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After a farewell to the Seventies (Knightriders), George A. Romero enters the new decade—the overture is pure faux-Spielberg, only here the suburban tyke is grinning at the cloaked skeleton outside his bedroom window. The screen is a comic-book with canted angles and frames like barbed panels, five tales to lovingly distill the thrill of gruesome funnies. Father's day in the nest of vultures, a mansion with a cemetery next door. "A complete Freudian relationship" has the murdered paterfamilias rising from the grave following a little Cassavetesian tour de force from Viveca Lindfors as his splenetic daughter, the punchline in the kitchen is the key image of a colorful confection topped with discordant gore. The hayseed that sprouts, Stephen King's Beverly Hillbillies audition in a skit about meteorites and rotten luck. La Femme Infidèle is the point of departure for the third story, the video enthusiast (Leslie Nielsen) with his wife's paramour (Ted Danson) up to his neck in the surf, serenaded by an ominous synth version of "Camptown Races." "Is this camp or kitsch?" Then, the saber-toothed ape in the crate under the staircase, not a hallucination ("Tasmanian devils instead of pink elephants") but a bit of marital therapy for the henpecked university professor (Hal Holbrook) and the loudmouthed harpy (Adrienne Barbeau). Finally, E.G. Marshall's puckish bravura like Beckett's Lionel Barrymore inside an antiseptic penthouse, creepy-crawlies added to a virtuosic composition of marble floors and jukeboxes and computer screens. (The ultimate gag is that the magnate has no stomach for cockroaches, cp. Malle's My Dinner with Andre.) Cold cuts and just desserts, the Romero moral terror in blue and crimson suffusions, "there is a funny side to it." With Fritz Weaver, Ed Harris, Carrie Nye, Warner Shook, Robert Harper, Elizabeth Regan, Gaylen Ross, and Tom Atkins.
--- Fernando F. Croce |