Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975)

This rad and retro little number comes from the funky annals of mid-'70s made-for-TV movies, and is one of several in a string of similar productions in the post-Exorcist career of the fabulous Linda Blair. Having been monitoring the situation since 2005 when I discovered Linda, I have seen Sarah T. be drip-fed to the internet very slowly over the course of a decade. My first glimpse was of a cute scene which occurs some 25 minutes in, in which Sarah (Linda Blair) sings Carole King's It's Too Late at a party as a very youthful Mark Hamill looks on endearingly. Only recently did the whole movie become available to watch, so I was very excited to finally view it in its full form.

Sarah Travis is a slightly shy and reserved fifteen-year-old who is pissed about her parents' divorce and her mother's courting of another gent, and the necessity of her starting at a new school. Things don't go too well, and nerves get the better of her during her audition for the Glee Club. Meanwhile, her father (J.R. himself, Larry Hagman) dips in and out of her life, blowing money he doesn't have on presents for her and then disappearing again. Sarah's mother's pride is hurt to see her daughter struggling to get along in society, so she is pleased when chipper young local kid Ken Newkirk (Mark Hamill) calls by and invites Sarah to a party. She is reluctant at first, but the kids there are quite receptive of her, and after a couple of stiff ones (drinks, that is) she feels groovy and ready to sing, clad in the amazing denim two-piece with matching Casey Jones hat that Daddy bought her.

One of the girls from school who's at the party was present at Sarah's ill-fated Glee Club audition, and so requests her song for her from the resident guy-with-guitar. Dear Lord, we give you thanks and praise for the shaggy-haired guitar guy in every '70s movie ever, Amen. She gives a really cute little performance with her newfound Dutch courage, and comes to the quick realization that booze is the answer to all of life's problems! Ken soon discovers her in a sloppy state and drags her home, apologizing profusely to her outraged mother, whose primary concern is what the neighbours will say.

Ken and Sarah grow close and between the not-so-subtle flask and cup in her locker and her popular boyfriend, things start to get better for Sarah. But as an AA counsellor later warns, booze starts out by giving, and then ends up taking. She gets ridiculously large booze orders delivered to the house, running the shower and pretending her mother is home to convince the guy to let her accept them. And when Mom finally notices watered-down Scotch, she jumps straight to blaming and firing the housemaid. Sarah witnesses the whole thing, and being the ultimately decent kid that she is, she feels ashamed and does try to argue her mother's decision, but to little avail. Home is getting crazier. Sarah fights with her mother, with one culminating in the classic outburst, "He's not my father, he's just somebody you sleep with!"

School is getting similarly tumultuous, with Sarah finally getting caught for cutting classes and forging notes. Her mother is called to the school about it, and poor Sarah pitifully tries to hint her mum into cutting her some slack ("Oh, that was that day, Mom, remember?") and the school counsellor tells Mother Travis in no uncertain terms that something dodgy must be going on at home to be causing this. Of course, Sarah's socially-conscious mother is utterly outraged by such an implication, and furiously reminds the counsellor that she has successfully raised an elder daughter who turned out with no problems.

Things get even worse. Sarah and Ken finally make love, but the very next day he is edgy and cold, and soon informs Sarah that he has to focus on his schoolwork, and can't afford to be distracted by a troubled, needy girlfriend. She is, naturally, heartbroken, having decided just a couple of days before that Ken was the guy she would lose her virginity to. Although Ken seems like a good kid, and a pretty sensible one too, it also appears that he's a sporter of the Schoolboy Insensitivity badge. He doesn't recognise the stupidity and downright assholishness of dumping a fifteen-year-old girl the day after taking her virginity. This situation would have explosive consequences in any case, but with Booze's recurring guest-star spot in Sarah's everyday life, things go from bad to worse. Whilst babysitting her young niece, she sorrowfully hits the bottle and blacks out on the couch. Her parents end up breaking into the house in panic, to find her in a very conspicuous state.

Sarah is a pitiful character throughout. It is good to see an ultimately preachy movie be made through the eyes of the people it's trying to preach to, and therefore decipherable to the loony horny teenagers out there. It's true that teenagers don't like to listen to anybody. I remember being the same. Feeling the ridiculousness of a schoolmarmish grey-haired nurse telling us about sex. The ridiculousness of her warning us to use condoms when performing oral sex, and then the humiliation of people's reactions to the suggestion in real life. Fact was, they were outdated and didn't seem to have a clue. And when adults make made-for-TV movies about drugs or booze or underage sex, they seem to have a difficult time of it. I imagine pained cries from the offices of NBC..."How do I reeeach these keeeeeds?!" Writers Richard and Esther Shapiro really tune in to the teen wave, and bring the material down to the audience's level, where we can feel sorry for Sarah as she takes one saddening blow after another, rather than look down on her for her methods of coping. So the kids can understand how people like them can succumb to terrible ways so easily, and how shitty it feels when they do, but how readily they could seek help. It is a story of warning, but also of redemption, which really seems like the right way to do it. If we're being presented with a problem, it's nice to be simultaneously dealt a solution.

Sarah attends an AA meeting, resentment brimming in her eyes, where she hears a 10-year-old kid talk. He's been an alcoholic since the age of 3, because his old man (one of those black-and-white Brando-as-Kowalski types by the sounds of it) would get him drunk and laugh his head off about it with his buddies. This made me double-take. Teenage alcoholics is one thing, but a fucking three-year-old?! It really got me thinking. Abuse in this world knows no limit, so what is so unbelievable about there being some degenerate asshole, who fathered an unwanted kid, spends his every unemployed day drinking and slobbing, and gets a real kick out of sousing the toddler and seeing his drunken, diaper-covered ass hit the deck? Although my mind had never before conceived such a wretched thought, and it hit me hard upon presentation, it's really no surprise at all. And that's a sad thought.

Sarah leaves the meeting, seemingly unaffected, and deliberately so. She just doesn't seem convinced, doesn't seem ready to quit. So you know what that means...a highly traumatic incident, as a result of her drinking, to shock her into quitting. And surprisingly, this doesn't seem to be the time that she approaches a bunch of young guys to buy her booze, and ends up sucking them all off for the privilege, only for them to drink it to themselves and beat her up. How low can things possibly get for this poor little creature? Well, now visibly on the brink, she wanders around one night and decides to take Ken's pet horse for a ride. Don't drink and ride, kids. In a very well-shot sequence, she rides the horse out to the freeway and causes a pile-up. Linda Blair is (or was as a young woman) a very accomplished equestrian, and it is my suspicion that her skills in this field helps them to pull off such an effective shot.

Comes the monumental trauma, when the very real aftermath of her drunken actions take place. Still on the freeway, blue and red lights flashing everywhere, surrounded by cops, Sarah watches, devastated, as the agonized horse is put down by a vet, and Ken is sobbing his heart out on the roadside. Now, given the former scene I just described, and the personal degradation and trauma that Sarah endured, it speaks volumes about her character that this horse incident would be the turning point for her. Causing harm to herself was of no concern to her, but as soon as she realized she had really harmed others, it was finally too much to bear. Sarah Travis is a good kid, and one we can relate to. It's easy to forget how quickly things can spin out until we're in the spiral. That night, Sarah could have stayed sat out in the dark, drinking by herself, and then eventually gone home and passed out. But she made one unwise decision after another, and within a matter of minutes, her very quiet evening had gone to full-blown legal issue with life lost and relationships irretrievably destroyed.

Sarah's problem now formally comes to everyone's attention, and she is checked into a hospital, where she has to finally come to terms with herself and accept the help that everyone is offering her. Her parents have to endure each other to discuss their daughter's issues, and after a bunch of screaming, they both seem to see their own faults as parents, with Mother Travis guiltily putting down a glass of scotch clutched in her hand. Sarah comes to her parents, looks them straight in the eyes, and tells them, "I'm an alcoholic." Her mother still seems unbelieving of the idea. She almost laughs at the unreality of it all. But if ever, she should be proud of her daughter now, for expressing remorse for her errors, and strength of belief in herself to correct them.

Sarah T. is a really good movie for its kind. Thoughtfully written, filmed with care, and well acted. Linda Blair is a good actress, whose career took an incredibly unfortunate downturn in the late seventies. In a documentary, I heard her detail how she got caught up in a drug charge, when a friend repeatedly phoned her to ask if she knew any potential clients. Eventually she said, "OK, I might know someone," and with that recorded sentence, the police had a conviction for their commission cheque. And as is not unbelievable in the slightest, Linda's lawyer advised that her best option was a no contest, as the cops would ensure that any trial would ruin her financially, and still convict her in the end anyhow. ACAB, eh? It is particularly unfortunate that she didn't manage any big comeback like Downey Jr. or Gibson, especially as, by all accounts, she wasn't even a user to begin with. But then, she was a young hot star in late '70s Hollywood, so I dunno. Perhaps her crippling typecasting was just too big an obstacle.

Her later-young career involved a very sexy direction, both, I imagine, by choice and as a last resort. Linda did some gorgeous glamour and nude shoots for various magazines, and my God, are they a sight for sore eyes! As her teenage movies constantly teased, she indeed had an incredible, voluptuous figure, and the most beautiful face, which radiated both youth and attitude. Then her only movie credits were regular low budget exploitation flicks, in which she often got naked. Yeah, it wasn't ideal a mere decade after she was an Oscar nominee on the cover of every entertainment magazine -- she had become a B-movie queen that we loved to see naked. But she really owned it, and didn't decide years later to spin it as a story of woe and detailing how she was used and abused. She stood by her decisions. Linda Blair is one cool chick.


....Right?!

Crowsnest (2012)

One might wonder if there is a bigger 'thing' in the horror genre of recent years than Found Footage. From the dawn, with Cannibal Holocaust in 1980, through Blair Witch Project throwing it to the mainstream in 1999, Found Footage has become a highly exploited medium. Recent offerings have included [REC], Paranormal Activity, Grave Encounters, and their copious sequels and prequels. Some of these have been very effective, where others have been nauseating in their efforts. Crowsnest stood out to me for some reason. Everybody on the web seemed to hate it, but it left me thinking enough to watch two subsequent times. And the more I think, I'm still not sure why. Stupid, unlikable characters who make dumbass moves time after freakin' time... crappy and repetitive dialogue with lots of forced emotions...

We open with a douchebag whose girlfriend got him a video camera for his birthday - it's his birthday - and he's filming out of his window, spying and making asshole comments about the people he zooms in on in the apartment building opposite. Good time to mention to your girlfriend that this camera has night vision. We'd assume that she already knows because she bought the fucking thing, but how else would we, the audience, know this otherwise? Well, yes, OK, we could have just observed the change in camera setting as it occurred, but this sort of movie assumes that we are as dumb as it is. Anyway, we already don't like this guy. He is Justin (Victor Zinck Jr.), she is Brooke (Mittita Barber), and the friends who arrive at their apartment for the birthday get-together are Amanda (Chelsea Reist) and Kirk (Aslam Husain). It quickly becomes apparent from listening to their mind-numbing conversation that they are all morons to varying degrees.

The next day they are off to Kirk's parents' cabin in Kirk's parents' shiny red Jeep (bearing in mind that these douches are grown-up and well-off enough to be drinking scotch the night before, but none of them seem to own a car). Amanda's even-douchier emo sister Danielle (Christie Burke, from Twilight, apparently)is tagging along for whatever reason, and seems to have made it her personal mission to kill the buzz her sister's friends are indulging in all kinds of substances to achieve. Justin is doing one of those douchebag 'record everything' things which serves merely to give the film a medium and to emphasise his douchebaggery. You'll notice that word, in various forms, pops up a lot when describing these people. They are monumental morons throughout, which is possibly one of its draws. Stupid people facing life threatening situations surely calls for results that you just couldn't make up!

En route to the cabin (we may think it's gonna be another of those Cabin in the Woods horrors, but these guys are so dumb they don't even make it as far as the cabin), Kirk says that he knows of a place called Crowsnest, where you can get half price beer. He saw it online. So, he suggests, they should make a detour that seems to span for at least 20 or 30 miles - and that's just one-way - and incur the cost of the extra fuel to get there, in order to save 50% on beer, which is cheaper that gas. Take a deep breath, and behold the fine idiocy! Of course, Crowsnest is like the rotting set of some old spaghetti western in MGM's storage locker, and there seems to be no life there, let alone half-price beer salesmen.

The guys go off in search of half-price beer, which at this rate is pretty much guaranteed to be carbonated bottled piss, and Brooke (taking the one camera which narrates the whole story) wanders while Amanda loudly announces her imminent public urination. The camerawoman soon comes across the statutory creepy little girl in long white nightgown with dark hair shielding her face, but when she turns to inform Amanda, the kid's disappeared. We didn't see that one coming - creepy ghost children make a real habit of sticking around for sane witnesses to verify. The guys then come yelling and screaming for everyone to get in the car and get outta here now, and once they're speeding off outta there, they tell the girls about the creepy beer salesman who gave them the statutory "You kids better turn around and go back right now, or y'all's gon' diiiieee" line.

Apparently Brooke doesn't think to shut off recording for a sec to show her friends the footage of the creepy kid, so they continue on their way, drinking and smoking doobs behind the wheel. Little sis Danielle, when not busy scowling and telling people "this was a bad idea", is suffering the adverse affects of alcohol consumption. The douches then start to demonstrate a compulsion to pull over unnecessarily. You'd think they didn't actually have a destination. On the first pit stop after Crowsnest, they have no phone signal (duh) but pick up one of those cult religious radio stations, with a dark-voiced preacher talking about flames and hell and sin and all that. Super-emo Danielle takes this as an opportunity to force unwanted information on unwilling participants repeatedly. She lists off the many things that the Bible supposedly condemns people to death for, and each time one of the friends interjects to get her to shut the fuck up, she starts talking again to the point of desperation. She summarises that if this were the Bible, they would all be fucked. Not that this movie contains any religious connotations or morals beyond that.

That's the other thing. This movie contains more uses of the word 'fuck' than most. It seems to be down to poor screenwriting (improv?) and/or the characters' (actors'?) lack of intellect. And then the cheeky motherfuckers have the nerve to feel like the wronged party when Amanda obnoxiously wanders into the middle of the road and is almost (damn) creamed by a massive RV. Next thing you know, there's shit loads of screaming going on, and the guys are doing that typical "I'm gonna get that fucker's plates, you don't mess with me, fucker!" stuff and are speeding up a mountain road after the RV. The point of filming everything now becomes "for insurance". The girls scream, the boys grunt and growl, and the RV suddenly stops dead, then does a miraculous 180 turn on the narrow mountain and comes speeding back at them. And to be honest, can we help but laugh? Even though it would be impossible for a vehicle of that size to turn so quickly on that road without getting ditched, it's hilarious to see the douchebags suddenly screaming for a different reason.

They get through this episode, but haven't learned their lesson. Whilst speeding away, Danielle succumbs to drunkenness, and insists they stop the car so she can vomit. Bitch, haven't you ever heard of the window?! Having just seriously pissed off a bunch of hicks in a vehicle far bigger than theirs and only just gotten away, and not even gotten a mile up the road yet, the last thing they need to be doing is stopping. But you know what horror movie girls get like with the "Stop the Car" thing: throw a couple of "fucking"s into the mix and slap the back of the driver's seat, and they get what they want. Danielle does her chundering and everybody's about ready to go, but then suddenly she must hop out of the car again, and BAM! The RV, which they would've heard and seen thundering down the road, comes out of nowhere and totally wipes her out.

In typical horror fashion, now that they have to get a mangled emo to a hospital, the car won't start (for whatever reason) and there's still no cell phone service. These being dumb fuckers, they scream at each other a whole bunch, before deciding to hike through the woods up to the top of the mountain, where they think they can get a signal and call a helicopter. Danielle promptly dies, but Amanda stupidly decides to stay with her sister's body at the car, despite having been the original source of annoyance to the RV hicks, whilst the others bugger off up the mountain. Chelsea Reist's performance is a weird one. In the earlier scenes, her delivery is very contrived, and particularly her laughter is painfully forced. The area she does strongly in is hysteria, which I guess to a mediocre horror maker seemed to outweigh her terrible speaking.

One semi-potent element of the storytelling is that there is only one camera, which is pretty unusual to this subgenre, as the camerapeople in the stories are usually professional to some capacity, warranting multiple perspectives. This means that for the duration of the group being separated in whatever combinations, we only know what is happening to one party, which does produce a sort of tense worry for the unseen characters, despite how idiotic they are. The woodsy Justin-Brooke-Kirk gang head on into the woods with the camera, and it doesn't take long for them to bitch up a storm among themselves, culminating in the revelation of Brooke having cheated on her asshole boyfriend with Kirk, and Justin storming off in response, camera in hand. Just prior to this they heard Amanda screaming in the distance, so Brooke and Kirk try to head back to the car, where she will obviously still be!


Meanwhile, Justin gets himself full-on, flat-out lost in the woods, as dickheads who storm off in a tantrum in the middle of nowhere tend to do, and it's not long before he's giving his snotty-nosed Blair Witch confessional to Mom and Pop, detailing very simplistically how scared he is, how cold he is, how much he loves them all etc. etc. But after his mini-breakdown, he sensibly (don't hold your breath - this is where his sensibility ends) decides to carry on, and soon *gasp* stumbles across the RV parked in a bald spot on the mountain. Problem is, by the time he spots it, he is about as central to this bald spot as the vehicle is, and seems to think that crouching on the upper edge of the pit is a completely inconspicuous move. He sneaks up, snoops around, checks the fucker's plates, but there are none, and then decides to investigate the blood running out of the door.

This is one of the film's strongest sequences, and even then it's certainly not exceptional. But thankfully, the concept of the camera containing night-vision had been gracelessly handed to us on a verbal plate by Justin at the beginning, so he flicks it on, and takes in all the black-and-green gore he's standing in. Lots of blood, ambiguous giblets and plastic sheets lay about the place, and on a slab lies Amanda, with her foot sawed off. We, the audience, plead guilty to lack of sympathy. She was loud and annoying - but wait, she ain't finished wailin' yet! Justin wakes her up, to which she starts screaming hysterically. He tells her "Sshh! It's me, Justin!" several times, and yet the dumb bitch doesn't quieten. The RV's sinister and as yet unseen occupants are currently absent for whatever reason, but chances are they're nearby. So now would be a really fucking good time for Amanda to shut her hole. For her own good.

But did we really expect her not to die? The dumb blonde always dies. Shoulda stuck in school, Amanda, things woulda worked out diff'rent. As Justin takes the opportunity to stoop to her level of idiocy and explore the vehicle's interiors, where of course he should just been grabbing the annoying bitch and getting the hell out, he ventures to the bedroom compartment, where Danielle's body is having its finger chewed by that creepy kid from earlier. Except is it her? Earlier, that was definitely a kid, and a female one at that. We get a brief 'menacing' glimpse at this creepy kid's face, and it's quite obviously a male uh--- little person. Now is this meant to be a different kid, or are we meant to be startled because originally she looked a little sweet, and now she looks minging, or is it either in addition to the typical 'creepy midget' stereotype that horror almost forgot?

Oh, now I realise that I said Justin's sensibility ended with his decision to keep walking, but I was forgetting this bit. Upon coming across said finger-chewing midget, he keeps quiet and still and attempts to make a swift exit, for he is as yet unseen. But we also have a dumb bitch on board, who is yelling "Justin! Justin, where are you?!" over and over again, so of course the finger-muncher looks up, gives us the scary face, and makes a dive for Justin. But he manages to beat the thing to death. OK, despite his douchiness, Justin gives it a fair go in this five-minute window. He then tries to saw through Amanda's chain, fails, and decides to leave her there and come back (yeah, right), which as you can imagine, goes down like a sack of shit. So she yells even more, even louder, and the hicks come a-runnin'. Justin makes a dive under the RV while they tumble inside and Amanda starts screaming even louder still. Wow, anybody else developing tinnitus?

Now that we have finally seen at least the feet of the two recreationally vehicular hicks, the remaining characters start doing that annoying horror thing that dead teenagers always do: wait literally two seconds from the bad guy disappearing from sight before coming out of their hiding place. I mean, seriously, they barely give him a chance to turn his back. He is still right there, they need to wait until he's a safe distance away, for Christ's sake! So two seconds after the RV door closes, Justin hops out and runs back up...to the edge of the pit, which he doesn't seem to realise acts more as a podium than a shelter. And he turns back again to face the vehicle. Does he honestly not know he's totally visible? They're gonna come out aft---they're coming out after him!! He's screwed! I really do like the way they capture these 'hick assailant bumbling towards victim' shots. I'm not sure what it is, but they are really quite menacing. With the help of the classic 'camera fallen in front of doomed victim' trick, the audience, and later Brooke and Kirk, get to witness his demise, which is actually a fairly impressive special effect. We also get to learn that these hicks aren't too smart. Murderers usually take the victim's camera (evidence!) with them, but these guys just leave it for others to find.


Here we have it folks, the imminent horror situation: two left - one guy, one girl. We never know, will one get out, or both, or neither? Brooke and Kirk find the camera, suddenly realise what they're up against, and freak out. Whilst walking back to the car, they find a road again, and duck down as the RV trundles past. It stops briefly and then carries on, having dumped some bloody remains of one of their friends on the road. They freak out some more. The point of the camera now becomes "for the police". After a bit more walking, the RV passes again. Have they been seen? They must've been. Oh, OK, I guess maybe they haven't-- OH MY GOD, THEY'VE BEEN SEEN! Out come bursting the hicks once more in an even more menacing shot than the last one, and they leg it. Kirk has his hand sliced up but they get away. God knows what they actually do to his hand (finally, no one really cares about angles, they just want to get out alive) but it must've been something pretty gnarly, as Kirk is soon rendered incapacitated, turning pale and cold and tired from apparent blood loss, with Brooke having to coax him up off the ground. And eventually he screams that his hand has fallen off! Pretty freakin' gnarly!

After a lot of hobbling about in woodland, they finally make it back to the car, which of course won't start, and Kirk pops the camera on the dashboard, facing them. So while he babbles a bunch of romantic crap about how he's always loved Brooke, we can just feel that at the end of that long mountain road we see behind them, a big ol' monster is gonna come rumbling at any moment. It does, and they carry on chatting shit and turning the key, and funnily enough, it gives them the jump start they needed, and soon gets run off the road. Wow, things are starting to look up for the two survivors of the original five-man party. They even get a cell phone signal, and get a call through to the police, and are just telling that they're in Crowsnest when HHHOOOOONNNNKKK! Rumble, smash, etc. It seems the hicks specialise in un-ditching massive vehicles at record-speed. Maybe they have their own reality show like the Storage Hunters and the Lizard Lick Towers.

"I told you this was a bad idea, guys. Fuck."

So that's Crowsnest. Having dissected it in a sarcastic humour, I still find myself unsure as to why it's so enjoyable. Maybe cos DTMs are always more satisfying the stupider the characters are. If we don't like them, don't sympathise them, and don't root for them, then we root against them, just like whichever Slasher pursues them. It makes it pretty damn exciting at times. And it's safe to say that this gang's lack of chemistry, camaraderie and loyalty to one another - along with their constant flaunting of their collective 5 brain cells - sticks them firmly in VIP lounge at the National Douchebag Awards. Fuck me, fucking congratulations, guys. Shit!