Here's a little tasty mash-up I found when I was perusing Topless Robot today, The Batman Complex. In a nutshell (get it, nutshell), Bale's Bruce Wayne is just a crazy Brit who think's he's Batman. Then Leonardo is out to Incept him, and between the miasma of scenes from The Machinist, the Batman movies, Inception, The Fighter, American Psycho, and one really nice surprise appearance. It's got a couple of editing hiccups where the movie seems off and a tad on the convoluted side, but I thought it was worth checking out. So here it tis', enjoy....


Now head over to Freddy in Space and see the other best video today, the trailer for a new Call of Duty : Black Ops map called 'Escalation'. You may ask why should you care? I did. I'm only a casual game fan at best. Here's why:Robert Englund, Michael Rooker, Danny Trejo, Sarah Michelle Gellar and George Romero, 'nuff said? Check it Out, and tell Mr. Boots the Bugg said hello.

I attended several dances in high school, but I can’t think of one of my alma mater’s functions that I attended stag. However once, I went to the rival school’s Homecoming Dance in the early spring of 1990. I was a freshman, and there is no telling who talked me into going, that detail is lost to the ages, but the fact remains that I did. I wasn’t attending the enemy’s dance with a master plan to shame their school in some sort of Breakin’ style dance off or to steal all their women. Then I met this girl, an “alternative” type (back when there was such a thing to be) in a Jessica Rabbit style velvet dress. Yeah, I don’t know why she was wearing such a thing, but she was and had the assets to match. (As I recall, I was wearing an unstructured jacket from Chess King, a printed shirt buttoned all the way up “Parker Lewis” style, and pleated slacks, quite overdressed for the after the football game in the cafeteria affair, but who am I to judge.) Somehow, we started dancing if that’s what you want to call it. Later, when it was the stuff of teenage legend, people went on to describe it in many ways, dirty dancing, shocking, an atrocity, crimes against nature, scandalous, and etc. and so forth. At the time though, there was one word on the lips of the zeitgeist that I remember hearing repeatedly that night, and that word was Lambada.

While the Lambada had built a dance craze throughout Central and South America though the late ‘80’s, it didn’t reach American shores until the very end of the decade. The song “Lambada” by Kaoma began to work its way up the charts (peaking at #46), Somehow the idea that the craze was going to take root all across America where people (who may or may not have been at Homecoming dances) sparked not one, but two, films on the subject released the same day in March 1990. The first film, Lambada, directed by Breakin’ and Rappin’ auteur Joel Silberg, stars J. Eddie Peck as a high school teacher who moonlights as a Lambada dancer (opposite The Office’s Melora Hardin) and gets in trouble for it. I know. That sounds awful silly. This is of course nothing at all like tonight’s feature, the competing Lambada flick from the mind of Greydon Clark, The Forbidden Dance (Is Lambada). I put the “Is Lambada” in parentheses because while it may have been in the original title, the producers of the Silberg Lambada film sued to have it taken off. However, only one movie was clever enough to get the Kaoma song for that film, and in that regard, Clark's film comes out on top.

Now, for that far more plausible plot. Lara Harring (Mullholland Drive, Silent Night Deadly Night III) stars as Nisa, a princess from the Amazon jungle. When her tribe is threatened by Benjamin Maxwell (Richard Lynch), she and medicine man Joa (Sid Haig) travel to the city with a plan to confront the head of the evil corporation. This naturally ends up with Joa landing himself in jail and Nisa ending up working as a maid. After going out to dance with her employer’s son Jason (Jeff James), Nisa soon finds herself without a job. Jason, on the other hand, finds himself intoxicated by Nisa’s exotic Lambada dance. Dancing leads Nisa to her next gig, working in a go-go bar as a private dancer (a la Ms. Turner), and when Jason finds her there, he thinks she’s started hooking. Convinced that the princess’ honor is still intact, Jason and the ecological warrior begin to practice to win a dance contest that will allow her to save the jungle or something.

I have to admit by that point it gets a little convoluted, but it also doesn’t matter. Here’s a film that has it all; montages, magical explosions, fighting scenes, cheesy love scenes, dancing, more montages, and even more dancing. You even get a rival for the star-crossed Lambada dancing pair that features a female dancer who would be the perfect match for William Zabka. Once again, Graydon Clark manages to pull all these elements and tenuous trend together into a movie that is a silly good time. Working from a script by Monster High scripters John Platt and Roy Langston based upon a story by uber-schlock producer Manheim Golan, I can’t imagine on paper the Forbidden Dance looked like a good idea. For some when they see the picture, it will still look like a bad idea, but genre fans who love the offbeat and strange will find tons to love here.

I have to start with what I consider the biggest hook for anyone I would want to tempt with this film, Sid Haig as the mute medicine man Joa. Haig, best known now for his Captain Spaulding role, is an actor who has been in everything from Coffy and Spider Baby to Jackie Brown and Boris and Natasha, but I’ve never seen him so tragically miscast. Towering over the other “tribesmen”, Haig looks about as much like an Amazonian as I look like Bradley Cooper (bad example, I know, but you get the point), and his mute performance leads to plenty of laughs both intentional and unintentional. Likewise, Lara Harring doesn’t look so much like she’s come out of the jungle as off the runway. Harring’s performance, like most, is pretty off, but as the film is constantly a little off, it seems to fit and her beauty overcomes plenty of her shortcomings. The film is littered with great supporting performances as well, I especially would like to mention Miranda Garrison (who was also the choreographer) for her role as the predatory club owner Mickey, Richard Lynch for showing up and actually giving the film a heavy, and Barbra Brighton for being the perfect blonde, bitchy, poofy haired rival for innocent Nisa.

If I wanted to (and believe me I want to), I could go on about The Forbidden Dance for much longer. I haven’t even gotten around to little moments like when Nisa tears her skirt off to dance, the final dance showdown, or gotten to talk about the clothes (so many men in giant vests featuring giant blocks of color!) However, these are the kind of things best shared with a few friend and a few drinks. I highly recommend this as a compliment to any dance themed double feature. So pair it with Showgirls, Burlesque, Dirty Dancing, or any of the Step Up films for a night of dancing and strangeness. That about summed up that Homecoming as well, dancing and strangeness. I recall hordes of teens staring as the girl I had just met and I grinded against each other, and little did I know the calf high slit in the back oh her dress has continued to split until it was just shy of showing off her goods. I’ve never danced like that again, and I can’t imagine what possessed me to do so. Years later, when I ended up in a writing class with her, it was a story I was asked to repeat many times, my experience with the Lambada. Now I have finally found a story of The Forbidden Dance that I will speak of in my own hushed tones, and while that Homecoming memory is a faded moment of “glory” from 21 years ago, Greydon Clark’s The Forbidden Dance is the kind of film I can cherish forever.

Hey folks. It’s Friday so that means another dose of Spring Slashers. This week, I thought I would check out a title that had been sitting around the house for some time. I picked up Midnight Movie as part of a 2 pack that also included the biker slasher Poker Run. While bikers getting hacked up didn't hold much interest for me, I thought that Midnight Movie sounded like it might be a little bit of cheesy fun. Now I was basing this solely on the synopsis because the cover art looked terrible and the only actor I vaguely recognized was Brea Grant from Heroes and Rob Zombie’s Halloween II. As it seemed to me, Midnight Movie looked like a supernatural slasher with a self referential nod to the genre. Done right, this could have been a great modern twist on classic slashers meets present day, but as I bought this film and another for three dollars, I didn’t hold out much hope.

Director Ted Radford (Arthur Roberts) had been institutionalized for years because of his obsession with his own film, The Dark Beneath. When a doctor decides to show Ted the film in hopes of making a breakthrough, the results are very different indeed. Seventy people in the psych ward are killed including, presumably, Ted Radford as well. Meanwhile, in a nearby small town, at a dumpy theater that only shows crappy movies because the boss is a cheapskate, The Dark Beneath is tonight’s feature. Settling down to watch the film, a group of teens, a biker on a date with his old lady, and the cop obsessed with the Radford case all think they’re in for a dose of schlock horror, but when patrons of the theater begin to get killed off, it seems that Radford’s screen slasher has made it to the real world.

Thankfully, since I didn’t hold out much hope, I didn’t get my hopes dashed. In fact I got just what I expected. This was the first film directed by Jack Messitt, who currently works as a camera operator for the TV series Bones, and it does show. It also shows that Messitt is more than a little fan of Wes Craven. Throughout there are several references to Cravens films The Nightmare on Elm Street and Shocker as well as Texas Chainsaw Massacre which the movie within a movie, The Dark Beneath, most resembles.  While Messitt doesn’t execute all his high concept ideas, Midnight Movie is no where near the biggest failure I’ve seen recently. (Craven’s recent My Soul to Take was not much (if any) better). No specific part of the film ever rises enough above the mundane to warrant a mention, but Midnight Movie does remain absolutely consistent throughout. The consistency is just at a very low level.

I did rather enjoy the design of the slasher. Though he did appear somewhat similar to Leslie Vernon in 2006’s Behind the Mask, it wasn’t enough to bother me. I did feel like his sharpened corkscrew pointy weapon left a bit to be desired, but perhaps it was chosen just because it would be weird and unwieldy. Unfortunately, it also meant that while there was plenty of blood in the kills, there was really only one or two different ways of killing someone with it. In general, I commend the film for its use of gore, something sadly used all too sparingly in many slashers. The biggest detraction (other than the abrupt and nonsensical ending) is that none of the actors were really all that good. While they were not generally hate-able  as so many other slasher film casts are, the scant 79 minute running time barely gives the film enough set up time much less lots of free moments for character development. That being said, the film takes a solid 30 minutes before it really gets going wherein it meanders about before getting the murders going.

On the scale of bad slasher films, Midnight Movie is no where near the top (or bottom however you want to think of it), but the fact remains that it still belongs on the bad list. There’s just too much in the film that is disjointed and doesn’t quite work. Looking back over this review, I failed to mention but one actor's name, and he’s only in the film less than five minutes. However, that is really the kind of non-entities these people are. Even the last survivor is not someone I had made a connection with through the script had been specifically set up for the audience to feel sympathy for the character. The clumsiness with which they went about it turned me off of it as much as anything else in the film. The only thing that saved it being rated a one was the best illustration of a "if you want them then you'll have to go through me" scene. In the end, I would have been better off watching one of the real, original midnight movies instead.

Today is a red letter day. Not only is it the day that the events that unfold in The Fog take place, but it is also the wedding anniversary of myself and The Lady Bugg. This day 13 years ago we were married, and ever since we’ve managed to avoid ghost pirates of all sorts. So I thought in honor of the date of The Fog and my own nuptials, I thought I would look into 13 things that make me love The Fog. (Listing 13 reasons I love my wife would have just been too easy.)

John Houseman can scare little kids with a story around a campfire, intimidate law students (that’s a Paper Chase reference for those not old enough to remember), and knows how to make money the old fashioned way. I love movies such as The Fog, Sleepaway Camp II, and Madman that kick off with the convention. They always seem to be among my favorites. Here’s the complete text of the story Mr. Houseman tells the kiddies.


There are some things that just go together perfectly. I could write a clichéd list, but you know what I’m talking about. One thing that should be added it the team of Debra Hill and John Carpenter. They began their professional career in 1975 on the set of Assault on Precinct 13, and it eventually lead to them co-writing Halloween, The Fog, and Escape from L.A. as well as Hill producing Carpenter’s films on several occasions. It also lead to a personal relationship between the pair. Sadly, Hill passed away in 2004 from cancer, and for fans of Carpenter’s films, she will forever be missed. After her passing, John remembered her by saying that knowing her was "one of the greatest experiences of my life - she had a passion for not just movies about women or women's ideas but films for everybody".




Carpenter and Cundey is a team up that can do no wrong in my eyes. While Cundey got his start working with the Lair’s good friend Greydon Clark, he did so much amazing work with Carpenter on six of both men’s greatest films. (The Thing, Halloween 1 and 2, Big Trouble in Little China, The Fog, Escape from New York) The work he did here, balancing light, shadow, fog, monsters, actors, and everything else Carpenter had going on in a frame, was nothing less than masterful.


On a more serious writing note, the film starts off with a couplet from an Edgar Allan Poe poem, here’s the entire text to “Dream within a Dream”




I know what with all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies that people have about had enough of pirates (I actually just hit that point this morning when I found out Patti Smith was in the new PotC film.), but Carpenter’s seadogs are not all eye liner and Keith Richards speak. These pirates mean business. After all they have a great legend, and they also happen to be….

Or zombie ghosts, or undead, or special fog creatures, who knows? It doesn’t really matter because they’ve shown up to kill everyone in town. They’re rarely seen, they are vicious as they can be, and they appear to be unstoppable. The final sequences at the Church and the Lighthouse should not to be missed by any horror fan as they are as near to perfect as one could imagine.


So there we have it, 13 things I love about The Fog. While I mentioned earlier that doing 13 things I love about my wife would be too easy, it would also not be nearly enough. So Happy Anniversary my dear, lets hope for 87 more so at the century mark we can show up somewhere on a galleon dressed like ghost zombie sailors. That’s right. I know how to keep the romance alive.

I don’t know where you folks hail from, but here in the general vicinity of the Lair (which of course must remain Top Secret), sometimes it can be hard to get a drink on Sundays. There’s one place that I know of that’s always open anytime I want.....

Seeing as I've been in a slasher mood lately, I thought why not keep the Spring Slashers going and look at Greydon Clark's contribution to the genre, 1982's satirical Wacko. With a stacked cast including Joe Don Baker, George Kennedy, Julia Duffy, Andrew 'Dice' Clay, and Charles Napier, I had great expectations. The taglines, "The Comedy That Takes Off Where Airplane Landed", "At Last! A Motion Picture Made By, For, And About People... Just Like You", and most underwhelmingly "The Wacky Movie", however, did not inspire confidence. What really sold me on watching Wacko was the film's promise of "The Lawnmower Killer" which brought to mind one of my favorite kills in Sleepaway Camp III. So I pulled out a bar stool and cracked open a tall cool one before settling down to Clark's comedic killer, and it just so turns out that this "wacky movie" might be the greatest unsung spoof of all time.

Thirteen years ago, "The Lawnmower Killer" slaughtered several teens on the night of the Halloween Pumpkin Prom. Since then, Detective Dick Harbinger (Joe Don Baker) has not taken a moment of rest, literally. The man hasn't slept for the last 13 years not wanting to waste a single moment that could be devoted to chasing down the Pumpkinheaded lawn equipment wielding killer. One of the victims was the older sister of Mary Graves (Julia Duffy), and poor Mary has extreme trauma from seeing her sister get killed which makes her scream and run in fright anytime the "Lawnmower Killer" is even mentioned. It doesn't help matters that her beau Norman Bates makes sounds like a mower every time he gets sexually excited, her father (George Kennedy) is constantly peeping in her window, and her high-school is full of freaks, losers and loons.

The horror-comedy genre is a rich and full set of films with a number of successes, but the lesser subset of horror spoof movies have been far more miss than hit. The exceptions, Student Bodies and the first Scary Movie, have their charms. Yet Student Bodies was the single directorial effort from Micky Rose (the author of Woody Allen's Bananas) and Scary Movie was a Wayans Brothers product. Neither of the driving forces behind those films had solid genre film credentials. Greydon Clark had plenty of those, but what he didn't have was studio backing or a huge budget. As usual, it turned out that he didn't need it. Instead, he paired the script, written by future The 'burbs writer Dana Olsen, National Treasure and Rush Hour scribe Jim Kouf, and Buffy writer/producer/director David Greenwalt, with a great group of actors.

First off, I love Joe Don Baker. I talked a little about him when I reviewed the Clark film Joysticks, but I just can't say how much his appearance brightens up a film. His Wacko detective Harbinger, complete with "hard boiled" voice-overs, is absolutely a riot. Baker plays it straight, and with wild hair and deadpan delivery, and he takes simple flashbacks to the level of fine art. Julia Duffy is an actress I know primarily from the '80's sitcom Newhart, but Wacko is just one of dozens of parts the actress took in the beginning of her career (including Battle Beyond the Stars) before she landed the part of Dick Loudon's yuppie maid. Wacko showcases the dry, sarcastic, delivery that made her TV character, Stephanie Vanderkellen, so funny. Why Duffy remains an underused actress, I don't know, but I was happy to see her recently on a couple episodes of Showtime's Shameless. George Kennedy, the character actor best remembered now for The Naked Gun movies, creeps it up as Duffy's dad. In one of my favorite silly jokes in the film, it's revealed that Kennedy, who has been shown to be an inept gynecological surgeon, is not a doctor at all. His given name just happens to be Doctor Graves.

Wacko was Andrew 'Dice' Clay's first feature film, and it made me wish the stand-up had never discovered the lowest common denominator magic of dirty nursery rhymes. He was extremely funny, and even his crass gimmick, his character Tony Scholongini can't stop himself from getting boners, made for a few very funny scenes. Scott McGinnis, who appeared in Joysticks as cool guy Jefferson, appears here as Norman Bates compete with dead mom he puppeteers. While the film is a litany of references, the Psycho and Hitchcock homages do tend to lurk around every corner for the keen viewer. It also bears mentioning that Elizabeth Daily, Dottie in Pee-wee's Big Adventure, shows up here in a small role, but her appearance as a genie at the Halloween dance is reason enough to take note. Later in her career, Daily went into cartoons voicing lead characters on Rugrats, The Powerpuff Girls, and Eek! The Cat. She's also continued to make occasional screen appearances in films such as The Devil's Rejects and Potheads:The Movie.

I think one of the best things about Wacko is that while spoofing the slasher genre the film also has room for The Exorcist, The Omen, Halloween, Prom Night, Brian De Palma, and a jillion other little touches that are just there for hardcore horror fans to notice. As much as I like Student Bodies, I would pit Wacko against it time and time again, and each time, I think Greydon Clark's film would come out on top by a hair. It's always hard to get across how funny a movie is as opposed to how exciting, gory, or life changing it might be. For me, I think it's because comedy is something that is experienced on an extremely subjective. So if anyone disagrees with my estimation of Wacko, I would not be all that surprised, but for my sense of humor, it hit the spot. Greydon Clark is a director who is always full of surprises. From film to film you never know what kind of story you might get next, just that it will always be the best, most passion filled version that Clark could execute. In the case of Wacko, the film not only worked; it killed.

That's it this time for my trip to the Greydon Clark Bar. Join me back here the rest of the month and check out what else Mr. Clark has on tap for us.

To kick off Spring Slashers, I thought I would see if there was someone’s first film that would fit the bill. I found just what I was looking for in the premiere feature from David Schmoeller, future director of Puppet Master, Netherworld, and Crawlspace. With a career filled with both cult classics and complete misses, I knew that Schmoeller’s first film could go either way, but I had heard things about Tourist Trap (1979). Good things mostly, but I’d also been told it used a slasher formula that was tired even by late Seventies standards. However, I had to see it because no one loves a tourist trap quite like I do. No matter if an attraction boasts a two headed snaked, cavemen hanging with dinosaurs, a weird cave, or a giant statue, you can sign me up because I will go. After watching House of 1000 Corpses, the thought of crazy people inhabiting a tourist trap never strays far from my mind when I pull into one of the invariably dusty parking lots, but it wasn’t quite enough to make me stay away. What might do the trick though is mannequins and The Rifleman, and that’s not a combination I would expect.

The movie does start formulaically with a group of teens and their broken down car. One goes up the road to get help (never to return) and the others soon run into Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors), proprietor of Slausen’s Lost Oasis, a wax museum. The stranded teens (including future That 70’s Show MILF Tanya Roberts) hitch a ride with Slausen back to his place. While the group’s lone guy, Jerry (John Van Ness) and Slausen head back to try to fix the car, three girls are left at the Oasis and warned not to venture out due to coyotes. The real danger is Davey. As the girls start to venture out exploring the creepy old house behind Slausen’s tourist trap, they soon encounter the doll faced Davey and his telekinetically powered killer mannequins. The girls are soon picked down to one, the sweet and wholesome Molly (Jocelyn Jones) who discovers the true nature of the slasher’s secret.

So, Tourist Trap sounds like a stale, crusty, hackish slasher, but the first few minutes disprove that notion. The film starts out like a DIY version of Herbie Hancock’s Rockit video plus blood, and sets the film’s strange tone from the get-go. Judging from David Schmoeller’s other film, the man has an offbeat sense of humor and it’s on full display here. Not only does the killer alternate between incredibly creepy and neurotically hilarious, the situations that the film presents appear deliberately broadly portrayed. There is a subtle spoof going on under the surface at all times, and Schmoeller has rarely been more in command. With Dolomite (and frequent Graydon Clark) DP Nicholas Josef von Sternberg behind the cameras and a supremely eerie score from Italian maestro Pino Donaggio, the whole feeling of the film keeps the viewer off kilter. Tourist Trap is the type of film where I felt like I knew what to expect, but the result was something more erratically charming.

With all the great people at work behind the camera, the real magic for me happened in front of the camera. Chuck Connors, a.k.a TV’s Rifleman, landed in several cult and genre films late in his career, but I’ve never seen him be better anywhere than in Tourist Trap. The sad thing is that I can’t talk about the complete greatness of his performance without spoiling parts of the movie, and the sadder thing is that just saying that is a spoiler unto itself. So I’ll leave it at this, if you like Chuck Connors, this is THE Chuck Connors movie to see. The supporting cast is not anything to write home about, but they all serve their purpose as grist for the eerie, weird murderous Davey. I do have to take a second to mention Tanya Roberts’ miniscule tube top barely containing her assets. The replacement Charlie’s Angel does get a chance to show off some of the ditzy adorable humor she would tap into again in the ’90’s, and she far outshines female lead Jocelyn Jones (The Great Texas Dynamite Chase). The other two characters, played by Jon Van Ness and Robin Sherwood, do prove themselves utterly disposable, but the kills are so strangely imaginative their deaths were indispensable.

I will always take a chance on films from a director like David Schmoeller. Even his lesser efforts have some kind of attraction to them. Sure Netherworld is a piece of crap, but just try and resist the crap-tacular wonders of the flying stone hand. Tourist Trap needs no such defense. As a first film it captures something that Schmoeller would flirt with in every film of his I’ve seen, horror as tone. There are moments of Tourist Trap that feel like Mario Bava was let loose in Charles Band’s backyard. Even though there were many dark laughs, Tourist Trap also served up more than its share of disconcerting moments equaling anything in better known slashers. If I were going to compare Tourist Trap to a roadside attraction, I would have to say it was the kind that draws you in from the highway and shows you something incredible that might also make you throw up in your mouth a little. In other words the best kind, and for that it gets the first five Bug rating of 2011.

When I started this series of Guest Posts, there were people who I literally could not wait to invite to participate. One of those folks is my internet cousin (don't ask) Christine Hadden from Facination with Fear. Christine is both a great writer and a great lover of Hitchcock. While I take my obsession with Vertigo pretty damn seriously, no one can talk Psycho quite like Ms. Hadden. I'd take a vote as to if it was time to turn it over to Christine, but I think the "eyes" would have it.

It’s hard to imagine what one could even write about Psycho that hasn’t been said before, and yet - when asked to contribute to this Hitchcock series, I couldn’t NOT write about it.  Oh, I thought about Rear Window and Strangers on a Train, as well as several others.  But the Norman Bates lover in me would not stop the voices in my head screaming Psycho!  Psycho!  So I had to go with it. 

Obviously a review of the film would be a moot point.  Anyone worth their salt and reading this blog has seen (and treasured) Hitchcock’s most famous film. Hitch's brilliance is undeniable here. There have been discussions about every darn frame of the film, and finding something to focus on became difficult for me, even though I would count it as being one of my top two favorite films. Ever.

So I chose to focus on something perhaps less ordinary.  The eyes.  This masterfully filmed movie has more focus on the character’s eyes than you can shake a stick at.  Someone once said (a very long time ago) that the eyes are the window to the soul, and I have to agree...

When we first meet Marion in the motel room with her lover, we are yet to discover the horrors that await.  It seems like a quick nooner has become a luxurious afternoon delight, with Marion and Sam rolling in the sheets and giving each other the googly eyes.  But on closer examination, you can see the desperation in their eyes that tells the tale of their struggling relationship. 

Though Sam is stuck paying alimony to his ex-wife, for the life of me I still can't figure out why he and Marion are sneaking around.  He's divorced, so what?  Regardless, you can see the yearning in his eyes as he longs to have a normal relationship with his beloved.  But Marion seems somewhat distracted.  Could it be she feels she's at a dead end with Sam?  At any rate, the eyes tell the story of a pair of troubled lovers, with no idea of the events yet to come.

Once Marion makes the fatal (literally) mistake of stealing the forty grand, we witness her attempt to get out of Dodge.  While she is supposedly home nursing a headache, she is in fact skipping town with the dough.  As luck would have it though, at a stop light her boss is crossing the street and at first smiles, then gives her a second glance, realizing something just isn't right with this picture.  The look in his eyes is so telling, and when the weekend is over and he is back at work on Monday, he'll finally comprehend just what was going on.  And he'll be pissed.

At this point, Marion knows she's caught. The look in her eyes as she is caught with her pants down is sheer terror.  That feeling you get when you're ensnared in a lie is such a powerful one.  We've all been there, it's just that Marion's lie is to the tune of thousands of dollars. She has no choice but to continue on, and she heads out of town. 

When Marion pulls off the road after nearly falling asleep, she is startled to have a cop knocking on the driver's side window of the car.  The officer is kind at first, but when Marion gets all hinky and suspicious, his mood changes.  He does not, however, take off his sunglasses.  It gives him an ominous look, but even though we can't see his eyes, we know damn well he just isn't buying what Marion is selling.  It's even more obvious when he ends up at the used car sales lot when she is there trading in her jalopy for the swamp-destined car.  He stands across the road and glares.  Like I said, you can't see his eyes but it is all the more effective that way.

By the time Marion makes it to the Bates Motel, she is exhausted and feeling guilty as hell.  Meeting Norman Bates must have felt like a breath of fresh air, plus she wouldn't have had to feel any real nerves since Norman doesn't know her from adam. 

At first, he seems like the perfect host, rather nerdy and flustered around a beautiful woman.  His eyes say so much at this point in the film.  Here is where I fell in love with Norman Bates, folks.  Right. Here. 
Those boy next door looks, gentle demeanor, and soothing voice just took me away.  And I think it took Marion away too.  His eyes here are quite kind - just what our Marion needs to make herself feel better. Us too, as viewers.  We're already aghast that Janet Leigh is playing a criminal, right? 

Of course the chat in the parlor changes all that, I think.  When Norman goes off on a tangent about people clicking their thick tongues and always suggesting they put their demented loved ones somewhere, I'm pretty sure Marion has figured out he's slightly off his rocker.  When she retires to her room though, she's all but decided that she's going back to make things right.  She hops into that shower and... well, the rest is history.

But before the big screeching murder scene, we see something else.  The true Norman Bates.  We are privy to his little hole in the wall (and I don't mean his house or business).  We see he's actually rather disturbed, even more than we thought after the parlor rant.  Here is the place in the movie where we all recognize the signs of psychosis.  With just one look.

I'm certainly not saying Norman Bates is a pervert, because I don't see him that way at all.  I see a boy trapped in a man's body - someone that wasn't allowed to grow up the same as other children and someone whose mother has cheated him out of a normal life and exposed him to such things as jealousy and hatred when he neither deserved it nor had a clue how to deal with it.

Probably the most famous "eye" scene in Psycho is Marion after the shower. Obviously.
Though truth be told her eye would certainly be dilated after death, that scene in which the camera goes from the drain to her lifeless eye is what I would call a big money shot.  After all, they killed off Janet Leigh for Christ's sake!  That particular scene has been played over and over in countless retrospectives and clips, but it just never gets old. Very, very effective.

But better than that, in my opinion, is the shot of Norman after he's sent Marion's car to a watery grave, attempting to destroy all the evidence that she'd ever been there to protect "Mother".  It is a quite panic, and shows us all just how fragile and panic-stricken he is. At first, he seems simply nervous.  But as the car sinks to the depths of the swamp, we see that chilling look in his eyes. Now that's the Norman most people are familiar with.  I've no idea how Anthony Perkins didn't win an Oscar for this performance.  It has so many layers and nuances I can't keep up. Damn!  The simple soul we met in the motel lobby turns into the indignant mama's boy in the parlor, then morphs into the manipulative yet detached villain, only to end up the confused crackpot we feel sorry for as the credits roll.  And every bit of it is easily experienced just by the looks on his face. Every emotion, every tell-tale sign of his madness shows in his eyes.

Once Marion's sister Lila gets in on the action, rushing to Sam's looking for her misguided sis, we also meet private detective Arbogast and his looks of wary disbelief.  He's sure, after meeting Norman, that something "just ain't gellin'", and damn if he isn't right.  In every scene he's in, his eyes belay his intuition.  Even when he snoops around just a bit too much, his eyes tell the tale.  Should have stayed home, dude.

Lila Crane (Vera Miles) brings a dose of reality to the film.  Even when everyone is sure Marion is A-ok, Lila pushes the issue, and goes so far as to explore the Bates house herself.  The eyes certainly have it here, as we are finally introduced to Mrs. Bates.  Poor Lila thinks Norman is hiding Mom down in the fruit cellar so she won't be able to incriminate Norman - well, yeah - it is something like that.  In one of the most famous few moments in cinematic history - perhaps even more so than the shower from hell - is the look of sheer horror and disbelief in Lila's eyes when she turns that chair around and sees Mrs. Bates at long last.

And that look remains intact when she whips around to see Norman dressed as his dear old mama, wielding a butcher knife with deadly intent.  Powerful stuff.   Even the eye sockets of Mother's mummified remains are expressive.  See, you don't even need actual eyeballs in this film to relate feelings.Better yet, Hitchcock's fantastic talent with the camera is never better than right here, where the bare light bulb hanging by a string casts long shadows through the empty sockets of Mother's corpse. Absolutely brilliant.  If someone wasn't a fan of Hitchcock before this film (and just who are those people, anyway?), then this one certainly hitched them.  (Pun intended.)

But even after all the film's strongly effective looks, peeps and glances throughout Psycho are over, one compelling screen shot remains. You know the one. The last reel of the film.  Those last, terrifying moments.  Even after our pal Norman's plan with the knife is foiled by hero Sam and he is taken into custody, and we are regaled with the psychiatrist's tales of an overbearing mother and a belittled and jealous son, we get that shot of Norman/Mother in the police station. The voiceover by the Mother side of Norman's personality isn't the most frightening thing - it's the look in Norman's eyes as he gazes directly into the camera...telling everyone he wouldn't even harm a fly. 
In all my countless days of watching horror I have never witnessed a more effective scene in my life.  As I've mentioned at the beginning of this post, the eyes are the window to the soul.  And it has never been as true as in the final moments of Psycho.

As I suspected, that was incredible stuff from Christine. Check her out over at Fascination with Fear, and come back here on Friday to check out another entry into the Spring Slashers. Then Sunday I'm kicking off a brand new feature!