KATARINA’S
NIGHTMARE THEATER: THE CARPENTER (1987)Director: David Wellington
Scorpion Releasing
KATARINA’S
NIGHTMARE THEATER: THE CARPENTER (1987)It was someone’s bright idea to give batty Wings Hauser deadly power tools in the 1980s Canadian horror film THE CARPENTER, now on DVD in its uncut, unrated version from Scorpion Releasing and Katarina’s Nightmare Theater.
Cuckolded
housewife Alice (Lynne Adams, BLOOD RELATIONS) has a habit of cutting up her
husband Martin’s (Pierre Lenoir, HAWK’S VENGEANCE) suits. This is
not unusual among women with unfaithful husbands, but it’s apparently
enough to get her hospitalized. When she gets out, she finds that her husband
has sold their suburban house and purchased an isolated fixer-upper in the country.
Martin would rather Alice dope herself up with her medications rather than have
any input into the renovations, since he’s already cut a cheap deal with
construction manager Farnsworth (Bob Pot). While Martin spends his days in the
city teaching (and his evenings banging student Laura [Louise-Marie Mennier]),
Alice takes a job at a painting supply store in the nearby town. Although Alice
has been prescribed sleeping pills for her nightmares, she decides to forgo
them (her husband, on the other hand, takes them nightly). One night, Alice
wakes up to the sounds of hammering in the basement and finds a lone carpenter
(Wings Hauser, STREET ASYLUM). Strangely, she doesn’t see anything odd
in his dedication to the job (then again, she doesn’t see anything odd
when he dismembers a would-be rapist with an electric saw; then again, neither
does his stumpy victim). Is Alice hallucinating? The construction crew is short
one guy, but that’s apparently not unusual; however, the ahead-of-schedule
progress on the renovation has the workers suspecting Farnsworth of hiring scab
workers or students to work at night (two laid-off workers discover that not
to be the case when they break into steal tools and find themselves on the business
end of the carpenter’s belt sander and power drill). Alice finds herself
falling for the charming, gore-drenched carpenter, who may or may not be the
ghost of the house’s previous owner (who became obsessed with completing
the house and got the chair for polishing off visiting repo men). Her visiting
sister Rachel (Barbara Jones, CRIMINAL LAW) is convinced that Alice’s
dream carpenter is a figment of her imagination born out of frustration with
her husband. When Alice herself begins to do her own late night renovations
on the house, Martin is convinced that she is going off the deep end again.
When Laura shows up on Alice’s doorstep to tell her that she is pregnant
with Martin’s child, Alice takes a age from the carpenter’s book
and picks up a nail gun.
For
a late 1980s Canadian horror film, THE CARPENTER is fairly ambitious story-wise.
The carpenter’s back-story is alluded to through Martin’s lectures
about Paul Bunyon and the threat to his masculinity by modern technology. Although
Bunyon appears to be Martin’s ideal of masculinity, he favors the quick
and cheap work of Farnsworth over the pride of hard work and genuine craftsmanship
shared by Alice and the carpenter. The killings are outrageous not so much for
the glimpsed gore as the power tool motif. Hauser’s carpenter has some
lame one-liners during the early kills, but the actor generally leans towards
the more subtle (fans of a nutso Wings Hauser may also want to check out Nico
Mastorakis’ THE WIND, in which he stalks Meg Foster around a deserted
Greek village with a sickle). The victims and their deaths are almost afterthoughts,
as if they were cardboard concessions to the genre into which a potentially
classier psychological project had been shoehorned. The climax, however, is
rushed, abrupt, and unsatisfying. It also doesn’t help that Adams is a
rather enervating lead; Lenoir, on the other hand, is appropriately vile and
pathetic.
Director
David Wellington helmed a handful more low budget Canadian films before graduating
for television with direction of episodes the Canadian sketch show KIDS IN THE
HALL, the news show drama BURY THE LEAD, the Canada-shot QUEER AS FOLK, and
more recently the ABC cop drama ROOKIE BLUE. Executive producer Jack Bravman
had some memorable credits under his belt including Michael Findlay’s
THE SLAUGHTER – which was deemed unreleasable and was eventually reworked
by distributor Allan Shackleton into the successful SNUFF – and some other
soft and hardcore collaborations with Findlay (and his wife Roberta), as well
as John Amero (EVERYTHING FOR EVERYBODY), and is also credited with the direction
of the adult film ALL IN THE SEX FAMILY, and the obscure horror film JANIE.
Besides producing THE CARPENTER, Bravman also directed the Canadian horror pics
ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE with Jon Mikl Thor (and written by THE CARPENTER director Wellington)
and the truly dire slasher comedy NIGHT OF THE DRIBBLER. Bravman’s last
credit as a producer was VOODOO DOLLS, a low budget Canadian adaptation of “The
School” by Findlay collaborators Ed Kelleher and Henriette Vidal (who
penned a number of horror paperbacks for the Leisure Books imprint in the 1980s
and 1990s). More interestingly, producer Pierre Grise – who also produced
ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE – went on to more prolific and respectable work in France
including all of Jacques Rivette’s films from GANG OF FOUR to his most
recent AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN. Writer Doug Taylor more recently scripted well-received
SPLICE with CUBE director Vincenzo Natali, and THEY WAIT – in which an
American family faces off against Chinese “hungry ghosts”; however,
he is also partly responsible for Uwe Boll’s IN THE NAME OF THE KING:
A DUNGEON SIEGE TALE, so…
First
released in the U.S. by Republic Pictures Home Video in both R-rated and unrated
versions – and laserdisc in the unrated version – THE CARPENTER
arrives on DVD in a progressive, anamorphic 1.78:1 transfer. Grain looks natural,
and detail is mostly good. It also appears that the cut bits of gore have been
inserted from a lesser source (more likely a video master rather than a VHS
tape). There are faint scratches and one or two bumpy reel changes, but the
print source is likely the only game in town since this one went straight to
video. The mono audio is fairly clean, only evincing noticeable damage at those
changeovers. Extras are nil for this film, and the optional Katarina Leigh Waters
intro and closing remarks are not as entertaining as the ones for FINAL EXAM
and THE PYX, but that’s no reason to skip any release. The disc features
trailers for the dreadful Joan Collins possession picture THE DEVIL WITHIN HER
(not to be confused with the international title for BEYOND THE DOOR), FINAL
EXAM, THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW, and fellow Canuxploitation entries HUMONGOUS,
INCUBUS, and THE PYX. The cover is reversible (the flipside lacks the “Katarina’s
Nightmare Theater” banners). (Eric
Cotenas)