WB reaches into their vault of horror and dusts off six horror pics, five of which are new to DVD, just in time for Halloween. With six titles to offer – ‘The Hand’, ‘Someone’s Watching Me!’, ‘Eyes of A Stranger’, ‘From Beyond The Grave’, ‘Deadly Friend’ and ‘Dr.Giggles – at a very reasonable price, fans of the horror genre should be pleased.
While I wouldn’t consider any one of these pics horror classics per se, fans of the genre have been waiting a long time for some of these babies to make their DVD debut, with a lot of them on online petitions. With less-known offerings from Oliver Stone, Wes Craven and John Carpenter, this set will be a must-have for completists such as myself – it’s just too bad that the movies aren’t better.
One of the better pics in the set is our first flick, the Amicus compilation ‘From Beyond the Grave’ from 1973. An odd pic to include with the other five, this film stars Peter Cushing as the owner of an antiques shop whose customers get more than they bargained for. If you’re familiar with other Amicus anthologies like ‘Tales from the Crypt’, you’ll know the vibe of this one.
Four tales revolve around customers who try to swindle goods from the kind old man who runs the store but finds it may have been more prudent to go the honest route. Haunted mirrors and Wooden Doors leading to Hell make up some of the stories while some great British character actors like Donald Pleasance, David Warner and Ian Ogilvy fill out the cast. While somewhat antiquated as far as scares go, this is a solid, quaint horror film. Some will be immediately reminded of Stephen King’s ‘Needful Things’ in narrative, however, and this pic came first…
Besides a nice anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen transfer, the film’s original trailer is the only special feature.
Next is ‘Someone’s Watching Me!’, a 1978 made-for-TV movie from John Carpenter. It’s a competently made film that shows the future talents of Carpenter, but the tension and scares are noticeably watered down due to its origins on television. Lauren Hutton plays Leigh Michaels, a TV director in NY fresh from a move from LA. It doesn’t take long for her to attract a fan – a ruthless stalking murderer who spies on her through the windows of her high-rise apartment and torturing/teasing her via phone calls - a mix of ‘Rear Window’ and ‘When a Stranger Calls’.
There’s not a whole lot more to the pic than that. Hutton is good in the main role; Adrienne Barbeau (Carpenter’s future wife) plays the gay co-worker and confidant and Carpenter good-luck charm Charles Cyphers pops up as a detective. It works as well as it’s supposed to, staying just this side of dull and Carpenter fans will be eager to check it out, but we’ve seen this all before.
The film is presented in the curiously matted 1.85:1 aspect ratio and has one solid special feature, the featurette ‘John Carpenter: Director on the Rise’ - A recently made doc where Carpenter explains how this pic shaped how he shot ‘Halloween’, his first dealings with a studio and so on.
More interesting is ‘The Hand’ from 1981. Oliver Stone’s debut film has Michael Caine starring as Jon Lansdale, a successful cartoonist who has a less successful marriage. As his marriage seems to be falling apart, things get a lot worse when his hand is severed in a horrific car accident. His hand is never recovered from the scene but somehow manages to make it back into Jon’s life anyway.
With Jon’s life taking a depressing turn in a number of ways that include losing his cartoonist job and losing his wife, the man has a lot of anger, anger that leads to murder as it seems his severed hand feeds on this anger. But all may not be what it seems as Jon has taken to drinking and blacking out at the time of the murders, so could it all be in his head? Egads! A film that is widely hated by most that have seen it, I’ve never really had a problem with it. Once you get past the ridiculous suits and hairstyles that were norm for the time, you have a pretty decent horror pic here.
It’s silly to be sure but the gore quotient is quite high, the f/x by Carlo Rambaldi not bad, and Caine seems to be giving it his all. The film has its slow spots and the soft focus, dull lighting – a late seventies signature – is unpleasant but genre fans of this era should find this no surprise. The film is presented in a 1.85:1 widescreen transfer and special features consist of a trailer and a surprise Oliver Stone commentary that was recorded recently. A nice addition for Stone fans, he seems eager to talk about his first pic and remembers it rather fondly.
Next is a flick that’s similar to ‘Someone’s Watching Me!’ but proves much more interesting due to its nastier, gorier tone. ‘Eyes of A Stranger’ (1981) was directed by Ken Wiederhorn, best known to horror fans for the Nazi-zombie ‘Shock Waves’, but the films claim to fame is special make-up effects from f/x maestro Tom Savini and a really early performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Lauren Tewes stars as Miami reporter Jane who discovers that a notorious serial killer rapist is living in the apartment building across from hers. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays her younger sister Tracy, who is blind and deaf due to trauma from a kidnap/rape incident that resulted from Janet’s diregard. When the murderer learns that Jane is on to him, he goes after her younger sister Tracy with scenes that play out similar to ‘Wait until Dark’ or ‘Jennifer 8’.
With some gruesome effects from Savini and a solid cast, this obscure flick is actually a nice little find for horror fans. Besides a nice, anamorphic transfer, no other special features are included.
Next is Wes Craven’s goofiest pic, and yes that includes ‘Shocker’, ‘Vampire in Brooklyn’, ‘Cursed’ and ‘Music of the Heart’, with the oddball 1986 entry ‘Deadly Friend’. Trying to capitalize on both the horror craze and the young sci-fi craze of the mid-eighties (films like ‘D.A.R.Y.L.), Craven manages to make the worst film of both genres – you got to give him points for that.
Known mostly for the scene where the crazy lady from ‘The Goonies’ and ‘Throw Momma From the Train’ gets her head blown apart by a basketball, yes a basket ball, the sheer ridiculousness of this pic seems to be its sole selling point. A teen-‘Frankenstein’ story of sorts, Matthew Laborteaux stars as a young Doogie Howser, err I mean Paul Conway, who is the new kid in town. A boy genius; the lucky little punk even created his own fully functioning yellow robot called BB (quite possibly the lamest robot ever committed to celluloid I might add).
Developing a crush on Samantha, the girl next door (Kristy Swanson), his advances are routinely thwarted by her abusive and freakily jealous father. Halloween eve starts a nasty turn events that has an evil old lady neighbor, the aforementioned crazy lady Anne Ramsey, destroying BB with a shotgun and weeks later, Samantha gets pushed down the stairs by her father and goes into a coma where they eventually pull the plug. What’s a crazed boy genius to do? Put the robot microchip brain in the body of his dead girlfriend – yeah, that’s the ticket!
Crazy robot girl now wreaks havoc on all who have wronged them in increasingly lame ways…how does a head actually blow up when hit by a basketball anyway? Thankfully, the lone special feature is that the film does end at some point. Well, okay, I will say it qualifies as a guilty pleasure much like our next and last feature.
The only other film in this set that has been on DVD before is ‘Dr.Giggles’, which had a pan scan release from Good Times. Thankfully, WB listened to the pleas of millions of ‘Dr.Giggles’ fans and now we get the flick in all of its widescreen glory (actually not really since the flick was shot in super scope, a 2.35:1 ratio, and the film is presented in a flat 1.85:1 ratio…us Dr.Giggles fans have been foiled once again, drats!)
Larry Drake stars as the titular Dr. Giggles, the psychopathic, deranged son of a psychopathic, deranged small-town doctor whose victims revolted and killed him. Escaping from a mental institution, he heads back to the small town to seek revenge. The End. Well, there’s the usual teenage nonsense and the narrative is driven by Dr. Giggles infatuation to perform a heart transplant but the story elements are all your run-of-the-mill slasher clichés.
Larry Drake is quite funny as Dr.Giggles with a character that more than lives up to his name with his bad jokes and subsequent giggling and there is some nice differential in the numerous killings with some fun gore, but casual horror film fans need not apply. This one is for slasher pic completists only. No special features are on the disc.
I think the ‘Twisted Terror Collection’ offers a lot of value for the buck but these flicks definitely will appeal more to horror aficionados who will appreciate owning obscure Savini f/x, a mediocre early work of Carpenter, the strange first film of Oliver Stone or the most ridiculous film in Craven’s filmography. If these names mean nothing to you, you might want to hit the rental store first.
Twisted Terror Collection is now available at Amazon . As of yet, there is not a release date for the UK. Visit the DVD database for more information.
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