Weirdhouse Cinema: Demon Knight

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
This is Rob and I'm Joe, and today we are
going to unscramble the cable signal and tune into some
Tales from the Crypt.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
That's right, Yeah, we have another slice of nineties genre
cinema for you this week. Except this one's far cheaper
than Free Jack. I think, ultimately a more enjoyable film,
but it is, of course the initial cinematic spinoff of
HBO's Tales from the Crypt. It is Taiales from the Crypt,
Demon Knight from what nineteen ninety five?

Speaker 3 (00:45):
That sounds right, Yeah, it looks very mid nineties. So
I guess this one and last week's are a little
bit more mainstream than we usually go.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, yeah, they're more mainstream. But Demon Night is also one.
I mean, Freejack is definitely a film that it did
not perform to expectation and was kind of just thrown
out there and died and was forgotten by many. Demon
Night is a film that I think also is you know,
we're talking about this before we started recording, you know,
maybe a little underappreciated, though it certainly has its following

(01:16):
and oh yeah, and you know, continues to be popular
to this day. But you don't hear it championed that
often as being like a great piece of horror horror
comedy from the nineties.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
I guess it's hard to argue that it's great, but
it is really fun. This is a really fun, r rated,
frisky piece of horror comedy.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, it's It's essentially a siege movie. So the basic
structure is pretty pretty nailed down, you know, like you're
gonna have characters go somewhere, they're gonna hold up there,
and then things are gonna try and get in and
get them. It's the basic Night of the Living Dead scenario.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah, it's Night of the Living Dead, evil Dead assault
on Precinct thirteen, that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Yeah, so well, let's just jump right into the elevator
pitch on this one just now. This is the elevator
pitch for the basic movie itself. The Unholy Demon Lords
have six of the seven keys they need to drag
the universe back into darkness, and the only thing standing
in their way on Planet Earth for that last key
is one immortal drifter and a ragtag bunch of losers.

(02:21):
In a rundown hotel in the middle of the desert.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
Uh huh, in a place called Wormwood, New Mexico. I
looked it up. Not a real place.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
It sounds nice and biblical, though, which is good because
there's a lot of biblical nonsense going on in this
particular movie.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Yeah, and this movie is just jammed with drifters.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, yeah, it's all it's basically all drifters. I mean,
and I've actually seen it discussed in the sense that
it's like the meek shall inherit the earth, and this
is the meek. These are all the sorts of losers
that Jesus Christ himself would have hung out with in life.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
Maybe not Thomas Hayden Church. He's not that meek, but
he's a scumbag in this So yeah, that's true. So
the Pharisees come to Jesus and they say, hey, you
sit down to eat with the sinners and tax collectors
and even with Thomas Hayden Church.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
All right, well, let's go ahead, have just a little
bit of the trailer audio here, and there's probably gonna
be a little criptkeeper in there.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
Universal Pictures is proud to present the Motion picture Directing
debut of.

Speaker 4 (03:25):
One of America's most talented and respected artists.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Hot Cat.

Speaker 4 (03:32):
Oh hello kitties, So glad you could join me? Your pal.
The Cryptkeeper has gone Hollywood in a big way. I'm
directing my first feature film, Care for a Little Shriek preview.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
My Big Scream premiere.

Speaker 4 (03:52):
I wanted lots of suspecse, special effects, sex, the kind
of thing you could really sink your teeth into, frights,
camera and ladies if you think demon nice gross and yucke.

(04:21):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
All right? So yeah, basically the idea here, but the
whole Tales from the Crypt thing is, you know, Tales
from the Crypt was like the show on HBO back
in the day, and we've talked about it on the
show before here on like some of our horror anthology
specials around Halloween. You know, it's basically it's based on
the old horror comics, and each little story in the

(04:53):
horror comic would be about some horrible person getting their
come uppance, and so each episode of Tales from the
Crypt generally revolves around that as well.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah to me, the opening theme music of Tales from
the Crypt, I think it's composed by Danny Elfman. It
just sounds like the nineties, and it sounds like being
a kid in the nineties trying to watch stuff that
you're not allowed to watch.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Absolutely, it's like it's the.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
Sound of I think we may have made this comparison before,
but it's the sound of a scrambled cable channel that
you don't get that shows are rated depravity all night
and every day.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, yeah, it really does. And I guess one of
the interesting things about this is, like you can imagine
the studios came in there, some folks behind the scenes
were like, Hey, this show's really successful, we should do
a movie. The thing is, Tales from the Crypt doesn't
really lend itself well to that kind of format, unless
you're going to do an anthology film with just a
bunch of little stories, much like the original Tales from

(05:48):
the Crypt film, the nineteen seventy two anthology picture from Amicus.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
Oh, I don't think I even knew that existed.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Yeah, it has the Cryptkeeper in it, but the Cryptkeeper
is played by Sir Ralph in like a hood.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
That's nice. Yeah, But so, as you mentioned, the standard
format of a Tales from the Crypt episode, and you know,
there's some variation but the most common format is that
you have basically a sleazy salad of gratuitous gore and
nudity in which a morally bankrupt person does something evil,

(06:24):
they think they're going to get away with it, and
then they get their just desserts via the vengeful wrath
of a monster, demon, ancient curse, haunted scarecrow, chainsaw freak
or whatever.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, it's in a way, it's it's like horror in
a very simple form, fulfilling a societal need. You know,
we need the villains in our world, in our life
to suffer, and these little stories provide that suffering along
with some you know, gratuitous violence, maybe a little nudity
in maybe a few laughs as well. A lot of

(06:57):
gallows humor finds its way into these episodes.

Speaker 3 (06:59):
And lot of puns. I mean, the crypt Keeper loves
to make death related puns.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
That's right, because, of course, the big thing about the
HBO series is hosted by the crypt Keeper, this wonderful
puppetry creation of a reanimated corpse that just gleefully takes
you on this journey to hear all of these tales.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
You know who the crypt Keeper is, It's the preserved
remains of Jeremy Bentham. I couldn't stop thinking about that
this time. I mean, like God, that rotten looking head.
It's almost perfectly the crypt Keeper.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
Well, let's start with the Cryptkeeper. Talking about people involved
in this one. The Cryptkeeper's voice is, of course John
Casser born in nineteen fifty seven. He's a longtime actor
and voice actor, but he's most well known as the
voice of the Cryptkeeper from Tales from the Crypt on
HBO from eighty nine through ninety six, as well as
the cartoon Tales from the Crypt Keeper nineteen ninety three

(07:54):
through nineteen ninety nine three Tales from the Crypt movies.
Will get a touch on that in a bit, but basically,
just with the crypt Keeper, we have a great voice
coming together with an amazing puppet, at least for most appearances,
and all this based on one of the EC comics
horror hosts. You know. Other hosts included things like the
Vault Keeper and the Old Witch.

Speaker 3 (08:15):
But those were just in the comic right, They were
not on the TV series.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
I don't think so. Though. Occasionally the crypt Keeper has
a guest that's not a corpse in those little segments,
and we'll touch on some of those examples as we
go here. But of course in this movie Tales from
the Crypt Demon Night, the crypt Keeper is just there
to set things up to say, hey, we can hear
it is for you a movie. And the movie itself

(08:39):
is pretty self contained. It has a few nods to
Tails from the Crypt within it, but still you could
watch it on its own, without the intro or the
outro and you'd get it. So I guess the first
person we should talk about is the director. This was
directed by Ernest Dickerson. Dickerson was born in nineteen fifty one,

(09:01):
and he was a classmate of Spike Lee at the
Tisch School of the Arts, and so he went on
to work as a frequent collaborator with Spike Lee as
a cinematographer on various Spike Lee joints including School Days,
Do the Right Thing, Mo Beetter, Blues, Jungle Fever, and
Malcolm X. He also worked as a cinematographer on films

(09:21):
from John Salis, the film Brother from Another Planet, and
Jonathan Demi, and more recently you might have noticed his
name as a director on a number of TV projects,
including multiple episodes of The Walking Dead, Tremay The Wire.
He seems like one of those TV directors that just
works all the time, and he's also done a lot
of work in the horror genre. He was a cinematographer

(09:43):
on the TV series Tales from the Dark Side, an
anthology series, and while Demon Knight was his first horror
or sci fi film as a director, he went on
to direct nineteen ninety eight's Future Sport, which looks interesting,
and the two thousand and one Snoop Dogg ghost movie Bones,
which I haven't seen, but I was reading a little
about in it. It seems like it has its following,
so maybe it's worth trying out. Yeah, Okay, I mean

(10:06):
it's Snoop is always entertaining. Yeah. So Demon Night, though,
follows up on Dickerson's nineteen ninety two film Juice, which
starred Tupac Shakur, and also the exquisite nineteen ninety four
film Surviving the Game. Do you remember this one, Joe, Of.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
Course I do. Surviving the I don't think Surviving the
Game is as good as Demon Knight, as comparing Dickerson's
violent thrillers here Surviving, But one thing that is great
about Surviving the Game. Basically, it's an adaptation of the
short story The Most Dangerous Game about a group about
like a rich guy on an island who hunts human
beings for sport. This adapts that to the modern world,

(10:46):
and it's a movie about a character named Mason played
by iced T, who is like homeless and depressed, and
he gets offered a job by a guy who he
meets somewhere I think maybe at a like a like
a place where they're feeding the homeless, and he gets
recruited for this job to be a wilderness guide for
a bunch of rich dudes played by people like Rutger Howard,

(11:08):
Charles Stutton, Gary Busey, f Murray Abraham, John C. McGinley.
It is a real powerhouse cast, like every person who
could have played like, you know, the cocaine king of
the Week in an eighties crime movie. They're one of these,
one of the party of the hunters in this movie.
And then of course the twist is once they get
out in the woods, they tell iced T Okay, well

(11:30):
we're gonna hunt you now, but iced T outsmarts them all.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yeah. So I remember catching this one on cable, I think,
and I remember finding it irresistible, just drawn right.

Speaker 3 (11:40):
Int Yeah, And I gotta say Iced Tea has a
very weird charm in this movie. It's hard to describe
exactly what it is, but he plays a He plays
a very rude and sympathetic protagonist as he's like chugging
along through the forest while they're chasing him on ATVs.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah. So, so it's some notable films from Dickerson there. Now,
coming back to Demon Night, there's a there's an excellent
Shout Factory slash Screen Factory Blu ray of this film
that came out, and that's that's what I watched for this.
But it also includes some some really cool features, including
interviews with Dickerson among others, and one of the things

(12:21):
that came out of it, aside from him just being
really chill and apparently easy to work with and open
to some of the lunier ideas that the actors brought
to the table, he was also a major force behind
having a more diverse cast on this film, including the
casting of African American actors Jada Pinkett, C. C. H. Pounder,
and Mark David Kinnerley who plays a very small part

(12:43):
towards the end, but also presumably First Nations actor Gary
Farmer who will touch on here in a bit. And
it's worth noticing that even our secondary minority characters in
this film survive quite far into the picture, right.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
The cliche long being that in many horror movies it
is and for the cast to be all white except
for one black character, and the black guy dies first.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
Right. So yeah, it seems that having a black director
at at the front of this thing really helped out
in that regard. For instance, the main character, the character
the Jada Pinkett plays, you know, Jada Pinkett Smith plays
in this like that was I think the studio wanted
I forget which actor, but they wanted a white female
actor for the role, and he insisted on this, and

(13:27):
I think it's a better film for it.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
Now, the screenwriters on this were Ethan Rife, Cyrus Voris,
and Mark Bishop, so that this trio. They had written
a post apocalyptic movie called Escape from Saithe Haven in
nineteen eighty eight and that was directed by Bishop, and
Bishop didn't seem to go on to do much else
in film, but Rife and Voris went on to do
quite a lot, including two thousand and eight Kung Fu Panda.

(13:54):
They wrote that and you'll find their names attached to
anything involving Kung Fu Panda. They also twenty ten's Robinhood
that's the Ridley Scott version starring Russell Crowe.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
M I didn't never saw that.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yeah, No, and Demon Night was apparently a spec script
that they had out there and people were excited about it,
and it got picked up by this Tales from the
Crypt trilogy idea, like they were. The basic idea is like,
let's do three Tales from the Crypt films. We'll find
the screenplays and we'll we'll just you know, put to
some crypt keeper at the beginning, some crypt Keeper at

(14:28):
the end, and he got yourself a franchise.

Speaker 3 (14:30):
Now, unfortunately, being a feature film instead of being made
for TV, it does not have commercial breaks for the
crypt Keeper to come in in the middle of the
movie and comment about what's currently going on in the story.
He's just at the beginning and the end. But even
with only the beginning and the end of Brackets, the
crypt Keeper is a very welcome presence.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yes. Now, apparently I was watching some of the making
of and apparently there was some push and pull on
the idea of like what the movie itself was going
to be. The screenwriters really thought, this is more of
a hero movie, This is about a hero's journey, et cetera.
And then everyone else was like, well, but it's a
monster movie. It needs to be a monster movie. It's

(15:10):
Tales from the Crypt. And then, you know, ultimately it
goes back to what we said earlier, like this is
not a come upance film. It's not a film about
a horrible person getting their come upance. It ends up
really being more of a hero's journey kind of a
story with monsters, but with the Tales from the Crypt branding.

Speaker 3 (15:25):
But also, I mean, I think Dickerson handles it exactly
right in that it is not overly serious in any way,
Like it is a very loose, fun, frisky movie that
does not ever stop to take itself too seriously. And
the scenes that do get kind of serious addressing, like
the you know, the recurring hero motif or whatever, those

(15:46):
are brief enough to be kind of welcome, and then
it quickly gets back to goofy gory jokes.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
Yeah. Absolutely, Well, let's start talking about some of these
heroes again. Jada Pinkett, who would become Jada Pinkett Smith
later on Sheep Hero and this is jerry Lyne Jerry Lynn,
like Jerline Jerrelene. It's one of those where I got
prepared for it to be pronounced a certain way and
then it was not in the film.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
Well, actually, I think different characters in the movie pronounce
her name different and you might say, hey, that's not consistent,
But then hey, have you ever known somebody whose name
as written could be pronounced different ways? People pronounce it
different ways.

Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah, but we're going with Jerline Jerlene. Okay, jery Lene.
I'm gonna try and be consistent. I may just say
Jada Pinkett anyway. Yep, she's in this. She had not
yet married Will Smith, but she was on the rise here.
She was coming off of the Hughes Brothers Minace to
Society as well as Jason's Lyric, and she would apparently

(16:45):
go on to like really break out in nineteen ninety
six is the Nutty Professor. Then she was in Scream two,
the Matrix sequels, just to name a few.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
I saw that she's going to be in the upcoming
new Matrix movie, so I forget who her character is,
but whoever she is, she must survive the third film.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
Yeah, Now, let's see this is not a hero. This
is our main antagonist in the film, but we have
Billy Zaine as the collector.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
Billy Zaine is just wonderful in this movie.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
He is he's I mean, Zayin has a very punishable
face and a lot of roles and oh he's so
punishable in this he's he he just he hams it
up so much like he's great playing like a smug,
privileged sob and in so many other films, I mean,
especially Titanic comes to mind, but yeah, he's he's like

(17:35):
a Looney Tunes character in this in all the right ways,
with the in the appropriate in the appropriate ways. He
is just like a cartoon character.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
Oh well, you included a detail that he I think
revealed in one of the making of features. You said
you were watching that once. Once I read it, I
was like, oh my god, that's absolutely right, the one
about Aladdin.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yes. Yeah, he says that he approached the role like
he was playing the genie from Alatin, except evil, and
then you see it in everything.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
It's exactly what he's doing. He's almost Robin Williams, but
a little bit less manic and more smooth, but smooth
in a very sinister and silly way. He's perfect in
this role.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Yeah, this is this is apparently one of his favorite
roles that he did, and yeah, he really shines in it.
You know, no matter what your opinion is of Zain
in general, you know, he's been in some real some
real stinkers for sure, but yeah, this says just the
right amount of Billy Zay. And oh and this was
fun too. This was revealed on one of the featurettes.
This was apparently Zay's first film without a hair piece. Huh.

(18:41):
So yeah, apparently he came in to meet Dickerson and
he brought in like a little suitcase and he opened
it up, uh, and he was completely bald, you know,
shoes and shaved down, and he showed him the hair pieces.
He's like, which one do you want me to wear
for the film? And Dickerson's like, I don't know, I
like what you've got going on there, And so that's
what they which.

Speaker 3 (19:01):
Is bald right? Which yes, yeah, yeah, his bald head
is exquisite. And I wonder if that inspired the scenes
in the film where he's carrying around a suitcase or
maybe that was part of the script anyway, I mean,
so we should say that. In the movie, we said
he's the villain, but he is the titular demon Knight.
He is a hell beast who's a kind of smooth

(19:24):
talking prints of the infernal realms, who wants to do
some kind of apocalyptic magic, and it involves him frequently
getting out a suitcase and asking people to put a
thing inside it.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
Right, Yeah, yeah, So he does have a suitcase around,
so presumably a very similar suitcase that held his many
different hairs.

Speaker 3 (19:42):
Now, you've got a lot of films listed as Billy's
An credits that almost none of which I had any
idea Billy z An was in.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
Oh yeah, he was in nineteen eighty five's Back to
the Future.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
He was in nineteen eighty six's Critters. I had no
clue on that one.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
Yeah, no idea.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
I guess he really stood out. I guess one of
the early roles where he really stood out would be
the nineteen eighty nine thriller Dead Calm alongside Sam Neil
and Nicole Kidman. And he's he's quite good in that.

Speaker 3 (20:08):
I've never seen it.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
Oh it's good. It's a really good, solid thriller.

Speaker 3 (20:11):
Uh huh? Was that the one where he plays like
a he's like an evil guy on a boat.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yep, yeah, it's a thriller.

Speaker 3 (20:17):
That's probably oversimplifying it.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
But yeah yeah, I mean I haven't seen it in forever,
but I remember it as being quite good.

Speaker 3 (20:24):
It's like you take the end of Cape Fear and
make it a whole movie.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
Yeah, yeah, I guess so, yeah, Zay And of course
did a lot of TV work as well. He was
on Twin Peaks, he was in the film Tombstone, and
of course we can't forget his starring role in nineteen
ninety six is The Phantom, because there was that whole
period in the nineties when Hollywood decided that old timey
characters like Dick Tracy and the Shadow were the next

(20:48):
big thing.

Speaker 3 (20:49):
Uh huh, and that was a weird time. I kind
of wait, So was the Phantom an old property that
was being revived or was it a new property in
the style of the old adventure serials?

Speaker 2 (21:03):
The Phantom was an old character?

Speaker 3 (21:04):
Yeah, oh okay, yeah, I know the Shadow was. Didn't
Alec Baldwin play the Shadow and the Uh.

Speaker 2 (21:11):
Yeah, yeah that one. I do not remember that one
as being good, but it had Alec Baldwin and it
was directed by Russell McKay. So I'm sure if I
were to watch it again, I would I would find
some some lovable, weird things in it. But I don't know, Uh,
there are other Maquay films I would rather see.

Speaker 3 (21:28):
Now. I know you have unspeakable love for Dick Tracy.
Do you want to talk about that?

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Uh? Well, I wouldn't say it's unspeakable love because I
haven't seen it since I was a kid. But it
it was one that was not as good as anticipated, perhaps,
But it had such weird mobsters in it, Like all
the mobsters, you know, in a way they're they're trying
to create the kind of the like rough charactertures of
the of the of the Gold comic, and in doing

(21:54):
so they created these monstrous, mutant gangsters that were just,
you know, you're resistible, and also just so weird, Like
it's so weird that the movies filled with them.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
Wasn't there one called Little Face who had a huge
head with a little face in the middle of it.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
Yeah, yeah, there was Flat Top, and.

Speaker 3 (22:13):
I think there was one called No Face who didn't
have a face.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
There's one called the Brow with just this enormous, grotesque
brow Like, it's just tons of those type characters, most
of which they did nothing with. Most of them are
just I think like they have like a good dozen
of them that they kill in one scene just in passing.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
Yeah, they just have like the Star Wars canteena scene
but it's mutant mobsters.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah. So I feel like that kind of ruined me
for traditional gangster films to a certain extent, because you're like, oh, well,
you know, Godfather's good, but he didn't have any mutants
in it. Oh.

Speaker 3 (22:44):
I like the Godfather.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
God Godfather is good, but yeah, but I'd like to
see mutant gangsters come back. I feel like that's the
that's the takeaway from Dick Tracy.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
I agree, a little bit more boiling acid version of
The Godfather.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
All Right. We said that there was an immortal drifter
in this, and there is the character breaker played by
the always excellent William Sadler.

Speaker 3 (23:06):
Oh Man, William Sadler, he's got one of those faces, right,
That's just he has an inherently evil looking face, which
makes me assume that in reality he must be a
nice guy, because I recall there being a bit about
this in the novel Around the World in Eighty Days,
which I haven't read since I was a kid, but
I remember there's a part where a police detective is

(23:29):
talking about how people who have criminal looking faces have
no choice but to be honest, because you know, everybody
looks at them and suspects they're a criminal. It's only
people who look very trustworthy who can really get away
with great crime. So I don't know for sure, but yeah, Sadler,
he just has that face where he looks like a
devil person. And there are other people like this who

(23:51):
just kind of naturally look like a cartoon devil, like
Malcolm McDowell kind of looks like a cartoon devil. There's
a Prosperity Gospel TV preacher Mike Murdoch who just looks
like a cartoon demon.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Well, Sadler, Yeah, he definitely has that sort of face.
He's played a fairly fairly diverse amount of roles. I
don't know, he does tend to sort of play your
rougher characters. He's he's played villains of differing varieties, Like
he's definitely played the the suit wearing villain, but he's
also played the you know, the sort of you know

(24:26):
dirt kicker kind of a villain as well.

Speaker 3 (24:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah, for instance, he's he might be best known for
his role as the Seventh Seal inspired death in the
Bill and Ted movie.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
Right, yeah, the Reaper. Yeah, they melvin him yep.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
And and also, interestingly enough, his rendition of that character
shows up on Tails from the Crypt at one point
in the Crypt Keeper sequence where he's like playing a
game of chess with the Cripkeeper or something. But he
was in Shashankrediction, he was in the Second Diehard movie.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
Yeah, he's the guy. He's like the new martial arts Kernel.
I remember he's in the hotel room doing like naked
yoga or something, and then he I think at some
point he like punches out a TV screen.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
He he was on Tails from the Crypt. He appeared
in in what I believe was the pilot episode The
Man Who Was Death, And he also played the host
of a Tale from the Crypt spinoff, the title of
the Two Fisted Tales. This apparently wasn't picked up. They
ended up just using the three episodes. I think that
they shot using them as Tales from the Crypt episodes.

(25:32):
But he had this whole persona of mister rush a
crazy old cowboy in a wheelchair and if you look
it up on YouTube you can find clips of it.
It's like he's just completely over the top in the role,
as one should be.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
Oh yeah, Williams. Saddler is always like a high tension cable,
you know, He's like one of those like steel cables
that a tram car rides along.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yeah yeah, but yeah. Throughout his career he's played very
serious characters and he's played just yeah, real live wires.
He seemed to have a tremendous amount of range there,
but you don't see him, I guess, playing the hero
as much in this in this one.

Speaker 3 (26:04):
Because he's got an evil looking face.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah yeah, but it works here because he's supposed to be.
He's a I mean, he's a guy on the very
you know, margins of law and society.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
M yeah, all right.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Some of the rest of the cast here. C. C. H.
Pounder we already mentioned. She plays a character, Irene. She's
a She's a talented actor, probably best known for her
role on the Shield. She was in Avatar, she was
in RoboCop three, and a lot of TV work.

Speaker 3 (26:29):
I think she does one of those big crime TV shows.
Now didn't she like in CIS or something.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
I think so, yeah, she That's the sort of show
that she seemed to get a lot of work on. Now,
another character actor in this is somebody who recognized from
previous episodes of a Weird House, and that is Dick Miller,
who plays Uncle Willie. That's right, Yeah, I would say this,
whatever you expect of a Dick Miller character, you will

(26:54):
get it from this film. He's not really playing against
type or anything, but it's a substantial role. And I
found out on the special features for this one this
was his first time in his entire career in which
he wore a prosthetic makeup.

Speaker 3 (27:08):
Oh wow, I assume this is for the part where
he turns into a demon, not for his regular regular appearance,
because here he is, like you say, playing perfectly to type.
He is just a whiskey guzzling drifter.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
And there's some great drifter to drifter relations between him
and William Sadler.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
Yeah, yeah, they have. They have some good scenes. Apparently,
like Dick Miller was, you know, in all these old
older films, He's Corman films and all. So apparently the
effects guys and Dickerson himself, they were just super thrilled
to have Dick Miller on the picture because you know,
this is a guy who was in all those old
films that they grew up watching. So that's pretty much.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
Was you a vacuum salesman in a movie I saw
when I was a kid. Yeah, and you get taken
down to the furnace by by the Marlborough man.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
It's like, I've seen you die so many times, how
about one more time? Let's see Thomas Aiden Church is
in this plays a character named Roach. Kind of Church
is kind of like a younger handsomer William Sadler in
some ways.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
Yeah, in this movie. So he plays this swaggering creep,
but with a swaggering creep with a luxurious like Jethro
tull Roady hair, and he's also wearing a Trent Reznor
style see through T shirt.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
Yeah. Yeah, he's He's absolutely hateable in this role in
all the right ways. Like he really really makes you
hate this character. This was only his third film role though.

Speaker 3 (28:32):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, he'd go on to I mean he was I
think he'd already been on the show Wings and that's
what he was mainly known for. But he went on
of course being Sideways and Spider Man three.

Speaker 3 (28:43):
Now the movie, of course, like any good horror movie,
especially any good horror movie from the nineties, has its
share of useless cops.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, and we have two useless cops in this, one
of which dies pretty soon. The other is the deputy
deputy Bob Martel, that survives very long into the film.
And this is played by character actor Gary Farmer. And
here is your absolutely solid Overdrawn in the Memory Bank connection,
because he was in over Drawn in the Memory Bank.

Speaker 3 (29:11):
Really I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, yeah, that, of course was a nineteen eighty three
American playhouse rendition of over Drawn in the Memory Bank
that starred Rawle Julia And he just has a small,
ultimately kind of awkward role in it. But he went
on to be in a ton more stuff. So he
was born in fifty three. He's a Canadian First Nations actor.

(29:32):
And let's see something like, for instance, he went on
to be in Dead Man the Western with the Johnny J.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Jarmusch movie, Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
And then also in his film Ghost Dog Way of
the Samurai. He actually plays the same character in those
two films. He plays his character named Nobody. Okay, Yeah,
And he was also apparently under consideration for the role
of doctor Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
but that didn't come together for some reason.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
Oh, that ultimately went to what's his name, Benicio del Toro, Yes,
Benicccio del Toro.

Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (30:06):
Oh you know what, Actually I should go back on
what I said earlier, because I said that this movie
has useless cops, and it is a very reliable trope
of horror movies, especially like horror movies of the nineties.
But it's it's pretty much always there that you can
just count on cops to not be useful in them,
you know, like you run up. You never have the

(30:26):
scene where you run up to a cop and say
there's a monster chasing us and they whip out their
gun and say where get behind me. No, it's always like, oh,
calm down, missy, and then there's just like a claw
sticking through their face or something. But in this movie,
Gary Farmer's deputy Bob, he actually he becomes more useful
as the movie goes on than is actually kind of

(30:48):
heroic by the end.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Yeah. Yeah, even though he you know, as a character actor,
he has this kind of like bumbling quality to him.
You know, it plays well to comedy, and he does
some good comedy in this. But yeah, he also they
do more with the character than just have him fumble
a gun and get killed by a monster. All right.
Another interesting character we have in this is Charles Fleischer,

(31:11):
who plays his character Wally. I think this is a character.
A lot of you may not recognize his name. Some
of you may not even recognize a picture of him,
but you would recognize his voice, at least one voice
that he does because he was the voice of Roger Rabbit.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
And outside of that, he often plays weirdos. He has
a real kind of like weirdo look to him. You know,
he plays that kind of character. Well, he doesn't disappoint
in this film. He plays another weirdo.

Speaker 3 (31:37):
He plays a very awkward guy in yeah movie.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
But I've seen him in a number of things. He
had a fun role recurring role on Jonathan Ames TV
series Blunt Talk. So he's always a treat when he
shows up. But it doesn't seem he doesn't show up
a lot in things I watch.

Speaker 3 (31:52):
Now. We know that Ernest Dickerson was himself cinematographer on
a bunch of other movies, so he's directing here. Who
does the cinematography.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
One Rick Boda or Bata Bota, who went on to
direct not one, not two, but three direct to video
Hell Raiser sequels Ride in a Row, Hell Seeker, Debtor,
and Hell World.

Speaker 3 (32:14):
I believe that's gonna be your numbers six, seven, and
eight in the Hell Raiser series. I would say that
is not a high point of the series. But it's
weird because so those are not very good Hell Raiser movies.
But I like his cinematography style in the movie. It's nothing,
you know, it's nothing all that artistic, but it's very fluid.
I mean, like it's good in the sense that it's

(32:36):
the kind of good filmmaking that don't you're not thinking
about technique.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, yeah, And it has some some nice use of
gels in places that they kind of give it that
tales from the crypt vibe without like overdoing it right.
Like you see a similar thing done in what was
Stephen king Creep Show, where it was also an homage
to horror comics of old, But there are scenes in

(33:00):
that where they just go crazy with the gels to
create these kind of comic book colors, and so there's
a little lot of it in here, but it feels
a lot a lot more restrained.

Speaker 3 (33:09):
So Hell World is the Evil Dead or not Evil
Dead the I've totally forgotten what it's called hell Raiser
hell hell World is the hell Raiser movie where the
tagline is evil goes Online. Oh man, it's the one
where they go to So I think it's supposed to
be that the Pinhead is in a computer or something,

(33:31):
but then nobody ever really goes online in the movie.
I was talking to my friend Chuck about this not
too long ago. He pointed out that it's really a
very offline movie. It's about a party. People go to
a big party at somebody's house and Pinhead starts killing him.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
Oh wow. Well, yeah, I never saw any of those,
those these three hell Raiser films in particular, but they
all had Doug Bradley and then at least a little bit,
so they have that going for him.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
I guess Hell World also has Lance Hendrickson.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Oh yeah, yeah, Oh, I think I read about that
where they were able they were able to get him
for the role because he happened to be in I
want to say, these were filmed in Romania, and he
was in Romania already filming some other role and they're like, hey,
we can get Lance Henderson. He's got another day or
two on his hotel room.

Speaker 3 (34:13):
And they did it perfect serendipity.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
Now, we mentioned that the cinematography of the movie is
quite effective. It's nothing too flashy, but it's fun and
it's loose and it's very fluid and you're just right
in there in the action. I would say the same
thing for the makeup effects in the movie, which are
quite good.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
Yeah. Yeah, the makeup and the monsters in this are great.
And we have the Todd Masters Company to think for this.
They did all the special makeup on the picture. They
did the monsters, and Masters was ideal for this because
he was a Tales from the Crypt veteran already at
that point, and he's done a lot of film and
TV work, and he did a great job on the

(34:53):
monsters in this film as well, from like a just
from like a conceptual standpoint, because apparently in the early
stages the monsters were going to be more zombie like
or just kind of like possessed people, and he ended
up pushing for a different design, a design that ultimately
I think ended up being cheaper, which the studio liked,
but it leaned heavily on body paint and lean actors

(35:18):
in stilts with just prosthetic heads and some interesting like
growin and tail features that we'll get to here in
a bit. The monsters are terrific, but Masters has been
involved in a number of different films that have great
practical special effects like Necronomicon, Book of the Dead, Hell Raiser, Bloodline,
The Resurrected. The Resurrected is the good Lovecraft movie that

(35:41):
I was trying to remember in a previous episode. He
was in the fifth Nightmare on m Street movie. He
was in Return of not In. He did the effects
for them, Return of Swamp Things, Slither Star Trek, First Contact.
He did the borg stuff in that with the you know,
the boorg Queen. He was responsible for that. And apparently
he's going to do a movie according to IMDb, about

(36:02):
giant leeches. So bringing the giant leeches back. I think
they've been absent from cinema for well, what since the
fifties or something.

Speaker 3 (36:09):
Oh, bring them on. But yeah, I agree with everything
you said. I really love the monster design in this movie.
It's simple. They look great. They've got green glowing eyes
and mouths. That's excellent.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
All right, Well let's jump into the film itself. Let's
let's roll through the plot.

Speaker 3 (36:33):
Well, so, first of all, you have a classic Tails
from the crypt opening, which is, you know, your Dolly
shot through the Cobweby mansion, and then you go down
a secret passageway into the dungeon and it looks like
it's the layer of Doctor Faustus. And then the crypt
keeper he pops up out of the coffin and cackles
at you. And as I said before, all the sound
effects here, it's the Tales from the Crypto music is playing,

(36:56):
and then you get there crypt keeper laugh. That is
that is such a powerful auditory queue to nineties childhood mindset.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
I showed that, just the opening to my son to
see how he would dig it, and he did not
dig it. He found it, Oh, he found it. They
found it frightening, and he did not want any part
of it.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
That's probably all for the best. This movie is not
for kids.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
And I'm not to say he was traumatized by it
or anything, but I was like, you want to check
this out for Halloween, and he's like, okay, sure, and
then he saw it and he's like no, thank you.

Speaker 3 (37:27):
Now. I don't know if we even mentioned this before,
but the movie starts with an opening segment that is
not connected to the rest of the plot. I guess
we did mention that there were brackets, but it starts
you off in media res with stuff going on with
other characters you like. Pan up and it's on the
scene of a woman reclining in lingerie talking on the

(37:48):
phone about how she has just murdered her husband, like
his bloody clothes are still all over the place, and
he's and we see he's downstairs dissolving in a tub
of acid in the basement, and she's tall looking to
her lover on the phone about how much they're going
to enjoy spending all of the dead guy's money, and then,
of course, pretty much immediately the tub corpse wakes up,

(38:10):
and then it climbs the stairs and it has a
hatchet in its hand and it charges in on her
in a psycho style scene where she's in the bathtub
and he's like ah, and then we get a cut, cut, cut,
and it turns out it's a movie within a movie.
The corpse man is being played by John Laura Keett,
which is just excellent wait, did we already talk about

(38:31):
John Laura Keett.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
We didn't. But of course he's most famous, or at least
for older TV viewers, for being the lawyer what was
the name Felding on Night Court?

Speaker 3 (38:42):
I never saw Night Court Handfielding.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (38:45):
He also plays a lawyer at some point on The
West Wing.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
Yeah, he played a lot of characters like that. But
for horror fans, he of course was the narrator on
the original Texas Chainsaw Masker, that opening scroll that sets
the tone for the film, and he did that at
least in the the follow up in Texas Chanceallmascer two.
I'm not sure if he did any of the sequels
beyond that. I think he did, but most notably that
first one though, really the first thing you hear in

(39:10):
that picture.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
He's good at playing a kind of like a thundering, conceited,
pompous wind bag exactly.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
Yeah, that's that's That's everything that he played to a tee.

Speaker 3 (39:20):
But in this movie, it's funny because he's just got
this bit part where he plays an actor playing a
tub corpse who's about to hatchet his his scheming ex
wife to death. And then but it turns out it's
a movie within a movie. And then we pan up
on the crypt Keeper, who's sitting in the director's chair,
so imagine Jeremy Bentham's preserved remains and start he starts

(39:42):
screaming at John Larroquette about how he can't act at all.
He's like, you're no Gory Cooper, You're not even a
Robert Dadford.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
And he was an ambitious bit of special effects here,
because they clearly had a live actor doing some sort
of like green screen head and then they put the
puppeteered crypt keeper head over that in post so it
looks and it looks maybe a tiny bit rough. You
can tell there's some ambitious special effects going on here.

(40:12):
But it's still amusing, which makes sense. You know, this
is Tales from the Crypt the movie. You should go
for it right.

Speaker 3 (40:17):
Right, And it's great because so this opening film within
a film thing is perfect. It is a Tales from
the Crypt episode. You know, it's a c detail in
which a bad person gets what's coming to them.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
But so then of course we get the crypt Keeper
introducing the main story. He's you know, I can't remember
exactly what he says, but he makes a bunch of
puns and then he's like, I call this one demon night,
and then we cut to the opening credits over a
car cruising on a dark desert highway with the most
perfect nineteen ninety five soundtrack choice.

Speaker 2 (40:49):
That's right, it's filters hey Man, nice shot, which is
also in the trailer I think, which I think is
just mandatory. This was just us law that if you
had a film that came out in ninety five, you
had to use hey Man I shot.

Speaker 3 (41:01):
Yeah, I was. It was hard to contain the laughter
while that was going on. And then of course we
see William Saddler driving and he's you know, looking over
his shoulder as if pursued by the hounds of hell.
But no, it's even worse. It's Billy Zane and a
cowboy hat. And it's very funny when it first reveals
Billy Zayne's smirking face in the in the car that's

(41:23):
chasing William Saddler, and so William Sadler starts to run
out of gas on this desert highway and there is
a highway showdown slash shootout, like Billy z Ane's riding
up on him, and William Sadler gets out a rifle
it's like a lever action rifle, and starts shooting at
Billy Zanne's car. Eventually the car catches on fire, but
Billy Zayn, undeterred, just rams straight into Saddler's car. Saddler

(41:47):
gets out of it at the last second, and there's
this huge fiery ramming explosion. So William Saddler escapes the
flaming wreckage. And I guess we're supposed to assume, as
the naive audience, that Billy Zain has been killed in
the explosion, I guess, But why would we actually believe that?
I mean, would it make sense for Billy's aying to
be killed. No, it doesn't, doesn't. But William Sadler he

(42:08):
looks at his palm and he sees a bunch of dots.
I think they're a little like star tattoos on his palm,
and some of them are glowing and others are not.
And then he just sort of ambles on through the night.
He's got drifter energy.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
He's got places to be apocalypses too for event.

Speaker 3 (42:24):
Right, And so he ambles on into Wormwood, New Mexico,
again not a real place, and goes up to a
diner called the Halfway House Cafe and immediately starts trying
to jack cars, Like he gets out a butterfly knife
and is sticking it in the keyhole of a car
outside in the parking lot, and a kid comes out

(42:44):
and he's like, hey, are you stealing my daddy's car?
And he's like, no, I'm just testing the lock.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
Wormwood, New Mexico seems like a very interesting place because
not only do they have drifters, it seems to be
exclusively populated by drifters. Like I want to meet other
drifters that make up this town, like Mayor Drifter and
the rest of the post office, Like everybody's kind of
like a suspect, a drifter type character.

Speaker 3 (43:10):
It's a drifter community. Like the characters in the town
who are not drifters, they're written in such a way
that they're like one decision away from being a drifter.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yeah, I mean we all are, really, but especially these characters.

Speaker 3 (43:24):
So anyway, a bunch of people run out of the diner.
I think one of the people who runs out is
Thomas Hayden Church. But a bunch of people run out
and then they run William Saddler off, so he's chased
off into the night where he runs into Dick Miller
as an old drunk and they share some whiskey and
commiserate for a bid and then Dick Miller tells him that, hey,
I know a place where you can bed down for

(43:46):
the night, and so they're funneling him toward this old church.
You can immediately tell the sort of plot mechanics that
are happening here. We're sivving all of the characters into
this one fortress location.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Now, fact about this location, it looks really great, it
lose phenomenal. But when they went to put the film together,
Dickerson particularly did not want to film at night and
have like really long nights of shoots for the cast
and crew. So that was one of the reasons that
instead they got an airplane hangar, and in it they

(44:21):
built that building and the immediate surroundings oh nice like
in its entirety, so that they could just film during
the day at their leisure and have complete control over
the lighting. But there was one issue. Pigeons were already
living in there in the airplane hangar, and you know
how pigeons are, They're constantly making noise, making these pigeon noises.

(44:44):
So they couldn't get rid of the pigeons. But what
they ended up doing is every time before they would
the roll the camera, before they'd say action, they would
fire off a blank They would fire off a gun
in order to just frighten the pigeons and get them
to shut up, so they could they could have this
window of time in which they could film before the
pigeons started to their ruckus. Again.

Speaker 3 (45:05):
Oh, that's funny. Somehow I feel like I could kind
of sense that it was that it was indoor for outdoor,
even though it's a vast expanse, like you can't see
the walls of the airplane hangar or anything.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
But that's good.

Speaker 3 (45:16):
And I think I've said this on the show before.
I for some reason always really enjoy a good indoor
for outdoor set. Well.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
It can make a very surreal environment, you know. And
it makes sense for this film because the only exteriors
we have were this loathsome former church in the middle
of a desert at the end of the world, and
then one flashback to the Crucifixion. So yeah, so it
makes sense that that we have this alien environment created
by shooting everything inside of an airplane hangar exactly.

Speaker 3 (45:46):
But so what is this church? Dick Miller explains to
us that it's a church that isn't a church anymore.
He says they decommissioned it in the fifties due to
lack of interest.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
That's the official monology on the decommissioning.

Speaker 3 (46:02):
Form, right, Yeah, it was like interest on who's part,
like on the preacher there, or.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
I think it was the town. There's just you know,
it's just a bunch of drifters.

Speaker 3 (46:10):
It's just like, I'm not interested in that reverend. But so, yeah,
it turns into it turns out to be this boarding house.
It's like a desert hotel sort of. And it's it's
like we said, it's like the evil Dead cabin for
the movie, the Fortress of Order that will collect the
characters and then fall under attack. It's the supernatural Alamo.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:31):
Oh, and then meanwhile we also see that Billy Zain
is hooking up with the police, Like the police are
investigating the crash on the on the highway. The cars
are on fire. They're like nobody could have survived that.
Those cars hit each other going one hundred miles per hour,
which we saw that opening scene. They were not going
one hundred miles an hour, but whatever. So but then

(46:52):
Billy Zaine just sort of like walks out from behind
the flaming car and he's like, hey, what's up, and
they're all like, oh, I didn't think you could have
survived that. But so he explains to them that he
was chasing a man who stole something, and so they're like, well,
we'll help you find him, and so Zayan therefore enlists
the police on his team.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
Initially, yeah, he's just so ding dang charming, they just
can't say no. Yeah. Now, I have to say the
film does a great job setting all this up, there's
no wasted motion really, and getting us from here into
our siege location and beginning to establish the rules for everything.
And then the characters are mostly there to fulfill basic
tropes in the story, you know again, like the bumbling cop,

(47:34):
et cetera. But you know, I feel like it comes
together rather well and also ultimately surprises you with a
few choices in terms of like who survives and who doesn't.

Speaker 3 (47:46):
Yeah, totally all.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
Right, we got everybody more or less bottled up inside
this old building. Who are our characters?

Speaker 3 (47:52):
Okay, I'm not gonna remember all of them, but so
the main ones. I guess. You got William Sadler as
this guy who will find out his named breaker. He's
the drifter. You've got Jada Pinkett playing Jerlene, who is
she is somebody who I think formerly was in prison
and now she's working for the boarding house on work release.

(48:13):
Then you've got c h. Pounder who is playing Irene,
who is the owner proprietor of the boarding house. You've
got Cordelia who is a prostitute. You've got Wally who
is a mail carrier. You've got Thomas Hayden Church. I
don't remember his character's name, but he's the creep. He's
the guy roach right, Yeah, he's like the cook at

(48:34):
the diner who is just a nasty backstab and woman
Hayten creep. And then a few others.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
Well, you got uncle Wally in there.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
Oh did we not already talk about uncle We talked
about uncle Uncle Willie, Uncle Willy. That's that's that's stick Miller.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
And then and then we'll have the police and then
oh and there's a kid who shows up later, I think.

Speaker 2 (48:54):
But that's basically it. That's it.

Speaker 3 (48:55):
Yeah, Oh, okay, I thought I may have forgotten somebody.
There's a great scene when we're sort of just getting
to know all the characters. There's a scene of Breaker
eating this food on the table. It's just bright green slop.
It looks like the slime that they used to have
on Nickelodeon.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
Ye.

Speaker 3 (49:11):
So it's just bright green liquid that he's eating with
a spoon and he slathers it in ketchup.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
Yeah. Yeah, but he's happy to get it. He's just
he's clearly famished.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
Yeah. And then eventually the police arrive with Billy Zain
in response to a report of an attempted car theft.
I think that was William Sadler trying to jack the
car with his knife earlier. And as soon as Billy
Zay arrives and sees William Saddler in the sporting house,
it's just like this is like the you know, the
lights go off and he's sick in the cops on him.

(49:42):
They've got William Saddler in cuffs and Zayne is looking
for what Breaker stole, which is an antiquity of some kind.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
Yeah, and that's going to be our main plot element
here that we'll get to do in a bit. This
is the key. This is the thing that the demons
want and that the the mortals in the universe absolutely
cannot let fall into their hands.

Speaker 3 (50:04):
Right, And then Dick Miller sells him out. I felt betrayed.
They've got him in the cuffs there, they're like, where
is the thing? They've been looking around for it. I
think they come across Thomas Hayden Church in the middle
of some kind of sex act that involves him getting
hooked up to a car battery.

Speaker 2 (50:18):
Oh. Yeah, he has a great line, didn't He's like,
my nipples are burning.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
Yeah. I think he says they're smoking.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
Smoking, My nipples are smoking. Yeah, it's good. I hope
it's in his reel.

Speaker 3 (50:30):
Oh, it's got to be.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
But yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:32):
Eventually they've looked all over for this thing. They can't
find it. Then Dick Miller sells him out. He sells
out breaker. He's like, hey, actually the artifact is just
here under the table where everybody's standing. Yeah, and it's
some kind of key, But it's also like a bottle
filled with some liquid, and Billy Zay won't touch it.
It's clear something very significant is going on. What he

(50:54):
wants is for Dick Miller to pour out its contents
and then put it into a suitcase for him, and
Breaker tells him not to do it, and they argue
back and forth, and eventually the cops are like, ah,
the hell with it. Both of the cars from this
car crash were stolen. You're both going to jail and
we'll figure it out later. So they try to take
Sadler and Zaane off to jail. But then Zaye I

(51:16):
think the a switch flips and he comes off the
leash with an excellent punch right through the sheriff's head.
Through the sheriff's head Ricky O style.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
Yeah, except unlike Ricky Oh, he's got this wonderful awkwardness
of the head being stuck on his fist on his arm.
Seems like having to try and get that off of
his hand.

Speaker 3 (51:36):
It's pretty great, yeah, And then all hell breaks loose.
Billy fights to get the key, Breaker burns him with it,
so it's like a vampire with a crucifix, you know.
If you touch the key to his face, it seems
to burn him. And then Billy Zaying flies out the
window and then stands there while everybody watches him, and
he pierces his palm with a fingernail bleeds a bunch

(51:57):
of green blood all over the place. The drops of
his green blood on the earth make an army of
demons to attack the house.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
He throws a nice hissy fit first, though, there's a
there's a great but yeah. Then he starts summoning the monsters,
and man, if you if you weren't already on board
with this, once the monsters pop out in this film,
you're really good to go, because these are some great monsters. Again,
these are like they're They're unlike most monsters I've seen
in other films. They're like these ghastly gaunt grave walker

(52:27):
types but with also with the with the glowing green
eyes that we mentioned, but also like piercings in places,
but but not in like a punk sense, in a
like a seemingly like antique sense, like they're creatures of
another time. Yeahn you know, Yeah, so they have I
feel like they play against expectations in the of the
typical demon and zombie trope, like.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
Like the jewelry you might find in like an ancient
grave or something, you know, like ancient Egypt or something
who or something.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
Yeah, they have kind of a gin quality to them,
and they have a great silhouette to them. You know,
it's kind of like when you think of like having
a good logo, they say, well, it has to be
able to work in black and white. I mean you
think of like a iconic characters like Darth Vader, you
can recognize him by his silhouette, and these monsters cut
a really signature silhouette, which is key because they're often
just shot there. You see some great close ups of them,

(53:17):
but they're often just in the background, in the in
the shadows, kind of creeping about and all.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
Yeah, and that's great also because they provide a sort
of textural setting that really allows Billy Zaane to shine
because Billy Zain is the front man doing his uh,
doing his his funny stick. He's like a you know,
a burlesque comedian or something. And then he's got the
green eyed goblins all slinking around behind him to back
him up. They're his course line.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
Yeah. Absolutely. Now on the feature at one cool thing
they mentioned, I mentioned how like basically these are these
these outfits depend heavily on just body painting, like slender actors,
So there's a lot of like skin involved, and there's stilts.
But then they have an awesome prosth had it looks
kind of like a you know, demonic pickled pig or something.

(54:04):
And then they then they have this they're they're groin
and their their there there that area is covered up,
and they have these tails, uh, these like stunted tails
that wag and apparently those were radio controlled and the
actors had to stow the battery like high up between
their legs. So it was quite a demanding role a
you know, stilts battery between your leg big piece of

(54:26):
prosthetics over your head. But the end result looks tremendous.

Speaker 3 (54:30):
I totally agree. So so once these monsters are in
play and Billy zines outside trying to cause trouble, we've
got scenes of William Saddler running around the house trying
to seal up the openings, like seal up the doors
and windows with blood from this key. And then we
get flashbacks of the Crucifixion of Jesus yep, involving green

(54:51):
eyed demons and lightning strikes.

Speaker 2 (54:54):
Yeah yeah, and again they have a has an excellent
otherworldly feel to it, like this could be the Crucifixion
on an a world, which especially since it seems a
bit different, because I mean, some of you you ever
went to Sunday School and you know you've ever read
your Bible, You probably don't remember the hooded demons that
are showing up and chasing people around at the foot

(55:15):
of the cross, but it happens here.

Speaker 3 (55:17):
History is written by the victors, you know. The demons
lost that struggle, so they got written out of the story.
This is funny because it made me think about what
is the best Golgotha scene ever in a horror movie?
And another one that occurred to me is Layer of
the Whiteworm by Kim Russell, which is an awesomely weird
movie that we may have to cover on here someday.

Speaker 2 (55:38):
Oh yeah, yeah, that one has a good one. I
feel like maybe there's at least one other Kim Russell
film that has a crucifixion scene in it. Doesn't it
show up in His Last Devils? Well maybe in The Devils,
but also in The Altered States, right.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
Oh, the one where William Hurd is sort of playing R.
Gordon Wasson or maybe he's playing what's his name the
guy you did in as about.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
Oh John C. Lilly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that
one has a weird crucifixion in it. There's also an
excellent otherworldly crucifixion scene in the Ninth Configuration, the nineteen
eighty film directed by William Peter Bladdie and written by him,
based on one of his novels. Yeah, it's that one.
Who that's a weird film we could discuss, and it's
got some great performances in it.

Speaker 3 (56:30):
So after this part where the demons are set loose,
the rest of the movie you could say it becomes
less structured, I guess, because it's just sort of like
a you know, you get different sort of vignettes within
the supernatural demon siege, Like you get Billy Zane issuing
hallucinatory temptations to various characters in the boarding house, and

(56:52):
then often this temptation scene will be followed by demon
possession of the person, and then there will be attacks
by monsters, human attempting to escape and so forth, and
more flashbacks about the backstory of the key. We get
to see Breaker in World War One, it seems, looking
exactly the same. Age he's in the trenches. A buddy

(57:14):
of his gets killed somehow and is bleeding all over
the place, and the guy's like, now you are the
chosen one, and the I guess the memory of the
crucifixion of Jesus gets like downloaded into William Sadler's brain.

Speaker 2 (57:27):
Yeah, and he's now part of this lineage of immortals
that have to protect the key and carry it through time, right.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
And eventually Breaker has to explain this to all the
other characters and they're like, wow, that's interesting. You're the
chosen one across time and you've been alive since World
War One. And Thomas Hayden Church, who I just realized
earlier his initials are THHC. But anyway, he comes up.
So he's been a jerk the entire time so far.
He's been, you know, acting cowardly and cruel to others.

(57:56):
And after this story he comes up to a Breaker
and he's like, wow, I really admire what you did.
I was wrong about you. But then, of course, what
he's really trying to do is get Breaker to let
his guard down so he can double cross him, and
he swipes the key from him.

Speaker 2 (58:12):
Yeah, now he's swiped the key. Meanwhile, the temptations continue
because even though Billy's ain and his demon minions are
stuck outside for the most part, he can reach out
to your mind and tempt you last Temptation of Christ
style with something you want, And some of the these
make for some nice, fun little sequences. For instance, when

(58:34):
he's tempting Jada Pinkett's character, it's it's the this is
the sequence where it's like in it feels like it's
in a parking garage and there's this weird scene of
her face on a screen and they're like demon hands
on the other side pressing against it. And then when
that rips open, she's she sees this image of breakers

(58:54):
Breaker like being torn apart by the creatures of them
eating his entrails.

Speaker 3 (58:58):
Yeah, well he's I think Billy Zane's tempting her with
the idea that she that he could make her like
rich and famous and she'll see the world. Yeah, she'll
see the world. Oh, it's like it's like the vivid
you know, which they'll like to see the world. And
it seems Jada Pinkett really would like to see the world.
Like she's interested in this temptation, though she doesn't fall
for it. She's got the heroic constitution to resist the temptation.

(59:21):
I'm not sure what would that what would that saving
throw be?

Speaker 2 (59:24):
In D and D h I guess that would be
they'd be like a wisdom saving throw. Okay, so maybe
a charisma. I don't know, it depends how you play it.
Probably wisdom.

Speaker 3 (59:31):
She succeeds on the wisdom saving throw. She resists the temptation,
but what he's tempting her with is like, it's not
exactly clear, but it seems to suggest like, yeah, you
could have your face on the cover of magazines and
you could travel to all the capitals of the world
and see Rome and everything. Wouldn't you like that?

Speaker 2 (59:49):
Oh? And the whole time the grave dig is track
one eight hundred Suicide is playing, which is just a
great beat in the background.

Speaker 3 (59:55):
Yeah, that's an awesome song. I don't does it ever
get to the part with lyrics? I don't.

Speaker 2 (59:59):
I don't think they that much of it. Yeah, they
just use the intro. You got to be looking for
it to notice it.

Speaker 3 (01:00:03):
But yeah, that is a great beat. It does not
get to the part about confront an alligator let it
eat your raw.

Speaker 2 (01:00:11):
Ah man. But there are other temptation scenes as well, right.

Speaker 3 (01:00:14):
Oh, yeah, there's a bunch of them. There's the temptation
of Dick Miller is great because his is quite different.
His is a world of beautiful naked women offering him
bottles of scotch. And then he just sort of like
wanders through this crowd of ladies being like, try mine
and holds up but they're all holding identical bottles of scotch,
I think. And then he goes up maybe maybe Dick

(01:00:35):
Miller is just dedicated to one brand. I couldn't tell
what brand it was. They've got the labels turned away.
But then he goes up to a bar. And then
it turns out Billy Zain is the bartender in this
temptation dream and he so he's a friendly bartender who
offers him booze, but I think is also supposed to
be Hunter S. Thompson. Was I mistaken here?

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
I think you're right. It's very very much a Hunter
S Thompson. Look he has going on behind the bar there. Yeah,
and again it's it's it is Billy Zayane is an
evil genie from the Disney movie Aladdin here and in
it way works really well.

Speaker 3 (01:01:10):
I can't remember what Billy Zain says, maybe something about
the golf shoes, but it works. Oh but anyway, this
leads to, you know, as the standard sequence is somebody
has a temptation, they succumb to the temptation. They're like, yeah,
I want I want what you are putting down. Billy
Zain and Dick Miller obviously wants this, and so he
turns into a demon and attacks some of the characters.

(01:01:32):
I don't remember all who, but I think maybe he's
fighting with Jada Pinkett and with William Sadler, and somehow
his head gets cut off, and there's a great scene
where they, oh, the demons are vulnerable in their eyes.
The way you can put a demon down is to
like shoot it in the green eyeballs. And so the

(01:01:53):
way they stop Dick Miller's severed head from continually commanding
his body to attack them is one of the characters
grabs his head and shoves it into the antler of
a mounted stag.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
Yeah. Yeah, there's some great eye violence to the demons
in this film.

Speaker 3 (01:02:08):
Yeah. There's also a great scene where Billy Zain is
wheeling and dealing with Thomas Hayden Church because I remember
thhc is. He's been like, hey, I've got the key,
I stole it. You know, I'll give it to you
if you let me escape. And so they're they're talking
about their deal and Billy's ain is just walking on sunshine.
He is so light on his feet and frisky and exciting.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Yeah he is. It's another great scene and it's and
you know exactly what's going to happen, you know, and
it's it's delightful. This is a scene in which it's
it's like Tails from the Crypt classic again because you
have a horrible character that's gonna make making this choice.
You think he's gonna get away, but no, he's not
gonna get away with it because he's gonna be double
crossed by Billy Zaine. Of course, he barely makes it

(01:02:50):
down the stairs before he says, actually, I lied, You're
not gonna make it away safe, and all the demons
turn on Thomas Hayden Church and Terry's character to be.

Speaker 3 (01:03:00):
The next thing that was really funny was that there
is a scene of the next Temptation scene is of
the Kid Billy where he is turned into a violent
maniac by reading a copy of the Tales from the
Crypt comic book.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
I like that because on one hand it does it
is the idea of like the corrupting comic book, but
it also made me think. You know, with the adults,
Billy Zain's character, the Collector, he's like, what if I
offered you travel? What have I offered you all the
beautiful women and booze in the world. But for a kid,
he's like, what if I just literally turned you into
a bloodthirsty monster? Would you be down for that? And
the kid's like, yes, yes, I vote yes, Let's do

(01:03:35):
exactly that then, And that's what happens, pure honesty.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
I love it now. As the characters, it's the kind
of standard thing where in one of these supernatural fortress
siege movies where the characters are continually driven further and
further into retreat, like further back into the bailey or whatever.
And so at this point they end up retreating to
the attic, and at each point of retreat there's some
kind of battle that goes on, and we get some

(01:04:03):
chances for characterists to actually be like courageous and be heroes.
So Deputy Bob and Irene at one point, like the
suicide bomb, a bunch of the demons with a vestimate
out of grenades.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Yeah, they've been watching aliens?

Speaker 3 (01:04:18):
Where did they? Yes, they pull Aasquez and it's kind
of sweet.

Speaker 2 (01:04:22):
Yeah, yeah it is, and of course Breaker bites it
as well shortly thereafter.

Speaker 3 (01:04:26):
Yeah, he gets maimed. And then of course he's like, oh,
oh they got me, They got me. You got to
become the new Chosen One to Jada Pinkett and she's
like what but she I guess she like catches his
blood I think in the key, and it's just understood
that yep, from now on, she's just going to be
immortal and carrying this key around. But then then Billy

(01:04:49):
z Ain comes in for one final showdown with with
Jada and so, and I got to say, at the
beginning of the scene, he's got on sunglasses that make
him look like Riddick.

Speaker 2 (01:04:59):
Oh but kind of like ridic.

Speaker 3 (01:05:01):
Yeah wait what kind of ridic.

Speaker 2 (01:05:03):
Like pre Ritic? This would the Riddic didn't exist yet, right.

Speaker 3 (01:05:07):
Oh I guess not.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
Yeah, like maybe Vin Diesel eventually he saw Demon nine.
He's like that that's the look I'm going.

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
To steal exactly. No, I'm not saying they're imitating Ritic.
I'm just saying he does look like him.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
They look kind of like, yeah, almost like wrap around goggles.

Speaker 3 (01:05:22):
Yeah. But there's another temptation scene where I guess he's
trying once again. I think he's trying to convince Jeralene
to marry him. I didn't exactly follow what was going.

Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
Yeah, that was basically it's like, well, I've won at
this point, I'm going to kill you, but if I
could turn you instead, if I could, you know, if
you marry me, then I'm even more of a success
back home in the in the hells. So he's like,
I'm gonna I'm gonna shoot the moon. I'm going for it,
you know. He's he's feeling on top of it, and

(01:05:53):
he makes the offer.

Speaker 3 (01:05:54):
Yeah, and Billy's saying he is on broiler mode. In
this scene. He is like the energy is electric. And
there's a part where infernal lightning erupts out of his groin.
I don't know if that's explained why he's just been
like talking and then like lightning shoots out of his crotch.

Speaker 2 (01:06:12):
That was in the featurettes. It was mentioned that this
was Zaane's idea for the character, and Dickerson was like,
let's do it, let's roll with it, let's give it
a shot.

Speaker 3 (01:06:20):
Good choice. Yeah, And then there's a good climax that
involves Jada Pinkett the whole time that she somehow has
gotten William Sadler's blood in her mouth, and the whole
time Billy Zaane's like asking her, well, what do you say?
He's trying to get her to say something, and she won't.
And then it's revealed that, oh, she hasn't said anything
because she still has the blood in her mouth, the

(01:06:42):
blood of Christ, I believe somehow.

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):
Okay, so yeah, we can go ahead and talk about
this real quick. The idea is that this key with
the special glass container portion of it here, they it
was used to collect the blood of Christ at the crucifixion,
and it's like the rail myth. Yeah, yeah, and there's
still a little Jesus blood in there, but it's been
replenished with other people's blood, especially the blood of the

(01:07:05):
chosen Ones, over time. And so I'm not sure how
the genetics of that works out or if that's important
for holy blood, you know, hurting demons, but that's apparently
how it's supposed to.

Speaker 3 (01:07:15):
Work, right, And so she's got this blood in her mouth,
and what do you know, she spits it all over
Billy Zane's face and that that defeats him in the end.

Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
Yeah, great melt. He's a great death scene because he
melts a little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:07:27):
Then he turns into a puppet.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
He turns into a giant skeletal demon, and then he explodes.
They just do all the things, like the FX team
just they had no chill on this film. They're just yeah,
one hundred miles an hour the whole time.

Speaker 3 (01:07:41):
And so I guess we're just going to assume that
now Jada Pinkett is going to live for eighty years
or whatever until eventually she has to find the next
chosen One to put her blood into so they can
go on preventing Billy Zain from taking over the world.
Or I guess it's not Billy Zayne. I think he's destroyed.
There's just going to be a new collector from Hell
chasing her around.

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
Right, and we see him at the end. Yeah, because
she gets on a bus and when she gets on
she does the thing with the blood that's done throughout
the film where you form a seal that the demons
cannot cross. And then this other guy that has a
briefcase for the key, he sees it and he's like, no,
I'll wait on the next bus. And so the chase
continues and it potentially sets up a sequel that we

(01:08:24):
never got. But man, I think it would have been good,
would have been far preferable to Bordello of Blood, which
was the actual Tales from the Trip film to follow.

Speaker 3 (01:08:33):
I never saw Bordello of Blood, but I remember a
when I was in elementary school, a friend of mine
telling me about how his mom had a copy of
that movie on VHS, and I was like, I did
not know what Bordello meant, and I knew nothing of
Dennis Miller.

Speaker 2 (01:08:51):
I mean, yeah, well, yeah, it definitely has Dennis Miller
in it. I never saw that one. There was even
a third one that was I think is even less
worth seeing. I think it may have Tim Curry in it,
but it's like a New Orleans zombie kind of a thing.

Speaker 3 (01:09:07):
How could a movie with Tim Curry be not worth seeing.

Speaker 2 (01:09:11):
I don't know. It just doesn't it. I just don't.
It doesn't call out to me. Maybe other folks have
seen it and they can tell us how it is.
But I also understand that like some releases of it
didn't even have the Cryptkeeper sequences on it. They released
it as its own thing, and then other versions they
put the crypt Keeper back on. But it's also not
really top shelf Cryptkeeper puppetry going on. So it just

(01:09:32):
sounds it sounds like it would be sad to watch.
I'd rather stick with Demon Night and like the really
great tales from the Crypt episodes. Okay, now, in turn,
we've already talked to a good bit here about the
monsters and so forth. I guess it is worth noting
that we do have holy relics that are at least
alleged to contain the blood of Christ. I was looking

(01:09:53):
around a little bit. There are a couple of relics
of the Holy Blood. There's one in the Basilica of
Saint Andrea. There's one that at least was at some
point in Westminster in England. There's the relic of the
Precious Blood in Viegotten Abbey in Germany. So the idea
of this key containing the blood is it does seem

(01:10:14):
to be based on actual holy relics that allegedly contain
holy blood. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:10:20):
I think also this ties into the grail legend, like
the idea that at the death of Christ that Joseph
of Aramathea held a grail that caught the blood of
Jesus stripping from the cross, and that somehow later he
brought with him like containers of this blood to other places.
I think like that's part of the local Glastonbury legend

(01:10:40):
in Britain.

Speaker 2 (01:10:42):
Now. I don't know if any of these have actually
been used against demons though, but perhaps perhaps, Man, there's
so much they could have done with the sequel though,
you know, they could have had a thing where all right,
she's on the run as always, the demons are after
but then where does she wind up a genetics laboratory?
What do they want to do? They want to use
the precious blood in the key. They want to try
and clone Jesus or something, and then that becomes a

(01:11:04):
whole plot element.

Speaker 3 (01:11:05):
But then he'd be a mutant because he'd be like
part Jesus, but then also part William Sadler and part
Jada Pinkett.

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):
William Sadler is Jesus Christ in Demon Night two. There's
still time.

Speaker 3 (01:11:18):
There's still time, Ernest Dickerson, if you're listening, please make it.
I will watch it. I will. I will take all
my friends to see it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:26):
I will as well. All right, Well, before we close out,
I just want to I'll mention again that You can
rent or buy this one digitally most places these days.
But that twenty fifteen Blu ray release from Shout Factory
Scream Factory Import is really slick and it's loaded with
cool content. So if you're a Demon Night fan, that's
worth picking up.

Speaker 3 (01:11:46):
If you're a demon Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:47):
We rented our copy from Video Drum, the last video
store here in Atlanta, Georgia. So if you live in Atlanta,
go check out Videodrum. It's great. And if you don't,
look them up online because you can buy some of
their cool merch.

Speaker 3 (01:11:59):
Oh yeah, they got great T shirts and stuff. Oh
I was gonna say that the T shirt I'm wearing
right now is one of theirs. It's not, but it
could be. It's of their style.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
Oh oh oh, I see it. It says her Zog
and then it has the Danzig logo.

Speaker 3 (01:12:15):
Nice Rachel got me this one?

Speaker 2 (01:12:19):
All right? Well, anything else we need to say about
Demon Night before we close the crypt down this one?

Speaker 3 (01:12:25):
I think that wraps it up, but I just say again,
great fun.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
Yeah. Yeah, as always, we'd love to hear from everyone
out there. Do you have memories of seeing this when
it came out? We're discovering it later on. Do you
have particular episodes of Tales from the Crypt that were
your favorite, We'd love to hear from you about that
as well, or just any of the other elements in
this be it Holy Blood or really cool demons. It's
all on the table. Dick Miller movies that we should

(01:12:50):
add to the list. Let us know. In the meantime,
if you want to check out other episodes of Weird
House Cinema, it publishes every Friday in the Stuff to
Blow Your Mind podcast feed. Also, I try to put
up a blog post about the Weird House series at
Samouda music dot com. That's sem Uta music dot com.

(01:13:11):
It's just my own personal blog. We don't have anywhere
else to put blog type content these days, so I'm
just slapping it up over there.

Speaker 3 (01:13:17):
Long. May you slap blogging and slapping huge Thanks as
always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:13:42):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Weirdhouse Cinema: Demon Knight