Welcome to yet another B-Movie Enema review! This week, I’m looking at Dark Tower. Now, before you connect that title to another thing from Stephen King, just know this is a 1987 film that used that same title and set in Spain. Interestingly, though, this movie comes from a pair of directors I’ve talked about before.

The original director was Ken Wiederhorn. Wiederhorn is best known for horror. In particular, he directed Shock Waves in 1977 which features Nazi zombies. Then, in 1981, he did the quite good Eyes of a Stranger with Jennifer Jason Leigh in an early role. The year after this movie’s release, he did Return of the Living Dead II. He originally wanted to be a documentary director, but once he broke in with horror, he says none of the reputable news organizations wanted to work with him. To be fair, it probably has a lot to do with the spectacularly bad Animal House ripoff King Frat which I watched as part of the second season of B-Movie Enema: The Series.

Wiederhorn was replaced during filming. His replacement was Freddie Francis. Francis appeared recently on the site with 1970’s Girly which turned out to be quite a good movie that uses some salaciousness to draw someone in, but then turns out to be a really interesting movie about a messed up family and arrested development. Francis wasn’t the only replacement piece for this movie. Original leading lady Lucy Gutteridge was replaced by Jenny Agutter. Original leading man Roger Daltrey was replaced by Michael Moriarty.

So it would seem that Dark Tower, in general, was a troubled production. Seems as though IMDb’s trivia page for this movie is also a little troubled. It states that Agutter replaced “Lucy Guttridge”, but I think they mean Lucy Gutteridge who is best known for playing Hillary Flammond in the classic comedy Top Secret! Considering Gutteridge is British, as is Agutter, and there is no page for other spelling, I think it’s safe to say it was her.

Agutter getting the role and taking over is not too bad, though. She was a big part of a really key horror movie from the early part of the decade when she played Nurse Alex Price in An American Werewolf in London. She was also Jessica in the fantastic sci-fi classic Logan’s Run. Agutter even came around to play a member of the World Security Council in The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Plus, she’s just lovely.

Someone who is a little less lovely, but still fun to watch in movies is Michael Moriarty. Moriarty is probably best known in this genre for his work with Larry Cohen. Of those, the most notable ones were Q: The Winged Serpent and The Stuff. Particularly in the former, Moriarty is really good as a squirrelly rat that really isn’t as much interested in helping New York officials kill the winged serpent beast. He was much more interested in cashing in on knowing where the nest of the monster was.

Further down the cast list, we have a few other notable people. The first is Carol Lynley. She also appeared in an episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series as she was the leading lady in Bad Georgia Road. Austrian-born Theodore Bikel was in a bunch of big-time movies like My Fair Lady and The Defiant Ones. The latter earned Bikel a Best Support Actor Oscar nomination. I guess that’s cool and all, but best of all, he played Worf’s adoptive father Sergey Rozhenko on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And then we have Kevin McCarthy. There are two very specific things that McCarthy did that I’m enamored with. The first thing I knew him from growing up was as the evil R.J. Fletcher in Weird Al’s wonderful movie UHF. But as I got a little older, I got to know him pretty well for playing Dr. Miles J. Bennell in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But before any of that, he was also a Best Support Actor Oscar nominee for Death of a Salesman.

Let’s get inside and take the elevator up this Dark Tower and see if any art came from the adversity of the production and key replacements.

So the movie opens with some skyline shots of a Spanish city. Specifically, Barcelona. We then get ourselves into a cemetery that is one of those New Orleans-style above-ground cemeteries, but we only stop by there to see creepy shit before it goes back to the bustling streets of Barcelona and the music picks up again and decides to stop giving me the heebie-jeebies. Ken Wiederhorn, despite being dumped from the movie still kept his writing credit and is listed as an executive producer too. The “Directed By” credit goes to a Ken Barnett which was a pseudonym for Wiederhorn and Francis. So I’m guessing there is enough of both directors’ work with the previous cast and crew existing for it to prevent either one from getting sole credit while also not splitting it with Wiederhorn out and likely fired.

But, hold back, Jack. Jenny Agutter is here and lookin’ good.

She’s taking some Spanish men through a high-rise her company’s built. Work is nearly complete on this building. Jenny’s playing Carolyn Page. Page is the architect of the high-rise. When she gets to her office, she changes out of her white, action business lady on-the-go jumpsuit and into a sexy, yet still professional, red business dress. A window washer outside her window decides to take in the free peep show from a hot Jenny Agutter. She sees this and shuts the blinds on him, but I do give him credit for not just whipping it out and being a real weirdo or complaining that she did a Venetian cockblock.

However, his day gets a whole hell of a lot worse. The window washer, uh, thing (whatever they’re called) starts to wobble. Before long, he is tossed from the thing and turns into a dummy. That dummy ends up falling on an executive that was part of Carolyn Page’s tour earlier.

Do you think the people who worked for that land developer company that executive was leading got the day off for the exceptionally weird circumstances of a guy falling 29 stories and crushing him? If so, do you think it was paid? Do you think they had to go to the funeral? How many people were, like, secretly happy the guy got crushed by a window washer who fell 29 stories to their demises?

Anyway, enter security consultant Dennis Randall (Moriarty). He’s here to investigate what went on. I… I mean, the guy who called Moriarty said what happened. A guy fell 29 stories to his death and landed on an executive. There’s blood and chunks all over the place. Dennis works with the company that handles securities for the corporation and the corporate office thinks the securities company is somewhat to blame. Exactly how they would be held accountable for this is beyond me. Moriarty, in classic Moriarty style, laughs this off and says falling window washers should be falling all over the place.

I love Michael Moriarty. He’s such a turd most of the time. In some ways, he carries a bit of an attitude with him that makes me think of Michael Keaton. Like, imagine Keaton playing nothing but turds in movies. He’d basically be Michael Moriarty for a younger crowd. It’s great. Anyway, he goes to question Carolyn. She swears that the window washer’s movements and actions looked more like he was being thrown about or pushed than anything else. He conjectures that, at 29 stories up, on a windy day, the washer could have simply lost his balance and was picked up by the wind, thrown into the window, and then off the, uh, window washer’s thing.

He also decides to take a peek at Carolyn’s butt and legs and ankles and things.

Dennis goes to the roof, but he’s got issues with heights. His colleague is talking to the police. The detective working the case believes that because the window washer removed his safety harness, he had to have been suicidal. So, closed case! Dennis repeats what Carolyn told him which was that the guy was bashing his head against the window. If he was suicidal, why not just yeet himself right off to his death?

That night, it would appear Carolyn tries calling Dennis. Exactly why I’m not sure. However, Dennis is in bed with his girlfriend and then there’s a sexy dream of him going back to Carolyn’s office, in his super sexy Members Only jacket (I shit you not, that’s how he’s dressed), and they are about to get nasty around the place but he stops from honking and kissing them titties because he sees a reflection of a man in her desk.

Man, oh, man… Can I relate to this! I hate when I have sexy dreams of Jenny Agutter and there’s some old man staring hauntingly at me while I go for the goods.

Now I say this is a dream, but… was it? After it’s over, it just goes back to a wide-awake Michael Moriarty in bed with his girlfriend. So he was just thinking about doing sexy time with Jenny Agutter but it got interrupted by an executive’s ghost? It wasn’t her dream because she was just nervously pacing her office as she was before she tried calling him. I mean, I guess she could have been thinking about sexy time, but why would it get interrupted by him seeing the ghost’s reflection? Oh, fuck it.

Anyway, we’ve got security guards at the building doing their nightshift. They’re also playing cards and gambling. That’s fun. Anyway, one of the guards goes off to check out something. As he investigates, screws are being unscrewed from a support that holds up a fluorescent light. It falls and explodes, scaring the guy and he takes the elevator back to his security guard buddy so they can finish their poker game. But uh oh… The elevator has a mind of its own. He is trying to go down, but, after a while, it stops and goes back up. It then speeds downward where it causes him to scream and then apparently pop causing a bunch of strawberry preserves to squirt onto the elevator wall.

This is kind of a funny moment because I know, based on how the guy is screaming and the empirical evidence that he was taken back up the elevator shaft so that the elevator would then be thrown back down, what’s happening. It has the screaming. It has the strawberry preserves splashing onto the wall of the elevator. Got it. However, what makes this scene kind of funny is that once the thing that is causing these deaths has decided to toss that elevator back down to ultimately make the security guard pop the shot of the elevator coming back down doesn’t look all that sinister or scary. It just looks… normal? It’s just an elevator moving down an elevator shaft. Nothing too out of the ordinary here. But that guy is screaming his balls off over being tossed down that shaft. I dunno. Just strikes me funny.

So, here we go… We’ve got two deaths now, and Moriarty’s group is called back in and the question starts surrounding what might be wrong with the elevator if anything. Dennis’ buddy at the securities company goes to take a look. It should be mentioned that Dennis is really trying to avoid getting too much involved because he has an impending vacation that he, for fuck’s sake, ain’t gonna miss!

One of the ideas that Dennis had about the death of the window washer was that he was sick. Being sick gave the guy convulsions and that caused him to 1) bash his head against the window and 2) being sick, being that far up, and having bashed his head caused him to lose balance and fall to his death. So why she had been trying to get a hold of Dennis was to find out if the autopsy revealed anything about the guy’s health, but Dennis hasn’t gotten anything back. When Carolyn looks back out of the window the guy was at when he fell, she finds a blood stain…

On the inside of the window.

I don’t know how much of that matters because the scene ends and it just moves on. Later, it appears someone is trying to get into Carolyn’s office, but when she goes to the door, she finds nobody. She asks her secretary, Carol Lynley, and she’s like, “Nope! Nobody here!” Carolyn heads out for a lunch meeting. The other guy who works with Dennis was in the elevator checking things out and he apparently saw something pretty scary. He leaves the elevator in a dazed state. When others come out of the elevator on their lunch breaks, he pulls out his gun and fires off eight shots, kind of indiscriminately, until he gets to Carolyn, who he plans to be his next victim, before he’s shot and killed by a security guard.

Eight shots, ay?

I dunno. That seems like a pretty standard snubnosed revolver. Those only carry six bullets. I went back and clearly heard him fire eight times. He was going for one more shot, the ninth, to kill Carolyn before he got a round in his own back from the security guard. Was the ghost causing all these problems by mystically reloading his gun? God, I hope so. I wouldn’t have any notes or comments if the ghost was making more bullets appear in the gun if that was true. Holy shit that would be amazing.

In fact… You know what? I’m going with that. The ghost… Oh, by the way, there’s a ghost or demon or some such shit haunting/possessing this high rise. Anyway, the ghost makes more bullets appear in guns so it can use people using said possessed gun kill more people. Perfect.

Dennis rushes to the building to see what’s going on and what happened to his friend, Williams. He goes on and on about how there is no way Williams would snap. Not like this. He was just with him two hours before. He then says there is no way this is a coincidence. This is the third act of screwy death business in this building. He’s now telling his vacation to fuck off because he’s gonna crack this case.

He starts digging into the people involved in these events. He starts with Williams. Nothing comes up in his file that would lead to any thought that something bad would happen like this. He then looks up Carolyn Page. He realizes she’s smart and talented. He also knows she has an “effect” on people – him included. That night, he spots someone on the 28th floor and when he goes to investigate, he finds Carolyn working on architect things.

So that old man he saw in his sexy dream has been kind of following Dennis. That image belongs to Carolyn’s dead husband. When she talks about him dying two years prior, he has a vision of something chasing her down a hallway. After she leaves for the night, Dennis snoops around her office. But not too much, though. He just stares at the picture of Carolyn’s dead husband.

Dennis goes to visit his girlfriend, Elaine, at work. He wants to know about Philip Page. Elaine knows someone who knew Philip. He was married for 20 years before he met a young, hot(shot) new architect named Carolyn. He dumped his wife. Married Carolyn. Soon, she overshadowed Philip. This acquaintance says that Philip was kind of an ass. However, Carolyn kind of always propped him up. One night, Philip went missing. It was discovered that he was boozing it up at the pier and the thought by all was that he walked off the pier and was lost at sea.

But, hey, at least she still keeps a picture of him around to be tortured by.

Here’s the thing about Dark Tower. I really have no idea what this movie is doing. Okay, we know there’s a tower where mysterious things are happening. Got it. It’s clearly supernatural in nature. Sure. I think it’s safe to say, at this halfway point of the movie, that we’re on board with Michael Moriarty and buy into the situation having something to do with Philip Page. I think this is all fine as a mysteriously supernatural thing. We’ve gotten some interesting moments like the guy falling off the window washer, uh, thing. (Seriously I have no idea what those things are called.) We had that shooting that seemed to possess Moriarty’s buddy. Yet… The movie is not outwardly scary like a typical horror film is. It’s also teetering on the brink of being outright boring.

I’m all for a slow-paced, well-thought-out spooky flick. This is taking that to the extreme. Information is coming at us very slowly and it’s almost like the characters don’t want to tell us what’s up and what they are learning or what’s important about a piece of information, etc. I can probably kind of guess where this is headed, but you have to struggle for a bit before things really start to pick up the pace.

Enter Dr. Max Gold, played by Worf’s adoptive father. He’s pretty much the leading expert in psychic stuffs. When we meet him, he’s testing a young girl’s abilities. As Dennis watches from outside the office, he’s beginning to answer the doctor’s questions and even gets one right that the little girl gets wrong. When he talks to Gold about that, Dennis explains it as lucky hunches. Gold says that it’s more than luck because he’s got precognitive powers.

Gold then begins helping Dennis with the whole Philip Page business. He meets with Tilly (Lynley) to ask about Carolyn. He learns that Carolyn is planning to stay in Madrid in the building she’s set up shop in. Gold says that all those hours she spends in the building alone late at night, it might cause someone to start seeing and hearing things. This causes Tilly to get a little cagey and she excuses herself from the meeting and leaves.

Speaking of seeing weird things, as Carolyn leaves that night, she sees a vision of her dead husband in the elevator with her. She calls Dennis and goes straight to his place where she refuses to talk about what she saw. Dr. Gold arrives to talk to her, but she leaves and thinks they’re nuts for thinking she would want to talk to a parapsychologist. Gold wants Dennis to help him set up a visit to the tower where he will be left alone to explore and investigate what might be in the building.

It’s wild to think that I was just thinking that the movie was, at the halfway point, kind of listlessly moving through its runtime. It had some interesting things, but the plot was so slow and there seemed to be little that was keeping things gelled together in an interesting plot. Now, once Dr. Gold arrived, it feels like a totally different movie.

It’s much better at what it wants this movie to be now. He’s a parapsychologist. We’re flat out now saying there is a supernatural element to this movie and quite obviously going down that path. I mean, we knew that was the case, but this feels so much more focused.

Gold is going through the building and trying to communicate with a spirit in the building. He believes he is communicating with Philip Page. He thinks Philip is looking to find peace for the restless soul. He sits down and asks to have a chat. A sharp piece of equipment is thrown at Dr. Gold. So he leaves but wants the spirit to remember that he can be of help to the spirit. As he goes down the elevator, things get wonky again and he’s tossed around as it comes crashing down. Gold survives and tells Dennis he will need help to continue with this building.

Gold figures the entity wants to communicate directly with Dennis. The thing is, Dennis doesn’t know how to use his powers to communicate as a medium. So, Gold goes to his friend Sergey (Kevin McCarthy). He’s an experienced medium. Sergey agrees after he sees a vision from Dennis about Carolyn being in trouble. He agrees to go with them to the tower the next night, however, by morning, Sergey has gone missing.

They find Sergey liquored up at a bar. I feel like some stuff is missing because they, ostensibly, spent the day looking for Sergey. We have no idea how they found him at that specific bar. There are just a couple lines about how Dennis and Gold are not exactly filled with confidence. However, after successfully convincing him to join them on their quest, Sergey is ready to go do the thing.

Meanwhile, Carolyn is also liquored up and has passed out in her office. She is supernaturally locked into her office and the lights begin exploding and her phone begins to bleed. These are the things I see happening when I’m having a bad day at work, so I can relate. When she is finally able to escape the office, the building sends all the elevators to her floor, but she decides, correctly, to maybe just take the stairs.

Sergey, Gold, and Dennis arrive. Sergey says that the entity is waiting for them. Now, if you ask me, and I’m a part of a three-person team to bust some ghosts, I think hearing my ringer say that it’s waiting for us, the last thing I’d do is split up. However, I’m not on this team, so they are missing my sage wisdom, and they split up. Dr. Gold is the first person the entity tries to communicate with. Gold just wants to understand why this entity has come here. He is able to make out that the entity wants him to leave. He sharply refuses the entity and it seems to have stopped communicating with him.

Elsewhere, Sergey finds Carolyn who freaks the hell out because she sees a drunk, beret-wearing Kevin McCarthy. That would freak anyone out. Dennis says he’s going to get Carolyn out. However, Sergey correctly predicts the entity won’t let them leave. It throws a hammer at Dennis and then stabs Gold in the leg with a screwdriver. Between Sergey and Dennis, the entity speaks through Dennis. He goes on and on about how this is his building. He also reveals that Carolyn pushed him into a pit and covered him in concrete to kill him. Dr. Gold is electrocuted by some wires and Sergey is run through with some sharp metal.

Dennis understands everything now. Apparently, Philip was an evil asshole. Carolyn tried leaving him, but he wouldn’t let her. So she had to kill him. When she pleads for Dennis to understand, she then sees a scary undead version of Philip, and it is awesome.

Just look at that mama jamma. That’s some great makeup and mask effects on this ghoul. It’s absolutely the first true “horror” thing to happen. Well, I should say it’s the first 80s horror thing to happen in this movie. There was a lot of suspense. There was a lot of intrigue. There were thrills. But now we have the corpse of a dead husband chasing Jenny Agutter and it’s great. Yeah, we’ve had to wait for 80 minutes to get to this point, but hot damn, that ghoulie is great.

Eventually, Carolyn arrives at a floor where part of the wall blows out revealing that ghoul trapped in cement. I think we’re supposed to think this is where her husband ended up after she Hoffa’d him. And hot damn, this is a cool moment too. The ghoul grabs Carolyn and pulls her into the wall where it then reconstructs the wall and basically kills her the same way she killed him.

Later, Dennis and Elaine visit the cemetery and pay their respects to Max Gold.

This movie is a real mixed bag. It’s juuuust interesting enough to keep you involved. I mean Michael Moriarty and Jenny Agutter alone should keep you somewhat invested even if you don’t turn out liking the end product. That said, it is a tale of two movies. The first half almost comes off as a slog like a TV movie because of its pacing. The second half changes that pace and it turns into this supernatural thriller.

But then the end comes along. Whoooo boy! The final 20 minutes or so feel like an old horror comic. This is Vault of Horror or Tales from the Crypt through and through. We have a pretty lady in danger from a ghoulish being and we come to find out she’s not as good or innocent as we thought. She killed that husband and he’s come back to haunt her and now she’s trapped in the same cement she threw him into. That’s some serious comeuppance on the level of those old horror books.

Okay, sure, I do have some questions about that dead husband. The lady that told Dennis about Philip Page seemed to think he was an asshole. At that point, I was positive that Carolyn was involved with his death. I could easily figure that out. But then, when the shit really does go down, Carolyn might have been right about how he was a super asshole and she needed to leave him but he wouldn’t let her so she killed him. I mean, maybe murdering him wasn’t the best plan, but I’m not sure she was deserving of that karma she got at the end.

Still, I can’t fault the movie for really turning up the juice for those last 20 minutes.

Next week, I’ve got more Vinegar Syndrome backlog to get through. I also get to check off another thing I’ve not really done in blog form – talk about my deep appreciation for the James Bond series. To kill these two birds with one stone, I’ll be looking at the 80s action flick action adventure Bond ripoff Unmasking the Idol, the first film to feature super spy Jax, Duncan Jax! Be a real chap and come back here in seven days, why don’t ya?