It is hard to find a horror anthology film that people really like. It’s not surprising. I can’t think of any anthology film that people love. Well, Love Actually. But that is a sign of social psychosis. I’m not sure why people like it. It suffers from all the usual problems of anthology films. In particular, I literally only care about the stand-ins for the sex scene. And that is not enough to put up with the rest of the film, which makes me want to retch.

And this is, I think, the fundamental problem with anthology films. We like some of the stories and we hate other ones. But it’s weird. Because this is also the problem with TV shows like Deadwood: we care about some storylines and we don’t about others. And I think, as with Love Always, we put up with the bad to get to the good. I guess I hate Love Always because there is just way too much bad to wade through to get to the good.

But the anthology film does not have this advantage. It’s one whole story followed by another whole story. There is no clever editing to get through the stories we don’t like. So you get to the end of Dr Terror’s House of Horrors and you can’t deny that there were 10 straight minutes of “Creeping Vine.” It doesn’t matter that there were 15 awesome minutes of “Disembodied Hand”!

And for a long time, I thought this was why people don’t give anthology films the respect they deserve. But I’ve come to see that this is only part of the problem. I’m recently published an article about the Amicus horror anthology films. And I’m noticed another problem: the frame story.

Horror Anthology Frame Stories

There are two approaches to horror anthologies: those with a frame story and those without. People generally prefer those without. For example, Trilogy of Terror. Most people don’t just forget that they didn’t especially care for “Julie” and “Millicent and Therese.” They forget they watched them at all. They only remember “Amelia” — the one with a terror doll with a spear. (For the record, I love “Julie”!) But without a frame story to focus attention, Trilogy of Terror becomes simply “Amelia.”

But there’s a bigger issue here. A lot of horror anthology stories are wedged into their frame stories. For example, only two of the four stories in The House that Dripped Blood really takes place at the house. The stories themselves are pretty strong. But what’s all that nonsense about the house reflecting the person who lives there? It’s just post hoc nonsense!

Highs and Lows

So horror anthologies suffer from our desire to have continity. It doesn’t matter how high the highs are, the lows spoil it. And even a great story like “Terror Over Hollywood” disappoints us in the context of Torture Garden, where it doesn’t belong because the main character’s sin is so minor that we don’t think it deserves Hell.

But one of the big points of this site is that we shouldn’t allow cinematic lows to diminish the cinematic highs. And that’s more true now than ever. There was a time when you had to go to movie theater to see a film. And more recently, you’d have to watch on live TV. But now, you can just skip right to the part you want to watch.

And as I went through the Amicus horror anthologies, I found that the individual stories were, overall, excellent. Only a couple were disappointing outside their contexts. Most were excellent and it was only in the context of the frame story that they were weak. And some were “Creeping Vine.” You can’t win them all!

Horror Anthology Movie Volume 1 via IMDb under Fair Use.

Many years ago, I heard a stand-up comedian make the following joke about Gilligan’s Island.

My favorite episode was the one where they almost got off the island but then Gilligan screwed it up.

I thought it was very funny. As a kid, I watched the show daily. So I thought the joke did sum up every episode. But there’s a problem: it doesn’t.

The show ran for three seasons with 36, 32, and 30 episodes each for a total of 98 episodes, which is a lot. So I chose to look only at the first season. But a cursory look at the other episodes shows that what is true of the first season is broadly true of the second and third.

How many escape attempts depends upon how you define them. For one thing, many episodes tack on an escape at the end of an episode that is primarily about something else. There are also episodes where the escape attempts clearly wouldn’t work. If you go simply by episodes that revolve around an escape attempt that Gilligan ruins, I count only two episodes: “‘X’ Marks the Spot” and “Physical Fatness.”

First Season Episodes

Of the 36 episodes, fewer than half (17) have escape attempts. Of these, less than half (8) are Gilligan’s fault. Here’s a rundown:

Gilligan’s Fault

So I accept that two of the episodes conform to the trope: E18 “‘X’ Marks the Spot” and E32 “Physical Fatness.” But let’s go over the six episodes where Gilligan is at fault and why none of them fit the trope:

• E03 “Voodoo Something to Me”: This is just a Life episode. At the end, Gilligan does destroy all the flares, which is a big set-back for the castaways. But it isn’t a mistake made during an escape attempt.
• E04 “Goodnight, Sweet Skipper”: Skipper is able to repair the transmitter when he’s asleep. But it doesn’t work, and Gilligan fixes the transmitter by hitting it. Then he breaks it by hitting it again. So it’s the same problem as E03.
• E07 “Sound of Quacking”: A duck lands on the island and the professor proposes they put a note on it. But Gilligan forgets the note. So what’s the problem? Gilligan was the one who captured it and stopped the others from eating it. But most of all, this escape plan would never work.
• E08 “Goodbye Island”: Gilligan develops a glue they use to repair the boat. But he finds out that the glue only holds temporarily. You could say it was a bad plan but not that Gilligan messed it up.
• E20 “St Gilligan and the Dragon”: This episode is basically Lysistrata with the women going on strike. But at the very end, they find a weather balloon, which Gilligan destroys. So, could they have used it for an escape? Sure. Were they about to get off the island, but Gilligan screwed it up? No.
• E29 “Three to Get Ready”: This episode has Gilligan finding a wishing stone. But his final wish is that they get off the island. So it’s basically just a Monkey’s Paw situation where he gets his literal wish rather than his implied wish. This isn’t really an escape episode.

What Gilligan’s Island Is About

Most of the episodes of the show could be reworked into episodes of Leave It to Beaver or M*A*S*H or Northern Exposure. Because they are about people living their lives in a particular environment.

But the show doesn’t even stick with its primary environment. Roughly 15 percent of all the episodes include extended dream or fantasy sequences. And these become far more common in the last season.

The show really isn’t about the castaways trying to get off the island because it couldn’t be. Because there just isn’t enough material there. As it is, some of the escape attempts are lame. Even “Physical Fatness” (which I included as one of the trope episodes) features a questionable escape attempt.

What’s more, if Gilligan only screwed up, we wouldn’t like him. He is the hero more often than you probably remember.

But even if you want to include all eight episodes, you see that the show is about a lot more than the trope of escape attempts that Gilligan messes up.

But my takeaway from watching a bunch of the first season is that the show was really good. It’s silly in the extreme, of course. But there is a lot of clever writing. And the cast is fantastic. It really is as good as anything on TV now. And if it came out now, I think it would still be a hit.

Gilligan’s Island poster via IMDb under Fair Use.

If you’ve been reading me for long, you know one of my constant refrains is that movies are too long. So I thought it was nice when I recently watched Remain Calm but I wanted more.

The film features three actors who would be the stars of any low-budget feature: Pauly Shore, Nick Swardson, and Doug Jones. And the whole thing looks great. That’s particularly interesting given that most of the principals behind the camera have relatively little experience with this kind of professional narrative filmmaking. But many have experience in other areas. The editor Jenna Socha, for example, has impressive credits as a story producer in TV. And the First Assistant Director, Micah Johnson, has a ton of experience in that critical role.

Jake Lewis directed it. He also co-wrote it with his brother Sam. They’ve only made a few short films but I expect that to change. (Of course, I’m often shocked that people don’t get the opportunities they should. So who knows? They do seem well-connected though.)

Remain Calm tells the story of two bored clerks (Shore and Swardson) at a 24-hour convenience store on US Route 50. But a federal agent (Jones) interrupts them. He is looking for a creature that recently escaped from a desert facility. It eats people who show signs of stress.

It’s about 14 minutes long. But it goes by very quickly. Too quickly, actually. But the production budget constrains the story. I would have been happy with another five minutes to the first two deaths. My reaction to each was that there was tension and humor to mine. But it’s clear there is nothing wrong with the pacing. In fact, it works just fine. And I’m sure the filmmakers knew what they were doing.

Check it out. It is well worth your time.

Other Shorts

There are a lot of great short films. Here are just a few (mostly horror) I’ve written about:

• Call Girl
• Curve
• Dig Your Own Grave
• East Hell
• Finley
• Hide Your Crazy
• Plastic Bones
• SLUT

Remain Calm (2026) poster via IMDb under Fair use.

I like The Replacement Killers. It isn’t a great film. Hell, it isn’t even a particularly good film. But it’s stylish. And the two leads (Chow Yun-fat as John Lee and Mira Sorvino as Meg) are great. But the story is stupid and it depends upon the viewer thinking like a gamer. None of the characters are real except for those primary to the plot. Everyone else is a non-player character (NPC).

As is typical of action movies, we have a professional assassin who has ethics. In this case, he isn’t willing to kill a cop’s kid. In the film, a cop kills a crime boss’ son, so, in retaliation, the crime boss hires an assassin to kill the cop’s son. It’s very Code of Hammurabi.

In general, we don’t like the idea of a kid getting killed for what his dad did. But this is an action film, and there are two ways that make the idea more palatable.

1. The cop (Detective Stan Zedkov) is played by Michael Rooker. He’s a fine actor and works great in hateable roles. But Hollywood has spent a fair amount of effort trying to get audiences to like him. And it just ain’t there. And in The Replacement Killers, he plays an asshole. Even Alan Rickman couldn’t have made the character likeable.
2. The kid is annoying in the extreme. It’s hard to imagine that Zedkov would be all that upset to lose him.

Of course, the film gets worse. It isn’t enough to simply not kill the kid. Meg convinces Lee that he must protect the kid. And thus begins the bloodbath. Most sources claim that there are 38 total on-screen deaths. Some of these are not the direct result of John Lee’s refusal to kill the kid. But there are more deaths. I once tried to count the deaths myself but I gave up because of the theater scene, which implies but doesn’t show any actual deaths.

But let’s consider that one scene. If the heroes didn’t show up at the last minute, one person would have died — the kid. Instead, I believe several died. It doesn’t matter that we don’t see them. In fact, it makes the point clearer: it doesn’t matter than other people died because none of them are real.

There are also two characters who we care about: Eddie Rawlins (Frank Medrano) and the priest (James Wing Woo). And they are both killed off-screen because the filmmakers also see them as NPCs — just ones who need to provide a small amount of exposition.

And the truth is, I don’t think any of this matters. As I’ve said, I enjoy the film. Thirty seconds of Mira Sorvino sexily counterfeiting documents to “Makes Me Wanna Die” is worth the price of admission. So I wouldn’t even bring it up except for one thing.

The film takes its conceit seriously. It cares about that kid. But it doesn’t care about any other character. In fact, it’s kind of surprising that John Lee and Meg don’t end up dying — but happy knowing that the annoying kid will grow up to be as big an asshole as his dad.

But again: The Replacement Killers is fun. And the extended cut (about 9 minutes longer) includes more dialogue scenes, which improves the film immeasurably. (But my criticisms stand.) Here is the extended cut, if you are in the mood.

The Replacement Killers (1998) poster via Wikipedia under Fair Use.

John Carpenter is a great director, but his power harmed They Live and We Live with it to this day.

The old saying goes, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And this applies very well to film directors. Stanley Kubrick’s later films are among his weakest. I once thought Martin Scorsese escaped this when, in his middle career, he used his power to make exceptional off-brand films like Kundun and Bringing Out the Dead. But his recent work is so self-indulgent that I wish he would simply stop making films.

Fight Scene

I watch They Live every year or so. I like it a lot. But that’s really just because I like its politics. And the truth is that I know a lot of people with horrible politics who think the film justifies them. Whatever. The only problem I’ve had with the film as narrative art is that ridiculously long fight scene in the middle.

Last week, I went through all the special features on the Shout Factory Blu-ray of the film. It includes a recent interview with John Carpenter. Here’s a transcript:

Carpenter: A lot of people said at the time this is excessive, the fight was excessive, but I loved it!

Interviewer: Was there ever any concern when you finished the scene in terms of shortening it?

Carpenter: Fuck no!

But the fight scene in They Live is six and a half minutes long. That’s seven percent of the run time (credits included) of the entire film!

And here we are, four decades on, with a solid film that grinds to a halt right before the third act starts. I guess that’s what the fast-forward button is for. The truth is, no fight is even necessary but it works well enough to propel the action. But six and a half minutes? That’s a director’s blind hubris.

Collaboration Is Necessary

This is why directors shouldn’t have too much power. The fight scene works well on its own. True, it isn’t realistic or gritty — the way the film is. It’s very much a pro-wrestling kind of fight — including a piledriver. It doesn’t go too far. The problem is that the fight stops the film just as it moves into high gear.

Carpenter understands this. I’m sure he even sees it today. But his ego stops him from admitting that the fight scene is too long in the content of the film. So instead of admitting the error, he doubles down. But if he’d had a powerful enough producer, he could have been saved the public embarrassment. Larry Franco is a fine producer, but he owes his career to Carpenter. He wasn’t going to stand up to the man.

This is not to say that producers should be all-powerful. Indeed, powerful producers have destroyed many a great work. Blade Runner and Dark City come to mind as examples of producers fatally harming films because of their convictions that audiences are stupid. Clearly, there needs to be a balance.

Have you noticed that most directors’ cuts of films are longer than the release cuts — often much longer. This is ego. But it isn’t always the case. Scott’s Blade Runner cut was actually a couple of minutes shorter. And that’s while adding the unicorn dream scene! Dark City is longer, but it is in service of keeping the story mysterious.

John Carpenter Forgot About Us — Briefly

I like John Carpenter as a director. And a big reason for that is that he’s good to the audience. But this is an example of how even the best directors can fall into this trap of fluffing themselves and not working for the good of the whole film. Too bad we will never get a Franco cut of They Live “with four and a half minutes you don’t have to sit through”!

They Live (1988) poster via Wikipedia under Fair Use.

The broken man you see before you now is doubtless the result of my older sister sneaking me into drive-in movies that I absolutely should not have seen and, more importantly, Bob Wilkins, the strangely intellectual host of Creature Features. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I still think horror films are cool. And as I do my anti-cholesterol walks through the neighborhood, sporting odd T-shirts and weather-inappropriate short pants, I know that I see reality more clearly than those around me. Because at the age of seven, I survived The Last Man on Earth on Creature Features!

It’s lucky for me that I lived in the Bay Area. Had I lived in the Northeast, I might have been stuck with John Zacherle. Brilliant as he was, he was no intellectual. With him showing the way of horror, I might be focused on art films now!

Regardless, the hosted TV horror show was important to a lot of people of my age. What Saturday Night Live was for people of the following decade, these shows were to us. But in this regard, I might be a bit out of time. I was watching this way before I should have. Most of my friends look back on SNL, not Creature Features.

Vampira and Shock Theater

The prototypical hosted TV horror show was The Vampira Show. It wasn’t the first. Murder Before Midnight on WBKB with Drana Badour the Swami was probably the first. It was successful — running three years. But it didn’t have the impact of The Vampira Show, which had the advantage of featuring a sexy woman and being in Los Angeles. People noticed both these things!

As a result of the success of the show, in 1957, Screen Gems released Shock! (normally referred to as Shock Theater). This was a syndicated collection of 52 films that were sold to regional TV stations — explicitly to be used as hosted TV shows in the vein of The Vampira Show. And the films included in the collection are pretty awesome! They included the Universal hits Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man.

As a result of Shock Theater, local stations all over America created their own shows. Most were not exactly great. Many of the shows were simply titled “Shock Theater.” And few stations had anyone of the charisma of Maila Nurmi. But there were notable hosts:

The Anti-Horror Host

Bob Wilkins had a totally different take on this theme. He hosted Creature Features in the San Francisco Bay Area for 15 years across three stations: KCRA (1966-1970), KTVU (1971-1979), KTXL (1970-1981).

The show was more of a straight copy of Vampira. But instead of her silly routine, he was kind of an academic. He made jokes. But they were dry. He smoked a cigar (a pipe would have been better for the brand). And he interviewed notable psychotronic celebrities. These included Christopher Lee, William Marshall, John Carradine, Ray Harryhausen, and John Landis. He also interviewed the primary cast of Star Wars and Star Trek.

He was more or less what I am today: someone who loves horror but takes it rather more seriously than most, at the same time that he realizes it is all kind of silly.

Son of Shock

After the 1957 Shock Theater collection, Screen Gems put out Son of Shock. It included only 20 films, but it completed the Universal horror collection with Bride of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, and more.

Clearly, the idea was to repackage these old films in a way that they would appeal to a new audience. It was just a cash grab. But it was a great one. I love these films — largely because I first saw them on Creature Features. And Columbia (which owned Screen Gems) deserves all the money it got.

Shock Theater With Jim Ross on KGUL-TV poster via IMDb under Fair Use.

Hide Your Crazy is one of those fantastic horror shorts that make you wonder why you even watch features anymore. Irina Slepneva led the production with fully 24 other producers listed because of the Indiegogo campaign for the film.

The base idea here belongs to writer-director Austin Kase. He is a graduate of Yale. And he has a great track record as an independent writer-director.[1] He isn’t a psychotronic filmmaker. His work (as in Crazy) is much more thoughtful than that — even though it is often quirky. He peppers his films with little insights that you just don’t see much in film.

He also consistently gets excellent performances out of actors. That’s well on display here with the only two actors in the film, Amy-Helene Carlson and William Lawrence Toussaint (although they are clearly both pros).

The film also looks great. Making a suburban apartment look interesting is hard — especially in a horror film. Here, the apartment looks perfect for the story. A big part of that is the lighting by veteran cinematographer Chase Bowman, who is also the camera operator. Pate Sanders did a good job as the production designer making the apartment look real but attractive.

Veteran Tony Snegoff was the stunt coordinator, which was much needed. The fights look real! Finally, Santino Ferrese did the excellent special effects makeup.

You might call Hide Your Crazy a Romantic Comedy Horror film. It has all the elements of a standard rom-com: two people destined to be together who must overcome obstacles in order to secure their happiness. You see, they both have secrets. He has bipolar manic depressive disorder. And she is the daughter of a witch and a demon, and now she must consume pig’s blood or she turns into a monster. (More or less; it’s complicated.) Can these crazy kids get past their issues and find true love?!

The film is incredibly sweet. And it’s a testament to the power of horror. If it were a standard rom-com (especially as a feature), I’m not sure I could take it. But here I’m near tears of joy at the end. (Vomiting has never been so beautiful!)

So forget Anne Rice and The Twilight Saga and all those “sexy” monsters. I find all that stuff pretty banal. Hide Your Crazy shows you can have engaging romance, funny comedy, and scary horror — all in one package. I’m not sure it could be maintained for 80 minutes. But at 13 minutes? It couldn’t be better!

[1] I only found one other Austin Kase film online, which is well worth watching, To My Son. But I contacted Kase, and he shared unlisted links to Kvetch and Another Girl. The latter film shares a theme with Hide Your Crazy, but it isn’t horror. They are all really good and worth a watch!

Hide Your Crazy via IMDb under Fair Use.

Back on 2 March, Bruce Campbell announced he had cancer in an X post. He said it was “‘treatable’ not ‘curable’,” so I figured a bad kind. And then, exactly six months later, he announced on The Adam Carolla Show that his doctors give him five years.

Based on this, I’d have to say that I have no idea. I won’t be surprised if he’s dead in a year. And I won’t be surprised if he’s alive in ten. So I’d prefer if I knew nothing about his diagnosis. But I understand why he had to make it. He’s a big draw at the conventions and he had to cancel appearances. If he hadn’t said anything there would have been ridiculous rumors — maybe a “Bruce Campbell Is Dead” conspiracy.

I think Campbell is a solid actor. But I’m not that interested in him as an actor. I think that Evil Dead II kind of limited his career. He has breadth as an actor. But mostly, people want to see him play a maniac. I thought The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr was great. But most fans I know never took much to it. And I understand. I too enjoy Maniac Bruce. Ash vs Evil Dead was fantastic. And Man With the Screaming Brain is one of my favorite films. But he was capable of so much more.

Ernie & Emma

I’m much more interested in Bruce Campbell as a writer and director. And that’s the hidden good news of all this cancer stuff. He has said he has backed away from work on the Evil Dead franchise. That started before the cancer diagnosis but it seems to have now accelerated.

His new film, Ernie & Emma, is the first one he’s directed since My Name Is Bruce back in 2007. And it is the first he’s written since Screaming Brain. I haven’t seen Ernie & Emma, of course. It isn’t playing in my backwater. But based on the trailer, it looks very “Bruce Campbell.”

I’ll be sad to see Bruce Campbell die. But if we get a couple of independent films from him as a result, that will be an major silver lining.

Afterword: Alternative Take

There is another possibility. Some may consider it in poor taste to even mention it. But I love it!

Maybe Campbell knew about his cancer diagnosis long ago — maybe as far back as 2018 when he announced he wouldn’t play Ash again. In that case, he might have only gone public with the diagnosis to goose interest in Ernie & Emma.

I hope it’s true. He would be perpetrating one of the greatest things ever done in exploitation filmmaking!

Bruce Campbell by Gage Skidmore under CC BY 2.0.

East Hell is a short comedy-horror film from 2017. It tells a simple story. Two goth girls try to summon a demon to curse their high school tormentors. Meanwhile, they are babysitting a boy who tries to stop them. Eventually, a female demon shows up and she thinks the girls are just as lame as the bullies are. She gives the boy a loaded gun, like demons do. You see: the boy is way cooler than the girls!

The film was produced by Carver Diserens who seems to have a successful career working in various capacities of production. It stars Alexandra Noland, Allison Winn, and Lauren Cipoletti, who all seem to be doing well in the business. The little boy is played by Cole Krell.

But East Hell seems like Callum Smith‘s baby. He wrote and directed it. Looking at IMDb, you’d think he mostly disappeared. But like most talented filmmakers, he is simply doing work that doesn’t show up in that database. He seems to work primarily in the gaming industry where he focuses on directing the voice actors. He’s also made a science fiction short, Haxxors, which I have not been able to find.

Films like East Hell present Christianity as a war of good versus evil. This is one reason I especially love Catholic horror. It’s clean. What stops me from following the religion is that it’s silly. The world is imperfect because God gave humans free will. But God also created the Devil to temp humans because apparently it isn’t acceptable to just give humans a fair choice with their free will. And God knows everything so he doesn’t actually need to do any of this. And humans are actually so clueless that they would make deals with the Devil. So, as religion: stupid. As film, stupendous!

Of course, East Hell also works as an allegory of high school outcasts. But I try not to think about this kind of stuff too much. The moment you try to make a film an explicit metaphor, you lose the film and gain a George Lakoff lecture. So my advice: just watch the film!

East Hell (2017) via IMDb under Fair Use.

I love Samuel Fuller’s work. And it occurred to me that, in terms of cinematic technique, he’s very similar to Alfred Hitchcock. And it’s interesting that he doesn’t get more attention. It seems that every master’s student in film studies wants to write a thesis about Hitchcock. But not so much Fuller.

That’s not to say that Fuller isn’t also a darling of critics. But there is much less of that sort of thing. And what’s really weird is that Fuller has a far stronger case to being an auteur. After all, he wrote most of his own films. He had a clear vision — both artistically and philosophically. The man had things to say!

Hitchcock? He really didn’t have anything to say. Of course, that does work to his advantage. I don’t re-watch Fuller’s films nearly as much as I do Hitchcock’s. Frankly, Fuller asks so much more of me as a viewer! The Big Red One is a great film. But it ain’t easy!

The Look of a Fuller Film

But look at the films of the two men! They look very much the same. And why not? The truth is that most directors create films with a fairly general look. When people think of Stanley Kubrick, they mostly think of his later films — after he had made something of a fetish of a couple of techniques.

There really isn’t much of that in the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Samuel Fuller. They were both just trying to tell stories in an effective way. And they were both very successful at it! But really: critics should be embracing Fuller and leaving Hitchcock to me! Because Hitchcock wasn’t an auteur. And Fuller was.

Just the same, Fuller’s work is so raw! I always care about what’s going on. I care about the characters. There’s something very base about the stories he tells. But I find myself consistently outraged by the injustices that he presents.

A great example of what I’m talking about is Fuller’s 1969 film, Shark! It’s a wonderful bit of genre filmmaking. But Fuller just can’t help himself and not make it about something. Hitchcock is purer. But I can’t think of a time when he matched Fuller’s heart. So if you’re not feeling up to emotion but you want a fun film, watch Family Plot. But if you want that with some emotional depth and moral clarity, watch anything from Fuller. Today, let it be Shark!

But before you do, notice that the plot setup is as clear as anything you will find in Hitchcock.

Afterword: Burt Reynolds stars in this film. He really is great. He doesn’t get enough respect as an actor. And I say that as someone who doesn’t especially like the films he’s best known for. But everybody’s got to pay the bills. It speaks well of a man who doesn’t just sleep in the rest of the time.

Samuel Fuller by Roland Godefroy under CC BY 2.5.