{"id":18650,"date":"2024-06-14T17:08:16","date_gmt":"2024-06-14T17:08:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattshorroraddiction.com\/?p=18650"},"modified":"2024-06-14T17:08:16","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T17:08:16","slug":"cat-people-nightmare-and-tales-from-the-quadead-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/?p=18650","title":{"rendered":"Cat People, Nightmare, and Tales from the Quadead Zone"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Cat People <\/em><\/strong>– 1982, US, 118m. Director: Paul Schrader. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nightmare<\/em><\/strong> – 1981, Italy\/US, 98m. Director: Romano Scavolini. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tales from the Quadead Zone<\/em><\/strong> – 1987, US, 62m. Director: Chester N. Turner. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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CAT PEOPLE <\/em><\/strong>(1982)<\/em> Virginal Irena, orphaned as a child, travels to New Orleans to meet her brother Paul. Irena is immediately put off by his strange behavior and the unnatural way in which he touches her. That’s because Irena is played by Nastassja Kinski, one of cinema’s great beauties, and Paul is played by Malcolm McDowell, whose frightening performance in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange<\/em> pegged the actor as the go-to psychopath for years. A prostitute is nearly mauled to death by a black leopard, which\u2014after being captured and caged at the local zoo\u2014rips off the arm of an employee. Through this bloodshed, Irena learns the leopard is actually Paul\u2014and she, like her brother, belongs to an ancient race of incestuous people who transform into felines when sexually aroused. This bit of news spells doom for Irena’s budding romance with zoologist Oliver (John Heard), who hopes to bed the woman before movie’s end\u2014and to supply moviegoers with titillating scenes of Kinski in various stages of undress. Cat People<\/em> is by no means a mindless exploitation vehicle, but a thoughtful reimagining of Jacques Tourneur’s classic 1942 scare show. As with the original, the on-screen violence is played down in favor of suspense, although there are a couple of brutal deaths. The screenplay (by Alan Ormsby) drops the ball by offering a needlessly detailed historical account of the cat people, turning the mystery into a bunch of malarkey. Good, nonetheless. B<\/strong> (Not currently streaming.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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NIGHTMARE<\/em><\/strong> (1981)<\/em> (AKA: Nightmares in a Damaged Brain<\/em>) Schizophrenic psychopath George Tatum (Baird Stafford) suffers from lurid and violent night terrors but is released from an institution after being declared cured. George subsequently goes to a Times Square peep show and is triggered by the sight of sexualized women because, as a boy, he saw his parents having sadomasochistic sex. George ditches his court-appointed psychiatric meeting, steals a car, and drives to Florida with the intention of murdering his high-strung ex-wife (Sharon Smith) and children. When he isn’t graphically slicing people up, he’s sniveling on the phone to his shrink. In a completely unbelievable scene, the police try to bully George’s nine-year-old son (C.J. Cooke) into admitting his involvement in the brutal death of a woman George himself killed hours earlier. Why the cops or George’s doctors (who’ve been frantically looking for him since his disappearance) don’t connect the dots is just one of many glaring plot holes in the scattershot screenplay. But Nightmare<\/em> wasn’t made with logic in mind. Director Romano Scavolini focuses mostly on George leering at his soon-to-be victims and the gory aftermaths, which are gruesome and convincing. Tom Savini admitted to having been a consultant on the film but is credited on-screen as Special Effects Director. How’s that for false advertising? Ugly and dumb, but entertaining in a sleazy train wreck way. Perhaps the only slasher movie in existence to reference Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up<\/em>. B<\/strong>– (Not currently streaming.) <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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TALES FROM THE QUADEAD ZONE<\/em><\/strong> (1987)<\/em> A woman (Shirley L. Jones) entertains her invisible ghost child by reading two bizarre stories from a book called “Tales from the Quadead Zone.” The first tale centers on an impoverished religious family that solves its hunger issues by eliminating family members with a rifle. In the sophomore segment, a bitter man (Keefe L. Turner) steals his brother’s dead body and humiliates the corpse by dressing it in a clown costume. This is followed by an endless monologue in which Turner expresses his childhood woes of playing second fiddle to his sibling, with predictably gruesome results. The movie circles back to Jones, who’s forced to kill her abusive husband after he pitches a fit over her obsession with their deceased child. At times it’s difficult to tell what’s going on because most of the dialogue is inaudible. That’s not unusual with shot-on-video films, but it’s especially bad in Tales from the Quadead Zone<\/em>. Other examples of poor production quality are the muddy picture (the movie was shot on a camcorder), sloppy editing, and dollar store special effects. The worst part of this mess is the closing credits, which tells viewers, “Tales from the Quadead Zone<\/em> will return!” Luckily, audiences were spared this promise. Because of its ultra-rare availability on physical media, the film has become a collector’s item within the VHS circuit. D<\/strong>– (Currently streaming on Tubi.) <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cat People – 1982, US, 118m. Director: Paul Schrader. Nightmare – 1981, Italy\/US, 98m. Director: Romano Scavolini. Tales from the Quadead Zone – 1987, US, 62m. Director: Chester N. Turner. CAT PEOPLE (1982) Virginal Irena, orphaned as a child, travels to New Orleans to meet her brother Paul. Irena is immediately put off by his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-80s","category-capsule-reviews"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}