Craze (Freddie Francis, 1974)

Craze is by no means a classic of cinema, but it stars Jack Palance as a British antique dealer (sans accent), leader of a coven of black magic witches, and worshiper of the African idol Chuku, which he keeps in the basement of his store and delivers human sacrifices to, and if that doesn't sound like something you want to watch, then I don't know what the hell to tell you. Besides Palance, we also get a stacked cast of British character actors and personalities, including Diana Dors, Trevor Howard, Michael Jayston, Kathleen Byron, Hugh Griffith (and his eyebrows), Edith Evans, and Julie Ege (okay, she's Norwegian, but she was a Bond girl and starred in many British cult films).

Directed by the legendary Freddie Francis (more on him later), Craze is massively entertaining, with a hilarious scenery-chewing Palance performance. I love that he doesn't even attempt a British accent except for a couple of lines and the pronunciation of "garage" as "gair-awzh." A weird Palance British accent would have been so distracting. Instead, we get unadulterated, high-octane Palance with a few odd British pronunciations sprinkled in for crazy flavor. I thought his character was an American ex-pat in London until he said "garage" two-thirds of the way into the running time. I support this choice. It makes a weird movie even weirder.

Palance plays Neal Mottram, the owner of a high-end antiques shop in London. He lives in a flat above the store along with his assistant and sole employee Ronnie (Martin Potter), a young man he rescued from a hardscrabble life of grifting and trick-turning on the streets. Neal is behind on the bills and deep in debt, and he may have to close the shop if things don't turn around. He's not as worried as Ronnie, though, because he and his coven have been offering blood sacrifices to Chuku. No deaths yet, just some voluntary bloodletting from a sexy lady in the coven, but Neal knows Chuku will provide.

When an ugly encounter with a woman who was kicked out of the coven accidentally turns deadly, Neal offers her soul to Chuku. An unexpected financial windfall happens soon after, turning Ronnie from a Chuku skeptic into a possible believer and kicking Neal's craziness up several notches. Neal believes the secret to serving Chuku properly and receiving his rewards is murder, and lots of it!

Neal starts searching for vulnerable women he can kill in the name of Chuku. (As you can guess, it's a lot of fun to hear Jack Palance repeatedly say "Chuku.") Neal's murders run the gamut from poorly planned chaos to elaborately complicated schemes. To Neal, murder is jazz, baby. Devotion to Chuku is the goal, but the road to that goal changes from kill to kill depending on mood, circumstance, and feel.

These murders almost immediately bring Neal to the attention of detectives Wall and Russet (Michael Jayston and Percy Herbert), who decide pretty quickly that this arrogant weirdo is a prime suspect. Though a bit nervous in his first encounter with the detectives, Neal soon grows confident that Chuku will keep him from being arrested, so he begins to give zero effs about how he comes across to the police, lighting up his hand-rolled cigarettes, grinning smugly, making gallows-humor jokes, bouncing around wildly from mood to mood, just effin' and a-jeffin' all over the detectives' questions, even when grilled by the big boss, Superintendent Bellamy (Trevor Howard). Palance is so damn hilarious in these scenes.

As the insanity increases, so does the fun. Every supporting character gets a chance to show some personality, especially Diana Dors as a horny, cherry brandy-loving boarding house owner named Dolly Newman. Dors was about 15 years past her heyday as the Marilyn of the UK, but the rude comment Wall makes about her appearance took me aback. Not sure if that line was a cheap shot at Dors, an ironic joke due to her sexpot status in the previous decades, or just a character detail about Wall. Maybe all three? The cops in this movie are straight-up assholes, despite being correct about Neal.

Wrangling all this insanity and fun is Freddie Francis, one of the great cinematographers and the director of many '60s and '70s (and a few '80s) horror films that weren't afraid to be baroque, pulpy, lurid, shlocky, and/or rough around the edges. Francis' directing career includes Nightmare, The Evil of Frankenstein, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, The Deadly Bees, the infamous Trog (with Joan Crawford), Tales from the Crypt (the movie), The Creeping Flesh, and Son of Dracula. His final directorial effort was an episode of HBO's Tales from the Crypt in 1996.

His credits as cinematographer include Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Innocents, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Return to Oz, Glory, The Man in the Moon, Scorsese's Cape Fear, and three films for David Lynch, including his final film as a cinematographer (The Elephant Man, Dune, and The Straight Story). Oddly enough, Francis has 37 credits as director and 37 as cinematographer. He died in 2007.

The Curse (David Keith, 1987)

Directed by character actor David Keith from a screenplay loosely based on the H.P. Lovecraft story "The Colour out of Space" by A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 screenwriter David Chaskin and coproduced by Italian horror director Lucio Fulci (as Louis Fulci 😎) and Egyptian "rip-off king" Ovidio G. Assonitis (most famous for his Exorcist rip-off Beyond the Door), The Curse is a solid and unusual sci-fi/horror film with a good cast and mostly well-developed characters who get a lot of nice moments, most likely due to an actor being behind the camera.

Zack (Wil Wheaton, spelled "Will" in the credits), his sister Alice (Amy Wheaton, Wil's real-life sister), and his (probably widowed; the film is mercilessly light on exposition) mother Frances (Kathleen Jordon Gregory) live on a farm in rural Tennessee with Frances' second husband, humorless evangelical Christian and stern disciplinarian Nathan (Claude Akins) and Nathan's meathead idiot teenage son Cyrus (Malcolm Danare). Zack is understandably unhappy with his home life, and Frances is quietly not feeling too great about it either. We get little hints that the family was in dire straits after the absence of Zack and Alice's father and that Nathan saved them from homelessness, but his Bible-thumping and total lack of warmth are keeping Frances from getting any real affection, appreciation, or sexy times.

After being rebuffed by Nathan ("the man should approach the woman, not the other way around"), Frances finally gets some action from the hairy-backed, frequently shirtless hired man who's staying on the property while he installs a new well. It's unfortunately poor timing, because a damn meteor crashes onto the farm property while they're getting it on. Everyone rushes to the site, and Nathan sees his wife exit the hired man's place.

Zack runs to the home of the nearest neighbors, Forbes (Cooper Huckabee), the town doctor who also has a general scientific background, and Forbes' wife Esther (Hope North), a sexpot with plans to get the couple out of the country and back to the city, to tell them about the meteor. Forbes is stumped by the glowing orb that leaks brown goo when hammered into and suggests calling in the EPA. This doesn't sit well with Esther or the cigar-chomping Davidson (Steve Carlisle), a sleazy realtor, Chamber of Commerce president, and schmoozer who is in a secret business deal with Forbes and Esther to snatch up area farms that they can then sell at inflated prices, since Davidson has secret info that a dam is probably going to be constructed in the region. Forbes is a decent guy and a good doctor, but he's ready to move back to the city, so he reluctantly gets roped in to the scheme. When he needs more convincing, Esther gives him an oiled-up leg show, and he steps back in line. Our final major character, a Tennessee Valley River Authority surveyor named Willis, played by The Dukes of Hazzard's John Schneider, turns up in town shortly thereafter.

The meteor mysteriously dissolves just as mysteriously as it appeared, leaving the crops looking large, healthy, and abundant. Unfortunately, as soon as the apples, cabbages, and tomatoes are cut into, they leak disgusting brown goo or are filled with insects. Meanwhile, the horses, cows, and chickens start going crazy, the water tastes funny, everyone who drinks it starts getting weird sores on their faces, and Frances starts behaving very, very strangely.

Zack is a smart kid and quickly gives up drinking any water or eating any food that comes from the farm and its well, instead filling up his canteen from the hose outside Forbes and Esther's place and keeping himself and his sister fed with grocery store produce and cereal. Things start getting more and more insane, with Zack, Forbes, and Willis trying to get people to take notice and do something.

There are so many nice little character moments from most of the cast, and the Southern accents are legit instead of cartoonish. Even the non-Southerners in the cast do a decent job. Cyrus and Davidson are over-the-top exaggerated characters who supply the bulk of the comic relief, but the other actors deliver nuanced, layered performances that turn their characters into real people with real internal lives. Gregory, a Shakespearean theater actress in her only movie role (she died of stomach cancer the following year), gets so much to do in a part that many other filmmakers would have reduced to an underdeveloped mother role. I also need to point out the uncredited actor who plays Davidson's secretary. She has three brief, mostly wordless scenes, but she steals the damn movie. She's so great and so funny.

The Curse is definitely a b-movie, with some inconsistent special effects, a few dropped narrative threads (what happened to the hired man after the meteor landed?), and a definite late-'80s VHS vibe, and I'm OK with all that. I liked this one.

Yikes. I was just Googling some info about the filming locations and found Wil Wheaton's blog post from last year about his and his sister's hellish experience working on the movie (and the hellish experience of having abusive stage parents). Child labor laws were ignored, two crew members touched him inappropriately, and the producers and director sometimes resorted to bullying tactics to get the performances they wanted. Never Google anything about anything you enjoyed.