Tag: Roger Corman

The Hatred (2017): "In death we are free"

On By Erica L. WrightIn Horrific movies2 Comments

The Hatred, (directed by Michael G. Kehoe and starring Andrew Divoff, David Naughton, Amanda Wyss, Sarah Davenport, Gabrielle Bourne, Bailey Corman, Alisha Wainwright, Nina Siemaszko, Shae Smolik, and Darby Walker) was released on DVD/Blu yesterday. I’m very excited about the upcoming podcast interview with Michael Kehoe, and Andrew Divoff’s upcoming announcement of his new business venture, Three Marm Brewing. In the meantime, I’ll share my thoughts about the film itself.

Without  revealing major spoilers, the first part of the film takes place in 1968, in which former Nazi soldier Samuel Sears (Andrew Divoff) has assimilated into American society as a reclusive farmer. He receives an amulet in the mail from one of his Nazi associates, and the amulet prompts a series of violent events at the farmhouse. In the present day, a group of young women on a weekend retreat at the old farmhouse encounter the amulet’s evil influence along with the ghosts of Sears’ family.

The trailer looked massively creepy, but the scenes involving the four young women in the present-day scenes made me a bit worried that the film itself would involve a bunch of shallow, bubble-headed bimboes being terrorized in typical slasher film fashion. Fortunately, I was very wrong about this point. The young women are actually intelligent and inquisitive. One of the funniest moments that counters audience expectations is when the blonde Samantha (Bailey Corman, the niece of Roger Corman) not only recognizes a gruesome artifact as an 11th century Viking death mask, but also exclaims, “I’m in heaven!” Later, Samantha is revealed to be a scholar and serious history buff. Once the malevolent supernatural activity really kicks off, the young women react by researching the history and properties of the amulet rather than becoming hysterical.

Andrew Divoff as the Nazi Samuel Sears

The film’s performances are solid. Darby Walker is great as Sears’ daughter, Alice, who meets an unpleasant end early in the film. Andrew Divoff is phenomenal as the ex-Nazi Samuel Sears. He’s as menacing as you would expect, based on Andrew’s other bad-guy roles, but he also shows some sensitivity and emotional vulnerability in some of the scenes, adding complexity to his overbearing, authoritarian patriarch character. There  are also some unanswered questions about this character and his relationship to the local Sheriff. It seems like the Sheriff has some skeletons in his own closet, and Sears leverages this knowledge to prevent the Sheriff from conducting any serious investigation into Alice’s disappearance, or from outing Sears as a former Nazi. 

Don’t go into this movie expecting a T&A slasher film, or even blood and gore. (Though there is a flashback sequence that makes me wonder if Sears disemboweled and taxidermied Alice.) Instead, it’s a character-centric ghost story with an emphasis on atmosphere and spookiness. Pick up your copy of The Hatred on Blu-ray today! Also, those of you in Southern California can meet  director Michael Kehoe, FX designer Gary Tunnicliffe, and cast members Andrew Divoff, Sarah Davenport,  Amanda Wyss, Gabrielle Bourne, Musetta Vander, and Nina Siemaszko at Dark Delicacies on September 16, 2017.

 

Weirding the Apocalypse Part 1: Carnosaur (1993)

On By Erica L. WrightIn Horrific moviesLeave a comment

Scoring only 3.5 out of 10 stars on IMDb and 11% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, the 1993 Jurassic Park knock-off Carnosaur (directed by Adam Simon and produced by Roger Corman) doesn’t get a lot of love. Technically, it isn’t a knock-off, as it’s loosely based on a 1984 novel by John Brosnan  (a.k.a. Harry Adam Knight), which itself predates  Crichton’s novel.  But the timing of the film’s release was certainly meant to cash in on the success of Jurassic Park, and even adds an additional callback by casting Diane Ladd, mother of Jurassic Park‘s Laura Dern, as a mad scientist.

Carnosaur doesn’t boast the then-cutting edge special effects of Jurassic Park. In fact, the dinosaurs are overly rubbery and the film as a whole is incredibly low budget, but in other respects, Carnosaur is the weirder, gorier, and more tantalizing of the two films.

Let me explain.

Despite Jeff Goldbloom’s character in Jurassic Park being quite delicious as the resident pessimist, like all Spielberg movies, the entire film is very much Up With People in its outlook. It’s comfortably anthropocentric, with dinosaurs being genetically engineered for the sole purpose of humans’ entertainment and corporate profit. Of course things go badly, but order is ultimately restored with humanity reasserting itself as the dominant species.

Carnosaur also has a plot involving the creation of genetically engineered dinosaurs, but with a twisted motive. Dr. Jane Tiptree (portrayed by Diane Ladd) is a female mad scientist (a rarity in horror films), who has a strange plan to save the earth. She has created and introduced a food-borne virus into poultry products that recodes human DNA in such a way as to cause women to give birth to dinosaurs, killing the female host and thereby preventing the human race from reproducing. Dr. Tiptree wants humans to become extinct and to “give the earth back to the dinosaurs.” This is an absurd, even arguably idiotic apocalypse scenario. What makes it effective is Dr. Tiptree’s misanthropic philosophy.

Carnosaur isn’t the first film to depict and apocalypse in which humanity is supplanted by another species. Better-known and more popular examples include Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and its remakes) and John Carpenter’s The Thing. Those films depicted a quiet alien invasion in which the alien species can imitate other life-forms. They didn’t celebrate the extinction of the human race. Carnosaur is nastier by virtue of Jane Tiptree acting as a species-traitor who promotes misanthropic and anti-natalist perspectives, viewing humans as nothing but a “set of instructions for the reproduction of the species.”

She explains her reasoning: “Just imagine. An ugly cancerous grey planet littered with the dying remnants of biological life as we know it. I actively worked on that in industry and in government. The earth isn’t ours to destroy…I don’t want to end the world, just one unruly species…The human being is the WORST. The human species is a disaster.” Tiptree’s radical solution to save the earth and the environment even includes her own extermination after serving as a vessel for her new breed of dinosaurs. The end of the film is ambiguous. The hero obtains the serum needed to reverse the effects of the virus, but he may be too late to save the high percentage of people infected.