Deadline (1980)

A former professor notorious (and popular) for his horror stories turned into movies struggles with writing a fresh story that isn't "the same blood and guts bullshit" and a family life gone to hell. His wife is totally committed to cocaine while everything else seems to be slipping away in importance. The kids "act out" without much attention or affection devoted to them. Working from home (I do that myself after the pandemic led to the office being closed) is a pain because he can't give totally focus to the story, and even then his mind is occupied with the horrors already printed to page and presented on screen. Those from his school consider his work crass, degenerate, and disgusting, his wife wants to clearly divorce herself totally from him, and kids are constantly concerned about their parents. The horror of "Deadline", interspersed jarringly from time to time like gremlins emerging in the writer's psyche, are quite brutal, ultra-violent, and full of blood red.

The black goat "encouraging" a thresher to chop up a mechanic/farmer, a fetus killing the mother from the inside, a priest on a cross (after poisoned, spitting up blood) being cut and eaten by nuns, a very bloody shower "drowning" a naked woman, and a punk group (with the look of a band from early MTV videos) with a giant Nazi swastika fist on the wall behind their music equipment loudly project a song causing drunk bums to defecate and "implode" all appear to be gore setpieces arranged by the ghoulish mind of the novelist. 

The horror genre does appear to be subjected to scrutiny by the film, all the while, featuring very explicit, elaborate, very gory kill-pieces. That part of the film, while I get it, doesn't work for me because I think the Roger Ebert/Gene Siskel "call to arms" against the genre was always sanctimonious and preachy. But there has always been serious critical rejection of horror and yet Stephen King has remained popular to this very day.

All that said, the main character is not likable at all, berating the actress trapped in the movies he writes, trying to hold on to a wife who is just flat done with him (feeling neglected as the kids do), and navigating crises, such as his sons hanging his daughter (based on a story of his). Again, the horror genre comes under attack...this would only get worse as the genre became more and more "objectionable" and subversive (and visceral). 

The deterioration of family, including a marriage that has met its end and children who seem to be a product of that, with the dead child an extreme example of how it all collapsed is hard to watch. This melodrama with the gore setpieces is just this odd but admittedly fascinating mix.

The direction, even though the setpieces can be a bit "discordant", has some real bite to it. There is a realism in the performances and how the writer's spiral seems both self-inflicted and also brought about by pressure that never seems to cease. You can see the intensified vice grip tightening the writer into a coil until there seems to be nothing left but unemployment and descent into alcoholism and self-destructive behavior. 3/5

The women he finds at a bar, relocating them to his mansion, reacting hostilely to a hallucination brought on by his tortured psyche and booze, with them ransacking and trashing his house really is an accumulation of a lot of unresolved problems left in shambles. The visions of mind reinacting the carnage characters he typed into form for customers to read shown to us as they emerge to him...the film really seems to tap into the possibilities of what can happen when a writer commits more to his "art" and less to the humans in his life.

Very Canadian in it's film presentation. But, man, is this depressing.