Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the next installment of A Movie A Day: Halloween 2010 edition!
[For the entirety of October I will be showcasing one horror film each day. Every film is pulled from my DVD shelf or streamed via Netflix Instant and will be one I haven’t seen. Unlike my A Movie A Day or A Movie A Week columns there won’t necessarily be connectors between each film, but you’ll more than likely see patterns emerge day to day.]
I’ve not had much luck being an adult and taking in some of these fan favorite made for TV chillers for the first time. When I bought this disc I also bought the famous and newly remade DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK. I excitedly gave that one a spin and found myself disconnected and disinterested for 90% of the film. I didn’t see it as a kid, so that particular story doesn’t have the same kind of entrance to my brain that it does for those that grew up with it.
Calling it nostalgia would be unfair and wholly dismissive. If a film works, it works. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark didn’t work for me, so I’m excited to see what the remake looks like. Good story done with more than $40 and some good craft service.
So it was with that mindset I went into another ‘70s TV horror flick that has a lot of fans: BAD RONALD, also released by the great Warner Archive. It could be my lower expectations or that it just didn’t have incredibly annoying Kim Darby in the lead, but I quite enjoyed this one.
At 71 minutes this is a quick, wham bam tale of a good kid, Ronald (Scott Jacoby), who might be a little too much of a mama’s boy but has a good heart, who makes a big mistake. The mistake in question is shoving a taunting neighborhood brat. Well, when this girl falls she hits her head. Badly.
In a panic, the nerdy high school senior buries the girl in a shallow grave and runs home, telling his mother everything.
The mother is played by Kim Hunter (Planet of the Apes). I’m going to take a brief side note and talk a little about horror as a genre. It’s a unique genre in that it is so welcoming of new blood and fading stars. There are examples in dramas, comedies, etc, but no more so than horror. It’s where the stars of tomorrow get a chance to prove themselves and the stars of yesterday are still cherished.
Seeing Kim Hunter as the obsessing and worried Elaine Wilby reminded me of that as well as seeing an early performance from the great Dabney Coleman.
Hunter’s Mama Wilby knows that her son will be caught, so she has him build a wall over a bathroom door and create a crawl space in the pantry. The plan is hide the kid for a few months then move away and start anew.
Of course, that plan doesn’t work out when she’s hospitalized and dies on the operating room table leaving poor Ronald with little but a set of rules for his safety (never come out, don’t make a sound, etc). A new family moves in (headed by Mr. Coleman) and Ronald’s life becomes a voyeur’s paradise.
He watches the family through holes drilled into the walls, becoming obsessed with Coleman’s blonde, teenage daughter.
What’s interesting to me about this movie is they don’t play Ronald as a bad kid. If he didn’t go out that one day, didn’t run into the annoying little girl, he probably would have grown up to be a doctor. He’s left with very little choice but to roll with what life throws at him and in the process turns even more inward than he was before.
Ronald writes fantasy stories, paints pictures and sees himself as a young Prince wrongfully banished from his land and the little girl, Cindy Fisher, is his Princess.
They don’t play Ronald as a creepy freak. In fact, he’s quite a sympathetic character. Outside of the accident early in the movie he doesn’t kill anybody… not directly, anyway. There’s just a small disconnect that makes him feel slightly off.
I couldn’t help but think of how many different ways this story could be told. The way we get it is pretty A to B to C storytelling, where we see the new family, we see Ronald watching, we get a good 15 minutes with Ronald and his mother early on… But what if the point of view was from the new family moving in?
The youngest daughter has a bad feeling about this old Victorian house, food starts disappearing from the fridge at night, they hear shuffling sounds that could be rats, the nosey neighborlady goes missing, they hear stories of the never caught murderer that used to live there, etc.
It’d be an interesting take and probably more effective in the thrills department, but I gotta say I kinda like this playing more true to life. It’s not something you usually get.
While I can’t say the movie got under my skin, I can see how it would really get to kids at the time. There’s a shot of one of the characters noticing a hole in the wall only to find a giant, wide-open eye staring at them that was really effective.
If I have a major complaint about the film it’s that it ends extremely abruptly. Not satisfyingly abruptly, like An American Werewolf In London, for instance, just in a rush. I have a hard time believing it was abrupt on purpose because the whole thing is building tension to the moment where Ronald is discovered… and when that happens it’s shocking and then immediately over. Like, credits rolling within 30 seconds abrupt.
The TV movie is based on a pulp novel by John Holbrook Vance that I have not read. If any talkbackers have, maybe you can fill me in on how close the TV movie stuck to it. I get the feeling that the movie tells only delivers a portion of what was in the novel, but that could just be me talking outta my butt.
Final Thoughts: Jacoby is strong in the lead, there’s a few moments of real unnerving imagery (the aforementioned eyeball as well as a hanging baby doll that was apparently dropped into this movie by Satan himself) and an interesting way to humanize what could have been a schlocky (and probably more fun, granted) exorcize in thriller storytelling.
Currently in print on DVD: YES
Currently available on Netflix Instant: NO
Here are the next week’s worth of AMAD titles:
Wednesday, October 6th: THE ENTITY (1981)
Thursday, October 7th: DOCTOR X (1932)
Friday, October 8th: THE RETURN OF DOCTOR X (1939)
Saturday, October 9th: THE TENANT (1976)
Sunday, October 10th: MAN IN THE ATTIC (1953)
Monday, October 11th: NEW YEAR’S EVIL (1980)
Tuesday, October 12th: PROPHECY (1979)
Tomorrow’s THE ENTITY, a film I’ve seen the trailer for a dozen times, yet I still keep getting it mixed up with DEMON SEED for some reason. Looking forward to finally digging into it!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter
