JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 182 из 359These films don't get wide American release, but if you watch the papers faithfully, you may see one of them playing at the drive-in as a pick-up second feature below some overrated major studio flick. Similarly, I heard about a little-known early John Carpenter film called Assault on Precinct 13 from Peter Straub, the author of Ghost Story and If You Could See Me Now . Done on a shoestring (and Carpenter's first feature, Dark Star , is reputed to have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000 a sum that makes even George Romero look like Dino DeLaurentiis), Carpenter's talent as a director onetheless shines through, and Carpenter went on to do Halloween and The Fog .
These are the nuggets, the horror-film fan's reward for sifting through films like Planet of the Vampires and The Monster from Green Hell . My own "discovery" (if you don't object to the word) is a little film called Tourist Trap , starring Chuck Connors. Connors himself isn't very good in the film-he tries gamely, but he's simply miscast. Yet the film wields an eerie, spooky power. Wax figures begin to move and come to life in a ruined, out-of-the-way tourist resort; there are a number of effective, atmospheric shots of the dummies' blank eyes and reaching hands, and the special effects are effective. As a film that deals with the queer power that inanimate dummies, mannequins, and human replicas can sometimes cast over us, it is a more effective film than the expensive and ill-advised film made from William Goldman's bestseller, Magic .*
But to get back to I Married a Monster from Outer Space : bad as it is, there is one absolutely chilling moment in the movie. I won't say that it's worth the price of admission, but it works . . . boy, does it work! Tryon has married his girl friend (Gloria Talbot) and they are on their honeymoon. While she stretches out on the bed, dressed in the obligatory filmy white nightgown and waiting for the consummation of all those steamy clinches on the beach, Tryon, who is still a good-looking man and who was even better looking twenty years ago, goes out on the balcony of their hotel room for a cigarette. A thunderstorm is brewing, and a sharp stroke of lightning abruptly renders that handsome face transparent for a moment. We see the horrible alien face beneath-runnelled and knotted and warty. It is a "seat-jumper" for sure, and during the fade-out we perhaps have time to think about the consummation to follow . . . and gulp.
These are the nuggets, the horror-film fan's reward for sifting through films like Planet of the Vampires and The Monster from Green Hell . My own "discovery" (if you don't object to the word) is a little film called Tourist Trap , starring Chuck Connors. Connors himself isn't very good in the film-he tries gamely, but he's simply miscast. Yet the film wields an eerie, spooky power. Wax figures begin to move and come to life in a ruined, out-of-the-way tourist resort; there are a number of effective, atmospheric shots of the dummies' blank eyes and reaching hands, and the special effects are effective. As a film that deals with the queer power that inanimate dummies, mannequins, and human replicas can sometimes cast over us, it is a more effective film than the expensive and ill-advised film made from William Goldman's bestseller, Magic .*
But to get back to I Married a Monster from Outer Space : bad as it is, there is one absolutely chilling moment in the movie. I won't say that it's worth the price of admission, but it works . . . boy, does it work! Tryon has married his girl friend (Gloria Talbot) and they are on their honeymoon. While she stretches out on the bed, dressed in the obligatory filmy white nightgown and waiting for the consummation of all those steamy clinches on the beach, Tryon, who is still a good-looking man and who was even better looking twenty years ago, goes out on the balcony of their hotel room for a cigarette. A thunderstorm is brewing, and a sharp stroke of lightning abruptly renders that handsome face transparent for a moment. We see the horrible alien face beneath-runnelled and knotted and warty. It is a "seat-jumper" for sure, and during the fade-out we perhaps have time to think about the consummation to follow . . . and gulp.