This strange little exploitation flick stunned me by the fact that I really rather enjoyed it. I don’t know what I was expecting but it was certainly not what I saw. Don’t get me wrong, its daft, and yet has an undercurrent of creepiness that puts the viewer off kilter. It has no great thought-out story either and I understand much of the dialogue was improvised but then it did have Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin doing the improvisation… oh and Ivan Reitman directed.
Is it grand cinema then… well no but it has something that raises it above the exploitation flick it appears to be and it also, in some regards, apes
Dracula.
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| beach attack |
It starts with a couple by the seaside and laying a blanket on the ground… it all looks a bit chilly to me being a snowy Canada but they are young and up for it. Or they were until a figure of a woman approaches and buries a pick axe in him. The girlfriend screams and has her blouse ripped open for her trouble. For a moment we get a close up of eyes (I’ll come back to those). In town the local cop (Robert McHeady) tells the doctor (Ray Lawlor) that they have another one.
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| Cliff and Gloria |
Leant up against a car, Gloria (Andrea Martin) is trying to read a map and can’t make head nor tails of where they are. Her boyfriend, Cliff (Eugene Levy), is off screen presumably relieving himself. After a while he stops talking back and she gets worried, she starts to look for him and he jumps out at her. We can see, however, that they are observed from the woods by a woman with a knife. The car refuses to start and after some shenanigans they get a false start and then the car nudges back to life.
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| Randall Carpenter as Anthea |
Cliff stops in the next town and asks at a garage if there is somewhere to stay and is directed to Mrs Wainwright’s (May Jarvis) motel. There is also a guy asking whether anyone has seen a girl, his sister, to no avail. After the man goes, the garage attendant talks to the cop and says the guy was asking about one of the Reverend’s girls and an arrangement is made to have him done away with. Meanwhile Cliff and Gloria have got to the motel and, when talking to Mrs Wainwright, she tells them the local legend of the cannibal girls.
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| Mira Pawluk as Leona |
The three lived in a large house, she explains, and were Anthea (Randall Carpenter), Clarissa (Bonnie Neilson) and Leona (Mira Pawluk). In her telling of the story, three men are lured to the house; Leona chats Felix (Allan Price) up in a bar, Earl (Earl Pomerantz) was already at the house when Felix arrives and, from the dialogue, it seems that the girls string them both along for a couple of days. Eventually Rick (Alan Gordon) is given shortcut directions to another town, which go past the house, and he ends up staying overnight, though how that happened isn't shown. Once all three are there they are done away with over the next night.
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| scissor attack |
The first to be killed is Earl, who finally thinks he is on a promise with Clarissa. We hear her (in her head) intone “
Within me and without me, I honour the blood, which gives me life” and then takes him out with scissors. Felix actually does sleep with Leona but is sent back to his own room afterwards and Anthea chops him with an axe as he leaves Leona's room. Somehow Rick sleeps through all this, wakes handcuffed to the bed and the girls come in, drip blood on his torso and then lick it up, which quickly becomes biting into him…
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| dinner with the Reverend |
And that’s the local legend but Mrs Wainwright assures them that it was some time ago (probably not that long ago, given the garage attendant being in the story and the missing sister possibly being Anthea). Nevertheless she then says the house is still there and is now a restaurant and takes the pair up there (after they settle in, Gloria falls asleep and Cliff takes the car to the garage – which we later see the attendant put a for sale sign on). The restaurant is run by the very theatrical (and formal wear wearing) Reverend Alex St. John (Ronald Ulrich), they are the only guests, there is only one thing on the menu and he dines with them (and is a tad handsy with Gloria)…
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| the Rev and his girls |
So, the Dracula bits I saw in this start with the Rev. He has the three girls, he wears formal wear like the Lugosi version of
Dracula (the top hat could also be a reference to
London After Midnight) and he also has a particularly strong line in eye mojo, it appears. This is augmented visually by several eye close-ups, indeed the eye close-up I mentioned at the beginning were his eyes (suggesting a telepathic connection also). He also asks the couple to stay and when they refuse makes them promise that if they hear anything in the woods they’ll run and not look back (building a fear). They leave anyway and almost immediately hear wolves, turn back and stay the night – so the scene is lifted from Dracula when the Count allows Harker the opportunity to leave Castle Dracula. The Rev. also says they should “
drink the blood of life eternal” (cf. the blood is the life) “
and live forever”.
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| a toast to the Reverend |
There were other things I perceived through the running time. As mentioned, the performance for the Rev was very theatrical (this is actually mentioned in dialogue and may have been an adlib) but would not have been out of place in
Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things. There is a turn around where Gloria is gaslight into thinking everything is in her head, the townsfolk are in on it (we see the main players having a meal beneath a picture of the Rev., with them eating flesh, drinking blood and a toast is called to the Rev. as their guiding spirit) and there are strange moments in town such as the town barber slicing a customer's ear off, unobserved by the couple as they walk past his shop. The atmosphere at times, through this, resembled the small town uncanny portrayed in
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.
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| Bonnie Neilson as Clarissa |
The film is therefore a strange old thing but it really kept my attention as I was drawn into apparent references. Even the fact that it seems a tad ill-prepared feeds into its uncanny presence. I think some of you will watch this and think me mad, but I was very taken with this one. It probably doesn't deserve
6 out of 10, but it's getting it anyway.
The imdb page is
here.
On DVD @ Amazon US
On DVD @ Amazon UK
