Late Night in the Reagan Era: Swimming Upstream on A Personal Horror Journey (PART 4)
B Harrison Smith discussed late-night horror in the Reagan Era! By B Harrison Smith Editor’s Note: B Harrison Smith is well known to horror fans as the writer/director of The Fields, Death House, and Camp Dread. He also directed The Special, released in 2020.
HBO where I got my fix of blood, boobs, babes and horror.
Summer late nights, Christmas breaks from school all allowed you to watch after hours. The parents went to bed and you got to tune into the movies you missed in theaters, due to the “R” rating, limited release or maybe you just didn’t have the guts to watch on the big screen.
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Having flunked his final exam on medical ethics, a student named Adam gets an e-mail asking him to venture to a remote, snowbound cabin where, his correspondent promises, he will share in revolutionary advances in medical science. Adam (Christian Oliver) takes the bait, is met by a young woman, driven to a remote mountain road, handed cross-country skis and told he can find the doctor s cabin by following the red ribbons on the trees. After a long, cold journey, he finds the cabin, occupied by young Dr. Vick (Dean Stapleton).
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Adam discovers (although not before being choked to death, left outside to freeze and then being brought back to life) that Dr. Vick has invented a serum that offers immortality. Death has no dominion in the mountain cabin, where Adam will be killed several more times (shot, hit by a snowmobile, etc.) and brought back to life several more times. These transitions are necessary because when Vick gets things wrong, it s necessary