HALLOWEEN HORRORFEST 2020: The Seduction (1982)

Our sponsor today is artist and author M. Lopes da Silva! Her new book is a perfect fit for the Halloween Horrorfest, as it involves a woman who becomes a hook-using vigilante to avenge her sister’s murder and take down a serial killer who’s targeting sex workers.  Buy Hooker here and check out other novels in the Rewind or Die series of grindhouse inspired novels!

Ms. Lopes da Silva represents Planned Parenthood, which needs your help more than ever in this, The Time of The Zealots.

She has chosen a film I haven’t thought about in decades, namely the stalker thriller directed by David Schmoeller as his follow-up to Tourist Trap, The Seduction.  It stars Morgan Fairchild, who I used to seriously crush on when I was a teenager.

Jamie Douglas (Fairchild) is a successful television anchorwoman with a great house in the Hills, a great boyfriend, a sassy best friend (Colleen Camp, who seems to have walked out of a 1940‘s screwball comedy)...and a stalker in Derek Stanford (Andrew Stevens trying to will his own eyes to launch from their sockets), a photographer who lives next door and apparently has all the super-powers of a movie slasher of the decade in his quest to get Jamie to be his love pocket.  So while her boyfriend (Michael Sarrazin) keeps trying to get his cop friend (Vince Edwards) to do something, Derek follows Jamie literally everywhere until he crosses the line and Jamie goes on the offensive.

Like The Unborn, this is a mess. Unlike yesterday’s film, this knows what it wants to be.  It’s what would be called an ‘erotic thriller’ if it was made ten years later, its low budget probably dictating its destiny as a Cinemax Exclusive.  But there are so many flaws in it--characters that disappear, plot points that are forgotten, backstories hinted at but not explored--that it falls to pieces on the floor.  And given that some of the flaws are more attractive than what is paying off, it’s a very annoying watch.  For example, we get some indication that we’ll get into Derek’s backstory to the point where I thought we might contrast him and Jamie...but nope, Derek’s just there to be creepy.  There is a serial killer running around Los Angeles that is name checked in the early stages of the first act, brought up during the late stages of the second, that led to believe he/she might be connected to Derek, but nope.  The subplot with the cop friend seems to take an uncanny Cape Fear-like turn when said cop friend says he hired an ex-con to warn Derek away, but it’s never mentioned again.  And the best part of the film, namely the sassy best friend, literally disappears about midway through to the point that Colleen Camp literally phones in a scene during the third act to remind us that Schmoeller hasn’t forgotten her.

Another part of the problem with the film is its two leads.  There was a time when ‘television acting’ was different from ‘movie acting,’ and we’re dealing with a film where Morgan Fairchild and Andrew Stevens are good-to-great television actors trying to scale up to being movie actors and failing utterly.  Fairchild is lovely to look at but she seems incapable of pivoting on her emotions quickly enough to be effective; there are moments where she is emoting which fall flat, in particular a moment where she breaks down during the evening news. But at least Fairchild gets to attempt some range.  Stevens apparently was just told to stare intently throughout the film, no matter if he’s presenting Fairchild with a present, lurking around her home or taking pictures of her skinny dipping, and he is comical.

I was also very annoyed with the way Stevens has what seems to be supernatural abilities.  There is nowhere our girl Jamie can go that Derek can’t get into, no information he doesn’t know so that if, let’s say, he wants to try and talk Sassy Colleen Camp into talking Jamie into have dinner with him, he knows exactly which Moulon-Rouge-y photo shoot she’s at.   There are a couple of times where Derek is asked how he got where he’s been hanging out, and he waves it all away with ‘It wasn’t that hard,’ and I have to disagree--it is pretty hard to get onto a television studio floor and plant a threatening message on the teleprompter.  I was beginning to think this television station had no security until Sarrazin mentions he talked to the security chief and I called out ‘He hasn’t been fired for this?’

You know, maybe I could forgive a lot of this if Schmoeller indicated he was aware of how silly and tacky it is....but with its lush Lalo Schifrin score and artsy photography, it seems like he was all too serious about this thing.  Add in that it’s an hour and three quarters long when it could be comfortably fit into eighty--especially given how accelerated the first act is--and it’s something I could not recommend.  Yes, it’s probably the most 80‘s thing you will ever see (Hell, its title sequence features hot pink cursive credits over a skinny-dipping Fairchild gliding through blue shimmering water while some soppy love song plays) but it’s not fun nor sleazy.  It’s just...there.

There’s no sponsor tomorrow, so the Randomizer has presented me with 1997‘s Cure, a Japanese thriller about a plague of murders...except the murderers are found next to the body with no recollection of killing their victims and carving an ‘X’ into their body.

There are Three Sponsorship Slots Left in the Halloween Horrorfest this year.  To claim one, do one of four things:

1) You can become a Domicile of Dread Patreon at any level.  Patreons always get a free slot, as well as advance access to podcasts and other goodies!

2) You can buy me a coffee at Ko-Fi.  Suggested donation is $3

3) You can make a donation to Black Lives Matter.  Suggested donation is $10.  Please forward your receipt to me as proof.

4) You can choose to make a donation to the charity chosen by a sponsor on his/her/their day. Like with the third possibility, please forward me proof of donation.

As with last year, if I end up with more sponsors than there are days in October, I will go into Horrorfest Overtime, which means Halloween goes into November for me--and you!