If you watch a horror movie called Frogs, and the frogs don’t actually provide any of the horror, does it make a sound? Or, I guess, a visual imprint? Wait, I guess movies have sound too, so... wait...
Look, it’s fucking dumb to name a movie Frogs when the frogs don’t kill anyone. All I'm saying.
I don’t blame our amphibian ancestors though. Frogs are pretty creepy (I am afraid of pretty much any water-dwelling creature though, including if not especially fish), but they don’t really have any sort of attack power I can discern. Do they even have teeth? They got those giant tongues, but unless the frog itself is giant (which these frogs are not, they’re merely “slightly bigger than normal”), I can’t see the tongue causing much damage to someone.
So does the film have a complete lack of kills? Quite the opposite - the movie actually has a higher body count than I expected. As I pointed out in the Home, Sweet Home review, you don’t have horror movies centered on family gatherings all that often, because that means you are wiping out someone’s entire family instead of their friends and neighbors. And each person meets their demise at the hands of lizards, snakes, spiders (those aren’t even amphibious!), alligators, turtles, birds (again - fit the theme!), and crabs. Apparently there was a butterfly kill at one point (!!!) but it was deleted and replaced with snakes, giving them TWO kills in the movie. The frogs sort of get in the final kill, but they simply ribbit until the old guy has a heart attack, so that doesn’t count. Maybe that’s why the movie was named after them? The producers felt bad for not letting them in on any of the carnage?
In fact, the frogs are so unthreatening that a little kid actually casually walks by a few on the porch during the “escape” that serves as the “that was it?” climax of the movie. No theatrics like waving a torch in their direction or anything, he and the others just sort of mosey on by while the damn things sit there doing nothing, much as they did for the 80 minutes before.
And without an actual villain, the movie has no climax either. Like Twister, the movie ends when whatever scene is occurring around the 90 minute mark has reached its logical conclusion and everyone calls it a day. The big finale goes down like this: the hero (a young Sam Elliott!) clubs a snake, hands a kid a shotgun, and then they all get into a car with a good Samaritan who is in no way puzzled as to why a shirtless man with a shotgun and a trio of obviously upset women and children doesn’t care to explain what happened or where his car is. Awesome.
Another hilarious thing about the movie is that everyone calls the old guy “Grandpa”. Either there’s some weird incestuous shit going on, or the family has skipped a generation. He’s also a wonderfully horrible old man; he hardly cares when his grandchildren are killed, and also shoots a snake hanging over the dinner table before ordering everyone to sit down and eat, without bothering to have his black sla-, er, servant clean up the snake guts first. He’s also a selfish ol’ bastard - the family has gotten together for a week to celebrate four birthdays, but he repeatedly refers to “his” birthday being ruined or whatever. Spread the joy, asshole.
And this is supposed to be scary, but I just found it kind of heartbreaking:
Let him in! He obviously won’t fucking do anything.
What say you?
And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the newest in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)
The funny thing about horror movies is that there’s no such thing as majority rule. Majority rule says that Shawshank Redemption and Godfather are great, Epic Movie and Gigli are shit, and that The Postman is actually pretty good if you bother to watch it (which few people have actually done). But with horror, it’s pretty much always 50/50. And with remakes coming along at a steady clip, you can’t even single out a few exceptions like Psycho or Halloween, because there are several fans who honestly believe that those films’ remakes are superior (and even some who thought they always sucked). But still, you want to be optimistic. So when I saw that just about every major horror outlet (Bloody, Shock, Dread, Rue Morgue, and Fango), had pull quotes on the Laid To Rest DVD, I assumed that I would at least enjoy it.
And in terms of the movie’s main appeal, I did. Going solely by the kills, the film certainly delivers on a level I haven’t seen since in a slasher since Hatchet. But me, I’m a story/character guy, and on that level, I can’t say the movie works. Even by slasher standards, there is a severe lack of logic at times, and there is little to no character development or any sort of explanation for the killer’s MO. At times I felt like I was watching the 3rd or 4th part in a franchise that I knew nothing about.
Before I focus on the negative, let me praise what deserves it. Again, the kills are phenomenal - anyone disappointed with the relatively tame kills in Friday the 13th2009will certainly be satisfied here. Heads are torn apart with knives or melted on countertops, faces are sliced off... they all focus on the head for some reason, but they are expertly done nonetheless. Also, Chromeskull is a great villain (at least on the concept level, more on that later) – he is menacing (the actor playing him is Tyler Mane-size) and unique looking. There haven’t been many memorable NEW slashers lately, even in otherwise solid movies (Cold Prey is a good example), but Chromeskull is definitely a future T-shirt/action figure staple, assuming the movie is a hit for Anchor Bay.
But almost instantly, I was rolling my eyes at the contrived nonsense on the screen. Our heroine has amnesia, which is fine - but it’s some form of amnesia that leaves the victim practically invalid. She can’t form basic sentences or recall basic vocabulary (she repeatedly refers to coffins as “Dead boxes” - why she’d remember THOSE words but not others is none of our business), nor can she remember the number for 911 without a helpful, hilariously handwritten note that has the number. But yet, later she is able operate a GPS system with ease. And her amnesia has the most lackluster payoff of all time. I won’t “spoil” it, but it amounts to essentially revealing her occupation, which has no resonance with what her character has done throughout the movie. You know how like, Jason Bourne doesn’t even know how or why he is able to kick so much ass and drive awesome and everything, and then he finds out he’s a trained assassin so it all makes sense? Imagine if instead, Bourne turned out to be, I dunno, a mailman. That’s about the same level of resolution that the reveal offers here.
What it DOES do is offer some sort of explanation for why Chromeskull has targeted her, but again, this has story problems. If he’s after her and others like her, why does he kill so many other people? At one point she runs off with her new friend (Kevin Gage), and rather than pursue her, Chromeskull hangs around and kills two people who hadn’t even seen him. Of course, he has slasher teleporting skills, so it’s not long before he catches up with her anyway, but still. It’s one thing for something in a sequel to cause problems with an earlier movie (i.e. Halloween II revealing Laurie is his sister, which makes Michael’s actions in the first film make zero sense), but it’s another when it doesn’t even stay consistent in its own movie, especially one that is solely the creation of one person (respected, and rightfully so, effects guru Rob Hall is listed as the writer and director, his company did the makeup effects, he composed the score with other crew members, and he’s also listed as a producer).
Having a killer with all of these interesting qualities but also never really explaining who he is or why he’s doing it is a bit of a missed opportunity too. And before anyone calls me out, yes, the original Halloween offered nothing in that department either. But that also applied to the costume – beyond his name, he was a blank slate in every conceivable way. Chromey, on the other hand, wears a mask that appears to be glued onto his face, has a leaking eye that he needs to inject with something every now and then, uses an elaborate series of technological gizmos (including the world’s first DV camera that takes AA batteries)... all these peculiar, possibly interesting things. And yet we never get as much as a hint as to what any of it means. I’m sure they are thinking prequel (a sequel doesn’t seem likely, unless they go into Jason Lives territory), but come on, throw us a fucking bone here, NOW.
Again, it eventually all feels like an entry in a well-known franchise. In a way, it kind of reminds me of the TV shows that came along in Lost’s wake. If you go back and watch the first episode (hell, most of the first SEASON), you would probably be a bit surprised to recall that none of the things that have taken over the show’s narrative (Dharma, time travel, Ben Linus) are even mentioned, let alone a significant factor. They let you get to know the characters, ground their situation in reality... and THEN sprung the gonzo sci-fi stuff on us at the end of the season (and even then, it was until I’d say season 3 that things got weird). But shows like The 9 and Invasion, both obviously created with Lost in mind, totally front-loaded their shows with the mystery and convoluted premises, never giving the audience a chance to really relate to them, and as a result, neither of them lasted more than a season.
Likewise, I think Laid To Rest could have been a better start to a solid franchise had Hall developed the lead characters a bit before the killer even appeared, and saved some of the stuff for future adventures, rather than present the first film as one nonstop (at times impressively so, admittedly) killing spree. It’s one thing to have questions and save the answers for later, it’s entirely another to do so before introductions are even made. Like the killer’s leaking eye thing - what’s the story behind that? To explain it would require either a flashback or a prequel now, whereas it could have been the result of an action he suffered in this film that was added to his roster of quirks in Laid to Rest Part 3.
The DVD comes with a standard collection of extras. Hall and lead/producer Bobbie Sue Luther provide an enjoyable enough commentary. Unusual for a track, they are married, which allows for some lighthearted bickering you don’t often hear in these things. The making of (which is kind of funny, as an actor and a producer describe the film in almost completely opposite ways, back to back) is about a half hour long and covers the entire production. Everyone seems to be working hard and enjoying what they are making/doing, so that’s good. Then there’s a look at the effects, which is surprisingly very short. Given Hall’s background and the fact that the movie is all but filler for the kill scenes, I thought this would be a longer and more in-depth piece. Then we get the trailer and some deleted scenes (the first of which is technically a joke, but a hilarious one) that won’t be missed. There is also a blooper reel, but damned if I can even tell what went wrong in half of them. Regardless of how you feel about the film, you can’t deny that Anchor Bay has delivered a nice collection of extras for the film, which is becoming increasingly rare these days for their independent pickups.
Like I said at the beginning, I really wanted to like the movie. I have friends who worked on it, and other friends who really dug it (and given messageboard postings and such, I am clearly in the minority here - a point I would like to stress for anyone using my thoughts on the film to gauge their own reaction). I hate to knock on an original R-rated horror movie (a technically sound one at that), but the script just needed too much work for the film to work as a whole for me. Some have pointed out that the film had a very small budget, but production value is not one of the film’s problems – in fact, I thought the film looked like it cost a lot more than it reportedly did. I wouldn’t mind watching another Chromeskull adventure, but next time I want someone equally as interesting on the good guys’ side.
Man, THREE New York monster movies in a row! I swear I don’t plan this shit. Even stranger, I swear that the house that at least serves as the exterior for Peter Weller’s home in Of Unknown Origin is the same one at the end of Q where the new egg is about to hatch. But I can’t be sure, they never offer an aerial or even a really wide shot of the place, and that’s all we got in Q.
But what they DO offer is a fucking awesome man vs. rat movie. I love how stripped down it is: the family is shipped off in the first few minutes, and there’s only one rat. There are a couple of side characters who you think might end up as rat fodder (the building’s handyman, Weller’s hot secretary) but nope. It’s always down to Weller and the rat, which is giant enough to be threatening but not giant enough to make the movie feel silly.
That’s not to say that the movie isn’t humorous. On the contrary, it’s pretty damn funny. But intentionally so. Weller more or less spends the entire movie alone, talking to himself, and he’s got some great lines throughout (when the rat chews out the electricity about an hour or so into the film, he mutters “I was wondering when you were gonna get around to that...”), and there are some terrific sight gags as well. It’s never set up or foreshadowed, so when Weller is chased by the rat into his bedroom and he dives onto a newly installed hammock, I laughed out loud. And even though it’s slightly obvious, I couldn’t help but grin when he grabs a copy of Moby Dick to pound the ceiling where the rat is chewing away.
It’s also a nice showcase for George P. Cosmatos, who got stuck doing a lot of lackluster movies in his later years (such as Leviathan, or his final film, Shadow Conspiracy, which also ended Charlie Sheen’s theatrical starring role career). He does a lot of rat point of view shots, which are all pretty solid. They are all scaled up sets, obviously, but the effect is sold quite well. He also creates some truly unsettling shots using a diopter, putting the rat’s foot in focus on one side of the frame as a poor cat (the movie’s only casualty) wanders around in the other side. The only blunder is that he never quite manages to really clarify how big the rat is in relation to Weller (seems about the size of his head), nor does he provide an explanation for how it seemingly can get into even tiny cupboards without making a hole.
On the commentary, Cosmatos explains this, citing the old Jaws example. I buy it for the first hour, but eventually you saw that the shark was big enough to eat Robert Shaw. The scenes where Weller is physically attacked by the thing are presented in quick cuts, and often in the dark. Weller’s also on the commentary (they are not together though), and it’s certainly worth a listen. Weller’s a pretty smart guy, and hilariously honest (he points out how it was hard to focus on his suitcase prop when Shannon Tweed, as his wife, was showering one room over). Cosmatos also explains that the movie wasn’t shot in New York, which ends my “house from Q” curiosity (I wrote the first half of the review before I watched the commentary, and I'm too lazy to scroll up and edit). They occasionally lapse into narration or silent mode, but it’s a pretty interesting track overall, and they point out things I had missed (like how Weller’s character walks perpendicular to the anonymous extras when things are going well for him, but parallel later in the film). Neither of them provide any explanation for the film’s otherwise awesome trailer, which ends on a suggestion that the house about to vanish into the next dimension or something. Watch it below, it’s fucking amazing if you’ve seen the movie, and needlessly misleading if you haven’t.
I am pretty sure I caught the end of this movie when I was like four or five. I know I saw a killer rat movie that had a conclusion in a basement, and I seem to recall water (the pipes have burst) as well. But the guy I had pictured in my head was a more mild-mannered type, like Dennis Christopher in IT or something. So I dunno. If there’s another early 80s killer rat movie that’s as good as this, I would certainly like to see it.
Also I’d like to quickly offer an aside about The Room. I admit to being quite late to the party (seeing as how everyone in the theater, even those claiming to be watching it for the first time, knew every line and were armed with spoons), but goddamn, if you have an opportunity to see this epic in theaters, you must. It’s not horror by any means, but it transcends any genre one could assign to it (if someone held a gun to my head, I’d call it a romantic drama, but that would be slighting it). It’s indescribable, and even if you’ve watched clips, you’re not getting anything even close to the right context (especially since the scenes exist without context in the film anyway). I went at 11:59 pm on Saturday (the word “midnight” should just be removed from the English language to avoid confusion), and was amazed to discover that the theater showed it on FOUR screens to meet the demand, despite having been shown once a month for years now. Even Rocky Horror doesn’t command that sort of treatment. I didn’t watch Of Unknown Origin until like 9pm today because I was too wired from The Room to fall asleep until like 6 am, which sort of shifted my daily routine by about 5 hrs. Anyway, I plan to go next time it comes around; if you’re in LA you simply must join me.
Attention: Makers of C.H.U.D. - THIS is how you make a low budget monster movie in New York that features under-loved character actor Eddie Jones in a small role. Q The Winged Serpent (recommended by HMAD reader Brian - not me) is hardly perfect, but its entertaining, unique, and puts every dollar on the screen. I am really glad that the stars (read: DVD online rental services) aligned so that I could watch these movies back to back - Q has benefited greatly from a not even 24 hours old memory of how easily this type of movie can go wrong.
Now, nothing against any of the actors in Chud - they were all great, but sadly working with a lackluster script. But none of them can really hold a candle to Michael Moriarty’s performance here. As in The Stuff, he’s seemingly on his own little planet, and the movie is the better for it. There’s a great scene early on in which he makes like Ty Webb on a seedy bar piano, and it’s probably the most entertaining part of the movie even though it has nothing to do with monsters or cult priests skinning some dudes.
Oh yeah - this movie isn’t simply a monster movie. There’s also a guy in a goofy bird costume skinning willing people alive. They (well, he - either it’s a one man cult or Larry Cohen couldn’t afford any robed followers) are (is) responsible for Quetzalcoatl’s rebirth in Manhattan. Hokey, sure, but it beats cinema’s seven millionth toxic waste and/or radiation explanation. And it gives Quetzalcoatl a break from being a summon spell, so there’s something.
Another cool thing about the movie is how high the body count is. Every 5-10 minutes, Cohen stages another attack. The effects are terrible, but that doesn’t matter. I’d rather poor effects than simply HEARING about such attacks or doing everything off-screen. And they all have their little humorous charms, like the guy who is convinced his co-workers are stealing his lunch. Again, it’s all about making up for the film’s weaknesses (i.e. bad effects) by maintaining a high level of “alternate” entertainment.
There is a subplot about Moriarty’s character that I wish was more prominent. After a botched jewelry store heist (this scene is so clumsy and random that I almost think Cohen half-assed it because it was ultimately superfluous), some crooks come after him. Having found Quetzalcoatl’s nest earlier in the movie, he leads the crooks to it, telling them that the diamonds are in there. And since he apparently has a high compatibility rating with Quetzalcoatl, it shows up almost instantly and devours the two guys. I was hoping Moriarty would find ways to take care of all of his problems like this - his landlord, maybe an ex-wife, but that’s pretty much it.
Another disappointment is that he sits out the entire finale with the monster. While David Carradine (!) and Richard Roundtree (!!!) take on the thing from various rooftops, Moriarty’s character sits in a hotel and deals with the cult guy. Would have been nice to have him around, being random and abrasive to the cops.
P.S. - remake casting choice for Moriarty’s role? Robert Downey Jr. Holy awesome.
The DVD comes with a surprisingly enjoyable commentary track. Cohen is usually a bore, but he’s joined by Bill Lustig, who asks him questions and keeps him from merely rambling about his other movies like he did on The Stuff track. He also tells a pretty awesome anecdote about Bruce Willis, so he got my vote right then and there. The awesome teaser ("Just call it Q, that's all you'll have time to say before it tears you apart!") is also included. I wish he could get Moriarty for one of these things, but c’est la vie.
Some movies more or less coast forever on their title alone, and now that I’ve seen it, I think I can add C.H.U.D. to the list. There’s a reason why the word “Chud” gets used in so many Simpsons episodes, but hardly ever accompanied by an actual visual reference to the movie - the movie, quite frankly, is kind of a bore. I have gotten more entertainment out of repeating "Of course you'll have a bad impression of New York if you only focus on the pimps and the C.H.U.D.s." to myself over the past decade than I did in the 96 minutes it took to watch the movie today.
The main problem, as always, is pace. Given its prominence in the film’s title, you’d think the damn Chuds (I’m not going through and typing out the initials with periods every time, deal with it!) would show up more often. It would be like calling E.T., I dunno, after one of Michael’s friends. In the first hour it only makes two brief attacks, and even during the finale it doesn’t do a hell of a lot. Christ, they don’t even kill the obligatory human villain! He gets shot and then blown up by Daniel Stern. Who the fuck makes a monster movie and has Marv the Wet Bandit carry out the movie’s climactic kill???
The human villain is the other problem with the movie, in that he’s in it too much. You know the scene in Ghostbusters where the ‘busters, Walter Peck, and some other guys crowd in the mayor’s office and debate about the public’s right to know and safety hazards and blah blah? Well, a similar collection of scenes take up more than half of this movie, except they’re not funny. For every second of Chud footage, there’s about 10 minutes of a bunch of guys in an office being glib with each other. Exciting. You look at The Stuff, which came out around the same time, and you see how to make a fun (if not exactly action-packed) monster movie when the budget is tight. Christ, even 50s movies had more monster footage.
To be fair, it’s a more character driven movie than most, and well acted to boot. If bad actors were in the roles, the movie would be damn near unwatchable. Stern in particular is enjoyable to watch, as it was long before Home Alone reshaped his career into permanently playing goofballs. And it’s fun to spot all the future stars. The movie offers not one but two future commanders of the Pegasus (John Heard and Graham Beckel), an unrecognizable (read: thin) Jon Polito, an almost as thin John Goodman, and probably a couple of others. It’s not often you watch a mid 80s horror movie, even a big budgeted one, and recognize more than half the stars. But good performances only go so far; you want them to engage in some action!
It’s also needlessly over-plotted. It’s cool to have a few different heroes, but they spend too much of the movie apart. John Heard’s pregnant model girlfriend is a nice damsel, but do we need to see her photo shoot? Do we need not one but two shady guys tailing our heroes around? Even the monster scenes are padded out. The Goodman scene is the worst offender - him and his partner enter a diner, flirt with a waitress, order food, flirt some more... and then when the damn Chuds show up, we jump cut to later on when they’re all dead. Come on, movie, throw us a fucking bone!
The commentary track is far more entertaining. Heard, Stern, director Douglas Cheek, co-writer Shepard Abbott, and 3rd hero (this movie has three heroes!) Christopher Curry all engage in a lively track that’s neatly split between mocking the movie (Stern in particular hates the monster’s design) and reminiscing about making it. They speak quite freely about certain folks (such as the other writer), and point out the future stars with as much surprise as I did (I wasn’t even aware about Polito until Stern pointed it out). In fact, I would suggest just listening to their track even if you hadn’t seen the movie yet - they occasionally stop and watch the movie so you can enjoy some of the endless dialogue.
About a year ago, rumors were circulating that Rob Zombie was going to remake the film (rumors he actually confirmed, just to be an asshole and fuck with the horror sites that didn’t like his shitty Halloween redux). I would actually support such a remake - the whole “New York probably wouldn’t notice monsters” angle is pretty awesome, and totally blown by the movie since New York seems closed throughout the entire thing (all of the street set scenes are devoid of taxis, pedestrians, etc). Assemble a cast of great character actors, beef up the action and the humor, and it would be pretty kick ass. Not to mention possibly live up to the legacy of its own title.
I wonder if the producers behind the myriad DTV sequels that have cropped up over the past year or so want to murder Joe Lynch and the rest of the Wrong Turn 2 crew. By delivering such a top notch sequel, it elevated the idea of what a non-theatrical sequel could be capable of delivering, and in turn made their lazy efforts (let’s throw in an example here: Vacancy 2) seem even worse than they would had WT2 never come along. So it’s a nice surprise to report that Screamers: The Hunting, a sequel only one man in the world was asking for (that would be Don the DVD fanatic), is actually pretty decent. It wouldn’t win a cage match with WT2, but it’s certainly an example of how to deliver an entertaining entry in a fledgling franchise.
For starters, it improves on the original. Not by much, but it does so in the areas that count: gore and effects. The screamers look better, and they interact with the backgrounds in a far more believable way. They also fuck folks up - I was actually surprised by how gory some of the kills were. It’s hardly a splatter film, but compared to the nearly bloodless kills in the original, it’s fucking Dead Alive. Plus, the human/screamer hybrids are truly hybrids this time around; their jaws open to reveal machinery and blades inside (it kind of looks like a robotic version of those things in Blade II). The body count is higher too, for what it’s worth.
It’s also improved in the pace department. It’s more or less a remake of the original, with folks going to check on a distress call and yadda yadda, but they move along. In the original, the first 45 minutes gave us... a mostly offscreen plane crash and a mostly offscreen opening attack. Here we get true carnage, a firefight, a couple of gory kills, etc.
Unfortunately, it also retains the original’s bizarre penchant of keeping important cast members to the 3rd act of the film. At least they aren’t lying about Lance Henriksen’s role - he is listed in the “and” role, not 2nd billed like Jennifer “I don’t appear in the movie for nearly an hour” Rubin was in Screamers1. But still, it’s not until the 70 minute mark that Lance finally appears, and he dies less than 10 minutes later. I actually began to wonder if the guy making the credits just assumed Lance was in the movie (“Space? Robots? DTV? Yeah, Lance has gotta be in here...”) and put his name in there just in case, as he doesn’t appear on the cover either.
Speaking of Lance, one must think of Aliens. For years, any low budget sci-fi/horror movie used Cameron’s film as a template when characterizing its main players. You always get the fish out of water teaming up with a bunch of hardasses. But it seems Screamers was actually using Battlestar Galactica as its template. We have the strong female, sure, but she’s not an outsider or whatever like Ripley was. They are a team, and they flirt with each other and more or less act like normal humans with normal issues. They even refer to the Screamers as "Toasters" at one point - sort of a giveaway. Even the requisite “evil” human isn’t a slimy fuck like Burke, he simply sees an opportunity to make some money, but isn’t doing so at the risk of his teammates’ lives. Keeping him in a morally gray area is far more interesting, much like BSG’s Baltar (at least, in the earlier seasons - I’m only on season 3 but he seems pretty much a full on villain at this point). It’s a change I hope to see more of; there’s only so many Hudson wannabes I can take in one lifetime.
At least one fellow reviewer has bemoaned the idea of rats being in the movie (and actually causing the screamers to “wake up”), but they were in the original too, so shut the fuck up. Rats are everywhere, and that’s all there is to it. Speaking of the original, it does have some ties; Peter Weller’s character is often mentioned (one of the characters is his daughter). Oddly, the opening credits once again say “based on the short story by Philip K. Dick”, but mention none of the original’s screenwriters.
Hey, why is it whenever someone in a movie mentions “raw materials”, I immediately want to go back to Star Wars Galaxies? Anyone else play that broken-ass game? I used to love crafting shit out of my hard-grinded materials. Folks would report of a great vein of Goobledygookdium on the planet Goofynameia and I’d go off with my survey tools in order to make a gun that would fetch me 200 credits... man, good times. I understand Fallout 3 has some crafting involved, I should get on that shit.
My notes have “Let’s go” written down. I dunno why, maybe I liked how they said it or something. Or maybe I was having flashbacks to The Cars. Whatever.
I also want to officially call it - every actress with the last name Holden is incredibly beautiful. Alexandra, Laurie, and now Gina Holden, the star of this movie (which, I am still technically reviewing, despite the length tangents I have taken). She reminds me a bit of Gabrielle Anwar, which is the polar opposite of a problem. She’s also the type of action heroine I like - she’s smart and tough, but she doesn’t have that annoying “grrrrl” attitude that makes me feel like I’m watching some sort of feminist propaganda (see: Tank Girl). Put this lovely woman in more movies, preferably ones people besides obsessive compulsive horror movie nerds will see.
The DVD’s only extra is a featurette that was also surprisingly above-average. It covers the usual ground (casting, story, visual effects), but it does so by literally taking you through the movie (do not watch it before watching the film, as it gives away the end), and keeps random clip usage to a minimum. Its worth noting that Lance appears in it more than he does in the film itself. One thing I was looking for, however, was information on what the movie was shot on; it looked a lot like digital at times, but they never discuss it. The end credits are no help, I only learned that this movie’s existence is due to Canadian Tax Brackets - about a dozen different of them are “thanked”.
So is it worth a watch? I would say so. I had fun watching it, unlike the dull original, and it was competently made across the board. Compared to Sony’s other recent DTV sequels, it’s theatrical-worthy. And I’d like to point out that director Sheldon Wilson also directed the surprisingly decent Kaw, so at this point I have to assume he’s not one of the hundreds of faceless hacks out there in DTV land, and is someone who actually gives a shit. Kudos, sir.
What say you?
And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the newest in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)
I don’t know if I ever saw Critters 2: The Main Course as a kid. I remember the giant ball of critters, as well as the scene with the old man in the barn, but nothing else (i.e. guy in Easter Bunny suit being killed - which I think would leave an imprint). Maybe I started watching it and fell asleep, and then caught the end some other time? I dunno, who cares.
It’s slightly better than the original, thanks to a faster pace and better effects. Unfortunately it’s also rather lackluster - the movie is essentially a REMAKE with a faster pace and better effects. The story is identical: the bounty hunters are in space, hunting, and then get sent to Earth to find “krites” in a small mid-western town, where they more or less join forces with Scott Grimes. I mean, its closest cinematic cousin would be Gremlins, and when you compare how much they upped the ante and really delivered a great sequel in that series, you can’t help but notice that Critters 2 just sort of goes through the motions. Even its biggest draw - the giant ball of critters - doesn’t really deliver. It rolls over a guy and then gets blown up. It’s only in the movie for about four minutes, most of that spent rolling along a road.
It also resembles Gremlins at times, particularly during the initial attack on the town (and by initial I mean, pretty much only). They wreak havoc with the phone and electric wires, then devour a diner. They even laugh at each others’ misfortunes and make bug eyes and such. The original may be called a Gremlins clone, but other than the idea of pint-sized creatures running about, it never really FELT like a ripoff; everything else was fairly unique. Not so much here.
But it’s certainly entertaining. Again, a guy in a bunny suit is killed (and better - he’s played by one of the annoying cops from Halloween 5 - always a pleasure to see him get mangled), and there are some nice injokes about other 80s movies. At one point, the shape-shifting bounty hunter begins to transform into Freddy Krueger before it is thwarted by Charlie, who convinces it to turn into Mick Garris’ wife instead (what an oddly Freudian moment here).
Speaking of Charlie, I love the scene when Scott Grimes (whose visit to the town is never adequately explained, and he leaves the instant the disaster is averted) looks at a photo of him and Charlie, because it’s just a still from the first movie:
Who took that?
It’s one thing for Halloween 4 to use a production still of Jamie Lee Curtis from the first movie, as she wasn’t around to take a real one with Danielle Harris, but both actors are in this movie, and despite Grimes’ aging, it wouldn’t have taken much effort to have them take a candid photo in front of a car or some generic thing like that to avoid snarky comments from sharp-eyed horror movie nerds 20 years later. On that note, the idea of stills getting used as photos in the sequel will probably go the way of the dodo, now that any old photos can be Photoshopped together to create whatever photo type the plot requires.
Speaking of actor availability, the M. Emmett Walsh role of Marv the sheriff was recast with Barry Corbin here. It’s weird how sometimes swapping out an actor doesn’t bug me (The Dark Knight, for example, and that’s coming from a man who once worshipped at the altar of Joey Potter), but here it did, despite the fact that I like Barry Corbin just fine. Not sure why they bothered making him the same guy; it would have been just as easy to say Corbin’s character was Walsh’s brother and had turned his back on the town after Marv was run out of town due to the events of the first movie. Or something.
I also love how we once again have a 1988 monster movie in which an old man and his dog are among the first victims. The Blob and Killer Klowns From Outer Space also used this time-honored device. Why not an old woman and her cat? And I say this as a cat owner. And a woman.
There’s also an odd moment in which a little girl (the same one from Shocker!) takes a chocolate bunny to bed with her (?) before awkwardly setting it down next to her heater. Naturally the damn thing melts, providing a cover for the hatched critter egg nearby. It’s pretty much the most inane thing I’ve ever seen in a movie.
The DVD’s only extra is the trailer, which gives away pretty much every good moment in the movie. Garris usually provides commentaries for his movies, so I’m not sure why New Line (who almost never released bare-bones DVDs) didn’t have him record one.
Also, one final note - this movie carries on the fine Critterstradition of having Titanic personnel involved. The first movie had Billy Zane, and just about everyone knows that Critters 3 was the first film with Leonardo DiCaprio. And wouldn’t you know it, Russell Carpenter (again! After Cameron’s Closet) shot this film. Maybe tomorrow, if I lose my job (the current rumor floating the halls at NBC), I will spend all day in my underwear, crying, while cross-referencing the crew members of Critters 4 to see if the odd connection comes full circle.
I don’t know if that is the exact quote from The Devil’s Chair, but the gist is there. In that film, the narrator mocked the viewer for liking horror movies. That, added to the utterly reprehensible bullshit that was Broken, left me feeling pretty sore about the filmmaking team of Adam Mason and Simon Boyes. However, since Chair showed marked improvement over Broken, I figured I would give their newest film, Blood River, a fair chance, even going so far as to take the night off to attend the premiere and rub shoulders with such Hollywood royalty as Xander Berkeley and Balthazar Getty (a premiere for a presumably big budget Hollywood movie over at the Mann’s must have driven away the likes of premiere staples Bai Ling and the fat guy from Borat).
And again, they have showed improvement. Blood River is, if nothing else, extremely well-shot, capably acted, and occasionally engaging. However, it’s not enough to warrant a pass for the film as a whole, as it still has several problems, and simply not being abysmal isn’t enough to justify its faults.
For starters, the movie is supposed to be set in 1969. This is never established with anything like a title card (I learned it from the written plot synopsis); instead they just show old Life magazines on a table and have the hero drive a cool “classic” car. The problem is, even present day movies, ESPECIALLY ones set in nearly-empty desert towns, have such things - it shows their “time has passed us by” nature. Likewise, our hero and heroine don’t dress any different than an average couple would today. Plus, shooting on digital doesn’t help matters in the slightest; you can’t ever really buy into a period feeling when you’re seeing it all through a very modern point of view. The period setting doesn’t really have any effect on the story (other than a reason why the couple doesn’t have cell phones, but those scenes are always written away with the “no service out here!” line anyway), so why they bothered I have no idea.
But the real problem of the movie is that it simply doesn’t make a lick of sense. The guy from Devil’s Chair is again the star, but this time he is playing a drifter who may or may not be an Angel working for God. Not the worst concept, but why he spends so much time toying with the couple (one of whom has a dark secret, ooooh) is never clarified. I mean, he’s working for God to punish sinners, right? They are hardly a rare breed; is it really the best use of his time to fuck around with just ONE guy for two days straight? He coulda probably have stopped 10 sinners in that time had he just gone up to the couple, said “Hey, I need to tell you something” and been on his way.
(SPOILERS FOLLOW)
But to be fair, he needs to do SOME legwork to get his results. An early scene shows us that he doesn’t inflict the killing blow on anyone; he seemingly needs to convince them to kill themselves, or in this case, have a “good” person kill the sinner. It’s never explained WHY he can’t do this, but fine. So why not just go up to the wife and say “Hey, your husband’s a child killer, the proof is in the trunk.” (actually I’m just assuming he’s a child killer - the script, again, doesn’t bother to explain WHAT the guy’s “sin” is, only that it has something to do with the woman’s son, his stepson). Why steal the spare tire and make up a story about being out of gas (especially when they know the guy’s a hitchhiker, a fact the couple never bothers to address) and go through 80 minutes of this shit just to end up pretty much doing that anyway? Like a woman WOULDN’T go ballistic on her new husband when she discovered he had done something awful to her 5 year old son, regardless of how much mental/physical strain she had endured in the hours prior to the discovery? Bullshit.
Of course, had logic been used, either on the script level or from the characters themselves, there would be no movie. So let’s move on.
Back to the “sin” - when your entire movie is built around this guy who we think is a good person turns out to be pretty bad, don’t you think it’s kind of necessary to explain exactly WHAT his sin is? I can’t even really buy the “child killer” angle, because the guy seems shocked to discover the kid’s corpse in the trunk, and not in a “how did THAT get here?” way but more in an “Oh my god my stepson is dead!” way. Assuming he wasn't just a lousy actor, was the character just a child molester? If so, did the Angel kill the kid? But he can’t kill anyone by his own hand, right? So who the fuck knows. For all I know the kid is a macguffin and his sin was stealing two grapes from the supermarket.
And I won’t even begin to wonder why everyone in the southwestern United States has a thick British accent.
I also had to laugh at the blown-tire scene. Like The Roost, we don’t actually see the accident; we just hear it and then see an aftermath that suggests a far more powerful force than a blown tire. I mean, they’re in THE DESERT, and yet we hear the car smashing into things. Plus our couple is pretty banged up. A few years ago, I blew a tire in heavy traffic on the CT turnpike and I didn’t even get a scratch on myself OR the car; how did this jackoff manage to mangle up his front end and practically tear his arm off?
At this point, I feel I have no choice but to give up on this filmmaking team. They show some talent in both writing and directing departments (again - the film is particularly well shot), but together their films always underwhelm at best. Each film shows improvement over the last, and that’s laudable (most modern horror filmmakers seemingly go the other way), but not enough to suggest that there is a solid, good film in the near future. Call me when they get to their tenth project together, then they might have something.
What say you?
*For a fucking premiere??? Jesus Christ. It's bad enough when they do shit like this at a film festival, but come on now.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. “Hello.” But I’ll also say this again: any movie with a theme song is better. I’m not talking about a song like My Heart Will Go On”, which is Titanic’s theme but has nothing to do with the movie or characters. I mean a song like “Cat’s Eye”, from the movie Cat’s Eye, sung by Ray Stevens. I mean, the title is right there, but his lyrics refer to breath being taken away and such, and fans will know that a troll trying to steal a little girl’s breath is the plot of the 3rd story in the movie.
It’s also the weakest story, though that’s not really the filmmaker’s fault. A prologue that would explain 90% of the plot of the 3rd story was deleted by producers. Director Lewis Teague explains what would have happened, and admittedly it helps clarify the story, but still, it’s not quite as successful as the other two stories. Part of the problem is that the story is so far removed from reality, when the other two are fairly grounded. For an hour you’ve been watching a pretty good and plausible movie, and then all of a sudden there’s a little troll running around Drew Barrymore’s bedroom while a super-intelligent cat tries to stop him from stealing her breath. Huh?
It would also help explain the odd moments in the film in which the cat sees the ghost or spirit or whatever of Drew in store windows. These scenes occur during the other stories, and it doesn’t help that Drew appears as different characters in those entries as well. Actually, as I think about it, this is one of the most needlessly baffling movies ever made.
The first two stories are great though. The first stars James Woods and is based on Stephen King’s terrific short “Quitters, Inc.”, which depicts a companies unusual methods of getting folks to quit smoking. As an avowed hater of cigarettes who has no problem of telling complete strangers to stop smoking, I sort of love the idea of a company that will torture your family if you light up when you think no one’s watching. Plus, the “evil” exec is played by the great Alan King, and the story allows us to enjoy him singing “Every Breath You Take” from The Police while he dances around in a smoking jacket (or bathrobe, I couldn’t really tell).
Speaking of the song - all of the songs in the movies are lame covers. Not sure if they simply couldn’t afford the real songs or they wanted to add an element of uneasiness to the movie, but it’s distracting as hell. It’s like when you’re playing Guitar Hero and all of a sudden its “As Made Famous By” time and you’re all like “Awww, fuck this generic shit!”. I assume Stevens’ theme is real, however.
The 2nd story is also based on one of King’s, but I haven’t read it yet. This one stars Robert Hays, and it was nice to see him in a rather serious role. Airplane! is, of course, one of the greatest films ever made, and his starring role alone should have ensured him a bigger career. The story itself treads some of the same ground as "Something To Tide You Over" from Creepshow, but without the silly supernatural ending. The story also features an early appearance from Charles S. Dutton - Roc! It’s not quite as great as "Quitters", but the suspense is pretty goddamn tense at times. Then again I have recurring nightmares about being on ledges and such, so maybe it’s just me.
The 3rd, as I’ve said, is the weakest. Not only does the edited sequence contain all of the plot points that would allow a viewer to really understand it, but it simply lacks thrills. You know the troll won’t succeed in killing Drew OR the cat, and the parents are kept out of it. The effects are good (another day, another Carlo Rambaldi monster, though this one is far better than the one in Cameron’s Closet), and I love the obviously oversized set that would allow a midget in the troll costume to run around (as opposed to matted effects, which are also used to less success). Then again, this story was written specifically for the screen by King, which is almost always a red mark.
Teague’s commentary is pretty dull, he rambles about the various crew members and other movies they have worked on (even key grips and such get their due), and points out the King references some folks may have missed, but he also just watches the movie for long stretches. And the presence of the commentary makes the lack of the deleted opening even more annoying; they obviously put some effort into the release, why not go all out? The trailer (which promises “a monster or two” - the former is the right answer) is also included, as well as cast and crew bios. Did you know Drew Barrymore has gone on to be a major star?
You know how on The Simpsons the first five minutes are just sort of setting up the real plot in a really random way? Cameron’s Closet is kind of like that. It starts off with a kid that has telekinetic powers and is seemingly starting to rebel against the scientist types who are studying him (it actually feels like the movie starts halfway through its own narrative), but after a while it’s really about some monster and a cop with psychiatric problems. The telekinesis eventually seems forgotten entirely.
Of course, that wouldn’t be too much of a problem had the monster/cop section of the movie been interesting, or even coherent. I eventually hadn’t the slightest clue as to what the fuck was going on, only that there was a monster in the kid’s closet and this little artifact thing was the key to stopping it. A cop that got turned into a zombie factors in somehow. It’s bad enough when your killer kid movie (he more or less kills his dad in the first few minutes, making a machete turn and chop the guy’s head off in one of my all time favorite movie decap deaths) isn’t really a killer kid movie at all, it’s even worse when the one they give you instead is dull and largely kill free.
Speaking of the kills - how fucked up is this kid’s mom going to be? Except for the cop’s partner, the only deaths in the movie are of the most important men in her life: her ex (father of her child), her boyfriend, and her brother. I assume her dad is already dead or else he probably would have gotten offed too. Plus, the entire movie is about some mythical monster trying to kill her son, and does so by... killing other people? Including one that pretty much wanted to kill him anyway (the boyfriend guy) for scratching up his car with a rubber ball? For most of the movie, it seems that the monster is on the kid’s side, if anything.
Speaking of the brother - the monster makes itself look like his sister in order to seduce him before killing him (again, the monster seems to be making things more difficult for himself than they should be). However, the brother is into it, gleefully macking on what he thinks is his sister. And yet, even with light incest, I still don’t recommend the movie.
I dunno why, but this annoyed the shit out of me too: Cameron has his name spelled out in sheets of paper (one letter per page) on the wall of his room in a zigzag shape. But they aren’t spaced evenly, which drove me insane. So of course, director Armand Mastroianni (He Knows Your Alone - sadly this movie did NOT feature the first appearance of a future legendary actor) finds a way to show the damn thing like twenty times over the course of the movie. As if I needed another excuse to punch the movie in the face.
The worst thing about it, however, is that the monster was designed by Carlo Rambaldi (Alien and ET), which is ordinarily a good thing. However, he seemingly worked for ten, fifteen minutes tops on this one - it never moves or does anything cool. I don’t even think the entire body was ever shown in a shot.
Couple crew members worth noting though - the DP was Russell Carpenter, who went on to shoot Titanic ten years later. And Lawrence Bender, better known as the producer of Pulp Fiction, worked as a key grip. Other than Mel Harris (thirtysomething*) I didn’t recognize any of the actors, though IMDb says Bill Lustig is in there somewhere eating an ice cream, a scene I no longer recall.
I watched this on Fearnet, and it was of no better (or worse) quality than the DVD: full frame, poorly transferred from a subpar print (or just a VHS), you know the drill. I’m not saying it deserves such a half-assed release, but it’s good to know that bad movies get short-changed just like the good ones (i.e. The Abyss - still not given an anamorphic DVD release anywhere in the world).
What say you?
*"I need clearance to land on runway thirty... thirtysomething!" "Thirtysomething has been canceled!"
And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the 8th in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)
What the hell is the difference between "Real3D" and "Tru3D"? I brought my Real glasses from My Bloody Valentine, because I knew that the theater showing Monsters Vs. Aliens used the kind that don't have hinges, which annoys me. But even though both appeared to be the same kind of lenses (that brownish gray, as opposed to red/blue), the Real ones didn't work. And then, of course, I missed the first minute of the movie while I looked around on the floor for my Tru3D pair, which I had discarded.
What DID work, luckily, was the film itself. After a rather slow beginning in which neither Monsters nor Aliens appear for at least 15 minutes, our heroine turns into a giant woman, and the movie begins proper. And before anyone balks at the idea of it not being a horror movie - correct, it's NOT a horror movie in the traditional sense (i.e. scares/violence/gore), but it DOES gain most of its mileage out of referencing horror movies, particularly those from the 1950s. So it is horror fans, not 8 year old kids, that will be enjoying the myriad references to The Fly, The Blob, Them!, etc., and thus in turn enjoying the film as a whole.
But back to the pop-culture, for once, Dreamworks has gotten it right. Apart from the occasional line, one could go into this movie without a single shred of trivia floating around their brain and still enjoy it without feeling like they missed the joke. Even the references to the horror/sci-fi films mentioned before are subtle; you probably won't even notice that they are there.
The animation is also quite good. They've come so far in the past ten years when it comes to things like texture and hair detail. There's a running gag: whenever a character describes a latte they get an extreme closeup, and it's amazing how much detail they throw in: stubble, skin blemishes, etc. Spaceships and such also have realistic metal textures; if you ignore the cartoon title characters, the ships look identical to those scene in "live action" space-set films.
As for the 3D, I didn't find that it added to the experience as much as other recent films like Coraline. There are a couple of "in your face!" gags, and a key action sequence around halfway through the movie was much more exciting with the immersion, but otherwise I wouldn't bother dealing with the higher costs (and probably more sold out viewings); the movie's charms lie in the humor and story, not the gee-whiz appeal of the technology. Of course, the IMAX screen is desirable for the big action scenes, but again - not enough to justify the 2 or 3 dollar ticket increase (x number of family members).
Like the other DW films, it doesn't hold a candle to Pixar's best, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Like Igor, it's nice to see these movies finding a new way to appeal to multiple generations and tastes (i.e. genre fans), and the lack of "timely" jokes will ensure that it will remain a favorite for future generations, while the Shark Tales of the world become irrelevant due to their reliance on jokes that won't mean anything to anyone born after their release date.
I remember seeing the box art for Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (on a format known as VHS) back in the day and thinking it was cool: a girl with a bag full of other 80s horror movie staples, Jason’s mask, Freddy’s glove, Leatherface’s (or Lefty’s) chainsaw*... but for some reason it didn’t appeal to me otherwise. Not having seen the original didn’t help, but that didn’t stop me for the other series, I think Chain Saw is the only major horror franchise where I saw the first one before any of the sequels (and, for the record, I saw Chain Saw before part 2 even hit video).
So what do I think about it, now that I've finally given it a chance? Eh. I like the out of the box approach - not too many 80s slashers focus mainly on the killer (an unmasked one at that), and was a rather unique way of more or less remaking the original film (someone even dies in a bathroom stall again) while giving it its own identity. Rather than have a mystery killer, you just have Angela (now really a girl) killing folks at her leisure.
Unfortunately, that’s also what’s wrong with the movie: there’s nothing to it. You don’t root for any of the other counselors, because you never really spend any time with them away from Angela. There isn’t any story to speak of (even for a slasher movie), the movie ends once Angela has run out of people to kill. Sure, there’s a final girl (played by Emilio Estevez’ sister Renee), but her role is ceremonial at best. The final 10 minutes involve characters we just met or have long since forgotten about (a rather attractive counselor who only appeared in two shots prior to the “finale” is the focus of Angela’s final attack on the camp), and even with that obvious bit of padding, the movie clocks in at 78 minutes, including credits that run at about half-speed (and a lengthy dream sequence in which Angela dreams about all of the murders she committed earlier in the movie).
It’s also distressingly cheap. The few kids at the camp completely disappear after a while (not a plot point, trust me), and a number of the kills occur offscreen. It’s one thing for Dimension to toss out a cheapo Children of the Corn sequel by the time part 5 or 6 rolls around, it’s another to shoot the franchise in the foot almost instantly. And Simpson is a pretty lousy director; there is absolutely no build up to any of the kill scenes, nor do the scenes themselves carry much weight. It’s something of a joke that Angela is pretty laid back about killing people, but that joke gets old after a half hour. As a result, the movie has no rhythm to the movie at all; the deaths just happen whenever the movie feels like getting around to it.
What I DID like, however, is how laid back and utterly reprehensible most of these people are. When Angela tells the final girl the story of the first movie, the girl barely blinks an eye when Angela confesses to drowning someone. And a sex scene is capped off by the girl asking “You don’t have AIDS or anything, do you?” Awesome. We also have a pair of young lads who take nudie photos (and also get killed - a moment this “Nature Trail To Hell” fan really appreciated). And one of the characters listens to Flotsam And Jetsam.
And while it got a bit distracting, the idea of naming just about every character after a Brat Packer is kind of funny. Some are a bit obscure (T.C. = Tom Cruise, who made movies with Emilio but otherwise was not really a member), but it’s a fun sort of little game to play. It’s not often you have a Demi in a movie.
The DVD has 13 minutes of behind the scenes footage, which is narrated by director Michael Simpson, which is something I wish I saw more often. The nuts and bolts stuff is fare more interesting than actor EPK-ready interviews, but you don’t want to just listen to the source audio (which is mostly people talking inaudibly in the background). There’s also a commentary with Simpson, screenwriter Fritz Gordon, and the Australian guy who runs one of the two Sleepaway fansites. He’s annoying as hell, but Simpson and Gordon are pretty informative, pointing out odd bits like the reason for the “party hats” line, which was a sub for “nips”, a line the labor people objected to due to the presence of a minor in the scene. While the movie isn’t nearly as good, it’s a far better commentary than the one on the original movie (which I couldn’t even finish - Felissa Rose was like nails on a chalkboard), so there’s something.
Oh, before anyone bitches: yeah, it’s Bruce Springsteen’s sister.
What say you?
*Michael Myers is represented in the film’s end credits, which copy the font from the original Halloween. It’s depressing that I recognize this.
One of the first HMAD entries was for Fabrice Du Welz’ film Calvaire, which I really dug due to its WAYYYY off-kilter approach to the standard “guy seeks shelter after his car breaks down and runs awful of crazy townfolk” story. So I was eager to check out Vinyan, which was also directed by Du Welz. Unfortunately, it was co-written by Donkey Punch’s Olly Blackburn, which I should have taken as a warning sign that the film would be a bore.
But even taking that into consideration, this movie is far too goddamn uneventful to resonate. And that’s a shame, because at its heart is a pretty interesting and sad story; that of a mother and father’s tragic obsession with finding their son, who was taken a few years earlier. After they think they see him on a charity video (you know, “these children are hungry, and the cameraman couldn’t be bothered to give them some sandwiches, so give us your money”), they meet with the usual shady types and arrange for travel deep in the Burma jungle (unfortunately for them, Rambo had just left with a different group), and then, naturally, run afoul of people they would rather not have dealt with.
Unfortunately, such scenes only make up maybe 10-15% of the entire 95 minute movie. The rest is like Terrence Malick’s version of a jungle/survival movie. If you like looking at trees and people gazing in awe at lush landscapes and such, you’ll love this movie, and maybe I would too - had I not been told it was a horror movie, or if I hadn’t already seen 90 versions of the same movie. Thin Red Line is a great film, and I don’t mind that it’s “slow”, because at its heart is another WWII movie. I’ve seen plenty of those, so I enjoyed the change of pace. But you don’t see a lot of jungle-set movies (horror or otherwise) that aren’t about cannibals, and I was genuinely interested in whether or not they would find their son. Unfortunately, Du Welz and Blackburn didn’t feel the same way.
I mean, Christ, we watch FOUR full minutes of opening credits (not even a full sequence, just the production companies and title) and some sort of filtered rain image before an actual shot appears on the screen. Then it takes another 30 for our couple to get to the jungle. Once they get there... nothing happens. It’s not until the hour mark that the “Feral children” promised on the DVD synopsis appear, and another twenty before they do anything, you know, feral (those hoping for Ils/Them or Eden Lake in the jungle will be sorely disappointed). The only exciting thing that occurs in the first hour is when a guy is suddenly beaten with a stick by some locals, a scene that is never explained beyond a guy that looks like Oldboy saying “He deserves it”.
And again, this wouldn’t even be a big problem had the actual plot been anything but a glorified Macguffin - most of the scenes with the parents (Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Beart) concern them watching one another sleep, staring longingly into space as they wander around, or getting fleeced by the locals (Sewell apparently carries several million dollars in cash in his pockets). You start to wonder if the kid didn’t just run away to find a less boring life.
Back to that DVD synopsis - on the top, written as more of a tagline, it explains “When someone dies a horrible death, their spirit becomes confused and angry. It becomes... VINYAN.” While I don’t argue with the definition, it has fuck all to do with this movie. Only two people die in the entire thing (in the final five minutes), and their spirits apparently had something better to do, because they sure as hell don’t do anything confused and/or angry. Sure, the dialogue appears in the film, but it has nothing to do with the story beyond providing more “local culture”; the movie could have just as easily been called Rice Paddy or maybe Hooker.
(While we’re on the subject of DVD box art, the Variety quote on the cover actually comes from a mixed (at best) review, though to be fair it’s about the cinematography and not the actual plot/acting/whatever else you think would be the subject of a blurb they would put on the cover of their movie.)
The only extra besides some Sony trailers (including yet another ripoff of The Departed; how many of these goddamn movies are they going to make? This one has Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke, for those like me who can’t tell them apart except for which 30ish actors appear in them) is a fifty minute featurette. Die hard fans will have to wait for the inevitable Ultimate Edition that features several more hours of Rufus Sewell wandering about (or, in all seriousness, an explanation for the scene where Sewell suddenly throws a Molotov into a hut, watches it burn for a while, and then screams “Go home, Josh!” over and over). Given the length, it’s obviously more interesting than the usual “featurette”, but insight into the story - which is what I was mainly hoping for - is unfortunately sparse. It’s also mainly in Thai and French; prepare for lots of reading!
Hopefully lots of people will read this review before seeing the film, and thus go into it knowing what they are in for. As I re-watched parts of the film again for review writing purposes (having not bothered to take notes the first time) I found myself warming to it a bit. It’s still needlessly pretentious and indulgent, but it wasn’t as painful to watch KNOWING that it was pretentious and indulgent. Had someone said “Hey, this is a strange drama about some parents’ search for their son”, I might even have dug it. I’m not sure why Sony is trying to market it to the horror crowd; even the brief horror elements in the film’s final 10 minutes are nothing fans will get excited about. It’s just a sad, very French story/travelogue about the dangers of rich folks going into the jungle, and not much more.
Here’s a weird thing: Those who follow my Twitter know I planned on watching Troll 2 yesterday, because I had to work all day and needed something PG-13 (and thus work safe). But I got out early and decided to save Troll 2 for today, opting for, as I joked, “something with tits”. But as it turned out, the movie I watched (Scourge) had no nudity whatsoever, and Troll 2 actually DID* - in the most wonderfully gruesome ending I’ve ever seen in a “kid’s horror movie”, our plucky hero watches a group of Goblins devour his mother before his eyes, with her (green slime covered) breasts in plain view. Huh.
But that’s just part of the nearly indescribable weird charm that Troll 2 oozes throughout its never coherent 95 minute running time. Plot points involve bologna sandwiches, the ghost of a grandfather (one that gives the one in Silent Night Deadly Night a run for his money in the “batshit and terrifying old loon” department), people turning into trees, a Winnebago filled with bisexual nerds, something called “brarkfarst”, and lots and lots of milk (some of which is stored on decidedly non-refrigerated shelves). And of course, Stonehenge, patron saint of nonsensical 80s horror movies. At one point the grandfather says “I’ll create some confusion to distract them”, as if the movie needed any more at that point.
One thing it doesn’t have, of course, is Trolls. Filmed as a movie simply called Goblins, you can’t fault the filmmakers for not having them in there, but you gotta wonder why the producer didn’t pony up 10-15 bucks to simply dub in the word “trolls” over “goblins”. It would still take place in Nilbog, but hey, at least it would show some effort. However, to be fair, it actually DOES have some thematic similarities, strangely enough. Both feature people being turned into trees, have a young hero talking to elderly folks in order to know what’s going on, a jaw-droppingly insane soundtrack, and don’t make a lick of sense. I think the original Trollhad a scene where a ball rolls down some stairs too. Way more in common than any of the Dark Harvestmovies offer anyway.
And for a PG-13 movie, it’s actually pretty harsh. The hero is bloodily turned into a tree during one of the film’s innumerous hallucination sequences, and another girl melts away into green goo. The woman playing the mother is also pretty terrifying in her own right; the spooky stare she offers throughout pretty much every scene in the film is the stuff of nightmares. And again, the film’s finale finds our 8-9 year old kid screaming in horror as his nude mother is devoured. Unlike the “original”, at least I have no trouble qualifying it as a horror movie.
But my God is it awful. The special kind of awful that makes it lovable, sure, but even amongst those films it stands out as particularly dreadful. The plot doesn’t make a word of sense (not to mention the fact that it manages to make villains out of vegetarians), the acting is sub-porn across the board, the dialogue sounds like it was written by a translator (and it’s also repeated - count how many “Good night, dears” there are in the first scene with the kid and his mom), etc. The climax of the film revolves around some people pushing on a rock while the goblins (midgets in potato sacks) leak more green goo and fall over (these shots are all repeated at least twice). Also, in order for the movie to work, every single character, even the villains, need to be functionally retarded.
So in other words, it’s amazing.
I’ve been hearing about this movie for years. My friend Kolleen has been bugging me to watch it since I started HMAD (actually even longer), it frequently pops up on “Worst Movies Ever Made” lists... there’s even a new documentary about it called Best Worst Movie, which focuses on the phenomenon its awfulness has created. You would think that all of the “hype” would result in an underwhelming experience, but while I have certainly seen more inept movies (I refer you to Dark Fields), everyone is right: this movie simply must be seen to be believed. Highly recommended.
What say you?
*It also had a subplot about four leaf clovers, which means it would have also been a fitting movie for St. Patrick's Day. Oh well.
What’s that saying about throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks? I have the same approach to Lionsgate-distributed indies. The sheer volume means that at least SOME of them have to be worth a damn, right? Well, one such film is Scourge. It’s not particularly great or anything, but it’s competently made, occasionally engaging, and features pretty decent CGI, which puts far beyond their usual killer scarecrow garbage.
The story itself isn’t very original; it’s more or less another Hidden retread, albeit in a small Wisconsin town. So you get the icky “transference” scenes (involving a giant parasite going into the victim’s belly button), the “how do we stop it!” scenes, etc, but with suburban locales instead of big city ones. And without a single recognizable face. But that’s OK - the money clearly went to actual production value and special effects, instead of blowing it all to get Sid Haig or Ken Foree or someone in a distracting two minute role.
I also dug a moment later in the film, when a car is crashed, which causes the gas tank to rupture. This leads to what I think is the first time in history where a movie character saw the leaking gas and said “we need a flame!” (he wants to blow up the monster, pinned between the car and a brick wall), rather than have the car just blow up for some nonsensical reason. Little bits like that can help win me over.
I should note that the car in question is NOT the 90s model Chevy Cavalier that the heroine drives. Or at least, drives sometimes. After the car blows up, she and the hero “get out of here!” and run in the opposite direction of her car, seen on the left of the frame:
And earlier in the movie, we see the car parked at the fire station, a scene that occurs while her character is at home:
Maybe there is a deleted twin sister character who she shares the car with, but the DVD has no deleted scenes (or any extras at all, not even the trailer) that can help prove or disprove my theory.
The movie does have a few issues that I couldn’t quite forgive. One is the complete disappearance of the first victim, a firefighter who is actually responsible for the monster/alien thing being unearthed. He passes the parasite on, and then drops dead on the stairs at a hockey game. When shit hits the fan, no one mentions him. So through the whole movie I kept imagining this mangled corpse lying on the stairs at the community rec center. Also, writer Jonas Quastel has apparently never heard of any other states besides California; in the film’s first ten minutes we learn that both the hero AND heroine’s girlfriend have relocated there, and then the hero announces his desire to move there as well. It’s distracting and silly, especially when you are led to believe that none of these people get along with each other, yet it sounds like they have gone out of their way to stay close. The ending is a bit baffling too, it’s a setup for a sequel but it seems rather illogical.
These are minor, but there is one that really bugged me. When people get infected by the parasite, they seemingly don’t realize it (and forget about what I assume is the rather painful process of a giant slug thing worming its way into your belly button). After a while I just assumed that the characters WEREN’T complete morons and that they were under some sort of hypnotic spell, but even that is inconsistent. One girl even completely ignores the fact that part of her boob is falling off, but otherwise functions normally.
But at one point a man gets punched in the jaw, and that jaw flies off, hanging by a vein and some tissue, so I can’t stay mad at the movie.
So is it worth a watch? Well, I dunno. It benefits mainly from simply being better than its indie brethren, but it’s too derivative and mild to compete with other body snatcher type movies. Let’s put it this way: should you find yourself in some insane situation that demands you watch an independent film with a misleading cover (actually the BACK of the DVD is the real liar, depicting a major city in ruins with overturned cars and such) that was released by Lionsgate, it would certainly be the one I’d suggest. It’s even anamorphic!
Before I begin, I’d like to thank Netflix for sending me the fucking full-frame version of Screamers, because I really only care about the middle part of a frame and never look at the 20% that gets cut off for the benefit of complete fucktards. Awesome. In all seriousness, I consider cropping to be just as vile as editing a movie without the director’s consent, and full frame discs should all be smashed and buried next to all of those ET Atari cartridges in New Mexico.
Anyway, even a glorious anamorphic Blu-Ray of Screamers wouldn’t make the movie much better. If anything, it might actually make it WORSE, since one of its two biggest flaws are its criminally bad special effects, and more resolution would reveal more of their terribleness. Other than Peter Weller, no one in the movie is a real draw, and the entire thing takes place in ugly warehouses and computer labs, so where the fuck did the reported 20 million budget go? Did it really cost a lot of money to pull off shit like this?
Hey, our hair is turning blue!
If you are making a special effects based horror movie without any big stars (even Weller was never really A-list, though he certainly adds credibility to any film), the effects should be topnotch. But not a single shot of the Screamers (except when they are just rolling under the ground) looks good; even when they’re not interacting with actors they look incredibly fake due to terrible compositing. Worse, there are never any really great money shots either. Take the first attack - the dude loses his arm, and then a leg. The razors ensure a perfectly straight, nearly bloodless cut, which is annoying enough, but then when the thing goes in for the kill (i.e. the head) we just cut to someone watching it in horror. LAME.
The other, more problematic, er, problem, is that the concept of Screamers that look like humans is never fully utilized, because the movie’s haphazard structure never allows you to care about anyone but Weller. It’s sort of like "The Odyssey", with Weller as Odysseus and all the other characters joining and leaving the story at random. Hell, he doesn’t even meet up with the main group of survivors until past the halfway point! It’s hard to be like “Oh no, that guy’s a robot!?!?” when you barely knew him anyway. It mainly just seems like a quick way around having more terrible robot shots; you can almost hear a producer on the set: “We need another kill scene. But god, those effects... hey, you! You’re a Screamer now!” Worse, the script (by Dan O’Bannon and some other guy who didn’t write Alien) hardly bothers with any sort of significant suspicion and paranoia sequences, which are integral to doing any sort ofThe Thing-style plot.
Actually, I take that back. At one point Weller suspects that Jennifer Rubin’s character is a robot, so he slices her hand open. Upon seeing blood, he wraps it up and apologizes... and then they fuck. While it certainly helps further the notion that Peter Weller is, in fact, a badass, it doesn’t quite qualify as successful suspense. It does give psychopaths a new method of trying to land the object of their desire though, so there’s something.
Weller is, of course, the only really good thing about the movie (OK, some of the music is pretty cool too). He’s the same sort of intelligent hardass he always plays, but unlike say, Robocop, there’s nothing to distract you away from his performance (you know, like, good effects or a worthy story). Over the course of the movie, he gets to shoot a kid in the face, fuck a Dream Warrior, listen to classical music, and display his mastery over a remote control for a holographic person (one that they open a door for, for some reason). He also delivers this line: “If you’re going to be a rock, be a rock! Don’t be a bug!”, after discovering a bug that looks like a rock. I liked that line because it sounds like something I would yell at a completely inanimate object (the scorn I heap on my universal remote is enough to put it into therapy).
The only reason I watched this movie was to prepare myself for the new DTV sequel, which is one of the ever-dwindling number of qualifiable HMAD entries available in the Blockbuster store. But A. they changed the exchange policy, which means I no longer have any reason to rent films from the store, and B. it sucked, so I don’t really want to bother with a sequel to a movie that should have gone DTV itself. But I’m sure I will. At least it’s a widescreen transfer.
After Necrosis, I was hoping Dark Reel would make up for what I already felt was a waste of 20 bucks for the day pass at the Paranoia Film Festival. The dealer room consisted of two dealers and two or three celebrities with nice glossy photos for them to sign for 20 bucks, and the presentation of the films (and many, MANY shorts; none of the ones I watched are worth a mention) was pretty lousy to boot - projecting a DVD in a room with bad acoustics and sunlight coming in is not ideal. Not to mention the uncomfortable seats, all at the same level. It was better than it was at the last Fango convention, but that was a screening room at a horror convention - this was billed as a film festival; they could at least show the films in a better manner.
And of course, had the films been really good, such things could be ignored, but with nonsense like Dark Reel, it just makes everything even harder to endure. At least Necrosis had the good sense to clock in at 80 minutes, whereas Dark Reel runs an unforgivable 110, due to having essentially two horror storylines (a ghost/murder mystery, and the slasher) going on when one would have sufficed. Luckily, it boasted a better cast (and better acting from them), some great lines (Lance Henriksen’s “eggs and bacon” metaphor is possibly the best thing he’s ever said onscreen), and a truly cool mask for the killer. But it’s also needlessly overlong, overpopulated (a slasher film’s climax should never involve more than three people - Dark Reel’s has about seven), and seemingly going out of its way to be uneven.
The biggest problem, which baffled me beyond belief, is that the film is a straight up ripoff of Scream 3, a movie that sucked to begin with (but was at least shorter). Like that film, our killer is the forgotten son of a failed actress with ties to a studio that is run by Lance Henriksen, and his revenge plan involves killing off the cast and crew of a lousy movie. A gothic mansion and a typical Hollywood house with a big pool are again key locations, and much of the humor comes from Hollywood in-jokes. The “slasher takes on a movie crew” plot has been done several times as it is, they can at least make sure that the specifics aren’t borrowed liberally from an earlier film.
And the length could easily be made manageable if it weren’t for the nonstop attempts to add “quirky” humor to the film. Some of it works fine, like the bizarrely ape-ish cop standing in the background while the lead detective questions a suspect, and another guy who wears an onion bib throughout the movie, because those are sight gags that don't take up screentime. What doesn't work as well are characters like the creepy little cook who I assume is supposed to be a red herring, but his role is too insignificant to qualify as a legitimate suspect. Yet, it IS long enough to add another two minutes to the already overstuffed running time. There are also a number of side characters who never die (actors in the film, various female characters), and thus should be extras, not.... whatever you call a role in a slasher movie that’s neither red herring nor victim.
As usual, Tiffany “Boiler Room” Shepis elevates her material with her effortlessly natural performance. Her role is much larger than many of the other ones I’ve watched for HMAD, and the movie is the better for it. She really does “light up the screen”, for lack of a less annoying phrase, and makes the overall film seem more fun than it probably is. It’s a shame she doesn’t get even smaller roles in big films. Even her worst movies (Bryan Loves You) benefit from her presence, so you’d think it would be a no-brainer to cast her as the best friend or crazy ex in some big budget romantic comedy and let someone besides horror fans get to appreciate her talent.
And if nothing else, she’s backed up by some capable co-stars, an increasing rarity. Tony Todd also delights as a cop who has a real problem with people’s nervous ticks, but his character sort of gets phased out of the third act, when he should be kept in as a possible suspect since he’s one of the few red herrings that I actually momentarily suspected. And Jeffrey Vincent Parise as the director is wonderfully douchey. Tracey Walter also pops up as another one of his exposition-prone weirdos; thank you movie. And Edward Furlong (curiously given the “and” billing despite the fact that he has more screen time than anyone besides Shepis) still has an annoying voice, but he’s within his range at least, unlike that Brotherhood Of Evil movie. Everyone else is serviceable, though Lance seems a bit out of his element at times. He’s supposed to be sort of clueless and thus “funny”, but it doesn’t work. However, when he gets into traditional Lance mode (i.e. being a hardass), he shines as always. The adorable Alexandra Holden also appears as a ghost, a nice surprise. However, none of them hold a candle to my good friend Spooky Dan Walter, whose two second cameo (ok, he’s an extra) is by far the best part of the movie.
On the positive side of things, I did get to add another entry into the “Glad I saw the movies when I did” canon: the house where Lance’s character lives is the Spider Baby house (at least, on the exterior), a little nod I wouldn’t have gotten had I not watched Spider Baby two weeks ago (on that note, had I watched it a year or more ago, I probably would have forgotten the reference). So there’s something.
I’ve certainly seen worse, and with some editing and a different, non Scream 3 ending this could actually be pretty decent, but as it is, it’s just too long to really bother with, building to the dullest climax in a slasher movie in quite some time. Besides, you can see Shepis in better movies (Abominable!), and spare yourself the icky site of her making cute with Edward Furlong. And if you need a “killer kills a movie crew” comedic slasher, I’d go with The Backlot Murders, itself no masterpiece (and also overlong) but the humor there is more on target and the victims outnumber the survivors.
GENRE: GHOST (?), PSYCHOLOGICAL (?) SOURCE: “THEATRICAL” (PROJECTED DVD AT A FILM FESTIVAL)
It’s not every day you get to watch a horror movie on a giant boat known for being haunted, so I was pretty excited to attend the Paranoia Film Festival aboard the Queen Mary, located about 30 miles south of me. Lots of movies have been shot there, and I was bound to run into some folks I know, so I bought a day pass for 20 bucks, and arrived in time to give me two hours of looking around before the day’s first feature film, Necrosis, was scheduled to begin. Sadly, within 5 minutes I had seen the entire convention, leaving me ALMOST two hours to wander around and wonder why I bothered. By the time Necrosis started, I had walked the length of the ship, had a drink at the bar, and more or less exhausted all "free" options to kill time on the ship, and thus sat in the theater from 4 until around 930 without leaving.
Anyway, It’s a wonder you don’t see more movies about the Donner party. It’s a freaky story, a true one at that, plus it would be nice to see a cannibal movie that wasn’t set in the jungle. So I was pretty hopeful that Necrosis, a modern day horror tale set at the site of the Donner tragedy, would be pretty solid and maybe inspire a few knockoffs. But I can’t imagine the resulting film would inspire anyone to do anything except make fun of Tiffany (yes, THAT Tiffany, who plays one of the main characters) more than they already do. Of course, in a perfect world, a good concept mangled by poor filmmaking/acting would in fact inspire someone to try to do it right, but that never happens. The only remakes we see, for the most part, are of films that were perfectly good to begin with, while the ones that COULD have been good are left forgotten. But I’m getting off track here.
The main problem with Necrosis is the stilted acting/dialogue that sounds forced throughout the entire film. The group is made up of 6 friends (and maybe a pair of sisters, I never quite figured out the exact relationship between Tiffany and some girl that sort of looked like her), but they have no natural rapport or chemistry. Lots of lines are supposed to reflect their longtime friendships, but none of the actors manage to pull them off properly. Maybe they all hated each other in real life, I don’t know. At one point Tiffany raises her glass and the others follow suit - one of the most common and basic actions in the world - and even that seemed staged. As a result, I never got attached to the story, so when one of them went nuts and began killing everyone, I couldn’t care less.
Of course, screenwriters Robert Michael Ryan and Jason Robert Stephens (2 guys, 6 first names!) don’t seem to care either. Two of the characters are killed off so unceremoniously (and never mentioned again) that it’s possible to miss their deaths entirely. Worse, the only one who sees their bodies is the one who is seeing things, so until the movie actually ends you’re never sure if he just imagined it or not. “Oh it’s over, I guess those 2 folks WERE dead.” And it doesn’t help that the movie never bothers to make it clear whether or not he IS just seeing things or if the ghosts of the Donner party are actually wandering about. It’s one thing to leave a climax up to interpretation, but they leave the entire fucking movie that way.
PLUS, adding to this annoyance is the fact that we aren’t told that the crazy character is schizo until an hour or so into the movie. Had that information been provided early on, the movie could take on an interesting “is he crazy or are the ghosts real?” dynamic, a la Emily Rose. But without any reason to believe that they aren’t real, the curiosity factor is non-existent. And, possibly needless to say, it’s hardly a rollercoaster ride - at one point they cut from a scene of two of the guys playing Foosball to a scene where they all suit up to go Snowmobiling (which leads to a hilarious moment when a girl, who goes off on her own to take pictures, falls into some quicksnow and screams for help, and somehow they hear her despite being on a snowy mountain with wind and at least a quarter mile between them). With a cast of only six, you know the body count will be sparse, but even with that in mind, this one's a snoozer.
Stephens also directed, and he matches the script’s lapses with his mind-numbingly dull visual sense. I can’t be sure, but I don’t think the camera ever moves unless absolutely necessary. He also worked closely with his editor to ensure that the movie constantly called attention to itself, with random cutaways to people smiling at jokes that didn’t work, not to mention what has to be a record for the most amount of cross-dissolves in a single film. At one point, they fade to a different angle of the same room! Maybe if he had used star wipes the entire time, he’d have something, but as is - good Christ it’s fucking annoying.
The only reason that the movie generated any surprise was a result of the baffling credit order. James Kyson Lee (Ando!) gets top billing, even though he is the least developed character (he likes to drink, and... that's about it) and isn't on screen the most. But my initial dismay at seeing the always welcome Penny Drake given 5th billing led to joy when it became pretty obvious that she was the Final Girl. Tiffany gets 3rd billing, despite getting killed halfway through and barely factoring in before then. At least they were on the mark with “Special Appearance By Michael Berryman”, who indeed only has a brief appearance.
So does anything work? Well, again, the concept itself is strong. The cabin where everything takes place is an interest location, and a snowy climate is always welcome in a horror movie. Drake gets her biggest role yet, which made me happy even if it meant forcing her to say even more lame dialogue. And uh... Tiffany is mercifully refrained from singing AND isn’t required to say much either, so there’s something.
As this was a film festival screening, I don’t know when it will be released or who will put it out, but needless to say, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it. Just rent Cold Prey or wait for Adam Green’s Frozen if you’re in need of a worthy snowbound horror movie.
Someone recently expressed outrage that I hadn’t yet seen My Little Eye, and now that I have, I am unsure if he was upset that I had missed a great movie, or if it was simply too late now to appreciate it (if I could remember who the hell it was, I would ask him/her). When it was released, reality TV was all the rage and made up seemingly 60% of the broadcast schedule. Nowadays, the only ones on are pretty much the originals, and in most cases they are left on for ceremonial tradition more than actual relevance.
So yeah, it’s kind of outdated already. Making matters worse, or at least ironic, the ‘mockumentary’ footage movie is now all the rage, so seeing it after so many others, its novelty value is completely non-existent. The only surprise I got was when I saw that the cast of "unknowns" included Bradley Cooper, who pops up briefly as a possible mole for the company that is trying to prevent the group from collecting their million bucks, which they are only days from earning.
But that’s actually the main problem with the movie - they are in there for six months and everything is apparently perfectly fine, yet on the last few days they suddenly all snap? It completely negates the mystery angle: you KNOW someone is pulling the strings, despite the myriad attempts to make the audience suspect that its merely cabin fever FINALLY sinking in. Had they spread the story out a bit over time, it would probably be a lot more suspenseful.
The sound design also causes major damage. There’s a lot of annoying distortion and industrial music playing over “action” scenes, often edited in as jarringly as possible (and cutting out just as abruptly). If it were me, I wouldn’t have ANY music or sound effects at all other than source (meaning, songs on a character’s discman or whatever), but putting grating shit like this all over it just makes it worse, not to mention betrays the “reality” of what we’re watching. The song over the end credits (“Desolation” by Bikini Atoll) is terrific, however.
That said, Eye still packs a small punch. Because of the awkward setup, we’re also spared a long amount of screentime before anything interesting happens. Even though I know that it’s all staged, the isolated locale still makes it kind of creepy. And the actors are all good, and manage to more or less convince me of the reasons not to simply leave the house. And one character is led to his doom by his desire to play the shitty Evil Dead game for the PS2, a bit I found hilarious. You hear Bruce Campbell’s opening animatic voiceover droning on as the guy gets his head cut off!
Going into the extras, you see how maybe some of the time/pace issues may be a result of the re-editing. Apparently, the first cut of the film was four hours long (the final product is 95), and drastically re-jiggered after a disastrous test screening. This is discussed in detail on the making of, which is refreshingly straight forward and interesting, focusing on the director’s faltering film career as well as the editing and such, instead of EPK bullshit. A half hour’s worth of deleted scenes, most of which would occur in the films opening scenes (when they first arrive at the house) is interesting, primarily because it further illustrates how much of the film was lost.
There are also two commentaries. One is the director and producer droning on about the difficulties of making the film and how good the actors are, though there are still a few good anecdotes and observations to hear. The other is an “in character” track featuring “live comments” by the guys running the cameras and setting up the fake scares. That’s an awesome idea, but unfortunately the track is mostly silence - in the first 25 minutes of the movie they provide maybe two minutes’ worth of comments. I didn’t bother finishing it, but if you’re reading this review before seeing the movie and thus spoiling everything anyway, I’d recommend watching the movie with their track on; they hardly ever talk over anyone’s lines, and unless you love the movie unconditionally, there’s no way you’d be able to sit through the movie three times to hear everything.
In the end, it’s an interesting movie... but also already a relic. The reality TV angle is no longer as relevant, and the mockumentary approach has been taken to far greater heights (Paranormal Activity, for starters). And had they simply re-imagined the “twist” and made it known from the start (i.e. showing the bomb first, under Hitchcock’s famous example), it would be an entirely different and vastly more interesting movie, dated or not.
You just can’t go wrong with the Christopher Lee/Terence Fisher combo. Even though Lee isn’t the title character in The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyll, his role is pretty large, and a perfect fit for Lee. He’s not a villain, per se, but he’s a slimy asshole all the same. But you can feel OK liking him, because Hyde is far more despicable. Also, the movie’s just plain good, regardless of who is playing who.
It’s not faithful to the novel, but I like the approach they took here. Jekyll is sort of a schlub, and Hyde is a handsome and charming fellow. While you are deprived of a traditional “monster”, it opens up an interesting dynamic to the proceedings, particularly with regards to Lee’s character. Lee is fucking Jekyll’s wife, and mooching off him to boot. But Hyde becomes his best bro, and they go out drinking and being awesome together. This leads to a truly wonderful scene where a young Oliver Reed pops up and smarts off to Hyde and Lee’s character Paul. Hyde tells him in imitable British fashion to simply “go to hell”, and Reed, drunk as always, attacks him. Lee joins the fracas (which is sadly too brief), resulting in the only Reed v. Lee scene I can recall. What I wouldn’t give to have them in a Face/Off style movie!
Of course, this leads to a bit of a goofy plot hole - no one recognizes Hyde as Jekyll, when the only difference is Jekyll has a fake beard and unkempt hair. As I currently have a (real) beard and am about 8 months overdue for a haircut, I began to wonder that if I cleaned myself up tonight if anyone would recognize me (and if it would mean I could go out partying with Christopher Lee). I mean, I can buy the supporting characters not noticing, but Jekyll’s wife (who Hyde tries to nail)? The eyes didn’t give him away? Come on now.
And it drags a bit at times, particularly during two interminable dance numbers that always seem to find their way into 1960s horror movies. Also, with only three central characters, all of whom are jerks, the movie doesn’t really give us anyone to sympathize with. Exacerbating this is the fact that Lee and the wife are killed off with like 20 minutes to go, leaving most of the final act sort of uneventful, as the only people in danger are folks we don’t really know.
However, there is a scene where an annoyed Jekyll suddenly pushes down a little girl that looks like a female Larry Drake, so all is forgiven:
I haven’t seen a lot of the Jekyll films (there are something like fifty variations on the story), so I have to assume that this wasn’t the only one to take the “Hyde is more appealing” route. It’s an interesting way to go I think, and given the glut of traditional “Hyde as monster” ones, helps make the overall story more enjoyable to sit through again. You know how it will end up, but the different path taken to get there is much appreciated.
What say you?
And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the 6th in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)
I must be slipping in my old age. Not only was I not aware that Shuttle had been playing all week at the Sunset 5 (same theater I was at not two weeks ago for Repo), but I didn’t even know that it was shot in Boston (where I’m from) AND that my best friend did the makeup FX work! Jesus Christ, at this rate, by the time I’m forty I’ll forget about looking at the IMDb entirely.
A couple of friends said that Shuttle was terrible and mocked me for going, but I actually thought it was pretty good (though I DO wish I had waited for DVD, since that’s what the theater was projecting, so it looked like ass). Its only real flaw was length. The first two acts are pretty tight - the girls get on the shuttle in the first ten minutes, and it’s not long after that the driver (Tony Curran) reveals his intentions. But once the van arrives at its destination, where the final thirty minutes or so take place, the movie loses steam. It’s the same problem Red Eye and the Assault On Precinct 13 remake had - if you’re going to have an enclosed location for your entire movie, you can’t have the finale take place somewhere else? It would be like if the end of Die Hard took place in Burbank for some reason. And worse, these scenes go on forever, as our two female leads stop the movie cold in order to have a confessional scene that ultimately serves no purpose. Writer/director Edward Anderson makes up for it with an impressively grim ending (with a truly mean-spirited visual punchline), but it still hurts the movie’s overall quality.
But I was impressed with how they managed to keep the movie from getting too dumb. I mean, you gotta allow some suspension of disbelief for the movie to work at all (Boston is seemingly closed; you never see a single other car or pedestrian in the entire movie), but the various ways of explaining why no one yells “Let’s roll!” and tackle the driver as a group are pretty valid. The driver has been doing this for five years, and you figure that by now he has thought of every possible action a would-be victim would take, and planned accordingly (plus, without spoiling anything further, let’s just say that the fact that since the movie didn’t fall into the same trap many survival horror films do, I was willing to forgive some of its lapses). There’s also a pretty great plot twist halfway through that I must admit I didn’t see coming.
Also, I believe this has to be the first movie in which a character holds HERSELF at knifepoint in order to get the upper hand on her attacker. It’s a wonderfully odd image. And lead actress Peyton List is cute as hell, not to mention believable. Like my beloved Rachel Nichols in P2, she’s not as stupid as some of her survival horror sisthren, and there’s a nice bit of foreshadowing that you think is simply serving as character development that impressed me. Considering how utterly fucking stupid many low budget “survival” horror movies turn out, the fact that any of the writing impressed me at all was shocking.
Oh and my friend’s FX were pretty damn good, though the shit projection kept me from seeing them properly. Since the horror/violence content was pretty minimal (there’s only six people in the entire movie), he didn’t get to show off too much, but some severed fingers and a ghastly head wound were aces. Proud of ya!
With some tightening and slightly better production value, this would be a pretty great movie I think. It’s impressively suspenseful, fairly well acted, and refreshingly light on “torture” (the one such act in the film - a blowtorch removal of a tattoo - occurs off-screen entirely, and is actually related to the plot). And even though the third act drags, it never actually got boring. Plus it offers not one but TWO dudes getting run over, so there’s something. The poster, on the other hand, fucking sucks - it somewhat spoils the third act. Don't look at it!
The other day I was mocking the Italians’ penchant for confusing people by changing the names of their movies in order to get them sold in other territories (i.e. by calling them sequels to movies that they don’t have a goddamn thing to do with). But I think their shenanigans with Demons 3 takes the cake, as there are at least THREE movies floating around under that title, NONE of which are really connected to the series. The Church (Italian: La Chiesa) is one of the three, and is usually considered the best overall film (the other two being Black Demons and The Ogre, the latter being the one US audiences are probably most familiar with as a Demons sequel).
And that is interesting, because unlike the other two films, The Church began life as a legitimate sequel, but director Michele Soavi didn’t want to “stoop” to the level of those movies, and rewrote it to be its own thing (it didn’t stop some foreign distributors from calling it Demons 3: The Church though). So you have a legit sequel that gets changed to be its own thing, and probably the majority of people that have seen it have done so because of its connection that is no longer there. I say again, bless the Italian horror industry.
Personally, I prefer the regular Demons movies. The Church isn’t bad, but it’s awfully slow, and never really builds to a satisfying climax. Around the one hour mark, a traditionally varied group of folks get trapped inside the church (including a Demons-esque elderly couple, and a pair of kids with a motorcycle), and I thought all hell would break loose, but the pace doesn’t pick up at all. There are a couple of stand alone setpieces in which someone is killed, but no traditional “outbreak”. Even the slower Fulci movies had a big zombie finish. In this, several people die when the church begins to collapse, but we don’t even know that until an epilogue tells us.
The reason this bugged me is the fact that the setup involves the church being built on a mass grave. The opening scene has the Inquisition killing an entire village, and all the bodies, plus a horse, are dumped together. I spent the whole movie wondering when the zombie horse would lead a charge of zombie peasants, but it never came to be, which means that the first five minutes of the movie are also its most exciting. There’s a great moment in which a mother hides her baby in a basket under a table. So you’re like ah, this baby grows up to be the hero or whatever”, but pretty much by the time I had completed the thought, a horse runs over, does its leg-kicking thing, and then tramples the basket, with a little splash of blood confirming the infanticide.
Speaking of non-heroes, Soavi also pulls a Psychoand kills off the would-be hero (the traditional visiting American who notices something is amiss) halfway through. Unfortunately, he never really replaces him with anyone else. There’s a priest named Gus who sort of takes over, and there’s a random, clunkily inserted scene of him using a bow and arrow during the first act that seems to exist solely to let us know he’s a badass and thus worthy of being our hero. But he doesn’t do anything! At the end of the movie he sees all the possessed folks chanting, as well as a goat/horse/demon thing fucking the shit out of a broad, but he just walks away.
But that just brings us back to the main problem of the movie: there’s no finale. I kept looking at the time remaining display during the final reel, baffled as to how there could only be 15, 10, 5 minutes left of the film without anything really kicking into high gear. And it’s a shame, because it starts off pretty great, with lots of atmosphere and a welcome bit of Prince of Darkness feel to the proceedings. Soavi’s a great director too, the Argento influence is obvious, but he gives it its own feel. And Goblin’s score is top notch, I would say it’s probably the best of theirs I have heard in a non-Argento movie (though Argento produced and co-wrote).
And, of course, there’s just the whole Italian-y feeling of the whole thing. There’s a mural in a church depicting people being murdered by goat devils, a mother reminding her husband to chop the onions as he is dragging their hysterical daughter around and shoving soap in her mouth, and a small role by Giovanni Lombardo Radice (yay!). There are also two moments that made me remember why I love illogical cinema in the first place. One is of a little fat kid who suddenly yells “Hi-yo Silver, away!” and runs up the main aisle of the church (I don’t think we ever see him again). The other is when the aforementioned little girl (Asia Argento - who else?) runs into a bride with the green soap foaming out of her mouth, and thus smears it all over the bride’s wedding dress. Now, any normal bride would cry, shriek, yell at people who had nothing to do with the accident, and more than likely remove the head of the little girl. But this is an Italian horror movie from the 80s, so what does she do? Nothing. She sort of laughs and continues with her photo shoot, green soapy smear be damned. It’s breathtaking.
Plus, the movie offers one of my all time favorite death scenes - a girl is being lowered into a tunnel when she sees two glowing orbs approaching. As her eyes adjust to the darkness, she realizes that it’s a subway car, but before she can be pulled up... well, see for yourself:
And before you bitch about spoilers, I took that shot from the damn trailer, which also gives away just about every other highlight in the movie. It’s also hilariously muted, simply playing music the entire time in order to hide the Italian dialogue and/or bad dubbing. Yet this didn’t stop the editor from cutting in shots of people simply talking with nothing “cool” occurring behind or around them. The only other extra is a bio of Soavi, which is too brief to be of much use and spends more time on the films he didn’t direct than the ones he did.
I think I will like this one more on a second viewing. There’s a lot of cool shit here, and now that I know that there’s no big finale, I can instead focus on the things that do work well and maybe find its lapses a little easier to forgive. Luckily it’s been dubbed into English, so I don’t have to worry about forgetting to read the subs, like I often do (I like looking at what’s actually happening!).
Everyone remembers their first trip to a Grindhouse night at the New Beverly... because they probably got mad at how late the first movie started. While you’d probably never want to set your watch to any movie start time there, the GH nights in particular tend to run later than scheduled. Why? Well, there’s usually a guest, a raffle, a super-sized trailer reel.... plus, unlike most theaters, the Bev won’t start a movie when there’s still a lot of people trying to get snacks. But me? I love the delays, because it means that on a night when I am working late, I can leave my office in Burbank at 7:50 and still make it over the hill, thru Hollywood, and into my usual seat at the Bev in time for something like Encounters Of The Spooky Kind II (Cantonese: Gui Yao Gui), which was scheduled to begin at 7:30. In fact, I got there in time for the raffle and trailers, which means I could have stopped for beer, but I digress.
Anyway, while not as awesome as I Love Maria (which wasn’t horror, but was still one of the top 10 “discoveries” I’ve made at the Bev), it’s certainly better than Return Of The Demon, my previous “kung-fu horror” movie. A big part of that is Sammo Hung, who stars in Encounters. You might know him from his short-lived show Martial Law, or as the sidekick in a few Jackie Chan movies, but you really owe it to yourself to check out one of his starring roles. The cool thing about Sammo is that he’s a bit chunky, so he looks like a normal guy, yet he’s able to pull all these moves off (long before wire-fu took over and gave guys like Jet Li a lame excuse to be lazy). And he can play a martial arts student believably, while retaining the everyman feel that a guy like Jet Li can’t quite pull off.
Another thing I dig about these movies is the kitchen sink attitude. I can only think of a handful of American movies that embrace so many genres in one film (Princess Bride comes to mind), but a Hong Kong movie? I’d be confused if it stuck to one or two genres. Encounters is equal parts a kung fu movie, a love story, a buddy comedy, and a horror movie. And even the horror is varied; you get vampires, ghosts, zombies, and possession (hence the all encompassing “Supernatural” tag). And the sad/funny thing about it is that it’s wholly commercial. I can understand why a studio might be unwilling to take a chance on a Repo - it’s a weird movie that requires total focus to understand. But this is nothing of the sort - it's fairly simple and immensely entertaining, so why aren’t our studios making their own cross-genre movies? Why is Princess Bride (and to a lesser extent, Armageddon, which functions as a sci-fi, buddy, comedy, action, and romantic movie) the exception and not the rule?
Oh well, it just makes me enjoy movies like this all the more. Sure it’s got some pacing issues, and the kitchen sink attitude means that entire plot threads and characters get sort of phased out of the movie (Sammo’s girlfriend, for example, is nowhere to be seen in the final 20 minutes or so, despite the fact that she’s the reason why the villain is after him in the first place), but that doesn’t diminish the fun. The martial arts action is exceptional, and while it’s not exactly scary, the “anything goes” approach keeps the horror elements constantly surprising. The opening scene has Sammo and the girlfriend facing off against a pair of vampires, resulting in a four-way neck biting scene that left me cheering. Then the main plot kicks in, which concerns a ghost, but that doesn’t stop a pair of zombies from attacking Sammo in one of the film’s best fight scenes.
Also, this movie may have inadvertently invented the “fetch quest”. Those who play MMORPGs are familiar with the term - it refers to a quest in which your character has to go collect 10 particular mushrooms or 20 pieces of wolf in order for a non-playable character to make their trademark recipe, which they will share with you (or inexplicably give you a suit of armor). It’s an annoyance in the games; not only does it make little sense (why are they trusting a stranger with this?), but it also can be time-consuming, particularly if the items are rare and other players are trying to get them as well. Anyway, early on in the movie, Sammo is instructed to get 60 (something Asian)s in order to make “Congee”, a delicacy that looks quite terrible if you ask me. It is unknown if Sammo dinged as a result of this.
The movie also has what may be my favorite “awful” line in a movie ever. Not that I think the actual act (which isn’t carried out) is funny by any means, but there is something strangely comical about a bad guy exclaiming “I’ve never raped a ghost before!”. Maybe you had to be there.
You may have noticed that this is a sequel. I haven’t seen the original, but it was made 10 years prior, and Sammo’s character has a different name, so I am guessing any connective narrative tissue is minor, if present at all. However, Tall F'n Joe won a copy of the original during a raffle, so maybe he will be kind enough to bring it next time so I can borrow and check for sure. I’d hate to miss any subtleties.
In this day and age, you would think that getting an R rated cut of a super gory Italian movie would take MORE effort, but that didn’t stop Netflix from sending me a 90 minute version of Patrick Still Lives (Italian: Patrick Vive Ancora), despite promising the uncut 96 minute version on the website and even the damn sleeve that the disc was mailed in. Why do people even stock these things? The fact that they were ever made at all is beyond me (even with the cuts, the movie is still pretty graphic and sleazy, so cutting it doesn’t even serve the basic purpose of altering a film without the director’s consent), but the second that the uncut version was released, the R cut discs should have been tossed and burned. I will do my part by scratching the goddamn thing to high heaven.
The thing that strikes me the most about this movie is the unparalleled amount of nudity it contains. I’ve seen pornos that were more chaste. There are five women in the movie and every single one of them spends a good chunk of time in the nude. One of them appears nude more often than clothed, in fact. Even a scene that shouldn’t really have any nudity - a girl walking around the spooky courtyard prior to her obvious doom, for example - has more full frontal shots than just about any other horror film I can recall, and that’s just one sequence! And at least two of the film’s deaths involve the vagina, leading me to wonder whether this film was designed as a softcore and the horror stuff got added in later. The score is certainly “bowm chicka bowm BOWM!” esque at times, at any rate.
I especially wonder about this because the horror plot doesn’t make a word of sense, even by Italian standards. A guy gets bottled in the face after his car breaks down (all of that occurs in the film’s first 20 seconds, mind you) and goes into a coma, where he develops telekinesis and under the control of his evil doctor father, gets revenge on six people, one of whom was responsible for the bottling incident. Now, I get bottles broken over my face all the time, and I’ve never gotten any telekinetic powers from it, so that aspect already bugged me, but how the hell does one track “everyone” who drove on a road one particular day?
But who cares really, as the plot is only there to pass the time in between nude/gore scenes. The body count may be kind of low, but director Mario Landi makes up for it by staging some pretty awesome death scenes. A woman is eaten by dogs, a guy gets hooked in the neck and hung, and in my personal favorite, a typically skeleton-less Italian woman is decapitated by an automatic window. The film’s most notorious kill, a poker through the vagina and out of the mouth, seems to have gotten the brunt of the editing, so I can’t comment on its awesomeness. However, there was a wonderfully gory one in Mother of Tears, so I’ve had my fill of such things anyway.
Another great thing about the movie is how much everyone hates each other. There are at least three scenes of people smacking each other around (including a pretty epic catfight). And the namecalling!!! In the first 15 minutes alone, people are called assholes, cunts, whores, cows, mannequins (?), idiots... you name it, someone is needlessly referred to as one, usually in their first appearance in the film. Even the non-mean-spirited dialogue is worth noting, particularly when a doctor claims that one character’s death “was due to a fatality”. But that’s all fine by me, especially considering how long it takes for people to start dying off.
As is typical of Italian films, this was an acknowledged ripoff/”sequel” to a movie they had nothing to do with, in this case, Richard Franklin’s Australian film Patrick (which, oddly enough, I almost bought yesterday, without even realizing Netflix was sending me this one my way). I haven’t seen that film, but I don’t think it matters any more than it would if you saw Fulci’s Zombi (aka Zombi 2) before seeing Dawn of the Dead (aka Zombi). Ah, the Italians, needlessly confusing horror fans for over thirty years.
The DVD has a couple interviews worth a look. One is with Gianni Dei, who plays the title role (well, the Patrick part of the title anyway). It’s funny because he’s never seen the movie, considers his acting career something of a triviality, and generally seems bored with the whole affair. The other one, with producer Gabriele Crisanti is far more detailed. He doesn’t hilariously berate everyone in the world like many other Italian horror filmmakers do in these sort of things, but he offers up some good information nonetheless. There is also a still gallery, which I skipped on the grounds of “I just saw the movie so I don’t need to see photos of it”.
What say you?
And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the 5th in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)
It’s always a nice surprise to watch a J-Horror film and discover that it has nothing to do with vengeful ghosts and/or electronic devices. So even though Marebito (recommended by HMAD reader "becca") is ugly (because it was shot on DV) and muddled, I had a good time watching it, and more importantly, I never got the impression that I had already seen the same story told with a different item from Best Buy.
Even more surprising was that it was directed by Takashi Shimizu, who helmed the Ju-On (Grudge) films, which are among my least favorite of the entire sub-genre. In fact, Marebito was shot in about 8 days in between two of the Ju-Ons. It’s pretty ironic that a throwaway project made to kill time in between two other movies ended up being superior (in my opinion), but there you go. Maybe I should finally get around to watching What Lies Beneath.*
Of course, being a J-horror film, it does have a fair share of baffling plot development; primarily - the lack of a clear explanation for what happened to our protagonist. Did he really go into an underground city and find this girl? Or was it all in his head? Is the girl actually a vampire of some sort, or the result of him simply raising her as one? Was the guy on the phone real? If there’s a clear cut answer, I sure as hell didn’t catch it. And since the movie was ugly to look at, for once I was paying pretty close attention to the subtitles. I have a feeling that the film would work better on a 2nd viewing, but time does not allow for such things (I will be keeping the movie though, Blockbuster’s receipt claims it will only set me back $3.99. I can swing it.)
Also the movie sort of breaks one of my cardinal rules of horror movies, and that is placing the first appearance of the “monster” past the halfway mark. If your movie is only 90 minutes with credits, then the monster/killer/whatever should do its first thing before the 45 minute mark. Here, it’s around 52 and some change by the time we learn exactly what the “strange girl” is craving when it comes to nourishment. Sure, it’s a nice surprise, but it’s not only a tad too late, it’s also pretty clunky (the guy cuts his finger and like hours later he’s still bleeding all over the place?). If they are going to make us wait, it should be the most epic reveal in history. Like, I dunno, she smells the blood from his neighbor’s period or something.
What’s cool about the movie, however, is that for the first time I can recall in one of the J-horror films from the past 10 years or so, there is evidence that they are aware of other cultures. I can’t be certain, but the “underground city” that the guy investigates seems dropped in from a Lovecraft story, and that’s BEFORE he refers to it as “The Mountains of Madness”. He also refers to Deros, a reference to the work of Richard Shaver. Usually, for better or for worse, the only sort of literary (or pop culture in general) references I see in Eastern films are from their own country, so it was interesting to see it tackled in a rather subtle way. Since the US is so adaptation-oriented, I wonder how a Stephen King story or something would translate if done by someone like Shimizu or the Pang Brothers.
The DVD contains about 45 minutes’ worth of interviews with Shimizu, star Shinya Tsukamoto, and producer Hiroshi Takahashi. They should be edited down, but the rather half-assed presentation results in some unintentional hilarity. During Shimizu’s interview, the cameraman (who apparently has ADD, or ants in his pants) suddenly pans the camera to the window and zooms in, seemingly to white-balance the camera. There’s also a lot of murmuring (not subtitled) during all three interviews. Shinya even answers his questions too quickly and we sit and watch while the interviewer tries to come up with some other questions with the cameraman. I found this ironic, because today I was editing my own interviews with the cast and crew of the Last House remake, and was trying to find ways to edit around such moments. Apparently, I was putting too much effort into them, as no one will be paying to watch those. Luckily, the actual content is pretty interesting, particularly Shinya, who is also a director in his own right.
Like Bloody Reunion and The Host, it just goes to show you that the better films coming out of Japan, Korea, etc. are also the ones that sort of fly under the radar over here. And for all I know, maybe there’s actually a whole bunch of them and they just haven’t found US distribution (a problem that will likely be exacerbated now that Tartan has shut down). So, (*Robert Stack voice*) If you or anyone you know has any information about a wealth of J-horror movies that concern monsters or slashers instead of angry little girl ghosts, please call our toll-free hotline at 1-800-HorrorMovieADay’s recommendation thread.
What say you?
*What Lies Beneath was filmed with the same crew as Cast Away, while Tom Hanks lost (or gained, I forget the order) the weight necessary for the two different "eras" of the latter film. I've never seen Lies, but since Cast Away is one of my all time favorite movies, maybe I should.
You will be seeing a lot less “Store Rental” sources after this, as Blockbuster has foolishly revised their “trade at the store” program. Now you don’t get another one mailed to you until you return the one you rented at the store. They try to make it sound like a good thing, by pointing out that they have removed due dates for movies rented at the store by trading in an envelope, but this is actually BAD for movies like Dorothy Mills, where they only get a couple of copies. I could theoretically keep this movie forever and deny a customer who relies on renting films in the store from ever seeing it. Plus, it goes without saying that I burn through a lot of rentals, and by essentially halving the number that I can have out at once, I might cancel my Blockbuster account entirely and upgrade my Netflix, which has a superior selection and the Xbox viewing thing for when I am desperate, whereas Blockbuster now offers no perks whatsoever (the instore trade-in being the ONLY reason I hadn’t already given up on them).
Anyway, Dorothy Mills is the type of movie I enjoy but would probably never recommend. You can’t say “it’s good” to anyone, because they will be bored by it (it’s a slow movie). And if you TELL them it’s slow, they probably won’t bother anyway. Like The Return, Dorothy is a movie that’s best to go in without even knowing what genre it is, and enjoying the story for what it is rather than obsess over the fact that there aren’t any kills or “action”.
And even for me, it’s a bit too slow at times. Certain aspects of the story seem superfluous, like a weird bit where the town’s men kill an animal and one of them gets blood smeared on his face. It’s, I guess, supposed to further drive home the “in this village we do things our own way and like it just fine” angle, but by that time in the movie, the point had already been made clear. Also, there are numerous flashbacks to the key incident that drives the plot, and some of them could be trimmed (i.e. do we really need THREE scenes of the 3 kids driving recklessly, especially when the accident occurs at a different time entirely?). Some trimming could have worked wonders and possibly even swayed a few folks who are dismissing the film as a whole because of its non-spectacle approach.
What DOES work is the performances (particularly of the title character, who needs to play about 6 different characters, technically), the sad story, and the locale. I dunno why Ireland doesn’t get used more often for horror movies; not only is it always appropriately dreary (there’s a hilarious part where someone comments on it being a beautiful day, but they don’t actually show you the exterior world as it was likely overcast at best), and simply interesting looking to boot. Doing a period piece wouldn’t take much effort, nor does it seem completely lost in time. Also the crew would have easy access to whiskey. Oh, maybe that’s why.
There is one bit of the film I chuckled at, because it seemed rather silly. Our heroine’s requisite “family tragedy” involves the accidental drowning of her son. So when it comes time for her to clutch a photo of him, we see that the photo is of the kid... near the water. I have to assume that as his mother, she would have plenty of photos of him. So the one she takes around with her bears a full blown reminder of how he died? I mean, it’s one thing if the deceased a soldier who died in the war and you wanted to honor that by carrying a photo of him in uniform around, but that’s not the case for a little kid. That’d be like if your kid got decapitated on the roller coaster at six flags because he stood up on it, and your prized photo is that 12 dollar blurry thing with him and 3 other people that they offer you as you exit the ride.
The DVD’s sole extra besides the trailer is a needlessly obnoxious making of piece. It runs about a half hour, and it’s the typically bland affair one would expect, but they make it damn near unwatchable for an English speaking audience with its subtitles. Apparently designed for France, French subtitles are burned into the thing for whenever someone is speaking English. However, half the time people are speaking French, so English speaking folks need to turn the English subs on, but the subs stay on even when people are speaking English! At times, half the screen is covered in text. A little effort next time, Weinstein/Genius?
Ultimately, the DVD’s biggest blunder is comparing it to The Exorcist on the cover blurb (even using the same font!). That just sets people up for disappointment right off the bat, and it’s even more frustrating when it’s not even that accurate and mars an otherwise excellent cover. Sure, a little girl swears and a priest tries to help, but that doesn’t make it “a contemporary take” on Friedkin’s film. There are enough legitimate ripoffs of that movie in the world, we don’t need other ones getting thrown into the mix when it’s not even warranted.
I think part of the reason I hate so many of those no-budget horror movies from the past couple years (most recent example would be Dark Harvest 3) is that they don’t have any creativity or daringness about them. They make generic slashers and “torture porn” movies in an attempt to fit in with current trends and get their film picked up for pennies and unceremoniously tossed onto the bottom-most shelf of a Blockbuster. But Jack Hill, working with a budget that was probably identical to those films (inflation considered), made Spider Baby, a film that STILL doesn’t give you the impression that you’ve already seen it 20 times, even 45 years later.
A common problem I run into when watching older movies for HMAD is that I’ve already seen a number of the newer films that have copied/homaged/just plain ripped it off, but that wasn’t an issue with Spider Baby. In fact, the only plot point I saw coming was the survival of one character, and that’s because the bulk of the film is his flashback (and even the 2nd part of his bookend contained a nice little surprise to make up for it). Also, since the film is rather obscure, plot points haven’t been spoiled over and over. Consider a film like Psycho, where it’s almost impossible to enjoy the film’s two major twists anymore as audiences did when the film was first released, and you can kind of get the appreciation I felt here. I doubt anyone will feel the same way in 40 years when they discover fucking Dark Ride.
It’s also a damn funny movie. Dark humor is pretty timeless I think, and if anything this type of comedy is more accepted nowadays, which makes Spider Baby a prime choice for rediscovery. Indeed, it’s showing at the New Bev in a few weeks, and I expect it to be a fantastic screening. Helping matters will be the in-theater presence of Sid Haig, who appears in the film as a sort of mutant mongoloid. It’s a terrific performance, and it also just kind of makes you yearn for the days when Haig’s appearance in a low budget horror film wasn’t a sign of mediocrity, like it is today.
Speaking of actors taking paychecks, I was also surprised to see how much Lon Chaney appeared in the film. I was expecting his role to amount to little more than a quick cameo, perhaps in a scene that had zero bearing on the actual film, but Chaney’s role is pretty significant, and he interacts with all of the cast in equal measures. Actually the film as a whole is like an ensemble; no character really dominates in terms of screentime. He gets a number of the laughs (there’s even a Wolf Man reference, possibly the first nerdy meta-injoke in a horror movie), and even sings the theme song (which sounds like Monster Mash set to the theme of the Batman TV show), but his character is also rather tragic. Again, that’s part of the surprise of the film - you expect him to be a scenery chewing typical villain, but Chaney actually delivers a sympathetic, fully-rounded performance.
The only real issues are technical ones. It’s a rather short film, so I assume things had to be dragged out in order to reach an acceptable runtime. So we get like, 10 straight minutes of a guy looking around the house at one point. Hill’s framing also gives away some shortcuts, such as a scene that obviously got shot at different times. The result? An actor disappears entirely:
Later, his framing also gives one otherwise touching scene a bit of unintentional hilarity:
Go Chaney!
Minor complaints though, and I only mention them to make sure it’s clear that I think this is a great movie. You only notice minor flaws when you’re actually engaged in the narrative and performances; the framing could reveal the goddamn catering table during a Dark Harvest movie and I’d never notice.
The DVD also has some strong extras worth your time. The commentary with Hill and Haig is filled with tidbits and anecdotes, and Hill sounds like an older version of 30 Rock’s Kenneth, so there’s something. He also inadvertently refers to the civil rights movement as a shame when discussing how it ended the career of racist black comic Mantan Moreland. Then we get a trio of featurettes, one about the music, another about the house where the exteriors were filmed, and finally a retrospective that has new interviews with just about every living performer from the film (Spider Baby Jill Banner sadly died in 1982 after some fucking drunk hit her on the 101). There’s also a deleted scene (not entirely necessary) and an “alternate credit sequence”, which is just the exact same credit sequence albeit with the title Cannibal Orgy instead.
Movies like Spider Baby are the exact type of ones I wanted to see when I began doing HMAD (so I owe some thanks to HMAD reader CannibalCrowley, who recommended it over a year ago!). It’s safe to assume that without “forcing” myself to watch everything I get my hands on, I never would have gotten around to seeing it (I might not even be able to attend the New Bev screening due to work, but damned if I won’t try), and that would be a shame. Even if I didn’t like it, I’d much rather watch something offbeat and unique than the umpteenth Breakdown movie, even a technically advanced one. Kudos to Hill and his cast/crew for delivering an example of the former, which 45 years later can help break my monotonous dealings with the latter.
I always forget how many TV movies Wes Craven made in the 70s and 80s. And when I watch one, I realize what a shame it is that he never took part in Masters of Horror. Unlike say, John Carpenter, his TV work stacks up favorably to his theatrical releases. In fact, Summer Of Fear (aka Stranger In Our House) actually DID play theatrically in Europe. Sure, they aren’t going to make you forget about Nightmare on Elm St or Shocker, but the level of quality is far beyond what you might expect given the “TV Movie” pedigree.
Unlike Invitation To Hell, this one’s actually pretty serious. It’s based on a YA novel by Lois Duncan (who also wrote the novel for I Know What You Did Last Summer, which was adapted by Scream-writer Kevin Williamson. Everything’s full circle), so the movie’s protagonist is a young girl and her problems are teen-centric (fighting a fellow girl over a boy, her love of a horse, fighting with parents, etc), but it’s not like today’s teen horror films that can’t possibly appeal to an older audience. You look at something like Molly Hartley, which is a crushing bore, and then this, which kept me engaged throughout, and you see the difference 30 years can make.
The only real problem is that a key bit of information is shoehorned in far too early in the narrative. SPOILERS AHEAD. The movie is about a woman coming to live with her aunt and uncle after her parents are killed in an auto wreck. But before we even see the girl, we are randomly told that her parents’ housekeeper was in the car with them when they died while the girl was home alone, and that the family has never seen what she looked like. In other words - the girl’s not their niece at all. Maybe some might not pick up on it, but for me it gave away the “twist” almost instantly (before the horror element had even been introduced!), and I can’t help but wonder if the information had been revealed a bit later, and in a more natural way, if I might not have seen it coming. It also negates some of the creepiness - she sets her designs on her “uncle”, but since I knew they weren’t really related I wasn’t as enthralled with the icky factor as I usually would be.
That aside, I dug it. The basic “someone isn’t who they claim to be” plot is usually a winner, and I almost always enjoy seeing it unfold. And by keeping the supernatural elements to a minimum, it keeps the movie from getting too silly or ridiculous. Of course, the downside is that it’s not particularly action-packed, but to counter that, Linda Blair’s character becomes suspicious of the girl almost instantly, and the bulk of the movie is about her trying to convince everyone else that she’s evil. I don’t want to watch the two of them be all buddy buddy for an hour when I know perfectly well that they will eventually be at each other’s throats.
Also the movie offers a young Fran Drescher. I have to admit - I think she’s hot as hell (when she’s not talking), so to see her at a younger age, without the Jersey hair, was a nice little bonus. She’s not in the movie much, and that surprised me as well - I figured she was obvious fodder, but she gets phased out of the movie without coming into any harm. And apparently her voice is real; the movie is set in CA but she still has her thick Queens brogue.
Being a TV movie, the violence is kept to a minimum, but Craven does deliver not one but two “Horse goes nuts” sequences, both pretty terrifying (I am mildly afraid of horses), and the ending is a hoot as well - a car chase, girls whaling on each other, demon pancake makeup.... plus the old standby: a car exploding in midair as it careens over a cliff. I always wondered how this behavior got started. Obviously a guy had to set an explosive in the car, so did the first guy just do it too early and it’s been a tradition/homage to it since? Or do cars really explode apropos of nothing beyond being moving while not connected to land?
The movie also contains one of the best ironic lines of all time. During one of the many scenes of Blair and the girl yelling at each other, Blair yells “I can’t stand a thing about you, and that includes your hair!” If you’ve seen the movie, you know that Blair’s hair could best be described as “the world’s largest clump from the washing machine lint trap”, so to hear her mocking someone else’s is pretty amazing. That’d be like me mocking someone’s beard.
(My beard sucks.)
The DVD was released by Artisan before they were bought by Lionsgate, so I am not sure if it’s still in print or if LG has re-released it. This one has a commentary by Craven and producer Max A. Keller. Craven has a good memory (he mentions Scream, so the production was at least 20 years old by the time the track was recorded) and tells some nice anecdotes, but overall it’s kind of dry (he does mention Cursed briefly - worth noting because it’s seemingly before the project became a hellhole and thus he isn't venomous about it). Some cast and crew bios are also tossed in for those who aren’t aware of the IMDb. It was a TV movie, so it was probably shot full frame, so I can’t complain about that. I will laud the transfer itself though; unlike several other TV films from the era, it has been given a sharp, colorful transfer. The print has dirt and flecks on occasion, but its THX quality compared to Somebody’s Watching Me (Carpenter’s TV film from around the same time), and given a 5.1 mix to boot.
So I say again - why aren’t there any made for TV horror films anymore? You can get away with more “R Rated” type material thanks to CSI and such, and since the horror crowds are thinning for theatrical releases anyway (Friday the 13th may have the distinction of being the first movie to gross 45 million on its opening weekend and yet fail to make 70 overall), you’d think the TV market would be pretty enticing for say, NBC (who originally aired the film), who has not a single show in the top 20 and could use an out of the box hit.
When Grindhousecame out, Eli Roth often claimed that the inspiration for his faux trailer Thanksgiving came from the fact that there had never been a Thanksgiving themed slasher movie during the slasher heyday, when every holiday was being used as a backdrop (I don’t recall an Easter one either). Well, Roth was mistaken, as the film Home Sweet Home, released at the tail end of 1981, was indeed centered on a Thanksgiving meal being ruined by a slasher.
But in Roth’s defense, the Thanksgiving angle is pretty goddamn flimsy. If not for the fact that a family is coming together and the main dish is turkey, I don’t really think the holiday has any bearing on the film at all. It’s not like everything is closed and such because of the holiday; the family lives in the middle of nowhere. Plus, the mom and dad leave (separately) to go to a store and gas station, respectively, so the holiday apparently didn’t really affect retail locations either (don’t forget, back in the day - most if not all places DID close on major holidays).
Ultimately, I suspect that is just a byproduct of the film’s rushed/improvised feel. You know how Roger Corman tossed together a Fantastic Four movie in a blind panic because his rights on the property were expiring? I have a feeling that Home Sweet Home was made as quickly as possible by some folks who wanted to do a “Thanksgiving slasher” before anyone else did. Hence the endless scenes of people saying and doing things that no one would actually sit down and write. It’s as if screenwriter Thomas Bush just wrote a script filled with vague scene concepts. “OK, in this scene you talk about the phone being out - GO!”. As a result, you get people repeating things ad nauseum, making the movie feel like a rather bland episode of 24.
Also, I swear the movie was produced by Pep Boys. No less than 20 minutes of the film resolves around cars breaking down or people talking about said cars breaking down. And it’s not even in the traditional “she’s running from the killer and the car doesn’t start” way. No, someone will ask to take a car to go to the store, and the owner will explain that the battery is on the fritz, so someone else lets them take HIS car, which has a faulty fuel gauge. Then there’s a lengthy scene where the family’s patriarch steals gas from an abandoned station wagon, then his battery gives out (again) so he tries to steal the wagon’s battery as well. And of course, the made up dialogue never lets us forget each car’s problems and what the drivers could be doing about it (“well he said the battery is dying, so maybe he went to the gas station to get a new one.”). It’s actually kind of charming in a peculiar way.
The killer is worthy of his own paragraph for sure. You might recognize him as Jake Steinfeld (better known as the Body By Jake guy), and that’s because he wears no mask or costume of any kind, a la Final Exam. But unlike Final Exam’s killer, this guy is memorable in that he laughs almost nonstop, and makes Adam Sandler faces as he kills folks. He even racks up a couple of great kills, including an electrocution by electric guitar, and during the aforementioned “battery theft” scene he actually dives out of the bushes and sort of body slams the hood, crushing the guy tinkering away underneath it.
He’s also one of the film’s two surprisingly recognizable stars. The other is a 4 or 5 year old Vinessa Shaw, playing the requisite little girl of the family. She doesn’t have much to do (her biggest scene requires her to watch a talking mime do magic tricks), but I like to think it was her performance here that convinced Stanley Kubrick to hire her for Eyes Wide Shut. Speaking of the mime - this guy is truly a piece of work. Besides the fact that he talks, he also carries the guitar around with him at all times, playing it as he annoys everyone around him at all times. At one point he busts in on what I THINK are his parents (the family genealogy is never made clear) and refers to it as “his lucky day”. I’m sorry, but if I saw my mom and dad going at it, the last word I’d use to describe it would be “lucky”. And I think he’s a real mime too - his only other credit is playing one in an episode of Wonder Woman. So either that or he suffered the absolute worst typecasting in cinematic history.
One of my notes reads “FY”. ...I? No idea what the hell that one’s about.
I got to thinking as the body count (slowly) piled up - I think the real reason that they never made any “true” Thanksgiving slashers is that it’s kind of depressing to watch a family bite it, as opposed to a group of friends. If you think about other family based horror movies, they usually introduce “the daughter’s boyfriend” or maybe an aunt to provide the kills so that the core unit (two parents, two kids) can survive, but that’s not the case here. Except for the Shaw character (whose relation to the family is, like all the others, incredibly vague), the entire family is wiped out, leaving only the son’s girlfriend alive. That’s a bummer. Luckily, without any sort of understanding of how they relate to one another, it’s not as upsetting as it could be.
So is the movie any good? Oh heavens no. It’s inept on every level (good luck trying to make out anything that is happening during half of the climax - apparently in the mad rush to get this thing in theaters they forgot to rent lights), plotless to the point where you can never tell if you’re 5 minutes or 5 hours away from its conclusion, and painfully slow despite only being 80 minutes long. But there’s just so much quirkiness to enjoy (I haven’t mentioned the peas) that I couldn’t help but be relatively charmed and delighted by the whole affair. I mean, at one point our would-be hero finds a corpse in the driveway, and rather than scream or make a mad dash back to safety, he rather casually says “What is going ON here?”, as if he had just found, I dunno, a ham sandwich under his bed. Even the main menu is a bit “off” - it’s a screenshot of the mime doing a magic trick, with “Play Movie” the only option. Chapter marks are there, but there is no accessible scene selection (which means I shouldn’t complain when studios try to pass off such things as a bonus feature).
If you’re a fan of things like Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 or Black Xmas, you will definitely dig this movie in the same way. A film with a complete lack of political correctness mixed with an abundance of mean-spirited glee is always welcome in my home. I mean, an old lady gets splattered across a windshield during the opening credits. You KNOW that’s worth a look.
What say you?
And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the 4th in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)
Finally, a movie I like on this Hammer set. Like Phantom of the Opera, I just don’t really care for the overall gist of the Mummystory, but The Curse Of The Mummy’s Tomb is much more exciting than the original Universal version, and has the traditional “guy in bandages” monster as opposed to a well-dressed Karloff, so I left feeling pleased overall.
It starts off pretty similar to the Universal one; complete with flashbacks and such. But once the Mummy’s tomb is opened (after an ENDLESS scene where the guy rambles on and on about where he found it and how he got it there and blah blah blah) it becomes more of a traditional monster movie. None of that eternal love bullshit, I want monster action! It’s hardly action packed, but there’s some good thrills and the Mummy makeup design (by Roy Ashton) is pretty awesome. Plus there’s a bit of a mystery angle to the film; there are like 5 stuffy British guys who all have a stake in the fame and fortune that is bestowed on cinematic graverobbers, so you know one of them is going to turn out to be the actual bad guy while the Mummy ends up finding redemption in the form of saving the heroine. The “curse” of the title refers to the brother of the Mummy, who needs him to kill him, or something (I got a little lost here due to all of the names sounding alike to me).
But what really set this one above the original were the random little moments, both intentional and unintentional, that kept it from feeling too slow or generic. For starters, there’s a monkey. All films are better when a monkey is utilized. And this monkey eats some Turkish Delight, a treat that is “discovered” in this film (you know how like in Titanic they talk about Picasso in the present tense and saying that “he won’t amount to a thing!” and we all laugh because we know that’s not true? This movie does it with Turkish Delight. Like I said, random). For the unintentional side of things, there’s an EXIT sign in plain view during one of the (19th century set) scenes, and a wonderfully prophetic line of dialogue where one of the stuffy Brits exclaims “Sir Charles is in charge!”
Also it’s the first film on this set that has been in color. I always love the look of Hammer films, and while I got nothing against black and white, looking at the inventive and wide-ranging color palettes in these movies can work wonders in giving them their own identity. Had this been in B&W like the original, I probably would have tuned out by the time the Mummy showed up, because the first act plays exactly like the original (which I didn’t care for). Plus, I love “blood” that looks like pink paint, and this movie offers a few gore moments (a severed hand being the highlight) that wouldn’t have been as silly with a monochromatic presentation. A guy’s head gets stomped on too, but you only hear it. Remake!
Strange for a Hammer movie, I don’t recognize anyone in it. With the 5 guy setup, it would have been great to have Cushing, Lee, etc playing the roles. None of these guys are particularly BAD, but they’re kind of bland all the same (though the American guy is likeably corny, probably the British’s idea of mocking us). Given the lack of Mummy action for the first 45 minutes or so, some top notch scenery chewing would have been nice. As I later learned, Lee played the Mummy in an earlier Hammer film, which is by all accounts better. And I am sure they are right, but since I haven’t seen it, I don’t have to play the comparison game. I'll have my McD's first, THEN enjoy the fancy steak.
If there’s one thing I never quite expect in one of my budget packs, it’s witty writing. Not that the movies are all “so bad it’s good” affairs like Cathy’s Curse, but they are all by and large rather generic filler (hence why they are available for forty cents a piece in a flimsy DVD boxed set). So I was surprised to find that The Werewolf Of Washington contained a healthy dose of wit and satirical writing. Being that it’s 37 years old, it obviously pales in comparison to what the Onion or Colbert come up with on a daily basis, but still, it beats the shit out of another inheritance scam movie.
The funny thing about the movie is how blatantly it rips off The Wolf Man setup, right down to the silver handled cane being used against a Gypsy guy. The twist is, our Larry Talbot standin (Dean Stockwell!) is convinced that the Gypsy (actually Hungarian, but for all intents and purposes it’s the same character) is a spy, so he asks his interpreter to “find out who she’s working for!” Then when the subject of pentagrams come up, he hears it as “Pentagon”. Heh. Once he gets back to Washington (actually Long Island) it’s more original, with lots of Watergate jokes (he's not supposed to be Nixon though, at least I don't think - they don't give him a name) and jabs at the President’s general cluelessness taking center stage.
What I dug about the movie was the general quirkiness of the whole thing. There’s a bald guy with sunglasses just standing in the background of several scenes (in one he keeps taking quick photos) but unless I missed it, he never talks, nor does anyone say what his job is. Then there’s a part where the president has to keep repeating “Chopper” over and over (and finishes with “Helichopper”). And then there’s this:
I mean, come on, the movie might have a lot of faults, but you can’t see a screenshot like that and still deny its intentional entertainment value.
One of those faults is the werewolf getup. Maybe they didn’t have enough money to tear the suit, or maybe it’s supposed to be a sight gag, but Stockwell simply looks like a guy wearing a werewolf mask. His nice suit never gets torn or even disheveled, making it hard to swallow. I don’t need a full blown transformation, but at least glue some hair on his chest and rip the shirt a little. Come on guys. Incidentally, the creepiest moment involving the werewolf is actually offscreen entirely. During the end credits, the President is giving a “My fellow Americans” speech, and he suddenly trails off, starts repeating himself, and then becomes a werewolf himself. It’s pretty awesome, and sets up a sequel that, far as I know, does not exist.
There’s also a scene in which two men engage in a rather tense scene in an in-home bowling alley. I can’t help but wonder if Paul Thomas Anderson watched the film before writing There Will Be Blood. I would like to think so. No one drinks a milk shake though, that was all PTA.
Like just about all of these movies, there is apparently no decent transfer available. Even on its own DVD, it’s a full frame VHS transfer, making the Tales of Terror version more enticing since you get 49 other movies with it for a few dollars more. But given the setup and occasionally (OK, usually) crude technical merits of the film, I would put this on the top of the “THIS should be remade” list. Surely you could modernize the film in every conceivable way: do a great Bush parody while delivering a decent werewolf movie at the same time. I know a few screenwriters/filmmakers read HMAD now - let’s write this bitch and live as kings! Also I’ll play the sunglasses guy.
What say you?
And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the 3rd in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)
Much like Quarantine, I simply had no time for The Haunting Of Molly Hartley during its theatrical run. Unlike Quarantine, I didn’t have much interest anyway - not only am I completely oblivious as to what a Chace Crawford is, I could tell from the trailer that even considering it’s PG-13 rating, it would be a rather dull movie. You know you’re in trouble when out of a 90 minute movie, the trailer’s editor can’t even find 2 minutes’ worth of exciting footage and is forced to spoil the villain’s identity just to try to give it SOME sort of panache.
Oddly, both films feature actress Marin Hinkle, whom I was smitten with after seeing her in the vastly under-appreciated Dark Blue, and until this pair of horror movies, hadn’t seen in anything since.
My assessment was spot on. Nothing fucking happens in this movie. I wouldn’t even be surprised to learn that it was turned into a “horror movie” during the post production process. After an out of place opening (featuring that ridiculously hot girl from Autopsy) - one that more or less removes any chance of mystery that the remaining film could muster - absolutely nothing in terms of action or suspense or horror occurs until the film’s final 10 minutes or so. Our lead girl gets bad headaches and nosebleeds, but its explained away as a small tumor in her nose. The “scares” come courtesy of things like bills coming through the mail slot (someone, I think the Onion’s AV Club, said that the film would probably work best on skittish cats). Finally, her crazy mom (Hinkle) comes back, explains the backstory, and promptly dies. Our climax concerns the two wholly obvious “villains” merely talking to Molly. Then an epilogue comes along that made me laugh out loud.
See, the reason I put villains in quotes is because they really don’t seem to do anything bad. Molly’s dad goes crazy as a result of trying to protect her, but it’s not their fault he’s a good guy. When Molly turns 18, she is cursed with.... looking prettier? Being more popular? Hell, becoming valedictorian? That’s all the ending shows us. Life is pretty great for Molly now. She doesn’t have any parents, she’s obviously keeping up with her grades, and, I assume, enjoying a healthy pre-marriage sex life with her boyfriend (Crawford, who seemingly went to the John Krasinski School Of Affable Charm). It’s like the complete opposite of a morality tale. You know those movies where someone sells their soul to the devil, and at first it’s pretty awesome but then the bad stuff happens and they realize it wasn’t worth it? This movie does it backwards. Molly’s life kind of sucks, her only friend is an annoying Jesus freak, and her dad keeps moving her around. But now, as a result of (whatever the hell happens when she turns 18 - it seems to have some sort of Satanic connotation though), she’s got it all. The end. Uh... lesson, learned? I guess?
I dunno, maybe director Mickey Liddell is a Satanist. He’s certainly a creepy perv who doesn’t know his release dates. On the DVD’s only extra besides the trailer, he discusses how he was inspired by the “those movies of the 70s”, and then gives The Shining (1980) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) as examples, while also repeatedly confessing how much he loves and gets excited working with teens. Awesome. Three of the film’s stars also provide pointless blather in the form of interviews; none of them seem to notice or care that the film, aimed squarely at teens, has a questionable and almost dangerous point that Satan can give you everything you ever wanted without a single caveat. And actually, had the movie not been so dull and horror-free, I would actually applaud such a ballsy denouement, but intentionally sending teens a terrible message won’t quite work if they are already bored to tears by the time it comes.
(I should note that the end credits list a “puppeteer”. Since no puppets or any other non-human figures appear in the film, I wonder if there were some and they got edited out of the final cut for whatever reason. This IS a FOX film after all; neutering the entire point out of movies is kind of their forte. See: The Abyss).
PLEASE, GO ON...
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