IT'S ALL IN THE FAMILY - WES CRAVEN KICK PART ONE

Watching Wes Craven's early career has been a blast and fascinating. 

 Like his first theatrical movie, you can feel Craven working how to work his themes into his movies, to varying success.  What has been intersting about tracking Craven's career is seeing how he would weave his favourite prominate themes into his gigs.  Wes Craven was very much a working director, he went where ever the money was, which is why his career is so varied with the horror genre, TV Movies and Antholgies as well as the movies he is known for.  Through watching Craven movies you can really see him experiementing with tone and themes

    Because I have already gone into depth on Last House on the Left in my Meeting of Minds Double.  I am going to start my Craven Kick with Cravens sophomore theatrical release, The Hills Have Eyes 

 THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977)

The Happiest Place on Earth - The Astor

For a sadistic grimy movie, The Hills Have Eyes has a lot of charm to it.  I first saw Hills at an all night horror Spooktacular at the Astor a few years ago.  Even watching a pristine Blu I could see the beaten up 35mm print around the edges, de-saturated and mostly pink.  This was the best way to be introduced to The Hills Have Eyes.  It also took me back to the Astor, it's hard leather seats that are a bit too straight, the smell of stale popcorn and the way you were enveloped into darkness under the Art Deco interior.  It really miss going to the movies.  Maybe, that is why I enjoyed Hills Have Eyes as much as I did because it did take me back to a happier place.

Getting to the movie itself, I could feel Wes Craven streaming lining the differing tones he was attempting in The Last House on the Left - complete with goofy humour and booby trapes.  I think Craven had a naturally silly sense of humour, but goofiness that really rubbed me the wrong way in Last House, works in this story of two opposing families meeting in the desert and going to war.  You can feel  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (another 1970s defining movie) in the bones of The Hills Have Eyes, one master working from another.  Hills is still very exploitation and  you can see the foundation cracks in the movie, but it's more palatable and goes down a lot easier to swallow.  More commercial - but I am here for it.  Hills is a story of two families.  The more tradition Anglo-Christian, and the literally nuclear family of Jupiter's Clan, who are cannibals and are as nuclear as the wasteland they inhabit.  Like Last House we see a tradition family coming into contact with pure violence and how they react, and like Last House booby traps involved.  Though Hills evolves, the Collingwood's in Last House lose their humanity to revenge, in Hills the violence is more a battle for the Carter's soul.  Baby Katie is the embodiment of this, save the baby save the world.  

SUMMER OF FEAR (1978)

  I was a little excited to push play on 1978's Summer of Fear, I was looking forward to checking out Wes Craven's TV work.  All I knew about Summer of Fear was it had Linda Blair, and Linda Blair's hair which should get it's own credits.  What I discovered that this movie is a low key insane movie.  My imagination is servery limited when it comes to how families would have sat down to watch a young adult single white female-esque story but with witchcraft on a Tuesday nigth.  But I had a blast.  As cousin Julie moves into the Byant home, she starts stealing boyfriends, prom dresses, also starts giving Uncles inappropriate back-rubs.  It could me my fuzzy memory, but did a lot of TV movies had a lot of vague incest.  There is happening under happening under all that 70s hair, and when it goes beszerk, Craven really commits to the bit.  Linda Blair herself is adorable, and feels appropriately petulant for what is happening around her.   And she's adorable to boot, when she comes out in a home made Prom dress that doesn't think, adorable is the only word for it I can think of.  Lee Purcell is also got a great sickly sweet atmosphere about her perm.  Summer of Fear is a choppy but a movie I had fun with.

DEADLY BLESSING (1981)

To say there is a lot happening with Deadly Blessing is an understatement.  Deadly Blessing feels like a bridging movie between what Craven was trying to do in the 1970s and what he will do in the 1980s more specificly Nightmare on Elm Street.  It's definetly not the simple stab and slasher movies that were at their peak in 1981, or the Slasher/Horror that Wikipeadia catagorizes it as.  But there is so much more to unpack  I don't think Deadly Blessing completely works but you can see the bones of what he would do more fluidly in A Nightmare on Elm Street.  Even through the mess you can see Craven developing as a film maker even bringing back past actors, like Michael Berryman and Jeff East.

Deadly Blessings set by a neighboring strict Hittite Community that is worried about a supposed Sucubus curse haunting the community, and that is now focusing it's haunt on a  young Widow and her friends.  Deadly Blessing is a movie about sex, the transgressions and taboos surrounding it.  Craven is really throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. It was a step to far to work in gender identity into this mix, even if it was a common troupe in the early 1980s.  Craven liked to work in complicated ideas and generally felt like he was interested in the people around him.   But to mix in sexual jealousy with transgender feels wrong footed now - even if it does feel like Craven is figuring things out. 

Here again,  you can still see Craven's strict traditional background in how sexual transgression is treated.  But at the same time, the movie does show the suffering that comes with repression.   It's also the first of Craven's theatrical movies that starts digging into the supernatural and the dream world he would become oh so famous for.  For me, this supernatural is still digging into the duelality that Craven has been playing around with his previous movies, especially with Sharon Stone (who has to be one of the more beautiful creatures to grace the planet) who is particular haunted, caught between the the two worlds.  But on earth there is something hunting and tracking these modern and free women.  I don't think the movie is punishing Maren Jensen, Sharon Stone, Susan Buckner, it feels more about the spectre of  controls that are put on sex and sexuality.  Again we are seeing two worlds, the traditional and the modern and how they mix and effect each other.

SWAMP THING (1982)

 I think we need to talk about how Wes Craven sneaked in David Hess into a 2.5 Million movie.  And he's still a dirt bag, who carries a snake in his pocket just in case he gets to torture someone.  Secondly, I we need to talk about how a 2.5 Million dollar budget is not enough for a Swamp Thing movie even in 1982. It really goes in the nature of how we view and expect from Superhero Movies.  1982 was a place in time where we believed a Man Could Fly and Swamp Thing had to step up.  

I'm not sure if Wes Craven's Swamp Thing was adapting the Allen Moore run, or if it's the Swamp Thing I know  and I'm the one using it as a reference point.  Allen Moore, like Craven is a creator of ideas, but Moore is far more nihilistic than Craven, and I felt that the two sensibilities are like oil and water.  The creature who has lost it's humanity and is seeking something else doesn't feel like it fits with Craven's sensibilities.  

We have been trained in a very specific way in how to watch a Superhero movie.  In fact, I think it's the one genre that needs a over sized budget.  Craven had less of a budget in Nightmare on Elm Street and was able to so much more, but in Swamp Thing there's an attempt to create large set pieces, but it feels awkward and shlonky.  In horror you can use imagination and mood to create more that is on screen because it's about fear, shadows or shock.  However,  in a Superhero movie you need to believe a man could fly, or that Swamp Thing is an actual creature not a guy in a suit.  It's a weird quirk of a genre that is now (or was - if we ever get back to the theatres) taking over the theatrical expression.  Even stripped back Superhero movies like Logan or Deadpool still had enough large enough to make what is happening on screen belieavable.

In saying all that, there is still a lot to like in Swamp Thing.  Most of it is the beginning, Adrienne Barbeau is channeling Rosalind Russell in a Hawaiian shirt.  Her banter with Ray Wise is adorable.  Also in a movie where Craven has to mostly put his Craven-ness aside, he sneaks his sensibilities in in the corners or in to riff on another Master.  The decadent dinner party with Barbeau tied up surrounded by reminded me of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  There's pockets of grotesqueness to Swamp Thing that I wish there was more of.  

INVITATION TO HELL (1984) 

1984 would be one hell of a year for Wes Craven.  Three movies of his were released and one, of those would change the course of where the horror genre would go.  Invitation to Hell is not that movie.  It's fine, I guess.  Growing up in New Zealand I've understood the whole country club thing, for me it was the Working Man's club, which is much more working class, and much more of a pub.  I am much more on Robert Urich's side not wanting to join the local Club.  Jeez, Susan Lucci is persistent in her sales pitch.  I mean yes, it's a Hell Mouth, but really how good is the service?  You would hope the Mojitos are good if you are going to be giving up your soul, though Susan Lucci keeps going on about is the gym.  Invitation to Hell is a dopey and thin movie, Craven does what he can putting in little flourishes here and there.

Watching Wes Craven's movies in order, I noticed that Craven's go to when he doesn't know how to connect the ideas is to go goofy.  There's a lot of goofy just under the surface, small ticks the movie has overall.  Invitation to Hell is your American Dream story gone awry.  Wealth and success comes with a cost.  And here that cost is a fabulous Susan Lucci in Devil Red.  But Craven never really leans into the 1980s Yuppie/Wall Street of Silicon Valley that you would expect.  It feels like like Craven is jumping back into what is comfortable.  A Tradition family trying to deal with a force of outside evil.  But it doesn't feel like it pushes any where outside of that.  Invitation to Hell feels like a TV Movie through and through, it never really pushes - well anything.  It's a movie that is filled with strong vetern TV actors, who are also very used to staying within the limits.  As I said it's fine.  But Lucci in full angry devil would make an amazing Halloween Costume, or even to wear around the house as casual wear.