In the late 1980s, Geraldo Rivera hosted a primetime special about the Satanic Panic. And yes, it’s every bit as awesome as you’d expect it to be.
PROPAGANDA REVIEW: Devil Worship — Exposing Satan’s Underground (1988)
Showing posts with label 1988. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1988. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Robocop: The Animated Series - The Pilot Episode!
Because why not turn one of the goriest, anti-capitalist screeds of the 1980s into a cartoon for the kiddo consumers?
By: Jimbo X
@Jimbo__X
The 1980s were a strange, strange time in American consumer culture, especially in terms of kid-targeted marketing. On one end - and keep in mind, this was well before the Disney-Marvel-Star Wars pop cultural Wehrmacht came to exist - you had stuff that was pretty straight-forward, kid-baiting capitalist claptrap, sans any real subtext, intentional or unintentional - your Smurfs, your Super Marios, your Care Bears and so on and so forth. This being the Reagan Era, of course there was a lot of pseudo-political stuff being repackaged as preteen entertainment, as well; it's no coincidence that G.I. Joe suddenly came back into vogue right around the same time America was transitioning from its post-Vietnam non-interventionist stance to today's always-battle-ready global protectorates (David Sirota's entertaining 2011 tome Back to our Future is a great read for anyone looking to see how jingoistic media in the ALF years helped create a culture of militarism in the U.S. that is still reverberating today.)
But on the other side of the toy store aisle - across the way from all of the Glo-Worms and My Little Pony dolls and Pound Puppies - you had stuff that seemed, well, just a wee bit outside the domain of juvenalia. Right next to Atari 2600 cartridges based on properties like E.T. and The Empire Strikes Back, there were video games inspired by ultra-violent splatter films like The Evil Dead and raunchy sex comedies like Porky's. Side by side with the hula hoops and Slinkies were startlingly realistic replicas of the machine guns used by Rambo and the A-Team, with some "playsets" more closely resembling the contents of Timothy McVeigh's tool shed than an elementary schooler's toychest. Wedged in between The Karate Kid action figures and plastic WWF pro wrestlers, one could find licensed playthings celebrating everything from a cybernetic assassin cop-killer to a horribly-disfigured, mass murdering child predator. And if you think that's a little age-inappropriate, just wait until you flip on the slate of Saturday morning television programming!
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, there were, at various points in time, kid-centered cartoons based on all of the following, adult-themed licenses: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Police Academy, Dumb and Dumber, Ace Ventura, Highlander, Conan the Barbarian, Little Shop of Horrors and, god help us, even The Toxic Avenger. Granted, these programs couldn't replicate the gross-out humor, sexual innuendos, and occasional disembowelings of their parent I.P., but they did what they could to soften up and reserve the properties (almost always with a corresponding toyline and video games out the wazoo) to America's consumption-hungry adolescent masses ... which, naturally, makes the existence of the 1988 Robocop cartoon series all the more ironic.
 |
| It may have taken some major liberties with the source material, but at least they kept in the part where Eric Foreman's dad shoots Murphy 40-bazillion times at point blank range. |
The first Robocop cartoon series - a joint Marvel Productions/AKOM Productions venture - ran for one season in 1988. While the general gist of the Robocop mythos was left intact - the program even began with a toned-down re-imagining of Alex Murphy's execution! - the show made quite a few tweaks here and there, primarily, to expand the toy line ... I mean, in-show universe. While the program certainly didn't live up to the lofty precedent set by its source material, for what it's worth, it wasn't that bad of a little cartoon, and a few of its ideas actually bordered on ingenious. The execution - in more ways than one - may have been flawed, but you at least have to give the writers some points for trying; all in all, had the basic storyline of the show been used as the general basis for the Robo-sequels, Parts 2 and 3 probably would've turned out as way more entertaining movies.
The pilot episode, titled "Crime Wave," introduces us the series' primary antagonists, a gaggle of criminal mischief-makers named the Vandals who share more than a passing resemblance to the Cretins from the Class of Nuke 'Em High franchise. Their shenanigans begin with a heist of the OCP-branded blood bank - why plasma in Future Detroit is so guldarn valuable, however, the episode never tells us. Carrying laser weapons, the scoundrels tell the po-po to kiss their "big toes" and threaten to blow the building sky high. They set an I.E.D. to go off in 12 minutes (not real time, of course), and here comes Robocop and his sidekick Officer Lewis to shoot the guns out of the bad guys' hands and prevent a few of them from making a getaway in a stereotypical 1980s rape-wagon. Robocop, with eleven seconds to spare, decides to get rid of the explosives by throwing them really high in the air, where the contents safely explode overhead and totally don't send shrapnel raining down on innocent citizens below.
After a still exterior jump-cut which appears to feature a poster of a topless woman lets us know we're back at the precinct, Robocop recounts his "prime directives," which irritates the station sergeant who believes OCP never should have made cyborg cops to begin with and that those no-good ruffians wouldn't have even set off the damn dynamite had that walking refrigerator powered by Peter Weller guts not intervened. From there, we hop to an OCP boardroom meeting, where the metal-fisted (literally) Dr. McNamara says that Robocop is causing too much collateral damage and it's time to bring out the old enforcement drones as replacements. Cue the all new ED-260 traffic control guards, which are basically the ED-209 sentries from the first movie, albeit with red and green lights welded onto them. As you'd expect, the unit tends to overreact when people make illegal U-turns, and before long, its rampaging down the streets of the Motor City, machine gunning people for not using their blinkers.
Following the embarrassing incident, Dr. McNamara comes up with a pretty creative way to save face. Traveling to the local arcade - complete with coin-ops titled Rambo and Cobra - he throws down a briefcase full of cash before the Vandals (it's never explained how they got out of jail for the blood bank heist, however, nor why the fuck they have a robotic wiener dog in their gang) and tells them he'll supply them with all of the high-tech weaponry they need to embark upon a rampage across Detroit. The idea, essentially, is to convince his Omni Consumer Products higher-ups that the crime level in town is so out-of-control that Robocop alone can't handle the volume, thus necessitating the roll-out of those aforementioned ED-260 bots.
This being a children's cartoon, their mayhem is limited to pretty PG-stuff, like driving dune buggies through department stores and setting teddy bears and Voltron action figures on fire. Still, it's more than enough tomfoolery to rouse the ire of the stereotypical black police chief, who speaks almost entirely in sports metaphors. After inquiring to the whereabouts of Robocop, we learn he is downstairs, having an "upgrade" installed by technician Dr. Tyler, who gets into a brief argument with Lewis, who accuses her firmware patches of wiping the "humanity" out of Robo's brain.
The Vandals - now equipped with all sorts of high-end weapons, including electro-shock gloves, chainsaws and even a pair of boots that can cause mini-earthquakes - are causing a ruckus at a shopping mall, and the local police are no match for their, uh, bowling balls. Thankfully, Robocop shows up and uses his expert marksmanship to shoot down a pile of twisted metal to create a makeshift kennel for a cyborg dachshund (no, really), but LOLOOPS! He ends up getting crushed under a pile of rubble, complete with his arm popping off.
We see that damn exterior department matte painting bumper (the third time this episode!) and Dr. Tyler says Robocop may have to go offline for good. This causes Lewis to kvetch about being responsible for Murphy's second demise. For like, two seconds.
At an OCP meeting, McNamara (boy, I wonder where that name came from?) shows the suits news clips of the Vandals royally fucking up the mall. Apparently, they've acquired jet-boosted vehicles, which kind of begs the question - couldn't the OCP auditors easily trace all of the money used to fund the crime spree back to McNamara, or is he pulling some Superman III/Office Space secret account shit on us?
Using God knows how much money from God knows what funding streams, the hoodlums have managed to build a giant bulldozer-type weapon, which they use to break into the Federal Reserve and steal gold bars. Interestingly enough, they don't encounter the mysterious oil-drum headed mastermind from The American Dream, which alone makes this cartoon a far more realistic take on central banking and fiat capital.
A half-powered Robocop shows up, and he's immediately knocked out by a steel beam. Lewis makes the save by tossing a smoke grenade in the bulldozer, which additionally gives Robo some time to recharge his batteries. Assailed by thugs, Robocop is mercilessly set ablaze and chainsawed - which, yeah, isn't exactly something you saw happening to the protagonists in that many other late 1980s cartoons. Eventually, though, he powers up to full capacity and starts tossing thugs around like lawn darts. Using one of those handy, dandy steel beams just lying all over the place, he manages to send the bulldozer operator off-course, retrieve his handgun and with his impeccable sharpshooting skills, make the heavy machinery's gas tank explode. And in true 1980s cartoon fashion, despite all of the wanton carnage going on, not only does no one get killed, no one is even seriously injured.
With the crime wave officially halted, OCP reneges on its plans to introduce the new ED-260 models, with a distraught McNamara vowing revenge and to expose Robocop as nothing more than a pile of "nuts and bolts." Back at the office, the shouty Afro-American chief keeps using sports analogies and Dr. Tyler chides Robocop for going back out into battle knowing he could have been damaged beyond repair. She orders him to hit the electro-charger chair thingy ASAP. "You can't keep a good man down," Lewis states, to which Tyler responds "or a good machine." Cue a somewhat out-of-character smirk from Robocop, and this one is all over.
All in all, the Robocop cartoon series - which lasted just one season - was somewhere between better than average and almost great. The show was certainly prone to all of the late 1980s cartoon tropes and thematic devices - with hyena-laughing villains knocking off cookie factories and slapstick humor replacing all of the psychopathic bad guys butchering police officers and satirical gore of the first flick - but it nonetheless had its moments of brilliance. Beating I, Robot to the punch by about 15 years, one episode dealt with rampant anti-robot discrimination sweeping Detroit, complete with the appearance of a hooded, cyborg-hating sect that acted, and looked, just like the Ku Klux Klan, while another dealt with Robocop going rogue to take down some politically-untouchable corporate polluters (which, as fate would have it, predicted the mass contamination of Flint, Michigan's water resources almost 30 years in advance.) The series finale even threw one of the biggest curve balls in animated TV history, when it was revealed that the leader of the Vandals was none other than Clarence goddamn Boddicker himself, who, somehow, had managed to survive having his trachea ripped out with a data spike at the tail end of the first Robo-picture.
Granted, the short-lived 'toon was really nothing more than a shameless excuse to market tie-in action figures, but to be fair, those action figures were pretty bitchin'. I mean, those motherfuckers doubled as cap pistols, and one of the toys sported a Hitler mustache ... sigh, if only I knew where I could've bought those little translucent blocks that were in EVERY toy commercial in the 1980s, I would have been in elementary school heaven. The Robo-mania would die down for awhile, but there was no corresponding toy line or animated revival by the time the somewhat-under-appreciated Robocop 2 hit theaters in 1990. Looking back on it, the '88 series definitely would have lent itself to an awesome - if not impossibly expensive - live-action Robocop sequel. I mean, who WOULDN'T have paid good money to watch Buckaroo Banzai wearing a refrigerator shoot it out with OCP-hired techno-goons with chainsaws and electro-death gloves welded to their hands? That's right, nobody who isn't a goddamn communist, that's who.
Following the box office disaster that was Robocop 3, Alex Murphy and pals were relegated to a crappy, no-budget live-action syndicated series that was redeemed ONLY by the fact that it featured Roddy Piper played a recurring vigilante superhero. The character got a second shot at animated stardom with 1998's Robocop: Alpha Command, which lasted about 40 episodes. Alas, I've never seen any of them and good God, will my girlfriend probably leave me if I told her I needed to invest a full weekend to binge-watching something intended for latchkey children at the beginning of the dotcom boom.
The fate of this particular Robo-toon? Well, the Wikipedia says it got a limited video release in the early, early '90s, but due to the restrictive nature of the media format, it only included three episodes. The original cartoon ultimately did get a DVD release in the mid-2000s, but it appears it was limited to the U.K.
So - unless you were one of those rare souls that had the original-syndicated television shows taped on VHS - it was pretty much impossible for us Yanks to watch the program for a good twenty years. Alas, the same way technology saved Alex Murphy from the icy sepulcher, the Intrawebs brought this antiquated bundle of nostalgia back from the dead. Thanks to the miracle of streaming video and Google's relaxed enforcement of copyright law, you can now watch every episode of Robo '88 online for free, anytime you want...
... you know, if you are a criminal and shit. And we all know how Robocop feels about criminals, don't we?
The pilot episode, titled "Crime Wave," introduces us the series' primary antagonists, a gaggle of criminal mischief-makers named the Vandals who share more than a passing resemblance to the Cretins from the Class of Nuke 'Em High franchise. Their shenanigans begin with a heist of the OCP-branded blood bank - why plasma in Future Detroit is so guldarn valuable, however, the episode never tells us. Carrying laser weapons, the scoundrels tell the po-po to kiss their "big toes" and threaten to blow the building sky high. They set an I.E.D. to go off in 12 minutes (not real time, of course), and here comes Robocop and his sidekick Officer Lewis to shoot the guns out of the bad guys' hands and prevent a few of them from making a getaway in a stereotypical 1980s rape-wagon. Robocop, with eleven seconds to spare, decides to get rid of the explosives by throwing them really high in the air, where the contents safely explode overhead and totally don't send shrapnel raining down on innocent citizens below.
 |
| Believe it or not, it does look like the cartoon included the full frontal female nudity of the source material, though. |
Following the embarrassing incident, Dr. McNamara comes up with a pretty creative way to save face. Traveling to the local arcade - complete with coin-ops titled Rambo and Cobra - he throws down a briefcase full of cash before the Vandals (it's never explained how they got out of jail for the blood bank heist, however, nor why the fuck they have a robotic wiener dog in their gang) and tells them he'll supply them with all of the high-tech weaponry they need to embark upon a rampage across Detroit. The idea, essentially, is to convince his Omni Consumer Products higher-ups that the crime level in town is so out-of-control that Robocop alone can't handle the volume, thus necessitating the roll-out of those aforementioned ED-260 bots.
This being a children's cartoon, their mayhem is limited to pretty PG-stuff, like driving dune buggies through department stores and setting teddy bears and Voltron action figures on fire. Still, it's more than enough tomfoolery to rouse the ire of the stereotypical black police chief, who speaks almost entirely in sports metaphors. After inquiring to the whereabouts of Robocop, we learn he is downstairs, having an "upgrade" installed by technician Dr. Tyler, who gets into a brief argument with Lewis, who accuses her firmware patches of wiping the "humanity" out of Robo's brain.
 |
| You know what's sorely missing from today's cartoons? Sociopaths with chainsaws. |
The Vandals - now equipped with all sorts of high-end weapons, including electro-shock gloves, chainsaws and even a pair of boots that can cause mini-earthquakes - are causing a ruckus at a shopping mall, and the local police are no match for their, uh, bowling balls. Thankfully, Robocop shows up and uses his expert marksmanship to shoot down a pile of twisted metal to create a makeshift kennel for a cyborg dachshund (no, really), but LOLOOPS! He ends up getting crushed under a pile of rubble, complete with his arm popping off.
We see that damn exterior department matte painting bumper (the third time this episode!) and Dr. Tyler says Robocop may have to go offline for good. This causes Lewis to kvetch about being responsible for Murphy's second demise. For like, two seconds.
At an OCP meeting, McNamara (boy, I wonder where that name came from?) shows the suits news clips of the Vandals royally fucking up the mall. Apparently, they've acquired jet-boosted vehicles, which kind of begs the question - couldn't the OCP auditors easily trace all of the money used to fund the crime spree back to McNamara, or is he pulling some Superman III/Office Space secret account shit on us?
Using God knows how much money from God knows what funding streams, the hoodlums have managed to build a giant bulldozer-type weapon, which they use to break into the Federal Reserve and steal gold bars. Interestingly enough, they don't encounter the mysterious oil-drum headed mastermind from The American Dream, which alone makes this cartoon a far more realistic take on central banking and fiat capital.
A half-powered Robocop shows up, and he's immediately knocked out by a steel beam. Lewis makes the save by tossing a smoke grenade in the bulldozer, which additionally gives Robo some time to recharge his batteries. Assailed by thugs, Robocop is mercilessly set ablaze and chainsawed - which, yeah, isn't exactly something you saw happening to the protagonists in that many other late 1980s cartoons. Eventually, though, he powers up to full capacity and starts tossing thugs around like lawn darts. Using one of those handy, dandy steel beams just lying all over the place, he manages to send the bulldozer operator off-course, retrieve his handgun and with his impeccable sharpshooting skills, make the heavy machinery's gas tank explode. And in true 1980s cartoon fashion, despite all of the wanton carnage going on, not only does no one get killed, no one is even seriously injured.
With the crime wave officially halted, OCP reneges on its plans to introduce the new ED-260 models, with a distraught McNamara vowing revenge and to expose Robocop as nothing more than a pile of "nuts and bolts." Back at the office, the shouty Afro-American chief keeps using sports analogies and Dr. Tyler chides Robocop for going back out into battle knowing he could have been damaged beyond repair. She orders him to hit the electro-charger chair thingy ASAP. "You can't keep a good man down," Lewis states, to which Tyler responds "or a good machine." Cue a somewhat out-of-character smirk from Robocop, and this one is all over.
 |
| And Alex Murphy gives that sweet scientist ass his thumbs-up of approval... |
All in all, the Robocop cartoon series - which lasted just one season - was somewhere between better than average and almost great. The show was certainly prone to all of the late 1980s cartoon tropes and thematic devices - with hyena-laughing villains knocking off cookie factories and slapstick humor replacing all of the psychopathic bad guys butchering police officers and satirical gore of the first flick - but it nonetheless had its moments of brilliance. Beating I, Robot to the punch by about 15 years, one episode dealt with rampant anti-robot discrimination sweeping Detroit, complete with the appearance of a hooded, cyborg-hating sect that acted, and looked, just like the Ku Klux Klan, while another dealt with Robocop going rogue to take down some politically-untouchable corporate polluters (which, as fate would have it, predicted the mass contamination of Flint, Michigan's water resources almost 30 years in advance.) The series finale even threw one of the biggest curve balls in animated TV history, when it was revealed that the leader of the Vandals was none other than Clarence goddamn Boddicker himself, who, somehow, had managed to survive having his trachea ripped out with a data spike at the tail end of the first Robo-picture.
Granted, the short-lived 'toon was really nothing more than a shameless excuse to market tie-in action figures, but to be fair, those action figures were pretty bitchin'. I mean, those motherfuckers doubled as cap pistols, and one of the toys sported a Hitler mustache ... sigh, if only I knew where I could've bought those little translucent blocks that were in EVERY toy commercial in the 1980s, I would have been in elementary school heaven. The Robo-mania would die down for awhile, but there was no corresponding toy line or animated revival by the time the somewhat-under-appreciated Robocop 2 hit theaters in 1990. Looking back on it, the '88 series definitely would have lent itself to an awesome - if not impossibly expensive - live-action Robocop sequel. I mean, who WOULDN'T have paid good money to watch Buckaroo Banzai wearing a refrigerator shoot it out with OCP-hired techno-goons with chainsaws and electro-death gloves welded to their hands? That's right, nobody who isn't a goddamn communist, that's who.
Following the box office disaster that was Robocop 3, Alex Murphy and pals were relegated to a crappy, no-budget live-action syndicated series that was redeemed ONLY by the fact that it featured Roddy Piper played a recurring vigilante superhero. The character got a second shot at animated stardom with 1998's Robocop: Alpha Command, which lasted about 40 episodes. Alas, I've never seen any of them and good God, will my girlfriend probably leave me if I told her I needed to invest a full weekend to binge-watching something intended for latchkey children at the beginning of the dotcom boom.
The fate of this particular Robo-toon? Well, the Wikipedia says it got a limited video release in the early, early '90s, but due to the restrictive nature of the media format, it only included three episodes. The original cartoon ultimately did get a DVD release in the mid-2000s, but it appears it was limited to the U.K.
So - unless you were one of those rare souls that had the original-syndicated television shows taped on VHS - it was pretty much impossible for us Yanks to watch the program for a good twenty years. Alas, the same way technology saved Alex Murphy from the icy sepulcher, the Intrawebs brought this antiquated bundle of nostalgia back from the dead. Thanks to the miracle of streaming video and Google's relaxed enforcement of copyright law, you can now watch every episode of Robo '88 online for free, anytime you want...
... you know, if you are a criminal and shit. And we all know how Robocop feels about criminals, don't we?
Monday, August 18, 2014
B-Movie Review: "Pin" (1988)
It's a weird psychosexual thriller from Canada about a dude who thinks a medical mannequin is alive. And it's actually one of the better horror films from the late '80s you've never heard of before.
I've been Jonesing for Halloween since February, and with the All Hallow's Eve season (which, as far as I am concerned, lasts from Labor Day until Thanksgiving) soon upon us, I decided to drudge up an old VHS favorite for all of you kooky kids.
Periodically, I will get comments from dudes asking me for a decent, unsung horror flick from the '80s, that probably WON'T make their girlfriends think they are psycho barfola perverts. Indeed, it's a rare animal, that Degenerate Cinema heyday, safe for girlfriend-consumption horror flick that don't suck, but "Pin" is certainly just such a celluloid endangered species.
The film starts with a bunch of kids eyeing this creepy old abandoned three-story house. One of the kids gets dared to climb the trellis, and he peeks behind a white sheet, uncovering what appears to be a very life-like dummy. Then, the dummy blinks, and seems to telepathically tell the kid to vamoose. Scared shitless, the kid runs for his life, and we flash back to 15 years prior.
So, there's this super-white family out in the burbs. The dad listens to Perry Como, and he makes his two kids -- Leon and Ursula -- count backwards from 100 by sevens every evening. He's a doctor, who keeps a very creepy medical dummy -- you know, the exposed tissue Vitruvian Man type mannequin -- in his office. As something of a ventriloquist, he's convinced his two kids that the dummy, named Pin (get it?) is actually alive, and he uses it as a kind of prop to discuss sex ed with them.
The mom of the family is your hyper-bitchy OCD type, who slaps Leon around for tracking mud in the house. Some of the neighborhood kids make fun of him, so he decides to head to his dad's office, after hours, to seek some sage advice from the dummy. A nurse walks into the room, so Leon has to hide. And then, the NURSE PROCEEDS TO HAVE SEX WITH THE MEDICAL DUMMY. Watching in rapt horror/awe, this apparently turns Leon into some kind of grade-school psychosexual maniac.
Leon goes home, slaps Ursula for calling Pin a dummy, and then his mama takes away one of his girlie mags. This leads to a lengthy talk about the birds and the bees from papa, and from there, we skip a few years into Leon and Ursula's high school days.
Leon, who now looks like Ed Cullen, is basically an asexual metrosexual, while Ursula -- who bares more than a passing resemblance to Taylor Swift -- is pretty much the town slut. While Ursula and her boyfriend of the week make the sign of the odd-toed ungulate in the backseat of a Volvo, Leon decides to "rescue" his little sis and pummel the crap out of her beau. Then, Ursula tells her sibling her period is late.
 |
| ...and just when you thought you were well-adjusted, too! |
Diagetically, Ursula and Leon are supposed to be 15, but I'm pretty sure both actors were about 30 when this thing was filmed. Hoo-ray for Dawson Casting! The two go to Pin for some advice about Ursula probably being preggers, and what do you know, now Leon is throwing his voice to make Pin "talk." Following an OB-GYN check up from Doctor Dad, the two kids start looking into college applications. Then, the father heads to his office, and hey, Leon is there, just talking to Pin like a weirdo.
Creeped out considerably, dad takes the mannequin with him while he and his wife drive like maniacs to a conference. Of course, they wind up crashing (due to Pin's meddling, perhaps?) and Ursula and Leon have to cope with being orphans. Apparently, they're not too saddened by their ma and pa's passing, as they celebrate their memory by yanking all of the plastic covering from the manor furniture and eating pizza.
At this point, Leon decides to put Pin in a tuxedo, and Ursula coincidentally decides to start doing some research on schizophrenia. Then, Aunt Dorothy decides to move in, and Leon moves Pin into the attic. One night, they hatch a plan to scare Dorothy to death, by leaving Pin in her bed like a horse head. Of course, the stunt gives their auntie a heart attack, and once more, Leon and Ursula find themselves the sole occupants of the spacious residence.
Leon makes beef stroganoff for dinner, and wheels out Pin, who know has realistic human skin and a blonde wig stapled to his plastic noggin. Ursula makes a snide comment, and Leon DEMANDS she apologize to Pin.
Working at the library, some dude named Stan hits on Ursula, and they go out on a date. Envious, Leon exacts revenge by going out on a date with some random skank. Leon and his gal pal start making out, and then Leon sends PIN IN A MOTORIZED WHEELCHAIR TO ATTACK HER. Ursula gets home early and saves her, and tells Leon that Stan is coming over for dinner the next evening.
At dinner, Leon brings out Pin and then, he recites a poem he wrote about raping his sister. Needless to say, Stan thinks his girl's sibling is cuckoo bananas, but Ursula doesn't want to do anything because she knows he'll wind up in a nuthouse.
So, Leon invites Stan over for drinks the day after. Of course, the hooch is poisoned, allowing Leon to pummel his sister's boyfriend half to death with a horse statue. Freaked out, he goes to Pin for advice, who tells him to hide the evidence. Leon then wraps up Stan in plastic and buries him under a woodpile.
Ursula gets home, and Leon lies about Stan's whereabouts. During dinner, Leon talks about dad a lot, and then she hears Stan's wristwatch go off, which wouldn't you know it, was the one piece of evidence Leon forgot to pick up!
This leads to the film's climactic death struggle, ending with Ursula lunging at her brother with a fire axe. Police then find Stan's not quite dead body, and the film concludes with Ursula visiting Leon in an insane asylum, where he's basically turned himself into Pin.
And...fin.
The film was directed and written by this Canuck named Sandor Stern, whose worked on a ton of TV shows and a few of the "Amityville Horror" flicks. Interestingly enough, the movie is based on a novel penned by Andrew Neiderman, who was also the dude who wrote "The Devil's Advocate."
The guy who played Leon, David Hewlitt, has gone on to have a pretty prolific career in sci-fi tinged fare, probably best known for his appearances in "Cube," "Splice" and the "Stargate" TV show. Cynthia Preston, who played Ursula, has been in a million billion TV shows, probably best known for her stint on "General Hospital." Her last big movie role was in 2013's "Carrie" remake, which as a reminder, sucked.
Oh, and the dad in the movie? He was played by Terry O'Quinn, whose probably best known for "Lost" and his role in "The Stepfather" films. And according to the Wikipedia, the guy who actually voiced Pin was Jonathan Banks, who is probably better known as Mike from "Breaking Bad."
Over the years, "Pin" has garnered something of a cult following, and for good reason. While it's hardly anything I'd consider the decade's best, it's certainly a well-above average horror flick that eschews the cartoonish gore for a more suspenseful, semi-psychological thriller pace.
This is one of those rare films that actually manages to give me the willies. Really, the trick to a good horror movie is the build-up: I mean, once all of the crazy shit starts happening, it's too chaotic to really be considered horrifying anymore. "Pin" really excels at building up dread, as Leon's psychosis delightfully grows from "mildly crazy" to "oh shit, this muddafuggah's out of his gourd." Pretty much the entire movie, there's this really uncomfortable feeling up in the air, where you just KNOW the dude's going to snap and his sister's too nice to really address it early on.
It may not be "Exorcist III" levels of scary, but the film no doubt knows how to give you the heebie-jeebies. In short? It's pretty much the perfect pre-Halloween flick to get you in the mood for what is undoubtedly the best time of the year.
Three stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
