Hubrisween 2016 :: N is for Nightmares (1983)

From the silents, to sound, to color, the anthology format has been around since the beginning of motion pictures. In fact, a staple of cinematic horror, the anthology -- a series of unrelated vignettes linked together by a common theme -- would seem to have a brief renaissance during each passing decade, going through a period of waxing and waning, but really seemed to catch fire in the 1960s, where you had Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963), Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (1964) and Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror (1962).

And then the format really took off in England, where Amicus was busting hump trying to compete with rival Hammer Studios and found great success, drawing inspiration from the small screen terrors of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the four-color shocks of EC Comics, with tales of the macabre and ironic consequences in Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) and Torture Garden (1967), then surging into the 1970s with The House that Dripped Blood (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1973) and The Vault of Horror (1973) until the cycle essentially ended with Tales that Witness Madness (1973).

The format was dusted off again in the 1980s when author Stephen King and George Romero teamed up for Creepshow (1982), which was followed up with the ill-fated Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), and Cat’s Eye (1985), which was also based on a bunch of King’s short-stories. Somewhere in the middle of all that came Nightmares (1983), which promised to bring four of your worst bad dreams to life that you’d never forget and, ergo, would never be the same. Allegedly.

Now, unlike a lot of its à la carte brethren, Nightmares eschews any kind of linking wraparound segment and just lets the audience cannonball right into the deep end of the pool after a brief opening credit sequence played out against a storm-ridden, Salvador Dali-esque hellscape as rendered by an Atari 2600, which dumps us right into the first of four segments, Terror in Topanga.

Cold opening or not, the blood is soon flying as a police officer is ambushed after a traffic stop and stabbed to death, the latest victim of a deranged killer who has been plaguing the area. This we learn by listening in on the 10 o’clock news as a mother struggles to put her rowdy children to bed, which also encourages citizens to stay indoors after dark until the killer is caught. But once the kids are tucked in, Lisa (Raines) realizes she’s out of cigarettes and tries to sneak out of the house to go for more -- only to be caught by her husband, who forbids this because, remember, there’s a psycho on the loose out there looking for his sixth pin-cushion. 

But, with nicotine being such a harsh mistress, Lisa manages to sneak out anyway. And after a few ominous twists and turns down a dark and lonely canyon road involving a suspicious looking hitchhiker and an even more suspicious spazoid-of-a store clerk at her destination, with a fresh pack in hand, a rattled Lisa heads for home only to realize her car is dangerously low on gas. 

Alas, with it being so late and all, the well-lit gas-stations in town are all closed for the night, leaving Lisa with only one option: the spooky secluded station on the side of that same canyon road -- complete with a suspicious attendant (Sanderson), who seems less interested in filling up her tank and more interested in getting the driver out of her car. 

At this point, it won’t take a genius to figure out where all of this is headed as the constantly absent-minded Lisa also forgot to lock her car when she went in for smokes at the other convenience store. Thus, like the well-worn urban legend of yore, the real threat has been hiding in her backseat all along; and so, of course, while she resists, the attendant, despite Lisa’s best misguided efforts at self-preservation nearly thwarting her own rescue, manages to save her from the real killer (Ving) in time.

From there, we abruptly cut to the next segment, The Bishop of Battle, where we find J.J. Cooney (Estevez) at the local arcade, hustling other gamers out of their quarters with the help of his friend, Zock (Jacoby). And Cooney needs all the quarters he can get his hands on, too, as he tries to conquer the hottest new video game, The Bishop of Battle. Seems no one has managed to reach the last level of the game yet. Rumors abound that a couple of guys one town over managed to crack this legendary 13th level, meaning it can be done, which Cooney echoes constantly as one attempt after another and quarter after quarter only ends in defeat. And so he plays on -- and on and on and on until the arcade closes and Cooney is forcibly evicted by the manager on a nightly basis.

Things have gotten so obsessively compulsively bad for Cooney his grades at school are even starting to slip, triggering an intervention with his parents, who ban their son from the arcade and ground him indefinitely. But sticking with the theme, here, Cooney sneaks out after dark and breaks into the arcade, where he finally manages to beat the game. But as he celebrates, things go staggeringly awry as the console seems to violently implode, releasing all the digital foes from the game into the real world who swarm and attack the disbelieving player.

And as the laser-bolts fly and the room is rocked with explosions, using the laser-pistol from the game, Cooney defends himself, destroying the arcade in the process. As this firefight rages on, Cooney manages to escape into the parking lot where he falsely believes he is safe until the Bishop materializes out of the ether and closes in on the terrified player.

Jump cut to the next morning, where a search for the missing teen brings his family and friends to the arcade, where everything appears back to normal, even the Bishop of Battle game, whose screen flashes to life with a few quick frames of Cooney’s face before he turns into a digitized character, who claims to be the new Bishop and challenges the next player to insert a quarter as those gathered around watch agog.

Next, we crash-cut again to our next tale of the supernatural, The Benediction, which focuses on a priest named MacLeod (Henriksen), who is suffering through a crisis of faith when he can’t come to existential terms with the Almighty always allowing bad things to happen to good people after the violent death of an innocent young boy. And so, no longer able to make good and evil compute properly, he quits his parish in a small desert community, packs up his car, and prepares to leave but not before another priest (Plana) tries and fails one last time at reconsideration, and then gives his friend a flask of holy water as a going away present to “keep him safe” on his travels.

From there, this morality play quickly morphs into a gonzo mash-up of Spielberg’s Duel (1971), where a psychotic trucker tries to run down a hapless driver, Elliot Silverstein’s The Car (1977), where a demonic hot-rod terrorizes a desert community, and Tremors (1990), for reasons you wouldn’t believe even if I told you, as the ex-priest is accosted on the road by someone (or some thing) in a black 4x4 (-- which, if I didn't know any better, appears to have been swiped off the set of The Fall Guy and painted black).

Some wild stunt driving ensues as the protagonist’s car is reduced to a pile of scrap, leading to a pretty intense game of cat and mouse -- or graboid and mouse as at one point the truck takes to the earth and starts plowing around like Bugs Bunny looking for Pismo Beach. (Told ya you wouldn’t believe it.) Anyhoo, remember that holy water? Yeah, me too, and so does MacLeod, who uses it like the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, which vaporizes the devil truck; and this miracle will eventually lead him down a road of personal salvation.

This redemption also leads us to our last episode, Night of the Rat, which dumps us in the suburbs where a husband and wife are kerfuffling over how to handle a most probable rat infestation. Seems Claire (Cartwright) and their daughter, Brooke (Andersen), have been hearing something crawling inside the walls and, assuming its rats, wants to call in a professional exterminator. Unfortunately, her husband, Steven (Masur), thinks she’s just hearing things at first and then refuses to cough up the money for professional help and buys a bunch of cheap traps instead. And while this proves moderately successful with the death of one rat, this seems to escalate the violence of the rest of the rodents as things start falling apart all around them.

And after finding what’s left of the family cat, Claire takes matters into her own hands and calls in an exterminator (Hague), who surveys the extensive damage and claw marks, and then finds evidence these vermin have chewed holes into the walls of the house, creating a virtual maze, with access to every room; and there’s even evidence they’ve been chewing on the power cables. But what really concerns the exterminator is the size of these bite-marks.

Fearing they are dealing with a Das Teufel Nagatier -- a nigh indestructible “devil rat," the exterminator tries to warn the couple of the real danger they’re in but Steven will hear none of it. This, of course, comes back to bite him in the ass as a night fraught with tension follows as things really go bump in the night. Sure, the segment kinda falls apart with the big revelation of the actual culprit as it menaces Brooke (-- a pig-sized, green-screened in rat), who seems to be able to communicate with it; and together, they teach this couple a much needed lesson in family bonding. And it was really hard to type that while trying to keep a straight face.

Okay, then, while anthology films kinda petered out in the 1970s the format found safe refuge on the small screen, thanks in most part to Dan Curtis, who sent many children to bed with a bad case of the drizzles back then, thanks to his telefilms Trilogy of Terror (1975) and Dead of Night (1977) and, to a lesser extent, the Kolchak films and The Night Stalker TV series. 

And at the dawn of the 1980s, when slasher films started lighting up the box-office, several TV executives were looking to cash in, hoping to draw in that same viewer demographic, which is why William Sackheim found ABC ready, willing, and able to produce his proposed horror anthology series, Darkroom, which I go into more detail here. But from the very beginning, that series would have trouble with the censors and caused a huge backlash from parental groups over violent and gruesome content, which soon found the network yanking Darkroom off the air after only seven episodes.

Now, for the longest time an entrenched rumor speculated that several of those unused or un-aired episodes of Darkroom that were deemed to be too unseemly were repackaged and released theatrically as Nightmares. Turns out that’s not quite true. Close, but not quite. Seems Nightmares can be traced back to producer Andrew Mirisch and screenwriter Christopher Crowe, who were hired by NBC to create their own horror anthology pilot to compete with their rival network. Both had some experience with this kind of format with the rotating tales in The Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew Mysteries, and both Mirisch and Crowe had worked on Darkroom in some capacity, which is probably how that long held assumption got started.

As envisioned, Nightmares would be a half hour show featuring a new self-contained tale each week. But to get it sold and go to series the duo hired prolific TV and feature film director Joseph Sargent -- Colossus the Forbin Project (1970), The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974), to shoot the two-hour pilot movie. But when it was finished, the network got cold feet after the harsh reaction to Darkroom and decided to just shelve it.

However, someone at Universal got wind of this and decided to try and salvage the production costs by repackaging it as a theatrical release, even going so far as shooting some new graphic inserts to try and punch things up and harden its R-rating a bit, most notably the opening segment where the police officer is brutally killed, which seems rather incongruous with the rest of the production. According to the credits, Dean Mitzner, who had worked on TRON (1982), was the production designer for the video game sequence, which went so far over-budget it nearly sunk the pilot. And perhaps they should’ve saved some of that money to try again with the giant rat F/X at the end of segment four?

Mirisch and Crowe would fare better when they resurrected Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1985, where it competed with a similarly resurrected The Twilight Zone and Amazing Stories. And with the proliferation of syndicated packages and original series on pay channels, which tended to take less heat from network censors, the anthology format once more had a boom with Tales from the Darkside, Monsters, The Hitchhiker, Tales from the Crypt, Freddy’s Nightmares, and The Ray Bradbury Theater. One could almost consider it the golden age of the format.

The most frustrating thing about this kind of format, however, is trying to remember which segment belongs to what program or film. Was that a Zone or an Outer Limits? I don’t remember seeing Nightmares in the theater back in 1983 but I clearly remember the video game segment and that superimposed rat, which I honestly thought belonged to Tales from the Darkside, so maybe I did? Overall, the film ain’t all that terrible and actually overachieves in a few spots with some genuine chills but it just can’t quite shake its small screen origins. Not necessarily a bad thing, but the difference is blatantly apparent. 

What is Hubrisween? This is Hubrisween. And now, Boils and Ghouls, be sure to follow this linkage to keep track of the whole conglomeration of reviews for Hubrisween right here. Or you can always follow we collective head of knuckle on Letterboxd. That's 14 down with 12 to go, making us officially over the hump!!!

Nightmares (1983) Universal Pictures / EP: Andrew Mirisch, Alex Beaton / P: Christopher Crowe / AP: Alan Barnette / D: Joseph Sargent / W: Christopher Crowe, Jeffrey Bloom / C: Mario DiLeo, Gerald Perry Finnerman / E: Michael Brown, Rod Stephens / M: Craig Safan / S: Cristina Raines, Joe Lambie, Lee Ving, William Sanderson, Emilio Estevez, Billy Jayne, Lance Henriksen, Tony Plana, Richard Masur, Veronica Cartwright, Bridgette Andersen

Hubrisween 2016 :: M is for The Mysterious Monsters (1976)

While the first documented evidence of Bigfoot dates back to 1811, found within the journals of noted explorer and surveyor David Thompson, who came upon some strange footprints in the snow in what was to become Alberta, Canada, that he nor his Indian guides could identify, the idea that some monstrous biped was roaming the backwoods of North America really didn’t get any traction until 1955, when William Roe hiked up Mica Mountain in British Columbia and came back with a whopper of a tale. Apparently, Roe had an encounter with "a creature between six and seven feet tall that was hairy all over, had large breasts, a Negroid-shaped head, and walked on two legs."

This was the first widely reported domestic sighting of a large hairy cryptid since the world became Abominable Snowman-addled when Sir Edmund Hillary brought tales of the Himalayan Yeti back with him after he conquered Mount Everest in 1953. And as these things made headlines, Albert Ostman came forward and detailed an encounter he had with the creatures back in 1924, where he claimed to have been kidnapped and held captive by a family of Bigfoot (Bigfeet?) for nearly a week before he engineered an escape. That same year also unearthed the Ape Canyon attack, which also took place in 1924, where several miners allegedly killed one of the creatures and then spent a harrowing night in a cabin near Mount St. Helens, Washington, while several other creatures hurled rocks at them and tried to break in to avenge the dead.

But it wasn't until about two years later in 1958, when several tracks of large, humanoid footprints were found in the soft loam along the logging trails around Bluff Creek, California, that the notion of “Bigfoot” as we’ve come to know it was really born. And it was these very same tracks that later brought Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin to the area in 1967, where they managed to capture what is probably the most infamous 16 seconds of footage ever committed to film; and with that footage, the legend of Bigfoot absolutely exploded in the national consciousness, creating a voracious appetite for more evidence of the creature that a lot of folks were happy to provide -- some more reputable than others.

One of the quieter patron saints of schlock cinema, Charles E. Sellier Jr. is probably best known to the masses for the ruination of Christmas with his controversial but, in the end, harmless holiday slasher, Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), but we children of the 1970s remember him more for a rash of crypto-zoological, strange phenomenon, and eccentric historical docudramas he produced for the Salt Lake City based Sunn Classic Pictures, where Sellier Jr. found a kindred spirit with filmmaker Robert Guenette, who is credited for introducing a distinctive “newsreel style” to the documentary format. And for a glorious period between 1975 and 1981 these two would conspire in the making of The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena (1976), The Unexplained: The UFO Connection (1976), In Search of Noah's Ark (1976), The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977)’, Beyond and Back (1977), The Bermuda Triangle (1979), Encounter with Disaster (1979), Beyond Death’s Door (1979) and The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981), where the likes of Brad Crandall or Orson Welles would guide us on a tour of the inexplicably unexplained. But this whole journey into the unknown began with a little pseudo documentary called The Mysterious Monsters (1975), which, perhaps inspired by the success of Charles B. Pierce’s The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), purported to present evidence that proved the existence of Bigfoot.

To set the proper studious mood, our delightful little cryptid doc opens with the Graves known as Peter going mano a mano with the audience, ensuring all the facts about to be presented were true based on gathered evidence and sworn testimony, and the conclusions reached astounding, making this the most startling picture the audience will ever see. And after the credits proper conclude, played over our first re-created sighting of a Bigfoot, Graves, our designated narrator and guide, admits he was skeptical at first but tantalized by the body of evidence of the mythical creature’s hotly contested existence; and so, acting as our surrogate, he will sift through all the exhibits and then draw a conclusion once all the evidence is in.

Since the dawn of creation, man has created monsters to explain away or embellish the unknown. But if the Bigfoot is just a figment of our collective imagination, Graves argues, why are all the eyewitness accounts, from all over the country, essentially the same: tall, hairy, ape-like, with an unholy stench. Perhaps the elusive creatures just haven’t been properly catalogued yet, like the gorilla, giant panda, or komodo dragons, who all use to be essentially myths until western eyes saw them. Is it some form of anthropoid, an offshoot of the gigantopithecus? Or is it some form of primitive man, a relative of the Yeti, who crossed over the Bering land bridge and managed to survive in seclusion until these modern times?

Here, the film takes a hilarious left turn for a bit, focusing on tales of the Abominable Snowman and, believe it or not, an extended take on the Loch Ness Monster; and using the same dubious evidence that doesn’t pass muster when talking about proof of Bigfoot and applying them to its mythical brethren, Graves concludes that both the Yeti and Nessie definitely exist; and therefore, since they exist, Bigfoot must exist as well; a mind-blowing circle of self-citation and fractured logic of ipso facto what the hell-o that will assuredly leave you giggling.

So what is this much ballyhooed evidence? Well, the film lays out its haphazard exhibits from A through H, skipping a few letters here and there and circling back to a few others, starting with all those eyewitness reports. But the experts believe these to be unreliable and demand concrete proof, asking why has no one ever found the remains of a Bigfoot. Counter-arguments involve the whole circle of life thing, saying nature serves as its own disposal service. There is even some arguments that Bigfoot bury their dead. 

Exhibit B does concern such physical evidence, such as all the giant footprints, hairs that defy scientific analysis, and the huge piles of scat-of-unknown-origin collected over the years. Again, this runs into the problem of overzealous monster hunters and hoaxers, which is countered by famed cryptozoologist, Grover Krantz, who shows off the notorious Bossburg print, which he claims shows some form of arthritic deformity that no hoaxer could ever concoct.

Exhibit C is more physical evidence, namely a recording of a Bigfoot howling in the wild. Graves takes this to be analyzed at the same vocal lab from that one episode of 3-2-1 Contact, where it’s run through a computer, which determines the subject lacks a certain “articulatory flexibility” and, judging by its vocal tract, it must be 50% larger than your average human being.

I honestly don’t know what happened to exhibit D, but exhibit E involves the tale of Jacko, a juvenile Bigfoot caught in British Columbia back in 1884; sourced from a single newspaper clipping unearthed by a reporter digging into the history of Bigfoot sightings back in the 1950s. And then there’s the notorious Minnesota Iceman, where carnival huckster Frank Hansen claimed to have a corpse of a Siberian Bigfoot trapped in a block of ice. An exhibit that mysteriously disappeared in 1968 when calls to defrost it for study got too loud, bringing into question the validity of exhibit E. 

Exhibit F takes us on another detour and a psychic consultation with famed psychometrist, Peter Hurkos, a consultant on the Boston Strangler case, who divines a picture of a large hairy creature, half man, half ape, based on unseen evidence locked in a briefcase.

Exhibit G ups the ante with multiple corroborative witnesses when a town was besieged with a rash of Bigfoot sightings over the course of three weeks, with several of those eyewitnesses passing polygraph tests or volunteering to go through hypnosis to bring out more details of these encounters (-- which, speaking honestly, comes off as more creepy and sad than factual).
 

Which finally brings us to exhibit H, photographic evidence, which also brings us full circle back to the Patterson film, which leads to a hilarious exchange between true-believer Krantz and the highly skeptical Dr. Geoffrey Bourne, who get into a heated point, counterpoint discussion over the validity of the footage -- an argument I think Krantz wins because, really, who really does know what the breast of a Bigfoot ought to look like?

And so, with all the evidence presented, the documentary wraps up with Graves coming to the conclusion that, without a doubt, Bigfoot does indeed exist. And now that that’s settled, he direly intones as we try to decide what exactly a Bigfoot is we must be careful not to destroy what we seek to understand.

Now, those of you who’ve followed my ramblings on the web over the years are probably keenly aware of my irrational fear of Bigfoot. And this doc, right here, is the root cause of my psyche-trauma: at the ripe old age of six, Peter Graves took me by the hand and asked me if I liked to watch gladiator movies. No. Wait … That’s not right. Wait. Got it. He asked me if I believed in the Loch Ness Monster, Yetis and peeping tom Bigfoot (Bigfoots? Bigfeet?), and then showed me all the proof I needed that there was something sinister lurking in the large shelter-belt of Evergreen trees just outside our house like my elder brothers always said -- the jerks. And then there was that pothole near my grandma’s house that inexplicably looked just like a huge footprint sunk in the asphalt. I shit you not. Yep. Bigfoot was a very real thing back then. Hell, I even remember being disappointed when I found out Chewbacca was just a Wookie and not a Sasquatch when Star Wars (1977) hit a couple of years later.

Like a lot of cryptid docs the backbone of The Mysterious Monsters are the dramatic reenactments, re-created from first hand accounts as the witnesses are interviewed on camera. Some of these are hilariously laughable, like the Boy Scout’s encounter, while others are startlingly effective, namely the scene where a Bigfoot stalks outside a house while a woman watches TV, unaware as a huge hairy shadow falls across the curtain of the picture window behind her -- a picture window not unlike the one in my house, by the Evergreens, which only reinforced my case of the induced drizzles and confirmed my older brothers were a couple of assholes. She hears a noise outside but takes a look out the wrong window as the creature crashes in from another; chaos ensues as her screams brings her husband running, armed with a rifle, and when he opens the front door comes face to face with the monster and, end of scene. GAH!

I don’t know what it is about these things that puts such a damned hypno-whammy on me, making me believe these things are not only possible but plausible. Guenette's mix of talking head experts, stock footage, and cagey staging of the sightings are bizarrely effective. 

Helping to sell all of this is some pretty spiffy work by The Burman Studio, who provided all the Bigfoot costumes that hold up well even in the light of day; and these technicians would go on to provide creatures and aliens for feature films ranging from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Prophecy (1978), The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), Waterworld (1995) and six seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And Ruby Raskin’s soundtrack runs the range from silent film melodrama and organ stings to the grandiose bombast of an industrial travelogue that constantly lulls you into things only to whack you upside the head to keep your eyes and ears open for what’s lurking in those bushes.

Personally, I like to believe more in the possibility of Bigfoot than its actual existence. Remember those footprints found around Bluff Creek that started all the initial Bigfoot hysteria back in the 1950s? Well, turns out those were all faked. This hoax was revealed with the death of Ray Wallace in 2002, who “found” these prints and, in accordance with his final wishes, Wallace’s family came forward with the molds and rubber casts used to make all of the fake prints. And if we follow the fruit of this poisoned tree, that probably means the much contested Patterson footage, shot in the same area, and corroborated by several footprints that bear a striking similarity to Wallace's forgeries, is cast into even further doubt. Say it ain’t so, Pete. Say it ain’t so. 

Other Points of Interest:

Newspaper ads for The Mysterious Monsters at the Morgue.  
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What is Hubrisween? This is Hubrisween. And now, Boils and Ghouls, be sure to follow this linkage to keep track of the whole conglomeration of reviews for Hubrisween right here. Or you can always follow we collective head of knuckle on Letterboxd. That's 13 down with 13 to go! Halfway! Woohoo!

The Mysterious Monsters (1976) Schick Sunn Classic Pictures / EP: David L. Wolper, Raylan D. Jensen / P: Charles E. Sellier Jr., Robert Guenette / AP: James L. Conway, Frances Guenette / D: Robert Guenette / W: Robert Guenette / C: Tony Coggans, Erik Daarstad, David MyersFrances Guenette / E: Earle Herdan, Robert K. Lambert / M: Ruby Raksin / S: Peter Graves