{"id":17,"date":"2011-05-16T03:55:43","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T07:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=17"},"modified":"2020-12-06T21:42:01","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T02:42:01","slug":"on-the-trail-of-blamires-screaming-forehead-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=17","title":{"rendered":"On the Trail of Blamire’s Screaming Forehead"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the things that gives me hope about the viability of Dr. Film <\/em>is the cult following afforded Larry Blamire.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t know who he is, I\u2019d recommend having a look at his Bantam Street site, www.bantamstreet.com<\/a>.\u00a0 So far, Larry\u2019s films have been witty spoofs of older genre films.\u00a0 His cult favorite, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra <\/em>(released theatrically in 2003), is part Roger Corman and part Ed Wood, while being delightfully silly for its entire length.\u00a0 Dark and Stormy Night <\/em>(2009) was also a funny spoof of a type of film that was rampant in the 1920s-1940s, in which a bunch of people are locked in an old spooky house while someone starts bumping them off one at a time.\u00a0 What I love about Blamire\u2019s work is that it demands something of its audience: you have to know something about what he\u2019s spoofing in order to get all the jokes.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d heard for some time about the great, missing Blamire epic, Trail of the Screaming Forehead<\/em>.\u00a0 It was slated for a 2007\/8 release when its cutting was, well, circumvented by an executive producer.\u00a0 We might compare this to what almost happened to Terry Gilliam\u2019s Brazil <\/em>(1985), albeit on a much smaller scale.\u00a0 The abortive cut has surfaced on Independent Film Channel a few times, but bears little resemblance to the original concept.\u00a0 Happily, Larry has been able to wrest the footage away from the miscreant, and we are now able to see the director\u2019s cut of Trail.<\/em> Like Gilliam before him, Larry has been trying to drum up support for the film by doing late-night showings at conventions.\u00a0 Blearily, I am happy to report that I was in attendance at the first of these screenings, and that it went wonderfully.\u00a0 (I say blearily since I had to drive for about 3 hours to attend the screening, which required the same return trip.)<\/p>\n

I am loath to give up much of Trail<\/em>\u2019s plot, which is one of those things that unravels itself like a mystery.\u00a0 It\u2019s intended to be that way, in much the same way that most of the 50s invasion movies were.\u00a0 Trail of the Screaming Forehead<\/em> is a tribute to Don Siegel and Douglas Sirk in the same way that Lost Skeleton <\/em>had been a tribute to Corman and Wood.\u00a0 Shot with deliberately garish colors (like so many films of the era), and full of stereotype characters, Trail <\/em>also boasts cameos from great 50s stars, including HM Wynant, the late Betty Garrett, Dick Miller, and the late Kevin McCarthy.<\/p>\n

Larry Blamire can write campy dialogue with the best that ever did it.\u00a0 His lead actors are now familiar repertory players in his company.\u00a0 They are all able to read deliberately clumsy lines in a convincing yet slightly bewildered way.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to do, and I respect them all for it.\u00a0 They don\u2019t make it wooden, and they don\u2019t do it winking at the camera in the way Adam Sandler would do.\u00a0 I laughed heartily all the way through the film, as did most of the preview audience.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad to see that most of Blamire\u2019s cast is now getting work in other productions.\u00a0 They deserve to.\u00a0 In Trail<\/em>, I\u2019d like to single out the performance of Andy Parks, who is a real master of the reaction shot.\u00a0 There\u2019s a scene in which HM Wynant mistakenly thinks Andy has been taken over by the alien foreheads (no, I\u2019m not kidding), and Parks does a take over his shoulder as if to ask, \u201cAre you talking to me?\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s an age-old gag, but Andy brings such conviction to it that I had to laugh.\u00a0 Parks hasn\u2019t worked in a mainstream film for years, and Hollywood is a poorer place for it.<\/p>\n

Am I completely glowing with praise?\u00a0 Well, mostly, yes.\u00a0 Those of you who know me also know how picky I am.\u00a0 As a hyphenate (a guy who does more than one job in a film), Larry Blamire sometimes has a problem.\u00a0 The Editor Larry sometimes is too in love with dialogue that the Writer Larry wrote. That sometimes lets the pace of the film drag a little.\u00a0 I thought that The Lost Skeleton Returns Again<\/em> had some slow moments in the middle, as did Dark and Stormy Night<\/em>.\u00a0 This does not seem to be the case with Trail of the Screaming Forehead<\/em>.\u00a0 There are a few carpy things I could say, such as the fact that I was confused about Jennifer Blaire\u2019s motivation when she fried the foreheads in one scene.\u00a0 I thought her rendition of the title song was a bit out of place in the middle of the film (I\u2019m not complaining about her singing, which is great, but rather the placement of the song).\u00a0 Incidentally, Trail of the Screaming Forehead <\/em>has a loopy title sequence, done by Manhattan Transfer in great 1950s style.\u00a0 My complaints are but small issues.<\/p>\n

OK, I give up… I know that someone is going to want a plot synopsis, but I warn you that it\u2019s not something you want to read about… you should see it.\u00a0 A scientist (Fay Masterson) discovers that the forehead, and not the brain, is the seat of all human knowledge.\u00a0 In order to further her theories, she isolates the formula for foreheadazine and injects it into a colleague (Andy Parks).\u00a0 His forehead and intellect grow to enormous proportions.\u00a0 Meanwhile, evil alien invaders, which are disembodied foreheads, invade the Earth and begin plastering themselves on local townsfolk.\u00a0 Can the world survive?\u00a0 Who will stop them? Can I stop laughing long enough to hear the plot unfold?<\/p>\n

I\u2019d love to see Larry Blamire get to do more films.\u00a0 He\u2019s got a lot of talent and great ideas.\u00a0 He\u2019s starting to get shoehorned into doing Lost Skeleton movies, and that\u2019s fine, but it would be great to see him get backing to do things like his interesting-looking Steam Wars <\/em>project.\u00a0 Regardless, I\u2019ll keep watching what he does.\u00a0 It\u2019s great to see someone else out there who loves old movies as much as I do.<\/p>\n

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One of the things that gives me hope about the viability of Dr. Film is the cult following afforded Larry Blamire.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t know who he is, I\u2019d recommend having a look at his Bantam Street site, www.bantamstreet.com.\u00a0 So far, Larry\u2019s films have been witty spoofs of older genre films.\u00a0 His cult favorite, The … Continue reading “On the Trail of Blamire’s Screaming Forehead”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207,4],"tags":[46,41,48,47],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-views-and-reviews","tag-larry-blamire","tag-review","tag-spoof","tag-trail-of-the-screaming-forehead"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/19"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}