#Eric Red

[monstersonscreen]

The werewolf form of Uncle Ted in Eric Red's Bad Moon (1996) was designed by Steve Johnson's XFX Inc.

Johnson's inspiration for the werewolf's design came from Warren Publishing's magazines such as Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella; according to Johnson, one story had a werewolf which was 'human in its lower body, waist down, but its upper body was wolf-like. Johnson doesn't specify the cover in question.

The head animatronic was designed and sculpted by Bill Corso, who emphasized the wolfish aspect rather than previous werewolf designs - the werewolf suit was so wolf-like that it intimidated most of the german shepard attack dogs used in filming, making them unwilling to attack the werewolf performer!

[rabidhiss]

This is amazing. It encapsulates the film better than all the other posters do. It’s so seedy and grindhouse positive. I want two. One for now and one for anywhere else I may live. I was simply searching out a screenwriter and director by the name of Eric Red and this image came up.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/10-11/2023: MAD LOVE (1935), BODY PARTS (1991)

I had always heard, casually, that Eric Red's BODY PARTS was a remake of Karl Freund's MAD LOVE. The relationship can't be quite that direct, since each film is adapted from a separate novel--MAD LOVE from Maurice Renard's The Hands of Orlac (1920), and BODY PARTS from a book with the English title Choice Cuts (1968) by crime-writing duo Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. It just so happens that the two films deal with the notion that consciousness exists throughout the body, not only in the brain. This is a real idea, actually (Wayback doesn't get behind this paywall, but maybe you have something better), although I haven't heard anyone posit that personality exists throughout the body like it does in these exciting movies.

Simply one of the best appearances of a human being in a movie.

In MAD LOVE Colin Clive plays Stephen Orlac, a famous pianist who, after a devastating accident, receives a transplant of both hands from the disturbed Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre). Orlac doesn't know that he now has the hands of a murderer, and they have retained their former habits. Gogol uses the ensuing drama to try to deprive the pianist of his beautiful wife Yvonne (Frances Drake), a Grand Guignol performer with whom the doctor is obsessed. Gogol seems to know that body parts can remain identified with their original owner, and perhaps this awareness feeds into his general attachment to appearances. His projected relationship with Yvonne is filtered through layers of simulation: He "knows" her from her stage role, and he lives with a wax figure of her in a self-conscious imitation of the myth of Galatea, the living statue. Perhaps what's inside doesn't count so much, when the personality is equally embedded in the outside.

In BODY PARTS, psychiatrist Bill Crushank (Jeff Fahey, don't ya just love him?) receives a new arm after a surviving a spectacular car wreck. The experimental procedure seems like a godsend until previous owner's violent nature begins to infect Crushank's behavior. To solve the mystery of what is happening to him, he seeks out the recipients of other limbs donated by the same crazed killer, including a vigorous young athlete named Mark (Peter Murnik) who needed new legs, and Remo (Brad Dourif), a hack painter who has experienced a burst of highly lucrative inspiration since he accepted his new arm. All of the men have been contaminated with the original donor's destructive rage, but Mark and Remo are less willing to part with their, er, parts. Here we have a whiff of the notion that the beast in man--the animal self that resists civilization--is connected to bodily power and pleasure, and also to subconscious, intuitive mental activities like the artistic impulse. Crushank, a psychiatrist who works with prisoners to help civilize them, is naturally less benefited by these bestial qualities.

The makeup in this movie is incredibly great, you can practically smell that arm.

BODY PARTS and MAD LOVE share the intriguing feature of a kind of decentralized evil. There is the evil of the original owner of the parts, and the evil that grows in their unwitting recipients, and the evil of the egomaniacal doctors who perform the operations for their own purposes. Villainy is sort of a free-floating essence that travels through bodily tissue but is never confined to a single, containable, even killable person. Instead it spreads like a virus through a person's life until both their inner feelings and their outer circumstances are entirely tainted. It's fortunate for the films' protagonists that consciousness is still corporeally dependent, despite how communicable it is, or else things could have been a lot worse!

PS Both of these movies deserve a lot more attention than I was able to give them during what I did not know would turn into a speed run season of Blogtober. I reserve the right to revisit them later! I didn't even get to talk about how BODY PARTS was co-written by Norman Snider who co-wrote DEAD RINGERS with David Cronenberg...

[brokehorrorfan]

Blue Steel will be released on Blu-ray on November 14 via Lionsgate. The 1990 action thriller is spine #31 in the Vestron Video Collector’s Series.

Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Near Dark) directs from a script she co-wrote with Eric Red (The Hitcher, Near Dark). Jamie Lee Curtis stars with Ron Silver, Clancy Brown, Elizabeth Peña, Louise Fletcher, and Tom Sizemore.

Blue Steel is presented in high definition with 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by film historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Interview with editor Lee Percy

Interview with production designer Toby Corbett

The Phallic Woman: Deconstructing Blue Steel - Featurette with film historian Jennifer Moorman

A Profound Emotional Response – Video essay by film historian Chris O'Neill

Theatrical trailer

TV spots

Vintage promo

Still gallery

Newly minted NYPD officer Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) responds to a grocery store robbery – and kills the perpetrator – her first day on the job. But Megan’s uncorroborated story of the shooting gets her suspended from active duty when the stickup gun mysteriously vanishes. Enter a charming-but-disturbed commodities trader (Ron Silver), whose obsession with Megan threatens to destroy everything she holds dear, pushing her into a desperate fight to salvage her reputation… and save her own life.

Pre-order Blue Steel.

[omercifulheaves]

The Hitcher (1986)

[ask-bing-and-the-g-unit]

Eric watched as Dark laid out newspapers along the tub. Such a fine tub — so clean. The cat wilted, ears pressing down as he thought about having to- to- to go to the bathroom. He shuddered at the very thought. Eating, going to the bathroom. Awful, awful, awful. He shook himself again, and he then noticed the start hairs that flew off of him. He was making a mess.

A long, low mewl of disconcertion came from his throat, and Dark looked over with confusion. After a moment of hesitation, they reached over to rub his head. Eric had quickly learned this soothed Dark as much as it felt good for Eric. “It’s just temporary. I doubt that this will last long. No more than a week.” Eric certainly hoped it would be shorter. A week? Unable to make sure everyone was okay? Unable to clean??? The world will fall to disarray! Chaos! Discord! Madness!

Dark was quiet as they rubbed his soft ears, then letting their hand run along his back slowly. Eric crept closer until barely pressed against their side and settled his head on their leg. His ears swiveled at every subtle crack and pop of their body, upset rising in Eric’s throat.

“Come along,” they sighed, standing carefully as more bones crackled against Eric’s ears. “You should be able to sleep through most of it, I would think. We’ll get you settled on the bed.”

Eric’s little pink nose wrinkled at that. He had seen the bed on the way in: crumpled and messy. It would need to be made before anything. He scampered off the ledge of the tub and sprinted ahead of Dark who startled at the the suddenness.

The cat leapt onto the bed and promptly collapsed with a less-than spectacular landing before pushing himself back up onto his paws. He stumbled across the foam mattress, but he had set himself to a task. Using his mouth (awful, terrible, so many germs, he hated this), Eric began his tedious undertaking of making the bed. Dark finished shuffling their way to stand in the doorframe to the en suite, watching with both amusement and bemusement. Each step that the cat took grew more confident by the meticulousness of walking back and forth to straighten the sheets just right.

Eric not moved to trek over to grab the next layer but rather froze, a paw hovering over the ‘pristinely’ placed sheets. He would– He would wrinkle it! Ruin it! The bed will fall to disarray!! Eric shrank back, tail between legs as he bumped the headboard. He couldn’t finish the bed without ruining it. An upset warble (?) sat in his throat, and he circled to hide in the pillows with a whimper.

All of this was terrible! Couldn’t cook, couldn’t clean, couldn’t even make a bed! He whined beneath the pillow, too upset to silence himself. While the cat fell into despair, Dark sighed and shuffled to Eric, dragging themself over by their cane. Their free hand moved with slight movements, and the rest of the covers drifted into the air by Dark’s will and made themselves on the mattress. Eric’s hairs stood on end and led him to peeking his head out as his nerves were now on edge.

The brown of his irises bloomed with dilated pupils as the magic finished making the bed. Clean! Neat! CREASELESS AND WITHOUT WRINKLES!!! He started trembling? and he whipped his head to find the source, stumbling out from behind the pillows as his chest continued rumbling.

A grey hand settled on his head, causing Eric to look up at Dark who rubbed — oh, that feels really nice — his ears. “Glad to have your approval,” they chuckled — also very nice; had he ever heard Dark chuckle before? — which only confused the former android more. How did they know that he liked the made bed?

Eric chirped at them in approval; this seemed to interrupt the strange vibrations for a moment, so he chirped again, only for the rumbled to resume. A little frustrated, he chirped over and over, worry crossing Dark’s face as he continued. “Are you… hiccuping?” Eric shook his head, his purrs overtaking him again when he stopped. “Okay, sleep as much as you can. It’ll help make the time go by faster.”

[madamshogunassassin]

[randomrichards]

BODY PARTS (1991):

Post car accident

Man’s arm replaced with killer’s

Evil in the flesh?

[80smovies]

[haverwood]

Body Parts Eric Red USA, 1991 ★★★ I started watching knowing Jeff Fahey was in it and went like "hey remember that movie where he loses an arm, gets a transplant from a criminal and starts acting all whacky and deranged?"

Well this was it! Amazing. Huge throwback to the good old (and fun) VHS days.

So anyway, I could've bet money on this being a King adaptation but no, it's based on the "horror novel Choice Cuts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac" (copy/paste from wiki). It's great, fun and gory, with lots of familiar faces in it.

This kind of genre needs a big comeback.

[byneddiedingo]

Lindsay Duncan, Jeff Fahey, and Kim Delaney in Body Parts (Eric Red, 1991)

Cast: Jeff Fahey, Lindsay Duncan, Kim Delaney, Zakes Mokae, Brad Dourif, John Walsh, Paul Ben-Victor, Peter Murnik. Screenplay: Patricia Herskovic, Joyce Taylor, Eric Red, Norman Snider, based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Cinematography: Theo van de Sande. Production design: Bill Brodie. Editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Loek Dikker. 

How can a movie with a car chase, a fight in a barroom, and an abundance of gore turn out so dull? Body Parts is based on an old trope, that of severed members taking on a life of their own. Adaptations of W.W. Jacobs's 1902 story "The Monkey's Paw" are so numerous they have a Wikipedia page of their own and Maurice Renard's 1920 novel Les Mains d'Orlac, about a concert pianist who receives the transplanted hands of a murderer, has been filmed several times, including Robert Wiene's 1924 silent The Hands of Orlac and Karl Freund's 1935 Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre. The many adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also play on the notion of reanimated body parts. But it's not that the idea behind Eric Red's movie has been done to death, so to speak, it's that Red and the various screenwriters who worked on the movie find so little new and interesting to do with it. It's adapted from a 1965 novel, Choice Cuts, by the writing team known as Boileau-Narcejac, who provided the source material for some much better movies: Diabolique (aka Les Diaboliques, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). The acting isn't bad. As Bill Chrushank, a psychiatrist who receives the arm of a murderer after losing his own in an auto accident, Jeff Fahey does a solid job of suggesting the ways the transplant brings out the worst in what may have been his own latent tendencies to violence. Lindsay Duncan plays the surgeon who does the transplant as a cold-blooded scientist with just a touch of hauteur that turns malevolent when her breakthrough technique is threatened. Brad Dourif overacts a little as the artist who receives the other arm and finds that it actually feeds his imagination and produces darkly disturbing paintings that sell. And Kim Delaney does what she can with the role of Chrushank's wife, who bears the brunt of his emotional transformation. But Red's direction never builds suspense, giving us time to anticipate the shocks we expect the material to provide. There's also a completely unearned "happy ending" that saps any lingering tension from what has gone before. 

[monstersonscreen]

Michael Pare's transformation into a werewolf in Eric Red's Bad Moon (1996) is one aspect of the film that has not aged well. Prosthetic appliances were applied, designed similarly to tho werewolf transformation prosthetics Steve Johnson had previously designed for Evil Ed's death sequence in Fright Night.

Unfortunately, these makeups were blended together with digital morphing effects (in a similar manner to the equally poorly aged transformations in Sleepwalkers). Both Steve Johnson and Eric Red deeply regret this, with Red's directors cut even cutting out most of the transformation.

[alexhorrorfilms]

100 Feet (100 футов)

Місце, з якого не можна вийти, але куди прибув дуже мстивий привид.

��рік Ред насамперед сценарист і письменник, але іноді знімав непогані жахіття.

Марні Вотсон відпущена із в'язниці умовно достроково. Але не зовсім на волю, а під домашній арешт, за дотриманням умов якого спостерігає спеціальний прилад браслет на нозі.

Начебто все йшло непогано, поки в її квартирі не з'являється примара покійного чоловіка, який шукає заховані в квартирі гроші

Міцний професійний одноразовий містичний трилер.

[cinemaquiles]

A cara do super cine: mulher luta contra espirito obsessor em "Refém do Espírito" (100 feet, 2008)

[egophiliac]

roll out the red carpet guys we're going to the SHAFTLANDS

[omercifulheaves]

So I found out today that Eric Red, the guy that wrote Near Dark and The Hitcher, penned a serial numbers filed off version of The Wild Bunch (with a dash of Hill's The Long Riders) for HBO Pictures back in the early 90s. Sports a crazy cast -- Mickey Rourke! Dermot Mulroney! Ted Levine! Steve Buscemi! The bad guy from Death Wish 3! Keith David playing a character named Lovecraft! -- and was directed by Geoff Murphy, he of Freejack and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory fame! (And yes, The Quiet Earth, which was quite good.) As you can see, full movie's up on YouTube.