Spawn of the Slithis (1978) and Two Frequent Low Budget Movie Problems

Bad movies are easy to find in almost any form.  One of the most common is the low budget bad movie.  With access to recording equipment becoming easier as technology advances, everyone has been given the ability to make something.  That doesn’t mean that they should.  It doesn’t mean that their idea will be good in this kind of $500 camera form.  Access to a camera does not mean that a budding filmmaker will have access to other amenities that they may need to make something good.

The 1978 release Spawn of the Slithis had a fairly low budget of $100,000.  Even with inflation, that only comes out at around $380,000.  That’s not a lot of money to make a movie, especially when you consider that technology cost more back then.  Camera equipment, lighting equipment, sound equipment, and effects would have been worth way more then than they’re worth now, even with the current technology being more advanced and providing a higher quality.  That’s why Spawn of the Slithis was able to bring up thoughts about the weaknesses provided through low budget filmmaking.  This week’s movie became a springboard for two different gripes that I have with many low budget films.

What set me down this path was a scene early in Spawn of the Slithis that involved a bickering couple in their house.  The feuding husband and wife awoke during the night to the sound of someone in their house.  The husband went to check, and that was the worst mistake he could have made.  Somewhere in the darkness of what can only be assumed to be the living room was the Slithis, ready to attack.  And attack it did.  The monster went to town on the man.

I only knew this information through the sounds of the scene.  This was where Spawn of the Slithis suffered from its low budget.  It was nearly impossible to make out anything that happened in that house.  The set was completely dark, allowing all of the shadows and black colours to blend right into each other.  There was no contrast at all and everything became a big black blur.  For a movie, which should be a visual medium unless completely necessary to the storytelling, there were very few visuals in the scene.

Dark, unrecognizable scenes happen frequently in low budget movies.  There never seems to be a sense of knowing how to shoot at night.  That’s also why so many low budget movies shoot day for night, putting a filter over the image while it was shot in sunlight to simulate night.  This is a completely different problem, though.  In this case, the people shooting the movie decided that they would shoot at night.  They wanted it to look more realistically night-like.  But they didn’t bring any lighting to enhance the visuals or, at the very least, give the camera enough to actually see.  Instead, the darkness led to darkness.  The shadows led to the entire frame being filled with shadow.

This problem is easy enough to fix, and through my rambling, I have already hit upon it.  The problem was in the lighting.  With low budget movies being low budget, it might be tough to purchase proper lighting equipment.  Spawn of the Slithis was also made in the 1970s, which meant that people didn’t have cell phones on them at all times, with flashlight features.  There were still cheap enough ways to light a place.  Low budget should breed ingenuity.  It should make people think about the best ways to bring up the value of what they’re shooting, rather than the easiest.  They could have brought in a desk lamp or two, used some pantyhose as a filter or diffuser, and put some faint light into the room.  Viewers would have passed it off as moonlight or some other nighttime source of faint light.  There would have been an added bit of contrast that would at least allow the different figures in the location to stand apart from one another.  It’s not hard.  A little effort on the part of low budget filmmakers could easily prevent this annoying trait of too much darkness from happening.

Now, I could end the post here.  It would be a nice little seven hundred word post about one annoying thing that frequently happens in low budget films.  But that’s not me.  I always like to write more than I need to.  There are other things that happen in low budget movies that bother me.  I want to discuss one more.  This one comes up time and time again.  I’ve mentioned it before in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I may have even written a post about it before, but I’m going to write about it again.  Let’s talk about low budget movies frequently using wooded areas for their settings.

Forests and other heavily foliaged areas are easy locations for low budget movies.  There are a few reasons for that.  Permits aren’t always necessary when filming in a wooded area.  There’s no need to do a bunch of paperwork to get clearance to film in them.  It’s heaven for an amateur filmmaker.  This is because many wooded areas are public property that anyone can use for whatever purposes they so choose.  Well, not any purpose.  I don’t think you’re supposed to murder, start fires, or do any of the other illegal activities in there.  Filming is fine, though.  This also leads into the second reason.

Filming in wooded areas helps to prevent any interruptions from nosy people.  The production will be surrounded by trees and nature, rather than the bustling streets of the city.  It becomes much less likely for someone passing by to curiously approach the production.  Production can move on unhindered by the public.

The final main reason for filming in the woods is that it can give a sense of being lost in the wilderness.  The character(s) can be lost in the woods, seeing the same sort of imagery around every corner.  No matter how much they run around, they will still be surrounded by trees on every side.  It makes their situation direr as they try to find a way out.  If there’s someone chasing after them, it could lead to that person being behind any trunk, log, or stump.  The character doesn’t know where they are and thus doesn’t know how far they have fled from their attacker.

But the thing about the sense of being lost in the wilderness is what brings on my gripe about a forest setting.  It makes sense from a character perspective to have them get lost in the woods because everything looks the same.  The problem is that visually, everything will look the same, leading to a boring look for a movie.  Take The Marine 4: Moving Target, for example.  A lot of the movie revolved around Jake Carter and the woman he was protecting hiding from their attackers in the woods.  Everything they hid behind or ran through looked exactly the same.  The movie only became exciting when something broke the monotony of the forest.  Some of the highlights were when the characters were at the safe house or at the police station.  The running through the woods stuff all blended together, though, which was fairly boring.

There are a few ways to solve the issue of boring wooded settings, and most are fairly simple.  One of the solutions is to put in the work and get a different location.  Anything that will stand out visually will help.  A run down ghost town, the seedy underbelly of a city, a junkyard… Anything that doesn’t look so same all the time.  The second solution is to make the forest an integral part of the story.  It needs to be more than the character simply being lost.  The movie Blackwoods was about murders happening within the wooded area and explored why.  It may not have done it well, but the movie deserves credit for tying the woods into the story.  The other solution is to have landmarks within the woods, or obstacles throughout them.  Cabins in the woods, rickety bridges, camping sites, or rock formations help a lot to break up the monotony.  In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale and its sequels did well with this sort of stuff to bring excitement to the travels of the main characters.

Wooded areas can be very dull when brought into movies and low budget films frequently use that setting.  It’s not as inept as having zero light when filming a dark location, but both problems are gripes that I have with low budget films.  The people making the movies need to try a little harder to fix these problem areas.  I know that their budgets aren’t big enough to secure some of the easy outs, but with a little bit of time and thought, some creative solutions could be achieved.

People making movies should strive to be creative.  They shouldn’t want to just get through the movie, they should want to make something fun and entertaining.  They should try to provide the best possible experience for viewers.  Small things like the monotony of the woods or poor lighting should be easy enough to overcome.  With a little more effort on the parts of the people involved, a scene like the house scene in Spawn of the Slithis could go from dark nothingness to a thrilling attack scene.  However, it would not have led to this post.  This has been a learning experience.  That’s a good thing.  We learn from bad movies as much as we learn from good, if not more.  That’s why I write these posts.  That’s why I’ll keep writing these posts.

Now for some notes:

• I mentioned The Marine 4: Moving Target, Blackwoods, and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale in this post.
• Chris Sprister made a return to the Sunday “Bad” Movies with Spawn of the Slithis, after being featured in Sharknado 2: The Second One.
• Another movie that comes to mind when I think of dark scenes where you can’t see anything is Octaman.
• Have you seen Spawn of the Slithis?  What did you think of it?  Are there any other bad aspects of low budget horror that could be easily fixed?  Let me know what you thought of any of these things in the comments below.
• The comments are a good place to let me know about your suggestions, as well.  I take every suggestion into consideration when I’m putting together schedules for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  You can suggest stuff to me in the comments or on Twitter.
• If you like seeing clips of bad movies, maybe add me on snapchat (jurassicgriffin).  I sometimes put up clips of the bad movies I watch.  I recently put up a story of clips from next week’s movie.
• Next week, I’ll be diving back into the world of Lifetime.  The topic this time will be Britney Spears as I watch Britney Ever After.  I have no idea what I’m going to write about it yet, but I can say it is insanely bad.  Come back in a week and we’ll see what I have written.

The Ward (2011)

“Sorry, I don’t converse with loonies.” – Sarah, The Ward

When people talk about the greats in horror filmmaking, there are a few names that always come to mind.  Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, and George Romero are three of the older era of horror directors that helped to make the genre what it is.  There’s a newer generation as well, with people like Eli Roth, James Wan, and Ti West moving things forward while paying tribute to those who came before.  One name that hasn’t been mentioned yet that deserves recognition is John Carpenter.

This week’s movie is The Ward, which is why I held back on mentioning John Carpenter.  It’s his most recent movie.  Released in 2011, it told the story of Kristen (Amber Heard), a young woman sent to a mental institution after burning down a farm house.  She quickly made friends with Emily (Mamie Gummer), Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), Zoey (Laura-Leigh Claire), and Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), four other patients.  Kristen worked hard to try to escape while the spirit of a girl named Alice (Mika Boorem) began killing her new friends.

John Carpenter was one of the directors in the seventies and eighties that helped to make slashers such a large part of horror.  This came about because of his movie Halloween, which was released in 1978.  It followed a group of teens as they were stalked and killed by The Shape, an adult version of the murderous child Michael Myers.  The Fog and The Thing, though not standard slashers, followed the same sort of “bad force shows up and people die one by one” formula.  He knows the blueprint for these kinds of movies, but for some reason, The Ward wasn’t as successful.  Let’s get into where the movie went wrong.

Something that must be discussed in order to properly analyze The Ward is the twist at the end of the movie.  This will be a major spoiler that will ruin much of what happens.  If you don’t want to know anything about The Ward, stop reading now and come back once you have seen it.  So, at the end, it was revealed that Kristen and her friends were all split personalities of Alice and that their being killed off was Alice fighting her way back to sanity.  She had been kidnapped and abused.  Her only way out of the torture she endured was to split her personality.  Now she wanted her life back.

One of the biggest reasons to watch a slasher movie is to see the characters die and how that affects the main character.  The deaths are as good a place to start as any.  There was an inconsistency to what happened during the deaths.  Some of them happened on screen while others happened off screen.  Some of them happened in front of characters while others happened on their own.  Now, there were always at least two of the six personalities involved in any of the deaths.  Alice was the killer and the other characters were the victims.  The problem was that if the personalities were being killed off so that only one personality reigned supreme, then all of the personalities should have known about the deaths.  They shouldn’t be happening where the other characters don’t know about them.  Iris and Sarah were killed while alone with Alice.  Zoey was killed off screen.  The only death that happened in front of Kristen, the protagonist, was that of Emily.  For a movie where we were supposed to be following one character, not all six of the personalities, the shifting of points of view from Kristen to whoever was going to die muddied the waters.

Another major factor that brought The Ward down was that John Carpenter seemed to restrain himself from being himself while making it.  The movie didn’t look like anything else he had made.  That was probably due to the advancement in technology between when he had made his previous movie, 2001’s Ghosts of Mars, and when he made The Ward nearly ten years later.  There was a shift from film-based shooting to digital-based shooting that influenced how The Ward looked.  Another major absence was a John Carpenter score.  He did not do the music this time around.  He had created interesting scores for many of his previous films including Halloween, Escape from New York, and Big Trouble in Little China.  Having someone else score one of his movies felt like a betrayal to the John Carpenter aesthetic.

The other major factor that took away from The Ward was the lack of character work.  That was intentional, based on the twist.  Every separate personality was only a fragment of Alice’s whole, which meant that they were each lacking some of the essential pieces that made you want to care for them.  Kristen was solely trying to solve the mystery and escape, with nothing else to her personality.  She was fighting the norm.  Iris was trying to be the artistic good girl, and Zoey was the childlike character.  Sarah was the sexual character, trying to sleep with the orderly at the asylum.  Emily was the crazy and insecure character.  None of them had layers beyond those basic types.  It makes sense, though, since they were fractured pieces of one person.  Put them together and you get a whole.  You get Alice.  It just didn’t make the movie interesting when the majority of it was spent watching those five interact.  Inside Out, a Pixar animated film from 2015, managed to do better with the idea of fractured personality traits.  Each of the traits had deeper character to them than what they were.  They may have revolved around being Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear, but they had more to them.  The Ward didn’t give the characters much more than their basic concepts, which made it hard to care for most of them.

Stock characters are a staple of slasher movies.  Who really cares about the camp counselors in a Friday the 13^th movie?  The thing is, the characters still feel like characters.  They might be there to have sex and party, but they have full personalities while they are alive.  They’re not these personality fragments that were put forward in The Ward.  They have complete character quirks.  Well, maybe not complete.  Sometimes they don’t even have names.  But the main characters that we are meant to follow through the action, similar to the five girls in the mental institution, get fleshed out enough that we care about them.  We get to know them before they get killed.  We aren’t judging them based on initial impressions.  The Ward felt like we never got past that first meeting with the girls, even though they interacted and even had a dance scene together.  They still felt like hollow shells of what they could be.  It’s like when you reach for that chocolate bunny at Easter, and instead of finding solid milk chocolate, you find a chocolate shell shaped like a bunny with a lot of empty space inside.  It’s a hollow shell of a chocolate bunny.  You feel disappointed.  That’s the character work in The Ward.

None of this is to say I didn’t enjoy The Ward for what it was.  There were some major problems with it, which made it feel like John Carpenter wasn’t trying.  He may not have been.  He hasn’t been shy in saying that he felt burned out by the time he made Ghosts of Mars.  Coming back to movies might not have been the right decision, made more apparent by how much it didn’t feel like one of his movies.  It still had its good moments, though.  The cast was good, regardless of their one note characters.  They still managed to bring energy to their performances, raising them slightly from where they would have been otherwise.  Some of the horror worked well.  I’m not too good with pointy things going into eyes, and one of the deaths involved that sort of stuff, so it got me.  There were some solid moments that showed that, were he to try, John Carpenter would still have it.  There was a lack of effort on his part that probably murdered the movie like the victims in much of his filmography.  He went too broad with the focus instead of narrowing it to the one character who was trying to solve the mystery, which ended up disconnecting the audience.  He stepped back from the amount of work he usually put in, changing how everything felt.  And, most of all, he didn’t do much work on the script to make his characters feel real.  There was potential for something great to come out of The Ward, but it ended up being average.  Sadly, John Carpenter’s directing career will likely end on this average note.  It’s a drastic step down from the highs of his older work, and to leave off on it feels wrong.  But there are much worse horror movies out there, so that’s something.

These notes are something too:

• The Ward was suggested by @GabnDad, who also suggested Furry Vengeance.
• I mentioned Halloween in the post.  Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers was covered in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• Friday the 13^th also got a quick mention in the post.  Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning and Jason Goes to Hell were covered for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• One actor from The Ward was in Jonah Hex.  That actor was Milos Milicevic.
• Have you seen The Ward?  What do you think about it?  Let me know in the comments.
• I’m always looking for movies that I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  This week was a suggestion.  If you suggest a movie, I might watch that one too.  Let me know about any suggestions in the comments or on Twitter.
• Sometimes when I’m watching bad movies, I’ll share clips of them on snapchat.  I did that with next week’s movie, which I have already watched.  Add me (jurassicgriffin) on snapchat if this kind of thing interests you.
• Speaking of next week’s movie, it’s going to be Spawn of the Slithis.  It’s about a monster coming out of the water and attacking people.  It’s a pretty basic premise with some environmental message stuff in there as well.  I’ll have something written next Sunday for that one, so come back then and read it.  Okay?  Okay.