Don't Go In The House (1979)

I decided to start from the beginning with the Don't... movies. They are a famous figure in the exploitation genre, and if the first installment is anything to go by, the titles offer rather irrelevant advice to potential victims. And for once, we find ourselves concurring with the taglines...'don't say we didn't warn you...' I mean, for God's sake, people: the title told you not to, and yet on you waltz into the house! Don't you know you're in the middle of a slasher movie?! Imaginative viewers have paid far more attention to the assertion of the movie's title than its characters do, and have suggested alternatives. A few of my own might include Don't Hitch Rides With Weirdos, Don't Snoop Around Weirdos' Houses and Don't Piss Off Child Abuse Victims. Any one of these could have served more suitably as the 'warning' of the story. 'Don't Go In The House!'? But all my stuff is in there!

Donny Kohler (Dan Grimaldi) is a quiet, weird guy who looks like a less-striking David Hess and works at an incinerator plant. He is obsessed with fire, thanks to his abusive mother's fanatical religiously-based abuse of him during which she'd 'burn the evil out' of him. So, you may say, 'Good on ya, Donny -- ya landed ya dream job!' But with fire being top of his Christmas list, he is less than responsive in fire-related health and safety situations. The opening scene sees one of Donny's colleagues fishing around an incinerator for an aerosol can. Now, I'm no Incineratory Technician, but I know that where there's a furnace and there's a metallic container of compressed gas, I'm not gonna be around to see out the consequences. So, the can goes boom and all the other guys scramble to put out their professional friend who doesn't seem to know the words Stop, Drop and Roll, while Donny stares on hazily.

The guys get mad at little ol' Donny for being fucking useless in a crisis situation, and he runs off home. The first second you get a glimpse of the Kohler place, you practically see 'Bates' written all over it. The obvious inspiration for this crooked mansion atop a hill sets the ball rolling for several other allusions to predecessors of the horror genre. Now if you thought Donny was having a bad day, you should see the look on his face when he finds his mother at home dead. How awful! But, oh wait, Donny's mother was a maniacal child-abuser. After an initial burst of rage at the cold and pale (yet still visibly breathing) mother, he recognises his newfound freedom, and so decides to live the good life: he turns up his records and swings back on the chair. He even smokes a cigarette!

But now for the real fun... to pretend his mother is still alive, not show up for work for a week, and lure gorgeous ladies back to his house for a little hot stuff. First up is a snotty florist (Johanna Brushay), whom Donny offers a ride home. Then he pulls that classic "I just gotta swing by my place for a minute -- it's right on the way" thing. Donny is no slobbering hick with an eyepatch; in fact he looks deceptively friendly, so when he is the only person around to give a lift, politeness indicates that there is little room for hesitation on this request. But then when they get there, Donny insists she come in and meet Mother Kohler. The girl seems to be with us in imagining that any guy who brings a random stranger in to meet his mother probably has some kind of issue, but it would just be plain rude to refuse, right?

The exteriors of the house are completely Hitchcockean, and the interiors have a real Carrie feel to them, with the long cavernous stairwells and gloomy woodwork. It is, as a drunken victim later comments, in dire need of a paint job. One room in particular is quite the spectacle. Once the girl is knocked out (as was imminent -- these buggers are never man enough to just drag a conscious person off against their will, are they?), she wakes up naked, chained to the floor by her feet and her hands to the ceiling of a steel-lined room, and Donny comes storming in menacingly in his full work uniform. Sure hope he noted the extra hours he put in at home down on his time sheet.

The death of Donny's first victim is apparently what most of the fuss was about, and what landed the movie in hot water with the Daily Mail's dumbass scaremongering campaign. The poor girl is doused in petrol and set ablaze with a flamethrower. My initial thought whilst watching this sequence was that its state-of-the-art CGI (Highlander style) were far more than I ever expected from a picture like Don't Go In The House. And I suppose it is quite horrific. But then, I'd recall the death of Delecroix in The Green Mile as far more painful to watch in comparison. I would say the more disturbing aspect of the scene is the mechanical, laborious manner in which Donny carries it out. Albeit a little batty, so far he has come across as a relatively meek fellow, but the way he torches the girl like he does every day at work...it feels as meaningless as a porn actor having sex with his wife at night.

Donny starts hearing voices. Encouraging him to burn the evil out of others. Seems like the Old Lady is getting bored and jealous out there on th'other side. He collects a couple more victims, and chars his mother's body, and arranges them in a macabre Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style family. Now a colleague, Bobby (Robert Osth), calls to see what has kept Donny from work for a week. He invites him out with suggested hooker arrangements made. Hesitant at first, Donny agrees, and hits the clothing store to purchase some disco-worthy gladrags. There he is served by a hilarious camp salesman, who kits him up in a surprisingly plain suit, so when he rolls up to the disco he feels kind of uncomfortable.

Well, it's uncertain whether the promise of whores is really fulfilled. It seems more like Bobby has met two young women who agreed to go out for the night, and he... filled in the gaps, so to speak. They seem nice. Not really whore material. Everyone is eager to dance except our valiant hero, and the poor girl who gets foisted upon him makes the mistake of being a bit too insistent with a secret psycho. Hey -- easy thing to do. As he is sat at a candlelit table, the girl grabs his hands and tries to pull him towards the dancefloor, rather carelessly holding his bare arms over the flame. *Momma Flashback* Cue the publicly alarming episodes which finally draw outside attention to Donny's shenanigans. He freaks out and throws the flame in the girl's face, setting her hair alight and promptly legging it.

During his workless week, Donny anxiously consulted with Father Gerrity (Ralph D. Bowman), telling him of the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother, and of his murderous tendencies as a result. Gerrity advises that Donny forget it all and move on, that what's in the past can't hurt him. So Donny tried this, but as the little incident in the nightclub demonstrates, it's not had the greatest success rate. So along with the alarmed Bobby, who is left to deal with two girls whose night has been little of what was promised, Donny also has Gerrity looking for him.

He has meanwhile picked up a couple of drunk chicks looking for a ride to the nearest available booze-jockey. Having developed something of a flair for bringing chicks home, he offers them a much better night at his house. They're drunk, and dumb (deadly combo) so gladly accept and start obnoxiously snooping around once they get to the Kohler place, as dumbass victims often do. To be honest, if I invited a new 'friend' to my house, went to get drinks, and came back to find them snooping through my bedroom, I'd be pretty pissed too.

The Priest-Whoremonger duo descend upon Donny's house, freeing the drunk girls from their topless captivity, and taking on the Fire Demon. Donny suits up, and tries to barbecue Gerrity, who is rescued by Bobby, prompting the psycho to barricade himself in his creepy Family Den. Now here's the cool ending I didn't see coming... the Mother-shaped jerky and her poor companions start to creak to life and edge menacingly towards him. I wonder if perhaps the ending sequence of Tony Scott's wicked The Hunger was inspired by this far less stylish example. But dontcha love it when the Insanity card is played throughout, only for the Supernatural card to be suddenly whipped out like a Thai bride's cock at last minute?! What a riot!

I mean, that's assuming that this isn't just another manifestation of Donny's increasingly menacing psyche. If nothing else, Don't Go In The House lends an ear to the lonely, abused souls who suffer pain and degradation. Donny's seeking of redemption in the form of Gerrity demonstrates his ultimately good nature, and he is clearly a tortured man. But what could be learnt from the movie? I suppose, the only lesson the duration of this pretty decent horror teaches can be best summed up by its title, or better by some of my own suggestions. The aim of Don't Go In The House is to warn audiences Don't Piss Off Child Abuse Victims. 

Crossroads (2002)

Uh...this is legal, right?

Road trip movies may be the most misleading subgenre ever...well, perhaps those and rom-coms. But for every road trip movie I watch, and for every standard requirement box each one ticks off, I find myself asking the same questions, as if what I were watching bore any resemblance to reality. I have come to the educated conclusion that the USA as a whole has no regulations against driving someone else's vehicle uninsured or carrying passengers on the trunk of a convertible. If it weren't for regular doses of Judge Judy, movies like this would convince me entirely that the Great Nation are inexplicably lenient with their legal system.

As a child of the '90s, I was supposedly the exact target audience for Britney's movie Crossroads when it was released in 2002. I was ten. I remember seeing it in the cinema with my dad and younger sister, who would have been eight. We were both massive Britney fans (gimme a break, it was a different time!) and if anyone can be sold an inane package with a famous character's face on it, it's eight- to ten-year-olds. I loved the movie as a child, and don't remember even wondering about the meaning of the surprisingly adult content within. I wasn't particularly alarmed by a pregnant eighteen year old, but the concepts of drink, rape, abandonment, miscarriage and the loss of one's virginity were lost upon my infant mind. Watching it in my 20s, I was sort of surprised at the age range this movie really was aimed at. It's sort of like the Parental Advisory announcement before the Jerry Springer show. Kids could watch it, but is it really a good idea?

Britney Spears plays Lucy, a cute (duh!), hard-working student who's ready to go off to med school and become a doctor, much to the delight of her equally hard-working but slightly abrasive dad Pete (Dan Ackroyd). The use of Ackroyd is a diluted form of his work as Harry Sultenfuss in the My Girl movies, where he had very well-written scripts and a character with more involvement than the statutory duties of the stern but loving father. He's still endearing, but Pete's opinions and actions merely serve the plot; there is no substance to them.


Years ago, Lucy buried a time capsule box with her two friends Mimi and Kitt, promising that they'd be friends forever (oh boy, we all know where this one's going). But on the day of their high school graduation, Mimi (Taryn Manning) is a pregnant trailer chick with dozens of gold hoop earrings and a scowl on her face, and Kitt (Zoe Saldana) is the stuck-up rich girl who has a fiancé over in LA. God knows how long it's been since they all hung out, but as often happens during adolescence, they drifted apart. They all reluctantly return to dig up the box on prom night, and an unconvincing, contrived form of a rediscovered relationship appears.

Mimi is off to audition for a recording contract in LA, hitching a ride with her shady friend Ben (Anson Mount), and invites the others to come along, for whatever reason. The trip is of the strictly-professional type at first: Mimi is auditioning, Kitt is making a surprise drop-in on her fiancé, and Lucy is getting off in Arizona for a surprise drop-in on her long-lost mother. Mimi is streetsmart, hence, the only one who doesn't think that surprise drop-ins on very absent figures is a good move, but who is she to convince her peers? They have their own inevitable fuck ups to serve that purpose.

The movie goes through the classic relationship motions of former friends/lovers/family brought together: initial wonder at the spectacle of being reunited, sudden realisation of why they are no longer friends, the primary threads of repair to the relationship, and ultimately the 'stronger than ever' crap. As with so many formulaic movies, we know what will happen in the end, and can make some pretty decent guesses about the middle. But that leaves us only to wonder about what they will do on the road. Will they have any deeply moving or thought-provoking conversations which really reveal their characters? Only at a 101 level. Will they pick up an interesting stranger who goes on to make or break them? No. Will at least one of them take up a questionable romantic attachment to the only male cast member who isn't the father? Of course, but it has to be the cute, exploitable one. (We're ready for you, Miss Spears!)

Rumour has it that Ben is fresh out of prison for murder (given his youthful appearance, we'd have to guess he was one of those Michael Myers child-convict types to have gotten out by now), and even sensible, would-be doctor Lucy is remarkably undeterred. She gets pissed and calls her father when their car breaks down, but when it is revealed the man driving them is a potential murderer, she just gives him the silent treatment. Of course, rumours are never true, and the reason for Ben's incarceration is very unexciting, giving him free reign to wiggle in as the cute virgin's First. And boy, is he willing. Throughout, he insists that nobody else drive his classic Buick convertible (fair enough), but as soon as the pussy's on the pedestal, he throws the keys to a couple of over-excited eighteen-year-olds in order to get rid of them. This guy's got his priorities in gear!

Is this really a screenshot from a kids' movie?

The more mature themes of the movie are questionable for me. I suppose given the embarrassing, manufactured 'icons' of today like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and the age ranges they cater to, it's a tough one. No young adult trying to mold a career wants to pander to small children; they want some level of maturity and seriousness to their act. Spears repeatedly prances around in her underwear, the treatment of College Virgins is called up for discussion, the girls drink underage, and learn that performing an abysmally weak cover of a classic rock track and grinding on a pole will leave local hicks clambering to drop dollar bills in the hat. To be honest, the material is diluted, and if it could have broken out into a more adolescent picture worthy of a 15 rating, it could perhaps have performed to its full potential.

This is not to say that the movie would ever have been a masterpiece, but there is a feeling of family-oriented restraint to the whole thing. If a couple of swear words could have been thrown in, and if the scriptwriters could have fully developed the plotlines of rape, pregnancy etc. to adequately demonstrate the consequences, it could have been something. There is an inherent nonchalance to every issue. Mimi may have been raped, but it happens all the time. She may be a pregnant teenager, but she loses the baby, so there's no need to deal with the reality of teenage parenthood. And the ultimate message is definitely questionable: Lucy has worked very hard throughout her school years to build a strong career for herself and move her family up the social ladder. But what is academia worth when you can be a popstar? Encouraging children to abandon serious achievable ambitions in favour of the oldest honeytrap in existence is not the thing to do. And when you look at the fame-hungry Western societies that we live in today, it's hard to feel unconvinced that these sorts of influences over our generation have tainted our views of life, the world, and our self-worth.


The poorly-written caricature for Dan Ackroyd to play sort of seals Lucy's fate as a girl who once had huge potential but will almost certainly end up like the real Britney - used up, spat out and irreparably damaged by the whole experience, with little hope for any longevity. While Pete is required to scorn Lucy about the money he has lost, the professional relationships with her future employers she has destroyed and the general emotional distress her shenanigans have put him through, all she has to do is flutter her eyes and breathily whisper "I'm sorry" and it's all forgotten. What sort of ideas does this give to Lucy, and by extension, to the children who witness her story? These are serious issues in a real-life situation, but hey, money grows on trees and there'll always be some sucker to bail you out.

When dissected, many of Crossroads' elements are detrimental and amateur. Not to say there are no saving graces: Ackroyd is as wonderful as he can be, Taryn Manning is utterly convincing as a tough-skinned trailer park girl, and Zoe Saldana is quite possibly the highlight, with her sterling comic timing and delivery. She really made me laugh. It's deserving that of the trio, she went on to the biggest and best things. And if I'm really honest, Britney takes the few lines that really require any acting and gives them her all. She is no actress, but she's not as bad as people like to make out, and had the role been given to any other young blonde, it probably would have turned out no better. It's not a demanding role in the slightest, so it fits her quite well.

In terms of the Britney machine, the film played an interesting role. Made in 2001, when her image was still squeaky clean, before the likes of Toxic and its transparent bodysuits launched Britney's Madonna-brand sex appeal, it is amusing to see her dressed in frilly pink cardigans that go up to her neck, and insisting, "I have seen one, y'all!" (They're referring to the male sex organ, incidentally). Most of all, it's nice to see her the way she was. My God, she was a pretty girl. She just exuded vitality and bubbliness, and it makes the process of her mid-noughties downfall all the more painful to remember. The industry really did break this girl, and it's nice to see that nowadays her much-improved family life and Vegas residency have given her the happy medium that she could have done with years ago.

People have questioned for years why Crossroads has such a cult following, despite being publicly hated by anyone with the opportunity to voice it. Is it pure nostalgia, for all of us who want to remember a time when our biggest problems were deciding which pair of glitter jeans to wear to the school dance, or which member of Boyzone we wanted to marry? Is it that on the surface, Crossroads is a good-natured, sunny movie which is catchily optimistic? A film for children, I honestly think it is not. It never scarred me or turned me into an inconsiderate, denim skirt-wearing, man-punching potato-chip muncher, but I'm not sure I'd be in a hurry to show it to my daughter at any age prior to, perhaps, eleven or twelve. The transition into high school around this age inevitably catapults kids into a world full of nasties, like rape and teenage pregnancy, as well as a couple of secret joys, like sex and drugs. Kids of this age could really appreciate the movie for what it is, I believe. As long as their parents are still telling them to go be a doctor by the end of it.