Schlock Corridor: Day Seven

SCHLOCK CORRIDOR: Deadly Blessing

I'm going to come clean right away and admit that I'm not the biggest fan of this Wes Craven guy. He's certainly earned his place in the pantheon of horror legends due to his A Nightmare On Elm Street alone, but what else is there, really? The Last House On The Left was a strong debut, getting serious notice in an era when transgressive cinema was the rule rather than the exception, and we also have 1996's Scream, a hip and clever slasher that ushered in a new era of horror films, with all the good and bad that came with it. Most people, even those who consider themselves Wes Craven fans, recognize Scream as the last of his "great" contributions to pop culture. After that, it's just a series of diminishing returns.

But what about everything in between Last House On The Left and Scream, Nightmare excluded? That's a big pile of movies whose merits could be debated until we all die of old age. It's entirely subjective, really, but I don't care for most of his work. What do we have? The Hills Have Eyes? It's okay. The Hills Have Eyes, Part II? That clusterfuck where the dog has a flashback? Even Craven hates that movie. Invitation To Hell? Nobody cares. Deadly Friend? I know this one is an example of studio tampering in an effort to pump up the horror elements, but this movie would have sucked, regardless. It was just a bad idea to begin with. The over the top gore effects actually provide the film's most memorable moments.

The Serpent And The Rainbow is fine until the third act goes off the rails, indulging in unnecessary supernatural antics that end up ruining an otherwise compelling and suspenseful narrative. Shocker is a truly bizarre attempt by Craven to create another Freddy Krueger, and in that respect it fails utterly. Horace Pinker is no Freddy Krueger. But the movie gets so fucking weird in its climax that it almost completely redeems the rather banal first half. So it's the inverse The Serpent And The Rainbow, I suppose. The People Under The Stairs? Fuck you. Vampire And Brooklyn? Fuck you, too. Wes Craven's New Nightmare? It's an ambitious movie that I respect more than I actually enjoy, so it gets an A for effort.

Do you want to know what my favorite Wes Craven movie is? Swamp Thing. I'm not joking. I find it funny and charming, and I think it works because its well-documented budget woes forced the young director to improvise every day on location, having to find clever solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems that threatened to sink the project at every turn. It's a movie that nearly collapsed during production numerous times, and the final film's ensuing anarchic, off-the-rails attitude is infectious. It's a lot of fun, and the only one of his films I will watch regularly. The recent Scream Factory blu ray was a no-brainer purchase for me, and I love it dearly.

Another Wes Craven film was also released from that lovely home video company, one that I had surprisingly never seen. Actually, it was the only one of Wes Craven's films I had never seen, a seemingly-forgotten little chiller called Deadly Blessing. When that film appeared in my Netflix recommendations, I decided now would be the perfect time to watch it. So does Deadly Blessing deserve to remain forgotten, or is it some unsung genre classic that deserves to be rediscovered for a new generation to cherish?

The film stars Maren Jensen, who played Athena on the old Battlestar Galactica series, a young Sharon Stone, Michael Berryman's beady eyes, and the craggy bulldog face of the late Ernest Borgnine, who sports a madness-inducing chinstrap beard for his role, portraying Isaiah, the leader of a pseudo-Amish cult of religious fanatics called "Hittites". There are Hittites mentioned in the Bible, but I fail to see the connection between this film's religious cult and the Biblical tribe, or their historical counterparts, for that matter. I think maybe the screenwriters just thought the name was cool.

These Hittites live an isolated existence, only sullying themselves by mingling with outsiders when absolutely necessary, preferring to remain in their insulated community, shunning modern civilization and all of its sinful decadence. They're also assholes, condemning everything they don't like as "Incubus" and "The Serpent", because everything that isn't Hittite is inherently evil. Isaiah, elder of the community, has already excommunicated one of his two sons for daring to fall in love with an outsider, and the ousted Jim lives on a farm with his wife that is strangely within earshot of the community that shunned him. Seriously, it's close enough that irate Hittites come sauntering by all the time, screaming "INCUBUS!!!" and pointing at his wife and his barn and his tractor and his baseball cap and his light bulbs and his toolbox. I don't know why the guy would willingly live next door to a bunch of people that fucking hate him with a burning passion, but I didn't write the script, so what the fuck do I know?

Shockingly, somebody murders Jim in his barn late one night with his favorite tractor (the green one), while his slightly pregnant wife hibernates in their love nest, and her pals Sharon Stone and some other lady drive out to keep her company in her time of need. But poor Martha refuses to leave her adopted homestead, despite the constant verbal abuse by the Hittites, and the fact that her husband was brutally murdered on the property not a week earlier. It makes perfect sense, really.

Hittite Michael Berryman and his gang of adolescent misfits break into the barn to check out the tractor... because it's... I don't know... some kind of macabre tourist attraction, I guess... and one of the kids, some kind of mutant who looks like a live-action cartoon with no goddamn neck and shoulders for days, warns his pals that the barn is Incubus, and they should all be wary. He either called the barn itself Incubus, or said it is of the Incubus, and either way I have no idea what this living Ralph Steadman drawing is talking about. Do any of these fucking Hittites know what an Incubus is? Michael Berryman screams at Martha, calling her Incubus, and all of these weirdoes throw the word around like prison slang, but I don't know if they understand what the word means.

An Incubus is traditionally known as a male demon that engages in sexual acts with women, usually in an effort to consume their lifeforce and corrupt their souls. It's not a fucking barn, or a tractor, or even a woman. We have a word for the female equivalent: Succubus. Why can't they just call Martha a Succubus? They don't seem aware of the word, to be honest. Nobody in this movie does. Unless that fucking barn is hanging dong and plowing that cocktease of a tractor, it's not a fucking Incubus, you shelf-shouldered abomination of a spot-faced child!

Anyway, Michael Berryman comes back at night to watch Martha take off her clothes, and somebody stabs him, Sharon Stone has nightmares and rambles about them in a bored manner, and Martha's weird neighbors (the non-Hittite ones) come by with a basket full of eggs and awkward conversation the next morning. Then Isaiah and his bearded pals arrive, looking for the missing Berryman, and when Martha helpfully offers to escort the wayward Hittite home if she sees him, Isaiah snaps, calling her a servant of evil and claiming they will handle their own affairs. Then why the fuck did you come by her house in the first place, you dickhead? These Hittites don't make any sense.

Martha's other friend runs through the woods, blasts a dog in the face with pepper spray, then meets the late Jim's brother John, played by that guy who looks like Lance Guest but isn't Lance Guest. His name is Jeff East, most notable for playing the young Clark Kent in 1978's Superman: The Movie, despite his voice being overdubbed by Christopher Reeve in the final film. At least in Deadly Blessing, you get to hear the man's real voice, but it's no great shakes. I always just assumed he sounded like Lance Guest, but he just ended up sounding like how you would imagine a guy named Jeff East would sound. Wait, what?  In the middle of a rather flirtatious conversation between the two, big daddy Isaiah happens along, staring daggers at Martha's friend as he calls her a filthy interloper and tells her to get lost before God strikes her down for being such a whore. Good times.

After this, I blacked out for a few minutes out of sheer boredom, and when I came to, Sharon Stone was wandering through the now-haunted Incu-Barn, making out with spiders and falling down in piles of hay. Michael Berryman's corpse falls out of the rafters like some kind of bug-eyed spook house attraction, and the Hittites show up to drag the body away, pissing all over the local Sheriff's burgeoning investigation by contaminating the crime scene with their fingerprints and refusing to allow the local forensics team to examine the body for clues because of their  wacky religious beliefs. The Sheriff shrugs in a comical manner, telling the girls to get the fuck out of town if they know what's good for them before leaving in a flash of impotence, but since the girls don't know what's good for them they decide to stay put, because the worst is surely over by now.

Then a snake tries to kill Martha in the bathtub, Sharon Stone has a weird spider-eating dream that turns her into a crazy person, and the other girl makes out with Lance Guest in a car that gets blown up by an unseen assailant in the woods. Thus, our climax begins. Martha discovers that the weird neighbor girl who likes eggs almost as much as she likes eavesdropping is actually a weird neighbor boy who is also in love with her, and is responsible for all of the murders, because somehow she/he saw Michael Berryman and Martha's extra-crispy friend as romantic rivals, necessitating their elimination. Then Lance Guest's Hittite fiancée shows up to stab the crazy tranny, and Isaiah comes to escort the wayward girl home, claiming that the messenger of the Incubus is now dead.

The next morning, Sharon Stone decides it's finally time to go back home, but Martha chooses to remain in the murder house, because "a seed has been planted", and she's simply too stupid to know any better. Literally as soon as she enters the house, the lights dim and the ghost of her husband appears before her, warning her of the Incubus. Before she can even begin to react to what she'd just seen, a fucking Incubus bursts through the floor like the Kool-Aid Man's sinister cousin, dragging Martha to Hell, and the movie ends.

What the fuck is this? The first hour and fifteen minutes of this movie is interminable, looking and feeling like a mediocre made-for-TV movie (despite the infrequent nudity), with insultingly dumb lead characters, pointlessly despicable antagonists in the Hittites, and a musical score by James Horner that belongs on the soundtrack to some forgotten industrial film illustrating the finer points of school cafeteria etiquette. It's so boring, I contemplated stopping playback and just walking away from the whole endeavor. I couldn't stand this movie for the lion's share of its run-time. The acting was just okay for the most part, and the film was competently made, I guess, but it was all so drab and cliché and the screenplay was a limp dick.

Then the movie pulled a Sleepaway Camp move before Sleepaway Camp even existed and revealed the killer to be an insane transvestite for absolutely no reason. The film never drops any hints pointing to the direction of the weird-but-harmless-seeming neighbor girl, coloring her overbearing, man-hating mother as a more obvious choice of killer. I understand this is misdirection, but who the fuck would guess that this woman's daughter is 1) actually a boy, 2) obsessed with Martha, and 3) a fucking psycho killer?! In the end, the Hittites aren't evil murderers, they're just backwards, bigoted assholes, and apparently they were also right about the Incubus shit, because Martha gets abducted by one of them in the closing moments of the film, once again FOR NO FUCKING REASON.

Maybe this reminds you of A Nightmare On Elm Street's ending, where Nancy's mother is dragged through the tiny front door window by a presumed-double-dead Freddy Krueger, but that film was awash in the supernatural, making the ending entirely appropriate. Deadly Blessing reveals all of its evils to be of the man-made (or woman-made) variety, tossing in this inexplicable shock ending that throws the entire film into an abyss of confusion and pointlessness. It makes the conclusion of Shocker seem positively quaint in comparison. I don't know what to make of this movie. I hate 90% of this piece of shit, and the other 10% confounds and entertains me in nearly equal measure. The climax, no matter how bat-shit crazy it is, still isn't enough to save the otherwise dreadfully dull film.

It's like eating a four-course meal, and the appetizer, soup, and main courses are all bland, tasteless slop. The dessert course is a delicious slice of orange cream & cherry cheesecake, something that sounds like a terrible idea, but in execution ends up tasting a whole lot better than you ever thought possible. That weird confection may taste good, but it doesn't make you look back on the entire meal in a positive light. You just wish you could find that fucking cheesecake in a store, but you know that even if you do manage to track one of those elusive treats down, it won't live up to that original slice of abominable deliciousness, perhaps because without the context of the unpalatable food that came before it, the cheesecake's taste is diminished. Or perhaps it never tasted that good in the first place, and you only remember it so vividly because it was the only oasis of flavor in a sea of porridge.

I feel like I lost the plot regarding this simile a long time ago, so I'm just going to end this now. Fuck you, Deadly Blessing!

TOMORROW: The Initiation