1981 horror, dir. John Landis, David Naughton, Jenny Agutter:
IMDb /
allmovie. Two American
college students go hiking on the Yorkshire moors. One of them comes
back.
John Landis was mostly known for Animal House and _The Blues
Brothers, but here he takes a turn into an somewhat unexpected blend
of horror and humour. This is always a risk: when horror fails to
horrify, it can still be funny, but when humour fails, it doesn't do
anything.
Mostly this works (though I find the comic-relief policemen a bit
much). I do wonder slightly how you wander off a tarmac road onto
grass without noticing, but hey. Rick Baker would win his first of
seven makeup Oscars for the creature effects here. And soon enough
David (David Naughton) is waking up in a hospital in London to be told
he and his friend were attacked by an escaped lunatic (not quite how
he remembers it) but everything's all right now.
Spoiler: it isn't. Not least because the decaying corpse of his friend
keeps appearing to him to warn him of impending Doom. Even if his main
nurse has fallen for him and looks like Jenny Agutter, that's not
going to be enough to stop him going out on a killing spree.
We also get John Woodvine as the doctor who ends up as the hero; his
sporty little car is perfect for a middle-aged consultant. But even
he can only get as far as accepting what's happening and trying to end
it; as in The Howling, nobody is going to make things right.
Indeed, I can conceive of a non-comedy version of this film in which
David is genuinely struggling with post-traumatic suicidal thoughts.
But that's not the way this film goes. Instead, he has a few days to
kill himself before he turns into a monster permanently, and that's
it.
There's an effective blend of genuine stress and lighter funny
material; the only bit that really falls flat for me is David, waking
up naked in the zoo after a rampage and having to get home, which is
played for laughs but feels to me genuinely stressful.
Do I love it? No. But I did have a good time watching it.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.