Dark Heritage (1989), directed by David McCormick

If you frequent the same b-movie review sites that I do (Bleeding Skull, Critical Condition, The Cinema Snob, etc.) some titles keep popping up with little context or explanation.  Horror is a fly-by-night genre, attracting unexperienced filmmakers with the promise of profiting from low-budget productions and just as easily letting them slip back into their day jobs.  The ease with which these movies can be made makes sure the market is always fresh with cheap, unknown movies that seemingly come out of nowhere, and not all of them have attracted any kind of cult fandom.  This makes them a mixed bag in terms of renting - some of them could be unsung masterpieces (like Lindsey Vickers's The Appointment), and some of them could be completely worthless (like The Amityville Curse, which can't even be saved by its decent theme music).  Dark Heritage is a movie that I'd heard about a few times, each time comparing it to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, a Pavlov Bell for a whole race of horror fans.  Adapting Lovecraft's byzantine cosmic horror universe to film has proven difficult, and while two excellent movies come to mind - John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness and the 45-minute neo-silent The Call of Cthulhu - those are few and far between, and the Carpenter movie isn't even an adaptation, but more like an homage.  Fans sometimes resort to praising mediocre movies to make up for the lack of good ones, like Stuart Gordon's swing-an'-a-miss Dagon, and the decent reviews I saw for Dark Heritage made me suspect another case of fandelusion.  You've got to admit - that's a pretty cool cover.  I have a bias towards the thing because its drawing style and content is heavily reminiscent of the wonderful young adult novel The House with a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs, and I've been wishing for a movie adaptation of the book for YEARS.  Alas, no dice are in sight, but it did get me to drop $0.01 (plus shipping) on the suspicious-looking DVD.  What I got was surprisingly solid - certainly a bit amateurish and cheap, but well-conceived and endowed with some nice touches.

A couple is hanging out in a small trailer when they are mysteriously attacked by people, or beings, with black rubber monster hands during a thunderstorm.  A reporter is assigned to investigate an old house nearby to the campgrounds the trailer was parked on, as the head of the paper thinks there's a link to the murders and a local legend of murders connected to the house stretching back a hundred years.  The house is abandoned, but the reporter insists on videotaping the team while they sleep - not that that saves the guy on watch from getting butchered.  The police suspect the reporter and he gets booted off the case, and while doing research at the local college he meets a pair of parapsychologists (naturally).  They discover in records that the house was owned by the mysterious Dansen family, who came to America in the 1790's and seemingly vanished after rumors of odd rituals and flashing lights in the house. As they investigate, one of their team is attacked and shockingly mutated (you gotta see it to believe it) by an unknown figure, the reporter has strange dreams of the dead coming back to life, and they find a tunnel system while unearthing a grave of a Dansen member, suspecting that there are many tunnels all converging at the Dansen house.  All of it points to a conspiracy of otherworldly creatures and dealings with dark forces, as well as cut-rate Creatures from the Lovecraft Lagoon.

OK, so this is far from perfect - it was clearly a homebrew production and none of the actors had ever been in a movie, nor would they go on to anything else.  Oddly enough, the director, David McCormick, went on to be an editor for a lot of Aardman Animation stuff, including the Creature Comforts TV series and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, but what really gets me is that he was an editor on Zastrozzi: A Romance, the Channel 4 mini-series produced by Lindsey Vickers, the maker of The Appointment.  While this factoid made my head explode, this doesn't mean that McCormick has Vickers's eye and ear for direction and storytelling.  The film doesn't look or sound terribly distinctive, just like a decent direct-to-video flick, which is exactly what it is.  The story is what's great in Dark Heritage, and it appears to have been lifted from Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear", though there's no credit for Lovecraft in front of or behind the movie.  The history and deepening conspiratorial mystery of the Dansen clan is quite original and the movie does a good job of drawing the audience into the plot without spoiling any important details too soon.  The actors are really trying despite their lack of experience, and what special effects are present are pulled off pretty well for a low-budget movie.  The results of the aforementioned attack/mutation are frightening by conception alone, and a dream the main character has in the middle of the movie has a seriously creepy, Carnival of Souls vibe.  It doesn't use much, but what is present is unsettling in an impressive way, a reminder that small details can be more creepy than big, thundering horror tropes.  The house is a grand setting, full of dark corners and trashed decor like a good abandoned mansion should.  The music is a slowly pulsating electronic score much like in a host of excellent 80's horror movies, giving the film a dream-like quality that sparks the nostalgia of watching a horror VHS after midnight and falling into a Casio hypnagogic state.  The ending is a little disappointing, though, but what can you do?  I might be giving the movie more of a pass than I should considering how unprofessional it looks compared to a Hollywood production, but you have no idea how awful some of these movies can be.

However, the real elephant in the room is the DVD release from Peacock Films, which is now officially the chintziest, most slapped-together DVD I own.  The sound balance is so bad that the music and sound effects frequently blow out the balance, and the levels were so high to begin with that it's probably the loudest DVD I own, too.  The menu system is a complete joke, and on one screen they actually misspelled the title, parking me at the play option for some movie called Drak Heritage.  HOW IN THE WHOMP DO YOU MISSPELL "DARK"?  I should have known from the box, which advertises "Interactive Menus" as a special feature despite being released in 2003, and also features this gem:

That's the sign of a truly cheap DVD company - they can't even afford to use the real DVD logo.  In researching this movie I heard that the company didn't pay the filmmakers a dime to distribute the thing, and I discovered something even more chilling - I know these people.  The worst DVD I ever purchased was the Miracle Pictures release of British z-movie director Michael Murphy's Invitation to Hell, a baffling, but very entertaining, 50-minute mess of a Satanic horror flick.  The DVD was unwatchable, featuring blaring, incomprehensible sound and pixels the size of golf balls.  I thankfully only got it at a thrift store and got rid of it soon after, but I never forgot the company logo animation that came before the menu, with the name in bland block letters on a CGI rock island.  That very same animation is used here for some company called Passion Productions, and I'll be damned if they're not the same guys behind the Invitation to Hell DVD.

If you're not in the demographic for low-buck horror movies you'll probably not think much of Dark Heritage, but for weirdos like me it's a good night's rental with real heart and soul behind it.  You'll be fine as long as you don't make a big point of tracking it down, though if you do try go for the original VHS release.  The Peacock Films release is pretty awful and it reeks of seedy corrupt-dollar-store distribution practices; I only bought it because it was for sale from an unrelated third party seller for a penny.  The only reason I can imagine you wanting to own it is for bragging rights, or if the full YouTube upload I've included below is taken down by its uploader or the filmmakers.  I doubt it though, because the YouTube account is owned by people who are making a prequel to Dark Heritage called Night of the Darkness, and the fact that somebody is making a prequel to a movie this obscure is pretty astonishing.  Maybe that factoid is enough to get you to give Dark Heritage a shot, and anything I can to do catalyze curiosity is A-OK.

~PNK

Solaris, written and directed by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh has had a lot of ups and downs as a director, coming to a momentary halt after his underrated neo-noir The Underneath failed to grab audiences and dollars (the cap to a string of near misses after sex, lies and videotape), and most recently announced his retirement, only for his IMDB page to list an upcoming miniseries under his direction.  Only half of his movies ever made money, or at least broke even, and one of the more unjust cases is Solaris, a movie remarkable for having been made less than 15 years ago with George Clooney of all people at the helm...and its DVD has gone out of print.  Normally an out-of-print studio movie from that soon ago means big collector value, but oddly enough there are acres of cheap used DVD's that sellers just can't get to move.  Not even GEORGE CLOONEY's bubble-adorned face, as well as James Cameron's name stamped on the top, can get people to spring for the thing, and of all the movies of his to slip through the cracks this one is among the most tragic (considering that The Underneath and King of the Hill are getting the royal Criterion treatment).  I've heard that the failure of Solaris has been attributed to poor advertising, which pitched it as a love story IN SPACE...and feature hideous light rock music in at least one trailer.  The actual movie is one of the best and most thought provoking sci-fi movies made in the last 20 years, and it deserves a hell of a lot more exposure than its piss-poor marketing campaign secured.

Set a few generations into the future, Clooney plays Chris Kelvin, a therapist who is contacted by Dr. Gilbarian, an old friend of his (Ulrich Tukur, The Lives of Others) whose mission to the distant planet of Solaris has gone mysteriously pear-shaped.  While Gilbarian doesn't specify what is going on, the company who funded the mission wants Kelvin to go out there and try to convince the crew to come home, as their previous rescue attempts have failed.  Upon arriving, Clooney finds Gilbarian and another crew member dead, the scientist Dr. Gordon (Viola Davis, Prisoners) locked in her room by her own choosing, and Snow (Jeremy Davies, Lost) at a loss to explain exactly what's happening.  After a day of stonewalling Kelvin goes to sleep and dreams of his wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone, feardotcom), and is shocked to find her sitting on his bed when he wakes up.  This is doubly shocking considering that his wife has been dead for some time, yet here she is.  Frightened and confused, Kelvin tricks her into crawling into an escape pod and sends her away, hoping that he was just seeing things.  Unfortunately, the truth is much more unnerving - each of the people on the ship has been visited by a kind of apparition of a loved one, usually dead, and the planet seems to be the culprit.  Nobody knows why the beings appear, but they seem to be fully aware copies of those people, created from the memories of the ship passenger and for all intents and purposes an actual person.  This doesn't sit well with Dr. Gordon, who plans to destroy her "visitor" using a higgs boson cannon (imagine that at your local gun show), a task Kelvin is none to motivated to perform on Rheya.  This doesn't stop Rheya from trying to kill herself, a character detail from Kelvin's memories, though she always comes back to life, ready to love Kelvin and eventually destroy herself.  As Kelvin's marital flashbacks, as well as questions of identity, ethics and alien motivation swirl and beckon, the viewer almost forgets about that ominous bloodstain in the ceiling of the infirmary, or what they're going to do about the apparition of Gilbarian's grade-school-age son.

Solaris was originally the breakout novel of Soviet sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem and was adapted to film twice before, first as a 1968 TV movie and Andrei Tarkovsky's three-hour 1973 film.  I'm going to be perfectly honest - I don't have enough time in my life for Tarkovsky.  I tried watching Stalker and felt like I was trapped in a special relativity time drag, and considering that Soderbergh makes a perfectly fascinating, already slow 95-minute movie with his version makes me dread the thought of watching a three-hour version with worse production value.  Soderbergh's pace is calm but steady, and the use of static shots and slow dissolves is a style that works to the movie's credit, allowing the exquisite cinematography, sparse-yet-detailed production design, excellent performances and haunting music envelop the viewer.  The ideas as presented in the movie are fascinating, questioning the nature of human identity and our inability to comprehend an alien universe on human terms.  The balance of elements is so flowing, and the pacing is so tight, that it'd be hard to imagine it being any longer.  Heck, Soderbergh was concerned that audiences would have trouble getting interested in his version, saying that if they didn't like the first 10 minutes "they might as well leave."  It's movies like this that make overlong art really seem overlong, and that good storytelling is what lets the ideas really come to life.  I was fortunate enough to see Solaris in the theater, but sadly I appear to have been one of the 15 who did, and there aren't any plans for a Blu-Ray or even a new DVD, which is frankly baffling considering those GEORGE CLOONEYs, JAMES CAMERONs and STEVEN SODERBERGHs on the box.  The good news is there are tons of supah-cheap copies of the widescreen DVD, many of them for a onepence and waiting for your DVD player t accept them.  Instead of playing you the trailer, I'll give you a sample of Cliff Martinez's elusive, haunting soundtrack, the drug that allows the viewer to slip fully into Solaris's crisply unsettling future.  Give Solaris a chance and I'll see you on the far side of the cent.

~PNK

Penny For Their Thoughts - a Mission Statement

"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!"

~Batman, Batman: The Motion Picture

Amazon Marketplace is arguably the largest used media store in the world - their selection of products and prices is staggering, and if housed in one place would probably cover an area the size of the Mall of America.  As a frequent AM shopper I come across items of a huge variety of prices, and the most mysterious ones (aside from enormous prices most likely borne from a misplaced decimal point) are the items listed for $0.01.  $0.01 is the lowest allowable price on AM, and the thought that immediately comes to the mind of most shoppers is that these are items the seller can't even give away.  These are items the seller just wants to get out of their building as fast as possible and sees that it has little to no collector value, so Rock Bottom listing it goes.  Even with $0.50 items you can imagine it on the shelf at your local library's book sale or on the We Don't Care If You Steal This rack on the street in front of a Righteous Record Rodeo.  Pennystuffs, no dice - this is the Please Steal This box that inevitably gets kicked into the gutter by passerby.  A lot of this stuff is just overstock, and you can find pretty much any big studio movie made in the last 10 years on DVD for a penny just because thousands of the things were printed and they have to go somewhere.  The Penny Ranks are an online landfill with the benefit of cataloging, and collecting them all together would make an impressive library, though not necessarily a quality one.

Penny For Their Thoughts is a blog dedicated to reviewing movies, music and literature that has been purchased by myself for the paltriest of Amazon sums.  The one question is a simple "why?", and a few guidelines will help keep the proceedings interesting.  Firstly, I'm going to avoid getting a new, bestselling item simply to avoid overstock blitzes.  This will also keep things at least a few years old so there's a chance the reader will discover something new.  For the same reasons I'm going to avoid items for sale at a penny but not actually purchased by me for that price, because otherwise I could just review copies of American Pie and The Godfather, and where's the fun in that?  Because I have to actually buy the item, the last provision is that I'll only do things that I wanted to buy in the first place, things that at least seem interesting from the viewpoint of an internet shopper and aren't just outright crap.  When applicable I'll also talk about the condition of the item, because sometimes you get sent plastered with library stickers and sometimes you get stuff that looks like the previous owner drove over it with an RV.

If you too want to sail the Seven Seas of Thrift, here's an easy trick: find the category you want in the search bar and press enter with no text entered, or just the letter "e".  You'll be shown every item for sale in Music or Movies & TV or whatever.  Next, go to the "Sort By" drop-down list and select "Price: Low to High" and BAM!  You now have a very long list of items for $0.01 in no particular order.  The order will be different every time you do it, so if you go through a bunch of pages and find nothing just try again a little while later and you'll get a brand new trough to snort through.

Will it be a grand adventure or a mild dig through the donation bin at Goodwill?  There's no way to know but go forward, so join me on my journey through the media adorned with the Scarlet Price.  Suggestions are encouraged, of course, so your secret favorite album may end up as an article someday.  Above all, Penny For Their Thoughts seeks to make life a constant adventure of art and culture, and what better way is there to spend a penny?

~PNK