Welcome to a killer new review here at B-Movie Enema.

This week, we’re looking at an early 80s film that I think has a little underground cult appeal. We’re going to discuss 1980’s The Unseen from director Danny Steinmann. Steinmann is likely a name horror fans will recognize, even though, for The Unseen, he used the credit Peter Foleg. Like with last week’s movie, Carnosaur, which had special effects done by Friday the 13th Part VI: The New Blood director John Carl Buechler, Steinmann is also a Camp Crystal Lake alum. In 1985, he co-wrote and directed his final film, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. By far, that is Steinmann’s most famous movie, for better or worse.

I don’t envy the guy who had to make the only other movie without Jason Voorhees in the franchise after the character became the most defining part of the series.

After getting his start in the 70s in the adult industry, directing the porno High Rise in 1973, Steinmann didn’t really do much with film for another seven years when he crossed over into the mainstream with The Unseen. At least, he wasn’t in the director’s chair or writing scripts. He did work as an assistant on 1975’s The Man in the Glass Booth and a 1977 TV movie for Gene Roddenberry’s Spectre.

What I find most interesting about Steinmann is that his career started in adult films, then he went deep behind the scenes as a production assistant on a couple of movies before resurfacing with a trio of 80s movies, where he didn’t just get the job of director but also co-wrote the films. In the case of The Unseen, Steinmann got his opportunity to get into the director’s chair thanks to his father, Herbert R. Steinmann showing up as “presenter” for this film. The first thing you see on screen in the credits is “Herbert R. Steinmann Presents,” which I will assume boosted Danny’s opportunity to direct a mainstream film. That said, Herbert wasn’t exactly a bigwig. I think it helped get Danny here, but I don’t think that helped him get his other two films made later in the mid 80s. Either way, The Unseen originally got a script co-written by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre co-writer Kim Henkel, and Danny completely rewrote it with a writing partner before he wound up making the movie.

Regardless of what the original script was like or whether or not Henkel had any power himself from Chainsaw, it seems interesting to me that a guy with no prior experience or track record as a filmmaker on mainstream films would have decided to heavily overhaul the script, but here we are. What’s more, The Unseen isn’t a movie full of practical unknowns or people looking for their break like, say, Halloween in 1978 or the first Friday the 13th. This starred Barbara Bach, who had, in recent years, starred as the Bond girl in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, a cherished entry and what many consider to be Roger Moore’s best of his 7-film run as 007. Maybe Bach wasn’t exactly the biggest star with the best of filmographies but her role as XXX in that Bond entry and a role in Force 10 from Navarone a year later certainly made her recognizable.

Along with her in the cast is the notable character actor Sydney Lassick. Not only did Lassick look a lot like my maternal grandfather, but he was likely best known for being in what I consider the best film ever made, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another key figure in this movie, and someone who had made his big break just a couple of years before this movie and was starting to rack up a lot of credits, was Stephen Furst. Furst was Kent Dorfman in the exceptionally popular National Lampoon’s film, Animal House. So, ultimately, this is not a movie in which the cast is made up of nobodies and young actors seeking an opportunity.

I’ve hinted at this movie being a cult classic that flies under the radar, yet has a lot of fans, which I’ve seen people wearing shirts with this movie’s poster in random scenarios. By the way, the poster for this movie is a good one.

There’s a classic, throwback feel to this poster. The art style, the fact that it isn’t a photograph, it has lots of color, and those stylized eyes of “the unseen” just pop. It reminds me of a movie that would have been released in the 60s, not the 80s. This poster hides something about this movie that surprised me as I was preparing to watch it. I figured the titular unseen was supernatural; a ghost or possibly a mutant animal. No! This movie is among the early slasher films that flooded the horror market after the success of Halloween. I suspect the cult following of this movie is couched in that fact.

The early slashers between 1979 and, say, 1982 are not all clones of Halloween or Friday the 13th. Sure, they often featured young actors as the victims or carried over a stalker element from John Carpenter’s masterpiece, but it’s often thought that every slasher that came out copied either of those seminal films. It’s not really true. They were much more in line with thriller mysteries than the mad slasher figure wearing a mask or using machetes or large kitchen knives as their weapons of choice.

Now, before we dive right into this movie to discover if its cult status is due to its quality or particularly memorable scenes or moments, there are just a couple more things I want to bring up. This is not the first Danny Steinmann film we’ve looked at here at B-Movie Enema. He has another 80s film with a cult following, the revenge classic Savage Streets, starring Linda Blair. This guy made three films in the decade, and all three of them are notable for either being cult classics or infamous (but still with a cult following like Friday Part V). The other notable thing is that I’m still going to call this a 1980 film. Both IMDb and Wikipedia agree on that year for the film, but it didn’t actually get released until a slow trickle roll out in the southwest and California in 1981. It didn’t get into a theater until it premiered in June 1981 in Tucson, Arizona, before getting a Halloween release in Los Angeles later that same year. I suspect this was independently made and took time to get a distributor. That means it might have been shopped at festivals, which is not at all uncommon for these genre films of that era. That is a complete and total conjecture, and I could be talking out my butt on that, but I am curious why the agreed upon year remains 1980 when it didn’t get shown in theaters for another year.

Alright, let’s get into the spooky world of Danny Steinmann’s The Unseen and figure out what the heck all the hubbub is around this largely forgotten film… or should I say this largely UNSEEN film?

Well, I’m glad to see that Danny is using some of his past experience to make this film. As the credits come onto the screen, we’re looking at various pictures and decorations around an apartment. Then, we hear grunting and thrusting. As we see pictures of Jennifer (Bach) and her boyfriend, football player Tony Ross (Douglas Barr), I can only imagine that Tony is getting himself a workout, if you catch my drift.

Quite literally!

The grunting and the thrusting are due to Tony recovering from a catastrophic knee injury. He’s trying hard to get back into football shape. Meanwhile, Jennifer is heading out for a trip. There’s quiet tension between the lovers as she quickly leaves without either of them saying a word to the other.

Jennifer is headed to Solvang, California, for a festival. There, she meets her sister, Karen, and their friend, Vicki. However, Karen reveals that the hotel they were originally booked to stay at apparently lost their reservation. This forces them to go well outside of Solvang to find a room at an ancient-looking hotel in the ghost town of Los Alamos. She speaks to Ernest Keller (Lassick), who tells her the hotel is no longer operating as such. Instead, it’s a museum. Ernest tries calling around to find a room for the women, but he says basically everything around the area is booked.

He comes up with an idea. He lives with his wife, Virginia, in a large farmhouse. He invites the girls to stay there for the festival so Jennifer can do her report for the television station covering Solvang. As the girls wait for Ernest to close up the museum and then lead them to his home, Ernest is having a very sinister call with Virginia. He tells her he wants her to get the room ready for their guests. He even says that he will get cross if she doesn’t do what he tells her to do.

When they arrive at the farmhouse, they are impressed with the home. It’s well-kept and beautiful. There’s even a room that was used for balls and events. Ernest explains that his mother used to have all sorts of events here at their house, but once she passed, well, no more events. Virginia comes out so Ernest can introduce her to their guests. She… Well, she doesn’t seem to be exactly as with it as you might expect. She speaks very weakly. She doesn’t keep eye contact. She seems nervous or overly shy. She also quickly excuses herself.

Ernest explains that Virginia has always been frail and shy. He says that she would be lost without him. He then takes the girls up to the room so they can settle in and return to Solvang.

Karen has a little bit of fun with how Virginia acted when they met her. But that is quickly brushed aside when Jennifer realizes it’s already almost 12:30 and she really needs to get back to Solvang to begin working on her report. Vicki asks if the girls would mind too much if she stayed behind and took a hot bath. Before the sisters leave, they hear a loud sound coming up from the vent in the floor that takes up their attention.

Downstairs, Virginia serves Ernest a second bowl of soup as he sits alone in the dining room. He tells her that it was salty, almost as if he’s warning her that he wasn’t as pleased as he could be with it. As Jennifer and Karen leave and say goodbye to him, he calls back in his overly polite tone. He watches as they drive away.

As Ernest finishes his dessert, he hears the pipes come to life as Vicki runs water for a bath. He goes upstairs to deliver more blankets but also to catch a peek at the pretty young woman. Unfortunately, his peepshow is interrupted by his keys falling to the hardwood floor, tipping Vicki off that someone is in their room.

Okay, so maybe Ernest is a little bit like Norman Bates with the peeping and whatnot. He’s also not exactly beating any Cuckoo’s Nest raps when he puts clothespins on his nose and lip to make funny faces toward Virginia while she does the laundry outside. But Virginia is not in a jokey mood. She begins crying and telling Ernest that “it isn’t right” that they’ve brought these women here. He tells her that she worries too much, but she is scared that they will “find out.”

When he asks if she is suggesting he doesn’t know what he’s doing with whatever terrible secret they have, he gets quite upset at his disturbed wife.

Ernest returns to the museum, leaving Virginia alone at home with the sick Vicki, planning on taking a nap after her bath. In the barn, Virginia takes the hatchet used to kill the chickens and sharpens it, making it seem as though that maybe she’s going to take care of these girls so they don’t find out the big secret themselves. In the bedroom, Vicki is woken up with a start and begins screaming about something that may have come up from the vent beside her bed. Whatever came into her room dragged her into the vent, where it ultimately kills her.

So much for the lovely Lois Smith in this movie. But don’t worry, Enemaniacs, if I did my homework correctly, she ended up having a great career in the afterlife as a singer who did a bunch of musical children’s theater in Los Angeles. All’s well that ends well, right?

Anyway, as Virginia brings in the chickens to boil, we see there is a padlock on a door that leads to the basement, deepening the mystery of what’s being hidden in the Kellers’ home.

Meanwhile, Jennifer and Karen are doing the report for television during the festival. They discover that Tony has followed them to Solvang. This very much pisses Jennifer off. Karen likes Tony and thinks her sister needs to be “sensitive” to her needs. However, when Jennifer catches Karen and Tony talking, we learn a bit more about what’s going on between the couple. Jennifer asks Tony if he’s “beaten up on any women lately.”

First of all… oof. Second of all… no, really OOF. Did Tony actually hit Jennifer? If so, that’s not good. But then that’s not exactly saying much of anything about Karen, who thinks Jennifer needs to be sensitive to his problems. Then, with Tony telling Jennifer that it would be crazy for them to end things like this? Oof. Again… OOF!

But what the fuck do I know? Jennifer decides to stay behind to go for a walk with Tony to talk, as he wanted to do. Jennifer sends Karen back to the farmhouse to check on Vicki.

As Karen passes the museum, we see what Ernest is up to. He’s drunk in the museum and hears the voice of his father from when he was younger. His father tells him to look around at the sad life he now has. This appears to be a replay of a conversation Ernest had with his father when he was 29 years old. The conversation is about Ernest possibly getting married. But his father realizes that Ernest must be a little too busy, what with all the taking care of the farmhouse and his… sister.

Ernest’s father mentions that Virginia came by to bring him lunch. She started crying and wouldn’t tell him what was wrong. So, Ernest’s father beat it out of her. She admits that she is pregnant. He didn’t figure this dumb girl would know anything about sex. And yeah, Mr. Keller figured correctly that it was Virginia’s own brother… Ernest.

Yup, it’s a good ol’ fashioned incest horror movie. The Kellers are a dysfunctional family. The father is abusive, the son is a weakling and damaged, and the daughter is, presumably, mentally deficient. The kids are off enough to begin an incestual love affair, and the son didn’t fall far from the family tree because Ernest told Virginia that he’d kill her if she told their father what was going on.

But, for real, though… Are we really surprised? This is a movie about a very mentally unwell guy who has a wife who seems to be abused or at least very ashamed of something. They have a terrible secret. And, yeah, what’s the secret they are hiding? That they are siblings or that there is something in their house that is killing people? No, I think the biggest surprise is that Mr. Keller is… A CAT!

During this whole conversation, this cat that lurks around the museum gets a lot of the reverse shots during this conversation that Ernest has with his father as he relives a very key day in his life. Of course, the cat isn’t where the voice is coming from. It’s what the cat settles into as the conversation comes to a head. Mr. Keller wanted to make sure that his children wouldn’t continue their relationship. He intended to castrate Ernest, but Ernest turned the tables and killed his father. That’s when we realize Ernest is sitting in the room with the corpse of his and Virginia’s father.

Back at the house, Virginia realizes that Vicki has been attacked and killed. Seeing the state of the room, she screams and vomits in the toilet just as Karen returns to the house and heads upstairs to check in on Vicki. Despite Vicki’s corpse still sticking out of the floor vent, Karen doesn’t see her at first.

Karen looks for Vicki around the house, confused about where she might have gone off to. She returns to the kitchen where she tries to pluck a grape from a fruit bowl sitting on the table, but as she tries to pull the grape, the bowl falls to the ground, sending the grapes and apples rolling all over the kitchen. She starts picking everything up, but as she leans over the vent in the kitchen, something starts pulling at her scarf through the grating.

Karen starts yelling to let go of her scarf, but whatever has her is holding onto it very tightly. Whatever has her scarf yanks her down hard onto the grating, cutting up her face. Whatever is in the basement pulls her down again, killing her from the blunt force trauma.

Virginia does not handle this well, buuuut this does get right to work to clean up the mess, so I guess she does at least have initiative.

We return to Solvang. Jennifer tries to make Tony see the truth. His knee injury is going to make it impossible for him to ever play football again. He’s struggled with the doctor’s diagnosis, but his refusal to accept this truth has made it so he’s become a little cuckoo himself. He desperately tries to get back to playing, but his inability to train and get back into physical shape has made it impossible for Jennifer to live with him. I’m not exactly sure what she meant by the “beat on any women lately” comment earlier because it seems as though he’s just been emotionally distant as opposed to physically abusive. Maybe it was said out of anger and not a literal thing that goes on between them? This is my only real critique of this movie. This whole “Beat on any women lately?” question, when Tony and Jennifer are reunited in Solvang, isn’t exactly explored any deeper. I guess, in a way, it helps show two couples with two very similar circumstances. The only difference between the two couples is the severity of their issues.

We do learn that maybe the biggest sticking point as to why these two are in a failing relationship is over Jennifer’s decision to have an abortion in a few days. Previously, when things were better between the two of them, Jennifer would talk about getting married to Tony and having a family with him. Now, with things deteriorating between them, she is not interested in marriage anymore, let alone carrying his child.

Speaking of physically abusive, Ernest returns to the farmhouse to discover Virginia in a near catatonic state. When she doesn’t answer about where the girls are, he slaps her, and she begins screaming. He realizes that there is something terribly wrong and rushes off to figure out what happened. Ernest goes to the basement and apparently begins beating whatever it is down there.

Of course, what’s down there is Ernest and Virginia’s son. He’s clearly been kept as a secret, and, at best, the son is underdeveloped mentally or, at worst, is severely deformed and a monster. Realizing what the child has done, Ernest tells Virginia that their peace has been quite upset. They need to make sure there are no loose ends. No one will ever know that they had guests. There is one who is not accounted for, and she is their only obstacle to things returning to normal for them.

Realizing that Ernest is talking about murder, Virginia starts crying and says, “No.”

Syndey Lassick responds with a marvelous line and delivery when he stands up. He says, “That assuredly is the most asinine statement to ever escape that delicate mouth of yours, dear.” That’s top-tier, chef’s kiss dialogue.

Sydney Lassick is chewing the scenery all over the place. He’s fantastic in this movie. I can see now the appeal of this movie and how it got such a following. It’s a combination of the marvelous atmosphere of this old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, bringing to mind something like X or Pearl. But what often propels genre films into great appeal for audiences is typically one performance that makes the film memorable. That’s where this movie is clearly paying some tribute to something like Psycho. Ernest is crazy. But he has these different personalities that he shows different people. He’s a kindly middle-aged guy who runs a museum to some. He’s almost overly kind to women in need of help. He’s brutal and mean to his sister. It’s just a great performance.

Alright, so we’re in the home stretch now. Tony has driven Jennifer back to the farmhouse, but he does not stay. He speeds off after she gets out of the car without even saying goodbye to her. Just as she re-enters the house, lightning starts to strike just to add a little more atmosphere to the whole proceedings.

One thing that Jennifer doesn’t quite immediately recognize is that she’s seen no one in the house since coming in. Her sister and friend are not in their room. Ernest and Virginia are nowhere to be found. She does hear banging around in the basement, and that sound is traveling up through the vents. She sees the basement door open and calls down into it. Ernest calls her down into the basement. He tells her that Vicki and Karen went out for a little ride for some air.

Jennifer is a bit dubious, but accepts that he must be telling the truth. He asks her to hold a piece of pipe he was working on while he goes to get a smaller screw. He ultimately locks her in the basement to leave her for the Unseen.

Jennifer attempts to find another way out of the basement after Ernest didn’t respond to her saying the door upstairs was locked. She finds the outside cellar door, but that lightning brought a lot of rain, which pours in on her, and it, too, is chained and padlocked. She explores the basement a little more while the Unseen watches her. She attempts to pull the bars out of the basement windows and escape that way, but it’s just about here where she discovers that her friends are not actually out for some air.

As Jennifer stumbles about, shocked that Mr. Keller would lie to her, she soon learns she is not alone in the basement. In the basement is the mentally handicapped and physically malformed son of the sibling Kellers. Despite all his shouting and stomping around, the Unseen, whose actual name is Junior, does not actually mean any harm to Jennifer. He tries comforting the crying woman and shares some of his toys with her.

Meanwhile, upstairs, I guess Ernest comes to the realization that Junior only plays rough; he doesn’t actually mean to harm anyone. So, Ernest has to do the job himself to kill Jennifer. However, Virginia’s had about enough of this guy’s shit and decides to stand up to Ernest for the first time in, like, ever?

Ernest tries to strangle Jennifer with his belt, but Virginia tries pulling Ernest off the woman and even bites him. Virginia screams that she wants no more killing to protect their secret. She scratches Ernest on the face, leading him to lose his temper. He starts punching and strangling Virginia, getting Junior to come to his mother’s defense while Jennifer slowly crawls up the stairs out of the basement. Junior checks to see if Virginia is okay, but she doesn’t respond, which makes Junior want to take out his anger on Ernest even more. In self-defense, Ernest stabs Junior in the head with a nail that is sticking out of a piece of wood on the floor of the basement. Ernest knocks Virginia out once more when she tries to attack him for ultimately killing Junior.

It’s alright… Ernest was a shitty father and didn’t really want Junior anyway. It’s probably best that Junior was put out of his misery. I will say that the entire 25-minute segment of this movie that starts with Jennifer going into the basement, then the whole thing with the pipe, then realizing she was locked in, all the searching until she finds the bodies of her sister and friend, and then ALL of that stuff with Junior is kind of incredible. You’re stuck there with her. More on that in a bit.

Jennifer makes it out of the basement with Ernest soon to follow. She hides in the chicken coop while Ernest searches for her. He’s pretty sure she is hiding in the coop. I mean, it’s storming outside and she’s not in the house. Where else can she be? The extra danger to this is that the hatchet that stays pretty sharp to kill chickens for dinner is in there, too. Jennifer tries to get to it first but loses out when they wrestle for it. She does escape the coop by pulling some bags of feed onto Ernest, but she’s on a bum ankle after spraining it in the basement earlier. She’s crawling through the mud with Ernest fast approaching with that hatchet.

But luckily, Tony returns to try to set things right once again with Jennifer. Hearing screaming, he tries running to save her from Ernest, but his fucked up knee fails him and he collapses. Thankfully, we earlier got a long shot of a rifle on the wall acting as a good ol’ fashioned Chekhov’s Gun.

Virginia finally rids herself of her abusive brother and terrible family legacy by blowing Ernest’s guts and heart and lungs and stuff out of his back with a shotgun. Jennifer and Tony embrace outside while Virginia returns to the basement, where she cradles the corpse of Junior.

The Unseen is a pretty good movie. It really is the type of slasher that was typically seen made between the release of Halloween and prior to the genre-changing release of Friday the 13th. It owes a little more to something like Psycho, but I can also see the lineage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I mentioned the original script was co-written by TCM’s Kim Henkel. The idea of a farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of secrets within sure does seem like what we saw when Leatherface was discovered by an unfortunate group of youngsters.

But I also made mention of that 25-minute sequence in which Jennifer is in the basement with Junior. That HAD to be part of Henkel’s original script. The kindly Ernest being friendly and sensitive to Jennifer when asking for her assistance with that pipe, only for it to betray her, is straight out of TCM when Sally thinks she’s going to be safe with the old man who ran the gas station only to realize he’s placed her into a dangerous situation. So too is how Furst plays Junior. He screams. He stomps around. It’s bombastic, and it shatters your sanity a little bit like how Sally wakes up realizing she’s the restrained guest of the killer Sawyers in TCM. That kicks off the second portion of that whole basement sequence because it takes us into that whole dysfunctional family horror that gives Jennifer at least a fighting chance to escape.

All of that makes for a compelling movie. This movie is deceptively fast-paced. Yeah, there are a lot of plot threads in this. What is the story with Kellers? What is the issue that is splitting Jennifer and Tony up? Turns out both questions are answered with a single word: baby. The Kellers have an incest baby. Jennifer is setting up an abortion to rid herself of a baby that would totally split Tony and her up for good. It isn’t just a bunch of young characters smoking weed and having sex being picked off by a relatively generic masked killer.

The greatest piece of this movie is Sydney Lassick. He is giving his all in the portrayal of Ernest Keller. He’s equal parts kind, scary, and even kind of funny at times. There’s a giddiness to his performance that has to be one of the reasons why this movie has a following. And, yeah, I’ll say it… This performance from Lassick is just as good, if not better, compared to his performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Alright, let’s wrap things up. Next week, we’re gonna go apeshit. Who doesn’t like a killer monkey that ends up giving a rage virus to people? Well… I suppose we don’t really want to like that, but we’ll like movies about that! Join me next time for Primal Rage.