Super Scary Saturday (One Minion in the Inn of the Damned!)

What are the chances? she thought to herself. Here I am at the library returning that Christopher Lee movie, and now I find another case exactly like the one I just had. How disturbing.

She lingered a ways from the movie racks, begging a god she didn’t believe in to find some reason for that unshaven and pungently aromatic patron perusing the shelves to shift his kiester, and hopefully in the direction of the doors. She could hold her breath a long time but still, why risk melting ear wax if you don’t have to?

But no matter; if there was a patron saint of the library, he or she heard the call, and sent the young man shuffling away from the films and into the adult graphic novel section. No doubt he’d find a quiet spot somewhere to … well, why else would someone draw cartoon boobs so large, Minion wondered.

She waited a few more moments for the odor to dissipate and then hurried toward the case marked DVD INNO.

Not for INNOcent, no. This movie is all about the Damned….at the Inn of the Damned!

I never mentioned it last time but the movies I’m watching are part of the Drive-In Cheezy Movie Collection, so you know I’m not coming into this with any assumption that they’re good.

Inn of the Damned was filmed in 1975 and Dame Judith Anderson is in it. I can’t say the name’s familiar, but her voice is. Why? She played a Vulcan High Priestess in Search for Spock. Fascinating. What’s a Dame doing in this colourful (Australia in 1896) western slash horror slash whatthefuckery? This is less Inn of the Damned and more Inn of the damned idiotic.

Before I start the plot rundown, I have to admit to liking Bob Young’s western music style for some of this picture. Not as thrilled over the synthesizer additions for the horror parts, though. Kind of reminds a person that it’s not a movie to take seriously when no attempt is made to keep the music in tune with the themes. But that’s not the biggest problem. Oh, what a better budget and a dozen more rewrites could have accomplished, we’ll never know.

So, the show. A couple innkeepers have gotten into the habit of killing nearly everyone who stops by, though I assume they arrange for payment first. There’s a bunch of crap going on.

There’s a local fiend they’re familiar with who gets killed by the law not long after in a river scene worthy of Deliverance and the lawman himself gets in trouble later for having both a naked prostitute and the dead man in his room. Why ask why, I say.

The inn people kill off a woman traveling with her stepdaughter, but not before Step-Mommy Dearest tries to molest the naked girl in the bathtub. Hubby/Dad turns up later wanting to set up a search party when they don’t arrive home but the Innfolk pass on that and let him leave unharmed for some reason.

A trooper who looks like a clone of Kevin Costner turns up looking for their American victim (or for the trooper who came looking first.. it got confusing) and they don’t kill him either – at least, they don’t try until they realize he’s getting close to the truth about their bizarre hobby. That comes near the end so bear with me.

This picture is in the film yet has nothing to do with the film, except it kind of ties into the reason the innkeepers are so whacked. It seems losing her kids 14 years ago to a mad man

helped the crazy rise to the top. Why her husband has to do so much killing for her.. well, when it comes to love, you do what you gotta do. And you gotta keep that crazy wife happy… or you’ll wind up with a packet of poison flavouring your tea on some dark night, just like the rest of them.

So, near the finale, the Costner clone, Kincaid, is back to spend the night at the Inn and uses his time there to snoop around. And, the Innfolk have apparently miscounted their dead people because the one in his room’s closet falls on him. He won’t sleep now, that’s for damn sure. So he locks the door and sits with his gun pointed at it. Of course, he has no iPod and groovy tunes, so his head nods anyway. But he’s still alive at four in the morning and happens to overhear the Inn lady talking to people who aren’t talking back. He also hears some kind of creaky wooden device start up. And if he’d been passed out in the bed like they wanted him, he would have been crushed by a slowly descending hamburger maker.

So, when the Inn lady comes to check how flat Kincaid is, he’s right there by the door with a shotgun to stuff in her face. Her screams lure the axe-wielding husband upstairs and it’s game on. And just their luck, a posse turns up in the yard – Kincaid’s boys maybe? I couldn’t figure that out. Kincaid gets shot in the scuffle but he’s okay and they all manage to stop crazy Inn lady and her rampaging hubby. But she’s going totally mental, not wanting them to look in the only locked room, so obviously they must go down and shoot the lock off to see what she’s hiding.

It turns out to be a room containing paintings of two kids. It’s the ones the madman butchered, the original painter tells the men later. He supplies much of the missing back story that would have come in handy much earlier. It seems Inn lady got to a point where she felt those paintings either were her children, or perhaps contained the spirits of them. It’s unclear. It’s also unclear how this all lead to so much death, unless she somehow thought the dead kids might want company? Zero clue.

The ending part was remarkably well done given how pathetic the rest was. A woman scolds her young daughter for being too curious about the corpse visible in the hearse window and the Inn lady gets that girl confused with her own lost daughter. A bit of editing between the present girl and the past girl, some colour changes, and then a few minutes of filming the poor Inn lady who’s keening and crying her eyes out and you actually feel a little bit sorry for her.

A little bit.

What did people do with crazy women prior to the 1900s? Insane asylums were a handy choice. Even if they weren’t actually crazy. If they were depressed or going through menopause or the man just wanted to ditch her for someone younger when divorce wasn’t exactly legal…

Fortunately we have a better understanding of mental health these days and I know I would have to be crazy to willingly watch this again. Thank the patron saint of libraries, because I won’t have to!

Next week’s treats: One Minion’s getting bloody…