Curse of the Blue Lights (John Henry Johnson, 1988)

Time to bounce from the last post's professional, star-studded, Hollywood production values to a lovable little micro-indie shot in rural Colorado near Pueblo. Curse of the Blue Lights is a regional oddity, made by a mixture of amateurs, professionals, and aspiring professionals. The acting is awkward but enjoyable and the sound quality is rough, but the special effects are pretty good for the budget, the director has a decent ability to frame shots, and the story is pretty damn weird. The small town let's-put-on-a-show vibes are strong here, and I find that endearing.

John Henry Johnson was obsessed with film and photography from a young age and grew up with a local showbiz father, Buddy Johnson, who played in a band called the Colorado Rangers and hosted local and regional radio and TV shows in Colorado from the 1940s to the '60s. The younger Johnson made his own amateur short films, worked as a cameraman for local television, did PA, crew, and cinematography work on regional commercials and educational and industrial films, and helped out with PA and crew work on Hollywood TV and film productions shooting in Colorado. After directing a couple of hour-long shorts about Damon Runyon and Zebulon Pike (one of which was narrated by Burgess Meredith), he decided to make a horror film for his feature debut, using several Pueblo-area urban legends as the basis of his story.

I give Johnson credit for not churning out another generic slasher film, but I'm not sure anyone knows just what the hell Curse of the Blue Lights is about in any comprehensive way. Part of this confusion is no doubt caused by the poor sound, which renders one supporting character mostly incomprehensible, and the prosthetics, which make it impossible for the actors wearing them to enunciate. Part of it is the wild plot, which blends a handful of urban legends to chaotic effect. Fortunately, most of our characters are clearly understood. Hey, it's low-budget filmmaking. Roll with it.

The film begins with a farmer working his crops on a sunny summer day. He spots something strange, stops his tractor, and checks it out. It's the mutilated body of a dog, covered in weird goo. While he's pondering this goo, the farmer is blindsided by a creep who has crawled inside his scarecrow. The scarecrow man shows no mercy. Ka-blammo, Johnson is coming in hot!

We jump to the night time. A group of early-twentysomethings are cruising the back roads, heading to an area called Blue Lights, a make-out spot for young couples and a great place for grease monkey burnouts to show each other their souped-up muscle cars. The spot is named after the mysterious blue lights frequently observed there, and the area is a hotbed of local folklore involving mysterious murders, alien visitations, and the preserved body of a prehistoric figure named the Muldoon Man.

Urban legend digression time. Blue Lights is a real Pueblo teen make-out spot, and there have been several reports of mysterious blue lights in the area. The Muldoon Man was an elaborate hoax perpetrated by Cardiff Giant hoaxer George Hull, P.T. Barnum, and W.A. Conant, and a few other accomplices, in the 1870s. The multi-state grift involved New Yorker Hull creating a prehistoric man out of rock, bone, plaster, blood, and meat and baking it in a kiln in Pennsylvania. He shipped it by train to Colorado Springs, where ex-Barnum employee Conant picked it up and buried it near Pueblo in an area known for its fossils. Barnum, then living in Denver, arrived with his "experts" to verify ol' Muldoon, named after Greco-Roman wrestling champion and soon to be one of the earliest pro wrestling stars William Muldoon. Muldoon Man toured the country, from Colorado back to New York, until one of the grift's Big Apple investors spilled the beans to the newspapers after suspecting he wasn't going to get paid. Digression over.

Our make-out couples and hot-rod burnouts see some blue lights and decide to follow them, armed with flashlights and a gun. The lights lead them to a partially buried Muldoon-like figure and an engraved stone amulet (everyone in the movie calls it a disc), which they steal. They decide they need a pickup to excavate Muldoon but are busted for speeding on their way back to town. They tell the cop the Muldoon story, and he goes back with them to check it out. Hey, guess what? Muldoon is gone. The cop gets pissed and gives the driver a speeding ticket.

Our intrepid youthful heroes briefly bemoan the ticket before they carry on investigating, following the tracks of the missing Muldoon to a cemetery and into a crypt, which leads them to an underground tunnel connected to the basement of a nearby mansion, where some ancient damn ghouls are melting bodies, including the farmer's, into a goo that they are feeding through a pipe into the Muldoon Man's mouth. There's a lot going on in that sentence. Once they get the disc back and Muldoon inhales enough goo, the prophecy will be fulfilled. This prophecy involves Muldoon somehow destroying every human so evil will reign. I don't know if these ghouls have looked into what humans have been up to for most of their existence, but, ghoul buddies, evil already reigns. You don't need ancient discs and elaborate goo pipes. The work is done, dudes.

Anyway, one of our ragtag group of young folks sneezes, the ghouls see him, and the chase is on. Will they eliminate our heroes one by one, regain the disc, and reanimate the Muldoon Man? I won't reveal that, but I will tell you that the movie also involves zombies, a witch, magic mirrors, fencing, cute '80s outfits, cinema's slowest sword fight, nitroglycerine explosions, possession, and a vintage '80s Colorado bedroom, decorated with posters of Bruce Lee, Spock, several different beer brands, bikini babes, and the ski resort at Keystone, and a stop sign with "WAR" spray painted on it. You know that bedroom is in the basement. (As a Midwesterner who has lived in Austin, TX, for 23 years, I miss partying in basements next to posters like these.)

Curse of the Blue Lights is a goofy little movie, and I enjoyed it, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the regional indie. Most of the people who worked on this film were nonprofessional friends and locals who never worked on another movie, but cast member Tom Massmann did make a go of it in the industry, acting and producing on shorts and indies and working as a stuntman on some pretty big TV shows. Special effects artist Mark Sisson also went on to a successful career, moving to Hollywood after Blue Lights and working on the fourth and fifth Nightmare on Elm Street movies, as well as C.H.U.D. II, Beastmaster II, The Resurrected, Windtalkers, Gettysburg, and The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The film also benefited from having Michael Spatola as a makeup consultant. I'm not sure who had the connections to Spatola, who had already been working in the industry for several years, but Spatola's CV includes The Return of the Living Dead I and II, House, Tremors, Alien Nation, Edward Scissorhands, Bride of Re-Animator, Predator 2, Stargate, Leviathan, Terminator 2, Iron Man 3, and several episodes of Tales from the Crypt. He currently runs a makeup and effects school in Hollywood.

After Blue Lights, Johnson moved to Los Angeles for four years, writing scripts and trying to get some directing work, but after hitting too many brick walls, he moved back to Colorado and embraced his other passion, fine art photography. He's worked steadily as a photographer and photography teacher ever since and has written a few books about photography and the life and career of his dad.

Damien: Omen II (Don Taylor, 1978)

The Omen was one of those glossy, big-budget horror films, with Hollywood money and distribution, big-name stars, and a veneer of mainstream respectability, but it also had a darkly wicked sense of humor, mercilessly savage death scenes, great atmosphere, and a top-notch Jerry Goldsmith score. For Hollywood horror, it's pretty damn solid. It was a huge hit, and plans were quickly put into place by Omen producer Harvey Bernhard to churn out a couple more sequels, though only composer Goldsmith and actor Leo McKern (in a brief role) return from the first film.

Damien, like most sequels, can't match the impact of the original, and director Don Taylor is a less accomplished visual stylist than the first film's director, Richard Donner (who was too busy filming Superman to take on this one), but the sequel has a lot going for it, including a better overall pace (the first film drags a bit in the return-to-Rome stretch in the middle), a couple of over-the-top nutso death scenes, and a pretty good cast. Taylor, a character actor and journeyman filmmaker who also directed Escape from the Planet of the Apes (the third film in the series), the '70s adaptations of Tom Sawyer and The Island of Dr. Moreau, and a whole bunch of episodic television, was hired after Damien had already begun filming, replacing Mike Hodges (also the co-screenwriter), who was fired a few weeks into the shoot.

It's fascinating to think about what the sequel could have been under Hodges' direction. He wanted to focus on the monstrous power corporations were increasingly having over politics and everyday life while tying it into the resurgence of apocalyptic religious hysteria, and he liked to spend a long time planning and setting up shots, angering the producers, who felt he was breaking the schedule and the budget and deemphasizing the horror movie thrills. Taylor, on the other hand, had a reputation for staying on schedule, coming in under budget, and doing what the studios wanted. Hodges, who also directed the original Get Carter, The Terminal Man, Flash Gordon (replacing a fired Nicolas Roeg), Black Rainbow, and Croupier, would have made a much more stylish film, but I also like the visceral, nuts-and-bolts Taylor approach, and he manages to capture the occasional beautiful shot, like the ice skaters in the snow from above (unless that one was left over from the few weeks of Hodges).

Though this film was released two years after the first Omen, Damien takes place seven years later. Our Antichrist demon-child is now approaching thirteen and has been adopted by his Chicago-based uncle and step-aunt after the deaths of his parents in the first film, played by Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. The adoptive parents are played by another famous woman named Lee, Lee Grant, and the original choice for the Gregory Peck role, William Holden. Holden summarily dismissed the first Omen offer by saying he didn't want to be in a devil movie. After seeing how much money that film and its second-choice star Peck made, Holden changed his tune and decided that he very much wanted to be in a devil movie. Even so, it's not one of my favorite Holden performances. He does a competent job, but you can tell he's not feeling this one the way he's feeling The Wild Bunch or Network. Grant, on the other hand, seems to be enjoying herself, and her character has a bit more to work with than Remick had.

Our new tween Damien (Jonathan Scott-Taylor) has an inexplicable British accent. Yes, Damien and his parents lived in England in the first film, but they were Americans (Peck played the newly appointed American ambassador to the UK), and he moved back to the States when he was still a small child after their deaths. Why the accent, guv'nor? Cor blimey! (I apologize to any and all UK readers.) The answer to this not-really-a-mystery is that Scott-Taylor is British. He was the actor the producers liked best, he looks a lot like the actor from the first movie, and he can do the Satanic stare almost as well as the little scamp from Omen number one, so let him have his British accent, is what I assume happened.

Damien has bounced from one exceedingly comfortable home, the child of a powerful political appointee, to another. His uncle Richard (Holden) is an executive at a multi-national corporation whose headquarters are in Chicago. Another exec, Paul (Robert Foxworth), has a gross but popular plan to control the world's food supply, with the only thing standing in his way the moral opposition of the company's aging CEO, Bill Atherton (Lew Ayres), playing perhaps the most farfetched character in film, the corporate CEO with ethics and a conscience.

Paul takes an unholy interest in Damien, as does the newest administrator, Sgt. Neff (Lance Henriksen), at the elite military academy for rich legacy kids that Damien and his cousin/brother Mark (Lucas Donat) attend. Damien, who'd mostly forgotten about being the Antichrist and was enjoying regular pre-teen life (or at least as regular as a spoiled rich kid at an elite military school who has weird occult powers sometimes can enjoy), relearns his Satanic purpose from Neff and Paul and begins to unleash hell, just in time for puberty. Unfortunately, Henriksen's role was scaled back by Taylor. Hodges was going to do a lot more with him.

You know what you're going to get if you've seen the first film. Someone learns that Damien is the Antichrist, tries to stop the Devil's plan or warn someone who can help, and gets crushed, devil-style. There are two surprisingly uninteresting death scenes in this film, but they are balanced out by two of the craziest, including a fantastic elevator scene. There's not much powerful opposition, narratively. Fighting the devil is a bit like the Mulkey Brothers trying to fight the Road Warriors. You will get the holy living fuck beat out of you, and it's not even close.

What can I say? This is a solid sequel. Not great, not terrible, legitimately entertaining, with a couple of thrilling moments. I didn't even mention the supporting roles for Allan Arbus, Sylvia Sidney, and, in his film debut, Meshach Taylor, as well as some fine work from some creepy crows, wrangled by the same animal trainer who handled the birds in The Birds. Is Damien: Omen II necessary? No, but what is? If you had a good time with the first one, you'll probably have a good time with this one. 

   

Revolt of the Zombies (Victor Halperin, 1936)

A bit creaky compared to director Victor Halperin's previous horror films, White Zombie and Supernatural, Revolt of the Zombies is nevertheless one of the most complicated scorned lover's revenge stories in the history of film. It gets off to a rough and awkward start, but after several mostly static scenes of people standing and talking in rooms, tents, and the great outdoors, the movie picks up quite a bit in its second half.

Beginning, as all love triangles do, in the Franco-Austrian frontier during World War I, Revolt of the Zombies opens with military linguist Armand (Dean Jagger) trying to convince his crusty superior that a Cambodian priest knows the secret of telepathic control and is able to turn the colonized Cambodian soldiers into fighting zombies or robots (the two terms are used interchangeably by the colonial Allied powers). No one's buying Armand's story, though his British friend and fellow Allied military mid-level bigwig, Clifford (Robert Noland), says Armand needs more confidence and killer instinct in his delivery and opines that between Armand's brains and his own ruthless determination, they'd make one powerful dude. We then briefly see those zombified Cambodians in action, taking bullets to the chest and continuing to fight, before returning to our multitude of scenes of people standing and talking. The bigwigs are finally convinced. The zombies/robots are real.

The priest is imprisoned by the colonial powers after he refuses to spill his zombie-making secrets to them, but he's stabbed to death in his cell by the sneaky General Mazovia (Roy D'Arcy, who makes the film's greatest faces), who then steals a parchment held by the priest containing a powerful secret, just not the zombification secret.

The colonial muckity-mucks, deciding zombified colonial armies are the key to winning the war and any future skirmishes, embark on an expedition to Angkor, Cambodia, to attempt to discover the elusive secret. Armand and Clifford are part of that expedition, along with French general Duval (George Cleveland) and his wisecracking daughter Claire (Dorothy Stone). Claire appears on the scene with a new hat, asking all the men how they like it. Armand immediately falls hard for Claire, but when Claire sees Clifford, it's hubba-hubba aw-oogah time. Claire accepts Armand's engagement proposal (things work fast in these old movies), but only to make Clifford jealous. Her nefarious plan works, the engagement with Armand is called off, and the engagement with Clifford is called on.

Standup guy Armand appears to take being dumped in one of the dirtiest ways possible relatively well. He's sad, but he tells Claire he'll always love her. Behind closed doors, he takes the down and dirty dumping less well, and when he discovers the ancient Cambodian telepathic zombification trick, standup guy Armand decides his days of being a standup guy are over. It's revenge time, MFers. He's going to zombie up nearly everyone, except for an older mentor figure and Claire, and he's going to snatch Claire back from that damn limey Clifford whether Claire likes it or not, with the help of his zombie horde. (She likes it not.) Damn, Armand. You didn't have to go so hard, but you did.

As I said earlier, the first half of the movie is mostly exposition scenes, with lots of standing (and occasional sitting at desks). It's a bit of a snooze, though we get some accidental art-film ellipses from the absence of several plot-developing connecting scenes that were clearly cut to get this movie on a double feature bill. There was likely even more exposition in this damn thing in its complete, uncut form.

Starting with the scene where Armand sneakily follows a Cambodian man through a waist-deep body of water to a hidden temple, the movie really kicks in, and the second half is pretty enjoyable. Armand turns from milquetoast goody two shoes to megalomaniac, and he wears this transformation well. Halperin sneakily reuses the closeup on Bela Lugosi's eyes from his previous White Zombie whenever Armand goes into telepathic mode (always fun to see), and the exciting conclusion lives up to its title.

White Zombie and Supernatural have much more atmosphere and style, and Revolt of the Zombies is clearly more a job of work for Halperin, but it has its moments. I can't completely dismiss it, though I'd only recommend it to the diehards who need to see everything.