CLIPS! Speaking of Psychos

So first of all, looking through the clips has revealed them to be more late 80s early 90s, so some of my older ones must have been in another folder, so I'll try to stick with the good stuff.

Yesterday was Psycho remake, and so to continue the theme, ANTHONY PERKINS! The first movie I remember seeing in the theater was The Black Hole, and his death in that is really badass. But if you watch the movie now, his whole character is awesome. He's like this creepy little fan boy to Reinhardt. It's like me when Carpenter has a new thing coming out and I go, "the trailer doesn't mean anything, JC knows what he's doing". I'm usually right. Perkins (I think his name was Durrant in Black Hole), was super wrong.

Then my dad showed me Psycho when I was in elementary school. And the scene in the parlour where he talks about "going a little mad sometimes", I wore that scene out. I watched that scene everyday. Got home, turned it on. Psycho replaced Star Wars and Raiders in my ritualised viewings. The shower scene is great, but that quiet parlour scene, man that stuff is why people even try to make movies.

So flash forward and we have a spat of really weird Perkins 80s horror films. I remember sitting down with my Grandmother to see Ken Russel's Crimes Of Passion, and that was on about 15 seconds before I had to turn it. Perkins is really in full on wacko mode in that. And then there is Edge of Sanity, made by Harry Alan Powers, who makes really cheap movies in South Africa. I used to have the clipping of that one. He plays a coke crazy Jack the Ripper. Never finished that one, they keep breaking the forth wall on it, and if you ain't Jonathan Demme you shouldn't mess with that too much. He's also great in I'm Dangerous Tonight, a Tobe Hooper made for TV movie where he is a nut who wants this evil red dress. The last shot in that one is great. No one does twitchy like Perkins when he's cashing a check.

And that lands us on Destroyer, 1988. Saw this at Atlanta's Lakewood Twin on Stewart Avenue (now Metropolitan). That theater was a pit. Holes in the ceiling, springs sticking out of the seats, classy joint. Perfect for these movies though. Destroyer fits in two types for this period in the genera, HAUNTED PRISON movie and CREW RETURNS TO THE CREEPY LOCATION TO FILM A MOVIE movie. Deborah Foreman is in it. Lyle Alzado is in it (has the best part of the film, in the last moment he eats something cool), and Anthony Perkins shows up as the twitchy director of the bad movie they are making. So this goes right in with The Horror Show and Shocker as movies about supernatural killers who survived the electric chair. It's a fun little movie, and Perkins dies really well in it.

But the best thing about Destroyer is the artwork. Check it! Lightning veins, that crazy face, the laser sight on the jackhammer, the cool lighting bolt on the "O". All of that is top notch and very metal!