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Review
by
Doug Red
Film:7
:
DVD:6
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| Hardworking
social philosopher Norman Bates wisely notes at the end of Hitchock's
Psycho that "we all go a little
crazy sometimes." Never has this observation been so well
proven as truth than with David Schmoeller's 1979 B-movie chiller
Tourist Trap. |
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Unjustly
ignored in its initial release, this PG rated horror has gathered
its own devoted following through late night TV showings and word
of mouth. But what makes it tick? In a word: craziness! |
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Tourist
Trap
begins with a stranded couple on the side of the road, Woody (Keith
McDermott) and Eileen (shapely Robin Sherwood). Woody rolls the
tire down the road to a nearby gas station, which is strangely
abandoned even though it appears to be in operation. In the first
of many macabre and unsettling images in the film, the search
of the premise though leads poor Woody to be attacked by inanimate
objects until he gets a final fatal perforation and the station
returns to silence as if it was never alive. Meanwhile, Eileen
meets up with their other friends, the sweet & virginal Molly
(delicate Jocelyn Jones), buff Jerry (Jon Van Ness), and the impossibly
leggy Becky (babe-alicious icon Tanya Roberts, wearing perhaps
the tightest painted-on Daisy Dukes ever worn by so shapely a
figure). They decide to try to find Woody but take a detour for
some PG skinny-dipping. It's while the ladies are au natural that
they encounter the mysterious Mr. Slausen (legendary actor Chuck
"The Rifleman" Conners), who invites them to come to the roadside
attraction he runs while they try to find Woody and get their
own malfunctioning car fixed. Slausen has been out there for years,
but changes to the roads and vacation habits have left his once
thriving tourist location a mere shell of what it used to be,
a run-down relic of another time that is struggling to survive.
Once the ladies get set up comfortably in Slausen's waxwork Americana
museum, Jerry leaves with Slausen, who asks the girls to not visit
the mysterious house he has out back behind the museum. Slausen
says he doesn't have a phone and there isn't one in the museum,
but Eileen, in true B-movie fashion, decides to see if he's hiding
a phone in the mysterious house, so off she goes secure in her
youth. Instead of finding a phone however, she encounters a house
where everything appears alive, and a weird masked maniac in a
hideous partial mask. The stage is thus set for the rest of the
film: three young beautiful people, a decrepit tourist trap with
an eccentric caretaker, some kind of animating phenomenon moving
objects like the telekinesis in Carrie,
and a masked weirdo with terrible fashion sense. |
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Tourist
Trap
is filled to the brim with unusual sights and sounds. The masked
killer seems to be channeling a Norman Bates drag, trying different
personas from time to time as seems appropriate. Any object may
come alive in the film. The ubiquitous mannequins that litter
Slausen's hep pad react with a startling half-life, from moving
like people to just moving like a pulled dead object, many times
with jaws that open up where they sing their strange song of death
to their victims, and they sometimes appear to be completely alive
as they move, dance, and occasionally attack. The musical score
by Pino Donaggio (Don't Look Now,
Carrie) is eccentric to the extreme,
with the lead melody almost too whimsical for its own good, but
somehow it comes to add a terrific dimension of psychotic detachment
to the horrifying events that unfold, and it creates a counterpoint
to the hypnotic vocals of the mannequins when they sing en masse.
The narrative builds over the 90 minute running time to smash
into a crescendo of insanity that defies cold logic leaving the
viewer with only theories about what they are seeing but no answers.
Add to that the tour de force acting of Chuck Conners giving it
his all and Tanya Roberts at her foxiest and you are left with
Tourist Trap, a classic cult horror
film that succeeds not due to grotesqueness, explicitness, or
cruelty, but because of a carefully crafted visual narrative that
creates as true a portrait of human insanity and the mind's dream
state that there ever was. |
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| Cult
Video's 1998 DVD release of Tourist Trap
was timed for the film's then-20th anniversary. The 1.85:1 anamorphic
transfer is quite nice, though there's some speckling and it's
a little soft by the standards of today. Grain is also apparent,
but it adds to the charm of the film for this reviewer, and the
Dolby Digital 2.0 audio helps to accentuate the strange soundtrack
that is ever-present. |
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There
are extras included, though the back of the DVD has it wrong —
there are not "over 40 Full Moon trailers" on the DVD unless
they are hidden away somewhere; instead, there are seven trailers,
but at least they are good ones. Beside the obligatory trailer
for Tourist Trap, there are trailers
for Assault of the Killer Bimbos,
Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama,
Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity,
Cannibal Women in the Avacado Jungle of
Death, Parasite, and Petticoat
Planet. Other extras includes a more-or-less feature audio
commentary by director and co-writer David Schmoeller, who unfortunately
does not have anybody to talk with, which means that there are
some painfully long quiet spells. However, the informational tidbits
about the making of the film and reminiscences are well worth
hearing. Examples of what you'll find out are: Chuck Conner's
explanation of what constitutes "doing a Brody", and the location
of Conner's "Brody" in the film; or Conner's own jokes
about the famous title sequence where the Rifleman continually
cocks his weapon; or how a certain death scene retained an on-set
sound created during shooting because the sound was so creepy;
or how Tanya Roberts would run out into the night barefoot to
injure her feet — to get into character — but then couldn't stop
crying when the scene stopped). Other extras include a cast &
crew page containing another short on-screen interview with David
Schmoeller, which comes off as highlights of many of the points
he made in the feature audio track in about ten minutes. The other
cast/crew pages have bio information and/or filmographies for
the actors. Shockingly, there are still other features on this
chock-filled disc: a "Merchandise" page which has contact information
for Full Moon Film's merchandise arm as well as a short ad for
their then-current line of Puppetmaster toys; a "website" link
witch informs the home audience how to communicate with Full Moon/Cult
Video; and there is even a "Credits" page which is literally credits
for the DVD authoring, which I couldn't get to stop on my DVD
player — I had to wait for the 30 seconds or so of it running
to be returned to the menu. 1/11/12
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