The Unholy

Cast: Ben Cross, Hal Holbrook, and Ned Beatty

Director: Camilo Vila  

102 minutes (18) 1988

Lions Gate 
Blu-ray region B

Rating: 7/10

Review by Donald Morefield

  

Camilo Vila’s The Unholy stars Ben Cross as catholic priest Father Michael, appointed as pastor of the reportedly cursed St Agnes church in New Orleans. The church was closed for three years when Father Michael’s predecessors were murdered at the altar after they were seduced into temptation by a demon of desire in the alluring guise of a red-haired succubus (stunning model Nicole Fortier), and the violent crimes were hushed up by parish officials, here represented by Hal Holbrook as Archbishop Mosely. Father Michael learns he’s most likely to share the victims' seemingly predestined fates when the creature also appears to him, offering sensual ecstasy. Can he resist her naked charms? To submit means death and damnation, but perhaps some pleasures are worth dying for...

A late addition to the cycle of religious horrors, then boosted to prominence by sequels to The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976), The Unholy was Cuban-born director Vila’s first English-language production and, given the subject matter, perhaps the genre influence of Mario Bava and Dario Argento seems inevitable. The heavyweight supporting cast led by Holbrook, includes Trevor Howard (then in his eighties) playing the blind Father Silva - apparently gifted with the foresight of prophesy - for one of his last screen appearances; and Ned Beatty is well cast as Lieutenant Stern, the police detective baffled by unsolved homicides. These classy actors do what they can with an obviously weak script, bolstered by special effects work from Bob Keen, ensuring that the movie's production values, at least, earns its well deserved ‘A’ picture status, and their efforts lifted this chiller from the morass of routine schlock-horror video fodder in the 1980s.

A local club practices theatrically cheesy satanic rites, quite appealing to bogus acolytes and the sinfully curious tourism trade. Father Michael counteracts this blatant depravity with slap-happy sing-along hymns, while preaching this comforting familiarity to a newly revived congregation, but his commonplace rituals fail to halt his own persistently erotic nightmares. While investigating, our priestly hero experiences an indoor windstorm that, much like the very sudden tempest at Karswell’s mansion in Night Of The Demon (1957), is centred upon, or prompted by, villainy. Here, it’s the scandal-mongering blond showman and local scoundrel Luke (William Russ). Later, there’s a phone call from Hell, and crazy somnambulistic visions of burning crucifixions (somewhat reminiscent of Altered States), after poor distraught and innocent waitress Millie (Jill Carroll, Psycho II), winds up in a padded-cell at the local loony-bin, before the silent demoness lures the ‘incorruptible’ Father Michael into a betrayal of his vows.

In spite of its dream sequences, there is precious little room in the unfolding of this mystery’s narrative for many convincingly rational or likely psychological explanations of several nocturnal disturbances that are clearly supernatural happenings. So, thankfully, The Unholy has no cop-out ending as just another treatment of evil immortality themes in horror cinema. An intentionally awkward confrontational scene between Holbrook’s pious clergyman and Beatty’s worried sleuth forms the heart of this story’s balancing act of humanist concerns versus complacent faith. 

The director’s attention seems focused upon making certain the imposing visuals are fully supported by an effectively moody atmosphere on the key sets, and The Unholy is worth catching for bewitchingly rendered imagery that’s sustained by strong cameos. Although, obviously, it lacks the contemporary genre impact of Alan Parker’s superbly chilling Angel Heart (1987), the bloody shocks of Clive Barker’s compelling debut Hellraiser (1987), or the unsettling weirdness of John Carpenter’s uncanny and apocalyptic Prince Of Darkness (1987), The Unholy still deserves another chance to impress horror fans, especially with its amusingly esoteric climax of godforsaken monsters, and stylised mayhem that's happily uncut in this HD version.

A fine package of extras, including three featurettes, a director’s commentary track, good interviews, and promotional material, adds plenty of merits to this welcome re-release.

Parents

Cast: Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, and Sandy Dennis

Director: Bob Balaban

83 minutes (18) 1989

Lions Gate Blu-ray region B

[Released 25th February]

Rating: 8/10

Review by Christopher Geary

“Leftovers from what..?”

A decidedly odd little horror, Parents is a quirky mystery-movie of engagingly stylised black-comedy, with a 1950s period setting where the brightly cheerful colour schemes conceal a grimly brooding tale of suburban cannibalism with gigantic meals cooked for a charming family of three, devouring fleshy platefuls of glistening protein gastronomy.

Moving into a new house, the Laemles quickly acclimate themselves into a neighbourhood that’s unbearably distant for the pressurised imagination of young Michael (Bryan Madorsky, in his first screen role), a morbidly sulky boy so desperately serious, and seemingly ‘manic-depressive’, that he effortlessly freaks out well-meaning social worker and school shrink Millie (Sandy Dennis). Randy Quaid plays a psycho dad Nick in what might qualify as his career-best performance of the 1980s, at least, and Nick’s wife, Lily (Mary Beth Hurt), is the epitome of a quaintly post-war homemaker, an adventurous whizz in the kitchen who denies any wrongdoings when it comes to supersized family dinners or other housework.

    

“What have we said about snacks late at night?”

Usually, such things (like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for instance) are darkly dreary, with shocks that are hammered home with swinging axes, but here’s a differently mannered childhood fantasy about domestic betrayals, very cleverly directed by Bob Balaban, who serves up ominous chills with a feverishly compelling air of smirking normality in a sitcom format. As a character-actor, Balaban had appeared in three of the greatest American SF movies, Spielberg’s magnificent UFOlogy trip Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977), Ken Russell’s masterpiece Altered States (1980), and the sequel to Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, Peter Hyams’ 2010 (1984), so it’s fascinating to see him directing this kind of picture that reveals another side to Balaban’s genre interests, following similarly themed TV work, helming episodes of anthology shows Tales From The Darkside (1983) and Amazing Stories (1985).  

Is this a pro-vegetarian propaganda piece, centred on the familiar ‘meat is murder’ diet slogan? Yes, but Parents emerges from its various references as an unrepentantly fierce critique of consumer society, delivered for any TV dinner of your choice, with all its fatty jokes trimmed off. Some visual elements are clearly borrowed from early David Lynch’s oeuvre (particularly Eraserhead and Blue Velvet), and aspects of the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise, but Balaban concocts a startling recipe for sub-genre success, one that scores highly even when it’s matched against broader knockabout routines in Joe Dante’s excellent comedy The ’Burbs (1989).  

Bonus material:  

• Commentary track with Bob Balaban and producer Bonnie Palef
• Isolated score selections and audio interview with composer Jonathan Elias
• Leftovers To Be - with screenwriter Christopher Hawthorne
• Mother’s Day - with actress Mary Beth Hurt
• Inside Out - interview with director of photography Robin Vidgeon
• Vintage Tastes - with decorative consultant Yolanda Cuomo
• Theatrical trailer
• Radio spots
• Stills gallery

Class Of 1999

Cast: Bradley Gregg, Stacy Keach, and Pam Grier

Director: Mark L. Lester   

96 minutes (15) 1990

Lions Gate 
Blu-ray region B

[Released 25th February]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Steven Hampton

This sequel to Class Of 1984 is basically a standard-model exploitation movie of sci-fi and action. If the influence of Blackboard Jungle (1955), was most evident in Class Of 1984, then pre-millennial themes of corporal punishment in teenage education sting these rowdy students much like humanity is besieged in the man versus machine dramas of Westworld (1973), and The Terminator (1984), albeit with stunt gags often presented here, quite winningly it must be said, as tongue-in-cheek satire. This is when and where Class Of 1999 nods most affectionately to RoboCop (1987), as the various decision-making processes of three mecha-teachers go horribly wrong.

Class Of 1999 has newly paroled teen Cody (Bradley Gregg) going back to school where the Mega-Tech company and federal defences now provide strict android teachers capable of enforcing programmed rules against rebellious students, and brutal discipline to eradicate gang violence. Kennedy High School’s headmaster, Langford, is portrayed by Malcolm McDowell, whose screen presence chimes with the unrelated Roddy McDowell, of Class Of 1984, but also brings welcome genre references to a British movie, Lindsay Anderson’s classic of allegorical revolution in a boarding school, If.... (1968).

Stacy Keach essays the smirking yet deranged albino inventor, Bob Forrest, who conspires with Langford to employ inhuman methods, including splatterpunk SF mayhem against unruly kids. His humanoid tools of authority are Hardin (John P. Ryan, It’s Alive), Connors (blaxploitation queen Pam Grier, Jackie Brown, Ghosts Of Mars), and Bryles (Patrick Kilpatrick), playing quirky variations on stereotyped school-teachers with cybernetic enhancements to deal with disobedient children. Class Of 1999 delivers savagely cynical futurism with a gross-out horror climax, alternating from cheesy jokes to militarised ultra-violence, while also successfully bridging the conceptual gaps between aforementioned sci-fi movies and off-beat contemporary thrillers like The Warriors (1979), and John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13 (1976).     

The action-packed, explosive finale, where rival gangs team-up against homicidal battle-droids involves the rescue of a kidnapped girlfriend, before a school bus is used like a battering-ram, smashing through the main doors. The director, Mark L. Lester, is a highly capable creator of several cult or genre pictures, including Stunts (1977), Firestarter (1984), Commando (1985), Showdown In Little Tokyo (1991), Night Of The Running Man (1995), and White Rush (2003). Are some of these movies just guilty pleasures? Well, yes... but most of Lester’s work is good fun, scoring higher points than usual, especially when compared to the standards of many other movies from the VHS rentals era.    

Disc extras -

• Audio commentary by Mark L. Lester
• School Safety: interviews with Lester, and co-producer Eugene Mazzola
• New Rules: interview with screenwriter C. Courtney Joyner
• Cyber-Teachers From Hell: interviews with special-effects creators Eric Allard and Rick Stratton
• Future Of Discipline: interview with director of photography Mark Irwin
• Theatrical trailer
• TV spots
• Still gallery
• Video promo

Class Of 1984

Cast: Perry King, Timothy Van Patten, and Roddy McDowell

Director: Mark L. Lester    

98 minutes 18 1982

101 Films Blu-ray region B

[Released 25th February]

Rating: 8/10

Review by Steve Hampton

“Life is pain. Pain is everything. You will learn.”

An unnerving portrait of violence in schools, especially with guns, this looks unfortunately so topical that it’s somewhat controversial to see Class Of 1984 getting a re-release on the premium home-entertainment format. Problems of modern juvenile delinquency are fuelled by a punk rebellion, and falling or failing education standards, resulting in quite mindless and constant aggression. In this ‘lawless zoo’ of a wholly American educational institution, a grim situation is further aggravated by drugs and racism, amidst rumbling echoes of Richard Brooks’ seminal The Blackboard Jungle (1955), and a clever title, just ahead of its time, that riffs blatantly upon George Orwell’s dystopian SF novel, 1984 (1948).

New-in-town music teacher, Andy Norris (Perry King), seems endearingly naive, but he’s also engagingly sympathetic to troubled children, even more so as he's appalled by the bitterly  confrontational misbehaviour of gangs when he’s employed at the rundown Lincoln High School. Norris is facing up to one of the greatest dilemmas of our time - how can a responsibly moral establishment figure manage to properly and fairly educate young people when so many of them simply refuse to learn anything? Active participation in various classrooms is rejected in favour of bullying, sporadic rioting, and other criminal activities.

   

Before achieving stardom as the time-travelling hero of Back To The Future, a chubby Michael J. Fox here plays a trumpet in the school band, at least until he’s stabbed and so winds up in hospital. Clever brat Stegman (Timothy Van Patten) is the ruthless gang leader who provokes everyone in sight without any obvious reasoning beyond a surly disruptive attitude, but his apparent case of utterly psychopathic charm is quickly exposed, to an opposing and unsubtly moral force, when Norris attempts to deal with the nasty boy’s cruel antics. Roddy McDowell plays biology teacher Corrigan, a man who cracks under pressure after the movie’s first hour, and he starts teaching a full class at gunpoint. This sequence is a decidedly moving portrayal of vengeful authority run amok, for a tragedy just waiting to happen. It's certainly a potent theme that media has often returned to, particularly in French TV movie, La Journee de la jupe (aka: Skirt Day, 2008), starring the great Isabelle Adjani.   

Long befre the bell rings on the closing action, one kid climbs up the flagpole and falls to his death. Vandalism in school corridors, labs, or workshops, reflects the mental turmoil of broken homes, dysfunctional families, and social depravation. Like the vicious ‘droogs’ (Nadsat for ‘friends’) in Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated A Clockwork Orange (1971), Stegman’s gang of thugs are not averse to home invasion, sexual assault, and kidnapping. Pervy gang moll Patsy (Lisa Langlois, Transformations, Mindfield), lures reactive hero Andy into a final and ultimately fatal pursuit, resulting in a night of hysterical mayhem, complete with an accidental lynching above a theatre stage.

The stunning resurrection granted to Class Of 1984 for this welcome HD release really ought to spark a career retrospective for its under-appreciated filmmaker, and the disc extras reflect this very well. 

Bonus material:

A limited edition booklet includes ‘Future Retro: The Punk Culture And 1980s Sci-Fi’ by Scott Harrison, and ‘And Pain Is Everything: an interview with director Mark L. Lester’.

Disc extras:

• Commentary track with director Mark L. Lester
• Life Is Pain... an interview with writer Tom Holland
• Do What You Love - a career retrospective of Perry King
• History Repeats Itself - an interview with director Mark Lester and composer Lalo Schifrin
• Blood And Blackboards - interviews with cast and crew
• Girls Next Door - interviews with actresses Erin Noble and Lisa Langlois
• Trailer and TV spots
• Stills gallery