matter. I became aware of him via the film adaptations of his novels The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man, as well as regular viewings of his original film Westworld whenever it would air on television. I have never bothered with the reimagined television show, though. I do remember seeing Futureworld on the big screen, as well as watching at least one episode of the short-lived syndicated series Beyond Westworld. So there.
Reading wise I would gulp down The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, Congo, Sphere, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Five Patients, and Disclosure before tapping out on Crichton’s output.
For more than twenty years, maybe closer to thirty, I had to settle for the truncated 1989 soundtrack album released by Varese Sarabande for what remains my all-time favorite James Cameron movie, The Abyss.
That changed when Varese Sarabande released this two-disc Deluxe Edition. It contains the film’s entire score, which clocks an impressive, and almost feature-length, running time of one hour and twenty-nine minutes. Cameron himself, for the original album’s liner notes, described Silvestri’s music as “explosive, delicate, intensely emotional, wondrously expansive, mysterious, fiercely driving, tender, and ecclesiastical.”
That is not hyperbole. It is accurate. Silvestri’s compositions for The Abyss are explosive, delicate, emotional, expansive, mysterious, driving, tender, and ecclesiastical.
The presentation here is the composer’s original and, I am assuming, preferred order. Which means some different sequencing and, in a few instances, longer tracks that feature unused music.
Listening to this over the years only made me crave a high definition upgrade of the film itself. Something that finally happened this year. I could not be happier…
After his mother’s necklace is removed from his resting place, Johnny (Ry Barrett) crawls out of his grave to retrieve it. He also kills anyone and everyone unlucky enough to either cross his path or capture his attention whilst he lumbers through the woods, searching for that stolen necklace…
Who would have thunk that doing a Friday the 13th homage from Jason’s point of view could turn out to be so damn entertaining? Not me. I walked into my local Cinemark at a loss as to how writer-director Chris Nash could make long takes of a decayed behemoth lumbering through the woods, interspersed with an occasional bloody kill, into an interesting or compelling viewing experience.
Yet, In A Violent Nature managed to keep me interested and entertained from beginning to end.
Nash lets the viewer know that the how and why of Johnny’s resurrection is more important than the people responsible for it. We hear the voices of several people that are visiting Johnny’s “supposed” resting place, but they are not shown. Not even when the necklace is taken. Because they are unimportant. Meaningless.
Johnny awakens not too soon after the unseen group leaves. He crawls out of his grave, climbs to his feet, and commences to stride through the forest. Only the occasional edit, wherein the scenery and lighting change, let the viewer know that Johnny’s tireless tread is covering a considerable amount of both time and distance.
The woods are not empty or uninhabited, though. This allows Johnny to wander in and out of a variety of scenes and set-pieces that could be from any paint-by-the-numbers boilerplate slasher film released in the 1980s.
This is the true brilliance that makes In A Violent Nature so damn entertaining. The inherent silliness of all the zero context dialogue, coupled with the over the top brutality of the kills, had me doubled over with laughter.
Yes, I have heard people were either passing out or throwing up at some screenings of In A Violent Nature, but I think that is just marketing department hype designed to sell tickets. Which does this movie a disservice. Because In A Violent Nature is one of the best horror-comedies I have ever seen.
Just remember. All Johnny wants is his mother’s necklace…
“What the hell is a million year old grizzly doing here?“
When a rogue bear starts killing and eating campers in an unnamed national park, it is up to ranger Kelly (Christopher George), naturalist Scott (Richard Jaeckel), and helicopter pilot Don (Andrew Prine) to hunt down and destroy the man-eating marauder.
Grizzly first opened in San Francisco Bay Area theaters and drive-ins on Wednesday, May 12th, 1976. I was all of eight years old at the time.
While there were a lot of trailers and newspaper ads that grabbed my attention, or just freaked me the hell out, I have no memory whatsoever of seeing a commercial or trailer for this particular film. The only reason for my knowing of its release date is thanks to my scouring the archives of both the San Francisco Examiner and the Oakland Tribune at newspapers.com, so I can clip and collect ads and listings for beloved, and not so beloved, movies, television shows, books, and more.
I would learn about Grizzly the same way I learned about a lot of mid-seventies horror and exploitation movies. By being disinterested with whatever movie my parents had chosen to see at the Coliseum Drive-In and looking over at the other screen(s) to see what was there. One night it was Grizzly and what little I saw of it made me want to see more.
In July of 1975 Jaws had blown my mind, cementing itself in my heart and soul and becoming my undisputed favorite movie of all time. Although I knew that Grizzly offered more of the same kind of thrills, I did not think to question why a film that was so similar to Jaws could and would be in theaters a mere eleven months after that film started gulping down copious amounts of cash at the box office. I was just grateful there was more of what I loved to watch unspooling at a local movie theater.
My strongest memories of when I first saw Grizzly, at the Alameda Theatre on Central Avenue, is being scared to death by the attack scenes and of making myself sick trying to eat an entire gigantic bar of Hershey’s Special Dark chocolate that I had pestered my dad into buying for me.
I walked into the theater not knowing who Christopher George, Richard Jaeckel, or Andrew Prine were, but I walked out a passionate fan of all three actors. Those three, and the chemistry between them, do a lot of heavy lifting here, making their tissue-thin character archetypes (i.e. carbon copies of Brody, Hooper, and Quint) look, sound, and feel like they could be actual people.
People you wouldn’t mind having a beer with. Especially Prine, who gets to make quite a few wisecracks throughout the film. His offhand “You know, that boy’s weird” and his barked “You could help!” are all-time favorite lines of mine. Yet it would take a few years, and going through puberty, for me to understand what he meant when he asks Kelly, “How ’bout that filly you been riding?”
The next time I would see Grizzly it would be as Killer Grizzly, when it made its network television debut. What was memorable about that experience was how my mother snarled at how stupid Gail (the late Victoria Jackson) was in stripping down to her undies and strolling under a waterfall, while she was supposed to be looking for a dangerous animal. This moment served as one of my formative introductions to critical thinking and laid the foundation for one of my core movie viewing rules. That while I will suspend my disbelief for whatever ludicrous scenario is about to unfold, the film should not insult my intelligence.
When I got my first VCR, I actually purchased a copy of Grizzly and watched it on the semi-regular. It was those repeated viewings that made me notice just how slight the material truly was. That the dialogue filled time, but did little to nothing else. That blowing the grizzly apart with a rocket launcher, while undeniably entertaining, seemed a tad excessive and, well, kind of silly.
Revisiting the film, courtesy of the gorgeous blu-ray released by Severin, was an eye opening experience. There were things about the film I had never noticed before.
First, and most comedically, was that the female campers killed at that the beginning of the film had left their campfire unattended. What the hell!?! They could have burnt the whole park down. Idiots.
Second was there being an actual one-take in the film. It starts just after the bear tears into a tent and, for whatever weird reason, decides beat a poor woman to death by slamming her repeatedly against a tree. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood might have done it best, but I think Grizzly just might have done it first.
The woman’s boyfriend is sitting and quietly weeping. Kelly approaches and gently asks the bereaved man if he would like to ride in the ambulance. The man answers yes by saying that Sally loved him, she really did. Kelly then helps the man to his feet and walks him to the ambulance, the camera follows. Kelly then walks away from the ambulance and over to the Scott, the camera again follows, and they start talking.
Park Supervisor Kittridge (Joe Dorsey) and Grizzly‘s carbon copy of Mayor Vaughn, steps into frame and an argument between the three ensues. Kittridge turns to walk away and Kelly walks with him, yet again the camera follows, and Dr. Hallitt (Girdler regular and one-time Horror Host Charles Kissinger) steps in to offer some his commentary on the killer bear. End scene.
All of it in one take. Something I had never noticed before. Incredible.
Third is how Kittridge derisively calls Kelly a maverick and tells him that the park has no need for mavericks. Thing is Kelly not once acts in an unorthodox fashion. He seems more like an easy-going guy overwhelmed by the unexpected appearance of a killer bear than a take charge and screw the rules and repercussions type.
Something that is backed up when he tells Allison (Joan McCall), the film’s variation of Ellen Brody, that what he really likes about his job is telling stories around the campfire, giving lectures, and watching the animals. That’s not what I think of as maverick behavior.
Now if Kelly, and not Kittridge, had been the one to call in the hunters, maybe I would buy Kelly being a maverick. But everything he says and does points to a nice, decent guy just trying to figure out what the hell it is he is supposed to do about a killer bear. Maybe he should watch Jaws.
Yet, as paper thin as the characters are and as meandering as whatever it is that passes for a story in this movie are, I still found Grizzly to be an entertaining way to pass ninety or so minutes.
Not every soundtrack in my collection is for a movie I have seen. Abulele is one of them.
My knowledge of Israeli cinema is not all that impressive. I knew that Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, of the Cannon Group infamy, were Israeli and I have seen both Footnote and, because my wife was a huge fan of the Broadway musical adaptation, The Band’s Visit. That’s pretty much it.
I had never even heard of Abulele until Intrada offered the film’s soundtrack as part of their Special Collection. Seeing that it was a family friendly monster movie got me interested enough to give a listen to some of the selected clips. Those clips were enough to convince me Abulele needed to be in my soundtrack collection. It’s good stuff.
Writing this entry also reminds me that I still need to watch Abulele. It appears to be on Tubi…
This ad for Beyond the Door II was one of a trio from the first half of 1979 that I remember creeping me out so bad that I was afraid to look at them, for fear of being attacked by whatever horrors were being promised to their potential viewers.
Yet, I could not NOT look at them…
Although it was released in the United States as Beyond the Door II, the film is not a sequel. Its original title was Schock, but distributor Film Ventures International thought it best to capitalize on the name recognition from one of their bigger box office successes of the mid 1970s. So it goes.
Shock, as it is now known, would also be the last directing credit for the legendary Mario Bava. While this film does not reach the atmospheric levels of Bava’s earlier classics, it does manage to have one of the most artfully crafted jump scares in all of horror cinema. One so effective that it has been carbon copied innumerable times.
One example as to how Shock‘s jump scare is repackaged and reused.
Another example: its use in Imaginary‘s trailer for the now obligatory “end it with a BOO scare” gag.
Who, or what, is responsible for most, if not all, of those beloved and grisly “accidental” deaths that occur throughout the trilogy?
The Omen (1976) [IMDB]
Yes. TRILOGY. As far as I am concerned Omen IV: The Awakening never, ever happened. It was just an unpleasant fever dream I had back in the 1990s. I also do not consider the two delightfully bonkers tie-in novels that were written by Gordon McGill (Omen IV: Armaggedon 2000 and Omen V: The Abomination, respectively) to be legitimate sequels for this very simple reason…
The Final Conflict (1981) [IMDB]
The Final Conflict ended with the Second Coming of Christ. That means GAME OVER! The Anti-Christ has been defeated and the Actual-Christ is doing his whole Thousand Year Reign on Earth thing. There might be more to it, depending on which variation of Christianity you may, or may not, believe, but I am just going to stick to the basic fact that Christ returns. He’s walking around Earth, doing his whole salvation thing.
Yet the Second Coming of Christ is never, ever mentioned in Omen IV: The Awakening, or in either Omen IV: Armaggedon 2000 or Omen V: The Abomination, which means it did not happen and that means…
Wait a minute, I am digressing. I do tend to overthink this stuff, don’t I?
Yet that digression does get me back to my original random thought or observation concerning all those bombastic and horrific accidents that might make, as John McCarty put it in his seminal book Splatter Movies, “one [begin] to wonder if Damien’s protectors aren’t trying to call attention to him rather than keep his identity a secret.” [Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen, John McCarty, Page 108.]
Now, to borrow [steal] something George Carlin said, I have this moron thing I do, it’s called thinking.
If the coming of the Anti-Christ is one of several elaborate set-ups for Christ’s inevitable return, why are so many people trying to stop and/or destroy Damien? Doing so just screws up God’s Divine Plan. If you believe, then discovering that there is an actual flesh and blood Anti-Christ walking the Earth would be a good thing. That means Christ is on his way. Stopping, or killing, Damien stops that, because the Anti-Christ is supposed to set the stage for Christ’s return. No Anti-Christ, no Christ.
So, in my oddball way of thinking this through, killing Damien would only delay the End Times. Because, if you are a believer in this kind of thing, this is fated to happen no matter what you do. Satan might happy with a delay. God, on the other hand, would not.
Which is why I kind of suspect that God just might be responsible for some these deaths. “He” just might be doing some old-fashioned smiting from the heavens, shouting in a thunderous voice, “STOP FUCKING UP MY DIVINE PLAN YOU DISBELIEVING INGRATES!”
Ghoulies, Ghosties, and Long-Leggedy Beasties 