Cellar Dweller (1988)

Although horror fans, and general movie fans, tend to know some of the big names in the world of practical effects, it always ends up being the same people who get most of the praise, and not without good reason. You have Tom Savini, Stan Winston, Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, the guys who formed KNB (Kurtzman, Nicotero, and Berger). Those who love to celebrate the classics may mention Willis O’Brien and, of course, Ray Harryhausen, but that’s about your lot. Meet someone who wants to wax lyrical about Screaming Mad George (real name = Joji Tani) and you’ve discovered a rarity. Then there’s John Carl Buechler, a special effects artists who had a great knack for making memorable puppet creations with fairly limited resources. He worked with Stuart Gordon a few times, was involved with at least one instalment of each of the big three slasher icon franchises, and gave us those irascible Ghoulies. He also sat in the director’s chair occasionally, this film being one of those with him at the helm, and I think that it is time for Buechler to get the proper praise he has long been due.

Yet another film that I wanted to see for decades, thanks to the combination of the title and the VHS box, Cellar Dweller is a simple and fantastical piece of work. Less of an outright horror movie and more of an adult version of an extended Goosebumps episode, it’s something that will remain enjoyable to anyone who loves the cheap ‘n’ cheerful schlock from the 1980s.

Debrah Farentino (billed here as Debrah Mullowney) plays a comic book artist named Whitney Taylor who ends up unleashing some major trouble when she spends time at an artist’s retreat, headed up by Mrs. Briggs (Yvonne De Carlo). It turns out that there’s a power in the place, a magic that can turn Whitney’s drawings into reality. It isn’t long until the titular cellar dweller starts killing off the other residents.

Written by Don Mancini, this is a brisk and amusing bit of silliness that benefits more from Buechler’s work on the special effects than it does from Buechler’s direction. Not that he does a terrible job in the latter role, but he certainly ends up maintaining a surprisingly lighter-than-expected tone throughout. There’s some attempt throughout the first half to craft some tension, helped by a decent score from Carl Dante, but that soon goes out the window as the daffiness of the main premise starts to outweigh the potential for real horror.

Cast-wise, people are good, not great. Taylor is a decent lead, and it’s fun to watch De Carlo in her supporting role, but few others make a strong impression, with the main exception being Brian Robbins (who would go on to become a director of some shocking Eddie Murphy movies decades later). Robbins plays a friend/artist/love interest and the third act makes the interesting choice to position him as a kind of “damsel in distress”, which may stem from Mancini having fun with the genre tropes. Or it’s maybe just because we are sticking with the female lead for the majority of the movie. The other name to mention here is Jeffrey Combs, only acting in the brief prologue, but doing enough to ensure that this film has an approved Combs quota.

If you end up watching this expecting some lo-fi gore and nastiness then you will be disappointed. This isn’t a blood-soaked shocker. It is, instead, the kind of cosy dark fantasy that we don’t tend to see made nowadays. It will give you a warm glow of nostalgia, it will have you once again remembering why practical effects, as flawed as they are, so often outshine CGI, and it will most likely keep you smiling as it entertains you for the brief, 77-minutes in all, runtime.

6/10

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Noir November: The Killing (1956)

An early film in the career of one Mr. Stanley Kubrick, The Killing may be a relatively low-budget, low-key movie compared to some of his later works, but it's no less enjoyable for it. Based on a novel ("Clean Break") by Lionel White, this is a tense, unhurried look at a group of criminals planning a major heist.

The main players are: Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), the man with the plan, a corrupt cop named Randy Kennan (Ted De Corsia), a teller who works at the racecourse they're planning to rob (Elisha Cook Jr), a sharpshooter (Timothy Carey), and a couple of other guys who will help to distract people while the robbery occurs. Everything is planned out precisely, and onscreen details, as well as narration, help viewers to keep track of just how all of the pieces fall into place. But no plan is foolproof, is it?

Kubrick may be working on a smaller scale here, compared to his more famous works, but he shows the same attention to detail and clinical approach to the material that cinema fans would respond so well to. The script, with dialogue by Jim Thompson, nicely balances things out between the specifics of the job and the drama derived from the fluctuating dynamic of the group.

Performances are pretty great across the board, especially for a film that many would consider as nothing more than a b-movie (I guess). Hayden, Corsia, Carey and the others all do well, but I have to admit that Cook Jr. is someone I have always loved seeing onscreen, and his role here is a great one. Coleen Gray and Marie Windsor also do well, being the two main women in a film that focuses very much on the men. The fact that two make such a memorable impression, for very different reasons, is further testament to the script and their performances.

I'm not sure how audiences would have reacted to the content back in 1956, when this was first released, but it seems to have enough darker elements in there to make some people uncomfortable. There are some moments of violence, as expected from a film about an armed robbery, a healthy dollop of cynicism coating everything, and at least one outburst that uses a racial slur to shocking, though also brilliant, effect.

With it being so slight, however, it's hard to push this forward as an essential noir viewing. Yet it's easy to see how influential it has been, at least on certain people (Tarantino, I'm looking at you). It's also simply an excellent little movie that doesn't outstay its welcome. Give it a watch soon, if you've not seen it already.

8/10

http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Criterion-Collection-Blu-ray/dp/B005152C78/ref=sr_1_10?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1415885702&sr=1-10&keywords=the+killing

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