This week, we’re paying tribute to the late Harris Yulin by diving into the 1988 horror film ‘Bad Dreams.’

We explore Yulin’s illustrious career, his significant yet underrated roles, and his impact on Hollywood. We also dissect the plot, discuss the film’s eerie similarities to ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street,’ and reflect on its production and cast.

Don’t miss out on this deep dive into an overlooked 80’s horror flick and a talented actor’s legacy. Share your thoughts and comments below!

Episode 451, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, you know how I am about tribute episodes. Maybe I get a little more enthusiastic than you are. It depends on who it is. I mean, today’s tribute is to a man named Harris, Len. I don’t think that name is on the tip of too many people’s tongues when they’re asked to, uh, spout out, you know, 10 most famous actors they know, right?

If you see this guy’s face, you’ll be like, oh, that guy. Yeah. He died in June at the age of 87. And he has been in so much stuff. In fact, I think, uh, much like the last person that we did a tribute episode for, he was kind of one of those guys who enjoyed all of the big roles and probably the money and stuff of Hollywood without having to deal with the trappings of fame.

Mm-hmm. Because he was just shy of getting that, you know, one breakout role that would just kinda lift him up and sort of define his career. But the guy is very versatile, although he did tend to get cast in a lot of roles like this. Like he is in this movie. And the movie we’re doing, by the way, is Bad Dreams from 1988.

You know, like a psychiatrist or a police officer or a, a judge. Judge, yeah. Like a doer or serious government official or something like that. You know, it was fun to learn a lot, a little bit about him. But this is why we do this. It’s so good to have an excuse to learn more about some of these guys. It is 

Craig: kind of cool.

Todd: Right. Did so, did you look up, uh, some information about him? 

Craig: Just a little bit. I mean, I, I was mostly impressed that he really started in the theater and did some really amazing stuff and worked with really amazing people. When he was a, a younger man, he, he really didn’t get into. Film and TV until the second half of his life.

But, well, I don’t know. He, he lived to be pretty old, but like in his thirties, I think. Yeah, thirties and forties. But just, just looking at his theater resume was pretty mind blowing. Tons of Shakespeare and with huge people, I wanna say like Kevin Klein and James Earl Jones and like, 

Todd: yeah. Yeah, 

Craig: I, it was really, really impressive.

Todd: It’s insane. And then you go and look at his film when he did start getting into film, you know, he’s been in so much stuff. Scarface Ghostbusters two, I remember him from Clear and Present Danger. He had a pretty big role in that one. Rush hour Rush, rush Hour two, I think. Again, we could say all these things.

You probably wouldn’t know who we’re talking about until you saw his face. I know him. Anyway, a sort of middle aged looking guy with a very, very receding hairline and just, uh, like I said, almost always, just like a serious. Ish face on i I, when I was going through and reading about some of his filmography, I saw that he played, I think it was this Wyatt Earp or Doc Holiday, I’m not sure.

One 

Craig: or the other. Yeah. 

Todd: In a movie called Doc, uh, from 1971. And I actually pulled that up and started to watch it and said, okay, I’m putting a pin in this after we record our podcast. I think tomorrow I’m gonna watch that. ’cause it looks like a really cool version of that story. He looks young in that one.

Uh, he still looks like almost exactly the same. It’s like the same. Face, just fewer wrinkles. I mean, hopefully we could all be that lucky, but he’s got these big glassy eyes that were just so much more obvious when he was younger that, I mean, a lot of expression possible with big eyes like that. It’s, uh, a weird thing to hone in on.

But it was just really jumping out at me when, uh, when I saw him in that. Anyway, there were a couple ones we could have chosen. There was the believers, which has been requested a couple times, and we briefly considered doing that, but I skimmed through the believers and I realized he didn’t have such a big role in that one.

However, in this one Bad dreams, he has a fairly significant role. He doesn’t have a ton of screen time. Mm-hmm. But, uh, his role in the story is, is pretty significant. So I’m glad we chose this one, and I’m really glad that we had the opportunity to do this movie because I’ve been wanting to do this for the podcast for a while.

Uh, had you seen this before? No. 

Craig: I don’t think I had heard of it before. 

Todd: Oh, you’d never saw it on the shelves? 

Craig: Not that I recall, but my God, that’s been 30 years ago. Yeah. Back when we, I dunno, 

Todd: perused the shelves of video stories. Right. I, this one always reached out at me ’cause it’s got a very scared looking woman.

It’s just a closeup of her face. There’s a gross hand over her mouth and the reflection of a knife in it. And it’s kind of hard to miss. 

Craig: Is it in black and white? 

Todd: Yeah. Yeah, 

Craig: I bet that’s why I didn’t ever look at it. Oh yeah, I bet. I thought it was a black and white movie and just passed it by. But I’m glad we did it too, because it’s a really interesting movie.

I think it’s gonna be very interesting to talk about. But Harris Yulin would all say, I will anytime I see him, I think, oh, that’s the judge from Ghostbusters too. And he’s really mean, and he like yells at them at the top of his voice and for whatever reason, and it’s not like I know him from a lot of things, but anytime I see him he just kind of exudes some kind of like authority, like Yeah, he looks, he looks like somebody who’s in charge.

Yeah, he does. And, and he looks like somebody you don’t wanna mess with. Uhhuh. And he is not even like a big guy or anything at all. No. He just has a really commanding presence. He also played the, uh, head of the Watcher’s Council on Buffy, and I vaguely remember him in that. But it’s interesting what you said about him, you know, being the guy that you re.

Because I feel like this whole movie is cast entirely of those people. Yeah. Virtually everybody in this movie, you’re gonna be like, wait a second, who’s that guy? Or who’s that gal? Pretty much all of them. 

Todd: It is cram packed full of stars. 

Craig: I don’t know that I would necessarily call them stars. That’s what I was getting at.

What you said about him was he never really kind of hit that big movie star thing. And I was just talking to Alan about this last night ’cause I was telling him about this movie. I said, you know, these are the people that you see especially, and things are different now. I think, but back then there was this pool of actors.

It was a large pool, I’m sure, but that you just saw in everything. They were all over tv. They were all over movies in small roles. And like these people, some of them, I had a feeling I knew what they were from, but I wanted to double check. So I would go to their IMDB page and they just have pages and pages and pages of credits.

Oh yeah. 

Craig: And I said to Alan, I’m like, I think that’s what I would want to do. Mm-hmm. I would want to just work all the time, make a comfortable living, live comfortably and work all the time in these smaller things. Because being famous 

Todd: sucks. 

Craig: Kind of sounds good on paper, but No, it, it sounds horrible to me.

Yeah. Like you have no privacy. Everything you do is scrutinized. Everything you’ve ever done in your past is scrutinized. Like it just. Sounds like a nightmare. Mm-hmm. But to just be able to work acting all the time. I mean, I guess you kind of do that to an extent. 

Todd: I guess I have the reverse thing. I think that a lot of people have seen me and are probably super annoyed by me.

Craig: Yeah. Probably I am. Every time you pop up,

like, oh, Jesus got that guy again. 

Todd: But I’m hidden on the other side of the world. I don’t have the chance to walk down the busy streets of a, of a big city and and see if anybody recognized. 

Craig: I bet people would recognize you. That’s hilarious. I bet people really would. ’cause you kind of a distinctive, stupid look about you that I think that, I don’t 

Todd: know.

I have more of a feeling that PE I would just be on that edge of people, be like, that guy looks familiar, but I have no idea where, you know, it’d be one of those people. Yeah. 

Craig: Yeah, you’re right. 

Todd: I’ve only had one guy, it was a guy who worked at Universal Studios here in Beijing and I was hanging out with a couple of his buddies at a little party that they had had, and he was a new guy who had just come in.

A young guy. He came right up to me and he was like, oh my. God. And that was a weird experience, you know, like he wanted to talk my ear off. He’s like, I, I’m sorry, I just can’t get over this. I feel like I’m meeting like someone famous. And I was like, alright, I get it. I guess I get it. But like. Wow. It was a weird feeling for me.

And I would hate to have to live with that day in and day out. I, I would, yeah, it would, you’d get a charge out of it for a while. Right. Then it would become annoying and then Right. It would be scary. 

Craig: Right. But these folks, you know, just get to work all the time and do cool stuff and meet other cool people.

I, that sounds very appealing. 

Todd: Collect residuals. I mean, the more movies you’re in. Right, 

Craig: right. When residuals existed, I don’t think they exist anymore, but I mean, not for people who are making stuff now. ’cause everything streams. 

Todd: Yeah. The streaming thing’s a problem. 

Craig: Anyway. So Bad Dreams is directed by Andrew Fleming, who, I don’t know that name.

Kind of sounded familiar to me. And it wasn’t until I got mostly through the movie and I had already looked up all the actors and seen what they were in. I was like, I should check out and see. Oh. And in the trivia I had read that this was his first feature film directing. Right. So, uh, I looked him up and I saw that he directed one of my favorite movies, the Craft.

Which again, like we’re like 10 years into this podcast and I can’t believe we haven’t done that. It’s, it’s one of my favorite. Movies. 

Todd: It’s weird. We haven’t done that yet. 

Craig: He did a couple other movies. He did a movie called Threesome. I don’t remember when that movie came out. I want to say like, when I was in high school, ’cause that was very sexy for me.

And then he did a funny movie called Dick about Richard Nixon. And more recently people might know him from Emily in Paris, which I’ve never watched, but I hear is awful and also wildly popular. So yeah, 

Todd: I’ve heard the same thing. I, I just, I don’t need another series to keep up on and that didn’t really seem like my cup of tea anyway, so I’ve, I’ve been avoiding it.

Craig: But I love the craft and I, it’s not like I see the craft in this movie, but I see kind of inklings of his style and I like it. This movie is, is odd. It, it’s, it’s strange to me that I’ve never seen it because it, it seems very well made, it seems among the movies of its kind and of its time. It looks good.

Oh yeah. The acting is good. Tons of people that you’ve seen before. Personally, I think the story kind of falls apart a little bit at the end, but whatever I can get over that, I, I’m surprised that I haven’t heard. 

Todd: More about it. It’s weird that this one sort of fell off the radar and it did pretty quickly because this was a movie that was on the shelves that I passed by all the time, looked like it’d be pretty scary.

And eventually I rented, I don’t know, maybe 10, 15 years after I’d been passing by it. I think I was either in college or maybe in late high school when I finally watched this film. And when I did, I was like, oh. This movie’s good. Why is, does it only exist on the video store shelves? You know, and it’s got so many people in it.

It’s produced by Gale Lan Herd, James Cameron’s longtime producer. And, and she had done just, just come off of aliens and uh, I think aliens just before this, and the co-writer of the screenplay is Steven Dea. And he’s like a freaking god of screenwriters. He’s like, box Office gold. This guy, he wrote 48 Hours and a Commando, the Running Man Die Hard, diehard two, all of these big, big, big movies.

So like, there’s so many great names behind this. And it’s not a bad movie to kick off your career with as a director at all? No. In some ways it starts to feel a bit like one of those cable pot boilers, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like the movies you would see on cable TV that were more thrillers than anything else.

But it’s not because it’s got. Very definite horror vibe because so much of it feels like it’s ripping off of Nightmare on Elm Street at times. 

Craig: It does. You know, I, I read that like I was, I was watching it and I was like reading stuff about it at the same time, and I read something that like, it was often criticized as being a rip off of Nightmare on Elm Street, and it hadn’t really crossed my mind, but the second I read it, I was like.

Oh yeah. It really is. 

Todd: No, at first I was getting final destination vibes. I was like, okay, this is a woman who was supposed to die who didn’t, and now it’s gonna be about death, or in this case, this character coming to, to get her, but then be, as the character was killing off all the people around most of the movie, if not all of it, takes place in a mental institution.

And I always love me a horror movie that kicks off with a beautiful, confused young woman in a mental institution. It’s, it’s almost a trope, but it’s a very nightmare in Elm Street trope. 

Craig: It is. And, and there are so many other parallels to, I don’t want to get too into them before we introduce like, what’s happening.

Sure. Like it, it starts out with this man, just like. Looking out over a desert sunset, we find out that this guy’s name is Harris, played by Richard Lynch, who I don’t really know a whole lot about. He’s one of the people that I didn’t know much about, but he obviously leads this cult. And it’s a bunch of, I would say, 20 to mid, I don’t know, 

Todd: 20-year-old hippie people to 

Craig: hippie.

But it looked like there was some range, like twenties, thirties, maybe even early forties. I don’t know. But it’s led by this guy Harris, and it looks like he’s baptizing people. Yeah, he’s ladling liquid out of something and and pouring it over their heads. And this is, uh, I guess Cynthia, our main character, her initiation now Cynthia’s played by Jennifer Rubin, but not in this scene.

This is a younger actress playing the character, but again, Jennifer Rubin, who I remember well from Nightmare in Elm Street. Three. Yeah, the Dream Warriors, the Badass Chick, which. Also takes place in a mental institution. Right. 

Todd: And didn’t come out too many years before this. What was that, 86, I think. Yeah.

Craig: I don’t know. But anyway, it was evident to me like I didn’t know this, I hadn’t read it or anything, but I knew, I’m like, that’s not water. He’s like pouring gasoline on their head and they’re gonna, you 

Todd: did. You knew that? Oh yeah. 

Craig: Absolutely. A hundred percent. No question. What? I don’t know why, but I just did.

Then you don’t see what happens inside, but it cuts to the outside of the house and the house explodes, like zillion sticks of dynamite went off inside of it. 

Todd: Not before a baby cries. That was like, 

Craig: yeah, you hear a baby. That was a 

Todd: little gruesome, extra bit that didn’t need to be in there, but, okay. Wow. 

Craig: I, yeah, I mean, it is gruesome, but I also feel like that was, yeah, it like it’s a cult like these.

People don’t think that what they’re doing is bad or harmful. Right. You know what I’m saying? Like they’re they’re totally in it. Yeah. As is Cynthia apparently. But the news says that like 24 people died and, and Harris, the leader is dead, or whatever. I have next in my notes to mention the classic rock soundtrack because Yes, it’s great.

Th this particular song that they play right now, I, I’ve never heard before, but I presume the title is something like, I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night, which is a little on the nose for a movie called Bad Dreams, but it was a really good song. Is it the Rolling Stones song? It, it, I couldn’t remember and I didn’t look it up.

I should have looked it up. But Time, the, the song that repeats over and over and over again. 

Todd: There is one. Yeah. That keeps coming in a lot. 

Craig: Well, it becomes a major motif because 

Todd: time has come today. If that’s the one I, I think it, I’m looking it up right now. It’s the Chamber Brothers 

Craig: in the song. It just repeats.

Time. Time and it, it keeps doing that throughout the movie as she jumps back and forth. And it’s not a time travel movie, it’s like flashbacks or whatever, but it uses that time motif over and over again. But anyway, great. Classic rock soundtrack. I don’t remember. I got that Harris and the Cult. So this must be while she’s in a coma, she’s thinking, I don’t know.

They’re talking about how life and death are just different states and that they will all be one spirit and lots of other culty stuff. 

Clip: Scared of Harris. You can’t escape. Harris loves you, brother. If I kill you, it’s because I love you. Come to me, Cynthia. Now, now, now, now, now, now you know. I’ll find you.

Craig: And then it cuts to 13 years later. So big culty backstory to set up this girl waking up from a coma 13 years later. 

Todd: Yeah, from the mid seventies to the late eighties. I guess it’s a combination. I think of her flashbacks while she’s in a coma with some news reports. You know, this was a big story obviously, uh, when it, when it happened.

Yeah. But when she wakes up, the first thing we see is good old Harris Yulan, who’s, uh, her psychiatrist, whose name is Dr. Barford. Mm-hmm. And he’s standing over her, uh, they have a press conference and the whole nine yards. ’cause it’s a big deal that she’s woken up. And one of the very first things that they tell her is that, or that that has mentioned anyway, is that they have been very unsuccessful in locating any family or friends, which is just something that I think they just had to get outta the way at the beginning to keep things uncomplicated for the plot.

Mm-hmm. It is just a girl. It’s a girl. And it makes sense. It’s not uncommon, I think, for these commune type things for people to just disavow their families and their past and go into this new life. As far as we know so far, what happened was some kind of accident. You know, we don’t really know a lot about why there was a fire or the explosion, but she did survive.

Clip: It’s a psychiatrist. Well a psychiatrist is, uh. Psyche from the Greek, it’s, uh, means mind and theary is to heal. So, uh, psychiatrist is a mind healer. Anyway, that’s the idea. You’ve been out of touch for so long that, uh, more than your muscle tone that it needs exercise. Anyway, I have a, an assistant named Dr.

Carmen and he has a group therapy session that meets every day. I’ve enrolled you in it starting tomorrow. 

Todd: I like the way this kicked off because she sits in this group and this guy immediately introduces himself as Dr. Carmen. It’s a super young guy. As he’s talking, he starts to come onto her and that’s when the real Dr.

Carmen comes in, who’s played by Bruce Abbott. 

Craig: Yeah, from re animator. Yeah. Uh, and re animator too. The first guy that you were talking about, Ralph, is Dean Cameron, who Yeah. Did a lot of stuff, but I always remember him from summer school with Mark Carmen. Uh, that movie was so funny. And he was really funny in it, and he’s funny in this movie.

Yeah. Um, he brings a little bit of light. To otherwise pretty dark movie. 

Todd: He’s not the only comedian in this film, but he’s, he’s one of a few. And I think that, from what I read, he had actually improvised quite a bit of what he did. Mm-hmm. And I think that probably added a little more levity than was probably originally in the script.

I loved his character and I thought his portrayal was fantastic. I’m not gonna complain about anybody’s acting in this movie, really. No. Everyone is is fantastic. But one thing I really did appreciate about this movie as we’re coming in and we’re being introduced to all these different people in this group, is how this might be one of those few horror films that I think gets the whole psychiatric group therapy hospital or whatever, more or less, right?

It’s not a place full of crazies that are just wandering around moaning. It doesn’t seem like a desolate place where nobody cares about anybody. This seems like a busy, bustling. Hospital. Yeah. With people who are very serious about their jobs and very professional, everything’s well lit. We don’t have much for like spooky, weird areas or anything like that, and I believe that every single one of these characters could exist in real life.

Although this is a group of borderline personality disorder people, which covers a wide gamut, as is explained to us by Dr. Carmen. 

Craig: Right, right. You know, I don’t know. I’ve never been in a mental institution, so I don’t know. How accurate it is. But it seems like a more real, it seems more realistic even in like this, like you said, the staff are friendly, you know, they’re, they’re helpful.

Usually the staff are portrayed as menacing or whatever. Yeah. Um, so I like that too. And the people who knows if whatever they’re portraying is any way realistic, but the acting is good. And there was one of the other people in the group, her name is Miriam, played by Susan Rutten or Raton, who was also in Ghostbusters too.

I don’t even think she’s credited. I looked at her IMDB page and I don’t even think it’s on her list. She’s only in one little tiny scene. It’s in the very beginning when Bill Murray is interviewing people on TV about their encounters with aliens, and she talks about how she. Was taken up on a spaceship, but it looked like the lobby of the Holiday Inn down the street.

And a man approached her and like it’s a hilarious, hilarious scene. And I like her in this movie a lot. And then all of them looked somewhat familiar. There was one older lady that I couldn’t place and I looked her up. I think it’s just because she looked like Blythe Danner and I couldn’t get that outta my head.

But the other one that was really familiar to me was Lana. Mm-hmm. Who’s played by EG Daley. I really like EG Daley. I like her most from PeeWee’s Big adventure. But she’s also very familiar from friends and many other things. She’s cute. She’s this little tiny blonde, squeaky person. She’s sweet and cute in this movie, and sadly not in it very much.

Todd: Well, more than anything, she’s kind of a rock star voice actor. She was, uh, Tommy Pickles and, um, right. Rug Rats and Buttercup from the Powderpuff Girls, and pretty much any movie or TV show that’s, that’s existed. 

Craig: I forget about that because I don’t watch a lot of animation. But that’s, I I did know that You’re right.

She is kind of a rock star 

Todd: if you listen to her voice. She has a bit of that yearly Smith quality to it. It’s a little higher and a little more girlish. 

Craig: Yeah, she, but a little bit of gravel in her voice too. She’s a singer as well. She, uh, strangely enough, she auditioned for the Voice. I thought that was so weird to see EG Daly audition.

I’m like, what are you doing? Like, you’re famous, but whatever. Anyway, so yeah, they have this group and Cynthia is telling them about her cult and. How great it was. Like that was another thing that was funny to me. Like pretty much through the whole movie, she is like, yeah, I would really just like to get out of here and find more people.

Like from Unity Fields. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: Which is, she really never gets over that. 

Todd: It makes sense. I mean she, you know, when she died she thought she was, well, we’ll learn later, but like she was in it a hundred percent. Why? Why would that have changed while she was having her, her coma, I suppose? 

Craig: Well, some, yeah.

Somebody says all the stuff that she says about unity and togetherness and blah, blah, blah. They say it’s bullshit. And Lana, who apparently hasn’t spoken for three weeks, says it’s not bullshit. It’s beautiful. Then we cut to another scene where the doctors are watching this. Now what they are watching is an extreme closeup of Lana’s face.

Todd: Like, who shot that? Who shot 

Craig: this? There were no cameramen in that room. 

Todd: Not that I saw. 

Craig: That was wild. 

Todd: It’s hilarious. But yeah, it’s Abbott and Dr. Carmen and Dr. Barford sitting there chatting. Well, look, Dr. Carmen says to Cynthia when she says she wants to find a place like Unity. He says, there are no places like that anymore.

You know, this is like old stuff. And now you gotta, you gotta start learning how to live in the eighties. But she starts having these visions of her old guru. Yeah, Franklin Harris. And she gets in the elevator with Dr. Carmen. This elevator is kind of known to have problems. I guess it flickers, the lights flicker a lot.

Like, come on, would you really like. Fixed, you know? Oh, right, right. Yeah. 

Craig: The old glitchy elevator, again, you know, hard, you’re 

Todd: the weather that’s packed with people’s, there are more people. This elevator that I’ve been in in a long time. Yeah. It’s full of people. And of course it breaks down and everyone’s like, oh, come on.

They’re banging on the doors and stuff. That is one of my fears is being stuck in a fricking elevator. Oh, it’s horrible. 

Craig: I got stuck in an elevator once, but it was a, uh, freight elevator, so it was open. So like, oh. After we stayed up there, it was just me and my uncle. And like we waited for a while to see if somebody would find us and they didn’t.

And eventually he just climbed out. 

Todd: Right? Right. But she freaks out because as the lights are flickering on and off, she sees one person in there and thinks she sees Harris. And it flickers between Harris, who already has a fairly scarred face. This is the actor, you know, Richard Lynch actually had a, a bad incident where he accidentally set fire to himself while he was on drugs.

And so he actually had a pretty noticeable, his face is a bit scarred, but uh, between that and, uh, his corpse makeup where he’s reaching out at him, and it reminded me a little bit of a creep show too. He, he’s just gross, you know, bloody, and his skin is sloughing off and his eyes are bugging out and 

Craig: Well, and I, I feel like we go back to group for a second.

Gilda, who is another girl in group who’s only purpose. Through the whole movie really is just to say really cryptic shit. Yeah. Like pointed at Cynthia. Very specific cryptic shit, 

Todd: like she knows things somehow. Yeah. 

Craig: You’ll never get away from him. He’ll always find you. We get that. Then we get Cynthia’s flashback to the day of the explosion.

As I suspected he was dousing people with gasoline and he lights the fire. I found this scene really fascinating and really well directed. Yeah. If you. Are in a cult and you believe that doing this is going to bring you together, how would you respond? And I thought that it was just really interesting in the acting like they, the people and and the effects were fine.

I thought they were fantastic 

Todd: actually. 

Craig: Yeah. I mean, as good as they could. As good as they could have been. Like I can’t imagine it didn’t look when the people were being engulfed in flames and you could still kind of see their faces and reactions. I wouldn’t say that it looked real, but I don’t know how you could have made it look any better.

Todd: Right. ‘

Craig: cause you can’t really set people on fire, 

Todd: sadly. 

Craig: Maybe someday. But it, but it was fascinating. Like lovers were clinging to each other and that baby, I don’t think we ever see the baby, but we hear it crying and it’s, you can imagine sitting there based on everybody else that, you know, it’s a family holding to one another eventually, because I’m sure.

Burning is probably the most excruciating thing you can go through. They start screaming out in pain and and whatnot. Then Harris says to her, you failed me, Cynthia. You failed us all. You made us wait while you slept. But the waiting time is over, and she screams and wakes up and tells the doctors all about that day.

But then it becomes, this is again the parallels to nightmare on Elm Street. First of all, you’ve got one of the stars of. Part three in the movie, which also takes place in a mental hospital, which also revolves largely around small group therapy. Now you’ve got a burned figure, stalking. All of these characters and picking them off one by one 

Todd: and, and appearing to her in her dreams.

Craig: Well, yeah. Is it her dream? Like I feel like she is just seeing him all the time, like, yeah, she doesn’t have to be asleep. No, it, it’s, it’s actually kind of interesting that they call this bad dreams because it’s not really dreams at all. 

Todd: That’s a good point. 

Craig: He appears 

Todd: daydreams. I don’t know. Yeah, 

Craig: it, it seems, I mean, it, it seems very much like Freddy because nobody else can see him and he’s just kind of stalking behind people.

Like people will walk past her door and she’ll see this guy Harris, you know, following them. And that’s how she knows they’re next. They’re in trouble and they are. And, and that’s what the movie becomes, and I don’t wanna gloss over it because I think each of the kills are interesting and set up an interesting way.

So I don’t wanna gloss over it, but that’s what it becomes. It just becomes picking people off at this in, in gruesome ways. 

Todd: I mean, it’s kind of mean spirited of this free love guy when you think about it like the, these other people had nothing to do with it, but this is, 

Craig: yeah, 

Todd: Freddy, it’s like he’s getting his punishment on her by killing off the people around her.

Like why didn’t you just take her like he took everybody else and be done with it? Right. I don’t think that this cult leader was ever made to seem like a nice guy. Even when one of the interview footages that we get earlier on, he’s kind of said some menacing things to the interviewer. 

Clip: Life and death are simply different states of being you just cross into the next state.

I could kill you right now, couldn’t I? You could,

Todd: but I won’t. So of course there’s that aspect to it. Like I said, I found us to be a little final destination because she would. See him, you know, she would have these premonitions just before something bad was about to happen. And the fact that, you know, it’s picking off people around her on its way to her.

But anyway, yeah, that’s what it, that’s what it is. And she was expected to die, but she didn’t. And now she’s haunted by fate and to a certain extent, I guess, a bit of guilt in that in a way, she’s responsible for this. And I also thought it was interesting because at first, I mean, there’s a turning point, but at first, like you said, she was all in on the whole situation.

It was a sort of an accident that she survived. It’s not like she got cold feet at the end and tried to run out. The explosion blew her out of the room and into a slightly safer room, and they managed to pull her out. There’s a struggle where she kind of believes this guy, but she’s not quite. Willing to just say, okay, I’m gonna kill myself.

Take me, right? I mean, did did you feel this? I, I don’t 

Craig: know. Like it’s, it’s frankly a little bit confusing because it seemed like she was there very willingly. Even in that opening scene. Some guy says, she doesn’t have to do this, and I don’t know, like, it, it seems like that’s true. She, she’s, she’s there very willingly and, and then when she wakes up, she still wants to get back to it.

Why is she so frightened of him? 

Yeah, 

Craig: I don’t know. Maybe, maybe. ’cause he is supposed to be dead and he is appearing to her. I don’t know. Sure. The first one is, this is one of the only scenes that bothered me. Sweet. Sweet. Lana. EG Daley comes up to Cynthia and says something really sweet, like there’s a hole in her heart.

And, and what Cynthia says about togetherness gives her hope and then Cynthia’s kind of a bitch about it. Yeah. 

Todd: Why? 

Craig: Like this sweet girl comes and is like, oh, I really like you and what you said inspired me. And she’s like, 

Todd: almost literally says that, yeah, 

Craig: I can’t even 

Todd: help myself. Okay. 

Craig: Yeah. And so Lana walks away crying and then Cynthia has a flashback to what I assume is her baptism, which looks more like a traditional baptism 

Todd: in the river.

Craig: But, uh, in the flashback, she, Cynthia, the actress, playing Cynthia turns into. Lana, then Harris holds her under until she drowns, and then they immediately find Lana drowned in the pool. 

Yeah. 

Craig: So again, like that it, that is so nightmare on Elm Street. 

Very, 

Craig: the way that you die in the dream. Isn’t literal, but it can be literally explained in the real world.

It is. I mean the like, I don’t even know if I hadn’t read that. I don’t even know. I mean, I’m kind of dense anyway, but I don’t even know that I would’ve put two and two together. But when you really scrutinize it, it really, really draws heavily from a nightmare on 

Todd: El Street. Yeah, I thought it was pretty.

Bold. It was interesting here because he and her flashback says, I warned you, Cynthia, I warned you someone else would take your place. So this, 

Craig: did he like what? 

Todd: I don’t remember if he did. It was more of a threat. Like, if you don’t combat, things will happen. Or like, go kill yourself and then everything will be fine.

You know? I mean, it’s easy to not go along with that because you don’t know if you’re crazy or not. 

Craig: I didn’t even get that. That’s what he wanted her to do. Like I, I, I didn’t understand. I think so. I thought, well, I, I do think so ultimately, but I didn’t get that at this point. I just felt like he was tormenting her and I, I didn’t really know what he wanted from her.

The very next thing that ha I mean, Gilda says something like, you are defenseless against him. She just pops in to say these things every once in a while. 

Todd: I know. And she was the most ridiculous character. Just every now and then, pops in. Like she’s got this direct line to God. It’s a trope too, right? As always.

That crazy. Or quiet or mysterious person. Sadly, almost always a black person too, who pops in to say something very pointed and direct, like they have this spiritual connection and then she just grabs her by the shoulders, turns around and sits her down to the chair and walks out. I thought that was funny, but uh, yeah.

You’d think the movie would make more of that woman. Gilda, you know? 

Craig: Right. It’s never explained. 

Todd: If you, if you were Cynthia, wouldn’t you be like sitting her in a room going, what? Do you know? You know? Okay. Did you come to you two? Okay, so 

Craig: Todd, now in thinking about it, I had, I hadn’t thought about it ’cause I only watched the movie one time.

In thinking about it, when we find out what’s really going on, couldn’t we just explain this by saying Gilda is just very observant. Oh. Oh, you’re right. I think she just may be very observant. I think Gilda may know what’s going on before. 

Todd: Oh, I never thought of that before. 

Craig: Anyway, the next one is Miriam, who again, I really liked, like they’re picking them off in my favorite order apparently, when she was not in the crazy ward, she was a reporter, but for like, some kind of like, not National Inquirer, but, and she says, you’ve got this great story.

I really wanna tell your story. We need to get out of here. And she’s, I’ll get us both out. And so they’ve got this plan, they’re gonna escape together. Cynthia’s all in. Uh, well, I think this is the 

Todd: turning point I was talking about. ’cause I was waiting for this moment because up to this point Cynthia’s still kind of troubled by everything and I’m not really sure what she is planning to do.

That woman asks her, you have to ask yourself, do you wanna live or do you want to die? And she looks at her and smiles and says, I want to live. And then she gets very, very happy. And I thought, okay, this is supposed to be her, her turning point. But then as she’s, the woman is walking away and she stands out in the hallway and she looks after and she’s smiling, I wasn’t quite sure what was going on.

It almost felt creepy like it did. Does she have something in mind? What is going on here? I don’t know if we were just supposed to believe she got a new lease on life and that’s just, it just came across weird. Or if she had something else in her head when she was, oh 

Craig: God. Again, when you find out what really is happening, you could almost explain her being kind of out of it and loopy and, yeah.

Inconsistent. Ah. She’s being drugged. Yeah, they’re all being drugged. Yeah. I can’t, I can’t keep it in any longer. 

Todd: You, you’ve made a valiant effort, 

Craig: but we don’t know that yet. We don’t know that. I mean, we know that they’re being medicated and, and obviously they’re being medicated. They’re in a mental health ward, but they’re being drugged.

Todd: There’s a character whose sole purpose is just to pop in every now and then and hand them cups full of pills. So that, that’s set up for later. Well, she sees Harris in the elevator with Miriam, so she freaks out and runs and, and can’t get into the elevator ’cause it’s already going down. So she runs down the stairs and trips and falls.

And then she gets to like the sixth floor, I think this was on the eighth floor. She gets to the sixth floor. She sees just Miriam’s bag stuck in the door and as she turns around, you see a quick shot of Maryanne flying out the window and Holy shit. That was rough. I mean she, that was quite a stun. She did, and I mean, we don’t actually see the hit, but we almost might as well have seen the hit because the way it is cut is just, and then blood splatter at glass.

Oh my God. I thought that was effective. You know, come to think of it, of all of the most gross, disgusting ways of people dying that we’ve seen in graphic detail, in horror movies, it almost seems like a person hitting the ground after falling from a height is still something that they just don’t show for whatever reason.

Craig: I don’t know, maybe I made it up, but I felt like I remember this being pretty graphic, but I, 

Todd: it’s, but, but it wasn’t, it, you don’t literally, you see Right. You see her fly out the window, you see her fall toward the ground, and then just at the moment of impact, it cuts to a closeup of the pavement next to her and there’s this big ass blood spray, and then the camera, you know, kind of comes out of the window from above and looks straight down.

And that’s classic too, right? Yeah. At the body down below. But yeah, it’s way bloodier than a lot of movies go with that. 

Craig: This is random, but I would also say that this is one of the few movies where the blood really kind of looks like real blood. Yeah. Like usually it’s super bright red and this, it looks more realistic.

It’s pretty gross. There are some pretty, 

Todd: there’s a lot 

Craig: of it. Yeah. There is a lot of it. There’s one scene where there’s a ridiculous amount of it. But Okay. So then they’re back in group. They keep coming back to group, to group every time somebody dies. Yeah. And it’s so funny, every time the doctor is just like, well, these things happen.

Like Dr. Bear. Yeah. They, they’re getting, or no, I think it’s even the other one. Carson, Carmen. Yeah. He’s like, well, you know, they, she was suicidal, you know, she was brought in here because she tried to kill herself like three times, and Lana had problems. She was depressed, you know? Yeah. Like they, they keep justifying it and they keep doing it even after, like, there’s only a couple of them left.

And, well, I mean, these things happen. Oh gosh. But in group this time, Cynthia says he wants us all with him, whether we like it or not. Okay. Yeah. I mean, if you say so, eh, whatever. But then terribly burned, Harris appears to her and says, don’t make me take another friend. Keep your promise. Join us. Okay. So I suppose.

I should have figured out at that point she should kill herself, and then these bad things would stop happening. But yeah, she doesn’t, and this is when there’s an older couple, I haven’t mentioned them yet, but in the group, I couldn’t figure out if they were married and I couldn’t either. Both of them in the institution or she seemingly was married because there was a picture on her bedside table of her and a man, but I couldn’t tell if the man in the picture was also the man that she was fooling around with.

Todd: Right. It was hard to know. It 

Craig: doesn’t matter. They’re fooling around and because they’re trying to avoid bed checks, they go up to the attic. I, I don’t know. It looks like Freddy’s lair. 

Todd: Yeah, 

Craig: basically. 

Todd: It was so hilarious when they walked into this place and it was just Freddy’s boiler room. 

Craig: Right. It’s like, oh my God.

Todd: Oh. So on the nose 

Craig: they go through a fence to stand. Directly in front of an industrial turbine fan. And I am thinking, I, I wonder where this is going. I know, right? Gee, gee, I wonder. Oh, boy. And at this point, like, Cynthia’s walking around the hallways and even the score sounds like the nightmare in Elm Street score.

Yeah. It’s pretty bad. But they get chopped up in the turbine. 

Todd: Yeah. Like they’re missing. And like, she, she freaks out. She’s looking up in the vents, I guess, you know, uh, where the, the air circulation is down. Well, she hears them calling to her, like Cynthia join us and sees the face of Harris again up there in the vents, the burned out face.

And eventually blood and guts just start fall. Well, a guy who looked just like the dude from Alf Yeah. Goes to investigate. He wasn’t him, was he? But I don’t think so. But he looked like him. I don’t think so. Goes to, you know, fix things. He can’t get into the turbine room ’cause it’s locked from the inside.

So I guess he goes to the room below it and there’s a trap door. Now this was interesting, right? Like he goes to open the trap door and he can’t, the handle is stuck. So he gives up and he sits back and then the handle moves on its own. And I was like, wait a minute. So this really is supernatural. Now you explain that to me.

Now that we know what we know, 

Craig: I don’t remember that at all. You remember that? No, not a bet. It’s 

Todd: in your face. You must have been looking away from the screen. 

Craig: I, I guess so. All I remember is he like, opens a vent or something and finds like chopped up hands and feet and stuff. 

Todd: Yeah, blood and stuff comes falling down.

But at first he can’t open it. Like there’s a closeup of his hand on the thing and it’s like, lock, unlock and, and he’s struggling to open it. He can’t. And he’s like, well that’s weird. And he sits back. Then there is a closeup of it and it slowly turns. 

Craig: Yeah, 

Todd: I don’t remember that at all. And that is when he looks up and he is like, what?

And he, yeah. Opens it up and it’s, I don’t know why that that bit was in there. I don’t know how you can explain that if it turns out things aren’t supernatural. Right. But yeah, all this junk falls down on him like can and viscera and gross stuff. And I suppose because it was the turbine, whatever, it’s all very nebulous anyway.

Fence, right? I mean, I’m sure that thing led to the outside if it even existed at all, but somehow, right, there is blood now being sprayed on everybody because it’s coming through the bed of the ceiling on the whole floor, right? 

Craig: Like it’s ridiculous. I mean, movies do this all the time, but this is gratuitous like a human being doesn’t have that much blood in them.

Not even if you squeezed us out, like right. No, there’s just not gonna be enough blood to shoot out of like. Eight ceiling vents and just like 

Todd: raining, raining, 

Craig: raining, dowsing people covered in blood. I mean, it looks great. Oh yeah. Loved it. Yeah. And then funny Ralph, who has told us that he self harms, he just slams his hand down on a knife all the way through his hand.

Todd: Oh God. That was painful. 

Craig: Oh God. These special 

Todd: effects look really good. They do. I 

Craig: have no idea. I didn’t look to see what the budget was, but it feels like there was money behind this movie. Oh, yeah. And the effects and the soundtrack, 

Todd: oh God, we will get to that. 

Craig: And then he smashes a coffee pot over the guy who’s guarding him, I guess.

His head, and then he runs away and there’s a rock and roll cover of my way. I loved it. I loved the soundtrack. It was fantastic. 

Yeah. 

Craig: And he walks down the hall to Cynthia’s room and takes her down to the basement and starts freaking out. Yeah. Now, I’m not really sure why, but at some point when Dr.

Carmen realizes that they’re missing the floor nurse is like, oh, because of all the commotion that’s been going on, he didn’t get his meds. And he’s like, oh crap. If he doesn’t get his meds, he goes nuts. Okay. So he’s down in the basement, he’s freaking out, he’s throwing stuff around. He disables the elevator, and then he knocks over a shelf.

That spills out a box of scalpels. 

Yeah. 

Craig: I’m not a medical professional, but I would venture to guess that scalpels are not just packed unwrapped in large quantities in cardboard boxes 

Todd: on the shelves. On shelves in basement in this dirty, dusty basement. No, absolutely not. 

Craig: Alright, whatever. He grabs a couple, then Harris, the bad guy, starts talking through him again.

You can’t really. Explain this except for, uh, if it’s just the drugs, I guess. And then he kills himself by taking the scalpels and like stabbing himself in the lower abdomen and pulling them all the way up. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: Oh boy. 

Todd: If it hadn’t already been established, this guy has no problem carving himself and, you know, he had scars all the way down his, his lower ab.

I mean, he was basically tracing the line of scars that he had there. That’s true. And plus he had said something about how whenever I feel bad, I cut a hole and then it all comes out and I feel better. 

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. But again, we find out soon that there’s a reason for that. Mm-hmm. This was a guy that was supposed to be on sedatives and he was actually getting amphetamines.

Yeah. So all of you know his symptoms are exacerbated. I mean, it doesn’t make. Real life sense. No, it 

Todd: doesn’t actually make sense, but, but in the, 

Craig: in, in the logic of the movie, it makes sense. So, okay, so then Cynthia says like, I guess she just resigns herself at this point. Bitch, you should have resigned yourself like four victims ago if you were just gonna, right.

So she’s like, uh. Yeah, I belong with him. Okay. Well they’re all dead now, except for the cryptic girl. She’s still alive for now. 

Yeah. 

Craig: And Dr. Carmen all of a sudden is very invested in Cynthia. 

Todd: Yeah. Like 

Craig: oddly invested in her. 

Todd: He’s really honor, I mean, to the point where there was one point where I thought, I was like, oh, what’s going on here?

There was one moment where he came into her room and he was like, on top of her, I, I knew that, you know, you needed Yeah. Company tonight. And I was like, what? You 

Craig: needed company. He’s, oh God, this is right. This is before crazy. Ralph comes and gets her and takes her down to the basement. But yeah, like he comes, like they’re gonna hang out and have a date.

Like he brings snacks and like he’s washing up in her restroom when Ralph comes and gets it, like, what is happening? Like, she is your patient. What is going on? He tells her he loves her later. Like this is, it’s very weird. 

Yeah. 

Craig: But he’s very invested in her in this at this point, and I don’t know what he’s so concerned about.

It seems like the police are escorting her away, like they’re gonna take her to jail, but they’re not. They’re just taking her to a different floor. But Dr. Carmen is freaking out and he’s like, I’ll release her into police custody so long as I can continue to be your doctor. And Dr. Barford is like, you’re fired.

Okay. 

Todd: This suddenly escalates in weird ways that, that we’re not projected because Burford and Carmen have an argument and Carmen says, 

Clip: the girl needs human contact connection. Isolation’s. The worst place in the world for the alternative is police custody. No. The alternative is a court order. There’s not a judge in the, you want this?

You want her on the edge. You’ve wanted it since the beginning. Alex, I know you’re fond of this girl, but you are out of line. I wanna see your theory played. Alex 

Todd: and I was like, theory, were we told about a theory that 

Craig: he had? Yeah, I had no idea. It just came 

Todd: outta left field and I’m like, whoa, where’s this coming from?

Anyway, I guess this is not the kind of psychiatric institution where you can come and go as you please, where you’re there of your own free will. ’cause it’s interesting, they’ve got these cops who are supposed to be guarding the rooms and keeping them in there, but they’re doing a really piss poor job of it.

This cop and this, I guess, orderly are walking her to her isolation booth or had whatever 

Craig: room basically, right? 

Todd: Yeah. But the scene kind of changes to where they are walking her up across the field to that house where that had burned down that she was in. Uh, by the way, I loved some of the transitions in this movie.

Were just me too. Really nice, me really skillful. This one was really cool. ’cause now we know, okay, now we’re in her head. Like she’s regressing back to that moment. This is where she is. And the transition too from the girl’s locker room into the baptism scene was just amazing. Just some really, really good filmmaking here.

Mm-hmm. So anyway, by, at this point, we’re like 20 minutes from the end and she is in her room having a conversation with Harris in the corner. Right. And the nurse is watching. 

Craig: Yes. And it looks like she’s talking to her. Self. Yeah. Which again, doesn’t make sense, but I suppose ultimately we’re to believe in that moment she is talking to herself.

I guess. 

Craig: I guess the other explanation could be that the person that she’s talking to is just out of frame. That’s possible. But I think at this point, if we are to apply what we know that they are being drugged. She is just hallucinating at this point. I don’t know. 

Todd: She is, what, what I didn’t understand is why the nurse said, who was looking at, I don’t know, eight or nine screens Yeah.

Of all these people in isolation doing all these weird things and all muttering and stuff, why she suddenly felt the need to go in and check on this girl who was also talking to herself. But she does, and she says, what’s going on? And then for some reason Gilda just suddenly walks into her room like, what?

Right. Why did Gilda get to drift into this isolation ward? And the nurse just turns around and rolls her eyes. Like, what? What kind 

Craig: of place did this become? Gilda says something like. Look to your heart, and then she leaves. And then this is interesting in light of knowing what is actually going on. Gilda is in her bed and there’s light shining in from the outside doorway and a shadow falls over her a a shadow of a person and she’s like, I knew you would come, but you won’t get me.

Todd: You’re too late. 

Craig: She drinks the formaldehyde that’s sitting on her bedside table in a bottle labeled formaldehyde to keep him from getting her. 

Todd: She says, I knew you’d come but you’re too late. I told her what to do. You won’t get her and you won’t get me again. I’m thinking, this is what’s guilt to tell her 

Craig: to do.

I don’t. I don’t, I don’t, 

Todd: I don’t care. I don’t know. It’s a lot real fast. Again, we’re thinking that this is really getting supernatural here. You know? At least I am. I’m thinking that this is the Harris figure, that she’s also hallucinating, that she’s known about this entire time. I don’t know. She’s like, I’m gonna kill myself before you kill me.

Craig: The next scene, I was like, what is happening? Dr. Carmen is all pissed off ’cause he is fired. So he goes outside and he throws all of his belongings that he packed up in a box. He throws them all over the parking lot and then he gets in his car and he sees Dr. Barford come out. Like he just intentionally.

Hits him with his car several times, like tries to hit him, misses, backs up, tries to hit him again, hits him, backs up, hits him again against the wall, like smashing him against the wall. 

Todd: It’s gruesome. 

Craig: It’s so gruesome, like blood is splattering all over the windshield. And I was like, what is happening?

Because this person has not been a crazy person that we’ve known up until this Wayland. 

Yes. 

Craig: And and then the car blows up with him in it and then he like wakes up behind the wheel and it was all a dream. Now I enjoyed that scene, but. What are you doing? Like 

Todd: now I know what, why at the moment I thought the movie had gone off the rails.

But you remember he pulls a pill out of his pocket and goes, well, I guess I’ll write a prescription for this later. And he takes it so he kind of drugs himself. Oh, ah-huh. And because he had that vision and he went a little nuts. He was like, what is going on with me? Oh, and that is what motivates him to go visit Mr.

Charles Fleischer. Yeah. The, uh, pharmacist, it took me some thought after the movie was over to put two and two together. There. 

Craig: Okay. That does totally make sense. And I do vaguely remember him taking that pill. That’s right. And, okay, so this, he goes and he pulls all the patient’s meds and he asks the Charles Fleischer, the pharmacist.

He’s like, what are these pills? And he’s like, holy shit. These are like crazy amphetamines. And this is like super, super concentrated THC. And this like, this will make people go nuts. So Carmen is like, oh, I know what’s going on. Barford is drugging them. And he runs away and it, it cracked me up that Fleischer takes the super, super concentrated THC and like sticks it in his pocket, right?

Todd: This, oh God, this scene was so funny, but it made no sense. Okay, so how is this working? He mentions, oh yeah, how does this work? He says, well, you know, I don’t fill the prescriptions. The doctor just comes in here and takes his stuff on his own and sets it all up in these cups. Really? 

Craig: Yeah. That’s not how that works at all.

The 

Todd: head psychiatrist at this hospital comes in every day and fills the prescriptions himself. That’s not how it works. And this guy has never once just glanced over at these pills that he knows by the back of his hand and goes, right. Wait a minute. These are all the opposite of what they should be.

Come on. Also, this nurse who passes them out, don’t make medical professionals look like idiots, right? They know What are these meds? There are checks and balances here. There’s no way that anybody could get away with this. And also it’s a ridiculous premise to be honest, that this doctor is giving them 

Craig: Well, and I don’t even really understand what he, he wanted them all to kill themselves.

I, I don’t, I don’t understand. I don’t 

Todd: get it either. To, to 

Craig: what end, what is he trying to prove? 

Todd: He’s trying to prove some paper he wrote. I mean, that he just kind of like, there’s a, there’s a bit of a line at the end on the big, uh, the big moment up on the roof. I mean, that’s, that’s what we’re coming to, right?

Carmen runs into Cynthia’s room. There’s no Harris. 

Craig: And, and what we are to believe at this point. Harris tells Cynthia to kill herself and leads her up to the roof, but what is revealed is that it’s never been Harris. It’s either been her hallucinations due to her memories or suggestions, or it’s been Dr.

Barford directly speaking to her. She has just envisioned Harris. 

Yeah, 

Craig: which is fine. I just, I don’t, I don’t know, like, it just seemed like kind of a lay ending. It’s kind of dumb. It’s, it’s, it’s fine, but whatever. So they all end up on the roof. And this is, this was so stupid. 

Todd: Oh God. This was dumb. 

Craig: They’re up on the roof and he’s like telling her to jump.

Carmen like shows up right before she jumps, but she does. And we’re to believe that she jumped and died, but she wakes up immediately outside of the cult house and starts walking towards it. But then it cuts back and we realized it was a fake out and Dr. Carmen had grabbed her by the hand. This makes absolutely no sense.

She is dangling off the roof. He is like kind of half on, half off and still she’s like, no, I wanna go. I’ll be with all of them. It’s Unity. She’s like, I don’t have anything here. And he’s like, you have me. I love you. What? What are you talking about? Oh my God. And this whole time I’m thinking, why doesn’t Barrister who is standing right there, just give Carmen a swift kick?

And they would both go off the side. 

Todd: Yeah. It wouldn’t take much. But what does he do instead? He pulls a syringe out of his. This guy who’s been so careful up to this point, 

Uhhuh 

Todd: again, could have just done that instead, pulls a syringe out of his pocket and starts stabbing this guy in the hand, his hand that’s holding onto the roof or whatever.

But then the cops swing up and they go, what’s going on here? And at first, uh, bears Bird tries to make it sound like it was karma who did all this, and he’s been drugging the patients and yada, yada, yada. But, uh, Carmen pulls her up and says, no, it was him. And the doctor Barford grabs one of the cops guns and it looks like he’s gonna shoot himself in the head.

Nope. Faked you out again and aims it at Carmen. But then Cynthia looks at him and sees Harris and she freaks out and she jumps after him and pushes him off the roof. And he falls and he dies. Yeah, very contrived. 

Craig: There’s one like last jump scare where. She kind of sees Harris like pull himself back up over the roof I think or something.

There’s one last jump scare, but then that’s it. It’s just them standing on the roof I think. 

Todd: Well, apparently there was a whole other ending bears for, doesn’t go for the cops gun. He’s not pushed. He jumps from the top of the building on his own to kill himself and then later. Carmine takes Cynthia to see the burned up house where they had their suicide.

For some reason, I guess she needs to go back and visit it to Clo fore closure. And she asks Alex to wait outside and then she goes into the house alone. And then she starts having visions of the cultus and you know her dead friends also from the asylum. And they ask her to join them by killing herself with a dagger that Harris presents to her.

And then he confirms that she is his biological daughter and that’s the reason why he wouldn’t leave her alone. Yeah. And then she seems to accept it and takes the dagger, but instead spins around and cuts and stabs him instead. And they all feel his pain and they all collapse. And this kind of ends her visions and she’s like, finally free.

But then there’s a jump scare as she and Carmen drive off back in the house. A skeleton hand reaches up and grabs the dagger. Yeah, that’s dumb. That would’ve been dumber. This, you know, tries to make it so there’s nothing supernatural about it at the end of the day for some weird dumbass reason that I still can’t wrap my mind around.

The psychiatrist was behind it all the time and wanted them to be pushed to the brink. I don’t know, you know, how do you even do this? Like, so say this plan went through and he publishes his paper or whatever. What do you list as proof? 

Craig: Well, and also congratulations. All your patients died like 

Todd: right under your care.

Craig: It is weird. And then it goes to the credits and the song over the credits is Sweet Child of Mine. 

Todd: I was blown away 

Craig: by Guns N Roses. I was too, I guess the, the song. Had not become a hit yet. 

Yeah. 

Craig: Maybe it hadn’t even been released as a single yet. That was 

it. 

Craig: I, I did read that initially when they did release it as a single, the music video was going to feature scenes from this movie, which was not at all uncommon in those days.

Youngsters, when these big songs would come out with movies, often there would be a tie in, in the music video to the movie. But I guess the Girl I, I, Axel Rose’s girlfriend objected ’cause it, the song was written about her and she didn’t want scenes from a horror movie in it. But yeah, it was kind of wild.

I mean, that’s a great, that’s a classic song. 

Todd: What a buzz kill. 

Craig: This movie is weird, mostly weird to me in that I’d never seen it before because it’s pretty good. Like, yeah, I wouldn’t, I, I wouldn’t say it’s, it’s great or amazing, but if you are a fan of these types of movies, like, I mean, even if you’re just a fan of like Nightmare and Elm Street, I think you’ll really like this.

I enjoyed it. I say the same things over and over again. I love eighties movies. And I always feel like I’ve seen all of them. And then when one comes along that I’ve never seen, and especially one like this where I actually enjoyed it and thought it was pretty good. I think had I seen this around the time that it came out when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, I would’ve really liked it then.

Yeah. I’m glad that we did it ’cause I, I doubt that I would’ve seen it otherwise. And if you haven’t seen it, I a hundred percent. Recommend. It’s fun. 

Todd: It is a fun movie and it’s really great to see all these actors in there, right? They’re really all really good actors, honestly. And the filmmaking is just great.

Yeah. Like you said, I mean, it is a little, I don’t know, could I say it’s a little same samey, I, I did liken it to any number of sort of cable TV thrillers. Yeah. And I think it is kind of like that, except it’s elevated a little bit by the, the talent behind it. Yeah, 

Craig: it’s well made. 

Todd: It’s goofy though. Like the plot is 

Craig: Oh, 

Todd: it is absolutely up to the end.

And I think you could have taken this movie a different direction. It would’ve been even more satisfying. I guess they just had to give a non-super natural reason for the whole thing. ’cause they were trying to make it. Usually that’s seen as more respectable sometimes. But yeah, aside from that, totally worth seeing.

It was 4 million that the movie was made for. It grossed more, more than double that. At the box office, it did a decent amount. The reviews were middling. It was cool seeing Harris Yulin in this as well. You know, he, he had a decent role in here. Yeah. It’s very rare sometimes that we get to do a tribute episode for a person who actually has a decent role in the film that we’re, that he did that was horror.

Well, I don’t know what else to say about the guy. It’s just one of those guys who had a nice run and a seems like a pretty good career. Very respectable. 

Craig: Lived a long life. Yeah. 

Todd: God. I mean, you know, did stage and film and everybody said he was just the, the opposite of the characters he tended to portray on screen.

Right. Just a real nice guy. And then got to live this, this nice sort of famous life without all the trappings of fame involved. I mean, what more can you ask for RIP Harris Yulin? Well, that’s it for this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. Please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts from, and write a review of our show.

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