Editorials
Remembering Tobe Hooper: The Cannon Years
It’s difficult to deal with the loss of our Masters. The passing of Romero was a massive gut punch, and now here we are again. Only a little over a month later, Tobe Hooper has passed away at the age of 74. It’s safe to say without his first feature, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the shape of American horror would not appear the same it does today. That original low budget slice of sun drenched terror has been massively influential to a number of directors working today. Despite this great loss, Hooper has a legacy in TCM that will live on forever, always provoking and inspiring those brave souls willing to venture into its abyss.
I’m not here to talk about TCM, however. As much as I adore the original for its shrill terror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 has always been more to my personal taste. It’s a vibrant, darkly comedic film, coming at the end of a bizarre run of flicks made in partnership with Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. The heads of the now infamous Cannon Film Group were hungry for a franchise they could exploit. Paramount had Friday the 13th. Newline had Freddy. Riding high off the success of the Spielberg collab Poltergeist, Hooper was a hot name in Hollywood, and Golan and Globus snapped the director up for a three picture deal. Before they got the Chainsaw sequel they wanted, Hooper wisely tackled two other films that tickled his fancy first.
Lifeforce (1985)
Lifeforce is a film that evaded me for many years. On a whim one night I rented a copy and sat down for two hours of pure sci-fi/horror insanity. With Lifeforce, you’re really getting four films in one: Alien-esque space horror, a body jumping procedural, zombie hordes (technically “vampires”), and large scale destructive action. Hooper was given the keys to the kingdom and ran wild with what was the largest budgeted film Cannon had produced at the time. Based on a book titled The Space Vampires, Hooper’s intent was to craft a colorful popcorn flick reminiscent of the Hammer films he loved so much.
While the title changed, the spirit remained. Hooper was clearly having a blast and throwing everything at the screen. No resource was left untapped from practical gore and creature design, optical effects, sweeping crane shots, classic British thespians, and the alluring Mathilda May as the lead space vamp. While this writer enjoys the film for its bonkers narrative shifts and Grand Canyon sized leaps of logic, May remains the centerpiece that seems to draw in many viewers. She’s an alluring presence without uttering but a few lines. She also happens to be completely naked for a majority of the runtime. Hooper shoots the nudity in a clinical, matter of fact manner. It’s a natural state for this alien being and is presented as such to the audience.
With Lifeforce, Hooper showed he could handle a large scale production. Lead actor Steve Railsback spoke highly of his talent, “As a director, he knew what the hell he was doing. He knew.” Unfortunately, Lifeforce failed to perform at the box office, losing in a head to head battle with that summer’s other sci-fi flick, Cocoon. It’s unclear if the wonky script was the culprit or the poor marketing, but the film failed to regain even half of its budget. No worries, Hooper still had two more films to tackle in that three picture deal.
Invaders from Mars (1986)
A family friendly remake of a 50s B-movie might not seem like a perfect fit for Hooper’s second film at Cannon, but it was actually a passion project the director chased down for years. The goal was to craft a horror story fit for kids. With a surprisingly subdued Karen Black and her real life son Hunter Carson (also the son of TCM 2 screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson) in the lead roles, amazing creature effects from master Stan Winston, and some grand scale set design – it’s puzzling to me why Invaders from Mars gets as much hate as it does. From moment one, Hooper presents us with a typical Leave it to Beaver facade that slowly gets chipped away as the Body Snatchers-lite plot unravels. The film is presented through the eyes of young David (Carson) as he tries to convince the adults around him that something just isn’t right since he witnessed a possible UFO crash land in his backyard.
Another financial failure for Cannon, Invaders still hasn’t managed to build a cult following similar to the other two films on this list. I think its time will come, however. It’s clear Hooper intended to play everything a bit more for camp than terror. The film becomes increasingly colorful as the story progresses and we move further away from “reality”. For those who’ve never checked this one out (or the original), I won’t give away the ending, but vague-ish spoilers follow. Nonetheless, maintaining the same stinger as the original was a major point of contention among audience members in 1986. Sure, it can be seen as a cheap cop-out, but Hooper truly earns that ending through his visual style and some of the more eye-roll worthy plotting.
To some, Tobe Hooper’s Invaders from Mars is amateur garbage heap of misguided decisions. To others, misunderstood art. It’s the perfect film to show a kid who is just dipping their toes into the genre waters. In fact, having just recently revisited the film, if I had been shown this when I was 8 or so, it most certainly would have been my favorite flick ever. Just watching the genuinely unique alien design would have provided countless Crayola adventures. In that, I believe, is exactly the response Hooper was aiming for.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
Finally, Golan and Globus were getting what they paid for, a sequel to the seminal backwoods survival horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. While the three picture deal hadn’t been very lucrative, Canon still showed confidence in Hooper by allowing him a lot of creative freedom to make the films he wanted as he wanted. That said, the budget for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was significantly less than the director’s previous outings. Mere days before production began, a producer swung by set just to inform everyone they were pulling a million dollars from the already tight budget. Coming in at around $4.7 million, Hooper still managed to pull together a team of incredibly talented artists who brought his demented carnival world to life.
From barbequing hippies in the original to lampooning yuppies, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a far cry from the stark, fever pitched survival horror of the original. It wasn’t exactly what Cannon had anticipated, despite the obvious humor built into Kit Carson’s screenplay, the execs were surprised the finished film was as much comedy as horror. The short turnaround time of the shoot thankfully left little time to fight with the MPAA over the rating, so the film went out to theaters unrated. What we were left with is one of my all time favorite films (as well as Stephen Spielberg apparently).
There’s a clear progression from the unhinged insanity of Lifeforce and the candy colored production design of Invaders that all flows straight into TCM 2. An obvious level of freedom is present within these three films that few directors are given the chance to experience. While there may have been some disagreements and post-production tweaking, ultimately Hooper was given multi-million dollar sandboxes to play around in. For that, thank you, Cannon, for allowing one of our Masters of Horror the chance to exorcise his neon colored nightmares onto theater screens across America.
Tobe Hooper will be missed, but his legacy will last forever. From the big hitters like the original TCM and Poltergeist to this oddball trilogy, I know I’ll think of him whenever I hear the revving of a chainsaw.
The Saw is Family. The Saw is Forever.
Editorials
‘A Haunted House’ and the Death of the Horror Spoof Movie
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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