Boo Business

A comedy tinged horror film, The Frighteners (1996) was actually the feature Peter Jackson co-wrote and directed right before moving onto The Lord of the Rings trilogy... and funnily enough, both The Fellowship of the Ring and today’s picture are celebrating worthy milestones this year – 25 and 30 years. Co-written along with longtime writing partner Fran Walsh, the story follows Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox), who after suffering some memory loss after a car accident that killed his wife, now has the bizarre ability to see and communicate with the ghosts who have not ‘moved on’.

Not talked about nearly as much as influential horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Black Christmas (1974), and Halloween (1978), in 1976 Alfred Sole co-wrote and directed Alice, Sweet Alice... very early on known as Communion and later on as Holy Terror, another pre-cursor to the slasher craze that would soon thrive during the early 1980s. With seeming touches of a gialli influence, funnily enough, Sole claims to have never seen a giallo before making the film... instead, pulling from the ever influential Alfred Hitchcock, and more precisely, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) – which can clearly be seen here.

Today’s feature really had me divided as to where it should be placed on my site – in a ‘Missed the Bloody Cut’ feature, a ‘What Could Have Been’ analysis, or as a typical ‘review’... I decided to go with the final option. Falling within the burgeoning slasher horror genre of the early 1980s, Jeff Lieberman co-writes the screenplay and directs Just Before Dawn (1981). Finding a group of friends heading into the Oregon mountains to investigate a plot of land Warren (a young Gregg Henry – Femme Fatale; Guardians of the Galaxy) has inherited, he is joined by his girlfriend Constance (Deborah Benson), another couple in Jonathan (Chris Lemmon) and Megan (Jamie Rose), as well as Jonathan’s brother Daniel (Ralph Seymour) – who has notoriously bad eyesight.

What would seemingly have been a massive hit crime film with an utterly impressive cast, Beat the Devil (1953) instead became a most bizarre experiment. With unhappy director John Huston having thrown the script out the window, he brought in the legendary Truman Capote to then help him co-write the story based upon British journalist Claud Cockburn’s novel of the same name at the very last minute. With a cast already assembled in Italy, names like Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida (in her first English language movie), Peter Lorre and others were simply sitting there and waiting to get started.

Nestled between two of Cecil B. DeMille’s massively successful historical epics (that he is so well known for), namely The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Cleopatra (1934), he directed two box office failures, This Day and Age (1933) and the movie reviewed here today, Four Frightened People (1934). Released just prior to the end of the Pre-Code era, DeMille’s early dramatic jungle adventure was reworked on the fly – which is partially why it is one of the iconic director’s middling efforts.

Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, back in 1976, Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader, before becoming household names (that would happen later the very same year with De Palma’s Carrie and Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver), attended a screening of an original print of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and were immediately inspired to co-write a story (with the latter polishing off the screenplay) for a movie that would eventually be titled Obsession – not at all related to this year’s box office craze with the same title, or the review posted here last week called Obsession: A Taste for Fear (1987). Like much of De Palma’s work, this too finds its brainchild from Hitchcock’s oeuvre, as mentioned before, most notably Vertigo.