Avery Crounse, 1983
Abram returns, very quickly, with Eyes Of Fire, (and also with the equally hard to find Forever Evil, but that is another story and another review) and I find him huddled in the back room with Hottie McHotster Holly.
�Check it, flick eyeballs shiznit!� exclaims Abram. �Wow, this looks cool!� says Holly. At least I understand what she says, but the excitement is clear from both. The box has some eerie cover art (which is strangely familiar to me, probably from being spotted on the horror/cult shelves at the countless mom & pop video stores I�ve frequented over the years) and a single screenshot on the back of something with� well� eyes of fire.
The weekend comes, and the movies go unwatched. On Saturday night, a strange thing happened: Bettie and I went out for dinner. We don�t normally dine out on Saturday nights. Not that there is anything wrong with eating out on Saturday nights, but by avoiding going out we avoid the cruising traffic spill-off from Sunset Blvd. I digress.
Ethiopian food is one of those cuisines I never really thought about, but once I had it I was hooked. It�s incredibly filling, and normally pretty cheap, and some of the flavors are seriously happy-making. Bettie and I picked the massive platter (served on that ever-present sponge-bread) nearly clean. Bettie pushed for us to clear our servings, stating that, �children are starving in��
We weren�t thrown bodily out of the restaurant.
Back at home, our inner-clocks sent spinning by this unwarranted alteration of normal weekly behavior, I decided to pop in this mostly unknown "horror-suspense" from 1983. Bettie safely seated at the computer (the better to avoid a scary movie), I poured three fingers of Old Whiskey River into a wine glass, (therefore the bourbon was masquerading as a red wine) and pressed play to see what I could see through flaming orbs...
On with the show.
We open in 1750 in what I believe is meant to be Pennsylvania, if only because I lived in Pennsylvania for a spell, and it looks familiar. A French soldier is interrogating a pair of young girls (one in her mid teens, the other still a precocious spud) who have been found �Miles from where you belong,� somewhere in Shawnee country. They have obviously traveled for miles and miles and miles, through hostile territory, but where are the adults? Where are their parents?
The littlest girl says something about how �Leah saved us�, and the French soldier is now interested in their story, though still skeptical. Well, I�m willing to guess that he�s gonna be a lot more skeptical when the story is finished.
The older girl is named (I think) Fanny Dalton and she is our narrator. Her mother (who I�m pretty sure is Eloise, though I may have their names backwards) had taken in a preacher, the Reverend Will Smythe, to their house. And with her tough trapper pa out trapping in In�jun country, Will Smythe (many thought) had up and moved into Eloise (or Fanny�s) bed as well.
Well, one night the local worthies come to hang Will Smythe and that accursed Dalton woman. They also manhandle Leah a bit. It isn�t clear, at first, who exactly Leah is. She speaks in tongues, and has prophetic dreams - in fact, she awoke everyone to the coming mob with a dream of Smythe & Fanny (or maybe it was Eloise) being hung.
Wait, a mob! This is great! So far all three movies tackled by Grumpy Critic, Angry Cook have contained a torch-bearing mob! And this mob is equal-opportunity, having some women in it. The women, it must be added, are far more angry and venomous than the men, when it comes to torch and pitch-fork bearing. The men seem to feel it�s something that should be done, whereas the women are raring to go and hang these damned sinning adulterers - and two of these women want to string up Leah for good measure, since she�s been babbling in tongues and wandering around in her nightdress. Great town.
Even as Smythe is shoved off of his impromptu gallows (a bucket), SHAZAM!!! The rope flies apart with a spark of electricity and a pop! He falls to the ground, unharmed! It is insinuated, that Leah had something to do with this. The narrating daughter (Eloise? Fanny? Is that you?) bitterly comments how she didn�t think Reverend Smythe could be harmed. Fortunately, there is a young and virile guy (Jewel Buchannan, played by Rob Paulsen), and a crusty old geezer (Calvin, played by Will Hare) who think all this mob-mentality business is no better here than it was back in the old country. Brandishing rifles, they burst in to free the sinning fornicators from the angry mob.
No one is happy, least of all the angry mob (this is the first film we�ve looked at where the angry mob didn�t get to at least burn someone), and the Reverend Smythe talks his small group of de facto followers into leaving the town, stealing the ferry, and floating down river till they are far from the angry mob. So Rev. Smythe (Dennis Lipscomb, who is still a busy actor), Calvin (and his wife Sister. Lousy name for ones wife to be saddled with), Jewel (and his wife, Margaret, played by the attractive Kerry Sherman), the mysterious Leah (Karlene Crockett. Girl, where are you now?), mother and daughter team of Eloise and Fanny Dalton� I�ll go out on a limb from now on and call Eloise the mom (played by Rebecca Stanley) because she has more credits on IMDB prior to 83 than post. Daughter Fanny (Sally Klein) and then the two tiny gals, lil� Cathleen and Meg. I think these are Jewel and Margaret�s daughters, but I might be wrong. Rev. Smythe says something about saving Leah from the witch-hunters who hung her mother before her very eyes. This comes during the slow river-journey south.
continue to part 2