Cameron's Closet (Armand Mastroianni, 1988)

Cameron's Closet, a decent little horror-fantasy with good performances and an unusual story, has an odd tone that may have kept it in obscurity. The movie at its heart is family-friendly horror, one of those gateway PG or PG-13 horror films suitable for, and about, kids but with enough menace and bite to please the grownups. However, Cameron's Closet goes full-on R-rated splatter horror with the death sequences, and the movie is full of decapitations, burning out of eyeballs, slashings, and deliberate falls from great heights. This weird mixture of a movie may be a little soft for hardcore horror freaks and too intense for kids, but I think it's worth checking out, and the strong cast sells the mystical hokum while grounding the rest of the story in believable human behavior.

I was a little worried in the opening moments, when Scott Curtis as Cameron speaks in that kind of stilted, overly cutesy child actor voice that makes most child actors so hard to watch, but he turns in a naturalistic, real-kid performance in the rest of the movie. That opening scene, narrated by Cameron's father Owen Lansing (Tab Hunter), lets us know right away that Cameron has telekinetic abilities and psychic premonitions and can manifest things with his mind. Owen is a scientist studying that kind of thing with his colleague, professor Ben Majors (Chuck McCann). The research seems to be going great until we enter the present moment. Cameron is at his home, playing with his toys in his large bedroom closet, but Owen is downstairs, looking sweaty and nervous. He calls Ben, who is also sweaty and nervous (and drunk and wearing an extremely lived-in bathrobe). Ben tells him to destroy the research, do that thing they talked about doing, and then leave him alone forever. As Owen pulls out a huge cleaver and goes to his son's bedroom, that thing they talked about doing becomes horribly clear. As usual with Ben and Owen, though, making plans and carrying them out successfully are two very different things.

As a result of events I won't spoil, Cameron is sent to live with his mother, the loving but sometimes irresponsible Dory (Kim Lankford). Unfortunately for Cameron, Dory's dipshit, freeloading, wannabe actor boyfriend Bob (Gary Hudson) has also moved in with Dory. Bob sucks, and he and Cameron constantly butt heads. Cameron has another large bedroom closet at Dory's place, and whatever weirdness was happening in the closet at his dad's home has followed him to his mother's. Things come to a head with Bob in ways I also won't spoil, and two people enter Cameron's life who become surrogate parental figures for the troubled, scared little boy: detective Sam Talliaferro (Cotter Smith, who I eventually recognized as a cast member from two of my favorite recent TV shows, Mindhunter and The Americans; his dark black hair in this earlier role threw me off at first) and psychologist Nora Haley (Thirtysomething's Mel Harris). Most of these characters come together to help Cameron, who has inadvertently caused all this crazy drama by accidentally summoning a demon. Oh shiiiiiiit! 

That demon has been designed by Carlo Rambaldi, the late special effects artist and creature designer whose credits include E.T., the sex monster in Zulawski's Possession, several Bava and Argento movies, Paul Morrissey's Dracula and Frankenstein movies for Warhol, the '76 King Kong, Alien (assisting Giger with the design of the creature's head), Conan the Destroyer, and David Lynch's Dune. He's clearly working with a much smaller budget on Cameron's Closet, and the demon is less impressive than the aforementioned creations, but he makes it work as the kind of thing a kid would dream up based on an idol in his father's possession. 

Director Armand Mastroianni (no relation to Marcello) directed several horror movies and horror TV shows in the '80s before focusing almost exclusively on television since the early '90s (with the exception of, uh, The Celestine Prophecy, the 2006 movie adaptation of the bestseller that annoying people used to tell you to read before they all got Da Vinci Code fever). His first film, the 1980 slasher He Knows You're Alone, was also the first film for Tom Hanks. His TV credits include Tales from the Darkside, Friday the 13th: The Series, Nightmare Cafe, and, uh, Touched by an Angel, and a couple dozen TV movies and miniseries. 

Cameron's Closet has more of a mainstream late '80s-early '90s TV look than a cinematic feel, but Mastroianni grabs the occasional striking image and paces the film well. The characters feel like real people, which may have something to do with the screenwriter Gary Brandner adapting his own novel and has a lot to do with actors like Smith and Harris who know how to avoid overplaying their parts. My wife made the excellent points that the Dory character got to retain her human flaws of drinking too much, being a little irresponsible, and having shitty taste in boyfriends while also being portrayed as a loving mother who comes through when it counts without being punished or blamed by the filmmakers for those flaws. The character of Nora also retains her professionalism and competence throughout, and though there is a mutual attraction between her and Sam, Nora never compromises her position as Sam's psychologist by acting on those feelings, even though most movies with a psychologist character (especially in this era) tend to show that character sleeping with a patient because the generic rules of moviedom demand that the male and female leads sleep together. It's nice to see the avoidance of cliches.

My verdict: Cameron's Closet isn't bad. Yeah, that's not a glowing rave, but it's got a good cast, an offbeat plot, and some sweet demon kills. Give it a whirl if you're looking for some under-the-radar '80s horror.