Evil Town (1987)

The web is full of people declaring that this or that movie is the 'worst film they've ever seen' - you can pretty much guarantee that they are talking about an Ed Wood movie or some other impoverished fifties or sixties B-movie.  Their cinematic experience of dross is clearly very limited.  Sure, the more adventurous among them might have seen an Andy Milligan film or two but, as I've noted before, these poverty row exercises by film-makers with limited or (in the case of Ed Wood) no talent whatsoever, were never going to be anything other than bad.  If only these bad movie cultists would venture a little bit further into the exploitation jungle, they'd find some tragically bad movies.  Tragically, because they could have been quite decent.  Indeed, the traces of their potential that are still visible make their overall badness all the more tragic.  Perhaps the worst example of such a film that I've seen recently is Evil Town (1987).  Eventually released in 1987 direct-to-video, Evil Town represents the culmination of no less than three attempts to complete a film originally started in 1973, under the title God Bless Grandma and Grandpa.  The fact that the finished product boasts no less than three credited directors, at least one of them pseudonymous, is a clear indication that the film has serious problems.  Lurking behind the directorial pseudonym 'Edward Collins', is none other than Curtis Hanson, later to direct the likes of The River Wild and LA Confidential, and it is Hanson who was responsible for the original, and best, footage in the film.

As will be obvious from the above, Evil Town had a complex, not to mention somewhat obscure, production history.  A very good account of what probably happened to create the final film can be found here.  In short, in 1973 Hanson started shooting God Bless Grandma and Grandma, in which two young couples find themselves stranded in a small coastal town apparently inhabited exclusively by elderly people, after their camper van breaks down. It eventually becomes clear that their superficially genial hosts - all played as the sort of small town caricatures found in classic Hollywood movies - are hiding a secret and have no intention of letting them leave.  It transpires that the town's inhabitants, led by the local doctor, are somehow using young people (presumably by harvesting their organs) in order to extend their own lives - having depleted their local resources by preying upon their own children, they now kidnap unwary young travelers.  By all accounts, the film was almost completed but, for reasons unknown, production was halted.  In 1974, it resumed, but with additions to cast and script that altered the story line somewhat.  Exactly who directed this new footage is unclear - it certainly doesn't look or feel quite like Hanson's original footage.  In the new segments, it is revealed that the real force behind the town's activities is a scientist - Dr Shagetz - working at his nearby clinic to extract secretions from the pituitary glands of the young victims with which to rejuvenate his elderly patients.  This process reduces the donors to a mindless, zombie-like, state.

These changes alter the film from being a slow-burning creepy small town horror thriller, into a more standard mad-scientist movie.  These new sequences star veteran actor Dean Jagger as Dr Shagetz, however, he barely interacts with the existing characters.  it seems that, due to the break in filming, most of the previous cast were unavailable for these scenes.  Indeed, only two of the film's original leads appear - James Keach and Michele Marsh - the other two - Robert Walker and Doria Cook - are perfunctorily killed off, their demises curtly reported in a single line of dialogue.   Shagetz tries to enlist Keach's help (his character is a doctor), but the latter turns the tables, killing Shagetz and escaping with Marsh, pursued by hordes of old age pensioners.  This new version of the film went through several titles: God Bless Dr Shagetz, God Damn Dr Shagetz and just plain Dr Shagetz.  It wasn't released under any of them, possibly due to the financial difficulties of its production company.  Whatever the reason, it sat on the shelf until the 1980s, when the footage was acquired by Mardi Rustam's Mars Productions.  Clearly feeling that the existing film was too tame for eighties audiences, Rustam shot yet more new scenes.  

Rustam's new scenes consist of two distinct blocks.  The first of these are a series of scenes at the hospital, featuring Jillian Kesnar as the head nurse - some of these are quite well integrated with the existing footage.  At one point, for instance, the camera seems to cut from Dr Schaeffer (as Shagetz has been redubbed) to Kesner reacting to his speech.  But they are never in the same shot and, the quality of the Kesner footage is clearly lit differently and shot on different stock to the earlier footage.  The other new scenes form a complete new sub-plot, featuring a pair of dim-witted garage mechanics who are doing the actual kidnapping of young travelers.  Not satisfied with just abducting them for experimentation, they also rape the girls they capture before handing them over to the hospital.  One of the women they kidnap is former Playboy Playmate Linda Wiesmeier and we are 'treated' to scenes of her running topless through the woods pursued by the two hicks, her undoubtedly impressive assets bouncing all over the place.  She is subsequently tied to a chair topless and pawed by the two idiot-rapists.  (These scenes clearly identify the intended audience as adolescent males, probably of an age when tying a woman up half clothed was the only way they could imagine ever getting their hands on a real pair of breasts).  They later abduct two other girls who, with Wiesmeier, succeed in escaping and running their captors over with their van.  There are crossovers between these two sets of scenes, with a couple of characters popping up in both.  The resulting film was finally edited together in 1985 and titled Evil Town, before spending another couple of years on the shelf, (presumably because of its many similarities to Rustam's other 1985 film, Evils of the Night), prior to its VHS release.  

The finished film is a mess.  While Rustam's late additions are easily the crassest part of the production, adding little to the overall plot and lacking any style whatsoever, it is the 1974 sequences with Dean Jagger which truly scupper the film.  The biggest problem lies with Jagger's performance, which is truly terrible.  While it is always sad to an actor of Jagger's stature, (a former winner of the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, no less), reduced to appearing in poverty row productions, they do, at least, usually bring a degree of class to the proceedings.  If that's what the producer's were hoping for here, it seems clear that Jagger had other ideas.  His line readings are perversely eccentric, (his pronunciation of the word 'pituitary' for example, is utterly bizarre), spitting out his dialogue with a staccato rhythm which frequently makes him sound like a New York gangster rather than a brilliant scientist.  He exaggerates his natural speech impediment to the point that it sounds like a parody and is clearly contemptuous of proceedings - and who could blame him?  The result, of course, is to completely undermine these sections of the film, completely undermining the tension and suspense built up in the earlier, Curtis Hanson-directed sections which preceded them.  The situation isn't helped by co-star James Keach appearing completely uninterested in the film by this point, in complete contrast to his earlier (1973) scenes.

But isn't the later 1974 and 1985 sequences which make Evil Town truly bad.  Rather, it is the fact that a far better film can still glimpsed through them.  Watching the earlier footage is frustrating, as it indicates that God Bless Grandma and Grandpa could have been a disturbing and suspensful low key shocker.  Hanson's original footage seems to show a slow-burning thriller, with the town's dark secrets being gradually revealed.  Sadly, in the finished product that is Evil Town, this footage is chopped up, interrupted at various points by new and inferior sequences, destroying its rhythm and throwing away any idea of suspense.  The crudeness of the sub-plot with the mechanics and their topless captives contrasts unfavourably with the far subtler build up of the original story.  Bizarre and disturbing original scenes involving Keach and friends having to physically fight off their elderly antagonists, or murderous pensioners bashing people's heads in with hammers, which should have been highlights, are pretty much thrown away in favour of the cruder 'shocks' of the new plot elements.  Creepy dialogue, such as one elderly couple reminiscing about the loss of their son, with the father reassuring his wife that 'he had died for a greater cause', ultimately lead nowhere in the finished film.  Likewise, the avuncular town doctor, clearly being built up to be revealed as the main villain, abruptly vanishes from the plot, with Keach simply being told that he is 'busy'.  While I doubt very much that God Bless Grandma and Grandpa would ever have set the box office alight, from what remains of it, it does look as if it could have been the sort of low key, small scale horror film that could easily have built a cult following and become a minor classic of the genre.  Sadly, we are instead left with Evil Town.