The legend of DeWitt Lee, Arizona's mysterious homegrown double-threat

DeWitt Lee in The Legend of Jedediah Carver (1976)

I'm a great fan of the output of Mill Creek Entertainment. They're the people behind those ultra-budget DVD sets you'll sometimes find in a bin at Walgreens or Menards and other places you don't generally think of as entertainment outlets, the ones with names like "50 Drive-In Classics" or "Flying Fists of Kung-Fu" or "John Wayne: Western Hero." These collections generally consist of forgotten films of bygone eras whose distribution rights can be had for cheap. While these packs almost always contain a few underrated gems, for the most part they're low-quality prints of equally low-quality movies. That being one of my favorite genres of cinema, they're tailor-made for creeps like me.

One of my favorite things to do with a Mill Creek set is to play a kind of movie roulette. I reach into the case and pull out a disc at random, pop it in my DVD player, and watch whatever comes up while I work out on my basement elliptical. That's how I came to watch Apache Blood, a 1975 film included on Mill Creek's "A Fistful of Bullets" spaghetti western collection. As it turns out, Apache Blood is not a spaghetti western at all, but rather an Old West survival story filmed in the deserts of Arizona, written by and starring a man by the name of DeWitt Lee. In the couple of weeks since I viewed Apache Blood, DeWitt Lee has occupied an ever-growing portion of my thoughts.

Apache Blood is not one of the aforementioned underrated gems. It's a cheaply made, thoroughly familiar, verrrrrry slow-moving story of a white tracker who gets mauled by a bear, left for dead by his Army buddies, and hunted across the desert by a vengeance-minded Apache warrior. (It's apparently taken from the same source material as The Revenant, which I haven't seen because I devote my time to watching things like Apache Blood.) The only notable name in the cast other than Lee is Ray Danton, a solid character actor who flirted with leading-man status in the early '60s. Here he's tasked with a non-speaking and racially problematic role as the titular Apache. Unsurprisingly, Danton retired from acting after this film and moved into a steady career as a TV director.

DeWitt Lee rises from his grave in Apache Blood (1975)

Even though it's decidedly not a very good film, Apache Blood is just the kind of regionally produced, shoestring-budgeted, handmade project that I hold dear. This was clearly a labor of love, a notion that was reinforced when I did a little research and found that DeWitt Lee followed it up with a 1976 film called The Legend of Jedediah Carver that seemed to have a near-identical plot. Lee, it seems, really wanted to tell the story of a dude barely surviving in the desert.

The Legend of Jedediah Carver is even more obscure than Apache Blood (TMDB didn't even have a listing for it until I created one), but I was able to track it down on YouTube. As it turns out, it's pretty close to a scene-for-scene remake with a new cast, save for Lee in the title role. The most noticeable differences are a larger (though still scanty) budget and DeWitt Lee replacing Vern Piehl in the director's chair. It isn't saying a whole lot, but Lee proves a much more technically skilled director than the barely competent Piehl. Jedediah Carver is decidedly the better-made film, but its (very) comparative slickness makes it slightly less engaging for a trash cinema lover such as myself.

Having dug this far, I was more or less compelled to keep the ball rolling by watching Ransom Money, a 1970 thriller that is the only other film credit I've found for DeWitt Lee. It's the only one of the three where Lee wears just one hat, making his directorial debut while neither writing nor acting. It's also the most star-powered of his three features, with aging Oscar-winner Broderick Crawford headlining as a legendary and grumpy detective called in to investigate the kidnapping of a wealthy widow's young son from the Grand Canyon. Future Maytag man and WKRP star Gordon Jump plays the Phoenix detective heading up the search, which is complicated by the kidnapper's godlike command of cutting edge technology.

Gordon Jump and Broderick Crawford in Ransom Money (1970)

Ransom Money is quite watchable but pretty dumb, and the tiny bit of information I've found about it online suggests that it was a bit of a bummer for DeWitt Lee. One unsubstantiated anecdote claims that Broderick Crawford was so displeased with his experience on the shoot that he quit mid-filming. (That would explain why his character is abruptly killed off in an off-screen car accident late in the movie.) Still, Lee comes off as a competent director with a good feel for his Southwestern surroundings. Lord knows I've come across plenty of far worse directors with far better-known bodies of work.

With Ransom Money, I'd reached the end of the DeWitt Lee filmography, at least according to every database I've been able to find. I did, however, unearth a different branch of his trail.

Turns out film wasn't DeWitt Lee's only artistic avenue. He released at least two Country-Western singles in the 1960s. The first, from 1960, features a blatant but quite enjoyable knock-off of "16 Tons" called "Poor Man," backed with a goofy little party tune called "How Nice." Lee's second single, from 1967, goes a little more straitlaced with the mournful cowboy ballad "Six White Horses" (not to be confused with Tommy Cash's 1970 hit of the same name) backed with a folk-tinged number called "Call Me Mister Blue." None of these songs is groundbreaking stuff, but they're all solid, workmanlike entries in the '60s country canon.



These singles are clearly the work of the same DeWitt Lee. I can tell this not only because they were released on Arizona-based labels and maintain a similar fascination with Western themes, but also because "How Nice" pops up on a car radio in Ransom Money. As a great fan of low-budget directors slipping plugs for their other work into their movies, I gotta love that hustle.

Beyond those three films and two singles, the legend of DeWitt Lee seems to be enveloped in total obscurity. Did he retire from filmmaking after Jedediah Carver? Did he do more creative work under a different name? Is he still living? Still obsessed with desert survival stories? Did he see The Revenant? I don't have answers to any of these questions, and I may never.

Regardless, I'm glad that I've been able to delve into his work over the past month. (Heck, at this point I may be the world's leading authority on the DeWitt Lee canon.) While it's true that I wouldn't recommend his movies to 99% of my social circle, and his music is probably of interest to Classic Country heads only, I cherish both bodies of work. I'm endlessly impressed with artists working outside of the system with modest means who manage to get their visions realized. Whatever your take on their quality, DeWitt Lee made three feature films and at least four songs on his home turf, and they're all still in some form of circulation today. That's something on which to hang one's hat.  I'm thrilled that I could bear witness to that legacy. I live for this kind of thing.

The MST3Konundrum: A trash film aficionado at the crossroads

I can’t say for certain when I first became a fan of “bad” movies. There were a lot of potential gateways back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, from the vintage Bela Lugosi clips spliced into Muppet Babies to the release of Tim Burton’s Ed Wood to the sci-fi sampling of bands like Man or Astroman? Heck, even Seinfeld had an early plotline about a screening of Plan 9 from Outer Space. But the real keystone for me and most of my generation was Mystery Science Theater 3000, or as it was frequently known at the time, “That cable show where the little shadow guys on the spaceship make fun of old movies.”

My family didn’t have cable, so MST3K was something of a forbidden fruit to be gobbled up on trips to my grandparents’ house or in stolen moments in friends’ TV rooms. When Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie unexpectedly turned up for a brief engagement at a movie theater 45 miles from my house, I cleared my weekend schedule and made it to three out of four late-night screenings. I was excited moving into my college dorm because I’d finally have a cable hook-up on which to watch MST3K, then crushed when I discovered my college’s cable package didn’t include the Sci-Fi channel.

I’ve always been passionate about my favorite art, but not many shows spurred me to that kind of dedication. What was it about MST3K that inspired such fervor? Well, for one thing, it was funny as heck. It was a kind of funny I’d never seen on TV before, yet it seemed oddly familiar. When I learned that MST3K was a Minnesota production, it all made sense. On its surface the sense of humor embodied by Joel Hodgson and the show’s writers was gentle, laconic and borderline corny, but concealed just beneath the surface was the melancholy acidity of a darkness that dared not speak its name. That was the same Minnesota sensibility I’d been drinking in at family gatherings my entire life. It was amazing to see it channeled into something so strange and singular and broadcast for an international audience.

It was the comedy that drew me into MST3K in the first place, but it didn’t take long for me to develop an appreciation for the movies that made the whole thing possible. Much like the sense of humor, the movies mocked by the crew were unlike anything else on my television. MST3K was my first exposure to the weird world of low-budget filmmakers like Bert I. Gordon, Coleman Francis and even Roger Corman. The La Crosse, Wisconsin area didn’t have a “midnight movie” host like Svengoolie, but even if it had, the MST3K repertoire went beyond the usual public domain monster movies and mad scientists, pulling in Italian apocalypsploitation, Japanese kaiju, educational film strips, James Bond knock-offs, biker flicks, kiddie Christmas movies and much more.

At some point I realized I was getting as much pleasure out of the movies themselves as I was from the riffing. Eventually that led me to start seeking out “bad” movies on my own. At my current stage in life, a solid 90% of my cinema intake is stuff that the average viewer would understandably shut off five minutes in. In the past couple of years, I’ve discovered a number of groups of like-minded people both online and in real life. It’s been a lot of fun swapping trash titles with oddballs on Letterboxd, keeping tabs on the Weird Wednesday lineup at Alamo Drafthouse and ducking into my local Trash Film Debauchery and Tape Freaks screenings. As I’ve gotten to know more of these z-movie devotees, I’ve discovered a curious phenomenon: quite a few of them hate MST3K.

I have to admit, I sort of get where they’re coming from. If you’re a fan of something, it’s understandable that you’d resent it being known primarily as the butt of a joke shared by thousands of philistines. In a particularly heartfelt review, for example, Letterboxd user pd187 declares Coleman Francis’s much-maligned The Beast of Yucca Flats “evocative desert noir” that’s “close to a masterpiece for real” before concluding that “mystery science theater is garbage for idiots.” My pal Joe, a sometime MST3K fan and as dedicated a cinephile as I know, recently punctuated a rave review of Rondo Hatton’s The Brute Man with “I don’t know what the inhabitants of the Satellite of Love had to say about this movie and I don’t want to know.”

I haven’t seen The Beast of Yucca Flats or The Brute Man minus the riffing, but I do appreciate many if not most MST3K targets on their own terms. Even the legendarily bad Manos: The Hands of Fate stands as a uniquely realized piece of outsider art. If someone knocked, say, Gamera or Bloodlust or The Crawling Eye as objectively bad films in private conversation, I would be quick to leap to their defense. Yet somehow, I don’t have a problem with them being lampooned on MST3K. I think that’s largely because I sense a genuine affection behind the mockery.

The invective hurled by Joel, Mike, Tom and Crow, especially in the show’s Comedy Central years, feels rooted in an appreciation of the oddness and ambition that got these movies made. You don’t come up with a sketch like “Peter Graves at the University of Minnesota” if you don’t love Peter Graves movies on at least some level. The sheer breadth of knowledge that went into the average episode of MST3K, with non-stop references to pop culture history, scientific ephemera and barely scrutable in-jokes, pegs it as a labor of love.

Still, I’ll acknowledge there are some legitimate knocks to be made against the show’s handling of its movies. Probably the biggest is the editing. Even though the show aired in a two-hour block, making time for commercial breaks, host segments and short films usually meant that the feature’s run-time was trimmed down considerably. In some cases that was arguably doing the movies a service - if you’re not a regular viewer of trash cinema, you have no idea how much mind-numbing padding got stuffed into the movies of the drive-in era. Often, though, that meant cutting material that might be important to the film. Most notoriously, the MST3K version of The Sidehackers deleted a brutal rape and murder scene that was the catalyst for everything else that happened in the movie. It feels somewhat dishonest to mock a movie’s incoherence when you’ve actively made it less coherent.

And then there’s the meanness critique. As much as I think MST3K originated from a place of love, sometimes the barbs got pretty harsh. There are multiple accounts of the Satellite of Love crew drawing the ire of their riff targets. It’s one thing to hear possibly apocryphal stories about big fish like producer Sandy Frank or actor Joe Don Baker grumbling about being ill-treated by TV puppets, quite another to learn about the genuine hurt feelings at a cast screening of MST3K’s take on the homemade dorkery of Time Chasers. Kevin Murphy says no less an icon of empathy than Kurt Vonnegut once gently upbraided him for belittling the efforts of artists just trying to do their best.

I absolutely don’t want to start yet another Joel vs. Mike argument (for the record, I prefer Joel by an inconsequential margin), but I do feel like the show got meaner once Mike moved from the writer’s room into the host’s jumpsuit. As I said before, even when he bared his sardonic teeth, Joel always gave the impression of being a genuine fan of these films. Mike, on the other hand, seemed more interested in putting them in their place. It’s no accident that the motto of Mike’s post-MST3K project Rifftrax is “Because some movies have it coming.” I hold that Michael J. Nelson is the most purely funny person ever involved with Mystery Science Theater, but having read his Movie Megacheese book, I came away with the impression that the guy just doesn’t much like movies unless they’re Jackie Chan vehicles or Roadhouse.

To me, the difference between Joel and Mike is the difference between gently chuckling at a sad-sack friend and pointing and laughing at the neighborhood weirdo. I can certainly see why you’d take issue with that, especially if you happen to be fond of that weirdo. I know I’ve cringed when Rifftrax has taken on movies I genuinely dig, like Death Promise or Attack of the Puppet People. On the other hand, some of the films pilloried on MST3K come awfully close to being objectively bad. Watching The Creeping Terror on its own is a painful slog (although I still have a certain affection for it), and I don’t know if I could even bring myself to attempt the confounding mess of Monster a-Go Go un-riffed. There’s almost zero artistry to a dreary, uninspired Jaws cash-in like Devil Fish, but Mike and his robot friends manage to mine whatever fun there is in the thing.

As a genuine lover of low-grade cinema, I think it’s possible to appreciate both the films and the mockery thereof. I may enjoy the heck out of something like Beginning of the End, but I can’t pretend there’s nothing funny about Bert I. Gordon attempting to pass off grasshoppers crawling across a Sears Tower postcard as a giant insect attack on downtown Chicago. And then there’s that gateway effect I mentioned earlier. Given my general proclivities, I probably would have stumbled into the world of trash cinema sooner or later, but MST3K gave me an easier in-road than I ever would have found poking around the dustier corners of my local video shop.

A fair number of the movies spotlighted on the show would likely have remained in obscurity if not for the exposure they got from their MST3K roastings. Perhaps movies like Manos and Pod People and Space Mutiny would have found tiny cult audiences on their own, but they certainly wouldn’t have become the iconic items they are today. And somewhere down the line, we cross over from laughing at these films to laughing with them. Ask any MST3K fan for an opinion on Zap Rowsdower, the mullet-sporting, denim-draped anti-hero of The Final Sacrifice, and you’ll get not scorn but genuine affection. We love Rowsdower in all his bizarre Canadian glory. Heck, we even put him on our t-shirts. Even the MST3K haters would have to admit that’s a far better fate than languishing unwatched and unloved in the VHS bin of some resale shop.

The four most Minnesotan moments in 'Fargo'

When folks from other parts of the country learn I live in Minnesota, they usually ask three things: 1) Does it really get that cold there? 2) Do you know Prince? 3) Is it just like Fargo? The answers are, of course, 1) Yes. 2) No. 3) Sorta. The Coen brothers’ classic isn’t a documentary by any means, but it gets a lot of things exactly right.

"Well, that don't sound like too good a deal for him, then." 

I know quite a few Minnesotans who resent Fargo because “we don’t really talk like that.” It’s true that some of the accents are far broader than you’ll usually hear in the Twin Cities metro region, but some are so spot-on that all is forgiven. No performance is more Minnesotan than Bain Boehlke as the deadpan Mr. Mora, the bartender who takes a break from shoveling to tip the cops off to a funny-looking guy “goin’ crazy out dere at da lake.”  My mom’s family is from Coon Lake, a rural community about 30 miles north of Saint Paul. If one of her uncles had ever been a vital witness in a murder case, the police interview would have sounded almost exactly like this.

Good Company

Steve and Sharon Edelman are members of the Minnesota Broadcasting Hall of Fame for good reason. Their dopey, cheery chat show Good Company was a local institution throughout the ‘80s, an oasis of gentle good-nature in the desert of daytime TV depravity. In other words, it’s exactly what a suburban housewife like Jean Lundegaard would be chuckling softly at over her knitting on a snowy weekday afternoon.

“It’s always more!”

The most unsung hero of the Fargo ensemble is Gary Houston as the frustrated customer trying to cut through Jerry Lundegaard’s car dealer double-speak. He embodies Minnesota Nice stretched to its breaking point. Everything about his delivery of “You lied to me, Mr. Lundegaard. You’re a bald-faced liar. A… fffucking liar!” is Minnesotan to the core. As angry as he is, he still addresses Jerry as “Mr. Lundegaard” in a show of respect for his position, and of disappointment that Jerry isn’t earning that respect. And then there’s that brief pause. That split second of silence tells us that this is a guy who never curses. Even here, in a situation that obviously calls for it, he has to psych himself up before pulling out the big guns. (Jerry has a point, though. In a Minnesota winter, you’re gonna want the Tru-Coat.)

Jerry’s frozen meltdown

Granted, Jerry is venting frustration with something a little bigger than a Minnesota winter here. Still, there’s not a motorist in the upper Midwest who can’t sympathize with this scene. The misery of chopping away at a thick-caked windshield, knowing that the immediate reward for your labor will be a soul-killing commute down ice-slicked highways, is enough to make anybody flip out. What makes this scene quintessentially Minnesotan, though, is Jerry’s follow-up to his brief tantrum. He picks up the scraper, collects himself and gets back to the loathsome task at hand. That’s what you do in these parts, mainly because it’s all you can do.

Johnny Cash: Torturer – “Five Minutes to Live” and the Maniac in Black

Back in the days before at-home internet access was the standard and IMDb topped every cinephile’s bookmarks list, I was an avid user of the Videohound Golden Movie Retriever, an annually published compendium of films available for home video viewing. As a voracious young movie buff and aspiring critic, I’d spend entire evenings poring over and memorizing the casts, directors and capsule descriptions of thousands of films. I studied the 1998 edition harder than I ever did any schoolbook. Eventually, I could have my pal Joel flip to any page and call out a random title, and 90% of the time I could tell him the plot and principal cast.

That encyclopedic knowledge came in handy when I browsed the racks at my local video store, but it also made me realize of the shop’s limitations. Videohound clued me in to dozens of intriguing-sounding titles that were simply unavailable in most of the outlets I frequented. Those obscure objects of desire ranged from trash like The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! to artsy fare like Alex in Wonderland to the mellifluously titled Spaghetti Western You’re Jinxed, Friend. You’ve Met Sacramento.

One forgotten film loomed above the rest on my must-see list, a low-budget crime flick from 1961 called Door-to-Door Maniac. That’s an indisputably great title, but that wasn’t the primary reason I wanted to track it down. That honor went to the actor playing the titular role: none other than the great Johnny Cash. The title, the star and Videohound’s damning bone-and-a-half rating made me believe that this was a movie I needed to see forthwith. Back in 1998, however, that was easier said than done.

Twelve years later, I finally fished a copy of Door-to-Door Maniac (presented under its less exciting, if more accurate, original title of Five Minutes to Live) out of the Cult Films section at my local Cheapo Discs. I don’t generally buy movies sight-unseen, but I reckoned I couldn’t really go wrong for eight bucks. I reckoned right.

On its surface, Five Minutes to Live is a grimy but not especially remarkable movie. It’s the story of the Wilsons, a bland small-town family with a few skeletons in the closet. Dad (Donald Woods) is prone to weekday hangovers and is having what looks to be an exceptionally chaste affair with a matronly neighbor. Mom (Cay Forrester, who also wrote the screenplay) buries her discontent under a blanket of passive-aggressive over-involvement with her women’s club. Junior (Ron Howard) channels his rage into a shrill series of precocious wisecracks and plots to one day torment humanity by making a string of grotesque, soulless, mega-budget movies.

These folks are so relentlessly unpleasant that it’s much easier to root for the purported villains, a smooth talker named Fred Dorella (Vic Tayback, looking especially large-faced) and a psychotic fugitive from New Jersey (!) called Johnny Cabot (Mr. Cash). Dorella has hatched a plan to knock over the local bank without pulling a stick-up: Cabot worms his way into the Wilson house and holds Mrs. Wilson hostage. Meanwhile, Dorella calmly orders her bank vice president husband to hand over $70,000 or his wife has five minutes to live. (Hey, that’s the name of the show!)

What follows is sort of an early ‘60s take on the techno thriller, with the perils and foibles of person-to-person calling at the center. As robbers, solicitors and nosy neighbors play a deadly game of phone tag, Cabot entertains himself by smashing Mrs. Wilson’s precious knick-knacks and torturing her emotionally, physically and possibly even sexually (the latter is only implied – this is a sleazy movie, sure, but it’s still 1961). Ultimately, it’s not a perfect B-movie – the ending is a cop-out that lets Dad off way too easy – but it’s sure as hell a memorable one.



It’s the Cabot character and Cash’s performance that establish Five Minutes to Live as something special. Forrester’s screenplay is surprisingly slimy, especially coming from a female writer of her time. It doesn’t try to pawn off a neutered, watered-down villain like many products of the era would. Within the first ten minutes, we see Cabot machine-gun a cop and shoot an unarmed woman in cold blood. This is a violent, remorseless and sadistic guy, and Johnny Cash is fully up to the part.

The cinematic vaults of the '50s and '60s are lousy with half-assed vanity projects for the era's pop stars, but this part bears little resemblance to Mel Torme’s frog-faced hood in Girls' Town or Roy Orbison's weirdness in The Fastest Guitar Alive. Sure, Cash is saddled with singing a tie-in title tune, but he makes it into a bad-ass meditation on evil and existence. In several chilling scenes, he taunts Mrs. Wilson with the song, looming close, strumming softly and reminding her she’s down to her last five minutes. It’s a brutal, muscular performance that sometimes goes over the top, but never egregiously so. There’s every reason to think it could have been a stepping stone to a long career of playing celluloid heavies for the Man in Black, had he chosen to take that route.



So how come nobody’s heard of this movie? It’s hard to say. My best guess is that Cash wasn’t particularly proud of Five Minutes to Live, not because of his performance, but because of who he was at the time. When Johnny Cash died in 2003, the few retrospectives that even mentioned his acting career focused on his '70s and '80s output, which ranged from half-respectable Westerns to made-for-TV garbage. In those later films (not to mention his prime-time variety show), a clean-and-sober Cash played variations on his somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘70s “outlaw” persona. Five Minutes to Live, on the other hand, captured him at his pill-addled worst. The Johnny Cash of 1961 was a man of many demons, and they’re all right there on the screen. Later on, Rick Rubin helped him embrace his innate darkness while still walking the line, but it’s not too shocking that Cash would prefer that this documentation of his ugliest days stay buried.

Ordinarily, I’m all in favor of respecting a dead man’s wishes. In this case, though, the ongoing obscurity of Five Minutes to Live does a disservice to lovers of Johnny Cash and trash cinema. This movie needs to become a full-on cult classic post-haste. I encourage you to spread the word. After all, not everyone has time to sit around memorizing Videohound guides.

You can watch the entirety of Five Minutes to Live right here. You should do so. Right now. Come on. It isn’t very long.

"Confessions of a video virgin" or "What's in the boooox?"

For someone who grew up to be a fairly devoted cinephile, I was a pretty sheltered kid. I grew up in the country, in a converted grain barn half a mile from the nearest paved road. We got four, sometimes five channels on our fuzzy 19-inch TV, depending on the weather. (Even if we’d had the money for cable, I don’t think our local provider delivered that far out.) We didn’t own a VCR until my great uncle gave us a hand-me-down RCA behemoth when I was around 12. Before that, we’d occasionally rent a video player and a stack of movies as a weekend treat. My selection was pretty limited, as my parents were very dutiful about keeping my brother and me on a righteous path and protecting us from the uglier side of the entertainment industry. There were a lot of re-watchings of the Star Wars trilogy, Yellow Submarine and old Laurel & Hardy shorts.

The point I’m very gradually getting to is that I didn’t see horror movies as a kid. The closest I came was when the local Fox affiliate showed a week’s worth of those Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy/Frankenstein/The Invisible Man movies one summer, but there wasn’t much resembling genuine scares in those. I didn’t see a bona fide horror film until my fifth grade field trip to Washington, D.C., when someone played the not particularly terrifying The Lost Boys on the bus-wide video system.

You’d think that this combination of protective parenting and backwoods exile would have kept me ignorant of the horrors of Hollywood. Quite the opposite, actually. In the grand childhood tradition of yearning for that which is forbidden, I became obsessed with horror movie video boxes. Every time we took a trip to the video shop or the grocery store, I couldn't help myself from lingering in the horror section, where out-of-context imagery from all sorts of '80s trash played hell with my fragile, Christian psyche. I had no idea what the actual movies were like – and I had no real desire to find out – but there was more than enough evil stuff going on on the covers to keep me wide awake at night, listening to the coyotes howl in the valley (seriously, we were hill people).

I was reminded of all of my video box nemeses recently when The AV Club ran a Halloween feature on “Entertainment that terrified us.” That inspired me to seek out some of the old nightmare fuel and see just how much of the terror holds up. I was plagued by dozens and dozens of covers back in the day, but these are a few that stand out as the worst offenders.

House


I think what got me about this one was the ambiguity of it. Whose severed hand was that? What business did it have with the residents of the titular house? How the hell did it float like that? I lost a lot of sleep coming up with answers to all of those questions. It didn’t help any that the artwork reminded me of the illustrations in those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, another reliable source of middle-of-the-night terror. The dangling veins and tendons made me look down at my own skinny wrists and reflect on how fragile a thing the human body really was.

Current take: I’ve never seen House, but looking back, it seems silly to have been scared of anything that prominently featured George Wendt.

The Nightmare on Elm Street movies


I think most of my classmates had similarly sheltered existences, but in a school as small as Leon Elementary (Fewer than 100 students, grades 1-6), pretty much everything is a community experience. Just the images of Freddy Krueger’s claws and scars would have been enough to freak me out, but mixing them with Brian Brooks’ vivid descriptions of Freddy’s various eviscerations created a potent cocktail of dread.

Current take: I’ve seen a few of these as a grown-up. They’re pretty fun, really. Wes Craven at the top of his game can craft a damned entertaining horror flick, and Robert Englund’s performance as Freddy is deservedly iconic.

Firestarter


I really couldn’t tell you what disturbed me so much about this cover. There’s nothing inherently scary about it. For some reason, though, I found the image of little Drew Barrymore glaring intensely while some sort of inferno erupts behind her deeply unnerving. Obviously, something terrible has happened to push her to this point, and whatever she’s doing is going to lead to even worse things. I know some kids would have found the idea of a girl their own age being able to wreak havoc on the adult world exciting and liberating. Me, I never got the whole resentment of grown-ups shtick. Grown-ups made my meals, got me to school and kept me safe from the evils of the world. Why would I want to give that up?

Current take: I caught Firestarter on TV a while back. There was nothing to be afraid of – it’s really more of a thriller than a horror film. I was surprised at how much I liked it. I might even call it the best performance of Drew’s career.

Basket Case


Once, when I was around eight or nine, we were at my parents’ friends’ house and I stumbled upon their teenage son’s stash of comic books. The first story I flipped to involved a soldier waking up from surgery to discover that his arms and legs had been amputated. There was a full-page splash panel of the terrified man reaching his bandaged stumps up to the ceiling and screaming, “What did you do to me? I’m a BASKET CASE!” I shut the comic right there and went home that day with a shiny new disturbing image to worm around in my brain. From then on, the Basket Case box was a double-whammy for me. I was mortified both by the slimy claw creeping out of that wicker basket and by flashbacks to that unfortunate soldier in some unknown ‘80s horror comic.

Current take: I recently watched Basket Case and rather loved it. It’s a perfectly sleazy little slab of exploitation cinema, the way mama used to make it.

Mother’s Day


OK, this one still makes me shiver a little bit. There’s something about the combination of that grinning, skull-faced old lady, her freakish sons and the frozen scream on the lips of that decapitated head that moves beyond horror and into the realm of pure sadism. This one didn’t scare me so much as fill me with an existential dread. I’d heard and read enough stories about real-life serial killers to know that this kind of evil did exist in the world. I was still at the age of wanting to believe in the inherent goodness of humanity, and the smirking cruelty of this video box called that into question.

Current take: From what I’ve heard about Mother’s Day – it was one of my wife’s traumatic childhood movies – it’s every bit as brutal as I’d imagined it. I like a good horror film, but I don’t take kindly to rape and torture.

Xtro


Why was Xtro my number one video box bogeyman? It’s hard to say. Looking at it now, it’s by far the cheesiest of any of these images – just a badly drawn alien juxtaposed with a serious-faced little boy. I think what really got to me was that tagline. I interpreted that to mean that the boy on the box was going to slowly turn into the abomination behind him. There was something about unholy transformations that shook me to my very core. I was also frightened by the pull quote from Twilight Zone Magazine (seriously) about Xtro making xenophobes of us all. Not knowing the definition of “xenophobe,” I used context clues to surmise, ironically enough, that it was the name of an alien race. The notion of everyone I knew and loved being transformed into slathering space monsters invoked terror on par with the Book of Revelations for me.

Current take: I’ve never seen Xtro – I’m not even sure if it’s available on DVD – but I’ve heard it’s pretty laughable. I kind of want to watch it and I kind of don’t. I’m pretty sure the real thing wouldn’t live up to my nightmare visions, and some part of me wants to preserve my boyhood fear. In a weird way, it’s sort of comforting.

"Requiem for a wasteland" or "There's cheese in them thar hills"

From the steaming jungle of Fitzcarraldo to the snowy wasteland of Fargo, an impressive shooting location has been a vital element of many a classic movie. Great locations have also been responsible for classing up any number of unremarkable movies. Just look at the countless no-budget Westerns shot in Arizona’s monument valley and the mountain country of Italy. It’s a perfectly logical train of thought: If the best we can offer our audience is Lee Van Cleef shooting it out with badly dubbed Italian extras, we may as well give them something nice to look at in the background.

That’s all well and good, but I’ve always had a soft spot for filmmakers who lacked the budget or the motivation to move out of their own backyard. I’m talking about movies shot in my all-time favorite location: the arid hills outside of Los Angeles.

Now, I’ll admit that I’m a biased Midwestern boy who’s partial to verdant pastures and green, rolling valleys. I’ve seen quite a few places and still rank Western Wisconsin among the loveliest I’ve laid eyes on. That said, I’ve also been to the arid hills outside of Los Angeles. They’re not without their charms, but there is very little about the arid hills outside of Los Angeles that I would describe as especially scenic or beautiful. And yet, countless directors of the ‘50s and ‘60s dragged their barely paid crews and barely verbal actors out to the arid hills outside of Los Angeles time and time again. Guys like Roger Corman and Bert I. Gordon were such regulars out in those hills that the local woodland creatures started following them around, Snow White-style. (Though in Gordon’s case, the animals may just have been angling for future starring roles.)

Obviously, the major benefit to shooting in these hills was cost-effectiveness. They’re close enough to Hollywood that budget-minded directors could shoot all their location shots in one afternoon and be home in time for happy hour without burning so much as a full tank of gas. If you were shooting a cheap drive-in feature focused on bikers, monsters, hippies, aliens or any combination thereof, those grungy hills offered everything you needed. Also, they covered enough ground that nobody was likely to hassle you about permits and other such trivialities.

It’s also a relatively versatile landscape. The tall grass, sparse forests and rocky slopes and occasional creek beds are actually fairly distinctive, but they make a barely passable substitute for just about any terrain. I’ve seen those hills stand in for everything from prehistoric worlds to post-apocalyptic landscapes, to varying degrees of believability. (Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Mike Nelson hilariously pointed out “the famous Illinois Mountains” in Gordon’s Beginning of the End.) They’re like a mediocre impressionist – you never forget it’s him doing the voices, but you can at least sort of tell what he’s going for.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a new cheapie shot out in that terrain. I suspect that has a lot to do with the rise of affordable filmmaking tools and the decline of in-theater sleaze. Today, just about any upstart with a digital video camera and a limited distribution model can crank out a straight-to-DVD monster movie full of digitally rendered effects and backgrounds. Shooting in one’s own backyard is easier than ever, and industry competition has gotten so heated that making a legit film in California is often an expensive proposition, even in the arid hills outside of Los Angeles.

In a way, that’s a shame, because it feels like we’ve lost an important element of low-budget filmmaking. But it also makes me kind of happy to know that this terrain will be forever tied to a specific age and a distinctive kind of movie. Hiking through Topanga Canyon a couple of summers ago made me feel like I was part of some zero-budget film shoot. At every bend in the path, I half expected to be set upon by acid-crazed bikers, cheaply costumed monsters or scantily clad space women. But the genres and budgets that facilitated those characters faded away as Hollywood passed on to a different age. Perhaps it’s best that the sweaty, rocky, gorgeously unremarkable landscape they called home is relegated to the same fate.

- Ira Brooker