1979 ***
I grabbed this early David Cronenberg movie off of HBOMax's list of horror flicks because it stars Oliver Reed here, who delighted me to no end in The Shuttered Room. He did not disappoint! But instead of a thuggish towny he brings a menacing, smarter-than-you arrogance as Dr. Hal Raglan, a "brilliant" pioneer with a cutting-edge psychological treatment of his own invention. Psychoplasmics!
So important they stuck some vinyl stickers on a rented bus!
Psychoplasmics looks like experimental theater in which Oliver Reed role-plays as various persons in the patient's life -- sometimes being really mean! -- and the patient's mental breakthroughs manifest as gross make-up effects, because they're externalizing their emotions I guess? I'm going out a limb and saying this premise is not terribly well developed. I think this might just be a problem with early Cronenberg, because I had to watch Videodrome at least three times before I figured out that "new flesh" nonsense.
Anyway, plot plot plot. Our hero is Frank, an adorable 70s everydad who is locked in a nasty custody fight with his estranged wife, Nola. He looked familiar and I think that's because he's in Porky's, I'm pretty sure as the older brother who's a cop? I only dug so far.
"And then I'll say 'Faulty hood ornament!' Blam! Heh heh heh... I'm sorry what were we talking about?"
Nola has been under treatment at the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics for a while, and demands their daughter Candice visit her there on the weekends.
She's clearly cutting her hair with her heat vision, but nobody talks about it.
The action starts rolling when Frank brings Candice home from a visit and she has bruises on her back. In a completely bullshit scene, his cartoonish lawyer tells him that's not enough to deny Nola next weekend's visit (maybe that's not bullshit in Canada in 1979 but I'd like to think bruises = child protective services = ALL the red flags in reality). Frank decides to dig deeper, meanwhile Nola's theatrical therapy sessions with Dr. Raglan gain intensity, and the subjects of the sessions start getting hammer-murdered by a deformed child in a snowsuit. First is Nola's mom, who does a ridiculous slow pan of her noisily trashed kitchen before she gets pounced.
"No threat to my life on THAT cabinet, moving on..."
"Curses! That red snowsuit blended perfectly with my 70s wallpaper!"
I thought I knew where this movie was coming from when it threw a curveball and the mutant kid just up and dies mid-attempted murder.
There's an autopsy and a story in the newspaper and everything. The cops write it off as a deformed kid who's been hidden by his mother all his life out of shame. "Wouldn't be the first time this happened." WHA
Meanwhile Laser Bangs's kindergarten teacher makes the mistake of answering Frank's phone when Nora calls, and the next day she gets a visit from a couple of ugly kids who really like the cute little wooden kindergarten hammers, but not for banging in cute little wooden pegs. For hammer murder.
It's the snowsuits. They blend in anywhere.
Poor Frank! He's outside telling another parent about his dead in-laws who were hammer-murdered and a little kid runs out saying the teacher is right now being hammer-murdered and when he checks it out Candice is gone. We see the bad kids taking her back to the institute, something I want to put a pin in for now.
Canada is what you make if you have a lot left over after making New Hampshire
I had a good time with this movie but it barely rated the three stars, there's a fair amount of padding and the premise, as I mentioned, is pretty thin. However the actors involved have abilities and bring their A game to a small, well-meaning story, so three stars it is. However however, I don't have much of a problem blowing most of the ending for you now, because, well, it's not that great and really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, for reasons I am delighted to go into. So I guess if you really want to keep this surprise, don't let your gaze wander beneath this photo of Nola, played by 70s TV mainstay Samantha Eggar (she was on Love Boat AND Fantasy Island!)
And here she is looking like her crazy treatment is going REALLY WELL I must say.
The endgame begins when Raglan empties all the sick folks from the institute and one of them runs to Frank and mentions the "disturbed kids in the work shed that you're wife's taking care of," and when Frank arrives at the Institute Raglan confronts him with a gun. But suddenly his whole "you can't see your wife because she's at a critical stage in her treatment" crap is gone and instead he's extremely scared of the monster children that live on his property, explains that it was them who hurt Candice because Nola got upset about something, and they're the reason he has the gun. Now he's a good guy and he's all "go in there and keep your wife calm so I can extract your daughter from the room full of mutants."
So Frank goes in and the two of them chew a little scenery and then the big reveal is that Nola's skin lesions grow into HUGE GROSS EXTERNAL WOMBS out of which she pulls her mutant babies and licks them clean. So gross!
"You have NO idea how hard it was to find this frock, what with there being no internet yet."
"That was the best summer of my life!"
As effectively gross and Cronenberg-y as the reveal is, the things I can't help but extrapolate make absolutely no sense. I thought Nola's powers were manifesting these homunculi on the spot, through some sort of psychic hoodoo. But no, they're very much flesh and blood, and they're also monster children who can't take the bus, so they have to fucking WALK all the way from the woods to downtown Toronto, and BACK. Remember the pin I put in up there, them walking along the road in the snow? Can you imagine maintaining murderous rage for three hours trudging through that? It really robbed the premise of its mystique.
The other problem is trying to figure out Raglan's motivation for letting the situation get that far. I mean how much more do you need to validate your pet theory than the fact you've created a new form of life -- through therapy no less -- after you've done it once? Or two or three times? Why didn't he tell anybody until he had an attic full of murderous monster kids? How did this never occur to him while he was out buying all those PJs and snowsuits? I guess you can be a genius shrink but still be bad at math, like for instance bringing a six-shot revolver into a room with a dozen lethal targets.
What would you, the reader at home, do? Think about it won't you?
1 comment:
i mean, every time i'm forced to count how many pictures of bicycles i see in captcha, i want to shoot my computer in the face with like a thousand bullets, and that's just one lethal target. so i think i've got my answer there.
you might recognize frank as brooke adams's creepy boyfriend in invasion of the body snatchers. i thought he might have been the guy playing the character of frank dodd in the dead zone but i think i was just typecasting him as "guy named frank", cause it's not him.
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