Childhood Trauma

In retrospect, Tobe Hooper probably should have walked away from Cannon Films and Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus after the debacle of Lifeforce. Hooper still had cache after directing Poltergeist for Steven Spielberg, and the lingering reputation from the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but his three pictures for Cannon were career killers. Cannon had a reputation for producing schlock while over-promising on the quality of their films and one has to wonder if that had something to do with the reception for the remake for Invaders from Mars (1986). There was a staggering amount of talent associated with this film, including Hooper, cinematographer Daniel Pearl, screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, special effects masters John Dykstra and Stan Winston, and a cast of familiar faces, even if there were no big, big stars. And the film itself? It's better than I remembered it being. Mind you, I didn't really understand this film when I first saw it when it was in movie theaters. I hadn't seen the original film as a kid, so I didn't feel its wavelength as a children's movie. Nor did I recognize how thoroughly it reconstructed the original film for the 1980s. I did have the feeling that it was a poisoned fruit from a poisoned tree, which is perhaps not really true.

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The Saw is Family

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, directed by Tobe Hooper) was always likely to be a fiasco over and above the inevitable comparisons to the unrepeatable original film. It was a troubled, unstable production, one whose budget ebbed and flowed depending on the box office of whatever films the feckless Cannon Films had in theaters at the time. Tobe Hooper was a reluctant director who originally intended only to produce the film before landing in the director's chair when no suitable director could be found for the money producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were willing to pay. Golan and Globus wanted a very different film from what Hooper wanted to make, too, and were horrified when he delivered not the intense bloodbath they expected, but rather a pitch black comedy. Even so, Hooper leaned into the original film's unearned reputation for extreme violence, resulting in a film that had to either accept an X-rating from the MPAA or go out unrated. Cutting the film wasn't even in the discussion. The film's problems with censors were a worldwide mountain to climb. Cannon was stuck with marketing a film it did not like or understand, but even so the teaser trailer was killer ("After ten years of silence, the buzz is back!") and the one-sheet was hilarious. Critics, like the producers, expected something else and excoriated the film for it.

And yet...somehow, the film managed to make a profit in its original theatrical run and slowly developed a cult following on home video. Rob Zombie has been trying to reverse engineer the film for years with indifferent results. For myself? The first time I saw it I knew it had more on its mind than its sick jokes and elaborate gore gags--though the sick jokes and elaborate gore gags were occasionally inspired. To quote another cult film from the 80s: it had a philosophy

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Tools of the Trade

I've been thinking about the career of the late Tobe Hooper this month, in part prodded by Catherine Stebbins's yearly top ten project which had many nice things to say about Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion for her 1990 edition. The last of Hooper's films that I wrote about, apart from his Masters of Horror episodes, was his remake of Toolbox Murders at my old web site in 2005. Here's that review--somewhat revised--to kick off Halloween season. I haven't changed my mind on any of this upon re-watch, so there you go. I'll be visiting with more of Hooper's films as the season goes on.

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Toolbox Murders. 2004. Directed by Tobe Hooper. Angela Bettis, Brent Roam, Brent Travis, Rance Howard, Juliet Landau,

Synopsis: Nell and Steven Barrows have taken advantage of a "remodelling" special to move into the Lusman Building, a crumbling Hollywood apartment building with a dark history. Pretty soon, they discover that not all is well at the Lusman. Some of their neighbors have been disappearing. Nell hates the place and would do anything to break her lease. She's quick to note that something is very wrong in the building, and gets a reputation as a kook when she calls the cops on a scene she misinterprets as bloody murder. But bloody murder IS happening around her, and as she investigates the building's sinister past, she gets drawn through the looking glass into a world of horror she could scarcely imagine...

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Netflix Roulette: The Funhouse (1981)

During the summer between my senior year of high school and my first year of college, I had a temporary gig assembling and disassembling a carnival. I got the job through my dad, who had a line on it through his connections on the military base where he worked. The carnival was set-up right outside the boundaries of the base--a shrewd location given the paucity of things for bored young servicemen to do in the vicinity. They raked in a ton of G.I. cash. I had an interesting view of it. I wasn't a carny, per se, but I got to move among them. The day workers they had working the joint were paid out of a trailer that doubled as an armored truck, and inside that trailer was an arsenal. There was also a drug concession, of course, and a fair amount of prostitution. There wasn't a freak show, but it was the sort of operation that would have HAD a freak show even five years earlier. It was pretty seedy, actually. After assembling and dismantling the various attractions at this carnival, I vowed that I would never, ever ride another carnival ride again. Ever. You know the cars at the end of the arms of The Octopus? They're held on by a single cotter pin. Or were at this particular carnival, anyway. The guns and the drugs made me uncomfortable, too. It's no wonder that Tod Browning set so many of his movies in a carnival. WhenI saw David Skal describe the horror genre as "Tod Browning's America" in The Monster Show, I realized that I had lived in that America for a week.

This was all in my head as I watched Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse (1981), a film that gets the ambiance of the carnival exactly right. This is something that I didn't know when I first saw the movie way back when it was first on cable. I hadn't worked the carnival yet. I remember disliking the grottiness of its setting, which turns out to have been a stupid opinion on my part. A horror movie is not obliged to polish off its rough edges to make its audience comfortable, after all, and if it knows what it's doing--and this one does--it can use that discomfort to its advantage. It's the same kind of trick that Hooper pulled in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the mood is everything.

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