Tourist Trap (1979)

I once heard on the radio a couple of guys chatting about classical music. One of them said that people frequently ask him to name his favorite composer, and he replies “Do you mean just real music or can I include Elgar?”

In the world of film-lovers this kind of thing is covered by the term “guilty pleasure,” by which is understood to mean those movies which have little if any recognizable artistic merit, but we love them anyway. Not just watch with pleasure—love.

Personally, I’m not big into the concept of guilty pleasure because I hate having to offer explanations or, even worse, make excuses for spending time at the bottom of the “B” movie barrel. That stuff is not all I watch, but I do find myself down there with more frequency as I age. I think that’s because a) my taste has widened—and I hope deepened, but I’m not making any bets, b) I like looking for the wee bits of gold among the dross, and c) many of these films can be connected to my childhood years, when I first discovered the joys of watching movies and everything was grist for the mill.

Which brings me, finally, to a throw-away horror picture from 1979—well past the years of my childhood, alas—called Tourist Trap. It began life as a 30-minute student film by director David Schmoeller (Crawlspace, 1986; Puppet Master, 1989) at the University of Texas. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was only five years old then and my guess is that many film students at UT hoped to strike another vein of Lone Star horror gold.

The feature version of the film stars Chuck Connors, an actor born to work in TV and “B” pictures, as Mr. Slausen, proprietor of a wax museum that has been bypassed by the new highway. His younger brother, Davy, was the sculptor, but Slausen tells us that he lives alone and that the large house behind the museum is now empty.

Who’s he talking to? A carload of young adults who have taken a wrong turn, had a flat, and are now looking for help. Woody (Keith McDermott), whose face opens the film, is seen rolling the flat down the road—you could be forgiven for thinking that Woody is returning to his car with the tire repaired as it appears to be all aired up—to Slausen’s combo museum/gas station/café. But no one is there.

Woody enters the café and, looking for help, enters the back room. The door slams shut behind him. It’s locked. He crosses to an open window only to have it slam down and lock. A mannequin crashes through the other window. What appears to be someone asleep on a cot turns out to be another mannequin, this one rising up to laugh at him. Things start flying around the room. This cacophony of action and noise ends when a piece of pipe hits Woody, inserting itself into his back. Suddenly, the only sound we hear is the blood running through the pipe and dripping onto the floor.

This occurs at the five-minute mark. Schmoeller and screenwriter J. Larry Carroll waste no time with set-up or exposition. They want to grab you by the hair, pull your head back, and put the blade to your throat before you’re comfortably in your seat. We have no idea who these kids are nor where they’re going, and we never come to care. We have the attachment to them we naturally have for attractive actors playing screen characters we know are victims, but as far as true empathy is concerned, forget it.

Soon Eileen (Robin Sherwood), the gal traveling with Woody, gets a ride with three friends in another car and they all end up at Slausen’s where they meet the man himself. He’s a big fella (Connors was 6’5”), he packs a shotgun and he’s a little on the eccentric side, but his speech and actions seem harmless. He invites them into the museum and promises to get his tools to help them when their Jeep stalls out.

Someone—either Slausen or an unknown person—appears to have telekinetic powers. The first clue that Davy may still be alive comes when Slausen tells his guests that his brother was a whiz with anything electrical and we assume that a clue to the “telekinesis” has been given to us. Could all the mysterious movement by inanimate objects be due to electronic jiggery-pokery? Or will it all turn out to be part of a shared insanity?

Not that it hasn’t already, but from here the plot follows a well-trod path. Slausen’s wife was a beauty and the joy of his life, but she died young. He has a wax figure of her that, when touched, feels as if it were covered by skin. Someone crazy is running around killing off the kids. It’s a tall man, say around 6’5”. He wears a plaster mask. Slausen says that it’s Davy. It all finally turns into a monster mash of Psycho, House of Wax, and the aforementioned TCSM.

The movie shows its influences clearly, but it’s just as obvious that it has inspired others as well. Spotting elements that will later turn up in the House of Wax remake and House of 1,000 Corpses is fairly easy. Schmoeller carried his animated mannequins over into Puppet Master. According to Henri Bergson, mechanical movement is supposed to be funny. I guess he was never stalked by a killer doll.

Personally, I find signs of life in inanimate objects to be pretty damn creepy, if not overdone to the point of Bergsonian chuckles. Michael Redgrave’s ventriloquist dummy in Dead of Night and the clown doll in Poltergeist are scary; Chucky is a hoot. This film is full of, and perhaps too full of, mannequins with moving eyes and whispering mouths. This surreal element is far creepier than the physical imperilment with which the lunatic threatens his victims.

The cast wanders back and forth across the line that divides competent performance from overwrought hackery. Connors, despite his stated desire to become the Boris Karloff of the 1980s, seems frequently to want to drop character and say “Come on, how can anyone take stuff like this seriously?”

Among the potential victims, Jocelyn Jones, daughter of character actor Henry Jones (he was the nasty maintenance man in The Bad Seed in 1956) is the best of the group as the mousy good girl. Jon Van Ness is Jerry, the guy who isn’t Woody, and Tanya Roberts, just barely pre-“Charley’s Angels,” is relatively convincing as Becky. Or maybe it’s just the shorts and tank top. Whatever, it works.

Tourist Trap is the creepiest—not scariest, but creepy is good, too—movie to come from producer Charles Band’s slush pile. Schmoeller knows what he’s doing and if this had been his third or fourth picture instead of his first, it would be a solid “B” classic. He has a good eye for the details that make a moment, as you’ll see in the last shot. Take a good look at the face of the person driving the jeep.

When you’re in the mood for schlocky “B” horror, you could do worse.

Odishon (Audition, 1999)

The story goes that when Ôdishon (Audition) played at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000 it scored a record number of walkouts. You’d think that the sadistic cruelty that was so upsetting in 2000 would be old hat by now, but the film is so well and smartly made it has lost none of its ability to make your lower jaw drop down and your fingers to dig deeply into the sofa cushion. And it’s not that the film is gory—you can enjoy more blood and guts in a standard episode of “C.S.I.”

No, in the case of this film, horror, thy name is intensity.

Ryo Ishibashi stars as Shigeharu Aoyama, a man who has been living a lonely life with his son since the death of his wife seven years ago. (Purists, please forgive me but I am writing Japanese names as if they were European, with the surname last.) The son, Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) will soon be leaving home and suggests to his dad that he’s been single long enough. Shigeharu admits that he doesn’t even know how the dating game works anymore, but he is pleased by the fact that his son is aware of and cares about his lonliness.

Shigeharu visits with a friend, a man who works as a film producer. The producer comes up with a clever way for Shigeharu to meet young women: the two of them will pretend to be holding auditions for a new movie. They will interview dozens of potential date-mates, and Shigeharu can select the one he likes best and set up a time when they can meet. He frets about the shadiness of the idea’s morality, but ultimately agrees to try it.

Already, the film’s tone is odd. Not frightening yet—just odd. An air of melancholy hangs over what is essentially a romcom meet-cute situation.

Shigeharu is uncomfortable with every young woman he interviews until Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) shows up. She is slight, almost fragile looking. Pretty, quiet, respectful, she is everything an old school Japanese gentleman could wish for. At the conclusion of the interview, Shigeharu tells her that he will call soon to let her know his casting decision. When he does overcome his shame about his deceitfulness and phones her, she agrees to meet him. When they meet, he tells her the truth about the phony audition. She seems to like him for himself and he promises to call her again.
Later we see her sitting by the phone, waiting like a cat watching a mouse hole. A large filled and sealed canvas sack is visible on the floor by the phone. It could be Asami’s laundry, but we don’t think it is. It’s out of place, a surreal touch that sends a message about Asami. And it isn’t cheerful.

During a weekend tryst with Asami, Shigeharu begins to learn some disquieting things about her—she was a ballet student who had to quit dancing due to a hip injury; she was abused by her instructor.

After an afternoon of, we assume, sex, Shigeharu awakens to find that Asami has left. Back in town, the now completely smitten lover searches for the missing woman, and he discovers more and more of her past, which includes a murder by dismemberment. When the chopped-up body was investigated by the police, they uncovered three fingers and an ear too many. At Asami’s apartment we see that unsettling canvas sack moving and find out what it contains. Right. It isn’t dirty clothes.

Returning home, Shigeharu pours himself a drink then quickly falls to the floor paralyzed. Asami steps out of the shadows to inform that 1) the drug she gave him will prevent him from moving but not from being completely aware of what is happening to him and from feeling pain, and 2) the thin wire she shows him can cleanly cut through flesh and bone.

Working from a script by Daisuke Tengan, adapted from a novel by Ryû Murakami, director Takashi Miike has created one of the creepiest, most suspenseful horror films of the 1990s. Miike plays expertly with audience expectations, taking us right to the edge of what we expect to see only to suddenly shift the carpet under us so that we end up looking at things we never expected.

No list of great psycho thrillers will ever again be complete without Ôdishon close to the top. Don’t see it with someone you love—when it’s over, you won’t feel like you can trust her anymore.

Phone, aka Pon (2002)

This effective ghost story from South Korea approaches overkill but doesn’t go over the line. It also presents one of the best creep-out performances from a child, ever.  

Ji-won (Ji-won Ha) is a reporter who has just completed a series of articles about a ring of pedophiles. A man who is outraged by the stories (we assume because he’s close to, if not a member of, the ring) keeps bombarding her with threatening phone calls. Her best friend Ho-jeong (Yu-mi Kim) invites her to move temporarily into the new house Ho-j has just finished decorating and in which she and her husband Chang-hoon (Woo-jae Choi) will soon take up residence. Ji-w accepts, hoping to hide from her tormentor. 

But after the move, something odd happens. Ho-j’s young daughter Yeong-ju (Seo-woo Eun) answers a call on “Aunt Ji-won’s” mobile phone. Whatever she hears shapes her face into a mask of terror and she begins screaming.  After that, she fluctuates between happy little Yeong-ju and something else, something that develops a creepy, sexually charged affection for her father and bitter jealousy for her mother. Note here that the Yeong-ju can’t be more than six years old. 

As the air grows thicker and the story moves toward its grotesque finale, we learn that Ji-won’s mobile phone as been assigned a number that was given previously to a couple of people who died violently. There seems to be something in the number 6644. There are the ghost of the teen Jin-hie (Ji-yeon Choi), a girl who seeks vengeance because of a sordid, failed love affair; lots of rainy nights, and enough sudden apparitions to satisfy the most fervent lover of K-horror. The scene when Jin-hie succeeds in possessing Yeong-ju is terrifying not only within the context of the story but also because of the intensity of young Seo-woo Eun. You won’t believe what you’re seeing. 

The film was written and directed by Byeong-ki Ahn, and it is a masterful piece of work. If you’re not already familiar with the South Korean horror renaissance of the 1990s-early 2000s, this is a good place to start getting acquainted.

Violette Noziere (1978)

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about Violette Noziere (Isabelle Huppert) as a character in Claude Chabrol's film is that she is so ordinary.  The real Vilolette was no beauty; as you can tell from her story, she was no evil genius. She was just a plain girl in her mid-teens who lived a somewhat awkward life with her lower-middle class parents in Paris in the early 1930s, who slipped out and pretended to be older so she could carry on with older men. She met a slick, useless young man with whom she fell completely in love and to whom she gave money and emotional support. When he threatened to leave her, she poisoned her parents, killing her father and nearly killing her mother.

Her story is the kind of sordid affair that frequently inspired fiction by James M. Cain, whose protagonists also found themselves tied up with emotional Gordian Knots. But Cain's hapless lovers/killers were snakes, beguiling us with the intensity of their stares as they looked in each other's eyes—Violette is a lizard, a dully colored Gila monster crawling along from moment to moment. She fascinates us not because we wonder how she can escape her fate or what will happen when her passion finally bursts forth, but because we know that she is neither imaginative nor smart enough to avoid slouching toward the guillotine.

The film moves along with the same relentlessness. The crime is not presented in the larger than life manner of a Bonnie and Clyde shootout, but just as another episode in another day in another life of silent desperation. Mother Germaine (Stephane Audran) seems to be always on the verge of admitting to herself that something is wrong in the way her husband, Violette's father Baptiste (Jean Carmet), relates to the girl. (We see Violette and Baptiste chatting casually as she is topless and he has a hard time controlling his eyes.) Violette visits her doctor, who tells her she has syphilis. When her parents find out about it, she convinces them that the only way she could have contracted the disease was by inheriting it at birth from them. They swallow her story and what she tells them is medicine. It's the poison.

We also spy on Violette with some friends of near her own age. They claim to be students but they do have plenty of time to hang out at cafes—the mall?—sipping drinks and conversing about nothing in particular. This is how she meets Jean Dabin (Jean-Francois Garreaud), the counterfeit millionaire who soon reveals his need for money and his entire lack of interest in earning it. Violette supplies it by stealing from her parents and blackmailing older men of her acquaintance.

It's remarkable that Chabrol is able to bleach all the sensation from what was one of the most sensational crimes of the Parisienne1930s and still keep us fascinated. Written by Odile Barski, Herve Bromberger, and Frederic Grendel, based on the book by Jean-Marie Fitere, the film is not an overheated crime, but a clinical autopsy. Director of photography Jean Rabier and production designer Jacques Brizzio remind us that things and places are not colorful and exciting merely by virtue of being historical.

There's a creeping ennui to Violette, a lethargic dullness which allows us to see life through the girl's eyes. Before she meets Dabin she feels trapped in her parents' bog of an existence and nothing really seems to matter to her. After she falls in love—if that is really what it is and not just a desire for love that is so strong because everything else is so weak—she has to follow the path of least resistance because that is the only way she knows how to go.

It's a fine and observant film, and an exhausting one, with its horror residing just under the surface.

 

Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (1935)

Murder in the Red Barn was the perfect vehicle for Tod Slaughter’s introduction to movie-goers. It was one of the Victorian melodramas in which he had been barnstorming the provincial theaters for years, the play having been based on an actual 1828 murder case. Since he had been portraying the villainous Squire Corder so long on the stage, Slaughter had made the hypocritical landowner one of his signature roles.

The film is introduced as if it were a play. A host walks on stage from the wings and offers to introduce the characters. Each is greeted with applause. Even Corder takes a bow under the proscenium to the approbation of the theater audience. This literal stage-setting, which will never be referred to again, only adds to the film’s time-machine feel. Just as the movie’s creaky plot and characterizations take us back to British neighborhood cinemas of 1935, the faux theatrical introduction would have removed audiences of 1935 back 70 years to the days of mid-Victorian melodrama.

At the village dance, Squire Corder appears to be the very soul of amiable generosity. Surely then as now audiences knew not to trust any man in a melodrama who seems to be that pleasant and courtly. He will certainly prove to be Up to No Good. Actually, you can see it in Slaughter’s body language. He stands stiff-backed, head erect, arms held oddly in front of his torso looking for all the world as if he were a praying mantis.

All goes well for Corder at the dance until he makes the mistake of allowing a gypsy woman—where would these pictures be without gypsy women—to read his palm, in which she sees death and the Squire hanging from the end of a rope. Talk about your buzz kills . . .

Next we cut to a humble cottage and see the lovely village maiden Maria Marten (Sophie Stewart)—where would these pictures be without lovely village maidens—telling her mother that she is off to choir practice. But—cue the organ—she is really sneaking off to Corder’s manor house because the cad has been promising her a life of luxury and respectability in London when he weds her, which he has absolutely no intention of doing after he gets what he wants from her. Have some Madeira, m’dear.

When Maria’s father (D.J. Williams) finds out that there was no choir practice that night, they gypsy lad Carlos (Eric Portman), who is smitten with our heroine, lies to Farmer Marten and says that he was with Maria. He’s trying to protect her but it isn’t made clear why spending night time hours with him is better than anything else she could have been doing.

Livid, Farmer Marten calls on the Squire and asks him to run the gypsies out of town.

This scene is a grand one for Slaughter as he gets to scale the heights of justified hypocrisy. He paces back and forth in his parlor, his steps stiff and forced as if he were counting “one, two, three, stop, turn, speak, pace back, one, two, three.” He dabs gently at his nose with his handkerchief, then paces to the bell cord, tugs on it manfully, and deliberately paces back. It’s stage movement of the most mechanical sort but it is oddly mesmerizing.

Slaughter is like the modern computer generated Scooby-Doo at the heart of the drama. He’s too large for the other actors. He stands out because he doesn’t seem to be quite real, and yet all the other characters in the movie accept his presence. His hand-wringing and eye-rolling, his way of underlining every laugh and condescending lip-curl are the most unsubtle ways of virtually commanding center stage. This is a Tod Slaughter film the way John Wayne’s later pictures belonged entirely to the Duke. He exists on his own plane, and the spotlight follows him wherever he goes.

Now we cut to a gaming room in London where Corder is experiencing a terrible run of bad luck at the dice table, losing toss after toss to a dandified Dennis Hoey (later Inspector Lestrade to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes). So busted does Corder become, he determines to marry a wealthy, plain, psalm-singing old maid for her money. When the winner of his fortune gives him but one month to pay up, it becomes clear that poor Maria is old news.

Of course all sexual action has taken place off screen but we can tell by Maria’s shamed demeanor that she and the Squire have been involved with some slap and tickle, and soon it will become obvious to the entire village. Her father, declaring her a “wanton,” throws her out of his house. She hastens to the manor to claim what is her due by former promise, but Corder dismisses her distress with a delicious “I meant what I said at the time.”

“You shan’t kick me into the gutter,” she cries, thinking her despair will melt his cold heart. So certain is she that Corder will do the right thing, she drives away the love-struck Carlos, who offers to marry her.

The Squire tells Maria to meet him that night at the red barn and they will slip away to London. When they meet, a storm is raging. Where would these pictures be without raging storms? Maria senses that all is not well with Corder. Slaughter allows his shoulders to hunch as he hisses, “Didn’t I promise to make you a bride? You shall be a bride, Maria. A bride of death!”

She screams. He shoots her with a dueling pistol. He digs a hole in the barn and buries her as thunder and lightning crash and flash. Director Milton Rosmer even places his camera in the grave so we can watch Corder as he shovels dirt onto our faces.

From this point on the movie hastens to its close. Maria is missed by her grieving parents. Carlos is tracked down and accused of causing her disappearance. He remembers seeing her with the Squire on the last night anyone saw her. The town officials take Corder and Carlos to the barn where Corder’s dog Tiger begins to sniff around a patch of disturbed earth. Corder offers to dig around to prove that there is nothing amiss and he digs up the pistol he had inadvertently dropped in the grave.

When the corpse is exposed—not to us but to the characters on screen—Slaughter give us a nicely overwrought mad scene right out of Edgar Allan Poe. “Don’t stare at me like that, Maria,” he gibbers. He is finally led away, barking mad, by the authorities.

But he has one last horrible indignity awaiting him as he is led to the gallows. He doesn’t see it coming—if people in old-fashioned melodramas like this had an ounce of imagination or self-restraint, there wouldn’t be any old-fashioned melodramas like this—but you’ll spot it as soon as you hear that the hangman is too sick to attend to his duties and so a “volunteer hangman” has been procured for the day.

As it is with other of Slaughter’s lead roles, in the end there’s a grandeur in Squire Corder’s evil. He covers all the bases: snobbishness, vanity, lechery, violence, greed, hypocrisy—he’s the complete villains of Charles Dickens all rolled into one. Slaughter is sui generis, and you wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

House Hunting (2013)

It’s a tale of two families—Hays and Thomson.  Charlie Hays (Marc Singer) has his hands full with a new(ish) wife, Susan (Hayley DuMond), and a teen daughter, Emmy (Janey Gioiosa), who hates her.  Biological mom ran off with another man.  Charlie works for a company (bank? investment firm?) that foreclosed on a farm, house and 70 acres, and Dad is taking the family out to look at it, thinking he may want to buy. 

Other family.   Don Thomson (Art LeFleur) is a grouch who is being dragged from one open house to another by his wife Leslie (Victoria Vance) and his teen son Jason (Paul McGill).  As he stands, smoking, in front of a suburban mediocrity that looks pretty much like the one they just left, a man wearing one of those hideous arctic hats with earflaps—mukluks for the head—and leading a dog on a leash approaches him.  They agree that the neighborhood sucks and the man gives Don a card with an address on it, an address for the perfect place, a farm on 70 acres. 

The Hays family arrives at the house first, but they are immediately followed by the Thomsons.  The two men appraise each other as rivals for the property, but neither of them goes into the building beyond the foyer, and then they decide to leave. 

As Charlie drives away from the house, a young woman rushes from the woods in front of his car.  He smacks into a tree, but gets out and goes to her, sees that he didn’t hit her but that still she is covered in blood. 

Don pulls up behind him.  Since Charlie’s car is too scrunched up to drive, Don offers to take him and the young woman back to the house so they can call for help.  The young woman, Hanna (Rebekah Kennedy), tries to flee in fear.  When they ask her why, the families discover that she has recently had her tongue cut out. 

All seven people cram into Don’s car and head back to the highway, but end up every time they try back at the house.  Which apparently doesn’t want them to leave.  In the pantry, they find seven cans of beef stew.  They think they see the man with the hat walking his dog, but when they shout at him to stop, he disappears. 

A month later, a month of no communication with the outside world, there continue to be seven cans of stew on the shelf every day. 

Until the day there are only six. 

The film was written and directed by Eric Hurt, who plays around nicely with the devices of the traditional ghost story.  What he does best is suggest a meaning for what the families are going through while keeping a definitive explanation just out of reach.  The best ghost stories don’t tell you what you you need to know in order to make the oddness understandable.  That’s not the way ghosts work in real life (so they tell me).  It’s said that the difference between a fictional ghost story and a real one is that the fictional haunting makes sense and the actual one doesn’t.  Hauntings don’t always happen out of a need for spectral revenge, or for the completion of some unfinished business. 

If you need an explanation in this case, imdb says that the film’s script is loosely based on Sartre’s play No Exit.  You can extrapolate a meaning from that. 

The acting is fine and production values are good.  There’s not a lot to be said yay or nay about either thing.  The real pleasure comes from watching a contemporary ghost movie that looks further back for inspiration than last week’s episode of some ghost hunting show on cable TV.

Popcorn (1991)

Popcorn makes the major mistake of placing high-camp burlesque versions of 1950s-style horror and science fiction movies—the kind using outlandish ballyhooish gimmicks to sell tickets—in the center of a quasi-legit slasher movie. The slasher part of the whole is not entirely serious as it’s a black comedy, but the parody movies-within-the-movie creamy filling are flat-out silly and so much more obviously funny than the chocolate coating that the whole thing melts in your hand.

Jill Schoelen (who had co-starred in the Robert Englund Phantom of the Opera in 1989) is Maggie, would-be screenwriter. She is a college student still living with her mom Suzanne (Dee Wallace). When Suzanne finds out that the struggling campus film department wants to put on an all night horror-palooza to raise money, she suddenly hesitates and asks Maggie not to get involved. Maggie wants to take part in the fund raiser. After all, they intend to run three schlocky gimmick flicks, recreating the original William Castle-ish stunts—shockers in the seats, a giant mosquito that buzzes the audience, and foul odors pumped into the theater to accompany a Japanese import called The Stench. Yeah, who’d want to miss that?

Ray Walston delivers a high energy cameo as Dr. Mnesyne (he remembers the good old days of motion picture promotion), proprietor of a movie memorabilia shop and owner of all the artifacts the students will need in order to pull off the promotional stunts. Walston is very much like the Devil in Damn Yankees.

While going through cases of stuff, one of the students finds a film can bearing a warning Not To Open, which is, of course, immediately ignored. A small reel of film is inside and when they project it they discover it’s part of a notorious movie made 15 years previously by Lanyard Gates, indie director and professional wacko. The movie was called The Possessor. To get revenge on everyone who ever doubted his talents, Gates presented his final film without an ending—an ending he intended to create live on stage by murdering his wife and daughter and everyone else he could. Somehow the theater caught on fire and Gates, as well as several people in the audience, were killed.

When she sees the remaining snippet of The Possessor, Maggie realizes that she has been dreaming it and quickly jumps to the conclusion that she is, in fact, Lanyard Gates’ daughter. How she wasn’t killed by the evil genius is explained in a quick bit of we-better-tell-the-audience-what-the-hell-really-happened-or-they’re-going-to-be-pissed exposition. And it seems that Gates is still alive, too, and plotting to kill everyone in the film department, a move that will spare future audiences hours of dreary independent art cinema.

The rest of the cast includes Tom Villard as Toby, the nerdiest of the class movie geeks; Elliott Hurst as Leon, the one in the wheelchair; and Freddie Marie Simpson as Tina, department flirt and student kootchymama (“people wonder how I manage to make straight A’s”) to department chair Mr. Davis (Tony Roberts). Derek Rydall is along as Mark, Maggie’s sort-of boyfriend and ineffectual hero.

To save some money on production costs, the picture was shot in Kingston, Jamaica. It’s based on a story by Mitchell Smith and screenwriter Alan Ormsby was set to direct until he lost the job after about three weeks of shooting and was replaced by Mark Hellier.

The film is a watchable failure, never generating anything like thrills or chills. That it has a cult following tells you more about movie cultists than it does about quality cinema, and I suspect people get a kick out of the movie parodies—I suspect this is where Ormsby’s heart really lay. You can watch this one once, but you’ll go back to Joe Dante’s Matinee, which also contains a burlesque movie-within-a-movie, over and over again.