Connecting the Horror
IT ALL CAME to me at once. That was the weird thing.
A week ago, a small mountain of movies from a variety of sources arrived in my mailbox. Some were things I was looking forward to seeing with great anticipation, while others were simply replacements for fading VHS tapes. Still others were there because someone had sent them to me and, well, there they were.
I carted them all home and stacked them, per usual, in a pile on the floor in front of the television. Bride of Frankenstein, a Vincent Price/AIP double bill featuring The Haunted Palace and Tower of London, The Osterman Weekend, The Hills Have Eyes, Dead & Buried, the 1976 remake of King Kong, Alien, the two sequels to Re-Animator (Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator) and something I'd never heard of before called The Resurrected.
That Saturday night, Morgan came over. We talked a while, had a few beers, and after trying to decide what to watch, I tossed in The Hills Have Eyes, Wes Craven's second feature film, which I hadn't seen in close to 20 years. With the exception of Michael Berryman's freakish presence, I wasn't any more impressed with it now than I was the first time I saw it.
Sometimes I can struggle for hours or days to come up with an actor's name, or identify the source of a particular line of dialogue. As the closing credits began to roll and I scooted across the floor to remove it from the machine, something occurred to me. I didn't need to cross-reference everything on the Internet Movie Database, I didn't need to ponder each title at length. In a flash of instantaneous, nerdy wisdom, I realized that all of the movies in the pile in front of me, disparate as they were, were connected to one another in some way. There was something almost conspiratorial about it. It was an insipid and pointless conspiracy, maybe, one of no value or consequence to anyone, anywhere, but it still kept me plenty entertained for at least five minutes.
It would've been one thing had I bought them all myself, at the same time, while in the same mindset, but that wasn't the case. They'd come from different and unconnected sources; I had nothing to do with what arrived in the mail. It was a chance gathering of titles, yet they were all linked in some way. This excited me more than it should have.
This is something best explained with a huge sheet of paper, a Sharpie and lots of arrows. That sort of thing isn't an option here, so let me see what I can do.
We'll start with The Osterman Weekend, appropriately enough-a baffling, incoherent conspiracy movie released in 1983. It was the last thing the great Sam Peckinpah directed before he died. Before taking on the project, Peckinpah's career was on the skids. His drug and alcohol abuse, together with his unpredictable, sometimes violent behavior, made him persona non grata around Hollywood. Still, occasional projects were offered to him.
One of those projects was the unjustly vilified remake of King Kong. Peckinpah immediately turned the job down, saying that he wasn't interested in working with puppets.
As it happens, they didn't use puppets in the Kong remake-mostly they used a guy in a gorilla suit, a giant mechanical arm, and, for one extremely brief shot, a 50-foot-tall, fake-looking robot gorilla. Those last two contraptions were designed by old-style special effects whiz Carlo Rambaldi, who up until that time had mostly worked in Italy.
After working on King Kong, Rambaldi's next project was to design the various creature effects in Alien, which was written by a man named Dan O'Bannon (kind of a bow-tie-wearing geek himself). It was his second feature, after co-writing John Carpenter's first film, Dark Star.
After the success of Alien, O'Bannon was hired to do a little rewrite on a sort-of zombie picture called Dead & Buried. Mostly, it seems, they just wanted to be able to use his name in the credits in order to make the Alien connection.
(This is where a big piece of paper and a Sharpie would be helpful, as things begin to dovetail some at this point. I'll follow the shorter branch first.)
Dead & Buried was directed by a guy named Gary Sherman. Sherman's first feature, back in the early 70s, was called either Death Line or Raw Meat (depending upon where and when you saw it) and concerned a family of inbred cannibals who lived in the subways beneath London, feeding on kidnapped surface dwellers. The script was loosely based on Sawney Bean and his clan, a family of inbred cannibals in 15th-century Scotland who lived in a cave, emerging only to waylay, rob and eat unwary travelers.
That same gruesome historical tale also provided the inspiration for The Hills Have Eyes, which came out five years after Sherman's film (I'm surprised no one else has pointed this out. Not that I'm aware of, at least).
While the second film on the Vincent Price double feature, The Tower of London, is loosely based on Shakespeare's Richard III, the first picture, The Haunted Palace, is also based on that very same H.P. Lovecraft novella (even though the opening credits cite it as an Edgar Alan Poe story).
In another strange coincidence, Roger Corman, who directed The Haunted Palace, was also originally slated to direct Alien, until O'Bannon got a better offer at the last minute.
Backing up a step now, The Re-Animator films, of course, are also based on Lovecraft (the first one more so than the other two), albeit not "Charles Dexter Ward" in this case, but a collection of six short stories collectively known as "Herbert West-Reanimator."
And the first Re-Animator sequel, Bride of Re-Animator, released in 1990, is of course an homage to the Universal classic, Bride of Frankenstein.
I sat back, exhausted, after laying all this out, wild-eyed, for Morgan, suddenly wondering why I was in possession of so many H.P. Lovecraft movies all of a sudden, when I was never really that big a fan of H.P. Lovecraft's writing.
Then came the flash of shame and humiliation. I was like one of those fat guys who, well into their 30s, still hang around the comic book stores, arguing over the virtues of various superheroes-or like one of those losers who spends a little too much time on the psychotronic message boards.
I apologized to Morgan (though she assured me there was no need), restacked the movies in front of the television, and took a shower.