The Norliss Tapes (1973)

NetFlix 2.9/5
IMDB 6.5/10
My Rating: 7.5/10

I haven't featured a guest review in a while, so I thought it was time for another - Especially since I've been so incredibly busy lately with work and the KFP web comic that I haven't had time to keep up with the movie reviews as I'd like.  This KFP guest review comes to you from my friend Joel Schama, and he managed to pick one of my favorite 70's made-for-TV horror flicks to kick off with.  I'll drop in a few comments of my own, and put my commentary in green...  and now, over to Joel!

The Norliss Tapes, circa 1973, directed and produced by William F. Nolan of Dark Shadows fame (and directed by my childhood favorite, Dan Curtis!), is a Night Gallery meets Kolchak: The Night Stalker pastiche. The story begins with David Norliss (Roy Thinnes) being unable to even begin a book he has been commissioned to write one year prior. Following David’s disappearance, his publisher finds stacks of tapes upon which David recorded the events of his investigation. Hoping these will provide clues as to Norliss’s whereabouts, his publisher begins to listen to the first tape.

The story unfolds following David’s descent into the realm of attempting to debunk certain paranormal activities, only to find himself within a situation that his skeptical mind finds most difficult to believe. Norliss’s character narrates the film throughout, juxtaposed with scenes of the actual events. Much in the same way Kolchak: The Night Stalker presents itself.

(The key...and unfortunate... difference for me between this and Night Stalker is in the main characters. Norliss Tapes was a terrific movie but it never had the cultural impact of Night Stalker, and I put a lot of that down to Norliss vs Kolchak - Roy Thinnes gives a good performance in a fairly dry and serious role, and that's his problem.  Kolchak the character was one of horror's all-time greats.  He was a loud, raucous, scenery-chewing loser you just had to cheer for, and IMO that made him a lot more fun to watch than Norliss, alas...)

In his attempt to debunk the occult, his research leads him to a wealthy widow (played by Angie Dickinson) who believes her husband no longer resides within the crypt within which his body was entombed. Her husband’s final wish was to be buried with the scarab ring of Osiris; a ring bought from an antique dealer specializing in the occult, which he believed would help grant immortality. Left only with Norliss’s tapes, his publisher continues to search for reasons for David’s disappearance.

Throughout the movie, the widow Ellen’s undead husband is seen only by his victims; victims later found by the sheriff (Claude Akins) to have a pale pallor, the explanation of which can only be attributed to the complete and total lack of blood!

The scarab purchased by Ellen’s husband, it is later shown, was for the purpose of allowing him to rise from the dead in order to finish his sculpture of Sargoth. By combining the blood of his victims with the clay, the Sargoth would gain entrance into our world and grant him immortality. Or so he believes.

(And just as an addendum, I saw this when it first aired, when I was only a wee little 7 year old Kentucky Fried Popcorn.  It scared me senseless.  One of my most frightening memories of the film was the underground tunnel lair of our vampire, which was strewn with the pale corpses of his victims - Heady stuff for a TV movie!)

We, as viewers, are left at the end not knowing what really happened to David Norliss, or what was to come after the Sargoth was brought forth into our dimension. However, if you enjoy 70’s made for television horror movies, and don’t mind an ambiguous ending, then this is one you must not miss.  

Ask me for my favorite 70's TV horror films and you'll get a list of three - Night Stalker, Norliss Tapes, and Spectre.  There were plenty of other good ones, but those are the Big Three to my mind, and every one is something I can watch again and again and still enjoy.  In fact, I think I'll go dig out my DVD of this now...

T.A.G. - The Assassination Game

NetFlix Not Available
DVD Purchase HERE for $8
IMDB 5.8/10
My Rating: 7/10

A campus newspaper reporter is drawn into a college game of TAG by his attraction to one of the players.  Through her, he becomes immersed in the world of play-killers and spies, until the two of them stumble into the path of a deranged murderer stalking the gamers.

Let's rewind to the early 80's, 1982 to be exact.  Back then, one of the raging controversies of the nation was WHAT to do about these satanic, suicide-provoking, heavy metal-infested role-playing games that were becoming so popular.  TV newscasters and sermonizers predictably freaked the fuck out and warned of impending social collapse if your kid was playing tabletop D&D with his buddies in the spare room - Never mind that you'd think it would be a parent's dream-come-true if their teen opted to stay home and do something that didn't involve drinking, drugs, or stoplight racing.  For a period of several years, we were bombarded with continual negative press regarding D&D, with the media seizing on every possible scare story to drum it it into a national issue.  Rona Jaffe's infamous "Mazes and Monsters" was an onerous example.  Today it's rightly considered a laughingstock by the RPG community, and looked back at much as we view Reefer Madness, but at the time people actually took this nonsense seriously.  In fact, I still attribute one of my earliest anti-religious jolts to a sermon I sat through where the preacher was ranting about the "satanic ills" of D&D while waving a copy of the Monster Manual in the air, howling, "There are DEMONS and WITCHES in here!"

Well, yes, but the same is true of Grimm's Fairy Tales, and for the same reason.

I vividly recall looking at the guy and thinking, "If this minister is so utterly, demonstrably clueless about what he considers a driving moral issue, WHY are we sitting here listening to him tell us how to live every Sunday?"  More potently, it was an example of just how stupid one can look if they get exercised about something that they have no understanding of.  I realize this is heavy stuff for a movie review, but it plays into why I enjoyed TAG so much at the time.

Alongside D&D, we also played a lot of Killer, one of the first live-action RPGs, in both high school and college.  Killer involved each player receiving the name of another player, their target, who they then had to stalk and "kill" with a toy gun until there was only one champion left.  As one can imagine, this was a blast.  TAG riffs on this concept with a group of college students cheerfully playing assassins. And while one of the players does go off the deep end, TAG was unusual at the time for portraying the players not as unstable, needy, friendless misfits, but rather as just ordinary kids looking for a little excitement.  This was so refreshing that I loved the movie to death, and it still remains a personal favorite of mine today.

The movie centers around a college newspaper reporter of the cigar-smoking, Chandler-reading, hopelessly romantic variety who has a mysterious encounter with Linda Hamilton, a player in TAG.  Ahh, Linda...

Linda Hamilton has never BEEN more gorgeous than she is in this movie, and she's able to convey a sort of sultry, film noir, femme fatale vibe that is far beyond her years.  She's just another player, a psych major who's looking for a fun time after hours, and our hero joins up with her because A) he is hopelessly smitten, and B) he is looking for a story for his newspaper.  This leads him, and the viewers, into the game world of TAG and we get to meet a lot of wildly varying players and the bizarro gamemaster who runs the show.  Speaking of, he's hilarious and steals his scenes effectively.  Anyone who's ever played a Killer-type game will recognize this guy immediately:

Our other main character is Gersh, the reigning TAG champion, played by Bruce Abbott (Yep, the Re-Animator guy) in his first starring role.  When an attempted shower assassination goes badly for him, our man Gersh goes off the deep end and begins taking his gaming way too seriously... murdering one student player after another and marking them off his "Kill" list until the inevitable face-off with Linda and Bruce.  Thankfully, it isn't played off as another god-awful "Gaming makes you unbalanced" message-movie - It's pretty obvious that Gersh is not all there from the start, and the game simply gives him a method for his madness.  The second half of the film is basically an 80's slasher with guns instead of knives as Gersh kills his way through the cast.

So why do I love it so much?  It was written and directed by genre legend Nick Castle, for starters, and the acting and dialog crackle with unusual energy and spice for a low budget flick.  You'll genuinely  like the characters and no one is there just to be a victim, a bimbo, or a hero.  Also, viewed from today's vantage point, it's a fascinating time capsule of college life before the days of cell phones, internet, and other electronica. Concerts, live action games, hanging around the student activity buildings, smoking cigars in dorm rooms... TAG gives us a microcosmic peek into the world of yesteryear's 20-something. After the college gun crimes of the past ten years, this is one movie that will never, EVER be remade today, so let's appreciate it for what it is - A look at a more innocent time when college students shooting each other was fodder for action-packed escapist adventure instead of the routine evening news.

PS - Special mention must be made of the opening credits sequence.  Most low budget flicks of the time were content with a simple credit roll, but this wasn't enough for Nick Castle and so we get an extended, swanky parody of a Bond opening, complete with rubber dart guns and LOTS of feathered hair (Skip ahead to the 1min, 50sec marker if you want to jump straight to the music):

The Innkeepers

NetFlix 2.7/5
IMDB 5.6/10
My Rating: 8/10

Two minimum wage, 20-something employees face the last weekend of operation at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a historic establishment that is closing its doors.  Their bored hours are spent doing amateur ghosthunting, until disturbing things begin going bump in the night.

First off, I must say that I absolutely loved this movie - I adored every minute of it and enjoyed the characters, the plot, and definitely the style of direction.  That said, I seem to be in the minority - A lot of viewers, especially younger ones, absolutely hate the film and thus its low IMDB score.  Even more puzzling is the dislike among reviewers I otherwise tend to agree with, like Emily over at Deadly Dolls, who was hoping it would be another House of the Devil.  That seems to be a common refrain - Fans of Ti West, the director, loved HOTD and want another HOTD, and this is not that and thus they are disappointed.    I enjoyed HOTD too, but I liked Innkeepers better.

Maybe what others miss is the retro-70's style of HOTD.  I loved it but I also found it a little distracting, in the sense that half my brain was marveling over their careful recreation of a grainy late 70's drive-in movie and paying less attention to the story.  Innkeepers eschews the retro look but proceeds in gloriously retro pace, which seems to be the other bone of internet contention.  One of the most common complaints on IMDB is, "It's so SLOOOOOOW."  Yes.  Yes, it is slow.  That's called, "Building tension and atmosphere", and not many movies bother with that anymore, much to their detriment.  Instead of giving us a pile of characters with 3 minutes of screen time and one breast flash each, and then burying us in chop-chop mayhem, Innkeepers spends most of its running time simply letting us follow the two main characters and get a feel for who they are, and care about them.  And what great characters they are!

Sara Paxton plays Claire, the heroine, and you already love her, you just don't know it yet.  Seriously, she was one of the most appealing horror film heroines I have seen in years, maybe decades...  This is not a case where you're just passing time until the annoying characters die.  You'll genuinely care for her and that makes the scary parts of the film a hundred times more fearful.  She and co-star Pat Healy also pull off the near-impossible in creating a pair of bored yoof-generation types that I didn't immediately want to kill.  Instead, you're drawn into the sheer pettiness of their lives - Both are undirected.  They don't know what they want to do.  They have no goals.  All they can think to do in their spare time is fritter it away.  Someone on another board pointed out that it was a theme of the movie that the Yankee Pedlar seemed to draw in "lost souls" like a vortex, and consume them, and I thought that was a clever observation.  They're the last employees running the hotel until the bitter end and this gives them impetus to hang on there when otherwise you'd hit the usual haunted house movie plot problem of, "Just leave the house!"  They could, but to be blunt, they don't really have anywhere else to go.

I am increasingly convinced that Ti West, the director, is one of the few directors left in Hollywood who knows how to properly pace a film.  Conversations are long takes that you're drawn into, not chopped up with 57 cuts to create faux-tension.  When a character walks cautiously down a spooky hall, the camera follow them slowly, tracking them for sustained tension instead of cutting every 3 seconds or, god forbid, spinning in circles around them as they walk.  This movie was the virtual antithesis of everything I've hated about the recent Doctor Who seasons for the simple reason that Ti West knows how to hold a camera still.  So basic, and yet so rare...  and for me it was a joy to be able to relax into the story and the personalities, without constantly being reminded of how clever the cameraman or director thought he was.

So, is it boring?  Well, it wasn't to me.  Other reviewers fuss that nothing happens until the last 20 minutes, but I viewed that time as investment in the atmosphere, of which Innkeepers has oodles.  I haven't run across many films that build this sort of nervousness so well.  It harkens back to movies like The Shining or The Fog, where "brooding" becomes a palpable thing.  And as for the last act, holy crap, I was on the edge of my seat!  My one real complaint is with the very final scene, or rather the "secret scene" - A bit that was rendered so subtly that I did not notice it on the first viewing, and found the ending rather generic.  Only after reading about it and following it with the director's commentary did I spot "the secret"... Probably a very unusual case of a director being TOO subtle.

In the end, I give this lots of love - It's one of the rare movies I want to go out and buy on blu-ray.  I wish badly that I'd held onto it and watched it on Halloween night, because it would have been a perfect Halloween treat.  If you can't handle slow movies, it's not for you.  But, if you're fond of older films and especially 40's-style haunted house pictures, I recommend it highly.  I haven't liked a ghost story this much since poor Eleanor met her fate in The Haunting in 1963.