DRIVEN-IN SATURDAY

DRIVEN-IN SATURDAY

Triple Feature!

by

Edouard Dauphin

Director John Carpenter surprised a lot of people with Halloween, a $300,000 movie that grossed $50 million. With his eagerly awaited follow-up, The Fog, he won’t reverse the process, but he’s pressing his luck. The Fog is a high budget flick that deserves to go down the tubes, but everybody knows: fog floats.

Set in Northern California—where most people are in a perpetual fog—this is an overblown ghost story about a doomed ship’s crew from a hundred years ago that returns to take vengeance on a coastal town. The ship’s passengers are inmates from a leper colony and something is definitely eatingthem.

So far, so good. The prospect of any part of California being wiped off the map is okay with me. The havoc begins with a lot of glass breaking, doors slamming, gas pumps inexplicably leaking—standard horror fare—as a dense fogbank rolls in to completely envelop the town .Too bad it didn’t envelop the movie:

Enter Adrie nn e Barbeau, an actress with three things going for her. If you’ve seen her poster pin-ups, you know what the first two are. The third is being married to John Carpenter, who just happened to cast her in the lead, as an all-night deejay in the fog-shrouded town—kind of a poor man’s Wolf man Jack.

Adrienne, who got her start as Bea Arthur’s smartass daughter on Maude, is one of those idiot box performers who just don’t make it on the big screen. She is hopelessly lost in this, her first feature. Oh well, Ade, there’s always The $20,000Pyramid.

Almost as adrift, we have Hal Holbrook as a wino priest; John Houseman, who has the good sense to get out of the picture before the opening credits; foxy Jamie Lee Curtis as an amorous hitchhiker; and her real life mother, Janet Psycho Leigh, who seems to be aging right before our eyes. (Back in the shower, Janet, where you belong!)

Main problems with The Fog: it’s just not scary, the violence is unbelievably tame, and, except for one quick wormcrawling glimpse, you don't even see the lepers. But then it is difficultto get lepers to work for scale.

Skip The Fog and wait for the sequel, set in Los Angeles—The Smog.

“Keep repeating: it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie.”

That was the phrase used to promote Last House On The Left, a grisly little shlockerfrom the early 70’s. So realistically repulsive was the film’s violence—a woman bit a man’s thing off—thatthere are still people out there, scattered across this great land of ours, wandering the streets muttering “It’s only a movie. ” Especially the actor who lost his dingus.

Now it’s the early 80’s and we h=*ve Last House On Dead End Street, a would-be sequel vying for audie nee attention with the forthcoming Last House, Part2, billed as the legitimate sequel. Considering that at the end of the original no one was left alive, there sure are a lot of sequels.

Shot for $1.49 in what looks like the Ramones’ living room, Dead End Street tells the tale of a group of partygoers trapped in a strange house presided over by a band of vicious nuts. Butthe food is good. So is the liquor. People have lingered atStudio 54 for much less.

Pretty soon it’s time for home movies—of the snuff variety. Seems the hosts are keen on murde ring guests and filming the proceedings, down to the last gory detail. One fellow is tied up and slowly strangled, his face turning a very photogenic shade of blue, while a grinning maniac cavorts about, brandishing a hand-held Arriflex. Allen Funt’s Candid Camera was never like this! '

As tne guests are slowly eliminated, the film sinks into a boring and predictable pattern—until the last twenty minutes when a young woman’s legs are sawed off just below the knees with a hacksaw. This scene, filmed with excruciating intensity, had a Times Square audience cowering under their seats. Quite an achievement when _ you consider that a sizable percentage of a Times Square audience consists of people who actually are murderers.

See Last House On Dead End Street, but skip the first hour.

Nasty is the word for Windows, a psychological thriller starring Elizabeth Ashley and Rocky-lovingTalia Shire. Directed by famed cinematographer Gordon Willis, it’s an A film* masquerading as a B movie—always a bad situation. Ten minutes into the picture there’s an assault/humiliation sequence designed to unnerve arid offend the audience. It works. At the screening I attended, critic Rex Reed very nearly tossed his cookies onto his Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. Filmed in New York City, Windows is a ruthless indictment of life in the Big Apple that made The Dauphin want to relocate to Toronto. Yeah, it’s thatbad. Skip Windows and sniff some Windex instead.