Terror in the Aisles

Terror in the Aisles is a 1984 anthology film starring Donald Pleasance and Nancy Allen narrating a bunch (and I mean a bunch) of horror movie clips from the Seventies and Eighties. or, mostly so. There's a wrap-around segment of them in a theater with a curiously multicultural bunch of moviegoers who are portrayed, weirdly enough, as obnoxious and unlikable. (What were the producers trying to say there?)

There is also a sort of white punk or biker type that looks like G.G. Allin in the Nineteen-Eighties, with a leather jacket, skull t-shirt, and Aviator sunglasses. He's an "undesirable" as portrayed by this film, due to his rebellious dress, and the rest of the audience is also so-portrayed. I suppose this was meant for comic effect, but it does strike one as odd for a film trying to "gain your trust."

The narration, while expertly done by Pleasance and Allen, is blatherskite, and you won't really remember any of it except that it introduced various segment blocks of clips all centered around the same theme (demonic possession sex and stalking, alien terrors, and so on). Pleasance, when describing or narrating over the infamous "bone room" scene in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), mispronounces the name Ed Gein as "Ed GINE", as if it rhymed with "fine." For some reason, the narration of Nancy Allen puts me in the mind of the original "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" television program, that starred the incredible Jack Palance. At times, Palance's daughter, Holly, as well as Marie Osmond and Catherine Shirriff were his co-hosts.

The films shown include classic clips from The Birds; Halloween; Halloween 2; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; Psycho; Night of the Living Dead; The Thing (1982); The Exorcist; The Omen; Rosemary's Baby; Poltergeist (made just that year); The Wolf Man; Frankenstein (1931); Marathon Man (not really a horror film; but a thriller); The Fly (1958); Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?; Alien; Dracula (1931); Dracula (1978)... and on and on.

We get the classic clip of Rosemary Woodhouse pulling back the black satin covering from the Antichrist's bassinet and reacting with terrified shock. "What have you done to his eyes!" she shrieks. To which Roman Castevet (Sydney Blackmer) replies, "He has His father's eyes!" And informs us further that, "Satan is his father!" We get the demonic tot Damien (another contender for the title of Antichrist at his lavish birthday party, wherein the nanny stands out on a window ledge and calls to him, saying, "It's all for you, Damien!" Then she jumps, the noose catching her tight, her body impacting against the window below. That must have been a HELL of a birthday surprise. But little Damien manages to knock another woman over the rail of the landing, to impact amid broken shards of pottery on the floor below.

We get Jason. We get Carrie at the prom. We get Norman and the shower scene, of course.

We get Jack and "Here's Johnny!"

Tippi Hedren and the townies from Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) try to prevent a man exiting his car from lighting a cigarette (he's standing unknowingly in a puddle of leaking gas, and we get an interview segment with Hitch himself about how to create suspense in a picture. Which seems weirdly incongruent with everything else here.

Harry Dean Stanton has an alien-within-an-alien penetrate his skull in Alien, from 1979 (a movie still so repellent it's as if the viewer is crawling around within the desiccated, dried-out guts of an enormous alien carcass), and a severed head grows spider legs and eyes on stalks in John Carpeneter's The Thing (1982), a scene that is punctuated by one actor exclaiming, as if in sheer wonder, "You've got to be fucking kidding me!"

Michael "The Shape" Myers walks casually around the curiously empty hospital corridors of Halloween 2 (1982), before finally being set afire and falling to the ground, and Sylvester Stallone and the late Rutger Hauer face off in a suspense thriller I can't readily identify (I recognize most of the other films here). A few of these movies I actually haven't seen.

Some of them as stated before are not strictly horror. There's a fascinating clip of Carol Kane from some thriller or slasher flick, that seems to be a take on the old urban legend of "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs." Looks peachy. Also, Dustin Hoffman and the Nazi war criminal dentist and his naked running down the street in The Marathon Man (1976). Like the Stallone movie, not strictly horror per se, but still very disturbing scenes.

The movie was criticized for corny audience reaction shots, but also because stripped of their context, these climactic scenes, all bundled together as they are, are said to lose their effectiveness.

I couldn't disagree more. Much in the same way, over a decade later, that the show "Reel Wild Cinema," a classic cable TV show hosted by Sandra Bernhard, from the era when alternative music and cult movies were enjoying a vogue, would strip out all the boring dross of the barnyard exploitation movies they ran until they were lean, mean, and ready to entertain, Terror in the Aisles packs a visceral impact for having put all the best scenes of a tour through celluloid Hell together, skipping the boring and unnecessary build-up and getting right to the MEAT. And if you don't believe me, just ask the MPAA. They originally thought this movie comprised of scenes from OTHER movies so disturbing, they wanted to give it an X rating. Yeah. The thing had to be pared down in order to squeak by with a less commercially suicidal R.

You'll see the best of the worst here, terrors of the dreaming imagination, hellbent on infecting your waking, and sleeping life, rising like slumbering cinematic vampires from the graveyard of your hopes and fears.

But mainly fears.

Terror in the Aisles (1984)