The Scare Salon

So I kept seeing this wonderfully cheesy, 80s-soap-opera-looking horror movie popping up every time I scrolled through Amazon Prime. I could tell it was made for TV just by the presence of a big-haired Susan Lucci on the movie poster and the lovably cheapjack design of the thing, so you knew I had to get around to watching it one of these days. You know me, I love me some 70s and 80s made-for-television horror.

The film, by the way, is called Invitation To Hell, and although I had no idea about this when I first pushed play on the sucker, it was directed by none other than Wes Craven, and aired in 1984, the same year as A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Hills Have Eyes Part II were released. This actually isn’t the first made-for-TV Wes Craven movie I’ve seen, by the way; Tom and I reviewed one called Summer of Fear from 1978, which starred Linda Blair and was pretty decent overall.

Invitation To Hell starts with a laugh-out-loud sequence that immediately got me pumped for the oncoming cheese. Susan Lucci (who plays a character named Jessica Jones, and no, not the Marvel one) is sashaying through a neat, upper-class suburb, dressed in the height of Dynasty finery. There are several brief shots of her walking blithely toward the street, intercut with shots of a man driving a car along said street, so you just know that the mountain is gonna meet Mohammed at some point, if you catch my drift.

And indeed, the careless driver (who I think is someone’s chauffeur) runs down poor Susan Lucci like an unlucky armadillo. Huh, I thought; for someone getting third billing, she sure didn’t last long, did she? But wait! Seconds after she goes under the wheels, she sorta raises up unharmed to a standing position behind the car, whips her hand out like she’s casting a spell, and the driver begins smoking and smoldering behind the wheel, eventually dying while everyone else in the neighborhood just walks around like it’s a normal Tuesday morning. So right off the bat, you know there’s some nefarious devilry afoot in this “perfect” suburb, as if the title of the movie didn’t already clue you in.

We’re then introduced to our main protagonists, the Winslow family, consisting of dad/husband Matt (Robert Urich), mom/wife Patricia (Joanna Cassidy), and their two kids, Chrissy and Robert (played by Soleil Moon-Frye, aka Punky Brewster, and Barret Oliver from The Neverending Story, respectively). They also have a dog named Albert who is threatened during the course of the movie but comes through unscathed, thank goodness.

Matt is some kind of aerospace engineer and has been working on this high-tech project having to do with a space suit that’s super heat-resistant, has cool-ass arm lasers, and comes equipped with a sort of AI system that can detect whether something is human or non-human, and also whether the thing approaching you is harmless or out to fuck you up. And before you ask, yes, these features will very much come into play during the climax of the story.

Matt has moved his family to this idyllic suburb called Steaming Springs (which kept autocorrecting in my head to Steaming Pile for some reason) to work at a faceless corporation with the hilariously on-the-nose name of Micro-DigiTech. It’s implied that he’s never worked in the corporate world before and is sort of apprehensive about it, but evidently the big paycheck was enough to make him tamp down his misgivings. His friend Tom Peterson (Joe Regalbuto) has already moved out here, also works at Micro-DigiTech, and lives in the same suburb with his wife Mary (Patty McCormack) and their kids, so at least the Winslows aren’t moving somewhere they don’t know anybody.

Patricia Winslow seems super stoked about the move, and it’s pretty clearly because she’s tired of living on an academic’s salary and wants a taste of that 1980s, big-shoulder-pad high life. She immediately begins agitating for new furniture to make their new home all classy and shit, and though Matt is perfectly happy with their “dorm room” décor, once the neighbor kids start making fun of how old and cheap their furniture is, Matt gives in and lets Patricia go wild with the decorating. Women, am I right? [insert eyeroll here]

Anyway, soon after settling in, Matt and fam meet Jessica Jones, a local insurance agent who also seems to be like the suburb’s welcoming committee. They get off on the wrong foot at first because Jessica’s chauffeur is driving like an asshole and causes Matt to get into a minor wreck with his whole family in the car, so he’s inclined to dislike her immediately, even though she’s beautiful, well put-together, and apologizes for her chauffeur’s shitty driving. She’s also quite overtly flirtatious, which puts Matt further on his guard. Everyone else in town seems to think the sun shines out of her ass, though.

Matt is getting acclimated at his new job, and tests of the badass space suit seem to be going well. One weird thing he notices, though, is that the dowdy older secretary Grace (Virginia Vincent) is always trying to get his attention, and seems to have something important she needs to tell him. One evening he even finds her in a restricted area of the facility and she gives him a red binder that she desperately implores him to read. He never gets around to it for various reasons, and the next day he finds out that Grace has been fired.

Meanwhile, everyone in town can’t stop flapping their jaws about “the club” and how awesome it is. There’s a Halloween party coming up and only members of the club are allowed to go, and Matt hears from several people that joining the club is the only way to get ahead, both at work and on the social scene. Matt is not a joiner (I hear you man; same here) and wishes everyone would shut the fuck up about it already, but Patricia really thinks they should become members so that they can make more money and hobnob with the Steaming Springs elite. The more people try to persuade Matt to join, however, the more resistant he becomes, which I admit really endeared his character to me.

It turns out that his friends Tom and Mary Peterson go through the initiation and join the club, and subsequently, Tom gets a big promotion and a bigger bump in pay. Even this isn’t enough for Matt to change his mind, which begins to drive something of a wedge between him and his social-climber wife.

The initiation, by the way, is shown fairly early on in the movie; the family being let into the club are all dressed in white bathrobes like they’re at a day spa, and then Jessica opens a big-ass vault door and a bunch of steam comes out. Jessica tells them to go into “the spring” and gives them a strange, invocation-sounding spiel, and then they all go in and the door closes behind them. Matt actually sneaks off and sees the vault door during a later tour of the clubhouse, and swears he hears screaming or something coming from behind it. Hmmmm.

Patricia is getting mightily annoyed by Matt’s reluctance to conform to the obviously sketchy bullshit going on in this town, and to wit, she befriends Jessica and begins telling her how much she wishes Matt would get on board with all the Stepford nonsense. Matt is not super happy about the friendship because Jessica is very transparently up to something and also possibly evil, and once pretty openly offers him sex if he’ll join the club. Weirded out, he again declines, and it occurred to me that perhaps if the residents of Steaming Springs weren’t so goddamn pushy and creepy, they might persuade more people to sign on to their mephitic plot. Just a bit of constructive criticism.

Jessica then tells Patricia that even though it’s normally the rule that the entire family has to join the club as a unit, an exception can be made in this case, and Patricia and the kids can join without Matt if they want to. Patricia is ecstatic, not seeing any of the gigantic red flags waving in her face, and agrees to get initiated the very next day.

At this point in the movie, I actually thought that something would conspire to keep Patricia and the children from getting initiated, but I was completely wrong; all three of them put on the spa bathrobes and get herded into the vault door just like the previous family. Patricia and Robert go willingly, while Punky Brewster (I mean Chrissy) gets scared at the last minute and tries to bounce, but is strong-armed back in by a bruiser-looking bodyguard dude.

Matt doesn’t actually know that his family has joined the club, but pretty soon after they do, he starts to notice some fairly drastic changes in their behavior. The kids are all quiet and sorta shifty, while Patricia begins dressing more glamorously in emulation of Jessica and starts acting like a queen bitch. She also decorates the house in a way that’s totally not her style; whereas before she’d been talking about how bright and homey she wanted to make it, Matt comes home from work one day and finds she’s painted every wall in the place a dark, flat gray, and decorated with a bunch of sleek black accents and chic glass gewgaws. I guess painting the walls blood red and having Baphomet statues and pentagrams littered around the rooms would have been too obvious.

Most upsettingly, though, Patricia claims that the beloved family dog Albert was vicious and had tried to bite her, and further states that she had never liked the dog. Matt is completely blindsided by this, as Patricia had adored Albert, and the dog had always been friendly. He’s even more shocked when he finds out that Patricia took the dog to a veterinarian—a guy named Walt (Bill Erwin) who happens to be the husband of the fired secretary Grace—to have him put to sleep.

Matt hightails it out to Walt’s place and finds to his relief that Walt hasn’t done anything to the dog; he examined Albert and found nothing wrong, so he told Patricia he was going to euthanize him just to get rid of her, but kept the pupper instead. During this visit, Matt also learns the troubling fact that Grace was recently killed in a freak car accident.

Now convinced something terrible is going on in Steaming Springs and suspicious that his wife and kids have joined the club behind his back, Matt decides to do his own investigation to figure out what the fuck is going on. During the big Halloween party at the club, he sneaks into the clubhouse while everyone is distracted, and using a high-tech thermometer thingie, discovers that the temperature behind the vault door is like a bajillion degrees or some shit. He gets spotted but manages to electrocute the security guard who jumps him, at which point he goes back home and gets attacked by his wife and also his kids, who are growling like Regan MacNeil. He knocks his wife’s ass out and locks his kids in the closet.

He then proceeds to his lab at Micro-DigiTech to put on the special space suit which will allow him to see what’s behind the vault door at the clubhouse (because it’s heat-resistant, remember). While doing this, he’s confronted by his friend Tom, who asks him why he couldn’t just go along with everything before coming at him with a golf club. Matt ends up killing his ass too with that arm-mounted laser I mentioned earlier. Matt is racking up quite the body count, I have to say.

Despite having just murdered two people and realizing that his family members have been taken over by demons (presumably), Matt has the presence of mind to show up at the Halloween party in the space suit and pretend to be Tom wearing a costume; pretty much everyone at the party is fooled because he’s wearing a helmet that hides his face and is doing a passable impression of Tom’s voice. Jessica Jones knows who he is, though, and immediately starts following him when he surreptitiously heads for the vault.

Oh, and remember how I said that the space suit would give you a digital reading telling you whether something was human or not, and whether it meant you harm or not? As you might have guessed, when Jessica falls within the helmet’s sights, it informs us that Jessica is not human and is malevolent, which…duh.

Matt uses the suit’s flamethrower option (because it has that too; did I mention that?) to try to roast Jessica like a Thanksgiving turkey, but because she’s a hellbeast it obviously doesn’t work. Matt is able to distract her long enough to get the vault door open, though, and inside, he finds about what you would expect: the red, steaming, stalactite-riddled plains of Hell, right there in the Steaming Springs clubhouse.

Matt can hear his wife and kids screaming from somewhere far below, and he looks down this ridiculously high cliff to where his family is ostensibly trapped. Jessica gives your standard villain monologue, but Matt, evidently operating on pure instinct, simply jumps off the cliff into a crazy, swirling 1980s special effect.

When he gets to the bottom of the pit, he finds a posterized version of Steaming Springs, where the “real” versions of the initiated people are trapped forever while their evil doppelgängers run around up on the surface. Matt finds his wife and kids in a replica of their house, and even though they seem to be protected by some kind of force field, Matt is able to use the power of love (or something) to break through the force field, rescue his family, and also cause Jessica to blow up as a nice bonus.

When they all awaken, they’re back in their regular house and are all okay, and the neighbors are exclaiming that the clubhouse completely burned down overnight. No update on the people Matt killed, or whether the other initiated people got rescued from Hell, but whatever.

I’m not gonna lie, this movie was cheesy and bonkers as fuck, but I had a really good time with it, and though it had some slow parts and some cringey bits (especially when the family was singing), it was sublimely dumb, entertaining fun. The acting was very TV-movie and the shot compositions were nothing special (even though it was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Art Direction), but damn if the sheer silliness of the thing didn’t draw me right in. If you love TV movies from this era and have always wanted to see Susan Lucci playing Satan (or a lesser demon; it wasn’t clear who she was supposed to be exactly), then check this one out; I honestly wouldn’t have known Wes Craven had directed it if his name wasn’t in the credits, but it was still an amusing watch. I do wish I’d had a few drinks while watching it to get maximum enjoyment, but oh well, live and learn.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.