{"id":13772,"date":"2020-04-03T11:00:35","date_gmt":"2020-04-03T18:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=13772"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:19:24","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:19:24","slug":"dont-movies-70s-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/dont-movies-70s-horror\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cDon\u2019t\u201d Hesitate to Stream This Triple-Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In his biblical tome Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents,<\/em> author Stephen Thrower likens exploitation films to \u201cthe uncultivated countryside of the American landscape, where weeds and flowers grow alike more freely,\u201d as opposed to the more sterile laboratory environment of Hollywood. Prestige cinema has always been easy enough to find in North America; the big dogs present a plethora of films annually to a public that doesn\u2019t question their value or pedigree. But as Nightmare USA<\/em> posits, variety is the spice of life, and low-budget genre pictures provide the fiery sauce to complement Hollywood\u2019s vanilla fare. Just before the major studios began paying attention to (and capitalizing on) the slasher subgenre in the 1980s, the decade prior saw an exponential increase in creativity (budget be damned) and taboo-pushing in the American exploitation film. Some saw instant notoriety, like The Last House on the Left<\/em> (1972), whereas some treasures have yet to get the discovery and cult following they deserve (I\u2019m doing my part by recommending Don\u2019t Go in the House<\/em>, below). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today we\u2019ll look at three such underseen gems of the 70\u2019s, all currently available on Amazon Prime. For the uninitiated: the same decade was peppered with horror and exploitation films with the word \u201cDon\u2019t\u201d in the title; the trend was ubiquitous to the point of parody. For the 2007 release of Grindhouse<\/em>, Edgar Wright did just that, cutting a fake trailer for a horror movie simply called Don\u2019t<\/em>. (Bonus: the first thirty seconds of that trailer references all three movies recommended below.) The \u201cDon\u2019t\u201d triple feature is the quarantine viewing you didn\u2019t know you needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Don\u2019t Look in the Basement<\/em> (1973)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first two genre pictures here come courtesy of the same director, one S.F. Brownrigg. Don\u2019t Look in the Basement <\/em>is through-and-through asylum horror that has a mean streak, despite obscuring its most titillating gore offscreen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film stars Rosie Holotik, who genre diehards may recognize as the leading lady in the only good segment (the last one) of Rod Serling\u2019s Encounters With the Unknown<\/em> (1972). Holotik is Charlotte Beale, a young psychiatric nurse who arrives to work at an isolated rural asylum. The doctor that she was hired by was murdered, in a more tragic predecessor to the halfway house axe murder scene in Friday the 13<\/em>th<\/sup><\/em>: A New Beginning<\/em> (notably, one of the few axe murders in that series that doesn\u2019t involve Jason Voorhees). There, she meets the remaining staff and patients, who proceed to torment her in as many ways as they can. Slashed throats, impalements, (implied) necrophilia, and multiple axe slayings follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Basement\u2019s<\/em> power lies in its modest but potent cast. From the creepy Mrs. Callingham (Rhea MacAdams)\u2014an old lady who speaks in vague riddles until she suddenly,shockingly, doesn\u2019t speak much at all\u2014to the perpetually horny Allyson (Betty Chandler) who battles intimacy issues, the story boasts a colorful cadre of patients, each as unique as the veteran patients of William Peter Blatty\u2019s slow-burn The Ninth Configuration<\/em>. The movie\u2019s problematic treatment of mental illness is a product of its time; the rising body count affirms the structural guideline illuminated by scholars Snyder and Mitchell in Cultural Locations of Disability<\/em>: \u201cdifference is exposed, explained, and rehabilitated, often through cure, rescue, or extermination.\u201d Seemingly curing mental illness by killing the person who carries it is one trope we can leave back in 20th<\/sup> century cinema, but Brownrigg does find balance in his Freaks<\/em>-esque ending that punishes those who don\u2019t do right by the patients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It all culminates in a fugue-state climax that recalls Tobe Hooper\u2019s sweat-soaked conclusion trifecta (as seen in Eaten Alive<\/em> and Texas Chain Saw Massacre<\/em>) of frantic camerawork, an off-putting uncanny score, and ear-piercing screams that don\u2019t discern between fear and madness. Without spoiling too much, it\u2019s safe to say that Don\u2019t Look in the Basement<\/em> contains one of the most mean-spirited endings of the \u201cDon\u2019t\u201d films. 
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Don\u2019t Open the Door<\/em><\/strong> (1974)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similar to cult classic The Nesting<\/em> (1980), S.F. Brownrigg\u2019s Don\u2019t Open the Door<\/em> concerns a woman navigating the attacks and disrespect of various men who have both motive and means to mentally destroy her. Also known as Don\u2019t Hang Up<\/em>, director S.F. Brownrigg\u2019s 1974 white trash thriller is the Pabst Blue Ribbon-soaked kin of When A Stranger Calls<\/em>, with the Blood and Black Lace<\/em> color aesthetic thrown in for good measure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The post-credits opening features a POV stalking shot of a house, three years before John Carpenter made the horror trope famous with Halloween<\/em> (but several years after giallo filmmakers such as Mario Bava had already primed the pump). In 1962, Rita Post was murdered as she slept in her Texas home. Her adolescent daughter Amanda discovered her body, and the killer let her go. Fourteen years later, an anonymous phone call summons Amanda (Susan Bracken) to return to the town of Allerton to care for her grandmother, who is apparently ill. Things get weird from there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the historic home (Texans will be tickled to find that the House of the Seasons in Jefferson served as the primary filming location), Amanda meets three men who immediately give her static: Dr. Crawther (Jim Harrell), who refuses to admit Amanda\u2019s grandmother into a hospital; Judge Stemple (Gene Ross), who wants to buy the home after the grandmother\u2019s death; and museum owner Claude Kearn (Larry O’Dwyer), whose obsession with both Amanda and porcelain dolls gives off immediate creeper vibes. After shooing all of the men away and focusing on her grandma, Amanda starts getting lewd phone calls from someone who knows a lot about her and her slain mother. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Make no mistake, the low-budget seams show in Don\u2019t Open the Door;<\/em> the title sequence cuts off mid-melody, and the occasional boom mic shadow peppers the frame. But the melodrama outdoes itself every ten minutes: creepy phone calls give way to dressing up a mannequin as a tribute to a dead woman, to cross-dressing, to doll molestation, and more. There\u2019s a certain two-fold charm to the film. The first is in its strong sense of place; shooting primarily at Jefferson\u2019s House of the Seasons cements Brownrigg as a proud Lone Star director in the same sense that Frederick Friedel (with only two genre films, Axe<\/em> and Kidnapped Coed<\/em>) reigns as king of North Carolina-based \u2018sploitation gems of the same era. <\/em>Second, it refuses to wink at its audience, maintaining an air of integrity in spite of its lowbrow texture. Brownrigg takes the narrative seriously and doesn\u2019t rely on gore (it has scarcely more blood than Psycho<\/em>, in color) steeping the story\u2019s tension in ever-increasing paranoia to create a potent, borderline-campy final brew. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Don\u2019t Go in the House<\/em><\/strong> (1979)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t let the disco music fool you\u2014Joseph Ellison\u2019s Don\u2019t Go in the House<\/em> has a lot to unpack. The director leavens the drama with a challenge to the domineering mother figure, presenting itself as a lowbrow homage to Hitchcock\u2019s Psycho<\/em>— with a flamethrower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Donny Kohler (Dan Grimaldi) is pathetic. He\u2019s a weirdo with mommy issues, the result of a domineering mother (Ruth Dardick) who held his arms over an open stovetop flame when he was a child. Upon her death, Donny is torn between celebration (he can smoke in the house and play his music as loud as he wants now) and fear; her voice pops into his head, along with several others, whispering grim things into his psyche. Already conditioned to view fire as a cleansing agent, the grown loner turns a room of his dead mother\u2019s house into a flame-resistant torture chamber and sets out to find a few sinful women in need of punishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ellison is wholly unconcerned with having fun with the narrative; he stays firmly in the macabre and refuses to budge in tone, letting sadism and scrutiny rule the day. With Dan Grimaldi leaning fully into the dark pathos of the lead role, Donny is Norman Bates in an asbestos suit, racking up charred bodies and dressing them up in his mother\u2019s old clothes for a low-key party from hell. He converses with them as though they weren\u2019t burnt corpses, and the voices sometimes turn on him, adding to his own paranoia. Between the still-shocking sequence in which Donny sets a nude, shackled victim aflame and quieter moments of introspection (voiced by the charred guests upstairs), the film oscillates between sadism and sad sobriety, striking a similar unsettling chord as grim killer pictures Deranged<\/em> (1974), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer<\/em> (1986), and recently, The Golden Glove <\/em>(2019). It\u2019s easy to call the lady-killer\u2019s tale a misogynist one, but Thrower hits the nail on the head in observing \u201cthe cultural trend wherein it\u2019s impossible to critique the mother figure without being portrayed as a woman-hater.\u201d Plenty of horror films interrogate patriarchal structures and upend the family unit (looking at you, Texas Chain Saw Massacre<\/em>); there\u2019s a rebellious streak of ahead-of-its-time progressiveness here film for giving bad moms the same unflinching eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These three films are solid products of an era when the sky was the limit for indie exploitation filmmakers. The cinema that they embody is mercenary and fleeting, resisting the sort of pigeonholing that mainstream film criticism entraps them in. While the creative soil was just as fertile in the 1980s, the \u201870s were nonetheless magical for the depraved rebel storytellers who, with a shoestring budget and a couple of cameras and trespassed film locations, could transcend the confines of genre and industry to reach out and grab viewers like an armed assailant in an alleyway. The \u201cDon\u2019t\u201d films (and there are many more than the above) represent an alternative answer to the more polished Excorcist<\/em>s and Jaws<\/em>es that sat at the offbeat-but-still-cool-kids\u2019 table in the celluloid lunchroom. Stray from the beaten path and take in the scenic Americana route today when you open your streaming app; \u201cdo\u201d the \u201cDon\u2019t\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Don\u2019t Look in the Basement<\/a>” and “Don\u2019t Open the Door<\/a>” are currently streaming on Amazon Prime; “Don\u2019t Go in the House<\/a>” is available to rent (it’s two bucks, live a little).<\/em>
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