The Fly was directed by Kurt Neumann and starred Vincent Price renowned and celebrated horror film actor, played the lead part as scientist Andre Delambre. He invents a teleportation device. But when he accidentally teleports himself with a common housefly, the fly’s genes become intertwined with his own, causing a mutation that transforms him into a grotesque and monstrous creature.

The film set a new standard for the science fiction genre with groundbreaking special effects. The convincing fly transformation sequence, in particular, was widely regarded as one of the best special effects of its time. Thanks to the technical and artistic brilliance of Hollywood artist Charles Ben who did both makeup and special effects for The Fly. The film’s success helped establish 20th Century Fox as a major player in the science fiction genre. It was so successful in fact, the film spawned two sequels and studio remade The Fly, in color this time, in 1986.

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Departing from the typical themes of science fiction, which often focused on futuristic societies and space exploration, The Fly instead explored the darker side of science and technology. In particular, the consequences of playing God with the natural world. The dangers of unchecked scientific progress presented in this film, set the scene for ethical debate in the years succeeding it’s release. (Something, along with disbelieving in God, unfortunately modern scientists believe they have overcome).

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“The Fly” is a landmark film that broke new ground in terms of its special effects, storytelling, and themes. The film was a major box office success and helped establish 20th Century Fox as a major player in the science fiction genre. Its impact on the movie-making industry cannot be overstated, and its influence can still be felt today in the many films that continue to be inspired by its themes and style.

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Mother’s day 1980 is a play on words because for most people Mother’s Day is a celebration for the woman who raised you and taught you how to love. This movie is NOT about that. Charles Kaufman presents a horror film that is pornographic violence with themes of rape and revenge. In actuality, this low budget film is exceedingly cheesy in it’s special effects. But the violence and rape scenes are creepy and realistic enough that youngsters and traumatized individuals should best avoid them. And it seems to have enough of a following, that it inspired a remake (not nearly as low budget) in 2010.

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Mother’s Day 1980 is supposed to be a satire on taking societal cues from television. There are multiple pop culture references, mostly within the depraved environment of the socially retarded, and violent sons to the title’s sadistic mother. Mother wears a neck brace and carries herself in public like a proper little old lady. But she is literally the conductor orchestrating the chaos and depravity of this movie.

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Like a director in a BDSM film, she instructs one of her boys in an elaborate role-playing scheme with his UN-willing participant while his brother snaps photos of the woman being violated. It’s like Mother, is purposely trying to raise the kind of men other people’s mother’s warn them about. I wonder if Kaufman wasn’t trying to also signal society on the pitfalls of allowing a mentally unstable single parent to raise her children in isolation? Whatever the case Mother’s Day 1980 does make you scratch your head.

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Obviously, Mother’s day 1980 isn’t a film for everyone. But it does have some humorous moments. For me it’s near the ending when escaped victims seek revenge for their best friend’s demise. I won’t give you all the details, but Mother’s Day to die, is the highlight. A absurdly comical and befitting death. I don’t much care for horror/gore films, but the revenge portion of Mother’s Day made the first half worth sitting through.

Do you need a therapist ?

Mother’s Day 1980

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The Omen is a classic film for those who like movies that make them fearful but don’t really go for extreme gore and enjoy a much more realistic story line. It’s the story about an Antichrist, from his birth and through his preschool years. One usually doesn’t find children threatening, but this “son of Satan” has supernatural abilities which manifest as coincidental circumstances. The subtle deniability of cause to violent accidental or suicidal deaths, is juxtaposed with the deep seeded belief that children are born innocent to create a spine chilling film.

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Starring Gregory Peck as Robert Thorn, a high-ranking diplomat who works overseas. The movie begins with Thorn rushing to the hospital in Italy, only to be told that it was a stillbirth. A priest pulls him aside and offers a orphaned newborn to take the place of his dead child. He adopts the infant, unbeknownst to his wife, to raise as their own. As the story progresses, Thorn is appointed the US Ambassador to England, and shortly he begins to notice that there are multiple un-timely deaths around him. A persistent photojournalist and another priest arrive on the scene talking about the Omen. Thorn begins to think that his son might be evil.

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Gregory Peck shot the Omen just months after his eldest son committed suicide at age 30, some say he was feeling guilty for not being able to save his real son. Peck known for always portraying the honorable man, was very believable as a conflicted father, being asked to murder his adopted devil child. His agreement to do the film was the green light for others to sign on and greatly influenced its success. In fact, it was Peck’s most profitable film because he took a percentage of box-office revenues instead of his usual high pay structure.

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Alien was a film that sparked a legacy of 7 (so far) sequels. Combining science fiction and horror, it juxtaposes humanity’s curiosity with it’s fear of the unknown, and comes away with an original chilling tale. The cryogenics and inter-galactic travel as it is portrayed is still beyond our reach, but has become widely accepted within the scifi genre and is there by conceivable given that the movie’s timeline is 100 years in our future. But perhaps the most compelling aspect of believably is the underlying politics, exploited (read expendable) workers versus corporate greed. Where employees, (not all men, or even all white) sign on for a grunt job, while being kept ignorant of the risks and even the nature of their activities.

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For me, Alien is a great film because of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. Forget the R rating and her running around in white panties, Sigourney plays a heroine that we can follow. First she is a leader among her working crew; she even assumes this role when her superiors are compromised. But more than that she has the stature, and calm focus that people can look up too. Then when things get really heated, she doesn’t rely on superpowers or some fantastical skill, she just puts her wits and the tools at hand against the enemy and narrowly escapes. For me she did an intergalactic “Die-Hard” almost 10 years before Bruce Willis, but then again the book on which his film was based was written in 1979…could this have inspired its writer?

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The Alien franchise includes of films includes 4 with Sigourney Weaver, as well as a prequel. There are also 2 spin off alien monster battle movies (reminiscent of Godzilla) combining this acid bleeding toothy widemouthed Alien with the game-hunting alien of the Predator movies. Alien struck a cord with the public, and has been entered into the collective psyche, through films, novels, comics, and video games. Why not watch the movie that started it all?

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Altered States explores drug induced, altered states of consciousness. Based on a novel by the same name, Altered States was written by Paddy Chayefsky. Chayefsky also wrote the screenplay, but was so upset by director Ken Russell’s adaptation, that he had his name removed from the credits. Regardless, the story is inspired by real life Psychoanalyst and Biophysicist Dr. John C. Lilly, who started isolation tank experiments in the 50s. The movie introduces the world to both actors William Hurt and Drew Barrymore. Hurt plays an obsessive self experimenting “mad-scientist” who combines deprivation tanks and psychoactive drugs in his pursuit to understand human consciousness. Drew has a bit part as one of his daughters.

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The premise of Altered States is very Darwinian, but I suppose what one sees reflected back when all external senses are muted by an isolation chamber, really depends on one’s underlying belief system in the first place. Dr. Edward Jessup (Hurt) has drug induced hallucinations that take him beyond the exploration of his own consciousness to visions of some DNA encoded memory. The more he self-experiments, the further he reverts to a prehistoric existence. This genetic awakening, also seems to trigger trans-mutagenic physical manifestations, transforming him into altered states of Darwinian conceptions of early humanoid development.

It’s all about being human

The subplot of this film has to do with Jessup’s humanity. His intellectual pursuits, his loves, and family life. His wife and he are scientific colleagues, who drift apart as their life becomes mundane. It’s like a metaphor for an egocentric primitive nature that lies dormant until Edward’s experiments activate it. Dr. Jessop and his wife Emily, re-find one another, in a love conquers all type of battle, against the primal existence that is taking over Edward.

The appeal of Altered States seems to be in the musical score and visual effects that attempt to take the viewer his own hallucinogenic journey. Does it work ? Not without pharmaceuticals…

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The movie begins with Jill Johnson played by Carol Kane babysitting for a local Dr. and his wife. After the kids are asleep and she is waiting for the parents to return, she starts to get phone calls asking her if she has checked on the children. She has heard nothing from them and figured that it is just a prank call. But the calls continue and increase in frequency so she calls the police, who discover that the calls are originating from within the home. The children were murdered shortly after Jill arrived to babysit.

Their killer Curt Duncan is put away in a psychiatric hospital, but 7 years later he escapes. Detective John Clifford, (Charles Durning), who was on the scene in the original slaying is hired as a PI to tract him down. He traces him to woman’s home and telling her of the previous crimes, he convinces her to try to help catch the killer at the bar where she works and they had met. Meanwhile, Duncan is hiding in wait in her bedroom closet. He manages to escape once again when Clifford goes to rescue his intended victim.

Jill, grown with kids of her own., is out for dinner with her husband when she has a call at the restaurant. It’s Duncan, she recognizes the voice of her nightmares instantly and understandably freaks out. The police escort her home and a friend of Clifford’s who is still on the force, let’s him know of the development in his case. (Any more details will ruin the ending….please watch it yourself).

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The premise of stereotypical redneck mentalities and lynching gives us the deep south setting in a small farming community. Our antagonists are a group of 4 overgrown bullies led by the rural town’s postman, Otiz Hazelrigg. The group comprised of the local postman, Skeeter the mechanic, Harliss a crop farmer and a hog farmer named Philby. has been tormenting a mentally deficient Bubba. As the film progresses it is suggested that Otiz’s obsession with getting even with Bubba may have been fueled by his own pedophile tendencies and subsequent jealousy of Bubba, who was naturally accepted by children as a playmate.

When Marylee, the best friend and neighbor to Bubba is attacked by a dog, he carries her limp body home, tearfully explaining that he didn’t do it. Her screaming mother sends him scurrying for home, petrified that he has been blamed. When Otiz hears of the accident he calls up his buddy’s saying “Bubba killed Marylee” and they bring bloodhounds to help lynch poor Bubba. Bubba gets home and manages to explain to his momma that they want to hurt him. She tells him to play the hiding game and helps him to disguise himself, like he has in the past, as a scarecrow.

The men think that Mrs.Ritter is hiding Bubba in their home, until the dogs pick up his trail. Following the hounds into the middle of a field, the men find only a scarecrow. But Otis walks up close to it and sees the whites of the terrified eyes of Bubba. He steps back and points his pistol directly at the ragged figure, waiting for his friends to hoist their own firearms. Together the 4 men unload 21 rounds into the docile man. Just then, the cb radio squacks and the group is informed that Marylee is going to be alright. How she was attacked by a dog and Bubba had saved her life. Desperate to save their own skin, Otiz places a pitchfork in Bubba’s hand.

The scene jumps to a murder trial, where the reputation of the postman as a teetotaler, pillar of the community, juxtaposed by the savagery of their vigilante crime is too difficult for the judge, who knows Otis personally, to accept and the gang is let go. The prosecuting DA is committed to finding a shred of evidence that the men did not act in self-defense as claimed, while Mrs. Ritter cries out that they are all murderers but justice has many forms, and it will come for them.

Marylee now fully recovered from the accident keeps asking for Bubba, but her parents can’t bring themselves to tell her what happened. She sneaks out to his place in the middle of the night and his mother explains that he has gone someplace that they can’t hurt him anymore. She runs outside to look for him and his mother eventually finds her signing beneath the very pole that he had hung on as a scarecrow. She tells his mother that he isn’t really gone, he is just playing the hiding game.

The next day. Harliss is startled to see in his field a Scarecrow. Knowing he did not put it there, he storms off to see his accomplices and yell at them for the sick joke. When they tell him they had nothing to do with it, it is assumed that the District Attorney must being trying to rattle them. Rattled nonetheless, he spends the day drinking, returning home late to hear something in his barn. While he is investigating in the loft, his wood-chipper suddenly turns on, startling him and he falls in. The incident is written off as accidental, but the guilt ridden mind of Otis is suspicious. He investigates further discovering that the machine had been turned off after Harliss’s demise, because the fuel tank was practically full.

But who is serving this justice? Who will be next to die?

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Woke audiences won’t enjoy the damsel in distress portrayal of women, that was rampant during the era, but they may be appeased by the heroic portrayal of Ben by actor Daune Jones. Jones an African American, is not only the lead character, but also the voice of calm reason among a panicked population. His cool leadership is juxtaposed against cowardly and irrational white male counterparts and screaming or comatose women, who are all holed up in a Pennsylvania farmhouse fending off an increasing onslaught of un-dead cannibals.

The movie opens with Barbra, played by Judith O’Dea, and her brother Johnny making an annual drive to visit their father’s rural grave site. Barbra is freaked out by the cemetery and Johnny clowns around trying to scare her. When a pale faced man wearing a ripped suit suddenly attacks her. Johnny is killed trying to come to her defense and she runs off looking for help. She runs into the first house she finds, and discovers the home owner’s partially eaten dead body. Looking outside she sees the ghoul from the cemetery has been joined by several others and they are headed her way. Our hero Ben arrives, and starts fortifying the farmhouse, shooting zombies that get too close with a rifle he found in the home. Others arrive until there are seven refugees taking shelter in the home. Night falls and the zombie attack is held off by fire and guns.

The group is informed by radio announcements that there is a wave of mass murder across the countryside and un-dead corpses. In response, armed men are organizing into posses and sweeping the area shooting ghouls on sight. They are warned that bodies discovered should be burned to prevent reanimation and that bullets or severe bows to the head, seem to be the only other way to stop these relentless cannibals. The gov’t has set up rescue centers and a plan is made, by the disagreeable housemates to get there, but the zombies are between their safe house and escape route.

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Shivers is a prime example of what became Cronenberg’s signature style…body horror, where physical changes gross out or titillate the viewer while manifesting into a psychological thriller. The film featuring Paul Hampton, Lynn Lowry and Barbara Steele was alternatively titled as The Parasite Murders and They Came From Within. If you watch carefully, you may be able to spot a young Cronenberg as a background extra.

The movie was shot on location in a high rise apt complex called Starliner Towers for the film. Things start of with a murder mystery when Dr. Hobbs kills a petite young woman. He posthumously cuts open her abdomen and dowses the cavity in acid then slits his own throat. An adulterous neighbor enters the apt shortly thereafter and sneaks away again without reporting the crime. The Starliner Towers has a medical facility on property, and the resident Doctor, Roger St. Luc has a lunch appointment to meet Dr. Hobbs upstairs at the location of the murder, so he discovers the horrid scene and calls the police.

Dr. St. Luc contacts Hobbes’ research partner, Rollo Linsky to discuss his obviously premeditated murder-suicide. Dr. Linsky tells him that the pair had been working on creating a parasite that could replace an organ and symbiotically function in the organ’s place. ​As Dr St. Luc continues with his day, we are introduced to a range of Starliner residents. Linksky, who has gone to clear out his partner’s office, phones Dr. St. Luc to tell him that Hobbes’ research notes revealed that he had used the murder victim as a guinea pig for a parasite that both replaces organs but also makes people mindlessly sex crazed. He warns him to not approach anyone acting strangely.

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