"The Pack" (1977) d/ Robert Clouse

In a world gone to the dogs, as Prospero and Jacopetti so eloquently stated back in the tumultuous sixties, it was only a matter of time before "man's best friend" finally turned the tables on us in the form of a couple of marginal survival horror/thrillers released towards the middle of the following decade. So what transformed these furry tail waggin', leg liftin', tongue waggin' pals o' ours into snarling, pack-minded, frothy-jawed biters of human meat? Prolonged exposure to Mason Reese's infernal Underwood deviled ham commercials / Paul Lynde musical numbers that feature Roz Kelly in a tune-carrying capacity / disco-themed action slacks ? Come to think of it, all of those things induce bloody rabies madness with billowing froth like a volcano o' violence, no matter how the frig you look at it. Tonight's review, the better of the aforementioned pair of killer dog movies (The less-satisfying 'Dogs'(1976) being the other), was written and directed by the guy responsible for Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon four years earlier, and stars Joe Don Baker, still riding a wave of "Walking Tall" popularity four years later.


"Now, you want me to make out with her? Can't I just bat her in the face instead?"
Right from the outset, we see how Seal Island's titular feral pack grows in number, as a vacationing family abandons their summertime pal, leaving the whining collie tied up in the woods, as they depart for home with fall weather on their heels. Apparently, lots of folks discarded their pets after a satisfying holiday together, culminating in an apex hunting party of flea-bitten mutts led by a particularly ornery-looking mongrel-beast, driven by equal parts hatred and hunger in dispatching adult horses, and even local blind hermits. Enter Jerry (Baker), the local widowed marine biologist(!) growing roots on the island with his young arm candy, Millie (Hope Alexander-Willis) and their two sons. In between some slobbery make out sessions and upright parenting, Jerry begins to notice the looming canine threat when the pack punks the family dog out of his junkyard rabbit chase and later terrorizes Millie in her Volkswagen, forcing him to alert the remaining islanders to the danger of the murderous reverse-Lassie's with a vicious storm impending.


...just as the car's eight track player chewed up her new David Soul album.
Among the sitting ducks-turned-human chew toys are a grizzled old angler (R.G. Armstrong), a local merchant (Richard Shull), a banker named Dodge (Richard O'Brien), his girl Marge (Bibi Besch), his drape son, Tommy (Paul Willson), and a happening chick named Lois (Sherry Miles) that Dodge has brought along in an attempt to "man" his withdrawn wallflower of a son up a bit. Naturally, the dogs whittle down the survivors' numbers; sending Tommy to plummeting cliff death (a seventies favorite, for sure), eating Lois alive in a barn, and tearing ol' Dodge up like he was one of your good loafers safely tucked away in the back of the closet, before Jerry and company can orchestrate a dramatic final showdown with the killer pack in one of the abandoned houses. His meticulous study of shrimp must have included classes on pyrotechnics and stunt falls, as he manages to set the house ablaze with the majority of mad dogs inside, impaling the main mongrel, Tepes-style on a sharpened radiator pipe (!!) after rolling off the roof, and even winning back the trust of the surviving abandoned collie from the first reel before the end credits finally roll. I think everything's gonna be alright here, afterall...


"I SAID...Roll that motherfuckin' beautiful bean footage..."
Though you'd rightfully expect to come away from tonight's movie mostly underwhelmed by the final product given the 'Meh' factor of the anti-Benji subject matter and much of the supporting cast, the performances of Baker, Besch, and an underutilized R.G. Armstrong, meshed with the film's realistic dog attacks, prove effective enough in raising tense vibes throughout to elevate this one out of the decade's prolific celluloid heap. Probably the best killer dog movie this side of 1983's Cujo or Wilderness (2006), it's available on dvd-r through Warner Archives. On the scale, a respectable deuce.


Luckily, we've kept the island's damage to a minimum...

"The Beast Within"(1981)d/Philippe Mora

One of the most familiar sounds of late summer is the droning mating buzz of the male cicada, sort of a bulky, ugly, winged leafhopper-on-steroids in its final phase, which, in periodical species, doesn't come for up to seventeen years.It's easy to see how one could meld the life cycle of an ugly, loud bug and a teenaged boy coming into adulthood into some sort of shlocky updated fifties-style monster movie with the proper levels of creative flair.Paris-born artist/director Philippe Mora, of "Mad Dog Morgan" fame, attempted just that during the horror heyday of the early eighties, and the finished product, though perplexingly muddled in spots, is a mostly satisfying exercise in B-movie hokum with an unhinged final reel that had audiences screaming, as your humble N(of course, in attendance) can attest to.Mora enlisted the services of FX wizard Tom Burman in bringing the were-cicada to life on the big screen, and through the aid of air bladders and puppetry, Burman transformed this into something like this.I'll let you be the judge on whether or not he succeeded.The cast included the likes of Ronny Cox, Bibi Besch, LQ Jones, Logan Ramsey, and as the lead, then-youngster Paul Clemens, whose mother just happens to be actress Eleanor "The Sound of Music" Parker.MGM released the film as part of its "Midnight Movies" series on dvd a few years back, and you should seek it out if you get the chance. Frankly, you'll probably never see as fine a "rape-crazed were-cicada terrorizes the deep south" movie as this in your lives.

Get yer tits out, get yer tits out, get yer tits out for the hemipterans!
The time is 1964, the place is Nioba, Mississippi(insert strains of 'Dixie' here), where the newlywed McClearys(Ronny Cox, Bibi Besch) have gotten their car stuck in the middle of some dark, desolate woods after husband Eli's ill-fated late night u-turn.He volunteers to walk the three plus miles back to the last filling station they had passed himself, leaving wife Caroline alone in the car.What's the worst that could happen to a young woman alone in a car on the side of a dark southern road through the forest(besides being raped to within an inch of her life by a horny cicada monster, of course)?Eli returns to find her bare-assed n' half buried in some wet leaves, and a makeshift posse puts the lead to local troublemaker Billy Connors for the crime, before the couple leave the whole harrowing experience behind them for a life in Jackson.Unfortunately, seventeen years later they're forced to return to the scene of the crime in search of answers when their teenage son, Michael(Paul Clemens), has suddenly been overtaken by an occult malignancy that has the big city specialists all baffled.Michael, who gets awfully sweaty and pale, has been having livid dreams of an empty old house with something unseen and awful in the cellar.Back in Nioba, they're met with resistance by the town's secretive senior officials: Judge Curwin(Don Gordon), his brother, Edwin(Logan Ramsey), and Dexter Ward(Luke Askew) the town mortician, all treat the McClearys inquiries with the disdain and indifference you'd expect from characters whose names were a silent nod to Howard Phillips himself.One more monster-in-the-cellar dream later, Michael rouses from a sweaty coma, jacks himself an Oldsmobile, and arrives at Edwin's doorstep in sync with a bag of groceries hastily dropped by a delivery boy put off by the old man's blatant homo-pederasty.In a wifebeater and jammies, the nonce fries up some hamburger peppered with boy-hungry innuendo until Michael takes a cue from the buzzing cicadas outside and bites a sizeable chunk out of the old perv's neck(gross),his feet flailing helplessly in some raw hamburger on the floor(more gross).

Michael(Paul Clemens)is about to slip into something more uncomfortable.
While his parents seek out answers, Michael endears himself to Amanda Platt(Katherine Moffat),the angelic teenage daughter of overprotective redneck psycho-dad, Horace(John Dennis Johnston), a man that never met a sass-ending backhander he didn't like, who also happens to be cousin to the Curwin clan.Town boozehound Tow Laws(Ron Soble) relates the story of Billy Connors and his goal of immortality-through-rebirth-every-seventeen-years-via-shapeshifting-into-a-cicada-monster(heard that one a hundred times before, huh?), in between hearty bottle swigs, leading the boy to abruptly cut off a torrid makeout session in the woods with Amanda to embalm Dexter alive at the funeral parlour.The wig-laden judge, panicked by his family's sudden rising mortality rate, admits to chaining up Billy Connors in the cellar of a house in the woods, and that Connors escaped the night the very night the McClearys had their car/rape troubles.It's now apparent that Michael is the pawn in Connors' ploy for revenge from beyond the grave against all conspiritors seventeen years earlier, and as an added bonus, he gets to painfully transform into a cicada monster himself, before the disbelieving eyes of a room full of horrified onlookers (that includes his parents), head bulging and popping before comically inflating like a full-term pregnant womb for minutes that seem to go on forever.He pulls the judge's head off through a jail wall before raping Amanda on what seems like the very same muddy stretch of road he was conceived on himself, ensuring the rape-revenge cycle will continue after he's eaten some post-rape shotgun-induced death...or would continue if enough interest generated a sequel at that point.It didn't.

Awww, ma, manburgers for dinner, again?
Besides the aforementioned Hopper vehicle Morgan, Mora also handled two Howling sequels, which apart from screen time involving Sybill Danning's magnificent bra-pups in the second, were pretty forgettable, and Communion, the Christopher Walken-gets-anally-probed alien abduction movie.Cox, as you should well know by now, has been in films like Deliverance(1972), Total Recall(1992), and everything in-between over his long, successful career.Clemens, who's done countless television roles over the years, most recently appeared in the colorfully titled, The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficent Weapon, in 2008.The feature attraction here has to be the transformation effects as imagined by Burman and company; still entertaining and eye-catching despite not having aged very well over the years.Overall, this one's a good old fashioned monster movie with some potent eighties flair that you'd do well to see for yourselves.On the scale, Within climbs out of the mud and up a tree, where its proboscis siphons out two big ones.Check it out!

"Arrgggh! Acne on the night of the Summer Social. Just my freakin' luck!"