Editorials
Adam Sandler Once Produced a Horror Movie … and It’s Not Bad
“Happy” and “Madison” are names that likely remind most of two of the biggest comedy hits from the ‘90s, Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison. Put together, they equal the production house “Happy Madison” that Gilmore and Madison star Adam Sandler created and populated with his talented friends early in his career.
Besides Sandler’s own movies, Happy Madison has brought to the screen hits like Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, Joe Dirt and Grandma’s Boy. They have even moved outside of the comedy realm to dive into more dramatic leaning fare like Funny People and Reign Over Me. One other genre the studio dabbled in — but only once — was horror.
That’s right. Adam Sandler produced a horror movie.
2009’s The Shortcut, executive produced by Sandler, was conceived in 2008 as the first film in a potential line of horror movies from the new Happy Madison division, Scary Madison. The film, which stars a young Dave Franco and is directed by Nicholas Goossen of Grandma’s Boy fame, is about two brothers who move to a new town and come in contact with a rarely used shortcut that is rumored by locals to be haunted.
The Shortcut mostly went unnoticed when originally released and Happy Madison quickly abandoned the idea of pursuing horror films altogether, which is a shame because The Shortcut played with enough interesting ideas to suggest that Scary Madison had potential as a horror division worth paying attention to.
Mind you, The Shortcut definitely has its faults.
It’s easy to smell a troubled production from the start with this one. Large bits of film or script feel like they have been left behind and what’s left is a bare-bones, 85-minute horror movie that never quite reaches its full potential. Co-writer Dan Hannon had once revealed that the script was rewritten numerous times before production commenced and the film only ended up earning financial backing after agreeing to a PG-13 rating. Sigh.
Another major fault is with the acting. There are occasional highlights — mostly from the charismatic Franco — but the acting nearly all around can make this movie feel cheap and amateurish at times. However, there’s still enough here that anyone who hasn’t seen this film should really check it out.
The shortcut in question has a history tied to a killer kid and a rich family betrayed by their town and their own stature in the world. A group of kids in the modern day begin investigating some strange happenings on the shortcut and it leads to nothing good for them. This shortcut creates an incredibly interesting mythology that provides a compelling foundation.
The Shortcut packs a lot of surprises for being what it is. It feels like an episode of “The Twilight Zone” drawn out to feature length. If it had been cut down to be an episode of television, it actually probably would have worked much better. And The Shortcut has the heart and passion that only a film made by true fans can have. While parts of it feel compromised by the process of moving from script to screen, this is a wild ride that you would have once been blessed to find scrolling through cable channels after midnight while the rest of the world sleeps.
The Shortcut has time jumps, mythology, killer kids, and all kinds of surprises… everything a good supernatural mystery needs. Those elements don’t always come together, but the way they are blended here makes for a fun watch and shows that the film deserved a little more attention than it got upon initially being released onto the world.
If The Shortcut is any indication, the folks at Happy Madison are true horror fans who have an eye for good campfire stories. Who knows, maybe Adam Sandler and company will feel the horror bug bite them once again in the future. Personally speaking, I’d be here for it.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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