The Beast Within (1982)

I saw The Beast Within when it first came out on video and I was but a horror-loving pre-adolescent whose parents paid no attention to what he was renting. All I remembered from it years later were some gory images, a particularly silly storyline (I could even pick up on that at age nine), and a transformation scene towards the climax that ODs on bladder effects. So, when I saw the VHS tape at Shock Stock, I had to pick it up. The verdict? It's a better-made film than I remembered and actually gorier, but it's still really silly.

Young Michael (played with conviction by Paul Clemens) is a medical anomaly. His metabolic system is in hyperdrive and he's lying in the hospital dying. His loving parents (played by Ronnie Cox and Bibi Besch) suspect that this has something to do with the hulking mutant that raped Mom after their car broke down on their wedding night, putting the beast within her, so to speak, and creating Michael. Hoping to help the boy, they return to the shit-hole Southern town where all of this took place and start asking questions that, of course, strike the town elders (who are seemingly all played by Sam Peckinpah regulars) as nosy. Meanwhile, Michael gets up and goes on the lam. Apparently, he's okay, except for his dreams about an old abandoned farmhouse with something locked in the basement and his need to kill people in gory ways. Puberty's a bitch.

In between getting painful headaches that cause him to kill and having these nightmares, Michael falls in love with a young girl named Amanda (Katherine Moffat) whose papa is an almost-comically goony redneck (John Dennis Johnston) and naturally wants to shotgun him. The parents, meanwhile, are discovering that this has something to do with this guy Billy Connors who raped the wife (and then died?) and the murders are connected because all of the people getting killed are from the same family. Also, Michael is apparently haunted by the cicadas whose life-cycle involves laying dormant for seventeen years and then shedding their skins. Like the dead rapist, Michael has a kinship with insects...

See what I mean? It's hard to discuss this plot without it getting silly. Because the big reveal is that Michael is sure as hell going to shed his skin and turn into a rubber monster, just like a cicada. We'll get to that in a second, but please see if this plot makes sense: Billy Connors was fucking some redneck's wife, so the redneck shot he,r and chained Billy up in the basement, starved him, and then fed loverboy her corpse. This, naturally, turned Billy into some sort of beast-man and he broke out, raping Besch and impregnating her. Her offspring, Michael, now, has the desire to kill off the members of the family that chained up Billy. So far, so good. Now, as he reaches seventeen, he's going to turn into a rubber monster and go on a rampage because his dead raping father loved cicadas- and that's where it gets silly.

The transformation scene, incidentally, is the highlight of the film with Tom Burman inflating Clemens's head like a rubber balloon. It's pretty cool 80s latex effects that will make you exclaim "fuck CGI!" if you're anything like me. It does require the suspension of belief that everyone basically stands around and watches this happen for an eternity without popping the kid's head with a pin. But, compared to accepting that the offspring of a rape turns into a cicada-monster, that's not much of a stretch!

In all fairness to the filmmakers, their film apparently got edited to hell by Universal and the original cut probably made more sense. The direction is pretty good and reminiscent of those old horror films where they tried to put you on edge through long, quiet scenes of people walking around dark buildings alone.
But, still, a movie in which the killer kid felt a kinship with cicadas would make sense and have a certain poetic logic to it- having him turn into a rubber cicada-monster via inflate-o-head? It's really hard not to find that a little silly.

The Park is Mine (1986)

A Vietnam vet jumps off a hospital building to his death and his veteran buddy Mitch takes up his plan to take over Central Park with explosives and heavy ammunition. Mitch is played by Tommy Lee Jones, who we last saw in Rolling Thunder, another angry veteran movie that never seems to be available on DVD. In the mid 80s, American cinema developed a renewed interest in Vietnam and its veterans. The Park is Mine came out around the same time as Rambo and Platoon- The Park is Mine was made for cable television- showed up on VHS and has since vanished. It’s out of print on DVD and, thus, popular with bootleggers. Naturally, I was curious.

Mitch is more than a little bit like Travis Bickle in a very similar New York City scumscape to the one depicted in Taxi Driver. He can’t hold down a job, he owes his ex-wife Rachel (Gale Garnett) a fortune, and Rolling Thunder keeps going out of print; so he becomes un uomo d’azione, as the Italians say, wandering around the park in camouflage and face paint and blowing shit up. Soon, he has New York (apparently, the film was shot largely in Toronto though) at a standstill. You probably couldn’t remake the movie today because it would end in five minutes with Homeland Security torturing the main character to death.

Instead, the SWAT team (led by Yaphet Koto) comes in to the park and gets chased out of the park. The Mayor’s office, instead, claims that there’s a team of men holding the park, and admittedly the idea of one man taking over Central Park is a bit farfetched. Sexy reporter Valery (Helen Shaver) sneaks into the Park and makes friends with Mitch, who finally issues a statement explaining where he’s coming from: America has forgotten about its veterans, average men are all-but-invisible, sex is hard to come by and he “just wants to remind people they don’t have to take shit every day”; today, he’d be a blogger (or Sarah Palin’s running mate), but in 1986, he’s blowing shit up. How far we’ve fallen.

Naturally, Mitch becomes an inspiration to average Joes around the city who finally realize they can be someone important, if only they take a few really batshit crazy, suicidal actions. The city sends in commandos.

The Park is Mine is a fairly well-made 80s television drama with a nice central portrayal of urban alienation. I’m always a sucker for watching Tommy Lee Jones act insane and the film does a good job of sustaining a mood. The soundtrack, by Tangerine Dream, has that synth-heavy, slightly inhuman feeling characteristic of John Carpenter’s music (Carpenter was a big Tangerine Dream aficionado). It is a bit lightweight, especially since it’s main message about Vietnam veterans seems to be, “Hey, pay attention to them!” There's also the slight problem of it being completely unbelievable that a veteran could mine Central Park without anyone noticing, or that one man could hold the park against the NYPD. And genre fans should be warned that it has no gore and only very brief semi-nudity- although lots of shit gets blown up. I wouldn't buy a $15 copy from a bootlegger, but it’s worth a five dollar rental, if you can actually find a copy.

Street Trash (1987)

Today, it's hard to imagine how we genre fans were first touched back in the mid 80s by this scrappy little independent movie about a shipment of liquor that has gone bad and now causes winos to melt and explode; but it's safe to say that Street Trash was truly something special. A tour de force, it is both heart warming and melting. And, if you're in Canada, this spring you will be able to relive the experience on the big screen. You'll laugh; you'll cry; you'll ooze.

Street Trash takes place in a New York junkyard populated by bums and winos and shows how they have turned it into their own kingdom, with the king being Bronson, a truly frightening deranged Vietnam vet. The main characters are Fred and Kevin, two brothers who live in a tire igloo and the first half of the movie is like an anthropological study of the world of the bums. Homeless characters aren't often featured in movies, and what makes Street Trash unique is that it takes them on their own terms. You can't see them escaping to a productive life, and the film isn't particularly interested in that anyway. It's more of a bum soap opera for the first half, which some viewers find boring. Not me.

Into the bumocracy comes 'Tenafly Viper', a well-aged hooch that a local liquor store is selling at rock bottom prices, unaware that it's gone bad. Very bad, in fact, as it causes people who drink it to melt into multicolored goop. I've read a review that claimed the hooch is supposed to have been spiked by the government, which if it's true, I never picked up on in all the times I've watched the movie. Then again, I've generally been on hooch myself when I've watched Street Trash; audience participation, you know. The effects, by Jennifer Aspinall and Scott Coulter, are incredibly inventive and over-the-top. I can't wait to see them with an audience.

In fact, much of the film goes way beyond "politically incorrect" to a territory of offensiveness past the town of South Park. One comedic interlude consists of the bums playing "keep away" with an unlucky fellow's severed penis. Another scene is a lighthearted rib tickler about necrophilia. It's a testament to the film that it wallows in sleaze without becoming too goofy (like most Troma films), or particularly alienating. Well, a scene suggesting an off-screen gang rape is a bit much, but wisely is not played for laughs. Overall though, a film whose end credits feature a lounge song about a mafioso being melted can't be taken too seriously.
Street Trash was screwed over by bad distribution the first time around and has been somewhat redeemed by a deluxe DVD edition that features the original 16 mm short, cut scenes, and a feature length documentary entitled The Meltdown Memoirs that is the single best making-of doc I've ever seen.

Even better, the degenerates at Vagrancy Films have secured the rights to screen one of only a handful of 35 mm prints in Canadian theatres and are going to do so in Spring 2010 in various locations in Canada. One of which is Toronto, which means that I will finally get the chance to see people explode on the big screen. (God willing, I'll even be sober this time.) Which is all I've ever really wanted to do in this life.