Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema, we're going to be talking about the nineteen eighty four ABC made for TV horror movie Invitation to Hell, directed by none other than Wes Craven. Did you know he made for TV movies?
Was this multiple?
Was this before Nightmare on Elm Street or after?
We'll get into this in a bit, but I believe this came out right before and or in the same year as Nightmare, So okay, we had a couple of different things happening at the same time. Here.
Wow, So Invitation to Hell starring Robert Urich, Joanna Cassidy, and Susan Lucci. Of apparently, I didn't know this when I first watched this movie, but apparently of like soap opera Royalty, Urreat fame.
Superstar in the soap opera world.
But this movie is about an expensive and exclusive West Coast country club that is in fact run by Satan.
It's true. So this one originally aired on Thursday May twenty fourth, nineteen eighty four in the eight to ten PM slot Eastern Time. I was looking this up on tv tango dot com. I think it was the highest rated network offering that night, beat out Simon and Simon Memory if my memory is correct. There it is not to be confused with a nineteen eighty two British horror film of the same name, directed by Michael J. Murphy.
So there are two invitations to hell out there. You can accept them both, but just don't confuse the two.
Both seem to involve people being invited to like swanky, fancy parties in order to be killed or exploited in some way. Yeah, so earlier this week, the reason I picked this movie is that I found myself craving that that sweet, unique flavor of made for TV horror. Oh. We've covered at least two other made for TV horror movies on Weird House Cinema. One was the nineteen seventy
eight CBS film Death Moon starring Robert Foxworth. That was the work beast of the work, based about a guy who he's getting too stressed out at work, so he goes on vacation to Hawaii, but uh oh, turns into a were wolf.
Yeah. Love that movie. I finally had to buy a bootleg of it, because if you look around, if you grow attached to some of these seventies and eighties TV movies, there's not always a physical media choice out there, not always a legitimate one. So sometimes you have to be a little creative if you want to give it a forever home in your house.
The other one that we've done already is the nineteen seventy two CBS horror fantasy Gargoyles. That was the one with Cornell Wild, Bernie k C, Jennifer Salt, and Scott Glenn as a motorcycle hooligan. That one was about subterranean demons living in the American Southwest, which are called gargoyles for some unspecified reason.
Yeah. Also an excellent film, excellent weird film.
Have we done another one that I'm forgetting? I think those are the only two made for TV.
Now, Shedy, I don't think we've actually done any other weird House episodes on other TV films. Of note that we have scouted a few others. I know we've talked about nineteen seventy three's The Horror at thirty seven thousand feet.
Is that the one that's like an adaptation of the Twilight Zone thing with Shatner with the Grimlin on the airplane wing or is that a different one. Oh no, this is the one with druid magic. Yeah, druid magic on the airplane.
Yes, some sort of druid magic or extorcism. So a number of different elements, including the shat going on at thirty seven thousand feet.
That must have been the association.
Yeah, okay, Yeah. We've also kind of batted around the idea of doing nineteen seventy three's of the night Stalker the kickstart of the TV series as well as of course, there are various Frameskenstein, Dracula and other horror adaptations for the small screen, though sometimes in those cases you get kind of out of because one of the things we're kind of talking about here are these weird one shot TV movies that are not a part of any other franchise,
and they're not like a prestige picture like some of these Frankenstein Dracula pictures are kind of like the big mini series of the day, Like you wouldn't compare this film to say any get like you wouldn't compare it to the old Showgun TV mini series. Like obviously that was a real prestige project. This is something a little different somewhere, kind of stuck between a prestige TV mini series or a prestige TV movie and your standard episodic offerings.
Yeah, I would say this movie is in its business life more of a quick and dirty cash in, but I you know, I want to sing for its virtues in this episode. So another reason that I was thinking about made for TV movies is that just recently, like in the past week, Rachel and I watched another one from also from nineteen seventy eight, the same year as Death Moon, which was an ABC made for TV horror called The Initiation of Sarah. Have you seen this, rob
I have not. Seems heavily based on Stephen King's Carrie. The movie version of Carrie with Sissy's Basic came out in nineteen seventy six, so this would have been, you know, in the wake of that a couple of years after. This movie was about a It's about a troubled young woman with telekinetic powers who goes to college, gets bullied by a bunch of mean sorority girls led by Morgan Fairchild, and you can guess where it goes based on the
Carry model, a similar kind of arc. There's you know, there's no pig's blood, but there's a similar there's like she sort of casts a spell that turns Morgan fairchild like like, evil looking and ugly, though this one has a variant Unlike Carrie, where the telekinetic girl is sort of coached in the dark side of the force by a mentor, an evil mentor, in this movie it's Shelley Winter is wearing a druid robe and a huge wig.
So that one was pretty fun. But anyway, that brought me to Invitation to Hell, which I think is even more of a winner. There is something I find delightful and even intoxicating about the particular combination of spiciness and blandness that you get with American made for TV horror
from these decades, from the seventies and eighties. Often these movies do have a really weird and disturbing premise and some wild ideas inside them, kind of trapped inside, but the imagination at work feels muted, muffled, of course censored for content because it was on TV, but also contorted
into a particular shape. I think we talked about this When we did the episode on Gargoyles, you know that you got to accommodate ad breaks and hit predictable plot beats on the tea timeline, So it creates this weird effect, especially when it's a horror story where I wanted to compare it to seeing the outline of a dread outer god,
but only through translucent glass bricks. Like occasionally, something weird and wild kind of gets loose in the story and for a moment it breaks through the confines of the format, before everything kind of settles back down and the being goes back behind the wall, and it ends up being kind of quaint and cozy at the same time. I really like it.
Yeah, Yeah, We were talking a little bit about this off Mike before we started recording. We were talking about other West Craven pictures, and I pointed out that I was trying to figure out how to express how I felt about this, because I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go out there and say this is the best West Craven film at and it's also far from the worst. But I might have liked it in ways that I have never liked of West Craven film, and I think
it comes down to comfy. This film felt comfy in a way that even I think objectively better West Craven films and certainly more influential West Craven films, are not. Like that might be part of what you're talking about here, Like the TV format is kind of this this way, this way of grounding the storytelling and in a way that makes you feel a little safer, Like this is network television in the seventies or eighties. It can only
go so hard on me, you know. It's it has kid gloves on, perhaps to a certain extent because they got to wrap this up by ten pm.
But it also provides a funny and comfortable contrast with the weirder and wilder elements of the horror themes. I just like the hot and cold showers element of it.
Oh yeah, and this one's got some This one really goes all over the place.
Yeah yeah, Now you were saying, in a way, you might think of this as kind of a favorite of Wes craven experiences. Some reviewers online regard this as Wes Craven's war movie. I don't think that's right. I'll give it that it is. He certainly has movies that I think are more artistically ambitious and more interesting and certainly scarier. This movie, I think is not very scary, but it is highly watchable and very entertaining and a lot of fun, I would say, much more so than some of Craven's
lesser theatrical releases. And you know, even it has a kind of made for TV hokiness, but has some ideas. It's like it's having some fun. It's it's playing around.
It's having some fun. It has things to say about ambition in the American dream. Yeah. So yeah, it's there's a fair amount going on here in this picture. And as we'll discuss too, it is perhaps a cut above some of the other made for TV films that were
popping out around this time. Yeah, and to be clear, it is I think it is very easy to dismiss made for TV movies, particularly from this era, is lower budget productions produced to adhere to network standards, you know, thinking of them as sort of bland sandboxes for bland
filmmakers and bland actors. But of course there's still plenty of room for talent to shine through even in those constraints, and I think part of it may be as well, that a lot of us have gotten away from watching films on broadcast television in general, but TV absolutely was, and you know, I guess, to a large distance still is a medium for film watching. In fact, TV is
where some films really cemented their following. And I'm not just talking about like the cult films that you know, you and I may have grown up watching on TV and listeners may have grown up watching on TV like Beast Master and Clash of the Titans and stuff like that. You can say that about films like The Wizard of Oz.
I was recently rewatching this film with my kid and it had the Turner Classic Movies intro by Ben Menkwitz, and he pointed out in this intro that when this film was released in thirty nine and then re released in forty nine and fifty five, you know, it's a critical success, but really only a modest financial success. It might sound crazy, but it was on TV that The Wizard of Oz apparently really caused viewers to fall in
love with it. This is where it really began to take on the legendary status that it has today, which was that was a real eye opener for me.
I wonder if that's the case with a lot of classic films. I'm just speculating, so I don't know in this case, but like I would strongly suspect that there are may be a lot of holiday films that are like that, that are like big because of reruns on TV. Like I wonder if that's the case with It's a Wonderful Life. Comparing the original release of that to like how much love it got in the years, you know, as I played in the holidays and stuff like that.
I would not be surprised at all. Yeah, if that were the case, and even into fairly recent years, I think it's been surprising at how you can be surprised
at at like what films can really like. Spike Rate a friend of mine who at the time worked for Cartoon Network and pointed out that like whenever they would play The Mask Too, the sequel to Jim Carrey's The Mask, ratings would just go through the like it was it was it was I'm not gonna say we'd go through the roof, but I think the idea was like if they needed to like sort of juice the ratings a little bit, this was always a film they could they
could call upon this is always a lever they could pull.
Is that just like ninety minutes of a cartoon faced dog biting crotches?
I guess so. But you know, it's it's what, it's
what works now. But to come back to this film and some of the others we've talked about, I am just continually impressed by just how weird and daring some of these TV movies of the Week were in the seventies and eighties, you know, rolling out strange scripts, bringing them to life, often with with modest budget casts and production values, and sometimes with up and coming or future big name actors attached, you know, the likes of John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg and of course Wes Craven.
Yeah, that's right, was Steven Spielberg's duel made for TV movie also, I believe it was. Yeah, also had early made for TV stuff. So yeah, it is not just a play place for hacks. I mean, you know, some of the best and most revered directors in Hollywood did a lot of work here. Another thing that I think is interesting about Invitation to Hell is that it reminds me of a favorite that we have covered on Weird House Cinema, before, and that is the unloved but excellent
Halloween sequel Halloween three, Season of the Witch. These are examples of the rare horror movie in which a sort of that have as their main feature a kind of economic or class critique, and that have a business as the main demonic villain. I thought that was kind of interesting. You would think there'd be more movies like that, But I struggle to come up with many examples. I mean,
it's the case here. I mean, the closest thing you get is stuff it's more on the border of like horror and sci fi where you get it's like a weird creature that is made by some experiment or something like that. And even then like the monster is just made by corporate malfeasance, you know, and ignoring safety protocols and so forth. Now, this, this movie we're talking about today has well. Actually, this would be kind of difficult
thing to disentangle. Do you think in Invitation to Hell that the country club or the corporation is actually the main evil institution, which is the main servant of Hell, and which one is more in service of the other.
I guess it's the country Club. I don't want to spoil too much at this point, but I guess it's the country club, even though like with the country club exists, if the company wasn't there, I don't know. They are kind of intermingled, and it seems like there's a lot of influence going back both ways.
It seems like almost like the corporation exists. I mean, they're making aerospace technology, but it just exists to funnel people into the country club.
Yeah, and then the head of the country club can just come over and tour your top secret projects at any moment. So that's right. It's a weird setup.
Well, maybe we should say here, as always on Weird House Cinema, we are going to discuss the plot in a lot of details. So if you would like to see Invitation to Hell without any additional spoilers, go watch it yourself. It's widely available. You can watch it streaming pause here. Go watch it and come back and listen to the rest. But if you think you're probably not going to watch it, or if you just don't care if we spoil the plot for you, you may proceed.
All right, let's go ahead and listen to a little trailer audio. This time I was able to grab a little bit of the ABC movie promo. I like the network television promo for this film off of YouTube, so let's go ahead and listen to a little bit of that.
It's a good one.
They were the perfect family finding a new life and a new home, but.
An invitation and the hottest spot in town.
Became an invitation to Hell.
One week from to Night at eight seven, said.
I model, see, don't you want to stay up late? I'm not really late. Don't you want to stay up to ten pm? Watching this movie?
Now I'm tuning in. I'm going to turn down any party invitations and any invitations to something other than Hell, because I already have an invitation to Hell on that's your TV screen, and.
You can still watch sixty minutes or twenty twenty afterwards. I think it's twenty twenty that air okay?
Nice?
All right? As Joe mentioned earlier, Yeah, you can definitely go and stream this pretty much anywhere you want. I watched it on Prime. I believe it's It's come out on both DVD and VHS before, but I don't think it's received much attention on the physical media front, more than other made for TV films to be sure, but yeah, you're not going to find an exquisite blu ray of Invitation to Hell.
Can I tell you my ideal way to own this. It would be like those tapes of the Star Wars Holiday Special where commercials are hardbaked in. If somebody out there has that, If you have a rip of Invitation to Hell with commercials in it, please please send it our way. I desperately want this.
All right, let's jump into the connections here the people who made this film, starting at the top with Wes Craven, who lived nineteen thirty nine through twenty fifteen. This is somehow our first Wes Craven movie.
We've talked about doing other ones. We've definitely talked about doing Swamp Thing and a number of other movies. Yeah, Wes Craven's got a lot of great films. But here, finally, at last, we have made it to the crave.
Yeah. Yeah. Legendary American horror director. He was an academic
and Humanity's professor in the mid sixties. His masters was in philosophy and writing, but then The Sirens Song of Cinema lured him away, initially into some low level editing position UNEs as well as some work in the adult film industry during the early in the mid seventies, including writing and directing under the moniker Abe Snake Abe Snake, which I love that name because it sounds as ridiculously made up and on brand for an adult film director
as Wes Craven does for horror. So Wes Craven was of his actual name, so good now. It was not uncommon for filmmakers at various points in their career to do this, of course, especially during the adult film industry's golden age. But of course, his first breakout directorial effort was the notorious nineteen seventy two revenge film The Last House on the Left, followed by nineteen seventy seven's The Hills Have Eyes and the seventy eight TV movie Summer of Fear starring Linda Blair.
Never Seen that one.
Oh, and then also nineteen eighty one's Deadly Blessing This is another TV movie starring Ernest Borgnine. After this came his take DC Swamp Thing in eighty two, which show which you just mentioned. This one, of course starred Louis Jordaan, Adrian Barbou and Ray Wise. Ray Wise played the Swamp
Thing and then in nineteen eighty four. This was a very interesting year for Craven because on one hand, we get this film, along with The Hills Have Eyes Part two, often considered one of, if not his worst film, and I think in part because I've also read it might not have actually been completed. It's supposedly a mess. And it's also a film where, if memory serves, everybody including a dog, has a flashback to the first.
Film where they get to Reeve's footage. Yeah, pad that thing out, baby.
Yeah. But this was also the year that he wrote and directed the excellent A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that really did change horror cinema forever. You just can't understate how important A Nightmare of That on Elm Street was the creation of Freddy Krueger.
So around the same time as in Vita to Hell. He's sort of there's somewhat overlapping projects night Mare on Elm Street and Invitation to Hell.
Yeah. I don't have the exact timeline on things, but yeah, like a number of different things were coming to Fruition, including the big one or the first of a few different big ones for Wes Craven. You know, he was far from a one hit wonder.
Though his success with Elm Street Weirdly Enough would not stop him from doing additional made for TV movies.
No, no, yeah, because the weird thing. I mean, it's not really weird. But we've seen so many cases where a director, you know, strikes strikes gold, and they're going to come back and do that sequel, at least the first sequel, because that's going to help fund the next thing. But he did not immediately return to the Elm Street director's chair. He kept mostly to the horror genre, but explored some sci fi horror in the nineteen eighty five
TV movie Chiller. I haven't seen that one, but that's like a cryogenics picture.
Yeah, it's got a guy who gets cryogenically preserved and then comes back to life and then I think goes around stabbing people or something as pauls Orvino as a priest in it.
Also, nineteen eighty six is Deadly Friend, which is I think a robotics movie. I almost rented it thinking it was invitation to help, Like, I picked it up off the shelf and I'm like, oh, this is the one Joe was talking about, and then I realized, oh wait, this is actually not.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't watch it though, No.
No. During this time he also directed an episode of the Magical World of Disney, an episode titled Casebusters starring Noah Hathaway. Of course we know as a Treyu from the never Ending Story.
Oh okay, not the only never ending story tieing in this episode correct.
He also directed five episodes of the nineteen eighties Twilight Zone revival, and then came the infamous nineteen eighty eight production of The Serpent in the Rainbow. I don't know if infamous is really the right way to describe it, but I know this one had a very troubled production story. There were a lot of complications this.
Yeah, that was a movie, but voodoo.
Yeah. Nineteen eighty nine Shocker came next that. That's when I know you have a fair amount of enthusiasm for Yeah.
I think that's a bullseye in my category of not good but a good time. Yeah.
And then nineteen ninety one's The People under the Stairs, a movie that I have seen, but it's weird. My memory of seeing it is still overshadowed by my childhood idea of what this movie might be if that makes sense, like seeing the posters, seeing the VHS box art, Like I remember my anticipation of this movie far more than I remember actually seeing it. I remember you and I have talked about this before.
How you would I think we would sort of do the same thing, like wander around the video store when we were young and look at the horror box covers and just imagine what the movie is without actually seeing it. So sometimes when you actually when you're older and you can see these movies, or maybe you're still too young to be watching them, but you see them anyway, it just doesn't match the movie you already imagined, and so you end up with a blended memory.
Yeah, yeah, it's true. So it wasn't until nineteen ninety four that he returned to the Elm Street franchise with the meta horror film New Nightmare, in which he, like many members of the original cast, plays himself as well in addition to directing it.
I have a lot of positive feelings about New Nightmare, but my memory I haven't seen it in a long time, But my memory is it almost is more exciting as a premise than effective as a completed film.
Yeah, I think what also, I saw the year it came out, but it was I think one of the factors that I have to take into account is this was the same year, nineteen ninety four that John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness came out. Both films that play with the sort of meta idea of horror fiction and reality blending and the membrane between the two worlds growing. And I think they're both effective in their own way.
But In the Mouth of Madness really resonated with me at the time and stands out more in my own memory as a film that I love.
Yeah, I think that's a more exciting film overall. But the premise of New Nightmare is really cool for people who aren't familiar. The idea is that it's about real people. It's about Wes Craven as Wes Craven, I mean, he's not the main character. The main character is Heather Langenkamp, the actress who played the main character in the first Nightmare movie as herself, and other fictionalized versions of like the actors and you know, Robert England and people involved
in these movies. And the premise is that there is a sort of ancient entity which attaches itself to characters in like scary stories that are told around the campfire over the years, and it attaches itself to the idea of Freddy Krueger. So for these people in the real world, the fictional character Freddy Krueger becomes real.
It is a really daring idea. I feel like it's exactly what the franchise needed at that point. I feel like we can look at the timeline of Freddy Krueger movies and can realize that it was getting long in the tooth and it needed to be shaken up one way or another, and this was like, this was a pretty artful and imaginative way to shake things up, and clearly like the way that brought Wes Craven back to
the picture. Yeah, totally now. He followed that up with the nineteen ninety five Eddie Murphy horror comedy Vampire in Brooklyn, which was widely panned at the time and there were a lot of jokes about it. But I believe it's been reassessed in recent years and there's some different ideas
about how we should look at Vampire in Brooklyn. I don't think I ever saw it myself, though, but the following year Craven hit it out of the park once more with a hugely successful Scream, which would spawn an entire franchise, obviously, with Craven directing the first four films, this time with twenty eleven Scream four standing as his final directorial credit before his death in twenty fifteen.
You know, after the first Scream, I think you could very legitimately make the charge that the Scream movie are no longer innovating. They're just kind of varying the same formula. So you know, that may be fair. But I've been entertained by all of them. I haven't been bored by a Scream movie yet.
Yeah, I mean, I haven't gotten to the point where I have wanted to go back and reassess the Scream movies. I enjoyed them. I enjoyed them at the time, and I guess on one level, it kind of makes me feel old to realize that ghost Face is a horror icon now, like he's shown up in the Mortal Kombat franchise as a DLC character at this point, alongside the likes of Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees and the Xeno Morph and Predator.
Wait a minute, if he's in Mortal does he like call lu Kang on the phone?
I don't know. I haven't played. This is the latest one that my poor system can't play this one. Someone else will have to write in and tell us how this plays out.
I mean, the phone calls are crucial. That's what scream is.
I would hope so Johnny Kaye has the phone, maybe he can get phone calls from ghost Face. Well anyway. Wes Craven's scream era also included some notable deviations, most notably the nineteen ninety nine drama Music of the Heart, which starred Meryl Streep. She was nominated for Best Actress Academy Award for that role. He also directed a segment in two thousand and six is Paris just him? This is French so and may be butchering alongside the likes of the Cohen Brothers and others. I saw this one
in the cinema. I think I only remember the Coen Brothers segment though, okay, I think it had steep yuseim me in it. But Craven also directed the two thousand and five werewolf movie Cursed starring Christina Ricci, and the air Travel thriller Red Eye, starring Rachel McAdams, Killian Murphy, and of course the legendary Brian Cox.
Oh, I didn't know Brian Cox was in that. Now I kind of want to see it.
Yeah, I haven't seen it. I often avoid the air travel thrillers. But I mean that's a good cast. There's no doubt about it. Love all three of them.
Oh yeah, well that's fair. I realist. That's probably the reason we have not yet covered go Co body Snatcher from Hell.
Yeah. Now's the time, though, I'm in between flights, so you don't have any trips coming up, not for a couple of months.
So yeah, okay, well maybe we should do it.
Yeah, all right, now that we've done Wes Craven, hopefully due diligence there at least a brief overview, we'll move on to the writer. The screenwriter of this TV movie. It's Richard Rothstein, who lived nineteen forty three through twenty eighteen American screenwriter and producer, whose first produced script was the nineteen seventy eight western shoot The Sundown, co starring
very young Christopher Walken. His credits include various other films and TV movies, but most Notable are eighty two episodes of TV's The Hitchhiker, which ran eighty four through ninety seven, and of course nineteen ninety two's Universal Soldier starring Jean Claude van Dam.
Oh. Okay, yeah, he was.
Just involved with the first one, but you'll see him as he gets a character credit on all subsequent Universal Soldier movies.
That also of Doulph Lundgren.
Yep, he's definitely in the first one and eventually pops back up in the latter ones as well. All right, getting into the cast here, top billing goes to Robert Urick, who plays Matt Winslow. Urick lived nineteen forty six through two thousand and two, American leading man actor, best remembered for his work in the seventies and eighties, which included a lot of TV, including the title role in Spencer for Hire and the role of Jake Spoon in the
nineteen eighty nine mini series Lonesome Dove. Oh yeah, that that of course had a terrific cast.
I haven't seen it, but I started reading the novel last year and really liked it, but then just didn't finish it.
Oh yeah, it's a great novel, as well, there's another one in that series that I read, Comanche Moon, that I really liked. But yeah, the mini series was definitely a prestige project, had Robert Duvall and it also had Sonny Carl Davis in it, a bunch of people. But yeah, Robert Urick is in that and plays a plays a character that kind of it's easy to look at his role in this picture and sort of identify the sort
of leading man type roles that he played. He plays a flawed character in Lonesome Dove, a character that ends up having not a great trajectory. Other films of his include seventy three's Magnum Force. Oh, and then the nineteen eighty two Alan Rudolph cattle mutilation conspiracy thriller Endangered Species. That's another one where he gets to play a more morally complicated character as you might expect from an Alan Rudolph picture.
Once again, that was not the cattle mutilation movie we talked about, that was the other one.
Yeah, Yeah, this is one where this one leans more conspiracy thriller as opposed to aliens doing things to cows. But it's also it's pretty great. It's like it's Alan Rudolph, you know, going for a mainstream thriller vibe, but it's quite effective. It's one that I've toyed around with the idea of covering. I definitely want to some Alan Rudolph film at one point or another. Is just a matter of picking the right one.
I've got one on my list. We can talk about after this episode.
Oh yeah, yeah, But anyway, I like Robert Urick, you know, yeah, you know, very much seventies eighties leading man stock but I feel like he always gets the job done. And you know, obviously he's an actor we would have liked to have seen more from. We didn't get to see a lot of late career character work from him, as he passed from cancer at the age of fifty five.
Yeah, the main character in this movie I actually found quite likable, So Matt Winslow. This character, he's sort of a classic like solid family man, like a loving father and a good husband and an emblem of rectitude, so you might expect, well, he's kind of an uncomplicated character, so there's not much to get into here. But I don't know, I really enjoyed this character. Actually, he's a
good guy by trade. In the movie he's an engineer who works in this era space technology industry, and they have him designing cutting edge suits for astronauts to wear, like in the next phase of Solar System exploration. And he has this ludicrous sci fi dialogue to deliver where he's like having them point this spacesuit helmet at things and it identifies whether it is human or not, or a non human terrestrial or non terrestrial.
Being, yes, or if you are benign or malignant, is it malignant or malicious?
Yeah, benign or malignant beings of whether or not they're from Earth, and it just the helmet knows.
It's remarkable tech that he developed here.
So he's but he delivers that with a kind of illan that's admirable. Also, this character, Matt and by extension, Urik, is a megahunk, and the movie is not shy about like letting you get a good idea of what his butt looks like in some nice fitting khakis.
Yeah, that's right. He's at least shirtless in one scene.
But this is a kind of leading man, good guy roll that I think we could potentially underappreciate. It takes a little more skill than you might think when when you first watched this movie because of all the different stuff he has to do and that he has to navigate the performance of like fighting off demonic versions of his own children that are attacking him, and you know he does well with it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He has to do kind of like the grounded, believable stuff and then like really lean into the into the into the role when it gets super weird towards the end. Yeah, all right, So that is Matt Winslow playing his wife. Pat Winslow is Joanna Cassidy born nineteen forty five. Two time Emmy nominated actress for Elite Actress role on eighty four's Buffalo Bill and then a guest role in the TV series Six Feet Under.
Best remembered by many of you, though as the snake handling replicant Zora in Really Scott's Blade Runner.
Oh okay, I didn't make that connection, all right.
She's the one who she's wearing like, yeah, yeah, it's like a shower curtain trench coat and she gets gunned down in the street by our hero.
Yeah yeah, totally. She's working at the club and she has the snake. Yeah, yeah, I remember her.
She also played the character Dolores in nineteen eighty eights who framed Roger Rabbit, and she had a role in seventy three as the Laughing Policeman.
She's also good here playing a conflicted character, someone who's torn between wanting to be like a loyal and kind wife and mother to her family, but she's also feeling the pull of like ostentatious wealth and the desire to be included in this rich new jet set that the family has moved in with.
Yeah, because that's all that's ultimately the meat, like the social commentary that this film dabbles in as ambition and what do you want to be versus what you are? What are you know? What are your values? What are your ambitions? What is the American dream that either you have for yourself or is being inflicted upon you? And who is doing the inflicting? Oh?
Oh, let's talk about Jessica Jones. Yes, that is the character's name.
Yes, it's such a Yeah, it feels like such an everyday name for this character. And I guess part of it is like I grew up with somebody named Jessica Jones, so it like it just feels like it's like literally the girl next Door's name. And the character that Susan Lucci is playing here is anything.
But isn't Jessica Jones also a superhero? There was a show of wasn't there.
Yeah, yeah, Jessica Jones. The it's a Marvel character. But I think they I'm not an expert on that character, but I think they chose the name Jessica Jones right, or at least they they focused in on it because it sounds so normal for a superhero, and it's about her being like an ex costume superhero now living a more like you know, film noir, kind of like gritty realistic existence.
Oh okay, Well I didn't know anything about it. I just knew if the character existed. But yeah, anyway, so this is Jessica Jones in Invitation to Hell. Is the character played by Susan Lucci, the daytime TV soap opera Royalty who we were talking about earlier. And Lucci seems to be having the time of her life in this movie, playing the Satanic impress of the golf course. I love this.
Yeah, she's really getting in there and having a good time with this. Yeah. She was born in nineteen forty six, still active, best known for her long running, ANY winning role as Erica Kine on the soap opera All My Children. I believe if I'MDB is correct here, and they usually are oney seven hundred and forty two episodes of that series.
How is that possible?
Yeah, just they crank them out and then they run forever, or they ran forever. She also co starred with Robert Urick in the nineteen ninety two thriller Double Edge. Undoubtedly a TV legend here, and I've read that this whole film exist because her nineteen eighty three contract to keep acting on All My Children specified that she would get to do some sort of a like a TV movie of the week, and so they had this script written
with her in mind. They were like, we've got to make we need to make a sci fi drama for Susan Lucci. See what you can put together, and so we end up with her playing Jessica Jones. Here.
This Wes Craven movie is actually a Susan Lucci vehicle.
Yes, yeah, I think crave. I've read that Craven came in kind of kind of laid on it, like there's still pre production, but a lot of the elements were already in place. But then he hit the ground running, you know, finishing putting everything together and figuring out how to make a few things work. But yeah, really fun role here. I think this and the nineteen eighty seven TV movie Haunted by Her Past maybe the only projects she's done that have a true speculative element to them.
So you can imagine somebody who's like cranking out soap opera after soap opera episode, you know, having a great time getting to play the devil.
Yeah, she should have done it more.
Also, of note, she was in a nineteen ninety five TV movie called Ebbie, in which she plays a female version of Ebenezer Scrooge. I haven't seen that one either, but that also sounds that sounds like that was also a fun alternative to what she usually did.
Do you know if on All My Children did she play a good character or a bad character?
I think maybe more bad. It seems like all the memorable soap opera characters are baddies, right, Like those are the characters you love to hate? Right? Maybe you know you remember names, like you know, and I'm betraying my you know how little I know about soap operas, But you're gonna remember Barnabas Collins because he's a vampire. You're gonna remember presumably Erica Kane because she's also a baddie.
Does sound like a bad character name?
Yeah, speaking of names, I guess it would have been two on the nose if they call or Lucci for in this you know, so they probably like just colleg Jaska jots. All right. Up next, we have Joe Rogato playing Tom Peterson born nineteen forty nine, probably best known to many of you out there. This is the main connection I had to his work because he played the character Frank on TV's Murphy Brown, which I remember watching
a lot as a kid for some reason. I think because it was it was on television, and that's it was something the family was watching. But he he was nominated for an Emmy for that performance. He was also in the nineteen eighty six movie Raw Deal, which we were just talking about last week.
Why were we talking about Raw Deal last time?
Oh? Yeah? Why were it was somebody? Somebody one of the actors or up. I just looked it up.
It was Sam Wanamaker.
There you go, Yeah, who.
Directed Sindbad in the Eye of the Tiger.
There you go. Yeah. So Rogato also did I did a lot of TV work, but also directed quite a bit of television, including many episodes of Murphy Brown. Here he's good.
Here.
I don't have a I have to say about this performance, but he's good. He is the coworker, I guess, former acquaintance of our lead character saying hey, you're working for the big evil corporation.
Great. Yeah, Well he's I think he's the friend who tempted Matt and his family to come into this. He's like, I have gone to take a job at a big evil corporation. Why don't you come work at the big evil corporation. You'll make lots of money. Yeah, And so he plays like an ingratiating, nervous corporate grimlin.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good performance. All right. We also have Kevin McCarthy showing up, at least for a little bit. He's not in this much, plays mister Thompson. McCarthy lived nineteen fourteen through twenty ten. American actor, nominated for an Oscar for his performance in the nineteen fifty two adaptation of Death of a Salesman, but probably best known to many out there for his maniacal paranoid performance
in nineteen fifty six's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also pops up in various genre films to follow multiple Joe Dante films. If I remember correctly, previously mentioned him on the show, because the episode I recorded with David Streepy on Joe Dante's Innerspace, of course, features Kevin McCarthy.
Kevin McCarthy has powerful, malicious boss energy, and that, in fact is exactly the role he plays in this movie. But I imagine he was just getting cast over and over again as the guy who calls the main character into his office to tell him he's fired.
Yeah. Yeah, that's the generally he played like certainly later in his career, tended to play nasty old men, and he was excellent at it.
Oh and speaking of old men, we also in this movie have Bill Irwin, the perpetual old man of the movies.
Yes, yes, playing Walt Henderson. Yeah. Irwin lived nineteen fourteen through twenty ten. American character actor appeared in more than two hundred and fifty television and film roles, including the one that earned him an Emmy nomination in nineteen ninety three. He played retiree Sid Fields on SIGND and we previously discussed him in our episode on the nineteen eighty four short film Quest.
He's got a brief sympathetic role in this movie. But yeah, it's a nice contrast to the other things I've seen him in, which are mainly comedies where he needs to pop up as like a curmudgeon.
Yeah. Yeah, here he is a little bit more to do. He has a nice scene and the last we see of him it's it's actually really sad. Yeah, yeah, all right. We also have a sheriff character that shows up. I don't think he has a name. Maybe he has a name, but it played by Nicholas Worth who lived nineteen thirty seven through two thousand and seven. Instantly recognizable rotun typically bald or balding American character actor, you know, kind of
like built like a like a pit bull. Probably best known to many of you out there for his role as the Hinchman Polly in nineteen nineties Dark Man.
He body slams Robert Urick. In this movie.
He does, he does, he gets the fulsome wrestling moves.
They have a wrestling scene.
Yeah, So obviously this guy plays a lot of heavies. His credits include seventy three Screen Blackula Scream, seventy four is The Terminal Man, seventy eights Coma, seventy nine's The Glove, nineteen eighties Don't Answer the Phone. I believe he was the main villain in that. He pops up an eighty two Swamp Thing, eighty six is Heartbreak, Ridge, eighty eight's Hell Comes to Frogtown, and Action Jackson and the Naked Gun. Wow. He also plays a demon in ninety four's Dark Angel
The Ascent. He's in ninety six's Barbed Wire. Did a lot of TV pops up on The X Files and a couple of different Star Trek shows.
No, I don't remember what he did in the X Files, but yeah, he's good. I don't even remember if he has any lines in this movie, but he does stand there and menace people, and then yeah, has a pretty sweet fight scene.
Oh and we need to talk about the Winslow children. Oh yes, yeah, the Winslow family. We have two children. There's a boy and a girl, both famous in their own right. That's right, but let's start with the girl. Let's start with the daughter. It is the character Chrissy, played by Soleigh Moon. Fry born nineteen seventy six. It's TV's Punky Brewster. That's who it is.
I've never seen Punky Brewster, but the name is burned in my brain from when I was a kid people talked about Punky Brewster. I imagine her as just like a girl Dennis the Menace. Is that sort of it?
Yeah?
I only have vague memories of watching this show, but I remember it like Punky Brewster, like she was to be celebrated. Okay, she was a lot of fun. She was a handful obviously, child actor here turned grown person actor. She's also known for her work in ninety three's Pumpkinhead two Blood Wings. She's also she was a cast member on TV Sabrina and the Teenage Witch. This is the version that ran two thousand and through two thousand and three. She's also done a little bit of directing.
So this movie does ask a decent amount of the children characters she has to play not only like a little girl who's kind of upset about her family having to move to a new city and like she misses their old house, but she also gets to play a demo possessed child who's like, there's only bad Chrissy.
Now, yeah, yeah, yeah, so you just have some fun with this role for sure, and then playing her brother, Robbie Winslow is Barrett Oliver born nineteen seventy three, a child actor that we previously talked about on the show because he of course played Dastian Balthazar Bucks in a much bigger film from the same year than Never Ending.
Story, both in the same year.
Wow, yeah, his other credit.
It's like Peter Mayhew being in Star Wars and Sindbad and The Eye of the Tiger the same year.
Yeah. I mean, you keep working and some things take off and some things don't, right, But yeah, so it's a quite a I mean quite a cast here, and the family itself is pretty interesting. So like, after I'd watched the film, I had to show the first ninety seconds of it to my wife. We'll talk about why in just a few minutes here, but then I also like, stick around. I've got to point out some things about this family, all right, moving behind the scene. The cinematographer on this is Dean Condy.
Oh yeah, we've talked about him on the show before. He was a cinematographer and I believe the very first movie we ever featured on Weird House Cinema right Without Warning?
Correct, yes, nineteen eighties without Warning. More famous probably for his work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which he won an oscar for ninety three's Jurassic Park ninety six is Apollo thirteen and many others. He's worked, of course, extensively with John Carpenter, Robert Zemeckis, Yeah, and great on Clark.
So I love Dean Coundy's work. Was he also a cinematographer on Halloween three season of The Witch?
But I believe he was. Yeah. I believe that's one one of the other ways that Dean Coundy has come up before.
Interesting but also connection in that these movies share these kind of unusual horror themes. Invitation to Hell is not beautiful to look at by any stretch of the imagination. The things it has to show you are mostly not all that exciting, and yet I think Condy's cinematography is one of the reasons the movie is so eminently watchable, even when he really when all he has to show you are fairly drab sets and locations. Kundy just has a very strong sense for visual storytelling, and his camera
naturally adds momentum to the story. So I don't think it's the only thing that makes Invitation to Hell a very fun and watchable movie despite being somewhat low budget. But yeah, there's something going on with the cinematography, despite the fact that the movie is not much to write home about in terms of visual spectacle. Yeah.
Yeah. Though on that note, it is worth pointing out that, Okay, many of these TV movies were apparently produced if in this era, were produced way too fast and at a lower budget, so they couldn't really benefit from storyboarding. But apparently, since this was a Susan Lucci vehicle in all, the studio went the extra mile and they hired storyboard board artist Petco d Kodiev, who is apparently known to some extent as the count behind the scenes, to sketch everything
out in pre production. He'd previously worked on the nineteen eighty three feature film Blue Thunder, which is the Helicopter Movie, and went on to work on such films as eighty six As King Kong Lives and eighty seven Is The Running Man.
Oh okay, so the storyboarding may also have helped give this movie more visual coherence than it might have had otherwise it was just sort of a over the shoulder point and shoot, like a lot of TV movies would be.
Yeah. And then finally, the composer here is Sylvester Levy, who lived still around as far as I know. Born nineteen forty five, Hungarian composer who also scored nineteen eighty six's Cobra, nineteen nineties Navy Seals, and various TV projects, including the TV series Werewolf.
Is this brother of Anton no No, but.
He's also partially responsible for the Elton John song Victim of Love from nineteen seventy nine, one of the writers on that, and he won a Grammy in nineteen seventy five for the song fly Robin Fluoh, performed by the German disco group Silver Convention, a group that he helped put together.
Rob I thought you might like the score on this movie. It's very synth heavy, and it has it's Moody's. Those are things I think that attract you to a film score.
Yeah, yeah, I liked it.
Yeah, Yeah, I liked it too. A lot of parts reminded me actually of the synth themes in The Terminator.
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. And yeah, I thought it worked well for the picture, because especially we get a pretty rocking opening scene, but then we get a lot of scenes in which it's like a family getting situated in this nice looking neighborhood, this nice little slice of the American corporate dream, and yet the music is here to remind us that things are maybe not what they seem.
All Right, you want to talk about the plot, let's jump into it. So if you don't decide to watch Invitation to Hell in full, let me at least convince you to watch the first ninety seconds or so. Yeah, it has a strong, cold opening, pulling you in after. Do you know what aired right before this?
I was trying to find out that I couldn't get a firm answer, So I'm thinking maybe it was just like your regional nightly Neves or maybe the national nightly news, because it would have been seven to I mean it would been eight to ten Eastern, So I'm guessing yeah, you would have just been after the news, watched the movie, and then watch twenty twenty.
Right, So it's fighting the Frizzies at eleven and then cuts to this. So we open the We open on the exterior of a country club. It is a bright sunny day birds are singing, rich people doing fancy country club stuff. You see golf carts zipping around. There are a couple of ladies walking through the valet a lot carrying tennis rackets with covers on them. This actually got
me wondering why did tennis rackets ever need covers? I never had a cover for any tennis racket I ever had, But like, what does the cover do?
I don't know. I guess if it's If it's nice, you need to put a cover on it.
The music selection here is eerie synthesizer chords with reverb heartbeats. And we pan over and see the see some of the people coming to the club. There's like a guy leaning against a no parking sign and a polo shirt with what do you call it when you got a sweatshirt with the arms tied around your neck? It's a it's a real yacht club look, yeah. Yeah. And then in the background we see a green golf course and beyond that typical arid mountains that you would see in
coastal southern California. So a station wagon with some really sick wood paneling hauls up to the gate and we see a sign telling us where this is. It is the Steaming Springs Country Club.
I love this. Every time they mentioned steaming Steaming Springs, it just made me think of like steaming polo crap or something. I don't know, just and I feel like that had to ha been intentional on the part of the filmmaker's screenwriter.
Here, there's a lot that on my first watch I thought maybe unintentional, and then when I came back to it, I was like, no, they did that on purpose.
Yes, yeah.
The station wagon is being driven by a uniformed chauffeur with a fancy little hat. And then we finally get our first good look at Susan Lucci in costume. In character. This is the character that will later be introduced as Jessica Jones. She's sort of the queen wasp of the club and her look is amazing.
It is a.
Cherry red, full body outfit. I was gonna say pant suit, but it's not really a pant suit. It's like because
it's not like a jacket over something. It's more like a shirt and pants going down to the ankles up to the neck, all cherry red, with long sleeves, some kind of silver metal half belt object at her waist and big, big hair, like it's all up in this volumina black curly perm She's also wearing a white patch on her chest with a design that I couldn't decipher at first, but eventually you get a close up and I realized it is the Steaming Springs logo, which is
three wispy lines that I guess signifies steam rising. And then maybe steaming springs would be like two s's, but then there's another S there, there's three lines. I believe it is not an accident that this superficially reminds us of the SS insignia.
Yeah. Yeah, like maybe they originally were just going to have two of them on there, and they're like that's a little too much. We should just go back and just have the three of these things on there. But yeah, this is quite a look. Huge hair, a jumpsuit that makes her look like she works at Gismonics Institute instead of the golf club the country club. Yeah, this is our luetio fur and it's striking right from the beginning.
So Jessica Jones is walking across the driveway as the chauffeur of the Woo Woody wagon drives up to the clubhouse entrance. Unfortunately, our chauffeur here gets distracted because he's ogling a couple of ladies in teal and purple bikinis, and he's on a collision course with Jessica Jones, who, by the way, does not even try to get out of the way. She just stands there staring head on at the car barreling toward her. The driver does a
double take, tire screech, crash. Jessica goes under the car, driver stops, looks out through the rear windshield, and then Jessica rises up from the ground like a lever. Yes, totally stiff, hands on hips. She just pops up into the window.
Yeah. Yeah, she totally pulls a low pan on this guy. Or I guess you make trouble a little China low pan pulls to Jessica Jones. Though, I'm gonna go ahead and assume that neither Craven nor Carpenter were the first to pull this exact sequence this. I'm curious. I have no answer here, but I feel like this must have come from somewhere. This must have been established somewhere else, otherwise it was created here. I don't know, well, it's.
Like, no, sparautu again, Yeah, I get you're right.
Yeah.
So she then points a finger, like I curse you. She just points a finger and the rear windshield shatters. The driver starts screaming, and then there is smoke fuming out of his clothes.
He's like, yeah, yeah, I showed this scene to my wife because I like, you gotta watch you gotta watch this first in the first ninety seconds of this film, And she commented this whole sequence with Susan Luci plays out like a demonic nineteen eighties hair commercial. You know, look at how confident she is.
That's so right. Yeah, maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's a gift from the Prince of darkness.
Yeah, she's turning heads, she's snatching souls, she's microwaving dudes in their cars.
That's right. Yeah. So the driver melts pretty solid melt right, yeah. Yeah. I mean they don't show you too much goop. It is made for TV, but I did a freeze frame here and in mid melt he looks like Lawn Cheney as the Phantom of the Opera, but with huge teeth, hollow eyes, and sweaty wax for skin. I like this model.
Yeah, this is Yeah, this looked I thought it looked really good, especially again since this is like, you know what, eight o five pm on a Thursday, it's hitting pretty hard.
But I also like that they're giving you Susan Lucci before they give you any of the good guys. She's just out here at the golf course melting drivers.
And I guess it's part of the whole vibe. Is Yeah, you want to get the viewer hooked right and give them a taste of how weird this is going to be. Let them see Susan Lucci, they know who Susan Lucci is, and then they'll be inclined to stick around for the rest of the picture.
As you said, she microwaves him he's good and melted, and then she just looks very pleased with her work and walks away from the car. She like tosses her hair and walks away beaming. And I was thinking, who has to clean this up? Do they have staff there who just mop up melted chauffeurs? And also this is a company car. It says steaming springs on the side of it.
Yeah. Yeah, And the screenshot you included in the outline. You can see that this dude that she just melts. It has the silver Spring, Silver Springs, the Steaming Springs logo on his outfit as well. So, yeah, she just totally melted an employee.
Did I say silver springs earlier? I know, I was hearing this in Stevie Nick's voice a lot.
It will happen again.
You can be my melted driver, let's see. Oh yeah, okay, so that's the cold open. After that we go on to meet our main family, the main characters. This is the Winslow family. So you got the father Matt Winslow played by Robert Urick, the mother, Patricia Winslow played by Joanna Cassidy, the daughter Chrissy played by Seleih Moonfry, and the son Robbie played by Barrett Oliver. And also we don't see him until later, but the family has a very cute dog named Albert.
Oh yes, he'll be important later on.
Yeah, do check in with the does the dog die crowd? I'll say the answer is no, but the dog is conceptually threatened.
Yes.
So the family they're on a car trip when we first see them. There crew in down the highway and another gorgeous American made station wagon of the nineteen eighties.
I don't know if this one has wood panels, but we get the title and the credits, playing and terminator font over aerial shots of the highway and like recently developed valley subdivisions in southern California, and of course more golf courses, and then in the car our first impression of the family is of Robbie the Sun, and we get the idea that he's the kind of kid who's
really interested in getting the high score. He's into points, so he's like, there's a dog five points, and I just saw two flags fifteen points, four hundred and seventy, four hundred and eighty, and he's just saying numbers. It reminds me that Tim and Eric sketch where it's an
ad and they're just saying numbers. Anyway, Chrissy is tired of playing Robbie's game, and she is especially annoyed that he counted those flags he just saw because they're on a golf course and golf course flags do not count as flags. But she also wants to quit the game because there are no more animals to see, just dumb buildings. I think that's a metaphor. So the family is moving from their home in the Midwest to their new house in southern California because Matt, who is an engineer, got
a new job at a company called Micro Digitech. And for a second I was like, surely they can't be playing on a real company, because Digitech is the real is the name of a real brand. They're the makers of, like the beloved Digitech whammy pedal for guitars.
Well, what sound is the whammy pedal responsible for?
Well, it's like a it's like an octave shifting pedal or tone shifting pedal, So you can play one note on your guitar and then with a whammy pedal you can make it an octave below or an octave above that actual tone. So it's like what you hear Jack White playing the guitar, but it sounds like a bass guitar. He's making that bass guitar sound with a whammy pedal to kick it an octave down. Oh okay, I see,
But I think this is just a coincidence. I mean, it's kind of an obvious name for a company I guess that makes digital technology Digitech, But this is Micro Digitech anyway. So the family's driving into town and Robbie, the son, he's a computer boy, and he's reading off the names of various company headquarters. He's like, oh, the TRX Corporation, Microchip International, Boy, it sounds like computer heaven. And then Chrissy, his sister, says, computers don't go to heaven. Well,
we'll see about that. So on the drive, Matt and Patricia have a conversation, making it clear that this is a big step up for them, this move, but one that Matt is a little bit uncertain about. Previously, they were scraping by on Matt's meager income from whatever he was doing before. I guess he was either an independent engineer and inventor or he was like working at a
university or something. They say this is his first time working for a big corporation, so it's a huge increase in pay and prestige, and Tricia is very excited for him, but he's like, I don't know, I've never worked for a big corporation. I'm just not sure about it. And the kids also seem divided on the move. Robbie is very excited for a taste of the good life, but Chrissy says she misses the snow back home, and she also says she doesn't like the building that her dad
is going to be working in. They showed this building. It's like a high rise office building, much taller than any of the other structures around it, with these mirrored windows top to bottom reflecting the sun. And Matt asks Chrissy why she doesn't like the building. She says, because you can't see the people inside.
M Yeah, I like that moment.
They don't play it like it's all that ponderous though. She just kind of says it and they move on. But I don't know, it's stuck and stuck in here for me.
Yeah, it's a subtle effect. And in general, I love the banter with the family. Yeah, I felt like the banter felt very realistic. It felt like a realistic amount of squabbling between the children, but also laid out in a way that helped establish some of the overall themes and establishing like what's going on in this family's life. Right.
So they arrive at their new home. It's a big, beautiful house and a beautiful subdivision. Think of the Simpsons episode. If you've seen it, you only move twice. In fact, this movie as a whole has serious overlap with you Only moved twice. Yeah, but it's more like like an eighties West Coast version of the house on Maple Systems Drive, or at least that's what it's supposed to be, because the house is indeed huge and spacious and nice looking from the outside. A lot of the interior sets look
like they were hastily built on a sound stage. So the kitchen is huge, with the cabinets and stuff kind of remind me of my college dorm room. So anyway, everybody's happy to move in. They're laughing, exploring. Matt picks up Patricia and carries her over the threshold, and while the movers are bringing things in, Patricia and Matt they have a mild argument. Matt's unpacking some kind of high tech gizmo from padded steel carrying case, and Patricia's like
hold it. She tells him that she wants him to take all his computer things and inventions into the lab at work, because she wants this to be a home, not a laboratory. And you never see it, but you get the idea that maybe their house in the Midwest was kind of like doctor Forrester's Burrow in Deep thirteen.
Yeah. Yeah, And I think it's important to note that Patty's Patty's not being unreasonable here. And he also, you know, sees the logic and what she's saying and quickly agrees. He's like, yeah, yeah, I'll put this in the garage. You know. She's like, this is a chance for us to live a little differently. And at this point in the film, it doesn't feel like that ambition is getting out of control at all. It seems reasonable totally.
You do not get the idea at all in the beginning that there's anything wrong with what Patricia wants. Yeah, that comes in more with like the influence of the Queen Wasp at the club and stuff. Also, there's a very he's seen with Robbie the Son antagonizing the moving men. He's on this computer in his new room, and the moving man's like, what you got on their games? And he's like, no, I have a computerized inventory of all my things, so i'll know if you lose any of it.
And indeed his computer starts flashing and reveals that he is missing a candy bar. He must have inventoried that, And then we see the mover like surreptitiously put a candy bar, like pull it out of his pocket and put it on the kid's bed. But like, how would the computer know the candy bar was missing unless it had been inventoried in by a human. This is just a good prelude to the way the movie generally treats computers,
which is that they are omniscient. They are somehow fully aware of their physical surroundings.
Yeah, it's a great example of late seventies early eighties computers and films. In a way, this matches up very closely with what Mother does in Alien. Yeah, of course Alien takes place in the future. It is a at least by our own, from our own vantage point, a retro futuristic view of computer technology. But also in films like that, it's just this is just what computers do, right.
You just talk to him conversationally, kind of like what we're doing now with these different chat bots, but at the time, you know, completely beyond what they were capable of doing totally.
There's a scene where Matt later just goes starts typing in open ended questions on like a doss prompt, and like it's like he's using chat GPT, but it's the green letters on the black screen. So later that night, the Winslows get a visit from some family friends who already live here and already work for this corporation. This is Mary and Tom Peterson and their kids, old family friends. We already talked about this, I think, But Tom is the who already took a job at this company, and
he invited Matt to come join him. And first there's kind of a jump scare where they're hearing rattling outside the windows, and Robbie the Sun is like, it's zombies. Definitely, they do stuff like that, but they go, you know, we get a boot scare, and then the friends come in. Oh, it's actually just our friends. They brought a bucket of chicken with them.
What time is it supposed to be, but it.
Looks like late late at night? Is pitch black outside? Did they show up with a bucket of KFC? And then the kids just each reach in and grab a fried chicken piece and run away. I mean, I remember no plates here.
I mean, I can I remember these buckets of chicken well from my own childhood. I can only imagine in this case, there's some cold chicken in there, not that it matters. In fact, I feel like KFC buckets. We're consumed like at least half the time, like just completely room temperature, if not fridge temperature.
Yeah. So the kids run off and play and the adults gather around a piano and Patricia starts playing music. She's playing when the Saints go marching in. I think they're trying to do a sing along. There were comments earlier about her once being a struggling music major, and in this scene you really get some of the class anxiety themes coming out. Tom and Mary both make kind of awkward comments. Mary is like, oh, yeah, remember when we used to do this in the dorm room, gathered
around that horrible, old, upright piano. But then they're like, oh, is this still the same piano you have? And Tom says, no worries. The days of out of tune pianos and beat up old furniture they're all behind you. Now you're in the big leagues. And Tom tries to make them toast to success, and once again it's like that that hammer horror toast to satan.
Yeah. The piano here made me think of the of the TV show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. At one point, they pick up a stand up piano that is like left on the curb, that has the word bed bugs spray painted on it, and they end up bringing it into the apartment. So I can only imagine a similar situation here.
Sure, you just don't sleep on the piano, You'll be fine. So later there's a scene where Matt is tucking the kids into bed and Robbie is up in his bed playing a handheld kind of beat boop game where he's blasting spaceships to save the galaxy, and he says, you know, how come I can save the whole galaxy, but I can't go to the Halloween party? What Halloween party? It's the one Tom and Mary's kids are going to. It's at the club and it's for members only. Don't you want to fit in?
Matt? I kept wondering about this handheld device that Robbie's playing on here. Is this supposed to be an actual device or is this can we never see the screen? I never saw the screen clearly, so I'm wondering if this is this tab that he's playing on, which, you know, we looks just like some sort of an iPad something here today if this was actually some sort of video gaming device of the time, or they're just getting a little futuristic care.
Yeah, what were handheld gaming devices like in nineteen eighty four? That seems I don't think there was a game boy yet, was there?
No? No, And by the early nineties he still had some very like I don't know, he's a crude little video game. I'm not even sure. I forget the terminology for them, but they were barely video games. You know, you're moving a few pixels around. They were not on the level of like a game boy or anything.
They're more like a digital watch where you press buttons. Yeah, okay, well anyway, so that's what he's playing. He's you know, blasting. I think they call it Astrobomber is the name of the game. But so the next day we're going to get some work stuff. We get carpooling to Matt's new job where he's riding to work with Tom. When he gets into Tom's car, Tom basically has Clarence Bodiker in the backseat and it's his boss. It's this character named
Larry Ferress. Yes, and Tom is embarrassed that he has to give his boss a ride to work in his car, which he calls a junker. But I'm gonna say, I cannot tell the difference between these supposedly good cars and the allegedly bad cars in this movie. They all just look the same. They look like huge American made sedans from the eighties.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I have similar problems today figuring out what is a nice car what's not. But I do want to point out, like this was definitely I'm so used to watching a weird house film and as certainly if there's some sort of an evil corporation going on. When the boss is introduced, I take note. I'm like, Okay, I need to look this guy up. See this actor is But it really doesn't matter. With Larry Ferris. They really don't come back around to him, not much.
I mean, later at the Halloween party he shows up in a very tasteless costume, but that's about it.
Like otherwise, Yeah, he's not much of a character.
But we do find out that Larry is Tom's sponsor at the club. So at the office we meet first of all Matt's secretary Grace, who is the first time we meet her. She's sneaking around with some secret binders hiding things and drawers and stuff. But we also meet Matt's project, which is the EVA Suit for the Astronauts of the future, and this is why Matt was hired to design computer components for this suit that Tom explains astronauts are going to wear for an upcoming manned mission
to the surface of Venus. Hilarious concept.
And at this point I have to also the suit is hanging from the ceiling, almost as if it is an object of worship. Yeah, And I feel like at this point, if you weren't already hooked in and strapped in for this movie, you strap in at this point because Okay, we started with the Lucifer blat, melting dudes and cars, and now we have introduced a clearly important spacesuit and we're about to get more rad details about it. Like already this movie's going a little bonkers on us.
Yeah, but to be clear, like for a mission that will never happen, there is no reason to take human crew to the surface of Venus, and that that is not really doable.
Well, we don't know in this reality. Perhaps there's something else that has occurred. I don't know. We can we can dream about it.
The other thing that's funny is so Tom, he explained, Tom is in the marketing department. He's going to be responsible for selling this suit. And I was thinking, is there a marketing department for technology that you're only gonna ever make a handful of for a single buyer, Like, wouldn't it instead be you would make a bid and get a government contract to make a select number of them. Here it seems like they're kind of making this spacesuit on spec and the marketing department will have to sell
it to NASA. Yeah, so anyway, Yeah, let's take a look at the suit, whatever it's features. Well, we learn that it can withstand heat up to a bazillion degrees. They demonstrate by blasting it with a flame thrower and there's no damage. It is armed with a laser pistol that shoots out of the like shoots out on a slide mechanism from the wrist, like Travis Bickle's gun and taxi driver. It is this concealed shootout into the hand a laser pistol. What is this for?
I mean, one can guess blasting Venusians, blasting rival astronauts. Maybe it's really more of a utility laser and they're just you know, firing it off. But then why would you need a quick draw on it. I don't know, in a dangerous environment on Venus or in orbit above Venus or in the clouds above Venus. But either way, I do love this thing. And you can already tell this is going to be important.
Yes, it's also armed with a flame thrower of its own. We just saw it getting blasted with one, but it has one that comes out of the arm. This also will clearly be very useful on Venus. And then I think this is Matt's main contribution. It's got a computerized visor that is going to tell you the temperature of whatever you're looking at, and then also whether the thing you're looking at is human or non human, terrestrial or non terrestrial, and malignant or benign. How does it know
those things? Never explained at this point.
I feel like maybe we do want just a little additional hint that I guess there are aliens on Venus and we don't know how they feel about humans, and maybe they're difficult to tell from humans. That's the only way this technology makes sense.
Oh, I didn't even think about that. Yeah, this would only be necessary if the thing you were looking at is indistinguishable from human anyway. Yeah, because if they just encounter a being on Venus and it's coming towards them, would they be like, is this from Earth? I don't know.
I want to stress again that this script was apparently written for Susan Lucci, so one can imagine like this script was plopped on her agent's desk and then on her desk, and she looked through it and she was like, yes, let's do this.
Give me that, give me more of that. So back home there is a conflict about furniture. Patricia wants new stuff befitting of their upgraded social status. First, Matt kind of scoffs at this, but then like some boys from the neighborhood come by to play Astrobomber the video game. And this includes not just the not just Tom and Mary's kid, but the kid of Larry Ferris, the Clarence Bodiker guy, the Boss, and Billy Ferris. The kid. He
first of all, he is a poor sport. He gets mad and smashes Robbie's game when he loses, and also when he walks into the house he insults the Winslow's furniture. He's like, why do you all have such old furniture? But like, have you ever heard a kid I'll say something. I don't know if they observe that anyway. So the Winslow's all head out to the furniture store. That's the
last straw we got to get new furniture. On the way, they nearly get run off the road by a chauffeured car that is like doing a doing tokyo drifting into the club, but the steaming springs entrance and Matt is he gets out. He's very angry. He gets out of the car to trade insurance info. But the passenger of this car gets out and it is Jessica Jones played by Susan Lucci. She introduces herself as the club's directors. She's like, I know all about you, she knows all
of the family names and everything. She says, no need to trade insurance info. Allow me to have my goons intimidate you instead. So she just gets back in the car and here we get this. Who's the actor of the sheriff worth Yeah, yeah, the sheriff guy. He says, here, we're a small, tight knit community. We do things a little differently, and I think that includes like not trading insurance info when it's this car. Maybe she's just going to send you some suspect to get instead. So next
we see an initiation at the club. So we see Tom and Mary's family undergoing their final initiation into steaming Springs,
and we have the Honorable Jessica Jones presiding. So the family, they're all standing there in these terry cloth robes in front of this door that is like, you know, has steam pouring out of it in white light, and Jessica Jones says, you are now accepted into the inner Circle, and by the symbolic entrance into our ancient spring, you forever forsake the mundane world and merge yourself into the protective,
exclusive shield of the Club. And so they're standing there and the doors open, the steam pours out the white light, and Jones says, do you forsake all for the club? And the family all say they say, I do. Then enter into the spring and taste its power. So they go inside and the doors close behind them, and then the sheer just stands outside the door, our arms folded. So at first it looks like I don't know, maybe they're going into just a really steamy sauna.
Yeah. At first you would assume, okay, this is the actual spring, this is the steaming spring. Yeah. But there's more details emerge. It becomes clear this is no ordinary spring. This is something infernal.
Right. So, back at the office, Matt catches Grace sneaking around in the records room where she doesn't have clearance, and she nervously hands him a file that she wants him to look into. They get interrupted by Harry Thompson, the president of the company. Matt does not rat out Grace here, he covers for her, and the president of the company, Thompson, is like, here's a very important person I want you to meet, Matt. It's TV Susan Lucci.
This is Kevin McCarthy playing mister Thompson here.
Right, yeah, yeah, the boss guy. And this guy suggests that Matt. First of all, he's like, hey, did you know she has a club? You should join her club. There's a lot of scenes like that. It does kind of get repetitive somewhat. There's so much insisting that people join the club. But the boss also says that he needs to give her a tour of all his highly classified research. And Matt's like, but isn't that stuff classified?
And he says, Matt, miss Jones is family. So he's trying to show off the suit's capabilities, and Jessica is like, ooh, Matt, did you play a sport in college? I like your muscles. And she says, at the club we have lots of exercise equipment, lots of pleasurable things. And Matt is like, well, I guess I'm not much of a joiner and she says, you know, you should think about it. It can do a lot more for you than you would think. And
then ooh, we get a stinger here. So as Jessica is walking out of the room, we see from inside the space helmet and when she walks across its field of view, it renders a judgment on her. The screen says non human malignant.
That's just for us the viewer at this point.
All right, Matt doesn't get to see it. Okay, So next we have let's see, oh, we have a scene where we find out that since being initiated into the club, Tom has gotten a promotion. Now he has a big, fancy office. It's got like six computers in it does doesn't Tom work in marketing? Does he need all those computers? It looks like a multiperson workspace. But they're just saying, is this is his office now?
Yeah.
Tom again insists that Matt should join the club. He says, you join the club, you start rubbing shoulders with top top people. It's like the end of Indiana Jones and the Top Men. But Matt is resistant. He's got bad feelings about it, and he leaves with Tom still insisting. Meanwhile, Mary arrives at their house and is showing off to Patricia her new car. Patricia is very jealous, and Patricia she's telling Matt she she thinks they should join the club.
She's like, it's our turn, Matt, It's our turn to have a little piece of success. And this is the part of the movie where there's like it's the middle of the night and Matt gets up. The kids are having a slumber party, and that creepy kid, Billy Ferris is there, and Matt goes into the kitchen and Billy Ferris is like up at midnight staring at a TV that's just showing old footage of riots and violence in the streets.
This is a local channel I'm the.
Semi Yeah, so let's see. There's a some more plot stuff. Matt finds out at work that Grace has been fired by Thompson, the big Boss, and he goes to confront Thompson about this. He says he wants him to hire her back, and Thompson kind of implies, well, he might consider it if Matt and his family join the club. Geez, okay, you're making your point. So finally, Matt, Patricia, and the family get a tour of the club. Tom and Mary are sponsoring them, and they walk around seeing all of
the wonderful facilities. You got tennis courts, a pool, golf course, Jim with a big weight room full of beautiful athletic people sculpting their body, and Jessica Jones tells them that they could be initiated in as little as three or four weeks. And Matt wanders off from the tour into an off limits corridor down to the door. The door we saw earlier from the initiation. This is the door to the spring, and he's sort of getting ready to try to look inside, but Jessica Jones finds him and
stops him. He explains that he thought he heard someone crying out for help on the other side of the door, and Jessica's like, oh, it was probably someone crying out in ecstasy. Pleasure can make you feel that good, you know, did you know? Pleasure can make you feel good? Jessica Jones tells him that she can carry. She can tell he doesn't care about money, but she thinks he does care about pleasure, and she will make sure that his
membership is as pleasurable as possible. Now, this is a theme they're kind of developing the movie, But I think this one doesn't necessarily work right because you never get the feeling that Matt is all that tempted or like he's about to give in or anything.
Yeah, I feel like we would need a couple of scenes sprinkled here there that show that he is to some degree sexually frustrated or you know, or particularly hedonistic in one way or another. As it stands, it's kind of like Jessica Jones is just saying, you're a human, you're all hot to trot, so let me just push those buttons. Yeah, it feels a little desperate on her part, and it makes him feel a little more immune to her various powers.
Yeah, I agree. I think it would have worked a little better if they'd shown him being slightly more vulnerable to the seduction. And it's just like bullets bouncing off of Superman. He doesn't really seem I mean, he seems like bothered by it.
He's bothered. He's bothered by this temptation. He's bothered by the door to perhaps hell, and he's also bothered by the fact that there's no basketball court here. He does point back, He's like, where the where's where's the bee ball? And they're just all that like, oh, it's a great place, Like they were like, oh, we forgot the basketball court. Oh yeah.
If only that would be the final victory for Satan, if.
She should have led with that, she'd be like, we will add a basketball court. Man, two of them full sid have done it.
Yea recruited. Now he gets to become spawn because they made a basketball court. But so he gets freaked out and leaves after this, and he has a fight with Patricia in the parking lot. She wants to join the club, Matt does not, and they're at an impasse. This is one of those movie conflicts that I think could be alleviated simply by one character telling the other what happened, but for some reason he doesn't.
Yeah.
So Patricia is upset because there is a club rule that says families have to join as a unit, but Matt won't join, so so she's like, oh, no, I want to join, but we can't. But then Patricia has a meeting with Jessica Jones, and Jessica says, you know, we don't have to be rigidly religious about our rules.
So we cut straight to the initiation once again, steamy door, the terry cloth robes, and the liturgy about you know, we're gonna forsake all others merge with the protective shield of the club, and it is Patricia, Robbie, and Chrissy joining without Matt. When we see them walk into the steamy doorway, Chrissy gets scared tries to run away, but the creepy sheriff stops her, makes her go in, and
then we get what's clearly an ad break. At this point, Matt's family has been replaced by replicants, a kind of Stepford Satan family that is simultaneously perfect and evil. They are very docile and elegant and well behaved, but also obsessed with the club and cruel and getting barked and growled at by their dog. And there's a whole subplot with the dog, by the way. So Matt later gets a call at work from Bill Irwin, playing a veteran Uh this is just by coincidence, the husband of Grace,
Matt's former secretary and the you know. He asks him to come out to his kennel and he explains that Patricia brought their dog. Albert said it was vicious from day one, probably some kind of brain tumor, and it had attacked their children and needed to be put down. So the vet lied to her and said he would do it after she left. Fortunately, the dog's still okay, folks, and we see it runs out and Matt pet's the dog and everybody's happy.
But not only did she say that she wanted the dog put down, She's like, I want to watch. Yeah, that was good. That was a nice detail. That was it.
He said, we don't do things that way. So Matt goes home to confront Patricia about this, and when he arrives, she has had the house goth renod while he was at work, so now it's all dark blue walls. Moody abstract art.
It's like the House and Beele Juice at this point.
Yeah, and later see Jessica Jones has sent Patricia a new grand piano. So he comes in, uh, and she's in the kitchen with a knife in a black cocktail dress. He confronts her about the dog and she just sort of deflects and manipulates him with the knife in her hand. And she wants him to join the club. So things are not right with his family.
You know, this is the point where Joanna Cassidy, I think, really gets to shine as well, because she's great earlier in the picture playing the normal pat but now she gets to play the sinister, ambitious, the sort of possessed Stepford pat And yeah, it has it's a nice performance.
I enjoyed it.
You know, you expect her to start going on a replicant rampage at any moment.
Yeah, and then also there's a funny seat. Later that night, Patricia is all like sexually aggressive with him. She's like she's jumping him and she she's there's one part where she's just repeating, I'm just making love to you, darling. But it looks like who he's been making love to is Freddy Krueger, because you see the scratches on his back. He's like looking in the mirror and they're like deep gouges.
Yeah, she goes zool on him.
For sure does not look like fingernails, cause this looks like knives. Yeah, let's see. So the next day, Matt finds out that Grace, his old secretary, was unfortunately killed in a terrible car accident with someone trying to shut her up. And Matt goes and finds the files that Grace had tried to get him to read earlier. I guess he forgot about it till now. And then this is the scene where he's just typing questions into a
computer to get information. What he finds out here is that all of the senior management at micro Digitech were promoted after becoming members of the Steaming Springs Country Club. So Matt now he has to learn more. He sneaks into the country club to investigate. He goes down into the basement to the door. He first uses some kind of gadget to hack the key code to access the door.
The key includes the number six sixty six, and then he uses a thermometer probe from the spacesuit to test the temperature inside the door when he gets at a crack open and he says, eight hundred degrees. No human could withstand it. And while he's sitting there, you know, getting the temperature, there's an ambush. He is attacked by the sheriff and they have a big fight scene. This is the scene with the wrestling moves where Matt gets like body slammed into the floor. So how's he going
to defeat this this demonic sheriff. Well, he electrocutes him on a chain link fence with a lamp. After this, Matt comes home. This is the Oh. Then we get the scene where the children are you know, fully evilfied. Now he comes home and he finds Chrissy mutilating her stuffed bunny with a crowbar and he's like, hey, let's be nice, and she says, we do not like nice, and she's whacking with the crowbar. He says, you're not my daughter, and then with a pazuzu voice, she says,
but I am your daughter. And he's like, is she down there in the springs and she says, she explains that the mechanics here. She says, good, Chrissy is down there in the springs. But you've just got bad Chrissy now bad, bad, bad Chrissy. And so Matt is attacked by evil children, by bad Chrissy and bad Robbie, and he has to lock both of them inside a closet. Why does that closet lock from the outside. That's not a yeah, you shouldn't have closets locked from the outside.
I mean, maybe it was part of these new renovations that all sorts of sinister changes to the house.
Then bad Patricia attacks him with a golf club. He escapes, He escapes the house, and then he goes to the lab, the lab at work, where he dons the suit.
I think it was coming at this point. You knew it was coming.
Yeah, it's all coming together now. So while he's all getting suited up in the spacesuit, he is confronted by Tom with a gun and Tom, this is bad Tom, I guess also, and bad Tom says, you're not one of us, Matt, You're a loser. We're the winners and we have to get rid of the losers. And he's going to shoot him, but it's like a duel. It's a quick draw. There's a blast, and what you realize happened is that Matt has blasted Tom with the sleeve laser guy on the suit.
Yeah, you knew it was going to be important and there was.
So Matt puts on the suit helmet, which has a dark visor, and then uses it to sneak into the club during the Halloween party we've heard so much about. This party has a number of guests, including Larry Ferris, the Boss, dressed as Nazi officers. Not a great Halloween costume.
No, I mean, you know, some things were acceptable in the eighties. Maybe this was a little more acceptable at the time. But I don't know. He's really He's really into it here, So I think we are meant to see this as somewhat sucks.
Should we also mention Jessica Jones's costume? This is one of the main you will see of this movie. Is Susan Lucci in this Halloween costume. I don't know exactly what she's supposed to be. She's kind of a big hair, ziggy stardust devil, like a red suit, sparkles, hair, volume, all that.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure what it's supposed to be. But either are a lot of great costumes. There's generally, it just looks like a fun party. I mean, yes, it's being held by awful half demon people, but it looks pretty good. It looks like I got some cool snacks, cool decorations, and you know, I assume there's maybe a DJ spinning. I don't know.
I'm not saying I would sell my soul to go to this party. But if I could go like Matt, if I could sneak in without selling my soul, I'd like to check this party out.
Yeah, selling your soul. You're not selling your soul just for this party. There are a whole number of benefits, and this is just one, that's right.
So Matt goes there, and then he sneaks away from the party with the suit on and enters the code to the secret door. And then finally he goes into the steaming spring. Yes, and along the way, he's followed by Jessica Jones. He sees her coming after him, and he tries to stop her with the flamethrower, but it doesn't seem to work on her just walks through the flames. And so now Matt descends into what is beyond the door. It's hell baby, It's hell.
Yeah, Yeah, And again. You can see all this coming together. You see it, saw it coming together when all the pieces were on the table. But at this point, Matt, clad in a spacesuit of his own design, powered by AI, armed with a laser and a flamethrower, is descending into Hell, literally harrowing Hell, in an attempt to save his family from the depths of damnation. And he's doing this by venturing through an occult gateway to Hell that happens to
be in the basement of his local country club. I mean, that's bonkers. I love it. This is again. This is all happening before ten pm on a Thursday network television. This is amazing. This film should be more celebrated for its weirdness. It's so good. Okay, so yeah.
Hell is a craggy, red cave full of these deep pits from which are coming these screams for help Somewhere down below. Matt does hear his family calling for help, so he goes up to the edge and Jessica's in there also, still talking to him. It's like, it's hopeless. You can't save them, you know, you got to stop.
But he makes a leap of faith into the pit and then he wakes up at the bottom in a kind of mirror world version of his neighborhood where he goes into his home and he finds his family imprisoned behind these animated barriers. Patricia's tortured soul is playing piano in Anguish and Jessica shows up once again and tells him that he can never rescue his family. He says, they all came here willingly, they made the choice, and then she also says that the Patricia down here is
the week Patricia. You don't even want her bag. This is the one that has no no, no will, no power to you know, survive. This is just the weak part of her that has been purged. And Matt's like, no, that's the good Patricia, and he says, that's what you've done, isn't it. You've taken all the love, all the good in people who joined the club and put them down here. And you know, so this movie is it's the way it attacks its themes. I think you could argue is
somewhat simplistic. But I was thinking about this, and you know, that's kind of interesting. The idea that in order to receive some kinds of luxury, people might trade in good parts of themselves, like put the good parts of themselves in storage so that a broken, diminished part of themselves can enjoy the fabulous amenities.
I think, by some measurements, this would be a theological misuse of Hell, taking the good parts out of someone and keeping them there and letting the worst of them thrive on earth. Not to go on a tangent here about what hell is theologically and the role it plays in the human psyche, but yeah, it does give us some food for thought here, and I want to add that the effects here I think are quite good all
things considered. I mean, you can feel this TV movie of the week's budget straining at the seams, but we
have a solid, rocky set. We have that in this weird precipice over this gulf that contains at the very bottom a replica of his neighborhood, Like this is this is trippy and weird, and there's a palpable feeling at that point when he's standing on the edge of the cliff and he's being mocked and or tempted by Jessica Jones that you know, like we've traveled well beyond the point of no return, and again it's not even ten pm Eastern Time on ABC Television on a Thursday, but
it feels like we've gone past midnight. Yeah, it's just it's the sort of thing I think it would feel right at home, and you're weirder contemporary television dramas or the films that have a particular psychotronic bent to them. So yeah, again, I feel like this film should be more celebrated for its weirdness. It should not be at the bottom of the West Craven Heap. Yeah.
I would say, in fact, if you don't give this a five out of five on letterbox, you should go to hell. You can go straight into the steaming.
Sportings at least the weak part of you that wasn't strong enough to give this film five stars. So let's see.
Oh, we get another part here where Jessica tries to tempt Matt with like, you know you don't want Patricia, you want me once again. It doesn't really work because of how they've characterized Matt. You never feel like you seriously tempted.
Yeah, she should have should have been be ball again. She'd been like, how about how about basketball? I can offer you all the basketball in the world, and then he and then he might be tempted.
She like pulls out a copy of Space Jam and she's on VHS. She's like, this is from the future, Matt, your future.
A Space Jam showdown right here at the end would have would have just capped it.
Yes, so Matt. At this point, he decides to take off his spacesuit to save his family. I don't remember how he figures out he's got to do this, but this also seems thematically loaded. He has to change out of the protective EVA suit the technology that he has been working on back into khakis and a polo shirt to save the good parts of his family.
Yeah. More, I guess this is more symbolic than sensible. But oh and I wanted to mention too, like the the like laser lights that his family's souls are trapped in. It's kind of like the laser lights from the egg chamber above aboard the space ship at the beginning of Alien, except blue instead of green.
Yeah, it is like that. So the power of love saves the whole family. They you know, they embrace, and they all awake together back in their house, seemingly in the real world. They hear sirens outside. What's that noise, and so they go outside to look and there are people running around saying there is a big fire down in the club. It's been burning all night and okay, I guess that's it for the club. And then Chrissy
says that her bunny is hungry. The bunny is intact once again, so we get kind of we're getting kind of a redo on reality. I guess things that we saw destroyed are actually now intact once again. And Patricia's like, oh, I guess we better feed bunny. Okay, And it looks like everything's cool now. Yeah, all good.
Yeah, a surprisingly upbeat ending because I was again when he was standing on the edge of that cliff, I was like, oh, he's not coming back from this. This is going to have a bleak ending. But they pulled back on it and they landed us in a nice spot so that we can lead into twenty twenty.
I want to revisit the question I asked earlier, now that we've talked about the whole plot, what is the core evil institution? Is it the country club or the corporation? I think it's Steaming Springs. It's like that micro digitech it is suggested exists it's only to provide employment to people who can be recruited into the service of our dark lord at Steaming Springs.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good read on it. I guess you know. Thematically, the main threat is just the spirit of wealth and ambition that permeates society, both at work and at home and you know, in your social circle. But yeah, I was thinking, okay, the gateway to Hell is definitely at the country club, so that is in many ways the focal point. But then Jessica Jones has complete access to all the high tech, presumably top secret experiments going on at Digitech, so the two
were linked at this point anyway. And who knows, maybe some member of the club back before it became possessed had some role in opening or widening that hell mouth so that everything can get out of whack. There's like a whole prequel you could explore right there. I'd watch that pre Invitation to Hell arriving early. Yeah.
Okay, well that was Invitation to Hell nineteen eighty four. As we've said, thumbs up from me. Check it out.
Yeah, this one was great. This is one I really wasn't even aware of. I was I don't know, maybe it's part of that attitude that we can sometimes have about made for TV films that even though I've certainly poured through Wes Craven's filmography on IMDb many times, I've just kind of skipped over these made for TV films and I've paid more attention to his more well known films. But yeah, this one was a real treat.
Well, let's let's look at the other one and see how they are.
Yeah, I mean, if they're as good as if they're even close to as good as this one, they're they're worth checking out for sure. All Right, Well, we're gonna gohead and close up this episode of Weird House Cinema. What we'd love to hear from everyone out there? Do you have thoughts on Invitation to Hell? Did you if anyone out there solid on network television in eighty four,
I definitely want to hear about that. Or if you've watched it with commercials intact, do write in and tell us all about it, Or if you've watched it recently and you have some thoughts about how it fits into the filmography of this legendary director. Yeah, right in and we'll we'll have a little conversation we'll share potentially share your email on a future listener mail episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday, short form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. Look us up on a letterbox where we are weird House. You can follow a list of all the films we've covered over the years, and sometimes
there's a peek ahead at what's coming up next. And next week is cat Week, by the way, we haven't really broadcast that fact jet on the show, but if you like cats or don't like cats, it's perfect week to tune in. We're experimenting with some thematic weeks spread throughout the year, and yes we will come back around and do a Dog Week as well, once we pinpoint the appropriate time of a year for that to happen.
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