Movies
The Carpenter
“[The Carpenter] is a different kind of 80’s slasher and there’s a cool kill or two, but it’s a little too padded, even though it runs under ninety minutes.”
DVD Review
“Never judge a book by its cover” has been a longstanding nugget of wisdom, but it’s kind of hard to look at the box art for The Carpenter – featuring Wings Hauser (Rubber) sporting a prohibition-era tommy gun with a giant drill bit shoved in the barrel – and not wish it would deliver the bat-shit insanity it’s so adamantly promising. The Canadian slasher/Lifetime psychological thriller hybrid has a fair amount of zany nonsense in it; maybe even more than you’d expect. But, when Doug Taylor’s script is just going through the motions and doing things like introducing a sheriff whose whole purpose is to vomit up exposition and messily chomp on donuts, the banality really starts to wear you down.
The Carpenter, at least, starts out wacky, with Alice (Lynn Adams) being committed for cutting up her husband’s clothes with a pair of scissors (Do people get committed for that?), presumably for being a prick and sleeping with his students. After having a wild dream about being accosted with power tools, she’s released and finds out that her husband has moved them into a fixer-upper out in the country for really no reason whatsoever. Most of the workers are beer-chugging, chauvinistic punks, save for the foreman who’s barely in the movie and The Carpenter (Hauser), who Alice finds working in their basement in the middle of the night.
Hauser totally steals the show as the off-kilter romantic interest, mostly because he’s doing something that either makes no sense, or is so over-the-top, it’s funny. There’s one scene in particular when he’s wooing Alice outside, and every time the camera cuts back and forth between them, he’s doing something completely different, like painting a miniature house or sanding a giant door. He plays all his scenes like a passive, charming psychopath, which ties into Martin’s (Pierre Lenoir) lecture on Paul Bunyan. I’m sure Taylor thought he could give his screenplay some real depth by making the mysterious figure in Alice’s life a rugged outdoorsman with good work ethic who stands up for his woman, while making everyone else a schmuck; instead, it’s groan-inducing, especially after the tenth time it’s heavy-handedly pointed out.
Anytime the focus switches to Alice’s emotional and mental turmoil, The Carpenter putters to a screeching halt because of its “could this all be in her imagination?” routine. But between Hauser’s scenery-chewing, Gary Busey routine, the neurotic paint store who hires Alice part-time after she admits to having hallucinations after her nervous breakdown and no experience doing anything remotely close to being called a job, and the WTF ending, The Carpenter shouldn’t be entirely dismissed. It’s a different kind of 80’s slasher and there’s a cool kill or two, but it’s a little too padded, even though it runs under ninety minutes.
The Scorpion Releasing DVD has a sole special feature, which is an introduction by Katrina Leigh Waters, a former WWE Diva, which isn’t worth watching. It’s not that she’s a horrible host; it’s just that the intro is completely unnecessary. The A/V quality is fine, considering The Carpenter seems low-budget, but it should be noted that the “uncut” footage, which has been put back in, is of significantly lower quality than the rest of the film – probably culled from a master tape. None of the films Scorpion has released under their Katrina’s Nightmare Theater banner have been great, but they’re all either receiving an official DVD treatment for the first time or are being brought back into print, so at least there’s that.
A contemporary reimagining of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story Herbert West: Reanimator is on the way, and Deadline has unveiled the first look at the new Herbert West and the pathologist drawn to his orbit.
The original screenplay and storyline come from Jade Sandberg Wallis.
Michael Grossman (“The Originals”, “Pretty Little Liars”) directs.
The new images introduce star Joseph Morgan (“Vampire Diaries“), who plays “brilliant surgeon and scientist Herbert West, who is obsessed with creating a serum to reanimate the dead.” Katie Cassidy (Speed Demon) stars opposite as the pathologist with a troubled past who joins his efforts.
Together, they prove that conquering death may be the ultimate sin against life itself.
The film’s official synopsis: “As a child, Herbert West watches his father Peter reanimate his dead mother Judith in a secret basement lab — only for Judith to mortally wound Peter and nearly kill Herbert before Peter shoots her. The trauma leaves its mark on Herbert, but so does one final image: his mother’s finger, twitching after death. Thirty years later, Herbert West is a brilliant, secretive surgeon still chasing his father’s obsession.
“Pathologist Kate Locke arrives in town and is drawn into his orbit — first through a spark at a hospital fundraiser, then through his secret lab, where he reveals a serum capable of reanimating severed tissue. Kate, hiding a dark past of her own, is thrilled rather than horrified, and moves into West’s mansion to work alongside him. Their early experiments on a cadaver succeed only briefly. West concludes that dead tissue is the problem — they need something fresher.”
Supporting cast includes Scott Aiello, Ira J Amyx, Randall Newsome, Emma Reinagal, James D. Bryce, Kathryn A Bentley, Jack Lancaster, Amy Holland Pennell, John Pierson, Mindy Shaw, Eric Dean White, Tristan Wilder Hallet, Adrienne Lamping, Aaron Crippen, and Drew Patterson.
Makeup artist Jeff Lewis (“Star Trek: Voyager,” “Star Trek: Enterprise”) and cousin Roger Lewis are heading the production via their newly established Woodlake Entertainment.
Lovecraft’s short story, first serialized in Home Brew magazine in 1922, is the first among his works to mention the fictional Miskatonic University. It was most famously adapted into a 1985 horror movie from Stuart Gordon, starring Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West.
Herbert West: Reanimator is set in Alton, Illinois, where production is now underway.
Herbert West: Reanimator. Photo credit: Matt Lief Anderson
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