The Sundance film festival recently pulled up stakes from where it was hosted in Park City, Utah, for over four decades. Odd how a small town so strongly associated with cinema has had so few films made there.
The only one that comes to my mind is 1981 independently-produced horror flick The Boogens, which has a title which does it no favors. It is way too easy to accidentally read it as “The Boogers”, especially in the goopy cursive font which was used on the theatrical posters. The artwork of skeletal green fingers of the same color as the discharge from a sinus infection only reinforces the likelihood to make this mistake.
When we eventually see the creature (only one was made) that serves in the capacity as the titular monsters (plural), it is a rather unfortunate puppet. According to a lively commentary track on the blu-ray, director James L. Conway told the effects guy to make the thing that scared him the most and the guy replied that was not getting paid. While the guy’s response wasn’t helpful, that suggests the lack of follow through which was inevitable. The end product, as was the case in so many of these things, is most effective when only glimpsed in quick flashes.
We don’t get any significant views of it until nearly the end of the runtime. Fortunately, what precedes it is a solid horror film alternating between an abandoned mine and a cabin in the woods—the latter so effective a horror locale that it was rightly immortalized in Cabin in the Woods.
Let’s start with the mine, as that is what the film does. Under the opening credits, we see a montage of historical photos and newspaper headlines concerning the discovery of silver in a mine in 1888, then a cave-in and quick closure of the mine in 1912. When Rebecca Balding goes through the archives of the local newspaper, she won’t be able to find a definitive reason why the mine was closed. She also learns there was a single survivor of the mine collapse, and that is a man who was declared insane and put in permanent residence at a mental hospital.
Balding is one of four staying at that cabin. She is the friend of Anne-Marie Martin, who is there to visit boyfriend Jeff Harlan, who is working on a project to reopen the mine. He got the job through friend Fred McCarren, whom he has set up on a double date with Balding.
There is a fifth person in a sense, and that is Tiger the Bichon Frisé, who may be the best actor of the cast. That is no knock on the human performers, who all do a perfectly fine job, but Tiger is simply one of the best canine actors I have seen in a movie.
Despite being Martin’s dog, we most see him interact with McCarren, who has a great series of bits with him in the cabin’s kitchen. I love how the dog seemingly acts exactly like a human being when McCarren invited him to sit in a chair at the table: “Come here. We’ll have a man-to-dog talk.” Tiger’s enthusiasm in infectious, such as the orgy of destruction he goes on as soon as he is alone in the cabin. Then there is his great leap off the porch when the door is open to admit Deputy Scott Wilkinson. He offers to go get the dog and, tellingly, our four respond emphatically, and in unison, “NO!”
Alas, Tiger is even more fixated on what is occasionally making odd sounds in the basement than he is on shredding his master’s shoes. You see, the titular creatures are able to travel to various houses via a series of tunnels from the abandoned mine. I found it odd nobody bothered to completely seal off the mysterious hole in the basement that is only haphazardly boarded over. Also, I found myself asking why we only see one house invaded by the creatures, given these tunnels apparently go to various other locales, none of which we see. Lastly, if the creatures were held in place by the collapse of the main entrance to the mine, I couldn’t think of a reason why they couldn’t still access those tunnels.
I was willing to overlook all these things because I was having too much fun watching the film. The leads have a solid chemistry, and there are also solid performances from screen veterans John Crawford and Med Flory as the experienced miners on the project. The characters all behave logically and not like they are in a horror picture. As McCarren remarks of that huge pile of skeletonized human remains: “Seems if it was poison gas or something, we would have found individual skeletons and not just a large pile of bones.”
It also helps that the script not only makes attempts at humor, but entirely succeeds. An early scene has Marcia Reider swerve off the road to avoid hitting a deer, only for the next shot to be the back of her car as it is stuck in a snowy embankment, a bumper sticker reading “I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS”. There is also pretty much every frame Tiger is on the screen. Harlan seems to ad lib every one of his lines and they largely land, such as this bizarre profession of his boundless horniness: “It’s Hormone Man! Able to leap tall women in a single bound.” I was amused when Martin, right before she’s about to hustle Flory at pool, is asked by the man if Harlan always acts like this. Her reply is a resigned “yesss”.
There is one additional character I should mention, and it is the one played by Jon Lormer. He is basically Old Man Exposition, and he has some critical bits of information for our heroes which will be introduced late in the picture. Before then, he behaved as cryptically as this character does in so many of these types of films, doing things like painting the word “DEATH” on a board he nails across the entrance of the mine, as well as putting a few wooden crosses in the way. As I learned from The Strangeness, another movie about a murderous beast in an abandoned mine, crosses are usually a good sign to head back the way you came. Of the board and crosses here, Wilkinson speculates this might be the work of vandals. Once again thinking rationally, Crawford observes the expensive radio equipment out in the open was left untouched: “Damn weird for vandals”.
I mentioned the subpar monster effects before, but that isn’t to say the other effects are lacking. There are actually some very effective bits featuring the beast before we see it in its entirety. My favorite moment in the film, and the only time I found it genuinely scary, was when a couple of claws reach up through a metal grate and slowly pull it into the duct as if it was made of tin foil. There are also some solid fire effects, especially one that will first explode outward from a structure, which then collapses inward almost as dramatically as the house at the end of Poltergeist.
Alas, one of those fire effects resulted in an unextinguishable blaze in the cave set which had been constructed in a former supermarket. That the cave set is indistinguishable from footage obtained in a real cave is a testament to the designer.
I only learned about that, and many other facts concerning the production, through that great commentary track on the disc for The Boogens. I also learned such bizarre trivia as Martin eventually marrying Michael Crichton and being the co-writer, and one of the producers, of Twister. It was there I also learned Conway and Balding met and quickly married on the set of the film. She is also on the commentary track, laughing about such mattes as when they finally decided to let their kids see the film, and the resulting awkwardness concerning her nude scenes. This track was recorded in 2012 for when it was released on DVD. It is good to have her thoughts on the production preserved here, as she would be dead from cancer a decade later and before the release of this blu-ray.
Dir: James L. Conway
Starring Rebecca Balding, Fred McCarren, Anne-Marie Martin, Jeff Harlan
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray