Tag Archives: Gary Sherman

Poltergeist III (1988)

Posted on October 8, 2023 | 2 comments

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Ghosts haunt a skyscraper.

Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) has been sent away by her parents to Chicago so that she can live with her Aunt Diane (Nancy Allen) and her husband Bruce (Tom Skerritt) along with Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) Bruce’s teen daughter from a previous marriage. Carol Ann is told that this is just a temporary set-up while she attends a school for gifted children. The school though is more of a therapy center for kids with emotional issues and run by Dr. Seaton (Richard Fire), who doesn’t believe Carol Ann’s stories about seeing ghosts and thinks she’s making it up to get attention and has some sort of ability to create mass hypnosis to get others to believe it too.  Soon after moving there the evil Reverend Kane (Nathan Davis) returns and begins terrorizing Carol Anne by appearing in mirrors as he continues his attempts to bring her back to the other side.

In another example of a sequel nobody asked for writer/director Gary Sherman, who had some success helming horror flicks early in his career that gained a cult following like Dead & Buried manages to inject an interesting vision. Moving the setting away from a suburban home and into a city skyscraper was a good idea as the story needed to progress somewhere and not just be a rehashing of things again and again in the same place, or one that looks just like it, would’ve give the whole thing a very redundant quality. Visually it looks sharp, I especially liked the scenes with frozen ice, with the special effects done live and not matted onto the film print later on like in the first two. The use of the mirrors, which are used as sort of window to the other dimension where the evil spirits reside, does offer a few jolts.

I liked that O’Rourke reprised her role and she gives an excellent performance, though she’s not seen all that much as she gets kidnapped and taken to the other side, which forces others to go after her just like in the first two installments, but it’s fun seeing her grow into a more accomplished actress who can handle broader speaking lines and able to hold her own in a wider variety of dramatic situations. The only negative is her visible swollen cheeks, the result of cortisone treatment shots that she was getting due to a misdiagnosis of Crohn’s disease, which gives her a chipmunk type look.

Zelda Rubinstein also reprises her role as Tangina, but like in the second installment, isn’t seen enough and it’s disappointing when she goes away. Davis takes on the role of the Reverend when Julian Beck, who played the role in Part II, died, but the character is only seen sporadically and doesn’t have all that much of a presence and an effective horror film needs a villain, whether it’s in human, spirit, or monster form, with adequate screen time to build tension and here that’s just not the case.

The storyline starts to become derivative of other better known horror flicks especially the use of the possession theme where we have an evil Carol Anne running around tricking everyone that she’s the real one, but isn’t. Her transformation into a devilish ghoul resembles a cheap imitation of Linda Blair from The Exorcist. I admit the first time it’s done it caught me off guard and was good enough to elicit a minor jolt, but then they go back to it too often where it becomes boring and predictable. The shots showing Carol Anne being spotted running away around corners and through doorways while wearing a red pajama suit is too reminiscent of Don’t Look Now, a Nicholas Roeg directed classic that dealt with parents searching for their missing young daughter and would occasionally spot her, or what they thought was her, running around street corners and through doorways in Venice while also wearing a bright red piece of clothing.

The biggest mistake though was that the reins weren’t fully handed over to O’Rourke as she was the only real carryover from the first two. Rubenstein too should’ve been given more of a part, but in any case the action should’ve followed Carol Anne all the way through and having it instead cut over to Skerrit and Allen’s characters and making them the main stars isn’t interesting at all. They come-off as quite bland and benign and just thrown in because Craig T. Nelson and Jobeth Williams didn’t want to recreate their roles. O’Rourke by this stage had enough acting ability that she could’ve carried it and the audiences would’ve excitedly been there with her the whole way, but unfortunately during the second and third act she gets relegated to cameo status while Skerrit and Allen take over, which are people we care nothing about and makes it seem like a completely different type of movie entirely.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: June 10, 1988

Runtime: 1 Hour 38 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Gary Sherman

Studio: MGM/UA

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

2 Comments

Posted in 80's Movies, Cult, Horror, Movies that take place in Chicago, Sequels

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Vice Squad (1982)

Posted on May 16, 2023 | 2 comments

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Violent pimp kills prostitutes.

Princess (Season Hubley) is a business woman who is having some financial trouble and thus decides to go back to being a prostitute in Hollywood in an effort to support her young daughter. She becomes aware that her friend Ginger (Nina Blackwood), who is also a prostitute, has been killed after getting beaten-up by a violent pimp named Ramrod (Wings Hauser). Tom (Gary Swanson), a police detective, gets her to agree to be wired, so that she can get Ramrod to incriminate himself when she goes back to his place for a rendezvous.  The sting works and Ramrod is arrested and put into police custody, but he’s able to escape and spends the rest of the night chasing after Princess and determined to exact a revenge on her while the cops remain always one-step behind and unable to apprehend him.

This was Gary Sherman’s fourth theatrical feature and third horror one. He had started out with British cult hit Raw Meat in 1972 about a group of underground cannibals living in a London subway tunnel was met with rave reviews and fans, but his subsequent horror foray Dead and Buried and Phobia, which he co-wrote only, didn’t do as well. This one is more of a sleazy thriller meant to ‘inform’ the viewer about the brutalities of street life, but is really just an excuse to be exploitive and get cheap points for nudity and violence with characters that are cliched and situations highly derivative.

My main issue was with the prostitutes themselves for instance Ginger who runs away from Ramrod and hides out in a seedy hotel only to let him into her room the minute he comes knocking at her door. Once inside he immediately kills her while asking ‘I can’t believe you were that stupid’ and I felt like saying the same thing. It’s hard to sympathize with characters when they do incredibly dumb things and the scene would’ve worked better if Ramrod was only able to get in by crashing through the window, or breaking down the door, but having her allow him in shows no common sense especially from someone that is supposedly ‘street smart’.

This then brings up the second problem that I had, which is the fact that these women have absolutely nothing to defend themselves with in case things get ugly. They should all have guns, knives, or the very least some pepper spray especially if they’re supposedly ‘street smart’, but instead if things get bad they’re virtually helpless as is the case of when one of the male customers decides to rob Princess of her money and all she can do is give him some veiled threat that her pimp would come after him, which seemed almost laughable. Another scene has her being attacked by Ramrod where she manages to get her hands on a metal pipe and she uses it to hit him twice with it and then drops it to go hide somewhere, but why not continue to hit him until he’s either dead, or comatose? She hated his guts for killing her friend, so why back-off from giving it to him when she had the chance? At the very least, if she is going to run-off, at least continue to carry pipe, so she could use it for protection when he gets back up.

The motivations of the Princess character made no sense. She’s supposedly this L.A. businesswoman living in a nice suburban house, who’s now in financial trouble for whatever reason, but why turn to prostitution? There seemed to be hundreds of other income avenues she could’ve considered before leaping into streetwalking. If it was a high end escort gig where the male clientele could be filtered and scrutinized so it would not just be any scumbag and the prices would be high enough and in a safe neutral area, so she would just have to service one a night instead of ten, then maybe. However, here she’s forced to do one after another submitting that whatever crazy kink they wanted in whatever scuzzy locale they took her to. If she was on drugs, or teen runaway with no money, it might be a little more understandable, but the film portrays her as being smart and educated and she somehow ‘chooses’ to do this, which for me made her seem completely insane and therefore not any one that I could relate to.

The film does have some great acting by Hauser, who also sings the closing song, and Gary Sherman is good as the detective as he doesn’t have the chiseled features of a Hollywood good guy, but instead is more non-descript like how most policemen look, which I liked. Sunset Boulevard, where most of it was filmed, gets captured in a cool way giving it a surreal presence where all the action takes place exclusively at night and once the sun rises all the dark characters go symbolically back into their caves. There’s even a nifty car chase, but overall it’s flat, and predictable, and only for those who enjoy sleazy B-movies.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: January 22, 1982

Runtime: 1 Hour 37 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Gary Sherman

Studio: AVCO Embassy Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube, Tubi

2 Comments

Posted in 80's Movies, Cult, Exploitation, Movies with Nudity, Thrillers/Suspense

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Dead & Buried (1981)

Posted on October 8, 2018 | 2 comments

 

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Dead people terrorize town.

Dan (James Farentino) is the sheriff of a sleepy New England town called Potter’s Bluff. Normally his days are routine but suddenly he finds himself investigating a bizarre case where a group of people murder a visiting photographer by burning him at a stake for no apparent reason. Soon other strange murders begin occurring and his peaceful little town as well as his own life gets turned upside down as neither he nor the town’s coroner (Jack Albertson) can come up with any answers especially as the dead victims start to come back to life.

The film, which was directed by Gary Sherman, starts off well as the big band era music and picturesque small town scenery makes it seem like something straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Sherman went to great lengths to keep every scene consistent with a gray color tone including having a giant flag hung over a cliff in order to block out the sunlight during outdoor scenes and keeping everything looking like it was under a continual foggy haze.

The story though can’t match the atmosphere and the interest level wanes pretty quickly. The dead coming back to life angle has been used too often and is no longer novel to the point that it’s now almost boring. There’s no consistent protagonist either. The sheriff eventually becomes one, but there are long breaks where the film follows other characters including a young family, who come into contact with the killers, but they’re not that interesting and it becomes difficult for the viewer to connect emotionally with anyone on the screen.

For years Dan O’Bannon was credited with creating the story and many movie posters advertised this due to his success with Alien, but O’Bannon later stated in a 1983 interview that he actually had nothing to do with the script and disown the film. Ronald Shusett apparently wrote the entire thing, but in order to get it sold he felt a big name writer needed to be attached to it, so he promised O’Bannon that they would implement some of the ideas that he had into the final revision in order to allow them to use his name on the credits, but when the film eventually came out none of O’Bannon’s suggestions had been used.

The film’s tone is yet another issue. Sherman had wanted to approach it as a dark comedy, but one of the film’s investors PSO International pushed for the gore to be emphasized more. The result is jarring as half the time it’s this quant atmospheric chiller while at other points it becomes without warning graphically gory.

Farentino is good, but Melody Patterson, who was 17 years younger than him in real-life, is miscast as his wife. Jack Albertson is the best thing in the movie. Initially I feared that his part was too small, but he comes on strong at the end, which is great and I was also happy to read that despite the fact that he was dying of cancer while the movie was being made he still remained alive long enough to attend its premiere although he had to do it while being in a wheelchair and connected to an oxygen tank.

If you’re looking for a horror movie that emphasizes atmosphere and an offbeat touch then this may hit-the-spot, but the plot needed to encompass a broader time frame as it didn’t seem believable that so much of the town’s people could be in on this secret without the sheriff becoming suspicion of things much sooner than he does. The twist ending is weak too as it’s full of loopholes and creates way more questions than it answers.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: May 29, 1981

Runtime: 1Hour 34Minutes

Rated R

Director: Gary Sherman

Studio: AVCO Embassy Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray (Region B/2), Amazon Video, YouTube

2 Comments

Posted in 80's Movies, Horror, Moody/Stylish, Mystery, Slasher/Gore, Zombie Movies

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