THE MOVIE: This scare picture is set at the country home of a horror novelist, played by Jonathan Frid, the Barnabas Collins of TV's Dark Shadows. The novelist is having a bunch of friends he despises come over for the weekend so they can all get drunk and recoil from each other in disgust, but this fun time is spoiled by the appearance of three malevolent figures who appear to have sprung from the darkest resources of his own fevered brain: Herve Villechaize as a bossy dwarf named Spider, British screen queen Martine Beswick in silky dominatrix gear (playing a character billed as "Queen of Evil"), and a giant hooded bodybuilder who brought along his enormous ax in case the generator breaks down and some firewood needs a-cuttin'. These worthies proceed to organize the weekend activities, which turn into a series of truth games and tests that result in the steady thinning out of the cast (which includes Mary Woronov, Richard Cox, Christina Pickles, and Troy Donahue). At the end, Frid makes the welcome disovery that this has all been a dream. Then the remaining members of the audience, which has also thinned out somewhat since the opening credits, finds out that, oh, no it wasn't.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: Seizure was the first feature directed by the then-twenty-eight-year-old Oliver Stone, from an original screenplay credited to Stone and Edward Mann, the writer-director of Hallucination Generation, Hot Pants Holiday, and Who Says I Can't Ride a Raindbow!, the only film I know of whose cast includes both Morgan Freeman and Skitch Henderson. Even allowing for its director's youth and inexperience, Seizure reeks of technical incompetence and is very hard to remain focused on. More turgid than scary, it isolates you in a poorly shot dark of night someplace and leaves you stranded there with a bunch of people who are pretty unpleasant in some pretty uninteresting ways. Then it leans on you to feel bad when they're picked off, if only because it serves as a memento mori. It has a gruesome, amateurish sort of integrity: a more cynical hack who cared more about entertainment value than his vision would have gotten a sense of how the characters were coming across and tilted things so that at least the audience could get a chuckle out of seeing the snarling bastards bite the dust.

WHY IT CAN NEVER POSSIBLY BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: A lot of major directors have a Seizure, or a Dementia 13 or a Boxcar Bertha, near the beginning of their resumes. Working on a piece of shlock is probably a good way for an untested new talent to learn the basic moves he'll need to master to make the movies he really cares about. What's embarrassing about Seizure is that it gives you the feeling that Stone really cared about it, or at least that he thought he could use it impress people not just with his (then non-existent, from the look of it) abilities as a filmmaker but with his creativity and the quality of his mind. The movie is not fun in a way that screams out "misguided artistic aspirations." The sub-Twilight Zone "Is it all a dream?" stuff seems meant to pass for the kind of illusion vs. reality gamesmanship then all the rage in bad student films, and the character dynamics suggest the work of someone who'd seen a bunch of Antonioni flicks in college and had concluded that what was supposed to be so great about them was that they were full of rich bores treating each other badly. In any case, Seizure was too little seen to do Stone's career much damage, but then it may not have been produced with the intention that it would ever be seen at all. Rumors persist that the production was actually funded by organized crime figures as part of a money laundering operation, something that neither Tony Montana nor Gordon Gekko ever stooped to.

Part of a becoming an artist is learning what you're not good at, which is why the existence of Seizure became a thousand times more embarrassing seven years later, when Stone, now a Hollywood player after winning an Academy Award for his screenplay for Alan Parker's Midnight Express (1978), attempted for the second time to launch himself as a writer-director, and once again chose to do so in the ill-fitting garb of a Master of Horror. The Hand (1981), Stone's first big studio job as a director, stars Michael Caine as a cartoonist who loses his drawing hand in a grisly car accident, with his nagging soon-to-be-ex-wife (Andrea Marcovicci) at the wheel. His marriage disintegrating, his career over, Caine takes a teaching gig and settles into his bachelor life at a house in the woods, where he is plagued by dreams of his diembodied hand committing a string of murders--murders that actually take place, though the film teases you about whether this is actually the work of a monster hand possessed by the revenging fury of its former owner, or if Caine has simply gone batshit. Once again, Stone seems to be taken with the horror genre mainly because of the excuse it gives him to fuck around with what's "real" and what's "unreal", this time in the form of a psychological thriller that may be taking place partly inside the head of a madman.

Maladroit though it is, The Hand much more clearly anticipates the movies that Stone would go on to make when--third time's a charm!--he reinvented himself yet again as a political filmmaker with 1986's Salvador and Platoon. You can see Stone in its overwrought hysteria and also its ugly misogyny, which Stone tries to pass off as the governing personality trait of the hateful, one-pawed protagonist, who starts out as an unpleasant bloke and steadily becomes so repellant that not even Caine can get us to identify with him or feel for him much. (There's also a nod to Stone's mystical macho side and his next project--the screenplay for John Milius's Conan thr Barbarian (1982)--in the glimpses we see of the cartoonist's work, which is a sinewy swords-and-sorcery adventure strip about a muscular fellow called Mandro. In the original novel that Stone adapted for the screenplay--Marc Brendel's The Lizard's Tail, a much better and more subtle piece of work than the movie--the cartoonist was a Jules Feiffer-style satirist.) And even though he got to work with a professional crew this time and turned out a much more polished piece of goods than Seizure, Stone found out the hard way that the technology for showing disembodied hands strangling pop-eyed actors was still very much as the MST3K stage. (One of those strangled is none other than Oliver Stone himself, making a cameo appearance as a drunken bum who falls prey to the monster, and in the process paying homage to Larry Hagman, who made a similar cameo in the 1972 film he directed, Son of Blob.) Tha Hand, which actually earned a few kind reviews, did just well enough at the box office to send Stone back to writing screenplays until it was time for him to find himself yet again, this time as a righteous auteur with a camera in one hand and a copy of Mother Jones in the other. That was the incarnation that stuck, but in the many years since, he hasn't attempted another horror movie, unless W. counts.