DRIVE-IN SATURDAY
Take a best selling horror novel that even scared The Dauphin who can barely read. Hire a film director who made one of the best of the PBS mini-series. Cast four of Hollywood’s greatest stars, whose combined acting experience totals nearly 200 years.
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DRIVE IN SATURDAY
...And Don’t Forget To Boogen
by Edouard Dauphin
Take a best selling horror novel that even scared The Dauphin who can barely read. Hire a film director who made one of the best of the PBS mini-series. Cast four of Hollywood’s greatest stars, whose combined acting experience totals nearly 200 years. The results should be a classy chiller, right? Think again, gullible goons.
Ghost Story, the movie, is a disaster on the order of The Shining, Blow Out or any. picture starring Elliott Gould. Based on the 560 page “good read” by Peter Straub and directed by John (Tinker. Tailor, Soldier, Spy) Irvin, it blows double digit millions on a simple terror tale that would have been better off as a low budget flick. (CREEM could have used that money for Dave DiMartino to take aerobic dancing classes.)
The plot: four old men meet each week as what they call The Chowder Society, amusing one another with ghost stories. As the film opens, this harmless diversion has turned sinister. Each of the oldsters is experiencing vivid nightmares of the kind Edouard sometimes has after polishing a quart of Clyde’s Gin and half a dozen knishes. I’m talkin’ bald dreams!
Glenn Barr
When one of the senior citizens takes a long walk off a short bridge, the remaining three geeze'rs start to panic. Enter a young writer, played by newcomer Craig Wasson, who claims to know what is happening—which is more than the audience does at this point. The youthful Whippersnapper attempts to save The Chowder Society but nothing can save us from Wasson’s performance. It’s the most abysmal movie debut since John Revolta had his little thing played with in the front seat of a car in Carrie. Ugh.
Craig’s explanation for the creepy goings-on revolves around a mysterious woman who killed his twin brother and is now haunting him. See, she’s the ghost of another woman who was killed by The Chowder Society fifty years ago. (Stop me if any of this is making sense.) This ghastly presence is enacted by yet another screen novice, Alice Krige, who looks like a cross between Romy Schneider and Gilda Radner. And you thought you had problems.
What follows is predictable, , boring and unfrightening. In fact, the scariest thing about Ghost Story is watching veteran actors like Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., John Houseman and the late Melvyn Douglas floundering in a movie that doesn’t deserve their talents. Add to that the fact that the film looks to have been edited with -a handsaw and photographed through a pair of argyle socks and you have Ghost Story, something to send you out of the theatre screaming—-for your money back.
W ☆ ☆
“Some things shouldn’t be disturbed. After 100 years someone has reawakened The Boogens.”
They shouldn’t have bothered. The Boogens, villians of this slick but ineffectual schlocker, are cute, snakelike critters that would have been happier snoozing than ravaging a Colorado mine town. As per the formula, four hapless teenagers are threatened with horrible mutilation and death, mostly due to their own idiocy, at the hands, or rather the razor sharp teeth of these slithering buggers. Some things shouldn’t be disturbed alright—this movie is downright unfair to narcoleptics.
Chief problem is the interminable length of time—nearly an hour!— before the audience gets a look at The Boogens. At the show The Dauph caught, the crowd in the theater got so bored that, when someone turned on a ghetto blaster) nobody even complained. And we were listening to the allnews station!
Finally, it’s time for The Boogens to strike. They reduce one girl to fettucine alfredo and eat up her pet poodle (Don’t laugh—he’s the best actor in the picture.). This action sequence, coming after so many lethargic reels, is surprisingly gruesome, prompting one interesting audience reaction. A brother, sitting two rows down from me, who looked unmistakeably like an 86th Street pimp, sat bolt upright and intoned in a basso profundo: “The damn thing is viciously strong—don’t trust it!” It turned out to be the evening’s best line.
See The Boogens but don’t trust it.
☆ ☆ ☆
Can you resist a Chinese 3-D film with the title Revenge Of The Shogun Women? If you can, you probably shouldn’t be reading this column. In fact, you should be trading in your subscription to CREEM in favor of Book Digest or maybe Golf. In this grisly little chop suey of an import, everything gets flung at the audience—knives, arrows, rocks, meat cleavers and a few assistant directors. Shogun Women is better than shrimp with lobster sauce and you don’t have to choose anything from Column B. See it and an hour later you’ll be hungry for another movie.
