Director Bob Clark has died in a car crash. He was 67.
The obits inevitably reference him as the director of A Christmas Story. Then, inevitably, they mention Porky's. And, ugh, Baby Geniuses.
That's an amazingly mixed bag right there. As if Baby Geniuses wasn't bad enough, Clark also directed two of the absolute worst comedies ever made, Rhinestone, featuring the deadly pairing of Sylvester Stallone and Dolly Parton, and Loose Cannons, showcasing that noted comedy trio of Gene Hackman, Dan Aykroyd and Dom DeLuise. (It's even worse than it sounds.)
But once upon a time, Bob Clark did some excellent stuff. In the early to mid seventies, he directed or produced a string of horror films every bit as worthy as anything by the more celebrated names of the era, guys like George Romero or David Cronenberg or Wes Craven.
Clark's Deathdream, for instance, is a chilling and surprisingly affecting parable about a soldier, killed in Vietnam, who returns to life and comes back to his home town. An obvious influence on Joe Dante's recent Homecoming, Deathdream was an early example of a director using the horror genre to comment on current events, and (sadly) it hasn't dated a bit.
Clark also produced and had a hand in directing Alan Ormsby's Deranged, a very, very strange movie based on the midwest's favorite psycho, Ed Gein. Part deadpan comedy, part straight-up horror fest, Deranged is mostly a character study, and the performance of Roberts Blossom as Gein surrogate Ezra Cobb would be justly celebrated in a perfect world.
Black Christmas virtually invented the familiar tropes of the seventies and eighties slasher cycle, and Murder By Decree is a superbly staged thriller pitting Sherlock Holmes against Jack The Ripper. That last title marked Clark's passage from the world of low-budget wonders to working with name casts. Soon he would be directing the likes of Jack Lemmon's godawful Tribute, and then came Porky's, A Christmas Story (which is unlike anything else in Clark's career), and then...after that, it just gets painful.
Clark's early movies are often awkwardly staged, and the camerawork tends towards the amateurish. Such defects are commom enough in low-budget movies, particularly of that era. But even though his budgets grew, Clark never really got better--his staging and camerawork seemed to grow increasingly maladroit, and the performances in his later films show his actors at their worst. Still, he kept working, and had several projects in the fire at the time of his death. His best movies were very good, and his worst efforts were fascinating in their very awfulness. A worthwhile body of work, though not always for reasons Clark might have wanted.
