Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is
Speaker 1: Rob Lamb and today we are sharing an episode that
Speaker 1: originally published though it's the eight one twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: This is Invitation to Hell from nineteen eighty four. This
Speaker 1: is a Wes Craven made for TV movie with some
Speaker 1: really fun like horror sci fi qualities to it. You
Speaker 1: think you know Wes Craven, Well this is This is
Speaker 1: a weirder, deeper cut. Let's jump right into the episode.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema,
Speaker 3: we are going to be talking about the nineteen eighty
Speaker 3: four ABC made for TV horror movie Invitation to Hell,
Speaker 3: directed by none other than Wes Craven. Did you know
Speaker 3: he made made for TV movies?
Speaker 1: Was this multiple?
Speaker 3: Was this before Nightmare on Elm Street or after?
Speaker 1: We'll get into this in a bit, but I believe
Speaker 1: this came out right before and or in the same
Speaker 1: year as Nightmare. So okay, we had a couple of
Speaker 1: different things happening at the same time.
Speaker 3: Here Wow, So Invitation to Hell starring Robert Urich, Joanna Cassidy,
Speaker 3: and Susan Lucci. Of apparently I didn't know this when
Speaker 3: I first watched this movie, but apparently of like Soap
Speaker 3: Opera Royalty, a great fame.
Speaker 1: Superstar in the soap opera world.
Speaker 3: But this movie is about an expensive and exclusive West
Speaker 3: Coast country club that is in fact run by Satan.
Speaker 1: It's true. So this one originally aired on Thursday May
Speaker 1: twenty fourth, nineteen eighty four, in the eight to ten
Speaker 1: pm slot Eastern Time. I was looking this up on
Speaker 1: tv tango dot com. I think it was the highest
Speaker 1: rated network offering that night, beat out Simon and Simon
Speaker 1: Memory if my memory is correct. There it is not
Speaker 1: to be confused with a nineteen eighty two British horror
Speaker 1: film of the same name, directed by Michael J.
Speaker 3: Murphy.
Speaker 1: So there are two Invitations to Hell out there. You
Speaker 1: can accept them both, but just don't confuse the two.
Speaker 3: Both seem to involve people being invited to like swanky,
Speaker 3: fancy parties in order to be killed or exploited in
Speaker 3: some way. Yeah, so earlier this week. The reason I
Speaker 3: picked this movie is that I found myself craving that sweet,
Speaker 3: unique flavor of made for TV horror. We've covered at
Speaker 3: least two other made for TV horror movies on Weird
Speaker 3: House Cinema. One was the nineteen seventy eight CBS film
Speaker 3: Death Moon starring Robert Foxworth. That was the work beast
Speaker 3: of the Work, based about a guy who he's getting
Speaker 3: too stressed out at work, so he goes on vacation
Speaker 3: to Hawaii, but uh oh turn into a were wolf.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Love that movie. I finally had to buy a
Speaker 1: bootleg of it because if you look around, if you
Speaker 1: grow attached to some of these seventies and eighties TV movies,
Speaker 1: there's not always a physical media choice out there, not
Speaker 1: always a legitimate one, So sometimes you have to be
Speaker 1: a little creative if you want to give it a
Speaker 1: forever home in your house.
Speaker 3: The other one that we've done already is the nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy two CBS horror fantasy Gargoyles. That was the one
Speaker 3: with Cornell Wild, Bernie k C, Jennifer Salt, and Scott
Speaker 3: Glenn as a motorcycle hooligan. That one was about subterranean
Speaker 3: demons living in the American Southwest, which are called gargoyles
Speaker 3: for some unspecified reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Also an excellent film. Excellent weird film.
Speaker 3: Have we done another one that I'm forgetting? I think
Speaker 3: those are the only two made for TV.
Speaker 1: Now, Shevy, I don't think we've actually done any other
Speaker 1: Weird House episodes on other TV films. Of note that
Speaker 1: we have scouted a few others. I know we've talked
Speaker 1: about nineteen seventy three's the Horror at thirty seven thousand feet.
Speaker 3: Is that the one that's like an adaptation of the
Speaker 3: Twilight Zone thing with Shatner with the Grimlin on the
Speaker 3: airplane wing or is that a different one? Oh? No,
Speaker 3: this is the one. Druid magic, Yeah, Druid magic on
Speaker 3: the airplane.
Speaker 1: Yes, some sort of druid magic or exorcism, so a
Speaker 1: number of different elements, including the shat going on at
Speaker 1: thirty seven thousand feet.
Speaker 3: That must have been the association.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, Yeah, we've also kind of batted around the
Speaker 1: idea of doing nineteen seventy thre's of the night Stalker.
Speaker 1: The kickstarted the TV series as well as of course,
Speaker 1: there are various Frankenstein, Dracula, and other horror adaptations for
Speaker 1: the small screen, though sometimes in those cases you get
Speaker 1: kind of out of because one of the things we're
Speaker 1: kind of talking about here are these weird one shot
Speaker 1: TV movies that are not a part of any other franchise,
Speaker 1: and they're not like a prestige picture like some of
Speaker 1: these Frankenstein Dracula pictures are kind of like the big
Speaker 1: mini series of the day. Like you wouldn't compare this
Speaker 1: film to say any get Like you wouldn't compare it
Speaker 1: to the old Showgun TV mini series. Obviously that was
Speaker 1: a real prestige project. This is something a little different somewhere,
Speaker 1: kind of stuck between a prestige TV mini series or
Speaker 1: a prestige TV movie and your standard you know, episodic offerings.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say this movie is in its business
Speaker 3: life more of a quick and dirty cash in, but
Speaker 3: I you know, I want to sing for its virtues
Speaker 3: in this episode. So another reason that I was thinking
Speaker 3: about made for TV movies is that just recently, like
Speaker 3: in the past week, Rachel and I watched another one
Speaker 3: from also from nineteen seventy eight, the same year as
Speaker 3: Death Moon, which was an ABC made for TV horror
Speaker 3: called The Initiation of Sarah. Have you seen this?
Speaker 1: Rob? I have not.
Speaker 3: It seems heavily based on Stephen King's Carrie that the
Speaker 3: movie version of Carrie with Sissy's Basic came out in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy six, so this would have been, you know,
Speaker 3: in the wake of that, a couple of years after.
Speaker 3: This movie was about a It's about a troubled young
Speaker 3: woman with telekinetic powers who goes to college, gets bullied
Speaker 3: by a bunch of mean sorority girls led by Morgan Fairchild,
Speaker 3: and you can guess where it goes. Based on the
Speaker 3: Carry model, a similar kind of arc. There's you know,
Speaker 3: there's no pig's blood, but there's a similar there's like
Speaker 3: she sort of casts a spell that turns Morgan Fairchild
Speaker 3: like like evil looking and ugly, though this one has
Speaker 3: a variant. Unlike Carrie, where the telekinetic girl is sort
Speaker 3: of coached in the dark side of the force by
Speaker 3: by a mentor, an evil mentor, in this movie it's
Speaker 3: Shelley Winter is wearing a druid robe and a huge wig.
Speaker 3: So that one was pretty fun. But anyway, that brought
Speaker 3: me to Invitation to Hell, which I think is even
Speaker 3: more of a winner. There is something I find delightful
Speaker 3: and even intoxicating about the particular combination of spiciness and
Speaker 3: blandness that you get with American made for TV horror
Speaker 3: from these decades, from the seventies and eighties. Often these
Speaker 3: movies do have a really weird and disturbing premise and
Speaker 3: some wild ideas inside them, kind of trapped inside, but
Speaker 3: the imagination at work feels muted, muffled, of course censored
Speaker 3: for content because it was on TV, but also contorted
Speaker 3: into a particular shape. I think we talked about this
Speaker 3: when we did the episode on Gargoyles. You know that
Speaker 3: you got to accommodate ad breaks and hit predictable plot
Speaker 3: beats on the TV timeline, So it creates this weird effect,
Speaker 3: especially when it's a horror story where I wanted to
Speaker 3: compare it to seeing the outline of a dread outer god,
Speaker 3: but only through translucent glass bricks. Like occasionally, something weird
Speaker 3: and wild kind of gets loose in the story and
Speaker 3: for a moment it breaks through the confines of the format,
Speaker 3: before everything kind of settles back down and the being
Speaker 3: goes back behind the wall, and it ends up being
Speaker 3: kind of quaint and cozy at the same time, and
Speaker 3: I really like it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah. We were talking a little bit about this
Speaker 1: off Mike before we started recording. We were talking about
Speaker 1: other West Craven pictures, and I pointed out that I
Speaker 1: was trying to figure out how to express how I
Speaker 1: felt about this, because I'm not gonna I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: go out there and say this is the best West
Speaker 1: Craven film at and it's also far from the worst.
Speaker 1: But I might have liked it in ways that I
Speaker 1: have never liked of Wes Craven film And I think
Speaker 1: it comes down to comfiness. This film felt comfy in
Speaker 1: a way that even I think objectively better Wes Craven
Speaker 1: films and certainly more influential West Craven films, are not.
Speaker 1: Like that might be part of what you're talking about here,
Speaker 1: Like the TV format is kind of this this way,
Speaker 1: this way of grounding the storytelling and in a way
Speaker 1: that makes you feel a little safer, Like this is
Speaker 1: network television in the seventies or eighties. It can only
Speaker 1: go so hard on me. You know, it has kid
Speaker 1: gloves on, perhaps to a certain extent because they got
Speaker 1: to wrap this up by ten PM, But it.
Speaker 3: Also provides a funny and comfortable contrast with the weirder
Speaker 3: and wilder elements of the horror themes. I just like
Speaker 3: the hot and cold showers element of it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and this one's got some h This one
Speaker 1: really goes all over the place.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, Now you were saying, in a way, you
Speaker 3: might think of this as kind of a favorite of
Speaker 3: Wes craven experiences. Some reviewers online regard this as Wes
Speaker 3: Craven's worst movie. I don't think that's right. I'll give
Speaker 3: it that is. He certainly has movies that I think
Speaker 3: are more artistically ambitious and more interesting and certainly scarier.
Speaker 3: This movie, I think is not very scary, but it
Speaker 3: is highly watchable and very entertaining and a lot of fun,
Speaker 3: I would say, much more so than some of Craven's
Speaker 3: lesser theatrical releases. And you know, even it has a
Speaker 3: kind of made for TV hopiness, but has some ideas.
Speaker 3: It's like, yeah, it's it's having some fun. It's it's
Speaker 3: playing around.
Speaker 1: It's having some fun. It has things to say about
Speaker 1: ambition in the American dream.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's there's a fair amount going on here
Speaker 1: in this picture. And as we'll discuss too, it is
Speaker 1: perhaps a cut above some of the other made for
Speaker 1: TV films that were popping out around this time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and to be clear, it is I think it is
Speaker 1: very easy to dismiss made for TV movies, particularly from
Speaker 1: this era, as lower budget productions produced to adhere to
Speaker 1: network standards, you know, thinking of them as sort of
Speaker 1: bland sandboxes for bland filmmakers and bland actors. But of
Speaker 1: course there's still plenty of room for talent to shine
Speaker 1: through even in those constraints. And I think part of
Speaker 1: it may be as well that a lot of us
Speaker 1: have gotten away from watching films on broadcast television in general.
Speaker 1: But TV absolutely was, and you know, I guess to
Speaker 1: a large etent still is a medium for film watching.
Speaker 1: In fact, TV is where some films really cemented their following.
Speaker 1: And I'm not just talking about like the cult films
Speaker 1: that you know, you and I may have grown up
Speaker 1: watching on TV and listeners may have grown up watching
Speaker 1: on TV like Beast Master and Clash of the Titans
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. You can say that about films
Speaker 1: like The Wizard of Oz. I was recently rewatching this
Speaker 1: film with my kid and it had the Turner Classic
Speaker 1: Movies intro by Ben Menkwitz, and he pointed out in
Speaker 1: this intro that when this film was released in thirty
Speaker 1: nine and then re released in forty nine and fifty five,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a critical success, but really only a
Speaker 1: modest financial success. It might sound crazy, but it was
Speaker 1: on TV that The Wizard of Oz apparently really caused
Speaker 1: viewers to fall in love with it. This is where
Speaker 1: it really began to take on the legendary status that
Speaker 1: it has today, which was that was a real eye
Speaker 1: opener for me.
Speaker 3: I wonder if that's the case with a lot of
Speaker 3: classic films. I'm just speculating, so I don't know in
Speaker 3: this case, but like I would strongly suspect that there
Speaker 3: are maybe a lot of holiday films that are like that,
Speaker 3: that are like big because of reruns on TV. Like,
Speaker 3: I wonder if that's the case with It's a Wonderful Life.
Speaker 3: Comparing the original release of that to like how much
Speaker 3: love it got in the years, you know, as I
Speaker 3: played in the holidays and stuff like that, I.
Speaker 1: Would not be surprised at all. Yeah, if that were
Speaker 1: the case, and even into fairly recent years, I think
Speaker 1: it's been surprising at how you can be surprised at
Speaker 1: at like what films can really like spike ratings. A
Speaker 1: friend of mine who at the time worked for Cartoon
Speaker 1: Network and pointed out that like whenever they would play
Speaker 1: The Mask Too, the sequel to Jim Carrey's The Mask,
Speaker 1: ratings would just go through the like it was. It
Speaker 1: was it was I'm not gonna say it would go
Speaker 1: through the roof. But I think the idea was like,
Speaker 1: if they needed to like sort of juice the ratings
Speaker 1: a little bit, this was always a film they could
Speaker 1: they could call upon.
Speaker 3: This is always a lever they could pull. Is that
Speaker 3: just like ninety minutes of a cartoon faced dog biting crotches?
Speaker 1: I guess so, but you know, it's what it's what
Speaker 1: works now. But to come back to this film and
Speaker 1: some of the others we've talked about, I am just
Speaker 1: continually impressed by just how weird and daring some of
Speaker 1: these TV movies of the Week were in the seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties, you know, rolling out strange scripts, bringing them
Speaker 1: to life, often with modest budget casts and production values,
Speaker 1: and sometimes with up and coming or future big name
Speaker 1: actors attached. You know, the likes of John Carpenter and
Speaker 1: Steven Spielberg, and of course Wes Craven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right, was Steven Spielberg's duel made for TV
Speaker 3: movie also, I believe it was. Yeah, also had early
Speaker 3: made for TV stuff, So so yeah, it is not
Speaker 3: just a play place for hacks. I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: some of the best and most revered directors in Hollywood
Speaker 3: did a lot of work here. Another thing that I
Speaker 3: think is interesting about Invitation to Hell is that it
Speaker 3: reminds me of a favorite that we have covered on
Speaker 3: Weird House Cinema before, and that is the unli loved
Speaker 3: but excellent Halloween sequel Halloween three Season of the Witch.
Speaker 3: These are examples of the rare horror movie in which
Speaker 3: a sort of that have as their main feature a
Speaker 3: kind of economic or class critique, and that have a
Speaker 3: business as the main demonic villain. I thought that was
Speaker 3: kind of interesting. You would think there'd be more movies
Speaker 3: like that, but I struggle to come up with many examples.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's the case here. I mean, the closest
Speaker 3: thing you get is stuff that's more on the border
Speaker 3: of like horror and sci fi, where you get it's
Speaker 3: like a weird creature that is made by some experiment
Speaker 3: or something like that. And even then, like the monster
Speaker 3: is just made by corporate malfeasance, you know, and ignoring
Speaker 3: safety protocols and so forth. Now, this, this movie we're
Speaker 3: talking about today has well. Actually this would be kind
Speaker 3: of difficult thing to disentangle. Do you think in Invitation
Speaker 3: to Hell that the country Club or the corporation is
Speaker 3: actually the main evil institution? Which is the main servant
Speaker 3: of Hell and which one is more in service of
Speaker 3: the other.
Speaker 1: I guess it's the country Club. I don't want to
Speaker 1: spoil too much at this point, but I guess it's
Speaker 1: the country club. Even though like with the country club
Speaker 1: exist if the company wasn't there, I don't know. They
Speaker 1: are kind of intermingled, and it seems like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of influence going back both ways.
Speaker 3: It seems like almost like the corporation exists. I mean,
Speaker 3: they're making aerospace technology, but it just exists to funnel
Speaker 3: people into the country club.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then the head of the country club can
Speaker 1: just come over and tour your top secret projects at
Speaker 1: any moment.
Speaker 3: So that's right.
Speaker 1: It's a weird setup.
Speaker 3: Well, maybe we should say here, as always on Weird
Speaker 3: House Cinema, we are going to discuss the plot in
Speaker 3: a lot of detail. So if you would like to
Speaker 3: see Invitation to Hell without any additional spoilers, go watch
Speaker 3: it yourself. It's widely available. You can watch it streaming
Speaker 3: pause here. Go watch it and come back and listen
Speaker 3: to the rest. But if you think you're probably not
Speaker 3: going to watch it, or if you just don't care
Speaker 3: if we spoil the plot for you, you may proceed.
Speaker 1: All right, let's go ahead and listen to a little
Speaker 1: trailer audio. This time I was able to grab a
Speaker 1: little bit of the ABC movie promo. I like the
Speaker 1: network television promo for this film off of YouTube, So
Speaker 1: let's go ahead and listen to a little bit of that.
Speaker 3: It's a good one. They were a perfect family finding
Speaker 3: a new life and a new home. But an invitation
Speaker 3: and the hottest spot in town as became an invitation
Speaker 3: to Hell. One week from to night at eight seven,
Speaker 3: said to Lem.
Speaker 1: Move see, don't you want to stay up late? I'm
Speaker 1: not really late. Don't you want to stay up to
Speaker 1: ten pm? Watching this movie?
Speaker 3: Now? I'm tuning in. I'm going to turn down any
Speaker 3: party invitations and any invitations to something other than Hell,
Speaker 3: because I already have an Invitation to Hell on that's
Speaker 3: your TV screen.
Speaker 1: And you can still watch sixty minutes or twenty twenty afterwards.
Speaker 1: I think it's twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: That arekay nice?
Speaker 1: All right? As Joe mentioned earlier, Yeah, you can definitely
Speaker 1: go and stream this pretty much anywhere you want. I
Speaker 1: watched it on Prime. I believe it's It's come out
Speaker 1: on both DVD and VHS before, but I don't think
Speaker 1: it's received much attention on the physical media front, more
Speaker 1: than other made for TV films, to be sure. But
Speaker 1: you know you're not going to find an exquisite Blu
Speaker 1: ray of Invitation to Hell.
Speaker 3: Can I tell you my ideal way to own this.
Speaker 3: It would be like those tapes of the Star Wars
Speaker 3: Holiday Special where commercials are hardbaked in. If somebody out
Speaker 3: there has that, If you have a rip of Invitation
Speaker 3: to Hell with commercials in it, please please send it
Speaker 3: our way. I desperately want this.
Speaker 1: All right. Let's jump into the connections here the people
Speaker 1: who made this film, starting at the top with s Craven,
Speaker 1: who lived nineteen thirty nine through twenty fifteen. This is
Speaker 1: somehow our first Wes Craven movie.
Speaker 3: We've talked about doing other ones. We definitely talked about
Speaker 3: doing Swamp Thing and a number of other movies. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Wes Craven's got a lot of great films. But here, finally,
Speaker 3: at last, we have made it to the crave.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Legendary American horror director. He was an academic
Speaker 1: and Humanity's professor in the mid sixties. His masters was
Speaker 1: in philosophy and writing, but then the Sirens Song of
Speaker 1: Cinema lured him away, initially into some low level editing positions,
Speaker 1: as well as some work in the adult film industry
Speaker 1: during the early to mid seventies, including writing and directing
Speaker 1: under the moniker Abe Snake Abe Snake, which I love
Speaker 1: that name because it sounds as ridiculously made up and
Speaker 1: on brand for an adult film director as Wes Craven
Speaker 1: does for horror. The Wes Craven was for his actual name,
Speaker 1: so good now. It was uncommon for filmmakers at various
Speaker 1: points in their career to do this, of course, especially
Speaker 1: during the adult film industry's golden age. But of course,
Speaker 1: his first breakout directorial effort was the notorious nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: two revenge film The Last House on the Left, followed
Speaker 1: by nineteen seventy seven's The Hills Have Eyes and the
Speaker 1: seventy eight TV movie Summer of Fear starring Linda Blair.
Speaker 3: Never Seen that one.
Speaker 1: Oh, and then also nineteen eighty one's Deadly Blessing This
Speaker 1: is another TV movie starring Ernest Borgnine. After this came
Speaker 1: his take on DC's Swamp Thing in eighty two, which
Speaker 1: show which you just mentioned this one, of course, starred
Speaker 1: Louis Jordaan, Adrian Barbou and ray Wise. Ray Wise played
Speaker 1: the Swamp Thing. And then in nineteen eighty four. This
Speaker 1: was a very interesting year for Craven because on one hand,
Speaker 1: we get this film, along with The Hills Have Eyes
Speaker 1: Part two, often considered one of, if not his worst film,
Speaker 1: and for I think in part because I've also read
Speaker 1: it might not have actually been completed. It's supposedly a mess.
Speaker 1: And it's also a film where, if memory serves, everybody
Speaker 1: including a dog, has a flashback to the first film.
Speaker 3: Where they get to re use footage. Yeah you pad
Speaker 3: that thing out, baby, Yeah.
Speaker 1: But this was also the year that he wrote and
Speaker 1: directed the excellent A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film
Speaker 1: that really did change horror cinema forever. You just can't
Speaker 1: understate how important A Nightmare of That on Elm Street
Speaker 1: was the creation of Freddy Krueger.
Speaker 3: So around the same time as Invitation to Hell. He's
Speaker 3: sort of there's somewhat overlapping projects a Nightmare on Elm
Speaker 3: Street and Invitation to Hell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't have the exact timeline on things, but yeah,
Speaker 1: like a number of different things were coming to fruition,
Speaker 1: including the big one or the first of a few
Speaker 1: different big ones for Wes Craven. You know, he was
Speaker 1: far from one hit wonder.
Speaker 3: Though his success with Elm Street weirdly enough would not
Speaker 3: stop him from doing additional made for TV movies.
Speaker 1: No, no, yeah, because the weird thing. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: not really weird. But we've seen so many cases where
Speaker 1: a director, you know, strikes it strikes gold, and they're
Speaker 1: going to come back and do that sequel, at least
Speaker 1: the first sequel, because that's going to help fund the
Speaker 1: next thing. But he did not immediately return to the
Speaker 1: Elm Street director's chair. He kept mostly to the horror genre,
Speaker 1: but explored some sci fi horror in the nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: five TV movie Chiller. I haven't seen that one, but
Speaker 1: that's like a cryogenics picture.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's got a guy who gets cryogenically preserved and
Speaker 3: then comes back to life, and then I think goes
Speaker 3: around stabbing people or something as Paul s Orvino as
Speaker 3: a priest in it.
Speaker 1: Also, nineteen eighty six is Deadly Friend, which is I
Speaker 1: think a robotics movie. I almost rented it thinking it
Speaker 1: was invitation to help, Like. I picked it up off
Speaker 1: the shelf and I'm like, oh, this is the one
Speaker 1: Joe was talking about, and then I realized, oh, wait,
Speaker 1: this is actually.
Speaker 3: Not It doesn't mean we shouldn't watch it, though, No. No.
Speaker 1: During this time, he also direct did an episode of
Speaker 1: The Magical World of Disney, an episode titled Casebusters starring
Speaker 1: Noah Hathaway. Of course we know is a Treyu from
Speaker 1: the Never Ending Story.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, not the only never Ending Story tie in
Speaker 3: in this episode, correct.
Speaker 1: He also directed five episodes of the nineteen eighties Twilight
Speaker 1: Zone revival, and then came the infamous nineteen eighty eight
Speaker 1: production of The Serpent in the Rainbow. I don't know if
Speaker 1: infamous is really the right way to describe it, but
Speaker 1: I know this one had had a very troubled production story.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of complications filming this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a movie about voodoo.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Nineteen eighty nine Shocker came next. That that's what
Speaker 1: I know you have a fair amount of enthusiasm for.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think that's a bullseye in my category of
Speaker 3: not good but a good time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then nineteen ninety one's The People Under the Stairs,
Speaker 1: a movie that I have seen, but it's weird. My
Speaker 1: memory of seeing it is still overshadowed by my childhood
Speaker 1: idea of what this movie might be, if that makes sense,
Speaker 1: Like seeing the posts, you're seeing the VHS box art, Like,
Speaker 1: I remember my anticipation of this movie far more than
Speaker 1: I remember actually seeing it. I remember you and I
Speaker 1: have talked about this before. How you would I think
Speaker 1: we would sort of do the.
Speaker 3: Same thing, like wander around the video store when we
Speaker 3: were young and look at the horror box covers and
Speaker 3: just imagine what the movie is without actually seeing it.
Speaker 3: So sometimes when you actually when you're older and you
Speaker 3: can see these movies, or maybe you're still too young
Speaker 3: to be watching them, but you see them anyway, it
Speaker 3: just doesn't match the movie you already imagined, And so
Speaker 3: you end up with a blended memory.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's true. So it wasn't until nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: four that he returned to the Elm Street franchise with
Speaker 1: the meta horror film New Nightmare, in which he, like
Speaker 1: many members of the original cast, plays himself as well
Speaker 1: in addition to directing it.
Speaker 3: I have a lot of positive feelings about New Nightmare,
Speaker 3: but my memory I haven't seen it in a long time,
Speaker 3: but my memory is it almost is more exciting as
Speaker 3: a premise than effective as a completed film.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think. What also, I saw it the year
Speaker 1: it came out, but it was I think one of
Speaker 1: the factors that I have to take into account is
Speaker 1: this was the same year, nineteen ninety four that John
Speaker 1: Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness came out. Both films
Speaker 1: that play with the sort of meta idea of horror
Speaker 1: fiction and reality blending and the membrane between the two
Speaker 1: worlds growing thin. And I think they're both effective in
Speaker 1: their own way. But In the Mouth of Madness really
Speaker 1: resonated with me at the time and stands out more
Speaker 1: in my own memory as a film that I love.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a more exciting film overall. But
Speaker 3: the premise of New Nightmare is really cool for people
Speaker 3: who aren't familiar. The idea is that it's about real people.
Speaker 3: It's about Wes Craven as Wes Craven. I mean, he's
Speaker 3: not the main character. The main character is Heather Langenkamp,
Speaker 3: the actress who played the main character in the first
Speaker 3: Nightmare movie, as herself, and other fictionalized versions of like
Speaker 3: the actors and you know, Robert England and people involved
Speaker 3: in these movies. And the premise is that there is
Speaker 3: a sort of ancient entity which attaches itself to characters
Speaker 3: in like scary stories that are told around the campfire
Speaker 3: over the years, and it attaches itself to the idea
Speaker 3: of Freddy Krueger. So for these people in the real world,
Speaker 3: the fictional character Freddy Krueger becomes real.
Speaker 1: It was a really daring idea. I feel like it's
Speaker 1: exactly what the franchise needed at that point. I feel
Speaker 1: like we can look at the timeline of Freddy Krueger
Speaker 1: movies and can realize that it was getting long in
Speaker 1: the tooth and it needed to be shaken up one
Speaker 1: way or another. And this was like, this was a
Speaker 1: pretty artful and imaginative way to shake things up and
Speaker 1: clearly like the way that brought Wes Craven back to
Speaker 1: the picture. Yeah, totally now. He followed that up with
Speaker 1: the nineteen ninety five Eddie Murphy horror comedy Vampire in Brooklyn,
Speaker 1: which was widely panned at the time and there were
Speaker 1: a lot of jokes about it. But I believe it's
Speaker 1: been reassessed in recent years and there's some different ideas
Speaker 1: about how we should look at Vampire in Brooklyn. I
Speaker 1: don't think I ever saw it myself, though, but the
Speaker 1: following year Craven hit it out of the park once
Speaker 1: more with a hugely successful Scream, which would spawn an
Speaker 1: entire franchise, obviously, with Craven directing the first four films,
Speaker 1: this time with twenty eleven Scream four standing as his
Speaker 1: final directorial credit before his death in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3: You know, after the first Scream, I think you could
Speaker 3: very legitimately make the charge that the Scream movies are
Speaker 3: no longer innovating. They're just kind of varying the same formula.
Speaker 3: So you know, that may be fair. But I've been
Speaker 3: entertained by all of them. I haven't been bored by
Speaker 3: a Scream movie yet.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I haven't gotten to the point where
Speaker 1: I have wanted to go back and reassess the Scream movies.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed them. I enjoyed them at the time, and
Speaker 1: I guess on one level, it kind of makes me
Speaker 1: feel old to realize that ghost Face is a horror
Speaker 1: icon now, like he's shown up in the Mortal Kombat
Speaker 1: franchise as a DLC character at this point, alongside the
Speaker 1: likes of Freddy Krueger and Jason voor Hee's and the
Speaker 1: Xena morphin Predator.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, if he's in Mortal does he like
Speaker 3: call lu Kang on the phone?
Speaker 1: I don't know play. This is the latest one that
Speaker 1: my poor system can't play this one. Someone else will
Speaker 1: have to write in and tell us how this plays out.
Speaker 3: I mean, the phone calls are crucial. That's what scream is.
Speaker 1: I would hope. So Johnny Katee has the phone, maybe
Speaker 1: he can get phone calls from ghost Face. Okay, well anyway.
Speaker 1: Wes Craven's Scream Era also included some notable deviations, most
Speaker 1: notably the nineteen ninety nine drama Music of the Heart,
Speaker 1: which starred Meryl Streep. She was nominated for Best Actress
Speaker 1: Academy Award for that role. He also directed a segment
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six is Paris just him? This
Speaker 1: is French so and may be butchering alongside the likes
Speaker 1: of the Cohen Brothers and others. I saw this one
Speaker 1: in the cinema. I think I only remember the Coen
Speaker 1: Brothers segment though, okay, I think it had steep.
Speaker 3: Yuseimi in it.
Speaker 1: But Craven also directed the two thousand and five werewolf
Speaker 1: movie Cursed starring Christina Ricci, and the air travel thriller
Speaker 1: Red Eye starring Rachel McAdams, Killian Murphy and of course
Speaker 1: the legendary Brian Cox.
Speaker 3: Oh, I didn't know Brian Cox was in that. Now
Speaker 3: I kind of want to see it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I haven't seen it. I often avoid the air
Speaker 1: travel thrillers. But I mean that's a good cast. There's
Speaker 1: no doubt about it. Love all three of them.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well that's fair, realis That's probably the reason
Speaker 3: we have not yet covered Gok body Snatcher from Hell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now's the time, though, I'm in between flights, so
Speaker 1: you don't have any trips coming up, not for a
Speaker 1: couple of.
Speaker 3: Months, so yeah, okay, well maybe we should do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Now that we've done Wes Craven, hopefully
Speaker 1: due diligence there at least a brief overview, we'll move
Speaker 1: on to the writer, the screenwriter of this TV movie.
Speaker 1: It's Richard Rothstein, who lived nineteen forty three through twenty
Speaker 1: eighteen American screen and producer whose first produced script was
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventy eight western shoot The Sundown, co starring
Speaker 1: very young Christopher Walken. His credits include various other films
Speaker 1: and TV movies, but most notable are eighty two episodes
Speaker 1: of TV's The Hitchhiker, which ran eighty four through ninety seven,
Speaker 1: and of course nineteen ninety two's Universal Soldier starring Jean
Speaker 1: Claude van Dam.
Speaker 3: Oh. Okay, yeah, he was.
Speaker 1: Just involved with the first one, but you'll see him
Speaker 1: as he gets a character credit on all subsequent Universal Soldier.
Speaker 3: Movies that also of Doulph Londgren.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep, he's definitely in the first one and eventually
Speaker 1: pops back up in the latter ones as well. All right,
Speaker 1: getting into the cast here, top billing goes to Robert Urick,
Speaker 1: who plays Matt Winslow. Urick lived nineteen forty six through
Speaker 1: two thousand and two American leading man actor, best remembered
Speaker 1: for his work in the seventies and eighties, which included
Speaker 1: a lot of TV, including the title role in Spencer
Speaker 1: for Hire and the role of Jake Spoon in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine mini series Lonesome Dove. Oh yeah, that
Speaker 1: of course had a terrific cast.
Speaker 3: I haven't seen it, but I started reading the novel
Speaker 3: last year and really liked it, but then just didn't
Speaker 3: finish it. Oh yeah, it's a great novel as well.
Speaker 3: There's another one in that series that I read, Comanche Moon,
Speaker 3: that I really liked. But yeah, the mini series was
Speaker 3: definitely a prestige project. Had Robert Duvall in it, also
Speaker 3: had Sonny Carl Davis in it, a bunch of people.
Speaker 3: But yeah, Robert Urick is in that and plays a
Speaker 3: plays a character that kind of it's easy to look
Speaker 3: at his role in this picture and sort of identified
Speaker 3: the sort of leading man type roles that he played.
Speaker 3: He plays a flawed character in Lonesome Dove, a character
Speaker 3: that ends up having not a great trajectory. Other films
Speaker 3: of his include seventy three's Magnum Force. Oh, and then
Speaker 3: the nineteen eighty two Alan Rudolph cattle mutilation conspiracy thriller
Speaker 3: Endangered Species. It's another one where he gets to play
Speaker 3: a more morally complicated character.
Speaker 1: As you might expect from an Alan Rudolph picture.
Speaker 3: Once again, that was not the cattle mutilation movie we
Speaker 3: talked about. That was the other one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this is one where this one leans more
Speaker 1: conspiracy thriller as opposed to aliens doing things to cows.
Speaker 1: But it's also it's pretty great. It's like it's Alan Rudolph,
Speaker 1: you know, going for a mainstream thriller vibe, but it's
Speaker 1: quite effective. It's one that I've toyed around with the
Speaker 1: idea of covering. I definitely want to cover some Alan
Speaker 1: Rudolph film at one point or another. Is just a
Speaker 1: matter of picking the right one.
Speaker 3: I've got one on my list we can talk about
Speaker 3: after this episode.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah. But anyway, I like Robert Urick, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, very much seventies eighties leading man stock but
Speaker 1: I feel like he always gets the job done. And
Speaker 1: you know, obviously he's an actor we would have liked
Speaker 1: to have seen more from. We didn't get to see
Speaker 1: a lot of late career character work from him, as
Speaker 1: he passed from cancer at age of fifty five.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the main character in this movie I actually found
Speaker 3: quite likable, So Matt Winslow. This character, he's sort of
Speaker 3: a classic like solid family man, like a loving father
Speaker 3: and a good husband and an emblem of rectitude, so
Speaker 3: you might expect, well, he's kind of an uncomplicated character,
Speaker 3: so there's not much to get into here, But I
Speaker 3: don't know, I really enjoyed this character. Actually, he's a
Speaker 3: good guy by trade. In the movie, he's an engineer
Speaker 3: who works in this aerospace technology industry and they have
Speaker 3: him designing cutting edge suits for astronauts to wear, like
Speaker 3: in the next phase of Solar System exploration. And he
Speaker 3: has this ludicrous sci fi dialogue to deliver where he's
Speaker 3: like having them point this space suit helmet at things
Speaker 3: and it identifies whether it is human or not, or
Speaker 3: a non human terrestrial or non terrestrial.
Speaker 1: Being, yes, or if you are benign or malignant? Is
Speaker 1: it malignant or malicious?
Speaker 3: Yeah, benign or malignant beings of whether or not there
Speaker 3: from Earth, And it just the helmet knows.
Speaker 1: It's remarkable tech that he developed here.
Speaker 3: So he's but he delivers that with a kind of
Speaker 3: illan that's admirable. Also, this character, Matt and by extension, Urik,
Speaker 3: is a megahunk, and the movie is not shy about
Speaker 3: like letting you get a good idea of what his
Speaker 3: butt looks like and some nice fitting khakis.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's right. He's at least shirtless in one scene.
Speaker 3: But this is a kind of leading man, good guy
Speaker 3: role that I think we could potentially underappreciate. It takes
Speaker 3: a little more skill than you might think when you
Speaker 3: first watched this movie because of all the different stuff
Speaker 3: he has to do and that he has to navigate
Speaker 3: the performance of, like fighting off demonic versions of his
Speaker 3: own children that are attacking him, and you know he
Speaker 3: does well with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Yeah. He has to do kind of like
Speaker 1: the grounded, believable stuff and then like lean into the
Speaker 1: the endo the role when it gets super weird towards
Speaker 1: the end. Yeah, all right, So that is Matt Winslow
Speaker 1: playing his wife. Pat Winslow is Joanna Cassidy born nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five, two time Emmy nominated Actress for Elite Actress
Speaker 1: Role on eighty four's Buffalo Bill and then a guest
Speaker 1: role in the TV series Six Feet Under. Best remembered
Speaker 1: by many of you, though, as the snake handling replicant
Speaker 1: Zora in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, I didn't make that connection, all right.
Speaker 1: She's the one who she's wearing like a yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a shower curtain trench coat and she gets
Speaker 1: gunned down in the street by our hero.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, totally is. She's working at the club and
Speaker 3: she has the snake. Yeah, yeah, I remember her.
Speaker 1: She also played the character Dolores in nineteen eighty eights
Speaker 1: who framed Roger Rabbit, and she had a role in
Speaker 1: seventy three as the laughing Policeman.
Speaker 3: She's also good here playing a conflicted character, someone who's
Speaker 3: torn between wanting to be like a loyal and kind
Speaker 3: wife and mother to her family, but she's also feeling
Speaker 3: the pull of like ostentatious wealth and the desire to
Speaker 3: be included in this in this rich new jet set
Speaker 3: that the family has moved in with.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because that's all that's ultimately the meat, like the
Speaker 1: social commentary that this film dabbles in as ambition and
Speaker 1: what do you want to be versus what you are?
Speaker 1: What are you know? What are your values? What are
Speaker 1: your ambitions? What is the American dream that either you
Speaker 1: have for yourself or is being inflicted upon you? And
Speaker 1: who is doing the inflicting.
Speaker 3: Oh oh, let's talk about Jessica Jones. Yes, that is
Speaker 3: the character's name.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's such a Yeah, it feels like such an
Speaker 1: everyday name for this character. And I guess part of
Speaker 1: it is like I grew up with somebody named Jessica Jones,
Speaker 1: so it like it just feels like it's like literally
Speaker 1: the girl next door's name. And the character that Susan
Speaker 1: Lucci is playing here is anything.
Speaker 3: But isn't Jessica Jones also a superhero? There was a
Speaker 3: show of wasn't there?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Jessica Jones. It's a Marvel character. But I
Speaker 1: think they I'm not an expert on that character, but
Speaker 1: I think they chose the name Jessica Jones right, or
Speaker 1: at least they focused in on it because it sounds
Speaker 1: so normal for a superhero, and it's about her being
Speaker 1: like an ex costume superhero now living a more like
Speaker 1: you know, film noir, kind of like gritty realistic existence.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, well, I didn't know anything about it. I
Speaker 3: just knew if the character existed, but yeah, anyway, So
Speaker 3: this is Jessica Jones in Invitation to Hell. Is the
Speaker 3: character played by Susan Lucci, the daytime TV soap opera
Speaker 3: Royalty who we were talking about earlier. And Lucci seems
Speaker 3: to be having the time of her life in this movie,
Speaker 3: playing the Satanic Impress of the golf course. I love this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's really getting in there and having a good
Speaker 1: time with this. She was born in nineteen forty six,
Speaker 1: still active, best known for her long running Emmy winning
Speaker 1: role as Erica Kine on the soap opera All My Children.
Speaker 1: I believe if IMDb is correct here, and they usually
Speaker 1: are oney seven hundred and forty two episodes.
Speaker 3: Of that series. How is that possible?
Speaker 1: Yeah, just they crank them out and then they run forever,
Speaker 1: or they ran forever. She also co starred with Robert
Speaker 1: Urich in the nineteen ninety two thriller Double Edge. Undoubtedly
Speaker 1: a TV legend here, and I've read that this whole
Speaker 1: film exists because her nineteen eighty three contract to keep
Speaker 1: acting on All My Children specified that she would get
Speaker 1: to do some sort of a like a TV movie
Speaker 1: of the week, and so they had this script written
Speaker 1: with her in mind. They were like, we've got to
Speaker 1: make we need to make a sci fi drama for
Speaker 1: Susan Lucci. See what you can put together, and so
Speaker 1: we end up with her playing Jessica Jones.
Speaker 3: Here this West Craven movie is actually a Susan Lucci vehicle.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I think Crave. I've read that Craven came
Speaker 1: in kind kind of laid on it, like there's still
Speaker 1: pre production, but a lot of the elements were already
Speaker 1: in place. But then he hit the ground running, you know,
Speaker 1: finishing and putting everything together and figuring out how to
Speaker 1: make a few things work. But yeah, really fun role here.
Speaker 1: I think this and the nineteen eighty seven TV movie
Speaker 1: Haunted by Her Past maybe the only projects she's done
Speaker 1: that have a true speculative element to them. So you
Speaker 1: can imagine somebody who's like cranking out soap opera after
Speaker 1: soap opera episode, you know, having a great time getting
Speaker 1: to play the devil.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she should have done it more.
Speaker 1: Also, of note, she was in a nineteen ninety five
Speaker 1: TV movie called Ebby, in which she plays a female
Speaker 1: version of Ebenezer Scrooge. I haven't seen that one either,
Speaker 1: but that also sound that sounds like that was also
Speaker 1: a fun alternative to what she usually did.
Speaker 3: Do you know if on All My Children did she
Speaker 3: play a good character or a bad character?
Speaker 1: I think maybe more bad. It seems like all the
Speaker 1: memorable soap opera characters are baddies, right, Like those are
Speaker 1: the characters you love to hate, right maybe you know
Speaker 1: you remember names like you know, and I'm betraying my
Speaker 1: you know how little I know about soap operas. But
Speaker 1: you're gonna remember Barnabas Collins because he's a vampire. You're
Speaker 1: gonna remember presumably Erica Kane because she's also a baddie.
Speaker 3: Does sound like a bad character name?
Speaker 1: Yeah, speaking of names, I guess it would have been
Speaker 1: too on the nose if they called her Lucci fur
Speaker 1: in this, you know, so they probably like just call
Speaker 1: her Jessica jobs all right. Up next, we have Joe
Speaker 1: Recabuto playing Tom Peterson born nineteen forty nine, probably best
Speaker 1: known to many of you out there. This is the
Speaker 1: main connection I had to his work because he played
Speaker 1: the character Frank on TV's Murphy Brown, which I remember
Speaker 1: watching a lot as a kid. For some reason, I
Speaker 1: think because it was it was on tele vision and
Speaker 1: that's it was something the family was watching. But he
Speaker 1: was nominated for an Emmy for that performance. He was
Speaker 1: also in the nineteen eighty six movie Raw Deal, which
Speaker 1: we were just talking about last week.
Speaker 3: Why were we talking about Raw Deal last time?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, why were It was somebody somebody one of
Speaker 1: the actors or lifted up.
Speaker 3: I just looked it up. It was Sam Wanamaker. There
Speaker 3: you go, yeah, who directed Sindbad and The Eye at
Speaker 3: the Tiger.
Speaker 1: There you go. Yeah. So Rogo Bhutto also did. I
Speaker 1: did a lot of TV work, but also directed quite
Speaker 1: a bit of television, including many episodes of Murphy Brown.
Speaker 1: Here he's good.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 1: I don't have a lot to say about this performance,
Speaker 1: but he's he's good. He is the the the the
Speaker 1: co worker, I guess, former acquaintance of our lead character saying, hey,
Speaker 1: you're working for the big evil corporation.
Speaker 3: Great. Yeah, Well he's I think he's the friend who
Speaker 3: tempted Matt and his family to come into this. He's like,
Speaker 3: I have gone to take a job at a big
Speaker 3: evil corporation. Why don't you come work at the big
Speaker 3: evil corporation. You'll make lots of money. Yeah, and so
Speaker 3: he plays like an ratiating, nervous corporate grimlin.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a good performance, all right.
Speaker 1: We also have Kevin McCarthy showing up at least forel
Speaker 1: a little bit. He's not in this much, plays mister Thompson.
Speaker 1: McCarthy lived nineteen fourteen through twenty ten. American actor, nominated
Speaker 1: for an Oscar for his performance in the nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: two adaptation of Death of a Salesman, but probably best
Speaker 1: known to many out there for his maniacal paranoid performance
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty six's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He
Speaker 1: also pops up in various genre films to follow multiple
Speaker 1: Joe Dante films, if I remember correctly, previously mentioned him
Speaker 1: on the show, because the episode I recorded with David's
Speaker 1: Treepy on Joe Dante's Innerspace, of course, features Kevin McCarthy.
Speaker 3: Kevin McCarthy has powerful, malicious boss energy, and that, in
Speaker 3: fact is exactly the role he plays in this movie.
Speaker 3: But I imagine he was just getting cast over and
Speaker 3: over again as the guy who calls the man character
Speaker 3: into his office to tell him he's fired.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, that's the generally he played like, certainly later
Speaker 1: in his career, tended to play nasty old men and
Speaker 1: he was excellent at it.
Speaker 3: Oh and speaking of old men, we also in this
Speaker 3: movie have Bill Irwin, the perpetual old man of the movies.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, playing Walt Henderson.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Irwin lived nineteen fourteen through twenty ten. American character actor
Speaker 1: appeared in more than two hundred and fifty television and
Speaker 1: film roles, including the one that earned him an Emmy nomination.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety three, he played retiree Sid Fields on Seinfeld,
Speaker 1: and we previously discussed him in our episode on the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four short film Quest.
Speaker 3: He's got a brief sympathetic role in this movie. But yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a nice contrast to the other things I've seen
Speaker 3: him in, which are mainly comedies where he needs to
Speaker 3: pop up as like a curmudgeon.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, here he is a little bit more to do.
Speaker 1: He has a nice scene, and the last we see
Speaker 1: of him it's it's actually really sad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, all right.
Speaker 1: We also have a sheriff character that shows up. I
Speaker 1: don't think he has a name. Maybe he has a name,
Speaker 1: but it played by Nicholas Worth, who lived nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: seven through two thousand and seven. Instantly recognizable rotun typically
Speaker 1: bald or balding American character actor, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: like built like a like a pit bull. Probably best
Speaker 1: known to many of you out there for his role
Speaker 1: as the henchman Polly in nineteen nineties Dark Man.
Speaker 3: He body slams Robert Urich in this movie.
Speaker 1: He does, he does, He gets the fulsome wrestling moves.
Speaker 3: They have a wrestling scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so obviously this guy played a lot of heavies.
Speaker 1: His credits include seventy three Screen Blackula Scream, seventy four
Speaker 1: is The Terminal Man, seventy eights Coma, seventy nine's The Glove,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties Don't Answer the Phone. I believe he was
Speaker 1: the main villain in that. He pops up an eighty
Speaker 1: two swamp Thing, eighty six is Heartbreak, Ridge, eighty eight's
Speaker 1: Hell Comes to Frogtown, and Action Jackson and The Naked
Speaker 1: Gun Wow. He also plays a demon in ninety four's
Speaker 1: Dark Angel The Ascent. He's in ninety six is Barbed Wire.
Speaker 1: Did a lot of TV pops up on The X
Speaker 1: Files and a couple of different star Trek shows.
Speaker 3: No, I don't remember what he did in The X Files,
Speaker 3: but yeah, he's good. I don't even remember if he
Speaker 3: has any lines in this movie, but he does stand
Speaker 3: there in Menace People and then yeah, has a pretty
Speaker 3: sweet fight scene.
Speaker 1: Oh and we need to talk about the Winslow children.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, yeah, the Winslow family. We have two children.
Speaker 1: There's a boy and a girl, both famous in their
Speaker 1: own right. That's right, but let's start with the girl.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the daughter. It is the character Chrissy,
Speaker 1: played by so Leigh moon Fry born nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 1: It's TV's Punky Brewster. That's who it is.
Speaker 3: I've never seen Punky Brewster, but the name is burned
Speaker 3: in my brain from when I was a kid, people
Speaker 3: talked about Punky Brewster. I imagined her as just like a
Speaker 3: girl Dennis the Menace is that sort of it.
Speaker 1: I only have vague memories of watching this show, but
Speaker 1: I remember it's like Punky Brewster, like she was to
Speaker 1: be celebrated. Okay, she was a lot of fun. She
Speaker 1: was a handful obviously child actor here turned grown person actor.
Speaker 1: She's also known for her work in ninety three's Pumpkinhead
Speaker 1: two Blood Wings. She's also she was a cast member
Speaker 1: on TV Sabrina and the Teenage Witch. This is the
Speaker 1: version that ran two thousand and through two thousand and three.
Speaker 1: She's also done a little bit of directing.
Speaker 3: So this movie does ask a decent amount of the
Speaker 3: children characters she has to play, not only like a
Speaker 3: little girl who's kind of upset about her family having
Speaker 3: to move to a new city, like she misses their
Speaker 3: old house, but she also gets to play a demonic,
Speaker 3: possessed child who's like, there's only bad Chrissy now yep.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so she gets to have some fun with
Speaker 1: this role for sure, and then playing her brother. Robbie
Speaker 1: Winslow is Barrett Oliver born nineteen seventy three, a child
Speaker 1: actor that we previously talked about on the show because
Speaker 1: he of course played Dastian Balthazar Bucks in a much
Speaker 1: bigger film from the same year than Never Ending Story, both.
Speaker 3: In the same year. Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, his other credit.
Speaker 3: It's like Peter Mayhew being in Star Wars and Sindbad
Speaker 3: and The Eye of the Tiger the same year. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, you keep working and some things take off
Speaker 1: and some things don't, right, but yeah, it's so it's
Speaker 1: quite a quite a quite a cast here, and the
Speaker 1: family itself is pretty interesting. So like, after I'd watched
Speaker 1: the film, I had to show the first ninety seconds
Speaker 1: of it to my to my wife. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: why in just a few minutes here. But then I
Speaker 1: also was like, stick around, I've got to point out
Speaker 1: some things about this family, all right, moving behind the scene.
Speaker 1: The cinematographer on this is Dean Cundy. Oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've talked about him on the show before. He
Speaker 3: was a cinematographer and I believe the very first movie
Speaker 3: we ever featured on Weird House Cinema right without Warning?
Speaker 1: Correct, Yes, nineteen eighties without Warning. More famous probably for
Speaker 1: his work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which he won
Speaker 1: an oscar for ninety three, is Jurassic Park ninety six,
Speaker 1: is Apollo thirteen, and many others. He's worked, of course,
Speaker 1: extensively with John Carpenter robertson Machis Yeah, and great on Clark.
Speaker 3: So I love Dean Coundy's work. Was he also a
Speaker 3: cinematographer on Halloween three season of The Witch, by the way.
Speaker 1: He was, Yeah, I believe that's one of the one
Speaker 1: of the other ways that Dean Coundy has come.
Speaker 3: Up before interesting but also connection in that these movies
Speaker 3: share these kind of unusual horror themes. Invitation to Hell
Speaker 3: is not beautiful to look at by any stretch of
Speaker 3: the imagination. The things it has to show you are
Speaker 3: mostly not all that exciting, and yet I think Coundy's
Speaker 3: cinematography is one of the reasons the movie is so
Speaker 3: eminently watchable, even when he really when all he has
Speaker 3: to show you are fairly drab sets and locations, Kundy
Speaker 3: just has a very strong sense for visual storytelling, and
Speaker 3: his camera naturally adds momentum to the story. So I
Speaker 3: don't think it's the only thing that makes Invitation to
Speaker 3: Hell a very fun and watchable movie despite being somewhat
Speaker 3: low budget. But yeah, there's something going on with the cinematography,
Speaker 3: despite the fact that the movie is not much to
Speaker 3: write home about in terms of visual spectacle.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Though on that note, it is worth pointing out that
Speaker 1: many of these TV movies were apparently produced if in
Speaker 1: this era, were produced way too fast and at a
Speaker 1: lower budget, so they couldn't really benefit from storyboarding. But apparently,
Speaker 1: since this was a Susan Lucci vehicle. In all, the
Speaker 1: studio went the extra mile and they hired st board
Speaker 1: artist Petco d Kodiev, who is apparently known to some
Speaker 1: extent as the count behind the scenes to sketch everything
Speaker 1: out in pre production. He'd previously worked on the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three feature film Blue Thunder, which is the helicopter Movie,
Speaker 1: and went on to work on such films as eighty
Speaker 1: six Is King Kong Lives and eighty seven Is The
Speaker 1: Running Man.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, so the storyboarding may also have helped give
Speaker 3: this movie more visual coherence than it might have had
Speaker 3: otherwise it was just sort of a over the shoulder
Speaker 3: point and shoot like a lot of TV movies would be.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then finally, the composer here is Sylvester Levy,
Speaker 1: who lived He's still around as far as I know.
Speaker 1: Born nineteen forty five, Hungarian composer who also scored nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six's Cobra, nineteen nineties Navy Seals, and various TV projects,
Speaker 1: including the TV series Werewolf.
Speaker 3: Is this brother of Anton no No, but.
Speaker 1: He's also partially responsible for the Elton John song Victim
Speaker 1: of Love from nineteen seventy nine. One of the writers
Speaker 1: on that and he won a Grammy in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: five for the song Fly Robin Fly, performed by the
Speaker 1: German disco group Silver Convention, a group that he helped
Speaker 1: put together.
Speaker 3: Rob I thought you might like the score on this movie.
Speaker 3: It's very synth heavy, and it has it's Moody's. Those
Speaker 3: are things I think that attract you to a film score. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I like it. Yeah, yeah, I liked it too. A
Speaker 3: lot of parts reminded me actually of the synth themes
Speaker 3: in The Terminator.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. And yeah, I thought
Speaker 1: it worked well for the p because especially we get
Speaker 1: a pretty rocking opening scene, but then we get a
Speaker 1: lot of scenes in which it's like a family getting
Speaker 1: situated in this nice looking neighborhood, this nice little slice
Speaker 1: of the American corporate dream, and yet the music is
Speaker 1: here to remind us that things are maybe not what
Speaker 1: they seem.
Speaker 3: All Right, you want to talk about the plot, let's
Speaker 3: jump into it. So if you don't decide to watch
Speaker 3: Invitation to Hell in full, let me at least convince
Speaker 3: you to watch the first ninety seconds or so. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it has a strong, cold opening, pulling you in. After
Speaker 3: do you know what aired right before this.
Speaker 1: I was trying to find out that I couldn't get
Speaker 1: a firm answer, So I'm thinking maybe it was just
Speaker 1: like your regional nightly Neves or maybe the national nightly news,
Speaker 1: because it would have been seven to I mean, it
Speaker 1: would have been eight to ten Eastern, So I'm guessing, yeah,
Speaker 1: you would have just been after that news. Watch the
Speaker 1: movie and then watch twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: Right, so it's fighting the Frizzies at eleven and then
Speaker 3: cuts to this. So we open the We open on
Speaker 3: the exterior of a country club. It is a bright
Speaker 3: sunny day. Birds are singing, rich people doing fancy country
Speaker 3: club stuff. You see golf carts zipping around. There are
Speaker 3: a couple of ladies walking through the valet a lot
Speaker 3: carrying tennis rackets with covers on them. This actually got
Speaker 3: me wondering why did tennis rackets ever need covers. I
Speaker 3: never had a cover for any tennis racket I ever had,
Speaker 3: But like, what does the cover do?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I guess if it's if it's nice,
Speaker 1: you need to put a cover on it.
Speaker 3: The music selection here is eerie synthesizer chords with reverb heartbeats,
Speaker 3: and we pan over and see some of the people
Speaker 3: coming to the club. There's like a guy leaning against
Speaker 3: a no parking sign and a polo shirt with what
Speaker 3: do you call it when you got a sweatshirt with
Speaker 3: the arms tied around your neck. It's a real yacht
Speaker 3: club look, yeah. Yeah. And then in the background we
Speaker 3: see a green golf course and beyond that typical arid
Speaker 3: mountains that you would see in coastal southern California. So
Speaker 3: a station wagon with some really sick wood paneling hauls
Speaker 3: up to the gate and we see a sign telling
Speaker 3: us where this is. It is the Steaming Springs Country Club.
Speaker 1: I love this. Every time they mentioned steaming Steaming Springs,
Speaker 1: it just made me think of like steaming polo crap
Speaker 1: or something I don't know, And I feel like that
Speaker 1: had to have been intentional on the part of the
Speaker 1: filmmaker's screenwriter.
Speaker 3: Here, there's a lot that on my first watch I
Speaker 3: thought maybe unintentional, and then when I came back to it,
Speaker 3: I was like, no, they did that on purpose.
Speaker 1: Yes, Springs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the station wagon is being driven by a uniformed
Speaker 3: chauffeur with a fancy little hat. And then we finally
Speaker 3: get our first good look at Susan Lucci in costume
Speaker 3: in character. This is the character that will later be
Speaker 3: introduced as Jessica Jones. She's sort of the queen Wasp
Speaker 3: of the club and her look is amazing. It is
Speaker 3: a cherry red, full body outfit. I was gonna say
Speaker 3: pant suit, but it's not really a pant suit. It's
Speaker 3: like because it's not like a jacket over something. It's
Speaker 3: more like a shirt and pants going down to the
Speaker 3: ankles up to the neck, all cherry red, with long sleeves,
Speaker 3: some kind of silver metal half belt object at her waist,
Speaker 3: and big, big hair like it's all up in this
Speaker 3: voluminous black, curly perm. She's also wearing a white patch
Speaker 3: on her chest with a design that I couldn't decipher
Speaker 3: at first, but eventually you get a close up and
Speaker 3: I realized it is the Steaming Spring's logo, which is
Speaker 3: three wispy lines that I guess signifies steam rising, and
Speaker 3: then maybe Steaming Springs would be like two s's, but
Speaker 3: then there's another S. There there's three lines. I believe
Speaker 3: it is not an accident that this superficially reminds us
Speaker 3: of the SS insignia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, like maybe they originally were just gonna have
Speaker 1: two of them on there, and they're like, that's a
Speaker 1: little too much. We should just go back and just
Speaker 1: have the three of these things on there. But yeah,
Speaker 1: this is quite a look. Huge hair, a jumpsuit that
Speaker 1: makes her look like she works at Gismonic's Institute instead
Speaker 1: of the golf club the country club. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: our Luchi fur and it's striking right from the beginning.
Speaker 3: So Jessica Jones is walking across the driveway as the
Speaker 3: chauffeur of the wo Woody wagon drives up to the
Speaker 3: clubhouse entrance. Unfortunately, our chauffeur here gets distracted because he's
Speaker 3: ogling a couple of ladies in teal and purple bikinis,
Speaker 3: and he's on a collision course with Jessica Jones, who,
Speaker 3: by the way, does not even try to get out
Speaker 3: of the way. She just stands there staring head on
Speaker 3: at the car barreling toward her. The driver does a
Speaker 3: double take, tire screech, crash. Jessica goes under the car,
Speaker 3: ever stops, looks out through the rear windshield, and then
Speaker 3: Jessica rises up from the ground like a lever. Yes,
Speaker 3: totally stiff hands on hips. She just pops up into
Speaker 3: the window.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep. She totally pulls a low Pan on this
Speaker 1: guy or I guess you know, they trouble a little
Speaker 1: China low pan pulls a Jessica Jones. Though, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go ahead and assume that neither Craven nor Carpenter were
Speaker 1: the first to pull this exact sequence this. I'm curious.
Speaker 1: I have no answer here, but I feel like this
Speaker 1: must have come from somewhere. This must have been established
Speaker 1: somewhere else. Otherwise it was created here. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Well, it's like no Sparatu again. Yeah, I get you're right. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So she then points a finger like I curse you.
Speaker 3: She just points a finger and the rear windshield shatters.
Speaker 3: The driver starts screaming, and then there is smoke fuming
Speaker 3: out of his clothes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I showed this scene to my wife because I like,
Speaker 1: you gotta watch you gotta watch this first in the
Speaker 1: first ninety seconds of this film, And she commented this
Speaker 1: whole sequence with Susan Lucci plays out like a demonic
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties hair commercial. You know, look at how confident
Speaker 1: she is.
Speaker 3: That's so right, Yeah, maybe she's born with it. Maybe
Speaker 3: it's a gift from the Prince of Darkness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's turning heads, she's snatching souls, she's microwaving dudes
Speaker 1: in their cars.
Speaker 3: That's right. Yeah. So the driver melts a pretty solid melt, right, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean they don't show you too much goop. It
Speaker 3: is made for TV, but I did a freeze frame
Speaker 3: here and in mid melt, he looks like Lawn Cheney
Speaker 3: as the Phantom of the Opera, but with huge teeth,
Speaker 3: hollow eyes, and sweaty wax for skin. I like this model.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is yeah, this looked I thought it looked
Speaker 1: really good, especially again since this is like, you know what,
Speaker 1: eight oh five pm on a Thursday.
Speaker 3: This is it.
Speaker 1: It's hitting pretty hard.
Speaker 3: But I also like that they're giving you Susan Lucci
Speaker 3: before they give you any of the good guys. She's
Speaker 3: just out here at the golf course melting drivers.
Speaker 1: And I guess it's part of the whole vibe. Is Yeah,
Speaker 1: you want to get the viewer hook, right, give them
Speaker 1: a taste of how weird this is going to be.
Speaker 1: Let them see Susan Lucci. They know who Susan Lucci
Speaker 1: is and they'll be inclined to stick around for the
Speaker 1: rest of the picture.
Speaker 3: As you said, she microwaves him. He's good and melted,
Speaker 3: and then she just looks very pleased with her work
Speaker 3: and walks away from the car. She tosses her hair
Speaker 3: and walks away beaming. And I was thinking, who has
Speaker 3: to clean this up? Do they have staff there who
Speaker 3: just mop up melted chauffeurs? And also, this is a
Speaker 3: company car. It says Steaming Springs on the side of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And the screenshot you included in the outline,
Speaker 1: you can see that this dude that she just melted
Speaker 1: has the silver Spring, Silver Springs, the Steaming Springs logo
Speaker 1: on his outfit as well. So, yeah, she just totally melted.
Speaker 1: And employee, did I say silver springs earlier? I know,
Speaker 1: I was hearing this in Stevie Nick's voice a lot.
Speaker 1: It will happen again.
Speaker 3: You can be my melted driver, let's see. Oh yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: So that's the cold open. After that we go on
Speaker 3: to meet our main family, the main characters. This is
Speaker 3: the Winslow family. So you got the father, Matt Winslow
Speaker 3: played by Robert Urick. The mother Patricia Winslow played by
Speaker 3: Joanna Cassidy, the daughter Chrissy played by Sleigh Moonfry, and
Speaker 3: the son Robbie played by Barrett Oliver. And also we
Speaker 3: don't see him until later, but the family has a
Speaker 3: very cute dog named Albert.
Speaker 1: Oh, yes, he'll be important later on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to check in with the does the dog die crowd,
Speaker 3: I'll say the answer is no, but the dog is
Speaker 3: conceptually threatened. Yes. So the family they're on a car trip.
Speaker 3: When we first see them. They are cruising down the
Speaker 3: highway and another gorgeous American made station wagon of the
Speaker 3: nineteen eighties. I don't know if this one has wood panels,
Speaker 3: but we get the title and the credits playing and
Speaker 3: terminator font over aerial shots of the highway and like
Speaker 3: recently developed valley subdivisions in southern California, and of course
Speaker 3: more golf courses. And then in the car our first
Speaker 3: impression of the family is of the sun and we
Speaker 3: get the idea that he's the kind of kid who's
Speaker 3: really interested in getting the high score. He's into points,
Speaker 3: so he's like, there's a dog five points and I
Speaker 3: just saw two flags fifteen points, four hundred and seventy
Speaker 3: four hundred and eighty and he's just saying numbers. It
Speaker 3: reminds me of that Tim and Eric sketch where it's
Speaker 3: an ad and they're just saying numbers. Anyway, Chrissy is
Speaker 3: tired of playing Robbie's game, and she is especially annoyed
Speaker 3: that he counted those flags he just saw because they're
Speaker 3: on a golf course and golf course flags do not
Speaker 3: count as flags. But she also wants to quit the
Speaker 3: game because there are no more animals to see, just
Speaker 3: dumb buildings. I think that's a metaphor. So the family
Speaker 3: is moving from their home in the Midwest to their
Speaker 3: new house in southern California because Matt, who is an engineer,
Speaker 3: got a new job at a company called micro Digitech.
Speaker 3: And for a second I was like, surely they can't
Speaker 3: be playing on a real company, because Digitech is the
Speaker 3: real the name of a real brand. They're the makers of,
Speaker 3: like the beloved Digitech whammy pedal for guitars.
Speaker 1: Well, what sound is the whammy pedal responsible for?
Speaker 3: Well, it's like a it's like an octave shifting pedal
Speaker 3: or tone shifting pedal, so you can play one note
Speaker 3: on your guitar, and then with the whammy pedal, you
Speaker 3: can make it an octave below or an octave above
Speaker 3: that actual tone. So it's like what you hear Jack
Speaker 3: White playing the guitar, but it sounds like a bass guitar.
Speaker 3: He's making that bass guitar sound with a whammy pedal
Speaker 3: to kick it an octave down. Oh okay, I see,
Speaker 3: but I think this is just a coincidence. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's kind of an obvious name for a company. I
Speaker 3: guess that makes digital technology Digitech, but this is micro
Speaker 3: Digitech anyway. So the family's driving into town and Robbie,
Speaker 3: the son, he's a computer boy, and he's reading off
Speaker 3: the names of various company headquarters. He's like, oh, the
Speaker 3: TRX Corporation, micro Chip International. Boy, it sounds like computer heaven.
Speaker 3: And then Chrissy, his sister, says, computers don't go to heaven. Well,
Speaker 3: we'll see about that. So on the drive, Matt and
Speaker 3: Patricia have a conversation, making it clear that this is
Speaker 3: a big step up for them, this move, but one
Speaker 3: that Matt is a little bit uncertain about. Previously, they
Speaker 3: were scraping by on Matt's meager income from whatever he
Speaker 3: was doing before. I guess he was either an independent
Speaker 3: engineer and inventor, or he was like working at a
Speaker 3: university or something. They say this is his first time
Speaker 3: working for a big corporation, so it's a huge increase
Speaker 3: in pay and prestige, and Patricia is very excited for him,
Speaker 3: but he's like, I don't know, I've never worked for
Speaker 3: a big corporation. I'm just not sure about it. And
Speaker 3: the kids also seemed divided on the move. Robbie is
Speaker 3: very excited for a taste of the good life, but
Speaker 3: Chrissy says she misses the snow back home, and she
Speaker 3: also says she doesn't like the building that her dad
Speaker 3: is going to be working in. They showed this building.
Speaker 3: It's like a high rise office building, much taller than
Speaker 3: any of the other story ructures around it, with these
Speaker 3: mirrored windows top to bottom reflecting the sun. And Matt
Speaker 3: asks Chrissy why she doesn't like the building. She says,
Speaker 3: because you can't see the people inside.
Speaker 1: M Yeah, I like that moment.
Speaker 3: They don't play it like it's all that ponderous though.
Speaker 3: She just kind of says it and they move on.
Speaker 3: But I don't know. It was stuck and stuck in
Speaker 3: here for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a subtle effect, and in general, I love
Speaker 1: the banter with the family. Yeah, I felt like the
Speaker 1: banter felt very realistic. It felt like a realistic amount
Speaker 1: of squabbling between the children, but also laid out in
Speaker 1: a way that helped establish some of the overall themes
Speaker 1: and establishing like what's going on in this family's life?
Speaker 3: Right, So they arrived at their new home. It's a big,
Speaker 3: beautiful house and a beautiful subdivision. Think of the Simpsons
Speaker 3: episode if you've seen it, You Only Moved Twice. In fact,
Speaker 3: this movie as a whole has serious overlap with You
Speaker 3: Only Moved Twice. Yeah, it was more like a like
Speaker 3: an eighties West Coast version of the house on Maple
Speaker 3: Systems Drive, or at least that's what it's supposed to be,
Speaker 3: because the house is indeed huge and spacious and nice
Speaker 3: looking from the outside. A lot of the interior sets
Speaker 3: look like they were hastily built on a sound stage.
Speaker 3: So the kitchen is huge, but the cabinets and stuff
Speaker 3: kind of remind me of my college dorm room. So anyway,
Speaker 3: everybody's happy to move in. They're laughing exploring. Matt picks
Speaker 3: up Patricia and carries her over the threshold, and while
Speaker 3: the movers are bringing things in, Patricia and Matt they
Speaker 3: have a mild argument. Matt's unpacking some kind of high
Speaker 3: tech gizmo from a padded steel carrying case, and Patricia
Speaker 3: is like, hold it. She tells him that she wants
Speaker 3: him to take all his computer things and inventions into
Speaker 3: the lab at work, because she wants this to be
Speaker 3: a home, not a laboratory. And you never see it,
Speaker 3: but you get the idea that maybe their house in
Speaker 3: the Midwest was kind of like Doctor Forrester's burrow in
Speaker 3: Deep thirteen. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think it's important to note that Patty's
Speaker 1: Patty's not being unreasonable here, like and he also, you know,
Speaker 1: sees the logic and what she's saying and quickly agrees.
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, I'll put this in the garage. You know.
Speaker 1: She's like, this is a chance for us to live
Speaker 1: a little differently. And at this point in the film,
Speaker 1: it doesn't feel like that ambition is getting out of
Speaker 1: control at all.
Speaker 3: It seems reasonable totally. You do not get the idea
Speaker 3: at all in the beginning that there's anything wrong with
Speaker 3: what Patricia wants Yeah, that comes in more with like
Speaker 3: the influence of the Queen Wasp at the club and stuff. Also,
Speaker 3: there's a very funny scene with Robbie the son antagonizing
Speaker 3: the moving men. He's on this computer in his new room,
Speaker 3: and the moving man's like, what you got on their games?
Speaker 3: And he's like, no, I have a computerized inventory of
Speaker 3: all my things, so I'll know if you lose any
Speaker 3: of it. And indeed, his computer starts flashing and reveals
Speaker 3: that he is missing a candy bar. You must have
Speaker 3: inventoried that. And then we see the mover like surreptitiously
Speaker 3: put a candy bar, like pull it out out of
Speaker 3: his pocket and put it on the kid's bed. But like,
Speaker 3: how would the computer know the candy bar was missing
Speaker 3: unless it had been inventoried in by a human. This
Speaker 3: is just a good prelude to the way the movie
Speaker 3: generally treats computers, which is that they are omniscient. They
Speaker 3: are somehow fully aware of their physical surroundings.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great example of late seventies early eighties
Speaker 1: computers and films. In a way, this matches up very
Speaker 1: closely with what Mother does in Alien. Of course, Alien
Speaker 1: takes place in the future. It is a at least
Speaker 1: by our own from our own vantage point, a retro
Speaker 1: futuristic view of computer technology. But also in films like that,
Speaker 1: it's just this is just what computers do, right. You
Speaker 1: just talk to him conversationally, kind of like what we're
Speaker 1: doing now with these different chatbots, but at the time,
Speaker 1: you know, completely beyond what they were capable of doing totally.
Speaker 3: There's a scene where Matt later just goes starts typing
Speaker 3: in been ended questions on like a doss prompt and
Speaker 3: like it's like he's using chat GPT, but it's the
Speaker 3: green letters on the black screen. Yeah. So later that night,
Speaker 3: the Winslows get a visit from some family friends who
Speaker 3: already live here and already work for this corporation. This
Speaker 3: is Mary and Tom Peterson and their kids, old family friends.
Speaker 3: We already talked about this, I think. But Tom is
Speaker 3: the guy who already took a job at this company,
Speaker 3: and he invited Matt to come join him. And first
Speaker 3: there's kind of a jump scare where they're hearing rattling
Speaker 3: outside the windows, and Robbie the Sun is like it's zombies. Definitely,
Speaker 3: they do stuff like that, but they go you know,
Speaker 3: we get a boot scare, and then the friends come in. Oh,
Speaker 3: it's actually just our friends. They brought a bucket of
Speaker 3: chicken with them.
Speaker 1: What time is it supposed to be that.
Speaker 3: It looks like late late at night? Is pitch black outside?
Speaker 3: Did they show up with a bucket of KFC? And
Speaker 3: then the kids just each reach in and grab a
Speaker 3: fried chicken piece and run away. I mean, I remember
Speaker 3: no plates here.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can I remember these buckets of chicken
Speaker 1: well from my own childhood. I can only imagine in
Speaker 1: this case has some cold chicken in there, not that
Speaker 1: it matters. In fact, I feel like KFC buckets were
Speaker 1: consumed like at least half the time, like just completely
Speaker 1: room temperature, if not like fridge temperature.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So the kids run off and play, and the
Speaker 3: adults gather around a piano. When Patricia starts playing music.
Speaker 3: She's playing when the Saints go marching in, I think
Speaker 3: they're trying to do a sing along. There were comments
Speaker 3: earlier about her once being a struggling music major, and
Speaker 3: in this scene you really get some of the class
Speaker 3: anxiety themes coming out. Tom and Mary both make kind
Speaker 3: of awkward comments. Mary is like, oh yeah, remember when
Speaker 3: we used to do this in the dorm room, gathered
Speaker 3: around that horrible, old, upright piano. But then they're like, oh,
Speaker 3: is this still the same piano you have? And Tom says,
Speaker 3: no worries. The days of out of tune pianos and
Speaker 3: beat up old furniture they're all behind you. Now you're
Speaker 3: in the big leagues. And Tom tries to make them
Speaker 3: toast to success, and once again it's like that that
Speaker 3: hammer horror toast to satan.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the piano here made me think of the of
Speaker 1: the TV show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmid. At one point
Speaker 1: they pick up a stand up piano that is like
Speaker 1: left on the curb that has the word bed bugs
Speaker 1: spray painted on it, and they end up bringing it
Speaker 1: into the apartment. So I can only imagine a similar
Speaker 1: situation here.
Speaker 3: Sure, you just don't sleep on the piano, you'll be fine.
Speaker 3: So later there's a scene where Matt is tucking the
Speaker 3: kids into bed and Robbie is up in his bed
Speaker 3: playing a handheld kind of beat boop game where he's
Speaker 3: blasting spaceships to save the galaxy, and he says, you know,
Speaker 3: how come I can save the whole Galaxy, But I
Speaker 3: can't go to the Halloween party. What Halloween party? It's
Speaker 3: the one Tom and Mary's kids are going to. It's
Speaker 3: at the club and it's for members only. Don't you
Speaker 3: want to fit in? Matt?
Speaker 1: I kept wondering about this handheld device that Robbie's playing
Speaker 1: on here. Is this supposed to be an actual device
Speaker 1: or is this Can we never see the screen? I
Speaker 1: never saw the screen clearly, so I'm wondering if this
Speaker 1: is this tabil that he's playing on, which, you know,
Speaker 1: we looks just like some sort of an iPad or
Speaker 1: something here today, if this was actually some sort of
Speaker 1: video gaming device of the time, or they're just getting
Speaker 1: a little futuristic here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what were handheld gaming devices like in nineteen eighty four?
Speaker 3: That seems I don't think there was a game boy yet?
Speaker 3: Was there?
Speaker 1: No? No, And by the early nineties he still had
Speaker 1: some very like I don't know, he's a crude little
Speaker 1: video game. I'm not even sure. I forget the terminology
Speaker 1: for them, but they were barely video games. You know,
Speaker 1: you're moving a few pixels around. They were not on
Speaker 1: the level of like a game boy or anything.
Speaker 3: They're more like a digital watch where you press buttons. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: Well anyway, so that's what he's playing. He's you know, blasting.
Speaker 3: I think they call it Astrobomber is the name of
Speaker 3: the game. But so the next day we're going to
Speaker 3: get some work stuff. We get carpooling to Matt's new
Speaker 3: job where he's riding to work with Tom. When he
Speaker 3: gets into Tom's car, Tom basically has Clarence Bodiker in
Speaker 3: the back seat. It's his boss. It's this character named
Speaker 3: Larry Ferris, and Tom is embarrassed that he has to
Speaker 3: give his boss a ride to work in his car,
Speaker 3: which he calls a junker. But I'm going to say
Speaker 3: I cannot tell the difference between the supposedly good cars
Speaker 3: and the allegedly bad cars in this movie. They all
Speaker 3: just look the same. They look like huge American made
Speaker 3: sedans from the eighties. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I have similar problems today figuring out
Speaker 1: what is a nice cars what's not. But I do
Speaker 1: want to point out like this was definitely I'm so
Speaker 1: used to watching a weird house film, and as certainly
Speaker 1: if there's some sort of evil corporation going on. When
Speaker 1: the boss is introduced, I take note I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I need to look this guy up, see what this
Speaker 1: actor is. But it really doesn't matter. With Larry Ferris.
Speaker 1: They really don't come back around to him.
Speaker 3: Not much. I mean later at the Halloween party he
Speaker 3: shows up in a very tasteless costume, but.
Speaker 1: That's about it. Like otherwise, Yeah, he's not much of
Speaker 1: a character.
Speaker 3: But we do find out that Larry is Tom's sponsor
Speaker 3: at the club. So at the office we meet, first
Speaker 3: of all Matt's secretary, Grace, who is the first time
Speaker 3: we meet her. She's sneaking around with some secret binders,
Speaker 3: hiding things in drawers and stuff. But we also meet
Speaker 3: Matt's project, which is the EVA Suit for the Astronauts
Speaker 3: of the Future, and this is why Matt was hired
Speaker 3: to design computer components for this suit that Tom explains
Speaker 3: astronauts are going to wear for an upcoming manned mission
Speaker 3: to the surface of Venus. Hilarious concept.
Speaker 1: And at this point I have to also know the
Speaker 1: suit is hanging from the ceiling, almost as if it
Speaker 1: is an object of worship. Yeah, and I feel like
Speaker 1: at this point, if you weren't already hooked in and
Speaker 1: strapped in for this movie, you strap in at this
Speaker 1: point because Okay, we started with the Lucci for blat
Speaker 1: melting dudes and cars, and now we have introduced a
Speaker 1: clearly important spacesuit and we're about to get more rad
Speaker 1: details about it. Like already this movie's going a little
Speaker 1: bonkers on us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but to be clear, like for a mission that
Speaker 3: will never happen, there is no reason to take human
Speaker 3: cru to the surface of Venus, and that that is
Speaker 3: not really doable.
Speaker 1: Well, we don't know in this reality. Perhaps there's something
Speaker 1: else that has occurred. I don't know, we can dream
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 3: The other thing that's funny is so Tom, he explained.
Speaker 3: Tom is in the marketing department. He's going to be
Speaker 3: responsible for selling this suit. And I was thinking, is
Speaker 3: there a marketing department for technology that you're only gonna
Speaker 3: ever make a handful of for a single buyer, Like,
Speaker 3: wouldn't it instead be you would make a bid and
Speaker 3: get a government contract to make a select number of them.
Speaker 3: Here it seems like they're kind of making this spacesuit
Speaker 3: on spec and the marketing department will have to sell
Speaker 3: it to NASA. Yeah, so anyway, Yeah, let's take a
Speaker 3: look at the suit whatter it's features. Well, we learned
Speaker 3: that it can withstand heat up to a bazillion degree
Speaker 3: is they demonstrate by blasting it with a flamethrower and
Speaker 3: there's no damage. It is armed with a laser pistol
Speaker 3: that shoots out of the like shoots out on a
Speaker 3: slide mechanism from the wrist like Travis Bickle's gun and
Speaker 3: taxi driver it like, is this concealed shootout into the
Speaker 3: hand a laser pistol? What is this for?
Speaker 1: I mean, one can guess blasting Venusians, blasting rival astronauts.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's really more of a utility laser and they're
Speaker 1: just firing it off. But then why would you need
Speaker 1: a quick draw on it? I don't know, in a
Speaker 1: dangerous environment on Venus or in orbit above Venus or
Speaker 1: in the clouds above Venus. But either way, I do
Speaker 1: love this thing. And you can already tell this is
Speaker 1: going to be important.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's also armed with a flamethrower of its own.
Speaker 3: We just saw it getting blasted with one, but it
Speaker 3: has one that comes out of the arm. This also
Speaker 3: will clearly be very useful on Venus. And then I
Speaker 3: think this is Matt's main contribution. It's got a computerized
Speaker 3: visor that is going to tell you the temperature of
Speaker 3: whatever you're looking at, and then also whether the thing
Speaker 3: you're looking at is human or non human, terrestrial or
Speaker 3: non terrestrial, and malignant or benign. How does it know
Speaker 3: those things? Never explained at this point.
Speaker 1: I feel like maybe we do want just a little
Speaker 1: additional hint that I guess there are aliens on Venus
Speaker 1: and we don't know how they feel about humans, and
Speaker 1: maybe they're difficult to tell from humans. That's the only
Speaker 1: way this technology makes sense.
Speaker 3: Oh, I didn't even think about that. Yeah, this would
Speaker 3: only be necessary if the thing you were looking at
Speaker 3: is indistinguishable from human anyway. Yeah, because if they just
Speaker 3: encounter a being on Venus and it's coming toward them,
Speaker 3: would they be like, is this from Earth? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I want to stress again that this script was apparently
Speaker 1: written for Susan Lucci, so one can imagine like this
Speaker 1: script was plopped on her agent's desk and then on
Speaker 1: her desk, and she looked through it and she was like, yes,
Speaker 1: let's do this.
Speaker 3: Give me that, give me more of that. So back home,
Speaker 3: there is a conflict about furniture. Patricia wants new stuff
Speaker 3: befitting of their upgraded social status. At first, Matt kind
Speaker 3: of scott this, but then like some boys from the
Speaker 3: neighborhood come by to play Astrobomber the video game. And
Speaker 3: this includes not just the not just Tom and Mary's kid,
Speaker 3: but the kid of Larry Ferris, the Clarence Bodiker guy,
Speaker 3: the Boss, and Billy Ferris. The kid. He first of all,
Speaker 3: he is a poor sport. He gets mad and smashes
Speaker 3: Robbie's game when he loses. And also when he walks
Speaker 3: into the house, he insults the Winslow's furniture. He's like,
Speaker 3: why do you all have such old furniture? But like,
Speaker 3: have you ever heard a kid? I'll say something. I
Speaker 3: don't know if they observe that anyway, So the Winslow's
Speaker 3: all head out to the furniture store. That's the last
Speaker 3: straw we got to get new furniture. On the way,
Speaker 3: they nearly get run off the road by a chauffeured
Speaker 3: car that is like doing a doing tokyo, drifting into
Speaker 3: the club of the Steaming Springs entrance, and Matt is
Speaker 3: he gets out. He's very angry. He gets out of
Speaker 3: the car to trade insurance info, but the passenger of
Speaker 3: this car gets out and it is Jessica Jones played
Speaker 3: by Susan Lucci. She introduces herself as the club's directors.
Speaker 3: She's like, I know all about you. She knows all
Speaker 3: of the family names and everything. She says, no need
Speaker 3: to trade insurance info. Allow me to have my goons
Speaker 3: intimidate you instead. So she just gets back in the car,
Speaker 3: and here we get this. Who's the actor of the
Speaker 3: sheriff worth Yeah, yeah, the sheriff guy. He says, here,
Speaker 3: we're a small, tight knit community. We do things a
Speaker 3: little differently, and I think that includes like not trading
Speaker 3: insurance info when it's this car. Maybe she's just going
Speaker 3: to send you some suspect of gifts instead. So next
Speaker 3: we see an initiation at the club. So we see
Speaker 3: Tom and Mary's family undergoing their final initiation into Steaming Springs,
Speaker 3: and we have the honorable Jessica Jones presiding. So the family,
Speaker 3: they're all standing there in these terry cloth robes in
Speaker 3: front of this door that is like, you know, has
Speaker 3: steam pouring out of it in White Life, and Jessica
Speaker 3: Jones says, you are now accepted into the inner circle,
Speaker 3: and by the symbolic entrance into our ancient spring, you
Speaker 3: forever forsake the mundane world and merge yourself into the protective,
Speaker 3: exclusive shield of the club. And so they're standing there
Speaker 3: and the doors open, the steam pours out, the white light,
Speaker 3: and Jones says, do you forsake all for the club?
Speaker 3: And the family all say they say I do. Then
Speaker 3: enter into the spring and taste its power. So they
Speaker 3: go inside and the doors close behind them, and then
Speaker 3: the sheriff just stands outside the door, our arms folded.
Speaker 3: So at first it looks like, I don't know, maybe
Speaker 3: they're going into just a really steamy sauna. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I at first you would assume, Okay, this is the
Speaker 1: actual spring, this is the steaming spring. Yeah. But there's
Speaker 1: more details emerge. It becomes clear this is no ordinary spring.
Speaker 1: This is something infernal.
Speaker 3: Right. So back at the office, Matt catches Grace sneaking
Speaker 3: around in the records room where she doesn't have clearance,
Speaker 3: and she nervously hands him a file that she wants
Speaker 3: him to look into. They get interrupted by Harry Thompson,
Speaker 3: the president of the company. Matt does not rat out
Speaker 3: Grace here, he covers for her and the president of
Speaker 3: the company. Thompson is like, here's a very important person
Speaker 3: I want you to meet, Matt. It's TV Susan Lucci.
Speaker 1: This is Kevin McCarthy playing mister Thompson here.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, yeah, the boss guy. And this guy suggests
Speaker 3: that Matt. First of all, he's like, hey, did you
Speaker 3: know she has a club? You should join her club.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of scenes like that. It does kind
Speaker 3: of get repetitive somewhat. There's so much insisting that people
Speaker 3: join the club. But the boss also says that he
Speaker 3: needs to give her a tour of all his highly
Speaker 3: classified research. And Matt's like, but isn't that stuff classified?
Speaker 3: And he says, Matt, Miss Jones is family. So he's
Speaker 3: trying to show off the suit's capabilities. And Jessica is like, ooh, Matt,
Speaker 3: did you play a sport in college? I like your muscles.
Speaker 3: And she says at the club, we have lots of
Speaker 3: exercise equipment, lots of pleasurable things. And Matt is like, well,
Speaker 3: I guess I'm not much of a joiner. And she says,
Speaker 3: you know, you should think about it. It can do
Speaker 3: a lot more for you than you would think. And
Speaker 3: then ooh, we get a stinger here. So as Jessica
Speaker 3: is walking out of the room, we see from inside
Speaker 3: the space helmet and when she walks across its field
Speaker 3: of view, it renders a judgment on her. The screen
Speaker 3: says non human malignant.
Speaker 1: That's just for us the viewer at this point.
Speaker 3: All right, Matt doesn't get to see it. Okay, So
Speaker 3: next we have let's see, Oh, we have a scene
Speaker 3: where we find out that since being initiated into the club,
Speaker 3: Tom has gotten a promotion. Now he has a big,
Speaker 3: fancy office. It's got like six computers in it. Does
Speaker 3: doesn't Tom work in marketing? Does he need all those computers?
Speaker 1: It looks like a multiperson workspace, but they're just Is
Speaker 1: this his office now?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Tom again insists that Matt should join the club.
Speaker 3: He says, you join the club, you start rubbing shoulders
Speaker 3: with top top people. It's like the end of Indiana
Speaker 3: Jones and the Top Men. But Matt is resistant. He's
Speaker 3: got bad feelings about it, and he leaves with Tom
Speaker 3: still insisting. Meanwhile, Mary arrives at their house and is
Speaker 3: showing off to Patricia her new car. Patricia is very jealous,
Speaker 3: and Patricia she's telling Matt she she thinks they should
Speaker 3: join the club. She's like, it's our turn, Matt, It's
Speaker 3: our turn to have a little piece of success. And
Speaker 3: this is the part of the movie where there's like
Speaker 3: it's the middle of the night and Matt gets up.
Speaker 3: The kids are having a slumber party, and that creepy kid,
Speaker 3: Billy Ferris is there, and Matt goes into the kitchen
Speaker 3: and Billy Ferris is like, up at midnight staring at
Speaker 3: a TV that's just showing old footage of riots and
Speaker 3: violence in the streets.
Speaker 1: This is a local channel. I'm the semi.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let's see. There's a little some more plot stuff.
Speaker 3: Matt finds out at work that Grace has been fired
Speaker 3: by Thompson, the big boss, and he goes to confront
Speaker 3: Thompson about this. He says he wants him to hire
Speaker 3: her back, and Thompson kind of implies, well, he might
Speaker 3: consider it if Matt and his family join the club. Geez, okay,
Speaker 3: you're making your point. So finally, Matt, Patricia and the
Speaker 3: family get a tour of the club. Tom and Mary
Speaker 3: are sponsoring them, and they walk around seeing all of
Speaker 3: the wonderful facilities. You got tennis courts, a pool, golf course,
Speaker 3: Jim with a big weight room full of beautiful athletic
Speaker 3: people sculpting their bodies, and Jessica Jones tells them that
Speaker 3: they could be initiated in as little as three or
Speaker 3: four weeks. And Matt wanders off from the tour into
Speaker 3: an off limits corridor down to the door. The door
Speaker 3: we saw earlier from the initiation. This is the door
Speaker 3: to the spring, and he's sort of getting ready to
Speaker 3: try to look inside, but Jessica Jones finds him and
Speaker 3: stops him. He explains that he thought he heard someone
Speaker 3: crying out for help on the other side of the door,
Speaker 3: and Jessica's like, oh, it was probably someone crying out
Speaker 3: in ecstasy. Pleasure can make you feel that good, you know?
Speaker 3: Did you know pleasure can make you feel good? Jessica
Speaker 3: Jones tells him that she can carry She can tell
Speaker 3: he doesn't care about money, but she thinks he does
Speaker 3: care about pleasure, and she will make sure that his
Speaker 3: membership is as pleasurable as possible. Now, this is a
Speaker 3: theme they're kind of developing the movie, but I think
Speaker 3: this one doesn't necessarily work right because you never get
Speaker 3: the feeling that Matt is all that tempted or like
Speaker 3: he's about to give in or anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like we would need a couple of
Speaker 1: scenes sprinkled here there that show that he is to
Speaker 1: some degree sexually frustrated or you know, or particularly hedonistic
Speaker 1: in one way or another. As it stands, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like Jessica Jones is just saying, you're a human,
Speaker 1: you're all hot to trot, so let me just push
Speaker 1: those buttons. It feels a little desperate on her part,
Speaker 1: and it makes him feel a little more immune to
Speaker 1: her various powers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree. I think it would have worked a
Speaker 3: little better if they'd shown him being slightly more vulnerable
Speaker 3: to the seduction. And it's just like bullets bouncing off
Speaker 3: of Superman, and he doesn't really seem I mean, he
Speaker 3: seems like bothered by it.
Speaker 1: He's bothered. He's bothered by this temptation. He's bothered by
Speaker 1: the door to perhaps hell, and he's also bothered by
Speaker 1: the fact that there's no basketball court here. He does
Speaker 1: point back, He's like, where the where's the where's the
Speaker 1: b ball? And they're just all that like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: a great place, like they were like we forgot the
Speaker 1: basketball court.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, if only that would be the final victory
Speaker 3: for Satan.
Speaker 1: If she should have she should have led with that,
Speaker 1: she'd be like, we will add a basketball court man.
Speaker 1: Two of them full sight have done it recruited.
Speaker 3: Now he gets to become spawn because they made him
Speaker 3: basketball court. But so he gets freaked out and leaves
Speaker 3: after this, and he a fight with Patricia in the
Speaker 3: parking lot. She wants to join the club, Matt does not,
Speaker 3: and they're at an impasse. This is one of those
Speaker 3: movie conflicts that I think could be alleviated simply by
Speaker 3: one character telling the other what happened, but for some
Speaker 3: reason he doesn't. Yeah, So Patricia is upset because there
Speaker 3: is a club rule that says families have to join
Speaker 3: as a unit, but Matt won't join. So so she's like,
Speaker 3: oh no, I want to join, but we can't. But
Speaker 3: then Patricia has a meeting with Jessica Jones, and Jessica says,
Speaker 3: you know, we don't have to be rigidly religious about
Speaker 3: our rules. So we cut straight to the initiation once again,
Speaker 3: steamy door, the terry cloth robes, and the liturgy about
Speaker 3: you know, we're gonna forsake all others merge with the
Speaker 3: protective shield of the club, and it is Patricia, Robbie,
Speaker 3: and Chrissy joining without Matt, and we see them walk
Speaker 3: into the steamy doorway. Chrissy gets scared and tries to
Speaker 3: run away, but the creepy sheriff stops her, makes her
Speaker 3: go in, and then we get what's clearly an ad break.
Speaker 3: At this point, Matt's family has been replaced by replicants,
Speaker 3: a kind of Stepford Satan family that is simultaneously perfect
Speaker 3: and evil. They are very docile and elegant and well behaved,
Speaker 3: but also obsessed with the club and cruel and getting
Speaker 3: barked and growled at by their dog. And there's a
Speaker 3: whole subplot with the dog, by the way. So Matt
Speaker 3: later gets a call at work from Bill Irwin, playing
Speaker 3: a veterinarian. This is just by coincidence, the husband of Grace,
Speaker 3: Matt's former secretary, and you know. He asks him to
Speaker 3: come out to his kennel and he explains that Patricia
Speaker 3: brought their dog. Albert said it was vicious from day one,
Speaker 3: probably some kind of brain tumor, and it had attacked
Speaker 3: their children and needed to be put down. So the
Speaker 3: vet lied to her and said he would do it
Speaker 3: after or she left. Fortunately, the dog's still okay, folks,
Speaker 3: and we see it runs out and Matt pet's the
Speaker 3: dog and everybody's happy.
Speaker 1: But not only did she say that she wanted the
Speaker 1: dog put down, She's like, I want to watch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was good. That was a nice detail. That
Speaker 3: was that he said, we don't do things that way.
Speaker 3: So Matt goes home to confront Patricia about this, and
Speaker 3: when he arrives, she has had the house goth renode
Speaker 3: while he was at work, so now it's all dark
Speaker 3: blue walls, moody abstract art.
Speaker 1: It's like the house and beal juice at this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and later we see Jessica Jones has sent Patricia
Speaker 3: a new grand piano, and so he comes in and
Speaker 3: she's in the kitchen with a knife and a black
Speaker 3: cocktail dress. He confronts her about the dog, and she
Speaker 3: just sort of deflects and manipulates him with a knife
Speaker 3: in her hand, and she wants him to join the club.
Speaker 3: So things are not right with his family.
Speaker 1: You know. This is the point where Joan Cassidy, I think,
Speaker 1: really gets to shine as well, because she's great earlier
Speaker 1: in the picture, playing the normal Pat. But now she
Speaker 1: gets to play this sinister, ambitious but sort of possessed
Speaker 1: Stepford pat And yeah, it has it's a nice performance,
Speaker 1: so I enjoyed it. You know, you expect her to
Speaker 1: start going on a replicant rampage at any moment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then also there's a funny seat. Later that night,
Speaker 3: Patricia is all like sexually aggressive with him. She's like
Speaker 3: she's jumping him and she she's there's one part where
Speaker 3: she's just repeating, I'm just making love to you, darling.
Speaker 3: But it looks like who he's been making love to
Speaker 3: is Freddy Krueger, because you see the scratches on his back.
Speaker 3: He's like looking in the mirror and they're like deep gouges.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she goes, she goes zool on him.
Speaker 3: For sure does not look like fingernails, cause those looks
Speaker 3: like knives. Yeah, let's see. So the next day, Matt
Speaker 3: finds out that Grace, his old secretary, was unfortunately killed
Speaker 3: in a terrible car accident with someone trying to shut
Speaker 3: her up up And Matt goes and finds the files
Speaker 3: that Grace had tried to get him to read earlier.
Speaker 3: I guess he forgot about it. Till now and then
Speaker 3: this is the scene where he's just typing questions into
Speaker 3: a computer to get information. What he finds out here
Speaker 3: is that all of the senior management at micro Digitech
Speaker 3: were promoted after becoming members of the Steaming Springs Country Club.
Speaker 3: So Matt now he has to learn more. He sneaks
Speaker 3: into the country club to investigate. He goes down into
Speaker 3: the basement to the door. He first uses some kind
Speaker 3: of gadget to hack the key code to access the door.
Speaker 3: The key code includes the number six sixty six, and
Speaker 3: then he uses a thermometer probe from the spacesuit to
Speaker 3: test the temperature inside the door. When he gets at
Speaker 3: a crack open and he says eight hundred degrees no
Speaker 3: human could withstand it. And while he's sitting there, you know,
Speaker 3: getting the temperature, there's an ambush. He is attacked by
Speaker 3: the sheriff and they have a big fight scene. This
Speaker 3: is the scene with the wrestling moves where Matt gets
Speaker 3: like body slammed into the floor. So how's he going
Speaker 3: to defeat this this demonic sheriff. Well, he electrocutes him
Speaker 3: on a chain link fence with a lamp. After this,
Speaker 3: Matt comes home this is the Oh. Then we get
Speaker 3: the scene where the children are, you know, fully evilfied.
Speaker 3: Now he comes home and he finds Chrissy mutilating her
Speaker 3: stuffed bunny with a crowbar and he's like, hey, let's
Speaker 3: be nice, and she says, we do not like nice,
Speaker 3: and she's whacking with the crowbar. He says, you're not
Speaker 3: my daughter, and then with a pazuzu voice, she says,
Speaker 3: but I am your daughter. And he's like, is she
Speaker 3: down there, down in the springs and she says, she
Speaker 3: explains it the mechanics here. She says, good Chrissy is
Speaker 3: down there in the springs. But you've just got bad Chrissy. Now, bad, bad,
Speaker 3: bad Chrissy. And so Matt is attacked by evil children,
Speaker 3: by bad Chrissy and bad Robbie, and he has to
Speaker 3: lock both of them inside a closet. Why does that
Speaker 3: closet lock from the outside. That's not a yeah, you
Speaker 3: shouldn't have closet locked from the outside.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe it was part of these new renovations,
Speaker 1: all sorts of sinister changes to the house.
Speaker 3: Then bad Patricia attacks him with a golf club. He escapes,
Speaker 3: He escapes the house, and then he goes to the lab,
Speaker 3: the lab at work, where he dons the suit.
Speaker 1: I think it was coming at this point, you knew
Speaker 1: it was coming.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's all coming together now. So while he's all
Speaker 3: getting suited up in the spacesuit, he is confronted by
Speaker 3: Tom with a gun and Tom, this is bad Tom,
Speaker 3: I guess also and bad Tom says, you're not one
Speaker 3: of us, Matt, You're a loser. We are the winners
Speaker 3: and we have to get rid of the losers. And
Speaker 3: he's going to shoot him, but it's like a duel.
Speaker 3: It's a quick draw. There's a blast, and what you
Speaker 3: realize happened is that Matt has blasted Tom with the
Speaker 3: sleeve laser gun on the suit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you knew it was going to be important, and
Speaker 1: there it was.
Speaker 3: So Matt puts on the suit helmet, which has a
Speaker 3: dark vibe, and then uses it to sneak into the
Speaker 3: club during the Halloween party we've heard so much about.
Speaker 3: This party has a number of guests, including Larry Ferris,
Speaker 3: the Boss, dressed as Nazi officers. Not a great Halloween costume, No.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, some things were acceptable in the eighties.
Speaker 1: Maybe this was a little more acceptable at the time,
Speaker 1: but I don't know, he's really he's really into it here,
Speaker 1: So I think we are meant to see this as
Speaker 1: somewhat sus.
Speaker 3: Should We also mention Jessica Jones's costume. This is one
Speaker 3: of the main images you will see of this movie
Speaker 3: is Susan Lucci in this Halloween costume. I don't know
Speaker 3: exactly what she's supposed to be. She's kind of a
Speaker 3: big hair, ziggy stardust devil, like a red suit, sparkles,
Speaker 3: hair volume, all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure what it's supposed to be.
Speaker 1: But either are a lot of great costumes. There's Generally it
Speaker 1: just looks like a fun party. I mean, yes, it's
Speaker 1: being held by awful half demon peeple, but it looks
Speaker 1: pretty good. It looks like I got some cool snacks,
Speaker 1: cool decorations, and you know, I assume there's maybe a
Speaker 1: DJ spinning. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying I would sell my soul to go
Speaker 3: to this party, but if I could go like Matt,
Speaker 3: if I could sneak in without selling my soul, I'd
Speaker 3: like to check this party out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, selling your soul, You're not selling your soul just
Speaker 1: for this party. There are a whole number of benefits
Speaker 1: and this is just one.
Speaker 3: That's right. So Matt goes there, and then he sneaks
Speaker 3: away from the party with the suit on and enters
Speaker 3: the code to the secret door. And then finally he
Speaker 3: goes into the steaming spring. Yes, and along the way
Speaker 3: he's followed by Jessica Jones. He sees her coming after him,
Speaker 3: and he tries to stop her with the flame thrower,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't seem to work on her just walks
Speaker 3: through the flames. And so now Matt descends into what
Speaker 3: is beyond the door. It's hell, baby, It's Hell. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And again you you can see all this coming together.
Speaker 1: You see it, saw it coming together when all the
Speaker 1: pieces were on the table. But at this point, Matt,
Speaker 1: clad in a spacesuit of his own design, powered by AI,
Speaker 1: armed with a laser and a flamethrower, is descending into Hell,
Speaker 1: literally harrowing Hell, in an attempt to save his family
Speaker 1: from the depths of damnation. And he's doing this by
Speaker 1: venturing through an occult gateway to Hell that happens to
Speaker 1: be in the basement of his local country club. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's bonkers. I love it. This is again. This is
Speaker 1: all happening before ten pm on a Thursday on network television.
Speaker 1: This is amazing that this suld. This film should be
Speaker 1: more celebrated for its weirdness. It's so good. Okay, so yeah.
Speaker 3: Hell is a craggy red cave full of these deep
Speaker 3: pits from which are coming these screams for help Somewhere
Speaker 3: down below. Matt does hear his family calling for help,
Speaker 3: so he goes up to the edge and Jessica's in
Speaker 3: there also, still talking to him. It's like, it's hopeless.
Speaker 3: You can't say them, you know, you got to stop.
Speaker 3: But he makes a leap of faith into the pit,
Speaker 3: and then he wakes up at the bottom in a
Speaker 3: kind of mirror world version of his neighborhood, where he
Speaker 3: goes into his home and he finds his family imprisoned
Speaker 3: behind these animated barriers. Patricia's tortured soul is playing piano
Speaker 3: in Anguish, and Jessica shows up once again and tells
Speaker 3: him that he can never rescue his family. He says,
Speaker 3: they all came here willingly, they made the choice, and
Speaker 3: then she also says that the Patricia down here is
Speaker 3: the weak Patricia. You don't even want her bag this
Speaker 3: is the one that has no will, no power to
Speaker 3: you know, survive. This is just the weak part of
Speaker 3: her that has been purged. And Matt's like, no, that's
Speaker 3: the good Patricia, And he says, that's what you've done,
Speaker 3: isn't it. You've taken all the love, all the good
Speaker 3: in people who joined the club and put them down here.
Speaker 3: And you know, so this movie is it's the way
Speaker 3: it attacks its themes, I think you could argue is
Speaker 3: somewhat simplistic. But I was thinking about this, and so,
Speaker 3: you know, that's kind of interesting. The idea that in
Speaker 3: order to receive some kinds of luxury, people might trade
Speaker 3: in good parts of themselves, like put the good parts
Speaker 3: of themselves in storage, so that a broken, diminished part
Speaker 3: of themselves can enjoy the fabulous amenities.
Speaker 1: I think, by some measurements, this would be a theological
Speaker 1: misuse of Hell, taking the good parts out of someone
Speaker 1: and keeping them there and letting the worst of them
Speaker 1: thrive on earth. Not to go on a tangent here
Speaker 1: about what hell is theologically and the role it plays
Speaker 1: in the human psyche, but yeah, it does give us
Speaker 1: some food for thought here. And I want to add
Speaker 1: that the effects here, I think are quite good all
Speaker 1: things considered. I mean, you can feel this TV movie
Speaker 1: of the week's budget straining at the seams, but we
Speaker 1: have a solid, rocky set. We have that in this
Speaker 1: weird precipice over this gulf that contains at the very
Speaker 1: bottom a replica of his neighborhood. Like this is Trip
Speaker 1: being weird. And there's a palpable feeling at that point
Speaker 1: when he's standing on the edge of the cliff and
Speaker 1: he's being mocked and or tempted by Jessica Jones that
Speaker 1: you know, like we've traveled well beyond the point of
Speaker 1: no return. And again, it's not even ten pm Eastern
Speaker 1: Time on ABC Television on a Thursday, but it feels
Speaker 1: like we've gone past midnight. Yeah, it's just it's the
Speaker 1: sort of thing I think it would feel right at home,
Speaker 1: and you're weirder contemporary television dramas or the films that
Speaker 1: have a particular psychotronic bent to them. So yeah, again,
Speaker 1: I feel like this film should be more celebrated for
Speaker 1: its weirdness. It should not be at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the West Craven Heap.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say, in fact, if you don't give
Speaker 3: this a five out of five on letterbox that you
Speaker 3: should go to hell. You can go straight into the
Speaker 3: steaming springs.
Speaker 1: At least the weak part of you that wasn't strong
Speaker 1: enough to give this film five stars.
Speaker 3: So let's see. Oh, we get another part here where
Speaker 3: Jessica tries to tempt Matt with like, you know you
Speaker 3: don't want Patricia, you want me once again. It doesn't
Speaker 3: really work because of how they've characterized Matt. You never
Speaker 3: feel like he's seriously tempted.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she should have should have been be ball again.
Speaker 1: She'd been like, yeah, how about how about basketball? I
Speaker 1: can offer you all the basketball in the world, and
Speaker 1: then he and then he might be tempted.
Speaker 3: She like pulls out a copy of Space Jam and
Speaker 3: she's on VHS. She's like, this is from the future, Matt,
Speaker 3: it's your future.
Speaker 1: A Space Jam showdown right here at the end would
Speaker 1: have would have just capped it.
Speaker 3: Yes, So Matt. At this point, he decides to take
Speaker 3: off his space suit to save his family. I don't
Speaker 3: remember how he figures out he's got to do this,
Speaker 3: but this also seems thematically loaded. He has to change
Speaker 3: out of the protective EVA suit, the technology that he
Speaker 3: has been working on back into khakis and a polo
Speaker 3: shirt to save the good parts of his family.
Speaker 1: Yeah more. I guess this is more symbolic than sensible.
Speaker 1: But oh and I wanted to mention too, like the
Speaker 1: the like laser lights that his family's souls are trapped in.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like the the laser lights from the
Speaker 1: egg chamber above aboard the spaceship at the beginning of Alien,
Speaker 1: except blue instead of green.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is like that. So the power of love
Speaker 3: saves the whole family. They you know, they embrace, and
Speaker 3: they all awake together back in their house, seemingly in
Speaker 3: the real world. They hear sirens outside. What's that noise?
Speaker 3: And so they go outside to look, and there are
Speaker 3: people running around saying there is a big fire down
Speaker 3: at the club. It's been burning all night, and oh, okay,
Speaker 3: I guess that's that's it for the club. And then
Speaker 3: Christy says that her bunny is hungry. This the bunny
Speaker 3: is intact once again, So we get kind of we're
Speaker 3: getting kind of a redo on reality. I guess things
Speaker 3: that we saw destroyed are actually now intact once again.
Speaker 3: And Patricia's like, oh, I guess we better feed bunny okay,
Speaker 3: and it looks like everything's cool now. Yeah, all good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, surprisingly up beat ending because I was again when
Speaker 1: he was standing on the edge of that cliff, I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, he's not coming back from this. This
Speaker 1: is going to have a bleak ending. But they pulled
Speaker 1: back on it. They landed us in a nice spot
Speaker 1: so that we can lead into twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: I want to revisit the question I asked earlier, now
Speaker 3: that we've talked about the whole plot, what is the
Speaker 3: core evil institution? Is it the country club or the corporation?
Speaker 3: I think it's Steaming Springs. It's like that micro digitech.
Speaker 3: It is suggested exists only to provide employment to people
Speaker 3: who can be recruited into the service of our dark
Speaker 3: lord at Steaming Springs.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good read on it.
Speaker 1: I guess you know, thematically, the main threat is just
Speaker 1: the spirit of wealth and ambition that permeates society, both
Speaker 1: at work and at home and you know, in your
Speaker 1: social But yeah, I was thinking, Okay, the gateway to
Speaker 1: hell is definitely at the country club, so that is
Speaker 1: in many ways the focal point. But then Jessica Jones
Speaker 1: has complete access to all the high tech, presumably top
Speaker 1: secret experiments going on at Digitech. So the two were
Speaker 1: linked at this point anyway. And who knows, maybe some
Speaker 1: member of the club back before it became possessed had
Speaker 1: some role in opening or widening that Hell mouth so
Speaker 1: that everything can get out of whack. There's like a
Speaker 1: whole prequel you could explore right there.
Speaker 3: I'd watch that pre Invitation to Hell arriving early. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: well that was Invitation to Hell nineteen eighty four, as
Speaker 3: we've said, thumbs up from me. Check it out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this one was great. This is one I really
Speaker 1: wasn't even aware of. I was. I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's part of that attitude that we can sometimes have
Speaker 1: about made for TV films that even though I've certainly
Speaker 1: poured through Wes Craven's filmography and IMDb many times, I've
Speaker 1: just kind of skipped over these made for TV films
Speaker 1: and I've paid more attention to his more well known films.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this one, this one was a real treat.
Speaker 3: Well, let's let's look at the other one and see
Speaker 3: how they are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, if they're as good as if they're
Speaker 1: even close to as good as this one. They're worth
Speaker 1: worth they're worth checking out for sure. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna go ahead and close up this episode of
Speaker 1: Weird House centem up. What we'd love to hear from
Speaker 1: everyone out there? Do you have thoughts on Invitation to Hell?
Speaker 1: Did you if anyone out there solid on network television
Speaker 1: in eighty four, I definitely want to hear about that,
Speaker 1: or or if you've watched it with commercials intact, uh,
Speaker 1: do write in and tell us all about it, or
Speaker 1: if you've watched it recently and you have some some
Speaker 1: some thoughts about how it fits into the filmography of
Speaker 1: this legendary director. Yeah, right in and we'll have a
Speaker 1: we'll have a little conversation. Well, well, well we'll share
Speaker 1: potentially share your email on a future listener man episode
Speaker 1: of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Just a reminder that
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
Speaker 1: culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday, short
Speaker 1: form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside
Speaker 1: most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
Speaker 1: here on Weird House Cinema. Look us up on a
Speaker 1: letterbox where we are Weird House. You can follow a
Speaker 1: list of all the films we've covered over the years,
Speaker 1: and sometimes there's a peek ahead at what's coming up next.
Speaker 1: And next week is cat Week. By the way, we
Speaker 1: haven't really broadcast that fact chat on the show, but
Speaker 1: if you like cats or don't like cats, it's perfect
Speaker 1: week to tune in. We're experimenting with some thematic weeks
Speaker 1: spread throughout the year, and yes we will come back
Speaker 1: around and do a Dog week as well, once we
Speaker 1: pinpoint the appropriate time of a year for that to happen.
Speaker 3: As the dog star rises.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
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