Twisted Terror Collection
Studio: Warner Bros
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Twisted Terror Collection
The selling point in Warner Bros.’ Twisted Terror Collection is its big-name directors; it boasts work from Wes Craven, John Carpenter and Oliver Stone. Only Stone’s film is an overlooked masterpiece; Craven’s is a bit of dated fun, but hardly on par with his most heralded movies; and Carpenter’s is only a notch above this box’s most callous F-you to its audience, Eyes of a Stranger.
First, the good: The Hand is one of the best movies made by Oliver Stone, and it makes you salivate just to imagine what a powerful filmmaker he’d still be if he’d gone the way of a B-horror auteur. In just his second feature, Stone was able to snag a huge star, Michael Caine, for the lead role of Jonathan Lansdale, a cartoonist who, while squabbling with his wife in the family car, loses his right hand in a horrific accident. Seeing blood fountain from the stump of an anonymous D-lister is commonplace; watching it happen to an actor as sophisticated as Caine is something else indeed, and the moment is an arresting shocker.
As he tries to rebuild his career and his marriage with a prosthetic hand, he imagines his severed extremity coming back to haunt him in everything from the shower knobs to a lobster dish. With crude but imaginative special effects, the hand takes on a murderous life of its own, albeit one controlled by Jonathan’s subconscious. What’s extraordinary is the film’s blend of supernatural fantasy and the realism of a crumbling marriage, making it a moving study of coping as much as a frightening horror film.
Craven’s Deadly Friend has a few interesting ideas, including the director’s recurring obsession with unveiling the darkness behind suburban complacency, but it proceeds in a clunky and obvious way. It bears a passing resemblance to Short Circuit (released the same year), which is never a good thing, but this story of a science nerd who attempts to revitalize his dead girlfriend as a robot becomes such a silly romp that Craven had to be in on the joke. And it’s not often you get to see somebody explode a head with a basketball.
Carpenter’s entry is the perfunctory made-for-TV movie Someone’s Watching Me!, with Lauren Hutton as a career woman in a posh high-rise who’s terrorized by a stalker from the building across the street. Even its best moments feel more pilfered from Hitchcock than De Palma’s most derivative hand-me-downs.
From Beyond the Grave is a four-part omnibus film from the Amicus production company, but only its second segment, with Angela Pleasence as an eccentric clairvoyant, is worth watching. The rest is hammy and often disarmingly stupid. Dr. Giggles – always good for a late-night heckle or two – is what it is, but the torturous psycho-killer slasher Eyes of a Stranger doesn’t even deserve the backhanded-compliment label of entertaining camp. The preposterous dialogue is sparse, leaving mostly the sporadic murders of detached pieces of flesh followed by the unappealing lead actors’ protracted, wordless search for the killer. It’s like watching red paint splatter and then dry.
This article appears in Oct 3-9, 2007.