With Halloween nearly upon us, I thought we could take a fun detour into the work of Tobe Hooper, one of the true masters of horror cinema. Though he shuffled off this mortal coil last year, Austin, TX native Hooper crammed a lot of directing jobs into a career that lasted nearly fifty years.Though the quality of projects he worked on went steadily downhill following his 1970s and 80s heyday, he managed to bring a unique eye and penchant for gore that few of his contemporaries could match.
Hooper was also one of the only good directors to really capitalize on the freedom afforded him by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of Cannon Films. His three films with the studio were all bonkers, bug-nuts, balls to the walls insane: Lifeforce, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, and Invaders from Mars. For Hooper, it was all in the timing, as he made those filmsduring Cannon'ssalad days, before financial problems—some of them created by Hooper's big budget flicks—sank them for good.
For those interested in learning more about Hooper, one of thehardcore mavericks of the horror industry, I would recommend John Kenneth Muir's bookEaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper, as it delves much deeper into the director's filmography than I'm able to here.
Eaten Alive
Following his 1974 breakout horror hit, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hooper's third feature concerns the exploits of Judd (Neville Brand), a bloodthirsty Texas motel purveyor who feeds unsuspecting guests to his voracious pet alligator. It's more hillbilly horror, a theme that defined much of Hooper's early work in his home state of Texas, and one he didn't really shake until he delved into the middle class world of Poltergeist.
The film marks the first time Hooper would work with future A Nightmare on Elm Street star Robert Englund, who has a sex scene with a topless Janus Blythe before being fed to Judd's gator...
Not long after this, Crystin Sinclaire strips down to just her panties and later spends a while brushing her hair in the mirror, though the lighting is quite bad in the second half of the scene...
Our very own description for Crystin's topless scene just about sums up all the nudity in this flick: "Crystin flashes her impressive rack during this super-long topless scene that serves no purpose other than 'gratuitous boob display'. Hooray!"
Probably the most memorable thing about the film is its parade of former stars, all seemingly eager to work with the guy who made Texas Chainsaw from The Addams Family'sCarolyn Jonesto Hollywood legend Mel Ferrer and Oscar nominee Stuart Whitman. Hooper even threw Chainsaw star Marilyn Burns a bone with another "final girl" role.
The Funhouse
With the release of films this Halloween season like Blood Fest and Hell Fest, it's fun to revisit this granddaddy to those flicks—or maybe more like their cool, drunk uncle, as the flick's only 37 years old. Four horny teenagers sneak off the rides at a carnival, hoping for a little frisky fun,only to end up pawns in a game being played by psychotic carnies. Tale as old as time.
The film's biggest claim to fame was that until the director's cut of Amadeus was released in 2002, the only way to see busty beauty Elizabeth Berridge topless was in thepoorly lit and framedshower scene from this flick...
There's also a brief topless scene from the legendary Sylvia Miles (Midnight Cowboy, Wall Street) who has her top ripped open by a particularly handsy Frankenstein...
Otherwise, this is a mostly forgettable slasher flick that most casual fans probably don't even realize is a Tobe Hooper film. It's sort of an also-ran in his career to the vastly superior Poltergeist, released the following year.The film does have a bit more notoriety in the UK where it was part of the infamous Video Nasties, a list of 72 films with questionable content.
Lifeforce
Enter Cannon Films. Hooper inked a three-picture deal with Golan and Globus that first yielded this insane sci-fi flick that cost $25 million dollars and only made back $11 million. Surely video sales and rentals helped it ultimately recoup its theatrical losses, and the film had one of the legendary covers of the VHS era...
via Instagram
Lifeforce would have to be on the Mount Rushmore of Cannon movies along with Ninja III The Domination, Death Wish 3, and a film to be decided later that's probably either Over the Top or Runaway Train. The film has amazing practical effects, a host of terrific character actors in nearly every major role, and some of the most amazing nudity of the 1980s, courtesy of Mathilda May, who gets an "and Introducing" line in the credits despite this being her third film.
Her introduction into the otherwise skinless space movie that it's been up until this point turns this into an entirely different movie...
Mathilda May is all you've ever wanted from a teenage boy's (or grown ass man's) wildest dreams. She's an all-timer, one of the greatest racks ever, incredibly and impeccably assembled...
Her first line of dialogue is "Use my body." Tell me this movie wasn't made to be the masturbatory piece of fantasy that a teenaged boy in the midst of puberty would luck into late one Saturday night thanks to Cinemax being tied to HBO in dad's cable package...
Beyond the amazing nude scenes, however, there's a lot of really dull scenes of exposition. The film will go twenty minutes between action scenes of any kind while two guys that both vaguely look like Hugo Weaving just jaw at each other about scientific mumbo jumbo.As much as you want it to be bug nuts balls to the wall insanity, there are a LOT of scenes of dudes just sitting aroundyakkingfor an extended period of time.
Sometimes those guys are Patrick Stewart and/or A Clockwork Orange's Mr. Deltoid himself, Aubrey Morris, which elevates the otherwise boring expository dialogue. Stewart gets the gold star from me for his world class freakout scenes in this flick. You can watch them both in this clip, but here's atease...
I still think this movie would've been better had it retained its original title "The Space Vampires," but it's probably the best film of Hooper's career that's not Texas Chainsaw or Poltergeist. He was given a huge budget and he used the hell out of it. It's a shame the movie is so dull for long stretches, but like Longfellow's proverbial little girl, when the film is good, it's very very good, and when it's bad, it'shorrid.
Tales from the Crypt “Dead Wait”
In the third season of the HBO horror anthology series, Hooper joined other horror luminaries like Walter Hill, Russell Mulcahy, Stephen Hopkins (Predator 2), and Michael J. Fox (???) at the helm of an episode. Like most Tales from the Crypt episodes, Hooper's entry, "Dead Wait,"features a star-studded cast (for 1991) including Whoopi Goldberg, John Rhys-Davies, James Remar, and Vanity!
Remar plays Red Buckley, an opportunist in search of a legendary black pearl. He travels to a southern plantation run by Duval (Rhys-Davies), the rumored location of the pearl, and quickly finds himself in bed with Duval's mistress Kathrine (Vanity). It isn't long before the two are scheming to keep the pearl for themselves, despite warnings from Duval's head servant Peligre (Goldberg) to Red that Kathrine isn't what she seems. As nearly every episode ends in an ironic twist, Peligre's words of warning were quite literal.
TA was a proud Tales from the Crypt tradition by this point, and Hooper gives us a great nude scene from Vanity, sadly her last one on film. The nude scene itself is fairly standard stuff—woman on top giving us the most boobage possible—and probably wouldn't even rank among the bombshells' top five nude scenes.
On a rather curious note, this would mark the second consecutive interracial love scene in Remar's career, following his tryst with a gargoyle played by Rae Dawn Chong in Tales from the Darkside: The Moviethe year prior.
Night Terrors
Another film with a troubled production history that only reached the screen thanks to Hooper's involvement as a director for hire, this flick based on some erotic tales by the Marquis de Sade is about as lame as early 90s horror gets. Co-written by former Cannon co-chair Yoram Globus' brother Rom, Night Terrors ismuch more interested in eroticism than horror, giving it a softcore feel that dampens any potential scares Hooper could serve up.
Busty beauty Zoe Trilling—whose other horror credits include Dr. Giggles, Night of the Demons 2, and Leprechaun 3—stars as Genie, a young Christian woman who travels toCairo to see her father, and quickly comes under the spell of de Sade's ancestor,Paul Chevalier, played byfrequent Hooper collaborator Robert Englund. It was part of Englund's tour of literary-minded horrorfilms that also includes The Phantom of the Opera and Dance Macabre.
Needless to say that with such a horny host as that, the big-breasted Genie's adventures take a turn for the erotic as she gets deflowered in a tent by the late Juliano Merr...
And later makes out with a naked woman while a pleased Chevalier looks on...
Hooper paints with a pretty broad brush in the film's nude scenes, with some pointedly literal symbolism that's more than a little comically heavy handed...
See, she's sucking on a snake, do you get it? No, seriously guys, do you get it?
In John Kenneth Muir's aforementioned book on Hooper, he describes the film—rather aptly—as a "heavy-handed, turgid muddle of a movie that isn't thrilling or even particularly erotic (thought it has been dubbed an 'erotic thriller'). [...] there's no sign of his infectious sense of humor [...] or even his unflagging energy." I can't help but agree that this is minor Hooper, surrounded as it is in his filmography by much better efforts like the skinless Spontaneous Combustion and his second Stephen King adaptation,The Mangler, once again starring Robert Englund.
Body Bags “Eye”
When John Carpenter was assembling this 1993 anthology series for Showtime, he approached Hooper to direct the segment titled "Eye" because he knew that Hooper was comfortable with the dark places this story goes. According to Carpenter, Hooper wanted to direct the much more lighthearted "Hair" with Stacey Keach, but Carpenter claimed that one for himself and gave Hooper "Eye."
Mark Hamill stars as a baseball player who gets in a ridiculous car accident, ending up with a shard of glass in his right eye. A doctor offers him the chance to have an experimental eye transplant surgery and while everything goes fine at first, the eye begins to give the player some terrifying visions.
Hamill’s advancing age—he was 41 when he filmed this—makes him being a baseball player a tad ridiculous, but he’s very committed to the insanity. There are also a number of fun cameos from Roger Corman as the doctor delivering bad news to Hamill and Charles Napier as his baseball coach. There are a number of biblical references throughout, including the somewhat overwrought final shot, buta sequence where audio of a priest reading from the bible plays over Hamill's eye surgery is pure Hooper gore.
Twiggy,while not a terribly convincing actress, plays Hamill’s wife and while their sex scene offers up much more Hamill nudity, Twiggy's butt can be briefly glimpsed as she pushes him off of herself.
The blu-ray remaster also allows us to see her privacy patch and his privacy pouch...
The short is basically Oliver Stone'sThe Hand or 1991'sBody Parts but with an evil eye, so it's nothing you haven't seen before. However, if you ever wanted to seeLuke Skywalker fuck a corpse, this is probably thebest place to scratch that itch.
I couldn't resist making this gif, you know, since I was already there...
God bless Mark Hamill, that man knows how to ham.
And god bless Tobe Hooper. Though his best films were skinless affairs, he was a good enough director to shoot and frame his nude scenes in a classic manner. Horror hounds will most assuredly give him a pass for all of his lesser efforts because he made two of the top ten scariest films of all time. We'llkeep the horror rolling in October with a look at the sex and nudity of Wes Craven's careerone week from today.
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
