The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sidney Lanfield, 1939)

Though it's his biggest hit, The Hound of the Baskervilles is an outlier in director Sidney Lanfield's career. Lanfield, a jazz musician and vaudeville star turned gag writer turned filmmaker, mostly directed light comedies (many of them starring Bob Hope) and ended his career with TV sitcoms (McHale's Navy and The Addams Family were his most frequent employers). Baskervilles, though not without dry humor and sight gags, is a dark, atmospheric Gothic murder mystery with horror elements, and Lanfield proves himself surprisingly adept at handling the tone.

The first of fourteen (!) Sherlock Holmes adaptations to star the duo of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson, respectively, and the first Sherlock Holmes movie to retain Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Victorian setting (the previous Holmes movies updated the action to the present day), Baskervilles kicks things off with a bang with an eerie run through the foggy moors from an old Gothic mansion, the howl of a hound, a mysterious death, and a strange man hiding in the shadows who rifles through the dead man's pockets.

Though the Yorkshire moors here are just studio sets in Hollywood, they look spectacular, and set decorator Thomas Little and art directors Richard Day and Hans Peters deserve a lot of credit for the film's success. I'll spare you a lengthy list of Little's credits, but if you're a movie fanatic, you should check out his imdb page. The guy assisted in giving a lot of great films their visual presence and character, especially in a great run from the late '40s to the early '50s.

If you've read the Doyle novella or seen one of the many other film and television adaptations, you know the basics of the story. Several small changes and one major change have been made to the source material, but Lanfield retains the bulk of the story and captures its spirit. Rathbone and Bruce have great chemistry as Holmes and Watson, and Bruce is good at supplying the curmudgeonly exasperation, boyish excitement, and comedic facial expressions necessary to deflate any self-importance in the material with a delicate enough touch to avoid hamming it up. Rathbone is great at riding the line between smugness and likability. Holmes needs to be pleased with himself and a bit condescending to Watson, but he also needs to be a guy you want to spend the running time of a movie with, too. No wonder these guys clicked with audiences.

The supporting cast also supplies a lot of flavor. John Carradine and Eily Malyon play the Barrymans (changed from "Barrymore" in the novella to avoid the appearance of poking fun at the Barrymore acting family), the caretakers of the Baskerville estate. Carradine and Malyon are excellent at playing suspicious characters, and Malyon has one of the best menacing stares in the game. The always reliable Lionel Atwill plays a village doctor who "dabbles in the occult" with his wife, a medium (Beryl Mercer, in one of her last roles). Morton Lowry is suitably oily and unctuous as the oily and unctuous John Stapleton. The impressively mutton-chopped Barlowe Borland is an elderly man who is constantly suing his neighbors for minor infractions of the law, and Nigel de Brulier gets to act weird and look even weirder as the mysterious man hiding in the moors. The only real snoozes in the cast are the standard-issue milquetoast young couple (a surprising staple of '30s cinema), in this case Richard Greene as Sir Henry Baskerville and Wendy Barrie as Beryl Stapleton, the half-sister of the oily and unctuous John, though Greene does get a couple of decent moments where a little personality comes through.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the classic Hollywood equivalent of comfort food. Every location and its set decorations are a visual pleasure: the stones and landscapes of the moor, the sprawling Gothic mansion, the London apartment of Holmes, the city streets with hansom cabs, a comfortable train car. The narrative with its interconnected mysteries and Lansfield's visual realization of it are satisfying and expertly delivered, and the cast gives it personality and life. For what has turned out to be a week filled with difficult and disappointing news for my wife and me, this movie helped us relax and forget ourselves for a few hours, and that's a great thing.

In the 2020s, a time when studio executives have very little interest in, knowledge of, or affinity for the medium of film, when completed movies' releases are permanently canceled and the movies themselves deleted in order for their parent companies to receive tax write-offs, when shareholders are more important than the people who make the movies and the audiences who watch them, when craftsmanship and artistry are pushed aside in favor of dimly lit computer-generated slop, watching something from Hollywood's golden years is bittersweet but refreshing.

I'm not a nostalgic person, and I don't fantasize about some mythical past when things were supposedly better, but I have a lot of aesthetic problems with a lot of 21st century filmmaking, especially mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. When people who run studios (and even some of the people who make movies) think of movies as just another piece of branded content that only has value if it increases profits for shareholders, we get the shit we've got now. When studios are run by people who love and value movies, we get movies like The Hound of the Baskervilles that look like they were made by human beings. To be clear, the old studio heads were profit-obsessed business jerks, too, who frequently butted in on creative decisions and exploited their workers, but they also loved movies, wanted to make good movies, and sometimes even trusted and respected the people who made those movies, and you can see it on screen. Now we live in a world where the profit and exploitation remain, but the good stuff has been discarded. Worst of both worlds.

I'm dangerously close to driving this post into the ditch, so I'll conclude by saying that The Hound of the Baskervilles is recommended to anyone who loves classic Hollywood, Gothic mysteries, character actors, Sherlock Holmes stories, and foggy moors. I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

The Dark Side of the Moon (D.J. Webster, 1990)

Aside from a few narrative inconsistencies I'm still puzzling over, The Dark Side of the Moon is an effective, atmospheric, and well-paced sci-fi/horror film with strong performances and a wild narrative that ties together space travel, the Bermuda Triangle, and Satan (and a sexy robot). Sometimes the film's low budget is visible onscreen, but director D.J. Webster mostly does a lot with a little, and the screenplay by twin brothers Carey and Chad Hayes is pretty solid. (The Hayes brothers wrote several low-budget movies for years afterward until hitting the big time with the Conjuring franchise.)

Surprisingly, Dark Side is Webster's only film as director, though he also made several music videos. His most well-known work in this medium is probably 'Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry," but he also directed videos for The Alan Parsons Project, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine, Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, En Vogue, Amy Grant (in her brief secular phase), The Beach Boys, Smokey Robinson, Restless Heart, Nanci Griffith, Pam Tillis, Little Texas, and one-hit wonders Calloway. I can't find any credits past 1996 (his incomplete imdb page ends in 1993), and I have no idea what he's doing now. Internet searches haven't been any help, unless he became an actual dance music DJ or a biopharmaceutical communications professional, but I'm suspecting these are different D.J. Websters. The D.J. Webster mystery continues. (Podcast idea: Finding D.J. Webster. Get on it, people. I probably won't listen to it, but I'll read a synopsis.)

The Dark Side of the Moon takes place in the terrifying future of 2022. In these days of future past, NASA stopped operating in 1992. It's unclear whether American space travel has been privatized, partially privatized, or simply moved to a different agency. We need answers, Hayes bros. Anyway, our spaceship is operated by a maintenance crew sent out to do some upkeep on a nuclear-armed satellite. Most of this maintenance is automated (but still extremely dangerous), so the mostly sausage party crew consists of two pilots, a jarhead defense and security guy, a research scientist (she's a woman, so she also makes the coffee and tea and endures sexual harassment from at least two of the dudes; don't they know it's 2022?), a doctor, a ship expert and representative of the company who built it, and the ship's inexplicably sexy humanoid robot, who has eyeliner, bright-red lipstick, and a form-fitting S&M-lite outfit possibly made of latex or leather. There must be some technological reason for this. I have to give the spaceship creators the benefit of the doubt here. It's the high-tech future of two years ago. I'm a man of the present. I don't have their science to understand why the robot has to be sexy.

Playing this crew is a strong cast of mostly veteran character actors. "Hey, it's that guy from all those things," you'll say to yourself about two-thirds of these people. Robert Sampson plays veteran pilot Flynn Harding (a quality pilot name). Sampson was in at least one episode of every television show you've ever seen (including The Rockford Files) made between the mid-'50s and 2020 (the year of his death), and his movie credits include Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead and Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and Robot Jox. Younger co-pilot Giles Stewart is played by Will Bledsoe, who had a much shorter acting career but has some spectacularly blow-dried hair that's a bit '80s Brian Bosworth if he didn't shave the sides. Good to know there are blow-driers in space. The jarhead security/defense guy, Philip Jennings, is played by Miami Vice regular John Diehl, whose other credits include Escape from New York, Stripes, National Lampoon's Vacation, the egg-yolk-sucking prostitute killer in Angel, D.C. Cab, Gettysburg, G. Gordon Liddy in Nixon, Jurassic Park III, and Wim Wenders' The End of Violence and Land of Plenty. Huge-glasses-wearer Joe Turkel plays ship expert Paxton Warner. Turkel's first film role was in 1949, and he appeared in several cult classics for Sam Fuller, Roger Corman, and, on three occasions, Stanley Kubrick (The Killing, Paths of Glory, and The Shining). He was also in Blade Runner and episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, Kojak, Fantasy Island, Tales from the Darkside, and Miami Vice. He died in 2022. Ship doctor Dreyfuss Steiner is played by Alan Blumenfeld. If Robert Sampson was in at least one episode of every television show you've ever seen, Blumenfeld was in at least two. To prevent this paragraph from devolving further into a list of credits, I will simply direct the curious to seek out Blumenfeld's imdb page. The guy's been in everything.

The two women in the cast, like the blow-dried Will Bledsoe, had shorter showbiz careers. Wendy MacDonald plays scientist Alex McInny. She was in several erotic thrillers, low-budget action movies, and TV movies in the late '80s and '90s before quitting the business. I reviewed her second movie, the slasher movie Blood Frenzy, on this site several years ago. That one was made by porn director Hal Freeman, who was then being targeted by the state of California in '87 in an initially successful but ultimately failed attempt by the state to destroy the adult film industry using Freeman as the scapegoat/precedent. He decided to make a horror movie while being prevented from directing porn. His conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, and he went back to crankin' out the smut. But I digress. Sexy robot Lesli is played by Camilla More, who was in a Doublemint gum commercial and the fourth Friday the 13th movie with her twin sister Carey, the second twin named Carey to be connected to this film. Both sisters also played the same character on Days of Our Lives, Camilla from 1986-'87, Carey from '87-'88.

Back to the movie. The spaceship inexplicably loses power as it nears the nuclear satellite (located near the titular dark side of the moon), though the sexy robot says everything is functioning normally. The backup generator power comes on, but several of the ship's electronics mysteriously short out, and the temperature plunges. The crew members know they're going to run out of oxygen and power eventually and either suffocate to death or crash into the moon (or both), but they're pros, so they attempt to fix the problem. While they're troubleshooting the entire ship, one of the crew notices a floating NASA shuttle heading their way, which is odd since NASA closed up shop three decades ago. They dock their ship to the shuttle, pump the shuttle's air over to the ship to fix the running-out-of-oxygen problem, and send the pilots in to see if anyone is on board.

The pilots find a mostly empty shuttle except for the dead body of an astronaut that lands on top of them. They move the body to their ship so the doctor can perform an autopsy. He can't find a cause of death, other than the bizarre triangle-shaped incision on the astronaut's stomach. Guess what, everybody? That incision was put there by ... the devil.

We eventually discover lots of entertaining mumbo jumbo about the connections between space travel, the Bermuda Triangle, 666, and Satan's plan to steal heaven from God, but first, our blow-dried hero Giles has to convince Paxton to give him access to the sexy robot, who functions as a sort of distractingly attractive World Wide Web/Wikipedia/Ask Jeeves/spaceship owner's manual. The robot was supposed to be accessible to the entire crew, but Paxton added a security feature giving him sole access. It's heavily implied that Paxton designed the robot, and since we already know Paxton was creeping on Alex, we finally understand why the robot is so sexy. It's because Paxton is a dirty old man. I won't spoil any of the other reveals in case you check this one out, but I will tell you that we get lots of demonic possession in space, which is always fun.

Some of the spaceship's interiors look a bit low-rent, but the exterior shots (which I'm guessing are of handcrafted miniatures) have a suitably awe-inspiring visual presence. The characters and their relations to each other have a natural and lived-in feel, the story remains compelling throughout the running time, and the narrative inconsistencies didn't bother me much, though I'm not someone who really cares about that anyway. I think of each movie as its own dream, with its own dream logic (yes, even The Garbage Pail Kids Movie and Hollywood Hot Tubs 2: Educating Crystal).

The Dark Side of the Moon is a solid, enjoyable movie about Satan taking over a spaceship with help from the Bermuda Triangle, and we all need a little of this kind of thing in our lives, don't we? Think about how much better the world would be if we had five movies a year about Satan taking over a spaceship with help from the Bermuda Triangle instead of all that superhero shit. I had a good time with this one.

Deadly Friend (Wes Craven, 1986)

Deadly Friend is a movie with a weirdly dissonant tone, though that weirdness becomes less strange when you know what happened during production. It's basically an R-rated kids' movie, a family entertainment with a family-unfriendly killing spree storyline. It flopped in 1986, but its cult has grown steadily over the years.

By 1986, Wes Craven had directed several hard-edged horror films (and a porn film under the name Abe Snake) and was coming off a big hit (A Nightmare on Elm Street), so he decided it was time to switch gears and make a PG movie for the whole family. (Technically, he'd already done this with his comic book adaptation Swamp Thing in 1982, but only because the R-rated version with sex, nudity, and more intense violence was sanitized to a PG version for American theaters. The unsanitized version was released internationally, and both versions got a home video release here.) Craven decided to take on Diana Henstell's novel Friend, a sci-fi/romance/Frankenstein homage, but was too busy directing episodes of the '80s Twilight Zone to adapt the screenplay himself. He hired Bruce Joel Rubin for the screenwriting job because he admired Rubin's then-unfilmed Jacob's Ladder screenplay. That movie finally came out in 1990, alongside another Rubin-written film, Ghost. Rubin made Henstell's characters a few years older but didn't veer from Craven's family-friendly instructions.

After Craven's initial family-movie cut was completed, the studio decided to hold a test screening for Wes Craven fans, who were anxiously anticipating the next movie from the guy who made The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, Deadly Blessing, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. This was a stupid move. When the Craven fanatics saw Friend, they collectively expressed their extreme disappointment. The studio demanded that Craven turn the film into an R-rated horror movie and add some kills, some gore, and, because nightmares were a big part of Elm Street, some Krueger-esque nightmare sequences. The head of the studio even demanded the ridiculous ending. A pissed-off Craven and Rubin had little choice but to comply, and reshoots ensued. Friend became Deadly Friend. 

Hilariously, when Craven presented his new, studio-mandated gore-filled cut to the MPAA, they flipped out and demanded he remove some of the gore to avoid an X rating. Craven had to return to the well for a third time and trim some splatter to get his formerly PG family film back down to an R. Then the damn thing flopped in theaters. The gore scenes were restored to their bloody glory for home video and streaming. So far, searches for Craven's original cut have been unsuccessful.

The version of Deadly Friend we ended up with is exactly the kind of movie that pleased no one at the time of release but had all the makings of a future cult film. Schizophrenic tone? Check. Sassy robot? Check. Cult actors? Check. Doomed teenage romance? Check. Comedic spit take? Check. Pat Benatar poster? Check. Someone getting their head crushed by a basketball? Check. I won't make any kind of case for Deadly Friend being a cinematic masterpiece, but it provides a lot of silly '80s time-capsule fun and the actors do a surprisingly good job of humanizing all the nonsense.

The film begins with Doogie Howser-esque teenage science prodigy Paul (Matthew Labyorteaux, child actor in Little House on the Prairie and A Woman under the Influence and one-time national Pac-Man champion), his single mom Jeannie (Anne Twomey), and the aforementioned sassy robot BB (voiced by Charles Fleischer, who makes all kinds of crazy, wacky robot sounds) moving to a classic '80s suburban neighborhood near the college where Paul will be a 16-year-old grad student and his mother will be working. Paul is a genius at robotics, AI, and brain science, and he built BB from scratch. Paul quickly befriends the 15-year-old neighborhood paperboy Tom (Michael Sharrett), who falls off his bike when he encounters the robot. Paul and Jeannie's next-door neighbor is a pretty and sweet girl-next-door type (she literally lives next door!), Samantha (a pre-MAGA Kristy Swanson). Samantha befriends Paul, Jeannie, and the robot (she already knew Tom), and soon, they're all hanging out at Paul's regularly. The robot joins them for basketball, lawnmowing, and teenage pranks. Everyone's having a good time.

Life would be perfect except for three problems, two relatively minor, one major. First, a gang of biker punk bullies give Paul and Tom the business and start smacking around the robot. BB retaliates by grabbing the leader of the gang's nuts and giving them a robot-strength squeeze. I give an automatic three stars to any movie where a robot grabs somebody's nuts. It's a tough but fair system. Anyway, the gang leader calls off his bros to save his family jewels but vows revenge on the robot. The second problem is neighborhood menace Elvira (the legendary Anne Ramsey). Elvira hates everyone, constantly calls the police, brandishes her shotgun at anyone who gets near her property, and steals our heroes' basketball when it lands in her yard. You best believe she becomes enraged when she takes a gander at the robot. Elvira hates robots just as much as she hates other people.

The final and most serious problem is Samantha's single dad Harry (Richard Marcus). What seems like a live-action Disney movie up to this point gets a lot darker with the introduction of Harry. Harry is an abusive drunk who hits his daughter, won't let her have any friends or boyfriends, and is possibly sexually abusive, too, which is hinted at in the first nightmare sequence. This nightmare is particularly jarring. Up to this point, Deadly Friend has been a light and breezy Disneyfied romp. If the father character was toned way down and turned from an abuser into simply an overly strict dad, this whole cast would've been perfect for a terrible '80s sitcom that would have lasted at least two seasons. Teen prodigy, loving mom, blonde girl next door, goofy friend, sassy robot, crazy neighbor, biker bullies, strict dad. It cries out for a laugh track and a catchy but godawful theme song. The nightmare sequence, however, cranks the tone from family sitcom to menacing psychosexual gorefest without any transition in between.

The silliness and darkness continue to fight it out. After a Halloween prank goes awry, our lovable robot BB gets his ass blasted to smithereens by Elvira's shotgun. Shortly thereafter, Samantha suffers a terrible brain injury when her father shoves her down the stairs and she hits her head. The next day, she's declared brain dead, and her life support will be pulled that night. This sitcom is fucked, son!

Unable to handle Samantha's impending death, Paul concocts a scheme to steal her body and implant BB's microchip in her brain to reanimate her. This kinda works, but it also kinda doesn't. Let's just say a teenage girl with the brain of a sassy robot causes problems for everyone.

This is a ridiculous movie that I can't help but enjoy. I've never been a huge Wes Craven fan, and he's definitely my least favorite among the pantheon of '70s and '80s horror filmmaking greats he's often mentioned with (I'm more of a George Romero, John Carpenter, Joe Dante guy), but he has his moments. The finest moment here is the death-by-basketball scene, which is one of the greatest beheadings/head-squashings I've ever had the pleasure to witness. There's something about decapitations, head smashings, and head explosions that make my heart sing, and a really great one can make my whole week. Between the robot and the basketball death scene, I can forgive this movie's flaws. As I mentioned earlier, the cast does a great job, too. They make you believe these characters are people, which is pretty hard to do with this subject matter. Check this one out. It's a weird time at the movies.

A Macabre Legacy (José Bohr, 1939)

If you're a committed movie obsessive and have been on this earth long enough, you've probably seen way too many otherwise hard-to-find films in less-than-ideal presentations. Pan-and-scan VHS, washed-out and faded film prints, b&w foreign-language films with white subtitles that are impossible to read, foreign-language films with no subtitles at all, truncated versions missing scenes, cheap DVD transfers of poor-quality videotapes, ancient tapes dubbed from degraded prints shown on local TV, edited-for-television versions, MPAA-censored versions, phony "director's cuts," and the list goes on.

One of the most frustrating of these examples in our modern digital/cloud/AI era is the half-assed subtitle created using some kind of program lacking the human touch. These programs sometimes translate each word literally, losing the idiosyncrasies and nuances of how a particular language is actually spoken and/or wrecking the grammatical construction. They sometimes extract only the basics of the dialogue's meaning, taking out all the spice and flavor and converting it into a bland literalness. Sometimes, they do a speech-to-text thing that misunderstands half the words, which can be amusing when those misunderstandings create accidental absurdist art. Most egregiously, these programs sometimes miss entire chunks of dialogue, giving incomplete translations, particularly when several characters are talking at once.

All of these subtitle problems were an issue in my unofficial DVD copy of A Macabre Legacy, a movie otherwise impossible for me to track down. I purchased it from a trusted source of these movies who conveniently lives in a nearby city, but this one got past her otherwise excellent quality control. Sounds like these issues made watching this movie a real chore, right? Surprisingly, no. The movie, a Mexican melodrama that turns into a mad scientist/psycho husband horror film in its final third, has a mostly straightforward plot that was relatively easy to piece together from the subtitle scraps, but the accidental absurdism was off the charts. I got a good laugh at least once every three minutes from the insane shit the subtitles had the characters saying. The final four pictures in this post are screenshot examples of some of the wild times the subtitles brought to this party.

So, what is A Macabre Legacy actually about, to the best of my knowledge? Unless I missed some important context, A Macabre Legacy is about a brilliant doctor and medical school teacher, Dr. Ernesto Duarte (Miguel Arenas), who is not only an insanely gifted plastic surgeon but also a researcher close to discovering a cure for various tropical diseases (or maybe just one) and who has one of those silly-looking 1930s mad scientist labs. The movie opens on the doc's wedding day to the beautiful but immature Rosa (Consuelo Frank), who is mad that the doctor is spending time with sick and injured people instead of giving her all his attention. The doctor seems more sympathetic than his wife at this point in the movie, but several of his students have to remind him that it is in fact his wedding day, so these sympathies seem ripe for flipping.

The movie jumps ahead in chronology. Rosa becomes a less selfish, more mature woman living a lonely life because dang old Dr. Duarte can't stop obsessing over his job and his research. She's neglected, and he can't take a damn hint. When the doctor misses most of their one-year anniversary, he sends one of his students, Eduardo (Ramón Armengod), to spend time with her until he can make it home. Sparks start to fly, but Duarte eventually, and cluelessly, shows up with the rest of the fellas. Bonehead play, doc.

You can guess where this is going. Rosa and Eduardo fall in love. It's the worst-kept secret in town. All Duarte's students and household servants know about it, but the doc is so career- and research-focused that he's the last to know. When he accidentally discovers the truth at a dinner party, it flips his wig. The altruistic and religious doc becomes a deranged madman hellbent on revenge against Eduardo. He plans to win Rosa back, but when that plan fails, he decides to enact revenge on her, too.

This is all mildly enjoyable and predictably routine. Director José Bohr gives the film a competent but perfunctory look that's closer to the future medium of television than cinema, except for one elegantly gliding shot over the dinner table. There's nothing particularly special or uniquely terrible about this movie. A solid, mediocre effort.

Here's where the subtitle fun comes in. What was once a run-of-the-mill melodrama with horror elements is transformed into absurdist comedy gold by some of the most inadvertently deranged subtitling I've ever witnessed. If these subtitles are accurate, the movie also predicted the Internet, uploads, and the careers of Shakira and the Bee Gees decades before the fact. Remarkable. A man tells a woman he can't relieve her penis. A medical student walks into surgery prep and says, "Playing guitar." A phone call ends with this dialogue: "He didn't want to taste a snack today. Communism." This kind of shit happens every few minutes. Delightful!

I don't know what happened to make these subtitles display such wondrous text. Frankly, I don't want to know. I choose to live in the mystery. I embrace this mystery. The answers are never as fulfilling as the questions. The Bee Gees.

  

Dark Sanity (Martin Green, 1982)

There ain't no (dark) sanity clause, so proceed at your own risk with the 1982 straight-to-video accidental avant-garde art object known as Dark Sanity, a movie that attempts to be a psychological horror film about psychic premonitions of murder but accidentally delivers one hour and 28 minutes of the opposite of its title. Yeah, I'm talking about light insanity, baby.

Unlike most of the general population, I have an enormously high tolerance for movies like Dark Sanity. But what exactly is a movie like Dark Sanity? It's hard to explain, but, like a Supreme Court justice once said about pornography, you know it when you see it. I'm talking about movies that make you feel like you've been kicked in the head by a horse seconds before hitting play on the remote. These are movies made by people attempting to deliver a routine piece of filmed entertainment within an existing genre with actors who are supposed to deliver a narrative in recognizable, believable ways, but through incompetence, inexperience, eccentricity, delusion, and/or lack of awareness (and hopefully all of the above), the filmmakers instead produce a deliriously weird movie-ish thing that only very loosely resembles something from our shared existence. I'm not talking about movies made by normies trying too hard to be weird or by weirdos legitimately being themselves. I'm talking about the special kind of weird. The weird made by people who think they're normal and think they're making a conventional movie but are instead inadvertently unlocking the cages in the zoo inside their minds.

Speaking of zoos (a nonsensical transition but just roll with it in the spirit of the film), Dark Sanity is the story of a young couple moving into new digs in Los Angeles after some unfortunate business went down in their old hometown of San Diego. Karen Nichols (Kory Clark) is a recovering alcoholic who also has occasional psychic visions. Her husband Al (Chuck Jamison) is a recently promoted low-level sales exec and quite possibly the worst husband ever portrayed on film. Many celluloid husbands have committed worse deeds, but they're all somehow more tolerable than Al. You just want to punch him from his first appearance until his last, and it is a major failing of Dark Sanity that you never get to see this chump get his head chopped off. Somehow Al has failed to inform his vulnerable wife that their nice new middle-class home was the site of a murder. The mentally ill son of the previous homeowner sliced up his mom (or did he?), and her head has never been found (or has it?).

Karen starts getting horrible psychic visions of murder in the new home, with Al showing absolutely no sympathy, accusing her of getting back on the sauce and of potentially ruining his new job prospects. This Al guy, I tell ya. I give him no respect. No regard, neither. Karen's mental state is not helped by the neighborhood kooks. Her busybody neighbor Madge (Bobbie Holt) shows up on day one and immediately starts ordering her around and giving her the local gossip. Madge's husband Henry (Andy Gwyn) is a leering, ogling creep. And a weirdo named Benny (Timothe McCormack) walks into her home uninvited to use the bathroom. Madge badgers Karen into giving Benny a job as a gardener and handyman. I would hate this neighborhood.

Besides all this neighborly drama, a strange man named Larry Craig (Aldo Ray, the only professional actor in the cast and the only one who got paid — more on that later) is following Karen around. He parks outside the house and watches her. He's in the parking lot of the grocery store. He's at her AA meeting. He follows her into a dive bar when she hurriedly leaves the AA meeting. Larry is fortunately not another weirdo, but an ex-detective with similar psychic visions. He warns Karen about the house and makes her feel less alone about her own clairvoyant powers. Of course, Al is a giant dick to him. Fuckin' Al, man. This guy is pushing me, baby. Hashtag cancel Al.

The plot gets a bit more complicated, with black cats, more premonitions, visits to institutions, discussions on the comedic merits of the Three Stooges and Cheech and Chong, a disastrous dinner with the boss and his wife, a viewing of the soap opera The Young Doctors, dive bar disagreements, TV news crews, more severed head business, job demotions, smashed whiskey bottles, Al continuing to be an asshole, homicide detectives, attempted beheadings, and rude talk about ladies' butts. You get a little bit of everything except coherence.

Dark Sanity takes a unique approach to almost everything, reinventing the rulebook when it comes to camera angles, sound design, dialogue, and character behavior. The acting is neither good nor bad in any conventional sense. It just is. I feel like you're getting the essence of the humans playing these roles in ways that have nothing to do with film acting or a lack of film acting. The dialogue is crystal clear but sounds like it's being beamed in from loudspeakers instead of coming out of the mouths of the characters. The things they say to each other sound like the English language but don't feel like it. Everything is off in ways that are hard to describe, but it's all poetry to me, man. I can't believe so many of these weird little film objects exist.

Director/producer Martin Green is a one-and-done mystery man. The other two credits on his imdb page are most likely a different guy with the same name. As mentioned earlier, Aldo Ray was the only guy who worked on the movie to get a paycheck. A veteran actor who bounced around from legit Hollywood and indie roles to DIY insanity like Dark Sanity, Ray was experienced enough to get paid in advance. The other cast and crew members got stiffed, with Green and his co-producers disappearing after the film was shot. The actors and crew didn't know what happened to the movie until it appeared on video store shelves. Green never directed again. God, I'd love an extensive oral history of how this whole Dark Sanity thing happened.

What can I tell you? This movie exists, and I'm glad it does. People made this for some reason. Actual, real people. You know deep down in your guts if you're the kind of person who needs a little Dark Sanity in your life. There aren't many of us, but we'll always be here, in the corner of the room where words like "good" and "bad" have lost all meaning. Get darkly sane, dudes.