Canada, 1988
Review:JA Kerswell
Quirky, offbeat and truly one of a kind. This Canadian horror thriller is a heady concoction of slasher, black comedy and high strangeness. A woman recovering from a nervous breakdown moves into an old house with her husband, but their renovations invoke the murderous ghost of a previous handyman owner, who starts to buzzsaw, nailgun and saw his way through anyone who comes between him and his new love.
Alice (Lynne Adams) is a young yuppie who loses it and methodically cuts up her husband’s (Martin (Pierre Lenoir)) suit with a pair of scissors, which is enough to place her in a mental asylum. There, she suffers the torture of the woman in the next bed singing the same song over and over again (Beverly Murray from CATHY’S CURSE (1977)). Intoning: “It’s like thunder lightning. The way you love me is frightening.” Despite seemingly hallucinating an old man looming over her with a chainsaw, her husband is told she is recovered enough to leave, with the doctor cheerily telling her, “You’d have to be crazy to come back to a place like this.”
Whilst Alice was inside, Martin had bought them a sprawling doer-upper and hired a gaggle of lazy workmen to renovate it for them. At first, Alice seems rejuvenated by the project and stops taking the tranquilisers she was prescribed to help her sleep. However, on waking one night, she hears the sounds of sawing and banging from downstairs. Investigating, she finds a Carpenter (Wings Hauser) hard at work in the basement even though it is 4 am. She mistakes him for one of their regular workmen and goes back to bed.
The regular contractors are confused by all the work done on the house whilst they are not there, but figure that some students have been hired to work nights. Whilst an extramarital squeeze preoccupies Martin - a student from the university he teaches at - Alice sees more of the Carpenter, and an unlikely romance begins to blossom.
However, whenever she or the house is perceived to be in danger, the Carpenter takes it upon himself to indulge in a little hammertime …
THE CARPENTER is a real curiosity. It has elements that will be very familiar to fans of late ‘80s horror movies - from the outlandish power tool death scenes to the wisecracking killer (a great turn by Wings Hauser). However, the film is not put together in anything resembling a conventional way at all. Although the idea of an unreliable narrator is hardly a new one, the wrinkle here is that everyone else can see The Carpenter, too, not just Alice. Unlike LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971), another film that deals with the ambiguity around the sanity of a woman recovering from a breakdown, there appears to be no ambiguity here at all. Perhaps at the start, the film may have flirted with the idea of him being a figment of her imagination; despite being a ghostly serial killer and former owner of the house, he is presented in a very flesh-and-blood form. Alice floats through much of the film in a fugue state where she treats The Carpenter as both a romantic suitor and something from a dream. She doesn’t even react when he cuts off the arms of a man with a power tool in front of her. To add to this state of confusion, for both Alice and the audience, it appears that sometimes she is dreaming, including the scene where it is suggested that The Carpenter is pulling down his flies to reveal his penis as a whirling power drill. In another scene, the discombulating effect is amplified during a conversation the pair have, where each time it cuts back to him, he has a different DIY project underway. It’s the kind of imagery that isn’t questioned during a dream, but makes no sense in real life.
Although the dream imagery isn’t taken to the extreme in the way the then still popular A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series did, it is perhaps not a surprise that the franchise was something of an inspiration for this film, especially its touches of humour. THE CARPENTER was a product of a youthful partnership between director David Wellingtom and writer Doug Taylor (they were only 24 years old when they made this). The pair had worked together on ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE (1987), and ex-porno producer Jack Bravman was impressed enough by their idea to bankroll the film.
THE CARPENTER was filmed in Montreal and around Quebec over 15 days in late 1986 or early 1987. The house used was about to be gutted, so the filmmakers were told they could pretty do what they wanted to it. The budget was in the region of about $350,000. Wings Hauser was a late addition to the cast after previous suggestions Peter Fonda and Kier Dullea didn’t work out. Hauser, who had prior slasher form chasing Meg Foster around a Greek island with a hand scythe in Nico Mastorakis’ THE WIND (akaTHE EDGE OF TERROR), was hired to play the title character. The actor was only on set for a couple of days and was allegedly an elusive presence, as he would return to his room after any take he was part of and didn’t socialise with the cast.
The film skipped theatrical distribution in the United States, but did get a limited release to Canadian theatres - including a French dubbed version in Quebec. The filmmakers were surprised that Cinema Canada took the film seriously and even extolled it as a “feminist horror film”. A December 1989 review in the Toronto Star said: “Made in Quebec on a painfully thin budget, this is a psychological thriller that squeezes whatever shocks it can from the inventive use of power tools, sort of a Toolbox Murders for the late ‘80s. Nail guns, staple guns, power saws, cordless drills, you name it — if it can be found in a fix-it shop, someone gets killed with it. As the homicidal handyman, veteran heavy Hauser alternates between the gentleness of John Lithgow and the down-home hysterics of Gary Busey, both of whom he resembles from various angles.”
Ultimately, whilst not entirely successful, THE CARPENTER is a real Canadian curio that plays with conventions whilst turning them into the cinematic equivalent of a fever dream.
BODY COUNT 5:
Female 1 / Male 4
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