Deadtime Stories (1986) -*

     We all know how it goes with anthology movies, right? Even the best of them have a clear standout segment, a segment that’s kind of limp, and a middle zone which the remaining segments fill up somehow or other. The questions are, (1) how good is the top end, (2) how bad is the bottom end, and (3) how well does the order of the segments cover for their variable quality? Deadtime Stories has answers to all those questions that I can’t recall seeing in any other anthology— which is, alas, not at all to the film’s advantage. For one thing, the kind-of-limp segment is the standout, establishing a standard of forgivable almost-adequacy that none of the others ever approach. The dud segment is dire indeed, and furthermore wastes the closest thing Deadtime Stories has to a good idea. And worst of all, the segments are arranged within the framing story so that the film becomes more and more punishingly terrible as it wears on.

     Brian (Brian De Persia) can’t get to sleep. He’s convinced that there’s a monster lurking in his bedroom, just waiting for him to nod off before it strikes. Worse yet, his parents are out for the night, leaving him in the decidedly indifferent care of his ne’er-do-well uncle, Mike (Michael Mesmer). Not temperamentally equipped for babysitting, Uncle Mike grows ever more annoyed with Brian’s persistent, noisy restlessness until the boy suggests that he tell him a story. That always seems to do the trick when Mom does it. Ultimately, Brian manages to get three bedtime stories out of his increasingly exasperated uncle, the first of which goes something like this…

     Once upon a time, there lived a boy named Peter (Scott Valentine, of My Demon Lover and To Sleep with a Vampire), whose parents were so grindingly poor that they eventually had to sell him into slavery to make ends meet. Peter was bought by a pair of reclusive spinsters called Hanagohl (Phyllis Craig) and Florinda (Anne Redfern). The old gals were witches, which accounts for their aloofness from society, and their other sister, Magoga (eventually to be played by Lisa Cain), was an even more formidable practitioner of the Black Arts when she was alive. Obviously being bought by witches could go very badly for a boy, but Peter was lucky insofar as Hanagohl and Florinda really were just looking for somebody younger than themselves to handle the more strenuous hovelhold chores. He grew to the threshold of manhood at their hermitage in the woods without once being stuffed into an oven or turned into a frog. One evening, however, the hags entrusted Peter with a task far more spiritually onerous than wood-chopping or fence-mending. A celestial configuration would soon occur under which it would be possible to conjure Magoga back to life, but strange herbs and chickens’ feet aren’t enough for that kind of magic. The resurrection spell called for both the blood of a virgin and the hand of a holyman, and it fell to Peter to procure the vital ingredients. Getting the holyman’s hand wasn’t so bad, really, because everyone knew that the local parson (Casper Roos) was a skirt-chasing pig, but when the time came to get the virgin (Kathy Fleig), Peter became determined not to let the sacrifice reach fruition. How to outmaneuver two witches, though, when you’re not but 30% sharper than a sack of wet mice…?

     Uncle Mike’s second tale is a riff on “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which Red is a nubile high school junior called Rachel (Nicole Picard), and the Big, Bad Wolf is Willie the hophead lycanthrope (Matt Miller, of Battle for the Lost Planet and The Mutilator). Their paths first cross at the pharmacy where Rachel is supposed to pick up a prescription for her grandmother (Fran Lopate, from Is There Sex After Death?), and where Willie is hoping to score some ludes to knock him out before tonight’s transformation comes over him. The closest thing to a do-gooding woodsman in Mike’s interpretation of the old tale is Rachel’s schmuck boyfriend, Greg (Michael Berlinger), with whom she wastes most of the afternoon and early evening having extremely disappointing sex in a tool shed at the park where he works as a groundskeeper. Willie discovers while the couple are thus occupied that the clerk at the drugstore (Benefit of the Doubt’s John Bachelder) mixed up his pills with Rachel’s grandma’s— and since his transaction wasn’t strictly legal in the first place, there’s nothing else for it but to head to the address on the prescription ticket, and to explain about the snafu in as innocent-sounding a manner as he can contrive. Naturally a werewolf’s patience and tact diminish sharply as moonrise approaches, and we all know what Little Red Riding Hood is canonically supposed to find waiting for her at Grandma’s house…

     Finally, Uncle Mike offers up the tale of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”— or in this case, Goldi Lox (Cathryn De Prume) and the three Baers. Goldi is a psychokinetic psycho, while Papa (Kevin Hannon) and Baby (Timothy Rule) Baer are deranged father-and-son robbers whose heists always come with a needlessly high body count. Mama Baer (Melissa Leo, of The Alphabet Killer and Red State), the real brains of the outfit, busts her menfolk out of the lunatic asylum, and hightails it to the abandoned house where they all used to live before the authorities caught up with them. They find Goldi already squatting the place, but the two sides’ respective insanities prove compatible, leading to a much more amicable settlement than in the nursery tale. No, this time the conflict is between the maniacs and the law, the latter represented by Lieutenant Jack B. Nimble (Robert Trimboli) and Captain Jack B. Quick (Harvey Pierce), the respective leaders of the Baer and Lox investigations. Can two trigger-happy morons hope to contend with the double threat of Dollar Tree Ma Barker and Borscht Belt Carrie White? And can the framing story end any other way than with the revelation that some beds really do have monsters living under them?

     Deadtime Stories wasn’t supposed to be like this. Hell, it wasn’t even supposed to be Deadtime Stories, really! When director/co-writer Jeffrey Delman first set to work on the film way back in 1982, it was going to be a feature-length version of the “Peter and the Witches” segment. It’s unclear to me how much of that iteration of the project was actually shot, or indeed whether any of the footage intended for it ended up in the picture that was ultimately released. Nor do I know for certain when or why Delman switched tracks to an anthology format. What I can say for certain is that it took about two years for Freaky Fairy Tales (as Deadtime Stories was called at that point) to get rolling again, and then two more years before it was hammered into releasable shape. That long and interrupted gestation goes some way toward explaining, I think, the otherwise baffling tonal and conceptual shift from relatively straight-faced period piece based on an original concept in fairy-tale style to broadly zany modern-day parodies of actual folk and fairy tales. The latter seems very much like what you’d come up with if you wanted to get 90 usable minutes in the can to salvage an old project, and found yourself as pressed for ideas on the theme of “bedtime stories” as Uncle Mike.

     The rest of this movie’s defects start to make sense, meanwhile, when you know about Delman’s sole paying gig as a screenwriter prior to Deadtime Stories. Stuck on You! billed itself as “the first raunchy comedy for lovers of all ages,” and while I haven’t actually seen it, the fact that it was directed in partnership between ex-pornographer Michael Herz and Troma mastermind Lloyd Kaufman gives me a pretty good idea of what I’ll be getting myself into if I do ever take it on. All the elements of Deadtime Stories that postdate “Peter and the Witches” reveal exactly the sense of humor that you’d expect from a guy who once wrote a Troma sex farce. It’s cruel and dark (which is fine by me in and of itself), but also totally lacking in wit or subtlety (which is not). The nearest approach to a decent gag occurs during the opening credits, when the hand turning the pages of the storybook inscribed with the names of the cast and crew gets wrestled out of the way by an ogre’s talon, which is wrestled out of the way in turn by the next in a succession of increasingly gnarly monster appendages. Otherwise, Deadtime Stories is the kind of movie in which the exercise of psionic powers is accompanied by cartoon booping noises, in which stilted declamation worthy of a children’s talent show stage is mistaken for comic delivery, and in which perpetually squabbling imbecile cops are named Jack B. Nimble and Jack B. Quick. Even the film’s one somewhat redeeming feature is reminiscent of early Troma in its own way, insofar as Deadtime Stories does offer some genuinely pretty impressive bargain-basement gore and monster effects. Nothing in, say, John Carl Buechler’s league, mind you, but SFX artisan Bryant Tausek still punches well above his weight here. (Tausek went on to join the gore-and-monsters team for Evil Dead II, so I’m plainly not the only one to see considerable merit in his work.) Still, though, Deadtime Stories is a real slog. Rarely have 93 minutes felt so agonizingly long.

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