Terror in the Aisles (1984)
(In French, On Cable TV, October 2020) I’m favourably predisposed toward anthology films—handled correctly à la That’s Entertainment, they can combine an educational quality with some great entertainment matter. But Terror in the Aisles does seem to miss its target. Supposedly an exploration of horror cinema narrated by Donald Pleasence and Nancy Allen as if they are in a movie theatre watching a horror film (a conceit that doesn’t quite work), it features excerpts of films from the 1930s to the early 1980s. Unfortunately, the chatter that accompanies the excerpts is definitely introductory material: While the film features footage of Hitchcock providing his well-known explanation of the difference between suspense and surprise, the rest of the film seems satisfied with familiar platitudes. The choice of the excerpts can also be suspicious: There’s a lengthy excerpt from Nighthawks that did make me want to see the film, but seems out of place in a film about horror. Much of the material is loosely grouped along thematic lines, which does add to the sense of wasted opportunities: by 1984, horror cinema was fresh from a decade of radical change after the rise and crash of slasher movies, the hybridization of themes (as with Alien, equally at ease in horror and SF), and the far-gorier material made for an increasingly distinct horror audience (à la Italian horror wave). Very little of this is covered in Terror in the Aisles, and one can’t really blame the lack of perspective when those trends were already obvious years before. I really would have enjoyed an assessment of the horror genre circa 1984, but this isn’t what this is meant to do—it feels closer to a mainstream cash-in on the horror craze of the time, not digging too deep for fear of losing their non-fan audience. For those who are knowledgeable about the genre, there is some value in being reminded of better movies and playing “name that movie” when the film doesn’t. Amusingly enough, the most interesting section of Terror in the Aisles is the one about horror spoofs because it features films that, to put it bluntly, have not withstood the test of time, and thus qualify as unfamiliar fresh material for anyone watching from the twenty-first century.
