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Forgotten Films: White Pongo (1945)

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White Pongo: Sometimes you're in the mood for a one-take ape flick.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 148th my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

It’s been a while since we did a good ape film here in the Forgotten Films. (And with this week’s choice, it will still be a while before we have a “good” ape film.) Whenever I am in desperate need of a short, interesting film to review, I go to my collection “Beyond Kong,” which contains eight ape movies. Over the years I think I’ve seen and reviewed four of them, including this one.

White Pongo will never be confused with anything other than a quick B film made cheaply and designed to bring some dollars into the studio coffers. The studio in question being Sigmund Neufeld Productions, headed by Sigmund who produced the film and was the brother to its director, Sam Newfield. Sam is legendary in Hollywood for having turned out somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 pictures in a 30-year career. Turn them out fast and cheap was his mantra.

White Pongo fits that mantra quite well. It has a flimsy story, an expedition trying to find an albino gorilla that might be the missing link, as well as a forced love story/triangle. But the one thing it does have is Ray “Crash” Corrigan in the title role.

Ray Corrigan was one of the best of the Hollywood Gorilla Men who worked in all the B flicks and comedies playing apes and gorillas. Corrigan owned his own suits and worked as a gorilla man early in his career, starting with 1932’s Tarzan the Ape Man with Johnny Weissmuller. Mark Finn could wax poetic for several pages here on the subtleties of Corrigan’s gorilla work. Let’s just say, he was among the best. When he finally retired from stunt work and the gorillas in 1948, he sold his suits to Steve Calvert. His suits lived on longer than he did.

Back to White Pongo. Captured scientist Gunderson (Milton Kibbee, the brother of actor Guy Kibbee) receives help and escapes from a Congo tribe intent on sacrificing him. Their attention is turned when the White Pongo (apparently Pongo is their word for gorilla) kills some of the tribesmen. Gunderson escapes with some scientific journals and manages to make it back to civilization, but in a bad physical state. He is delirious, but the journals interest Sir Harry Bragdon (Gordon Richards). Sir Harry organizes an expedition with his daughter Pamela (Maris Wrixon), his secretary Clive Carswell (Michael Dyne), a friend Baxter (George Lloyd) and guide Hans Krobert (Al Eben). Kobert has a native guide working for him named Mumbo Jumbo (Joel Fluellen). Among the safari workers is Bishop (Richard Fraser). Pamela takes an interest in Bishop, to the annoyance of Carswell, who has his own plans for Pamela. This leads to a confrontation when Pamela, at one of their rest stops, whips out her fanciest cocktail dress and entices Bishop to kiss her. Of course, this happens just as Carswell enters. One quick punch and Carswell is down, but Sir Harry does not like the help associating with his daughter.

There’s a lot of stock footage of animals and rivers. Apparently much of the film was shot at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanical Garden. The plot meanders with a double cross, a kidnapping, murder, mad monkey kung-fu fighting and more. One of those items may have been a hallucination.

Anyway, if you like gorillas, you want to see this. If you don’t, you should probably stay away. It makes less sense than an episode of Jungle Jim. But there is a fight between a black gorilla and the albino. You get to see the girl slung over the shoulder of Corrigan. Ray shambles through the jungle as only he can.

IMDB points out a weird inconsistency that I noted as the film went on. “Pongo” is apparently the native word for Gorilla. But the natives all say “Ponga,” not “Pongo.” Newfield was noted for being a one-take director so you can guess how many retakes he made here.

Anyway, I had fun. My wife stayed in the other room, so I know how much she would have enjoyed this one. Not. You should check it out, but be aware; mileage on gorilla films has been known to vary widely. And objects in the rear view mirror are really a lot closer than you think.

Have a great new year and we will see you in 2016.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Cocktail Hour: Guest bartender Mark Finn serves up the Blood and Thunder

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The Blood and Thunder cocktail and its literary inspiration.

Mark Finn is many things: author, actor, essayist, playwright and renown Robert E. Howard scholar — his Howard biography, Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, was nominated for a World Fantasy award in 2007. And I learned at the 2011 Armadillocon that Mark Finn also is one hell of a bartender. He took his role of toastmaster literally that year, shaking up signature cocktails during one of the room parties while wearing his signature fez.

As such, it only seemed natural for Mark to serve as my first Cocktail Hour guest bartender. Here, he pours us a bacon-spiked cocktail called the Blood and Thunder, inspired by Marly Youman’s recent novel Maze of Blood. Bottoms up!

Conall Weaver is tired. His mother is terminally ill, and he’s the only one who can care for her. His father, Doc Weaver, is one of several doctors living and working in Cross Plains, and he’s always making house call, delivering babies, tending to oil field injuries, and so on. So Conall has spent his adult life, scant as it is, tending to his mother’s needs as tuberculosis eats her away from the inside out. When she’s better, he can relax a bit. He can write. See, Conall Weaver is one of the greatest pulp writers of all time. His stories have appeared in Weird Tales and…oh, wait, you’ve heard this before, huh?

Well, think again. In Marly Youman’s Maze of Blood, we find the somewhat familiar life and times of Texas writer Robert E. Howard borrowed heavily from to prop up Youman’s magical realism novel, a dense and rich prose poem mash-up that reads fast and stays with you afterward.

If you don’t know anything about the life of Robert E. Howard (1906-1936), that’s okay. I wrote a book, and you can check it out here. For those of you who do know something about how one of Texas’ greatest writers spent his days in Cross Plains, this will feel oddly familiar to you. Youmans didn’t so much as borrow from Howard’s life and times as she simply filed off the serial numbers. This may only have been a problem for me, and I acknowledge that fully.

For fans of Conan, Bran Mak Morn, and the rest of Howard’s body of work, you’ll find no new insights here. Instead, you’ll see a man struggling with creative exhaustion, with his mother’s impending death, with rejection, and the grind of day-to-day living in a small Texas town as its sole creative artist. Divorced from Howard’s biography, Youmans has leave to explore some uncomfortable truths about those final days in a way that would be anathema to any die-hard Howard fan. But these are human truths, grounded in sweat and blood.

Youmans’ language is exquisite. She is clearly and obviously a poet, and her skill at choosing simple words to evoke complex pictures is well-served here. And, if I may be so bold, she knows a lot about Howard’s life, as well. I’m not sure if she’s a closet fan or an avid researcher. I’d like to find out what drew her to the subject matter. But Max of Blood is a transformative work, as each even in Conall’s life is given resonance and stories told to him are filtered through his experience and retold on the printed page. That’s the essence of understanding Robert E. Howard, and Marly Youmans gets it.

It was also nice to see her treating the delicate subject matter of Howard’s suicide with respect and gravitas. Her Conall Weaver isn’t so much like Robert E. Howard as the book goes on. Some of the more outlandish myths around Howard serve the fiction better than the man.

In the end, Maze of Blood is a book I would tentatively recommend to less-sensitive Robert E. Howard fans, and unreservedly recommend to lovers of magical realism and stories about writers telling stories. There’s a lot of layers in Maze of Blood, but it’s that complication that makes the novel so rewarding.

In Honor of Maze of Blood, I’m calling this twist on the Old Fashioned a Blood and Thunder. It uses bacon and more bacon. I shouldn’t have to explain to any of you why that’s wonderful.

BLOOD AND THUNDER

2 ounces bacon-infused bourbon (See recipe below)
1/4 ounce Grade B maple syrup
2 dashes Angostura bitters
A twist of orange
Optional cherry for garnish
Optional bacon slice for garnish

In a shaker, add 2 ounces bacon-infused bourbon, maple syrup, and bitters with ice. Shake for 30 seconds. Strain into a glass filled with ice. Squeeze the orange for a touch of acid, and garnish with the cherry and bacon.

BACON-INFUSED BOURBON

4 slices of bacon, thick cut (I use Wright’s Applewood Smoked Bacon)
1 bottle of bourbon (common wisdom says buy a cheap bottle, like Four Roses, but I think a Texas brand is appropriate for this. Pick Something you like.

Cook your bacon in a skillet and reserve rendered fat. When bacon fat has cooled a bit, pour off the fan into a non-porous container, like a glass bowl. Pour the whole bottle of bourbon into a non-porous container. Don’t worry if you have some bits of bacon in there. You can even add a cooked piece of bacon to this mix. Cover it with plastic wrap and let it hang out overnight at room temperature, at least 6 hours. Put the bowl in the freezer for at least 24 hours. I like 72 the best. Very bacon-y. Strain the fat off of the bourbon and run the bourbon through some cheesecloth to catch the globs and bits. When the bourbon is clean and free of debris, put it back in the bottle and be sure to label it with a “B” for bacon on the cap, or you will get a surprise if you’re not careful!

 

 

Moment of Wonder: Apollo Animation

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Last week, the Interwebs were abuzz with news on the bursting-fat Flickr archive of images from NASA’s 11 Apollo missions. Turns out an independent group called the Project Apollo Archive, rather than the feds, spent the past 15 years prepping the photos for public consumption.

The sheer volume of images in the archive requires time and deep digging to fully enjoy. Lucky for us, filmmakers have already started doing that hard work. They’re using the pics as raw material for stop-motion animations, such as this one from Vimeo user harrisonicus, which really bring the wonder to life. Enjoy:

Apollo Missions from harrisonicus on Vimeo.

Cocktail Hour: The Spacer (Inspired by Samuel Delaney’s “Aye, and Gomorrah…”)

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The Spacer blends ingredients that riff on the exoticism of the other in "Aye, and Gomorrah..."

When I first read Samuel Delaney’s “Aye, and Gomorrah…” as a teenager, I had no idea what to make of it.

Most of the sf I’d read up to that point was about big ideas, big action and big conflict. People saving or destroying planets, besting alien adversaries and exploring new dimensions. And here was a short story deemed important enough to win the 1967 Nebula award that was simply about a woman propositioning the protagonist for sex — or something like sex.

What was I missing? Turned out, a lot.

In Delaney’s story, interstellar travelers — dubbed “Spacers” — are neutered before puberty to null the effects of the radiation they encounter during their travels. They grow into sterile, androgynous adults whose original sex is the subject of guessing games. Enter the “frelks,” a group of fetishists aroused by the Spacers, primarily it’s suggested, because the sexless space travelers are unattainable.

The story begins with a group of Spacers on a Kerouac-esque road trip that whisks them from France to Mexico to Texas to Turkey, drawing gawks from the populace along the way. We learn the Spacers are hustling for frelks, seeking compensation for their desirable androgyny and sterility. We also get the sense that while they’re superficially respected by Earth people, they’re still lonely outsiders.

About midway through the story, the unnamed Spacer protagonist ends up making eye contact with a pretty Turkish student, who invites him to her apartment. The rest of the story plays out largely in dialogue as they spar over the Turkish woman’s interest in Spacers and she tries to convince her pickup to stay, even though she can’t come up with any lire to make it worthwhile.

Delaney, who is gay, points out the story was “written three years before Stonewall and half a dozen years before anyone was aware there might even be a disease like AIDS.” It’s clearly a commentary on what it means to be a sexual other, and it makes the powerful argument that sexuality is not a choice — an idea not widely accepted 50 years ago.

‘“You don’t choose your perversions,”‘ the Turkish student tells the Spacer. ‘”You have no perversions at all. You’refree of the whole business. I love you for that, Spacer. My love starts with the fear of love. Isn’t that beautiful? A pervert substitutes something unattainable for ‘normal’ love: the homosexual, a mirror, the fetishist, a shoe or a watch or a girdle.”’

The story works in part on the strength of the prose, which whips along with a  playful rhythm. Delaney doesn’t beat us over the head with long-winded explanations about who the Spacers or frelks are and how this future society works. We pick up those details gradually, through dialogue and action, as the story unfolds.

Even though its powerful message about sexuality not being a choice may not be as revelatory today (for many of us, anyway), “Aye, and Gomorrah…” has additional resonance because it recognizes that human sexuality evolves with technological change. Who’d have thunk back in 1966, for example, that people would be so willing to commit mutual masturbation in front of computer screens halfway around the globe? And consider the number of fetishes — from latex clothing to extreme body modifications — that are the outgrowth of technological advances.

I don’t know about you, but all that analysis has left me with a powerful thirst. May I present this week’s cocktail, the Spacer?

The Spacer riffs on the fetishized outsiders of “Aye, and Gomorrah” by giving exotic flavors a boozy boost. The ingredients also give a nod to the story’s Turkish, Mexican and Texan settings. The tequila and tamarindo are a perfect border combination, sweetened by the pineapple juice, and the mint spins us halfway around the world to Istanbul’s Flower Passage.

THE SPACER

2 oz. reposado tequila
2 oz. fresh pineapple juice
2 oz. or more of chilled tamarindo (tamarind soda available at most Latin American markets)
Fresh mint leaves
1/2 tsp sugar

Muddle six to eight mint leaves with the sugar in the bottom of a cocktail glass. Fill the glass with ice and pour in the tequila and pineapple juice. Still until condensation appears on the outside of the glass and top with the tamarindo. Garnish with another sprig of fresh mint.

 

FORGOTTEN BOOK: Academia Waltz and Other Profound Transgressions by Berke Breathed (2015)

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By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 158th in my series of Forgotten Books.

Berke Breathed is one of my favorite cartoonists. I discovered Bloom County in the early 1980’s and followed the exploits of Steve Dallas, Milo, Opus, Bill the Cat and the county’s other denizens. It joined Doonesbury, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbs, and Peanuts among my daily favorites. I read whatever was on the comics page, be it Mandrake, Brenda Starr, Dick Tracy, Mary Worth, Apartment 3-G, or Bizarro. I have no taste. I like comics.

But Bloom County was special. Recently IDW Publishing went to the back-breaking depths to provide all of the Bloom County, Outland and Opus strips (daily when they were around and Sunday) in a series of hardcover matched volumes. This was wonderful! Many daily strips were a little too topical for his publisher when the collections were being published so if I did not see that particular daily strip, I had missed them. Not so any more.

But Bloom County did not spring fully formed from Breathed’s mind. Like me, Breathed attended the University of Texas (imagine The Eyes of Texas in the background, burnt orange, and a Hook’em Horns held high). I bleed burnt orange. The six years I spent there were among the best in my life. I made friends I still see today and managed to form something approaching a human being from the lump of geeky clay that walked onto that campus 45 years ago.

Like Garry Trudeau at Yale before him, Breathed did a daily cartoon strip The Academia Waltz for the campus paper, The Daily Texan. I did not see these, as I was gone by the time he started publishing there and in the local newspaper the Austin American Statesman. While still at the University, Breathed self-published two volumes of his work, The Academia Waltz and The Academia Waltz Bowing Out. They had very small print runs and were highly coveted and hoarded by their owners. I had seen both and read them. In 35 years, I had found exactly one (1!) copy of the second book for sale at an affordable price and none of the first.

I owned all the other IDW Breathed publications (the five volumes of Bloom County, the Outland volume and the Opus volume). So when Academia Waltz and Other Profound Disasters was offered, my finger twitched and hit the Buy Now button.

These are certainly the fledgling efforts of a young cartoonist reacting to life around him. They center around some campus politics and sports (Earl Campbell is a featured sacred cow being barbecued). But you can see where things begin to develop. Steve Dallas is a Texas frat boy who shows up frequently as does his girlfriend Kitzi. Wheelchair bound Saigon John is a vet attending campus who is able to attract some girls and provide an alternative point of view.

The entire contents of both books are reprinted here. But that’s not much content. So Breathed opened up his files of original art and allowed them to be published. More than 180 pages of cartoons, some never before reprinted show up here. You see the original versions of some of the pieces reprinted in the two books and lots more. Some are Academia Waltz cartoons; others are political pieces from the regular paper.

I was in heaven. As I write this, I still am. I’m going upstairs later and pull out the other books and dip heavily into them. I’ll be looking at the anxiety closet or perhaps going into the political ones, skewering candidates of either party. Some things never change. Somewhere I have a Bill the Cat bumper sticker that may need to emerge from hibernation.

And I can’t go on about this without commenting that Bloom County has returned as Bloom County 2015. The wit and edge is still there. And it remains a daily fix.

At $39.99 the book might not be for everyone but I checked for The Academia Waltz original editions online before starting this. The cheapest single volume was about $250. The prices ranged from there up to four figures. Way too rich for my blood with most in the $350 and $400 range. I’ll stick with my $40 reprint, thank you very much.

Breathed does some stuff on Facebook and has some strips for sale these days which I may investigate as well as a nice Opus and Bill political poster. But you can check those out for yourself.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Films: Coherence (2013)

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Coherence offers some interesting twists, but its characters are yuppie scum.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 132nd in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

This week I back with a new review of a Forgotten Film, after a wild week of trivia contests and the like. If you check yesterday’s post here on the blog you’ll find my long report on the event. My team conquered the world and became the first National Trivia League champion, defeating more than 200 teams from 91 different cities around the country.

Anyway, this Labor Day weekend I was invited to a friend’s home with some other friends to watch some science fiction and fantasy films. We saw five films during the day and Coherence indicates that this film came out in 2013. I missed it totally at that time, not even hearing the name or anything about it. IMDB shows that it only took in $68,000 in its domestic release.

The film deals with a single evening in the life of eight people, four couples, some of whom know each other, though no one really appears to know everyone. Four men, four women of various ages. There is a comet passing close to Earth overhead. One of the guest, Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) has a brother (not shown) who is an astronomer or some sort of scientist.

Weird things start to happen. Cell phone screens break for Em (Emily Foxler) and Hugh. There are tensions among the group. Mike (Nicholas Brendon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is an actor from the old Roswell TV series (not really) but he can’t find work. Em’s old boyfriend Kevin (Maury Sterling) shows up with Laurie (Lauren Maher), whom none of the ladies like.

Things start slowly (really slowly, enough that I made some comment about My Dinner With Kahoutek in relation to the film) and then the lights go out. Candles get lit, women scream, glowsticks are found, and hysteria starts to raise its ugly head. Hugh looks outside and sees that there is a house up about two blocks that has lights on. He wants to call his brother and let him know what is going on. Hugh and Amir (Alex Manugian) go to check things out. They are gone for a while.

When they return, Hugh has a cut on his head and Amir has a locked box. Hugh claims not to have seen anything at the house and Amir says Hugh told him to take the box though Hugh denies this. Once the cut is treated, the box is open. Inside are photos of all eight dinner guests, including one of Amir that could only have been taken that evening. There are numbers written on the back of the photos in handwriting that Em recognizes as her own. Hugh then reveals that he saw something at the other house. He saw the eight of them inside.

Hugh’s wife Beth (Elizabeth Gracen) remembers that Hugh’s brother left a book when he visited the other day and she has it in their car outside. It’s an odd physics book and they open it at random and start talking about coherence and decoherence in a quantum physics sort of way. There are discussions of Shroedinger’s cat and the quandary it posed.

From here the film takes a very dark turn. Mike is concerned that the other him must be drinking and he is not a nice person when he is drinking. He wants to make a pre-emptive strike to prevent the other him from murdering him. That’s about as sane as it gets the rest of the way. A group visits the other house, which is of course a doppelganger of the house they are in. They see two sets of themselves, each carrying different color glowsticks.

Overall, this was an interesting film. Unfortunately, the first act is where we might get to know and like each of the eight guests. They are all annoying yuppy puppies and I had no sympathy for any of them. I kept hoping they would all die, several of them sooner than others, but I wanted them all dead. You might like them better.

The whole first third of the film just drug, hence the Dinner with Kahoutek reference. There is a wonderful Philip K. Dick paranoia through the last third of the film as it becomes apparent that the dinner guests are not always the same ones that started the evening earlier. People don’t remember significant things or identifying objects and numbers.

Overall, I think I’m glad I saw it. It ended up being much better than the final film of the evening, Under the Skin, which I found hopelessly muddled and making no sense whatsoever. But I am quite sure I will never watch this one again. And, as always, you may get better mileage than I did. I hope so.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

How to conquer the trivia world

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Scott and his team display the spoils of victory.

By Scott A. Cupp

Since Bill Crider asked so nicely, I thought I would give a detailed account of the Challenge Entertainment National Trivia Finals that I competed in on Saturday, August 29. I play trivia at least once a week, sometimes two or three times. There is the occasional week with 4. It is a team event. You grab a group and compete together. In the four years I have been competing I have had several teams. Initially I walked into a bar and found out that a trivia contest happened on Monday nights. I went back and competed by myself (our favorite trivia jockey would say I was playing with myself in public). I finished 3rd and won $10 in bar money.

The format is simple. There are 3 rounds of 3 questions in a variety of subjects, like Sports, Literature, History, and Vocabulary. There are three point values per round – 6, 4, and 2. The team decides what point value they want to assign to a question, based on their knowledge If they know the question answer, they might say it was worth 6 points. If they have no real clue, it might be their 2 point question. You have to use all three values each round, so each round is worth 12 points. After the three rounds, there is a half time question, in which you have to provide four answers to a question with each answer worth three points. For example, the question might be “Name four of the five Marx Brothers?” They would answer Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and then choose between Zeppo and the lesser known Gummo. At the half, their score could be as much as 48 points. Frequently it is not, because the questions can be hard, obscure, or not even in your wheelhouse. For example, if a Music question deals with current Pop music, chances are very good that I will have absolutely no idea, since current pop music sucks big time.

More than 200 teams ready to compete.

For the second half, there are three more rounds of three questions, but this time they are worth 9, 7, and 5 points (or 21 points per round). Questions get a little harder but, if you are sharp, you can make up some ground on the other teams. After Round Six, the scores are updated. The potential at this point is 111 points. Then comes the Final Question. This one can be worth up to 20 points, but there is a kicker. If it is not absolutely correct, the team will lose whatever points they bet. A perfect game has a value of 131 points. Pretty simple.

Sandi, my longsuffering wife, decided that free food and drinks sounded good to her and we began to be regulars. Our team name was “Sandi, Queen of the Universe and Her Pet Frog”. We were OK as a team since our team was me and a self appointed cheerleader. Then, we found out about the tournaments. There was a city championship, held twice a year. And you could have 5 people on your team. I put the call out and soon I had a team with my nephew Wes Hartman, his co-worker Doug Dlin, my horror writer/musician friend Sanford Allen, and Wes’ friend Shawn Lauderdale. We all had some specialized knowledge and we became a pretty good team.  We called ourselves the Boxcar Frogs, an amalgam of my team name with Sandi and Sanford’s band, Boxcar Satan.

We went to the second City Championship held. Going into the Final question we were in Fourth or Fifth place (I forget – it’s been a while). We got the final right and leapfrogged into Second Place and won some money and gift cards. The next time, we won the City Championship and then won it again. We were insufferable.

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Cocktail Hour: In honor of Wes Craven, the Deadly Friend

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This week's drink toasts one of Wes Craven's least successful, but still fun, flicks.

Last weekend, the horror world lost one of its heavyweights: director Wes Craven.

Craven gifted us with controversial early films such as Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes that pushed the limits on bloodshed and brutality. Later in his career, he turned out clever, self-aware and lucrative mainstream horror such as Nightmare on Elm Street, The Serpent and the Rainbow and Scream.

Of course, Craven also made some less successful films during his career. For my money, one of the most enjoyable of that bunch is Deadly Friend, his 1986 riff on the Frankenstein tale.

Teen genius Paul (Matthew Laborteaux) moves into a new town, along with a robot of his creation named Bee Bee. While Bee Bee is an amazing engineering feat, his artificial intelligence has a dark (some might say psychotic) side. It doesn’t take Paul long to fall hard for Samantha (Kristy Swanson), the wholesome girl next door. Problem is Samantha’s the victim of an abusive father, and during an argument, dear old dad pushes her down the stairs.

Samantha lapses into a coma after the fall, and Paul implants Bee Bee’s AI components into the girl’s brain to bring her back. Like you do.

Of course, reanimated Samantha — now buffed with a robot’s strength and walking in a stiff and Karloff-like gait — also inherits Bee Bee’s dark side. To Paul’s horror, she begins killing off all the townsfolk who treated her badly.

Robot Samantha delivers the game-winning shot.

The movie’s primary flaw is that it can’t decide whether it wants to be a slightly dark sci-fi kid’s movie or a gory terror flick. Reportedly, that’s the result of a conflict between Craven, who wanted to make a lighter PG-rated film, and the studio, eager to capitalize on the recent success of Nightmare on Elm Street.

Despite the confusion, Craven’s wit and dark humor shine through. The gore — including the film’s money shot: a beheading by basketball — is too campy to take seriously, and the director drops in some clever nods to reward attentive viewers. Look for the scene where one of Samantha’s victims dies as her television plays The Bad Seed, a movie about a little girl with a taste for homicide.

Is Deadly Friend a Craven masterpiece? Not by a long shot, but it’s a fun, largely forgotten slice of ’80s horror that (mostly) works despite the changes the studio forced on its creator.

It’s also the inspiration for this week’s cocktail, the Deadly Friend.

This drink is a spin on the similarly named Old Pal, a classic cocktail of rye, dry vermouth and the bitter, deep red Italian digestif Campari. I substituted another bitter Italian aperitif, Cynar, which is less sweet and hits a different array of aromatic notes. Watching Deadly Friend may leave you wanting something that feels less like kid’s stuff, and this cocktail’s bitter, savory qualities definitely satisfy adult tastes.

DEADLY FRIEND

1 oz. rye whiskey
1 oz. dry vermouth
1 oz. Cynar

Stir all three ingredients in an ice-filled glass until thoroughly chilled and pour into a cocktail or coupe glass. Optionally, serve garnished with a sliver of orange peel.