The Poughkeepsie Tapes

     Ok, so most cult films tend to be more on the older side because a cult following usually takes time, but now and then a cult film can be relatively new if it manages to get enough of a following within just a few years. In this case, The Poughkeepsie Tapes definitively achieved this. It was filmed and ready for release in 2007, but for unknown reasons, it was pulled from theaters and held for four years until being released as a video on demand, but it wasn't until a full ten years after being made that it finally got a DVD release. This is what makes it a cult film, one person heard about it, then told someone else, and so on until enough people had complained about wanting to see it but not being able to find it that it had to be widely released. And even now it's still a bit hard to find, but definitely worth the effort of trying.  

     It's a found footage film, which is a genre that may sound a bit overdone at this point but can still be pulled off if it's original enough. This one works because it resides in an area between being completely believable and totally disturbing, a combination that can easily ride the line between whether it's real or not. It begins with a criminology class discussing the events that led to the discovery of 500 videotapes left behind by a serial killer. The tapes are beyond disturbing and what's discussed about them in class is almost as freaky as what is actually shown on the tapes. 

      The killers' first few tapes are filled with strange balloon porn, such as women being made to sit on balloons and bounce up and down till they popped, etc. Around the fifth or sixth tape, the real scariness begins when the killer approaches an 8-year-old girl and abducts her, we learn afterward that she was found raped and murdered later that day. 

      The murders progress in increasingly disturbing ways. The killer pretends to have a broken-down car and hitches a ride with a man and his pregnant wife. Then on one of the tapes, the woman is awoken from being drugged only to find that her baby has been cut out and that her husband's severed head has been placed in her belly. 

      The tapes get worse when a 17-year-old girl named Cheryl Dempsey is filmed being abducted, hogtied, and forced to repeat over and over that her name is no longer Cheryl but is now "slave". She's brought to the killer's basement where he tortures her relentlessly into complete submission, and forces her to wear a rubber maid's outfit with a mask, leaving us to only be able to see her terrified eyes underneath. More tapes are shown where Cheryl is made to assist in the murders of other victims in increasingly violent ways. 

      The acting is so convincing that the viewer is sometimes left wondering how on Earth they were able to film it without the actors suffering an equal amount of actual torture. More victims fill the tapes, dismemberments are shown, and the fear starts feeling very genuine. 

      Through the criminology class, we learn that a policeman is eventually arrested for the crimes as his semen is found at several of the crime scenes. He is eventually put to death by lethal injection. A few days after the execution more murders are committed and it becomes obvious that the wrong man was put to death. It turns out that the actual killer had somehow gotten hold of the cops' donation to a fertility clinic and used it to plant his DNA at various crime scenes. The wrongly executed cop is posthumously exonerated but no one really pays attention to this news because the terrorist attack on 9/11 occurred the day before and this news completely dominated the airwaves and overshadowed what had happened with the falsely accused policeman. 

      More tapes are watched, showing more victims murdered in increasingly gruesome ways. We learn that the tapes were found at a house in which not a single fingerprint was discovered, the only thing left behind is a wooden box the size of a coffin containing what is assumed to be the corpse of Cheryl Dempsey, shockingly she is found to be alive but in horrible shape, too disturbing to even be described. We do learn that while in the hospital recuperating Cheryl mysteriously continues to show recent injuries and that she is so mentally disturbed by over ten years of constant torture that she compulsively continues to injure herself, thinking that this is what is normal and expected of her. An interview with her later shows what can only be described as the shell of a human who doesn't know how to think for herself and can only ask what the interviewer wants her to say, as this has become her normal existence. We also notice she is missing a hand along with other scars and somewhat healed injuries. A caption displayed after the failed interview lets the audience knows that Cheryl soon after committed suicide leaving a note stating that she loved her torturer, that he loved her, and that she believed he would return for her someday. 

      A new film is then shown of a rope being tied to the neck of a recently buried corpse that we can only assume is Cheryl being pulled from her grave and taken away. After the movie's credits, there is a short film of a woman whose mouth is taped shut and who is told that as long as she doesn't blink, she'll live. After a few very tense moments, she blinks and is stabbed in the neck. 

      As gruesome as the tapes are, there are still about 27 tapes unaccounted for and we're left to assume that the killer took these with him and contain footage so horrifying as to make all the others seem tame by comparison. 

      This is an extremely disturbing movie and I can see why its release was probably delayed due to its subject matter. What is shown on the tapes has such a feeling of intense realness that it's actually very believable and what isn't shown and simply described can only be visually imagined by the sickest of minds. A terrifying film to say the least, and even though we know it's just a movie, it's somehow believable enough to leave a very nasty taste in your mouth.

Salem's Lot

     Salem's Lot is a miniseries made from Stephen King's second book. In my opinion, the miniseries was just as scary as the book, it did have some changes but the changes made were actually a lot scarier when seen on film. Salem's Lot was made in the 1970s for people who were too lazy to just read the damn book. Fortunately, it turned out very well and personally scared the hell out of me. 

      Stephen King often wondered what would happen if you took Dracula and dropped him in the middle of modern-day suburbia, and the book Salem's Lot was the result. Since this is a blog about movies I won't go into all the differences between the movie and the book and just concentrate on the masterpiece that resulted when this miniseries was created. 

      David Soul was a huge star at the time so he landed the main character role of Ben Mears, a tormented writer who left the sleepy town of Jerusalem's Lot, shortened by its residents to "Salem's Lot", to achieve his dream of being a famous author who never really became that famous. It was directed by Tobe Hooper who had recently made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and was itching to take on a Stephen King novel and make a great miniseries out of it. He succeeded and it was a huge success. It's been remade a few times, one version with Rob Lowe that adhered a lot closer to the novel, but this version from 1979 has gained a huge cult following and is by far the scariest version out there. 

      Ben Mears has returned to write a story about the Marsten House, the old and supposedly haunted house on the hill at the edge of town. Upon arriving in town and attempting to rent the Marsten House to write a book about it, he soon learns that two mysterious antique dealers have just recently rented the house themselves and plan to open an antique shop in town. Sounds very gay, which is where I was hoping the story was going but alas, it did not. Mr. Straker is an English gentleman who definitely stands out in a town full of rather ordinary and mundane people. His partner Mr. Barlow is never seen but only heard about, and is told will soon arrive from a buying trip overseas. 

      Soon a young boy goes missing and a mysterious blood-related illness begins to affect some of the residents of the Lot. Friends and family of the missing and deceased begin having dreams of their loved ones and become unusually tired and develop mysterious marks on their necks. 

      What I like most about this story is that the vampire is rarely seen and the main story deals with the relationships of the people in the town. Ben meets up with Susan Norton, the local librarian and they begin a relationship, much to the dismay of her ex-boyfriend who is constantly dead set on beating the hell out of Ben, as you do in small towns. Mark Petrie is a high school student obsessed with horror and magic who sees his missing best friend floating outside his window one night begging to be let in. Having some knowledge of vampires and already being pretty sure his friend is dead since he attended his funeral a few days prior, refuses and busts out with a plastic cross from a graveyard model, sending his friend hissing into the night. Ben and Mark team up with a few other random characters to solve the mystery of what's going on in the Lot and soon find out that Mr. Straker has been kidnapping kids and feeding them to Mr. Barlow who is a pretty terrifying bald blue vampire with eerie glowing eyes, very much in the vein of Nosferatu, which is probably the biggest change from the book, but a change that scared me half to death the first time I saw him. 

      There's a back story about the Marsten House and an experience Ben had there as a child. Ben assumes that since the house is inherently evil and therefore attracts evil, why then did it attract him? We eventually learn that all the missing or dead people from the town are now bluish-colored vampires who now reside in the house's basement. Ben and Mark finally destroy Straker and Barlow and burn down the Marsten House, starting a fire that eventually sweeps through the entire town. 

      We learn from a few book references by Stephen King that vampires still reside in the Lot after the fire and it becomes known as a place you really don't wanna be caught in after dark. A truly creepy movie with some terrifying scenes and some pretty decent acting by some and some really bad acting by others. After it aired on television it became really hard to find until the miracle of DVD brought it back to life for fans who'd been completely scarred by it when it originally came out.

Fire Walk With Me

     Fire Walk With Me is a prequel film to the hit TV series Twin Peaks from the early '90s. Since Twin Peaks was mostly the story of who killed Laura Palmer, the prequel is naturally about the last week of Laura Palmer's life. We didn't see much of Laura in the series obviously because it starts off with her death, so getting to see her acting out all the things we already knew she did was really cool. I mean, we already knew that although Laura was the homecoming queen and did honorable things like helping with Meals on Wheels, tutoring Josie Packard with her English, and helping the mentally challenged Johnny Horne, she was also into drugs, prostitution, and S&M. The mystery of who killed her captivated the nation and had everyone wondering who the hell killed her. Around episodes 17-18 we finally find out that her father had been molesting her for years and finally killed her because he was possessed by an inhabiting spirit called Bob. 

      The main protagonist of the TV series is Special Agent Dale Cooper played by Kyle MacLachlan, and even though he was the main character in the series, he doesn't play a huge role in the film because Laura isn't dead yet so he has no real reason to be there. Plus, he didn't really want to be in the movie for fear of being typecast since he was trying to be considered a serious film actor. Instead, we have Special Agents Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley, played by Chris Isaak and Keifer Sutherland respectively. Both are investigating the murder of Teresa Banks, who is the murder victim just before Laura is killed. Only through the prequel though do we learn that Teresa and Laura were both prostitutes who sometimes worked together. 

      Many people weren't exactly fans of the movie because they thought it lacked the taste and class that the TV series had. After all, as a feature film, it was allowed the courtesy of profanity and nudity.  But in my opinion, it didn't really take away from the story. I mean, Laura did a lot of salacious things, and if we're gonna see her doing all the things we only heard about in the series, it's gonna have some scenes that are a little more intense. Sheryl Lee who plays Laura does an incredible job and acted her tush off in this role, and really gave the character some serious depth by giving it her all. 

      The movie premiered in 1992 about a year after the TV series finished its second season and was canceled. Many characters were written out of the movie, mostly because they either didn't have much to do with Laura's death or just didn't care to reprise their roles for the film. Another reason that most characters didn't show up was that the original version of the movie ran just over five hours long, but was cut down to just over two hours due to the restraints that were put on director David Lynch to keep the film a little shorter than that. This caused a lot of continuity errors and subplots that had no resolution or just plain didn't make sense. Personally, I thought this added to the mystery that Twin Peaks already had and matched the series quite well. Years later, a lot of outtakes and extended scenes were assembled together to form a movie of sorts called "The Missing Pieces" which was released as a feature film, one that doesn't actually resemble a film at all and just looks like what it was, a random collection of unneeded scenes that would've just slowed the movie down had they remained in the final version. Hopefully, fans will someday put the movie and missing pieces together in addition to the other 2-3 hours of missing footage that David Lynch was forced to cut from Fire Walk With Me in order to finally realize his original vision of the film. 

      One glaring change in the film is the replacement of Lara Flynn Boyle as Donna Hayward with actress Moira Kelly. Rumor has it that Lara didn't want to film the nude scenes, but she soon afterward starred in the movie The Road to Wellville in which she appeared topless, so nobody really knows her true reasons for declining to appear in Fire Walk With Me. The character of Donna Hayward was crucial to Laura's story though so her character couldn't be written out. Fortunately, Moira Kelly did a pretty good job playing the part so I can't complain. 

      I was one of the few people who saw the prequel movie before actually watching the TV series, which just made me more of a fan of the whole Twin Peaks phenomenon. There's much more backward talk in the movie too which I always thought was a really cool idea, by having the actors speak phonetically backward, then running the film backward so that the actors sounded strange and ethereal. Altogether I thought the movie was very well done despite the flaws that fans of the series love to complain about.

Abby

     I personally really love this movie, it's a freaking laugh riot! I mean, I know it's a complete ripoff of The Exorcist and is intended to be just as scary, but the exorcism takes place in a disco tech and the demon spouts some seriously funny jive-ass lines without a single curse word as opposed to The Exorcist. 

      Anyway, the film came out in 1974, ironically on Christmas Day, while The Exorcist was still making people pass out in theaters across the country and right away Warner Bros noticed that it mimicked their movie in an almost scene-for-scene way. Blaxploitation films were all the rage at the time and for a brief moment director William Girdler actually considered calling this movie "The Blaxorcist". Knowing that this movie was a rip-off, I guess he decided that making it too obvious would cause Warner Bros to notice even sooner than they did. Before Warner caught on though, Abby did turn a pretty good profit before its producer American-International was sued and Abby was taken out of theaters. The lawsuit was finally settled four years later. Unfortunately, William Girdler died shortly before that and never saw a penny of the profits. 

      Anyway, replace the little girl with a minister's wife, and change the demon from an Iraqi Pazuzu to a Nigerian Eshu and it's The Exorcist with a black cast instead of a white one. William Marshall who famously played the vampire in Blacula plays the priest who performs the actual exorcism. Lots of us though remember William Marshall as The King of Cartoons from Pee Wees Playhouse, but I don't wanna give my age away that easily. 

      The film starts off with Bishop Garnet Williams telling his class that he's leaving America to study demons in Nigeria, in passing he mentions that his son is a doubtful minister who doesn't really follow his father's beliefs and is relatively down to earth. Once in Nigeria, he finds a vessel of some sort in a cave, opens it and a gust of wind and dust flies out letting us know that he's released something sinister.  

     Meanwhile, his minister son and his wife Abby are moving into a new house, with the help of the church deacon, a rather timid guy (who can't act to save his life), and Abby's mother, played by Juanita Moore who was an Oscar nominee for her supporting role in Imitation of Life starring Lana Turner. Makes you wonder if she was proud of this movie, I'll give you a hint, few were. 

      The sex demon Eshu finds its way to their new house and possesses Abby who soon starts having a tad bit more of a brutal sexual appetite, has a deeper voice, and occasionally foams at the mouth, no doubt with the help of some Alka-Seltzer tablets. She doesn't curse as much as Regan did in The Exorcist but her insults are just as jarring and certainly out of place for a minister's wife. Her husband first thinks she's on drugs, then assumes it's a mental illness, but the poltergeist activity that occurs when she's around makes him a bit suspicious, so he calls his dad who's still in Nigeria and blissfully unaware that the demon he released is tormenting his daughter in law. 

      Abby is sent to the hospital for tests which of course show nothing out of the ordinary and she's judged as just being mental. After busting out of the hospital, she arrives back at home around the same time that Bishop Williams arrives there after a frantic call from his son concerning Abby's bizarre behavior change. Abby's voice drops several octaves and she makes a sexual reference about her father-in-laws' privates at which point the Bishop puts the pieces together and finally figures out that the sex demon he released has possessed Abby. After making some furniture fly around she leaves and goes nightclubbing, time for Abby to have some fun. 

      She makes it to a club where for some reason almost everything from the furniture, wallpaper, and what people are wearing is orange. She sleeps with the only white guy there who creepily resembles the comedian Gallagher and does a lot of W.C. Fields impressions, then runs into the church deacon at the same club and has sex with him in his car. What he was doing at this kind of club, having dinner there no less is never explained. 

      Her husband, his cop brother, and the Bishop father-in-law arrive at the club and exorcise Abby, practically destroying the place in the process. Afterward, after Abby has time to heal, we see the happy couple getting on a plane to go on vacation somewhere, to celebrate their post-demon possession happiness. The End. 

      Much like The Exorcist, rumors abounded about creepy things happening on set during filming, like the generators failing whenever actress Carol Speed would be filming scenes as the demon. At one point while filming, a storm producing violent tornadoes blew through and Carol Speed and Juanita Moore had to shelter under a table to avoid the shattered glass raining down on them from windows being blown out. 

      All in all, this is an incredibly entertaining movie that fortunately can now be found in its entirety on YouTube. Definitely worth checking out just to see the overwhelming similarities with its white people movie counterpart.

Let Me Die a Woman!

     This is a very in-your-face documentary on the topic of sex changes and transgenderism. And I mean that truly, it literally takes you from start to finish, into the nether regions that not so many of us wanted to see or know about (I can't say "all of us" because there's something for everyone). 

      It was made in 1978, not long after Christine Jourganson went public with her successful new life as a post-operative transgender, male to female. She pulled it off (no pun intended) rather well, appearing very feminine with little to no masculine reminders of her previous gender. Born a Man, Let Me Die a Woman begins as a very in-your-face documentary on the topic of sex changes and transgenderism. And I mean that truly, it literally takes you from start to finish, into the nether regions that not so many of us wanted to see or know about (I can't say "all of us" because there's something for everyone). 

      It was made in 1978 to explain in different ways, pre-op, post-op, half-op, hormone treatments, plastic surgery, etc.  This documentary explores them all... at a range, so close you can almost smell it (I'm so sorry, don't worry God'll get me for that) We're shown, the ins and out, the missing and the added, all narrated by a doctor that noticeable flinches every time he mentions the words "cut off". We're even shown demonstrations of sex with transgender people that are very unexpectedly pornographic but are still being narrated like a documentary (sort of like...and here we see the North American Humanus Pervertis in their natural habitat). 

      There is also a Puerto Rican transexual that does a lot of the narration, who is actually very attractive and intelligent and tells of her difficult life growing up transgender in a poor and intolerable society. The rest of the people (all transgender) in this documentary seemed like they were reading from a cue card or something. Their dialogue seems very scripted and wooden, and they all appeared to be "attempting" to act. Probably because they were transexuals and not actors (oh don't worry, they are proven without a shadow of a doubt to be transexuals). I know the correct term is Transgender, but the film uses the term Transexual, so that's why I'm using it here.  

     It's very campy, mostly due to its age, and I'm quite sure that today we've come a long way in surgical advancement when it comes to fine-tuning a medical procedure like a sex change since this was filmed. But whether you're genuinely interested in the subject or just desire 87 minutes of sheer weirdness, this Bud's for you. Definitely not for the squeamish, weak of stomach (or worse... homophobic).