For every brilliant horror film, there is an equal and opposite film, a mistake, an error, an aberration, an abomination. Here follows my short list of horror cinema’s most incalculably misconceived efforts. I do not include any of the usual attacks on Ed Wood because his delightfully campy inflections transcend the limits of his technique. Nor do I include films that are merely unconvincing because of their special effects as were many monster movies of an earlier time. These films bring a third O to BOO!
“The Horror of Party Beach” (1964)
Recoil in laughter from Del Tenney’s vision of the apocalypse in which sea monsters, zoned-out on radioactive waste, devour the surfers and their girlfriends.
I cannot remember the director’s name. And it is just as well; for this humorless narrative drones endlessly on about a CIA plot to employ a zombie created by some Space Agency. There is an unhappy marriage, a gun-wielding girl in a bikini (not altogether disappointing), and some spies who remind me of Ping, Pang, and Pong from “Turandot.”
I know we’re all supposed to love Bryan Forbes’s feminist parable of oppressed women living as brainless clones with evil men. But even William Goldman’s screenplay based on Ira Levin’s novel cannot save this film from the horror of its own political expediency. All the men associated with this film imagined it would help them seduce their “liberated” girlfriends. Oh, my apologies. I thought everyone knew this classic male strategy.
“Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS” (1974)
Director Don Edmonds should do the catering for Abraham Foxman’s birthday parties. I was forced by my coterie of LA leftists to watch this ridiculous portrait of Nazi savagery. A voice-over portentously reminds us that the film is based on the actual Ilsa Koch of Buchenwald. Sex and violence and more violence and yet more cannot retrieve from failure this laughable propaganda styled a horror film in which the horror is “real.” Nazis? Enough already. Give us a break. If I am told one more time how horrible the Germans were, I will send an army of Astro-Zombies into the nearest Museum of Tolerance.
“The Exorcist II: The Heretic” (1978)
Again, the director’s name escapes me. I only wish I could expunge from my memory this dreadful betrayal of the original. The plot goes something like this: Richard Burton flies on a giant locust from Georgetown to North Africa where James Earl Jones spits a globule of red evil at him. Linda Blair makes an appearance. Some doctors recommend therapy. Where are the Nazis when you need them?
But here is the moment I’ve been waiting for:
“Blair Witch 2: The Book of Shadows” (2000 and closing soon)
Considering how fundamentally the first film changed American horror cinema, one might reasonably expect a clever and sensitive sequel. But this film is a disaster in every respect. Its attempt to be inclusive by replacing the first film’s realistic homogeneity with several “types” of characters fails as certainly as its conventional plot structure, its unimaginative photography, its plodding exposition, its annoying soundtrack (with a cover of the MASH theme by Marilyn Manson), its imprecise evocation of details from the first film, and its almost complete dereliction from the plot summaries listed for months on its own website. That this film was made at all is the only thing frightening about it. The market is already punishing the film-makers for this heinous assault on the intellects of loyal fans. I hope the BW2 cast and crew have a Happy Halloween because they are going to be forgotten by Christmas.
November 2, 2000
Scott Wilkerson is curator of the Ward Library at the Mises Institute.
