Pulse (1988)

Programming Note: I’ll be on vacation next week, so the next scheduled movie post will be sometime during the week of August 20th. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The idea that our increasingly technological lives set us up for trouble has been a recurring theme since the twentieth century (and probably before that), updating itself whenever some new convenience becomes entrenched in the routine of the average westerner. Pulse is the late eighties version of this, set in a home with such advanced appliances as VCRs, microwaves, and air conditioning units, all things that can be turned against us when under the influence of something sinister. In the mind of the devoted Luddite, our homes used to be a solidly independent thing of wood and stone, but the advent of appliances not only makes people overly reliant on them, but invites an outside presence that we do not even understand, let alone know how to control. In this case, the presence takes the form of a malevolently intelligent jolt of electricity, something that can undermine the entire modern home—it’s another high concept horror, but one with a surprising amount on its mind, fanning out not just into the technological aspects of contemporary living, but with a specifically eighties critique of suburbia.

Slugs (1988)

Moving from household pests to garden pests, Slugs faces one potential hurdle to its status as horror: slugs are not particularly scary. Some people might find them creepy or gross, but probably not scary. I’m sure that was probably part of the appeal of making a horror story about them, though—they are so common, and so seemingly innocuous, that to turn them into bloodthirsty monsters creates a mildly subversive “horror of the everyday” scenario (they’re also weird enough as animals that actively ignoring their real biology won’t be noticed by most.) That’s all well and good, but you’re still going to need to put in some effort to make slugs come off as menacing, and this movie does try various things to do that—it doesn’t succeed, but it is sort of funny to see it try.

Pumpkinhead (1988)

To think, I haven’t written about a single Stan Winston movie yet, despite his prominence and importance to movie special effects and to movie monsters in particular. Winston and his team are responsible for the effects of some of the biggest movies of the eighties and nineties, but Winston himself only directed a few himself (which includes both A Gnome Named Gnorm and the Michael Jackson “Ghosts” video, and it’s hard to tell which is a more ignoble mark on his record), with Pumpkinhead being his first. Of course, you’d expect a movie directed by a guy who is a specialist in animatronics and detailed monster costumes to mostly be a straightforward vehicle for both (not unlike what Equinox was doing for creature effects in the late sixties/early seventies), but it actually manages to mash together a lot of different ideas, producing something that is never really just one thing. It’s a backwoods supernatural horror story, a melancholy morality play, a killer-chasing-young-people flick—I thought Equinox was a movie that was just looking for the most efficient path to justifying having a bunch of monsters on screen, but Pumpkinhead puts in a surprising amount of work into feeling like some legitimate modern folklore.

Brain Damage (1988)

For our third and final Shudder selection, I thought I’d go into something that seemed to more accurately represent the kind of movie that makes most of the service’s offerings—or so I thought. Yes, Brain Damage is a gory horror comedy complete with an ethereal synth soundtrack, but it’s also so odd as to defy any attempt to give it a high concept label—it simply wouldn’t accurately describe the experience here. This is a movie that starts at an eleven and just keeps going from there. It is to eighties horror comedy what Super Inframan is to whatever genre Super Inframan is supposed to be.