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.

   

Deadly Eyes aka Night Eyes (Robert Clouse, 1982)

A movie about a mutant colony of dog-sized rats tearing up early-'80s Toronto, directed by the guy who made Enter the Dragon and Black Belt Jones, with a special appearance by Scatman Crothers? Hell yeah, brother. Deadly Eyes is a sterling example of "this shit rocks" cinema. I had a great time with it.

A 21st century movie about large rats kicking ass in a big city would star several generically attractive and interchangeable snoozes who would say things like "so that just happened" after CGI rats attacked them from 38 different camera angles against a dimly lit, puke-brown-and-yellow color palette, but we used to live in a world that occasionally worked seventeen percent of the time, so Deadly Eyes looks like a proper killer rat movie that doesn't make me yell "get off my lawn" at the TV screen. Deadly Eyes also gives us plenty of local Toronto flavor, visually interesting locations, a varied cast (middle-aged divorcees, 29-year-old high school students, health department officials, the mayor, elderly academic rat experts, party animals, bowlers, moviegoers, and train-obsessed children), and the brilliant and hilarious decision to put rat costumes on dozens of dachshunds (animatronic rat puppets are used for the closeups).

City health inspector Kelly Leonard (Sara Botsford) decides to finally put an end to a careless entrepreneur's open storage of enormous piles of grain near the docks on the edge of the city. The steroid-treated grain is being transported overseas, but, in the meantime, has attracted a large colony of rats nesting inside it. No one yet knows that the repeated ingestion of the steroid grain has powered up these rats to dachshund size and also made them violently aggressive with rat-style 'roid rage. Kelly lets the grain-storer know she has condemned his grain and ordered its burning. Already on the scene is health department employee George Foskins (Scatman Crothers), and he's holding an orange cat (the Scatman has become the Catman). It's a killer rat movie, so things don't go well for the cat, though he shows some excellent acting skills in the few minutes before the rats eat him. Here's to you, little buddy.

After the grain is burned, the colony disperses to the Toronto sewers and begins to rain hell on the Ontario capital. The first target is a group of 29-year-old high school party animals hanging out at the temporarily parent-free home of two of their pals. One of the gang, Trudy White (Lisa Langlois), tired of her immature boyfriend, is obsessed with the idea of seducing one of her recently divorced teachers, Paul Harris (Sam Groom), who is also the boys' basketball coach. Even though this is the early '80s, Paul knows this is a bad idea and urges Trudy to forget about her crush on him and date someone her own age. This just makes Trudy hornier and more determined to bust some age-of-consent laws, much to Paul's annoyance. Anyway, one of the two party house siblings, Hoserman (Kevin Foxx), irritates the neighbors and his older sister by playing air guitar on a floor sweeper to deafeningly loud Canadian power pop while everyone drinks beer and smokes. The power pop wakes up their toddler younger sister, and big sis decides to hang back and take care of the kid while the others leave for a burger run. A bunch of giant rats decide to ruin the sisters' night.

The next day, Hoserman is inexplicably unaware of his sisters' fates and still craving burgers. Apparently, the previous burger run turned into an all-nighter. Before basketball practice, the burger-insatiable Hoserman decides to get three pre-practice burgs but gets his hand munched to the bone by a rat while unlocking his bicycle near a trash can. In the hospital, the burger-obsessed party animal is visited by Kelly to get some health department information about the large thing that bit him. Coach Paul stops by to give the young man an inspirational basketball signed by his teammates and meets Kelly. Middle-aged sparks fly. As Kelly heads back to the office, Hoserman winks at her and says, "Hey, Kelly. It's been real." Unfortunately, that's the last you see of Hoserman. My only complaint about this film? Needs more Hoserman. A scene of him whipping burgers at the rats would have really added to the vibe.

The rats move on from adult teens and toddlers and start creating mayhem all over the neighborhood. George reluctantly explores the sewer to see what's up with all the rodent damage calls they've received and unfortunately encounters the colony (the Scatman has become the Ratman).

The rodents soon unleash hell in a bowling alley, a movie theater showing a Bruce Lee marathon (the rats attack during Game of Death, another Clouse film that was a pieced-together hodgepodge of 11 minutes of the movie Lee was filming when he died, older Lee films, a Chuck Norris movie, and new footage shot to roughly tie the mess together), a university archive, and the Toronto subway during the dedication of a new subway line with the mayor in attendance. These are all cinematically fantastic rat-attack locations.

The whole movie is well-paced, fun, exciting, and exactly as silly as it needs to be. I like the ensemble cast approach and the sense of living, breathing community created by the variety of the characters' ages and professions, their interactions with each other, and the location shooting, and I miss this lack of atmosphere and setting in most modern genre films.

Deadly Eyes is the second of director Clouse's two horror films and shares its when-animals-attack premise. His first, 1977's The Pack, was about a pack of killer dogs terrorizing vacationers (led by Joe Don Baker) on a South African island. He also directed the post-apocalyptic sci-fi cult film The Ultimate Warrior, about the terrible post-plague future we're facing in 2012 (only eight years off). Aside from a couple of children's movies for the Disney Channel, Clouse otherwise specialized in action, with a particular focus on martial arts. Besides the previously mentioned Enter the Dragon and Game of Death with Bruce Lee and Black Belt Jones with Jim Kelly, Clouse's other films include The Amsterdam Kill with Robert Mitchum and Leslie Nielsen, Battle Creek Brawl with Jackie Chan, Force: Five, Gymkata with Olympian gymnast Kurt Thomas (maybe the only gymnastics-themed action movie??), and the China O'Brien movies with Cynthia Rothrock. He also directed something that sounds indescribably nuts, Golden Needles, starring Joe Don Baker, Elizabeth Ashley, Jim Kelly, Burgess Meredith, Ann Sothern, Roy Chiao, and Frances Fong, about an international fight to gain control of a statue filled with magic needles, which either cause superhuman sexual prowess or death, depending on where they're inserted. There's no way it could be better than any of the versions we're imagining, right? Has anyone seen this?