From The Pile: Fangs Of The Living Dead (1969)

AUGUST 25, 2021

GENRE: VAMPIRE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

The title seemed familiar, so I checked twice to make sure I hadn't already seen/reviewed Fangs of the Living Dead (aka Malenka) on the site before I opened the still wrapped disc from the endless "Pile" (now an overfilled box) with the intent of watching it, reviewing it, and - unless it was great - sending it to the *other* box, the one full of discs that are waiting to be traded in on a literal rainy day*. "I don't want to have another Killer Nun situation on my hands," I thought, before starting the film and discovering that it actually starred the Nun herself, Anita Ekberg. I found that pretty amusing.

Most things are more amusing than the film, as it turns out, as it's pretty much a total snooze. It was the first horror film for Amando de Ossorio, who found success a few years later with the Tombs of the Blind Dead films but hadn't quite found his groove yet (some would argue he never did; his name is certainly not one that inspires me to watch his entire filmography), though he's not entirely to blame for the film's lapses. Apparently no one could decide whether to make a fully serious horror movie or a lighthearted one with comedy akin to the recent (and successful) Fearless Vampire Killers, but even if they did settle that before shooting began, de Ossorio is no Polanski, so I don't think that switcheroo was the only reason the movie doesn't really work.

It's also far too chaste compared to what else we had at the time; it's nearly bloodless, the women don't show off a lot of skin (forget about actual nudity), and the ending can't even bring itself to kill off the hero's horny pal - a character who seemingly only exists to be pointy teeth fodder. Nothing wrong with dialing things back and aiming for a more atmospheric and suspenseful take on the subject matter (which is more or less just Dracula), but de Ossorio isn't exactly delivering on those fronts either, so it's just kind of sitting there like a wet fart for large chunks of its runtime. The only time it really comes to life is in the last half hour, when the town's doctor (Carlos Casaravilla) takes a more active role in the proceedings as a sort of Van Helsing type, but one who has looked the other way on the vampire villain's evil deeds.

As for the villains, well... their whole story doesn't make any sense really, as part of the plot reveal (spoiler for 50+ year old movie ahead) is that they're not actually vampires, though the main one's demise is straight up vampire stuff. So were they lying about lying about being vampires? And why wait until the end of the movie to tell us this when nothing much has happened? Do it earlier and then spring something more interesting on us for the finale instead of an endless scene of the guy's body turning into a husk after being staked. To be fair though, there's another ending where that doesn't happen, and it's presented on the disc as a bonus feature, but it's in the original Spanish language so his not-dying monologue is a mystery to my ears. That ending also gives everyone a happy ending, except for perhaps the hero's buddy, who is now a vampire himself (huh?) and sends us off while comically chasing after a frightened woman. Hilarious!

Honestly the highlight of the disc is the commentary by Troy Howarth, who thankfully doesn't think too much of the movie himself and spares us 90 minutes of defending it. Instead he runs through the filmographies and careers of its players as you'd expect, but also gives some interesting historical background on Spain at the time, operating under Generalissimo Francisco Franco (at that time, *not* dead), as this was one of the first horror films produced by the country. He also notes a few interesting tidbits, such as the fact that a character's name of Vladis was NOT a little nod to Vlad the Impaler, as I assumed while watching, as the connection between Vlad and Dracula was not introduced until a few years later. That sort of stuff is why I always listen to the historian tracks even if I don't like the movie; might as well learn something rather than write the whole thing off as a loss.

But hey, sometimes the discs from the pile end up being worth keeping, which doesn't help me in my never-ending attempt to pare the collection down. I have no desire to keep this one, so thanks for kind of sucking, movie! That's a quarter inch of horizontal space I don't have to find on the permanent shelf!

What say you?

*I started taking walks on my lunch break in an attempt to shed a few pandemic pounds, so that eats up the time I have to go across town and give the box to some weird dude at a CD/movie store and come up with some random amount of cash to give me for it. But if it rains? I will stay dry, and RAKE IN THAT TRADE-IN CASH!

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Suspiria (1977)

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: 4K BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Despite this being the third time I've gotten a copy of it, and seeing it on the big screen at least three times since I started the site, I've somehow never reviewed Suspiria in any form. Usually I do "non-canon" reviews for such things (i.e. movies I've already seen but are worthy of being written about, i.e. all of the Halloweens and other franchise films I covered over the years), but for whatever reason I somehow never got around to putting pen to paper (finger to keyboard) about Dario Argento's iconic classic. What do I pay you people for if you're not going to point these things out to me?

(And we still need to discuss how I managed to review Killer Nun a few weeks ago without ever once realizing I already reviewed Killer Nun.)

My only guess as to why I kept letting it slide: I have fallen asleep every time I've seen the movie, and thus I probably had some sort of "Let me pull that DVD or Blu-ray out and see what I missed first" plan that fell through when the 90 other things I need to do every day took priority. But I don't want you to take that as me being bored with the film or whatever - on the contrary, the last time I watched it (on the big screen, from the same 4K remaster that was used for this very disc) I finally realized *why* the film always knocked me out cold: the first 15-20 minutes are just too goddamn intense. The storm, Suzy's dread-inducing walk through the airport, her struggles to get inside, the murders... the film doesn't let up for an entire reel (more?), so when it does... well, I know it's crass but it's the only thing I can think of to compare, it's basically the same thing that happens after a good orgasm: I feel "spent" and nod off.

And of course, during a theatrical viewing that just means I miss things, but luckily at home I can rewind and see what I was dozing through. And trust me, on Synapse's long-awaited 4K restoration, you do not want to miss a single frame, as this is one of the best remasters of an older film I've ever been blessed enough to see. For some background; I have a 4K TV (from Sony, if you're wondering) but not because I'm much of a gearhead - my previous TV died and I figured I might as well get the shiniest new toy (albeit one within my budget). And so far most of my 4K disc purchases (or review copies) have been of newer films; my only "I've seen this on Blu-ray and now I'm watching in 4K" experience has been Halloween, which looked good but didn't blow me away or anything. The jump from VHS to DVD, and then DVD to Blu-ray, were like night and day differences to my eyes, but so far Blu-ray to 4K has been more like the difference between 4 and 5 o'clock at best, so upgrading my collection once again isn't anything I plan to do.

The Suspiria restoration made me a believer though. The last time I watched at home was on one of the older Blu-rays, and it looked good, but this was a revelation. Some details just pop more than ever, such as the blue iris behind Suzy as she tells Miss Tanner about how Pat mentioned an iris, or the glowing eyes that appear behind Sara before she falls into the razor wire room. (Oh, and never before has it been more clear that it's razor wire and not barbed wire, so there's something, too.) Yes, this means that the off-color fake blood puddle around Pat's roommate looks even more, well, fake, but for every blemish like that there are a dozen examples (such as the detail in all the stained glass that CAUSES that fake blood puddle) that will have your eyes popping throughout. This took them a few years to complete, and the evidence is right there on the screen.

Oh and the movie is still great. I think this is my first time watching the original since the remake, which I enjoyed parts of but overall found it to be too indulgent and sprawling for my tastes, so it was nice to go back to my preferred take on the "a lady goes to a dance school run by witches" story (which also clocks in at nearly an hour shorter). There are a few pacing issues (like when Udo Kier delivers an info dump, then introduces Karl from Exorcist, who gives yet another info dump), but that's an issue that plagued a lot of Argento's earlier stuff, and given that this was his first foray into the supernatural after a string of gialli, it's easily forgivable. The mystery is engaging, Harper's Suzy is an easy protagonist to care about, and the big scare scenes - like the aforementioned razor wire scene - haven't lost an ounce of their effectiveness, even after multiple viewings.

It's also just nice to go back to a time when Argento had the money and time to make the kind of films he excelled at. Especially in this gorgeous restoration, you can just soak in Giuseppe Bassan's production design and the cinematography by Luciano Tovoli, skilled artists who had four *months* to bring Argento's vision to life. Nowadays he gets as many weeks, with budgets that are probably less even without factoring in the inflation. It's easy to say that he got old/tired and that's what brought about the decline of his work, but then you see things like The Irishman and The Mule and realize that maybe the actual difference is having the resources to still work to the best of their abilities. Hopefully someday he (and Carpenter, De Palma, etc) will find themselves with the same kind of freedom that is still afforded to their fellow '70s cinema gods.

Synapse released a thorough special edition on standard blu-ray last year and has ported over all of the bonus features from that release, so supplements wise there's nothing different here: it's got the commentaries, the retrospective, the video essay (which is quite good), interviews, alternate opening title sequence, etc. The real draw here is the actual 4K disc (as opposed to the 4K restoration on standard blu), so only those who have made the leap to the format need apply with this particular release. But I have to say... if there was a film to sell me on the legitimacy on 4K and perhaps get me thinking about upgrading other older films that have been given actual restorations (Die Hard is a possible option since I hate the existing Blu-ray anyway), this is it. Maybe it's just because I've suffered through a faded film print (noooo) and thus have something "bad" to compare it to, but outside of Criterion's Night of the Living Dead release, it is quite simply the best looking legacy release I've ever seen with my own eyes. Enjoy!

What say you?

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Killer Nun (1979)

OCTOBER 15, 2019

GENRE: GIALLO
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (SCREENER)

I have only seen a handful of nunsploitation movies, so when I say that Killer Nun (Italian: Suor Omicidi) is one of the more interesting I've seen, you must take into consideration that it doesn't have a lot of competition. Still, as one of the few present day set ones, and a lack of torture or excessive nudity, I'm sure I'd say the same even with a little more hands-on experience with this unusual sub-genre, as director/co-writer Giulio Berruti is aiming for something a little less sleazy and exploitative and a little more psychological than, say, The Other Hell, but not "art house" like The Devils - it lands somewhere in between, presenting a decent (if easy to solve) mystery and some truly memorable bits of insanity and violence.

Speaking of Other Hell, there are two scenes in this movie that had me momentarily convinced that I had seen it before and just forgotten until my memory was jogged by these particular moments. It took a bit to remember they are from that other film, which also came later, so perhaps Hell director Bruno Mattei had seen this one and was intentionally "paying homage" to it? But otherwise they're fairly different; for starters this film has no supernatural elements whatsoever, grounding it in reality even more than the present day setting, which as I mentioned was somewhat rare as the films tended to go back in time to eras where the Church had more power. But it makes sense; the plot hews closer to a standard 1970s giallo than anything else, so a period setting would throw off that vibe I suspect.

Anita Ekberg plays Sister Gertrude, an older nun who is suffering from mood swings and blackouts as a side effect from brain surgery, a procedure that left her addicted to morphine on top of everything else. She is also starting to be openly hostile to the patients that her and the other sisters are caring for (it's a sort of rest home/convent, I guess?); in one insane scene she freaks out on an elderly woman who has put her dentures into a cup, and after chewing her out she throws the teeth on the floor and stomps on them over and over while the poor woman just cries hysterically (and later dies of a heart attack). But someone is also straight up murdering people around the joint, and she believes she herself is the killer (nun), chalking it up to the next logical step of her increasingly mean temper.

Naturally it's not that easy; if she WAS the killer she wouldn't be saying she was. Only someone with next to zero experience with mystery thrillers would have trouble pegging the real culprit, but that doesn't matter much - the fun is seeing both Gertrude and the real killer gradually lose their grip on sanity over the film's 90 minutes. Berruti throws in a few freak-out scenes (usually surrounding Gertrude's morphine usage) that help make up for the film's rather subdued "horror" elements (it goes on a few stretches that barely qualify as thriller fare, such as when Gertrude decides to head into the city to find a rando to screw), and it ultimately more or less fits the giallo definition - Berruti merely sticks closer to the dramatic side of the equation than the horror one that Argento and his imitators often did.

The real MVP of the film (besides that dentures scene; it's really something) is the score by Alessandro Alessandroni. It doesn't sound like a typical genre score, almost closer to western or something, but it works perfectly, and I thank Arrow for putting a decent length loop of it on the menu for me to enjoy whenever a bonus feature ended. As always the disc is well packed with interviews, plus a pretty good historian commentary by Adrian J. Smith and David Flint, where the men go into the history of nunsploitation a bit, comparing it to others using key scenes as examples, and on occasion rib a few of its wonkier moments. They also note how the film is indeed technically a giallo, but also sets itself apart from them as the murderer's identity is easy to solve whereas a true giallo the killer is on occasion a character who was so extraneous that more than once the reveal had audience members saying "Wait, who is that?". I wouldn't have minded more on the true story, howver; they note that it's a real thing that happened in Belgium, but offer up no other details and online info is a bit hard to come across to back it up. But otherwise it's a well rounded track, and reaffirms my belief that historian tracks are always better when there are two or more participants, as they otherwise tend to get too dry.

For more context on nunsploitation, there's a video essay by Kat Ellinger that runs nearly a half an hour and covers a lot of ground, and, much like the commentary, uses films like The Devils and School of the Holy Beast to show how Killer Nun fits into the sub-genre as a whole. It's a bit dry of course (it's an essay!) but it's an essential viewing for anyone like me who has yet to fully dive into this particular kind of film, if only to get an idea of which ones will be more your speed and which might be a bit too out there for you. Then there are some interviews with Berruti, editor Mario Giacco, and actress Ileana Fraia, whose 24 minute interview runs about 10 times as long as you'll see her in the film (she's neither of the leads and plays a character who is sent away relatively early).

If you've never seen any of these kind of films, this might be a good place to start. It's not overly graphic or violent (though there's a murder by facial acupuncture that comes close), the blasphemous elements are rather minimal (hell even Exorcist has that defaced statue), and it's got one foot in the giallo door, easing the transition for those who are a little strict with their definition of "horror" since several nunsploitation films wouldn't otherwise qualify. Arrow's presentation is outstanding and there are enough goodies to keep you busy if you're a fan, making it a solid package all around. Plus, you can easily find it here in the US, so it's got one up on The Devils!

What say you?

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The Prodigy (2019)

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

GENRE: KILLER KID
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (PRESS SCREENING)

Just this week I once again had to defend Orphan again, as it somehow landed on some site's list of the 20 worst twists in movie history or some nonsense. My only theory for why that reveal (which I'm gonna have to spoil in this paragraph so skip ahead if you inexplicably still haven't seen it) gets dragged so often is because people don't take the time to consider that it was a brilliant way to circumvent what seems to be a rule at the major studios, which is that evil children can't really do anything vicious. By making Esther (still played by a child actress) into an adult with a growth deficiency, the filmmakers were able to get away with letting her cut loose (the nun!), while cinematic cousins like Mac in The Good Son didn't really do much of anything beyond toss a dummy off a bridge (with no one being seriously hurt, we're assured). The Prodigy ends up somewhere in the middle of those two, but overall lands closer to Orphan on account of how surprisingly dark it is.

The plot is pretty straightforward: suburban parents have a son named Miles (the usual way, i.e. not adopted) and in addition to his heterochromia (different colored eyes) he seems to be gifted; he speaks early, he can figure out complex toys as a toddler, etc. After checking in with him a few times as he grows, we get to when he's eight, and his behavior starts leaning toward the disturbing side of things - including a possible attack on his babysitter and a definite attack on a schoolmate. Mom (Taylor Schilling) starts taking him to different specialists, but as soon as Colm Feore shows up you know he's gonna be the one to crack the mystery, because you don't get Colm Feore to be in your movie to be another cog in the wheel. The trailers have part of his explanation, but in the full scene he also explains how Miles can be cured of this new development.

Unfortunately that's at about the halfway point, and there are no other wrinkles to the plot. Worse, the opening scene (which I won't spoil here) gave us almost all of the information we needed anyway - a peculiar match cut in the first five minutes spells it out to any audience member with half a brain, so Feore isn't revealing so much as he is confirming the problem. It's a strange choice for this sort of thing, to the point where I wondered if they were purposely trying to lead us astray so they could pull out a more surprising reveal later. Whether or not they do is again something I won't spoil here, but either way it's odd to spend so much of the movie being ahead of its characters, watching them discover things we already learned for ourselves in the film's first sequence.

And that adds to my ongoing curiosity regarding the film's script and if it was reworked at a late stage. Not only is the information doled out earlier than necessary (and occasionally even repeated) but there are a few dropped story points that struck me as odd. Early on Miles causes a babysitter to fall down the stairs and cut up her foot (and perhaps break a bone or two) but the scene ends with her calling for the boy, unaware that he was at fault - and then it just cuts to later, with Miles saying he can't remember what happened. The babysitter's fate is never confirmed, nor is she ever mentioned again (same goes for Feore's character, who makes a phone call to give Schilling some more info and seems to be setting himself up to play a bigger part, only to never reappear). Likewise, he attacks one of his schoolmates at his fancy genius school, and later we see him attending what seems to be a regular public school - did he get kicked out of the other one, or did they decide it was best for him to be in a more normal environment? Schilling and her husband are also drawn with as much depth as a slasher victim - we're never told what they do for a living or anything like that, and a hint about a miscarriage or something ("We weren't sure we'd ever have you" she tells baby Miles) is never fleshed out either.

Yet, it still works for the most part! Maybe I'm more lenient given my well documented love of this particular sub-genre, but I had a good time watching it all the same. The trailer spoils one of its two best scares (and yes, it's swiped from Shock, but I suspect unlike Annabelle this is an intentional tip of the hat as there are some other similarities), but the other got me good and is more of the "Gah! CURSED IMAGE!" variety than a jump, and there's another more subtle one involving a simple line of dialogue that delighted me in its surprising harshness. Indeed, the film as a whole is shockingly dark/unsettling at times, particularly in the Feore sequence when Miles (in evil mode) tells him how the rest of their little session is gonna go. And the end is also less studio-friendly than I was expecting, which is always a plus.

Speaking of Annabelle, like that film I suspect it will work better on parents than non, because it plays on those very particular emotions albeit in very different ways; that one juiced up its scares by putting the kid in danger, this one opts for a "Would you do this if it was YOUR kid?" kind of thing though again, no spoilers so no details (I blame Pet Sematary's trailer debut for being so spoiler conscious - people were legit crying "spoiler!" at a trailer. Incidentally, same writer! Jeff Buhler wrote Pet and this). I also got some of the same creeped out vibes I get from body horror movies at times, and when you think about it it kind of makes sense. Someone once compared not knowing where your child was to having one of your own organs out in the wild somewhere, and it's true even for fathers who, as you hopefully know, never actually had the child inside of them and attached to them the way mothers do. So when Schilling starts suspecting the kid is evil and noticeably bristles when he tries to hug her or whatever, you really feel how skin-crawling and conflicting it must be for her, to be afraid of her own child's touch. There's a bit where he climbs into bed with her and tries to snuggle - it's one of the most unnerving things in the entire movie, without the need to have any violence or jump scares.

So I guess your mileage will vary depending on how much you enjoy this sub-genre. Nicholas McCarthy (whose movie The Pact is one I highly recommend, and am happy to see him getting a wide release) checks all the boxes one expects from this sort of thing, but the screenplay as presented on-screen is almost too mercenary at times, as if they didn't want to distract the audience with pesky things like "subplots" or "complications" or even "other characters" (these people have no friends or neighbors, apparently; even a brief Halloween scene seems to exist in a world with no other people). It'll scratch your itch if you have one, but goes no further than that, making it hard to recommend in general the way I could for the likes of Orphan or Home Movie. But whatever may have happened to the script or finished cut along the way, what we got is still effective at what it does, and a good way to tide us over until the seemingly more ambitious Brightburn comes along later this year.

What say you?

P.S. Hover at your own risk because it enters spoiler territory, but the movie also shares some DNA with this pet fave of mine, so that was a fun realization. However it'd be a huge red flag for most people (and again spoils some things) so let's keep it on the DL for now. Just feel free to tell me you agree (without using the name!) on Twitter or in the comments, I like to know who my peeps are for this particular film.

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The Devil Within Her (1975)

JANUARY 10, 2013

GENRE: KILLER KID (BABY!), POSSESSION
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

I am seriously considering writing a book about 70s Exorcist knockoffs and wannabes, because with each one I watch I find myself more and more fascinated by the fact that so many were made (and also that Exorcist II's batshittery may be the result of a creative team more concerned with competing with these things than with following up the original). Hell, this one confuses right off the bat; Netflix has it as The Devil Within Her, but the Wikipedia page goes under its original title of I Don't Want To Be Born and the IMDb goes with Sharon's Baby, the least interesting and sort of misleading to boot.

Sure, there's some Rosemary in there, but it would be more like a sequel since the baby is born in the opening scenes. No, this is a cross between Exorcist and It's Alive, featuring a baby that will bite or tear at anyone who gets close, and can only be saved by a 3rd act exorcism. Sadly, we don't see the baby actually do these things - someone will lean in and then there will be a cut to another character as we hear a pained cry, and then suddenly the victim will have blood on their face. "He did that on purpose!" they'll say, and then we'll move on, never actually getting to see a little baby inflict violence. Hilariously, the baby they got is clearly under duress for most of its shots, so we're led to believe it just bit a guy or something when it's clearly just sort of confused or in need of a nap. It's like the rats in Rats - the visuals never quite match up to the dialogue with regards to how much danger the "villain" poses, and thus we just have to take their word for it or use our imaginations.

As these things go, it's not quite as insane as I thought it would be - in fact I kept getting the sneaking suspicion that they thought this was a serious horror movie (the Wikipedia backed me up!), as the more exploitative elements were rather subdued compared to a Manitou or Beyond The Door. The body count is rather high, but without the ability to see the baby doing anything, they're all rather tame, like a whodunit slasher movie where the killer doesn't have a costume - all closeups and such. One character is beheaded near the end, and all I could think was "how is the baby getting that shovel up so high?" - not only do you have to use your imagination to know that the baby is evil, you also have to use it to provide the comedy that those other flicks offer in spades.

Hell, even Donald Pleasence isn't as whacked out as I'd like. He gets in one great line (might be a little off, but it's basically "I thought today would be boring, but here I am talking about mysticism with an Italian nun."), but otherwise this is one of his unfortunate "normal" roles, and he's not in it all that much to boot. Most of the upfront silliness is given to the villain, a pervy dwarf who curses Joan Collins after she spurns his advances, which is why she has an evil baby. If I'm not mistaken, he's actually possessing the tyke - they cut in shots of his face over the baby's on occasion in order to hammer home what is happening, but being a 1970s Exorcist wannabe you can be assured that the specifics are a little vague.

Plus, it seems like director Peter Sasdy (of Stone Tape fame! Also the far more satisfying Hands Of The Ripper) is more interested in showing off London - establishing shots are frequent and overlong, and no one goes anywhere without a shot or two of them walking down the street or whatever. Big Ben makes an obligatory appearance, and a few other familiar sites pop up more often than, say, an actual shot of a murderous baby (come on! Even a damn hand puppet would have been acceptable!). Again, the body count is decent, but the scenes themselves rarely have any buildup, and what comes between them isn't nutty enough to really elevate this into "Holy shit!" territory - lot of filler, lot of not-funny conversations, etc. In other words, it often plays out like a real dramatic horror film, except it's about a horny dwarf cursing an ex-stripper so that her baby decapitates dudes with shovels. So, no.

What a cast though, huh? Collins and Pleasence would be enough to satisfy, but Hammer regular Ralph Bates plays Collins' husband, and Caroline Munro plays Collins' best friend who helps her out in the movie's first half but then largely disappears until she shows up again, now sleeping with the guy Collins used to bang - a sleazy strip club owner played by John Steiner. Steiner would go on to appear in Shock, which is also known as a sequel to Beyond The Door - both of those films involved similar subject matter, so that's kind of a fun little bit of trivia. Oh, and the guy playing the dwarf was one of the Oompa Loompas, so he had a knack for being terrifying, I guess.

Thus, it's not without its charms and merits, but I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed that I only felt my jaw drop 2-3 times during its 95 minute runtime. After seeing the trailer at the New Bev a while back (before Beyond The Door, I think) and seeing Pleasence in the cast I truly thought this would be the Citizen Kane of batshit 70s supernatural movies, but it's more of an entry level film in that wonderful sub-genre.

What say you?

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Saint Dracula 3D (2012)

DECEMBER 15, 2012

GENRE: VAMPIRE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I really miss the way the Moviepass program used to work, where every eligible title in your area would show up on their website and you'd click to see where it was playing. It was a great way to find the smaller/indie films that were showing; the movies were ranked by popularity, so I'd go to the last page and see what obscure potential gems I could find. Now it's all app-based, and only popular/ mainstream releases show up - smaller things like Saint Dracula 3D, playing on one screen (and only one showing per day) take a little more effort to dig up.

Well, hopefully I'm not missing too many "have to see it to believe it" movies like this, which is bad in that special way where I spent most of the runtime just trying to understand how the movie even got funded, let alone given a theatrical release (to qualify for potential Oscar nominations, no less!). I can throw just about every criticism of a movie ever given at this thing - poor acting, nonsensical dialogue, incomprehensible storyline - but I'd rather just encourage you to see it as soon as you can so I can be assured I didn't somehow hallucinate the entire thing. As of this writing, there are no actual user reviews on its IMDb (just a guy who watched the trailer) and the only link in "external reviews" goes to a dead page. Come on! I need someone else to verify that there's a Dracula movie out there with an out of nowhere musical number!

Actually there was one other guy in the theater, who came in after it started and spent most of it looking at his phone (he was behind me, but the blue light in the corner of my eye if I turned my head to the right served as my proof that he hadn't walked out), but I was pulling mine out to take in theater notes (usually I just try to memorize them in a sort of "I went shopping and I bought..." process), so maybe he was another reviewer and doing the same thing. Or he was just doing what I WANTED to do, which was text friends and ask them to join me at once, but since I was in front of him and thus in his eyeline, I restricted my phone usage to quick notes.

Unfolding like any religious based Dracula movie, albeit filtered through the inept acting/production of The Room, Saint Dracula 3D (yes, the 3D is part of the title, even though this was a 2D screening) tells the story of a much more romantic Dracula, who has resurfaced after a few decades and has set his sights on a woman who has recently become a nun. Meanwhile, this monk guy (who looks like Jeffrey Donovan and sounds like Jason Statham, and isn't 1/10th as charismatic as either) is after Dracula, suspecting him to be the murderer of a few girls, all of whom have had hair ripped from the back of their head. Don't ask me if Dracula was indeed the killer, I couldn't make heads or tails of this subplot, mainly because I couldn't stop laughing at lines like "All of the victims... they were GIRLS!" to focus hard enough to follow it.

Because even when I wasn't chuckling (or just laughing out loud - it got THAT ridiculously awful at times), this was a nigh on impenetrable movie, thanks to the editor's apparent inability to, well, edit. Scenes come out of nowhere more often than not, introducing characters and major subplots in the middle of other scenes, with no sense of how much time has passed from one to the next. It's also often unclear if something is supposed to be a flashback or present day; some scenes are monochrome (except for red, giving it a bad Sin City wannabe flavor) and I THINK those are all the flashback ones, but others seem to be taking place at least a few days before the last one. Worse, it seems the movie was re-edited rather late into the post process; at least twice I caught a snippet of a third shot during a fade, which is a common problem editors face when trying to cut chunks out of a film that's already been edited on a different machine (or at least after the original elements have been lost/erased). IMDb says the runtime is 2 hrs (literally - not "120 minutes", just "2 hrs"), and this only ran a little over 90 minutes, so maybe 30 minutes were cut, or maybe it's just another piece of evidence that these folks aren't that good at their jobs. On that note, the sound mixing is also non existent - get used to the sound of hard cuts between two locations (and their respective room tones), or strange dead sounding interior scenes where the lines are clearly from an ADR session.

There's also a classic bit that left me howling; in a flashback (I think?) Dracula is checking out a woman at a club, and follows her up to a mirror where she is checking her makeup. Now, being a vampire, he has no reflection, but obviously director Rupesh Paul apparently couldn't figure out how to do this effect, so he clearly just has the guy playing Dracula (named Mitch, by the way - least likely name for a Dracula actor ever? Generic vampire costume too, akin to Dracula 3000's ridiculous getup) stand in a position where the camera will see him, her, her reflection, and some space where the easily fooled will think his reflection should be - it's an easy, old-school trick. Only problem - Paul then cuts to a different angle and we can see his reflection just fine.

Then again, maybe his "invisible" reflection in the first shot was just a poor choice of framing, as the "rules" are laid out but had one or two modifications. However, most of them are standard - no sunlight, wooden stake to the heart, etc, and yet our hero listens to them as if they are mind-blowing revelations. The great thing about the fact that there have been 49068 vampire movies (IMDb lists 300 just for the Dracula character alone) is that you don't have to waste time explaining the rules unless you're breaking them - this does the opposite, quickly dismissing the ones that don't apply and focusing on the ones that anyone in the theater would already know about in advance.

But if you don't know too much about the Bible, this is a terrific place to start, since roughly half of the film's dialogue consists of characters trading verses in order to make their points. You've seen the sort of thing in a bunch of movies, someone will say "Judge not lest he be judged! - John 3:17" and the other guy will reply "Ah yes, but Matthew 5:7, 'Let he who makes the best pie serve the worst beer.' (obviously these are made up and make no sense at all, I can't think of any specific examples right now - my mind is too fried from watching Saint Dracula 3D), and usually that'll be it. Not in this movie though, each time has at least TWO rounds of such quoting, and it seems another one pops up every 10 minutes or so. Corinthians, the Song of Solomon, Leviticus... books I thought I had forgotten (remember: I went to Catholic school for 8 years - they always skipped over St. Dracula's story though) came flooding back into memory, courtesy of gibberish dialogue in a bad vampire movie.

Oh yeah, the 3D. Well this was a 2D screening, so obviously I can't judge its quality, but I CAN tell you how the drive to show off the technology has had a detrimental effect on the film. Every establishing shot of an old castle or church runs for like 30 seconds, as the camera slowly pans around a spire or wall, which probably looks really cool (but still too long) in the format that few people will apparently get to see it. Apart from that and the ridiculous title sequence (swooping around a graphic - sort of like the 1989 Batman credits), I didn't quite see any reason for the extra dimension - it's a talky, action-lite movie set mostly in interior locations, and even the exteriors (like a goofy bit where the hero whips himself) aren't particularly interesting. So even if the technical details of the 3D process are top-notch (if I'm understanding, it was shot in 3D, not a convert), I still can't see much reason to spend the extra dough to see it that way, should the opportunity arise.

However, the out of nowhere musical number (which seems to be the focus of the film's insane push to get an Oscar nomination) is worth every penny. I don't know if it was its randomness (it appears over an hour into the film, in a scene that typically comes out of nowhere and has no real connection to the one before it), the fact that the singer sounded like Voltaire ("When you're evil..."), or just the sheer fact that it was a musical number - including dancing! - in the middle of an otherwise non-musical Dracula film that I found so intoxicating, but it was at that moment that I decided this was that special kind of bad movie that I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone with a sense of humor, an abundance of free time, and the pure love of how wonderfully random movie-going can be if you take the time to find everything that's out there. Thank you, Saint Dracula 3D.

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Killer Nun (1979)

APRIL 20, 2012

GENRE: GIALLO
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

With a title like Killer Nun (or Suor Omicidi, its Italian moniker), I was expecting something a little more exploitative and fun than the film actually delivered, and I hope someone can point me to a better "nunsploitation" movie to enjoy - with only a year of HMAD left, I can't imagine the opportunity or drive to see too many others in this most peculiar sub-genre will arise. But a man shouldn't go through life without seeing one really good nunsploitation movie. Jesus even said so.

Now before anyone gets on my ass for making a sacrilegious joke, I will remind you that I went to Catholic school for 8 years; uncomfortable shirt, ugly green tie, excessive mass going... the works. I was also referred to as an idiot by one of the nuns because I was/am left-handed, and one of them whipped a piece of chalk at me for an offense I can no longer recall, but most certainly didn't involve risking injury to another human being. In other words, I understand and respect the religion and those who devote their lives to it, but let's just say I wasn't exactly enamored by my perception of it during my formative years.

Thus, I was excited about the idea of a movie where the nun actually was the villain I perceived a few of them as, instead of a "sub-antagonist" like in Silent Night Deadly Night, where Mother Superior is a horrid nasty woman but it's really the killer Santa that may kill a character we care about. But alas, the movie is actually more a giallo, where the killer may or may NOT be our main character, Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg), who had a brain surgery early on and is hooked on morphine. Is she killing people in a drug induced haze? Is someone trying to frame her? More importantly: will this movie ever get entertaining enough to care?

Well, yeah, in the last 20 minutes, when this movie's version of a killing spree finally begins. Until then it's just an endless and snail-paced account of Gertrude more or less losing her shit, which gets tiresome after a while as there's really nothing else to the plot. There aren't any interesting characters, there's very little mystery (it's obviously either Gertrude or one other character), and even the occasional interesting bits go on for so long that they just become as obnoxious as everything else. At one point a crippled guy is relieved of his crutches and has to make his way up the stairs, and this goes on for what seems like 4 full minutes. Even if this was our hero it would be in dire need of an edit; that he's a rather anonymous character just makes it all the more excruciating.

It's also a very disjointed film; plot points are introduced with a shrug, other things (like the guy on the stairs) go on forever when they could have been cut entirely. Writer/director Giulio Berruti never worked on another narrative film after this as far as I can tell, and it's not hard to see why he wasn't much in demand. It's technically proficient, I guess, but there's no soul to it - it's just THERE. The most interesting elements are subdued - the religious angle doesn't even really have a bearing on anything; it might as well have been set in a hospital or nursing home, since that's what it resembles anyway.

Indeed, the old folks that Gertrude is supposed to be caring for provide the best parts of the flick. The highlight of the film is when she yells at one for taking out her dentures at the dinner table and proceeds to smash the things into bits as the old lady cries - THAT'S the sort of behavior I expect from all nuns, let alone one named a Killer by the film's title! A few of them get knocked off in the final reel, where Berruti finally remembered what kind of movie he was making and offs like 4 people in 20 minutes, with some of that Giallo flare that had been absent throughout the film. Even though it didn't make a lick of sense, I quite liked when Gertrude looks above her and sees a corpse dangling, blood dripping over her as she screams. And of course, the rope holding the body snaps and the body comes down. Alas, Berruti than haphazardly cuts to the next scene, killing the moment.

See that's the thing - it's like he figured the title (which translates to Sister Murders - close enough) and maybe a scene or two were enough for an audience to accept the film. No! You gotta commit to your killer nun movie! I mean, if you cheat on your diet, you don't just nibble some cake or an Oreo - you eat half a goddamn pie and wash it down with a milkshake. There's only enough bad taste and depravity here to justify maybe 20 minutes of boredom, when there's close to 75. But at the same time, those bits of nuttiness keep this from ever being taken seriously, so it just ends up satisfying me on either level.

I was happy with the interview with Berruti, however. In the disc's sole extra, he talks a bit about the cast and how the movie WAS actually based on a real person; a nun who was stealing from the old folks she was hired to care for. He also tells a funny anecdote about how they tricked a real convent into letting them film there by showing them fake script pages, and fiddling with lights and camera setups if a priest came over to see what they were doing (so he'd just get bored and leave). He's not as candid as some of these other Italian guys; he has nothing but nice things to say about everyone - the closest he gets to "dishing dirt" is saying that one of the supporting actresses didn't understand some of her character's actions, which is nothing. But it's a good interview nonetheless, and I'm glad Berruti has opted to stick to documentaries as he seems much more comfortable doing those (though it's odd none of them have found their way to his IMDb page, which stops which this film).

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666: The Child (2006)

DECEMBER 22, 2011

GENRE: KILLER KID, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

Two mockbusters of 2006 remakes in as many weeks? What kind of devilry is afoot here? Luckily, 666: The Child (made to cash in on Fox's 2006 remake of The Omen) is much better than Hillside Cannibals, in that it actually has some semblance of structure, a lot of surprisingly fun, Final Destination-lite deaths, and the lovely (Asylum regular) Sarah Lieving, inspiring me to once again sigh that I only see her in Asylum movies. Can someone upgrade her to Syfy Original regular, at least?

Anyway, the deaths really help keep this one going. They're all pretty splatter-y, and there's a lot of variety - a falling pipe, a trip through a glass door, a doctor's drill... even a good ol' fashioned old lady (a nun!) getting hit by a car. The movie is only 79 minutes long (a whopping 10 of which are just the hilariously slow end credits), but director Jack Perez seems to know how to balance the "talk" to "ridiculous" death ratio so that it feels even shorter.

It also helps that they're swiping from a plot-driven movie, so they have a "guide" of sorts to keep them from going astray. Unlike Hillside Cannibals, it wouldn't help anyone to try to surprise us by killing off most of the cast in the first 10 minutes, because this is a killer kid movie! The template is pretty simple: bring the kid into a new home, get suspicious of the recent deaths in act 2, and take action in act 3. If they raced through that and had the kid kill his new parents in the first act, they'd REALLY have to scramble to keep the thing going.

So they do the "right" thing and copy The Omen beat for beat. Even though the husband is some bland surfer looking dude, it still comes down to him to try to kill the evil child, after his wife (Lieving) has been dispatched. And he even gets shot to death by the police in the process, as the kid has suddenly lost his ability to control random objects and defend himself, I guess. There's even a cult member nanny named... wait for it... Lucy Fer, subbing in for the Mrs. Baylock character. Speaking of the names, "Donald" for the evil kid? That's the best they could come up with?

There's also an old priest delivering the exposition about Donald's true nature, but otherwise the Antichrist stuff is largely downplayed. I mean, there's still 666 imagery and such, but it seems far less based on religious text and superstition than either version of The Omen. They also drop the ball on the kid's relation to the events around him, he's present for some murders but others are of characters that he's barely had any involvement with, nor does he seem particularly threatening (remake) or even curious (original) about said events... he's just some punk kid who looks a lot older than the 9 years old he is supposed to be.

They also don't do nearly enough with the shift from politics to entertainment. Be it due to the budget or just some sort of satire that I'm not sharp enough to follow, his big ambition is seemingly not to enter politics, but to infiltrate the entertainment industry, and thus the movie ends with him... taking a co-host role on a basic cable daytime cooking show. Oh shit! But I guess in the long run it's not too big of a deal, since the sequel apparently ignored this concept anyway and just had him running some generic corporation as an adult, instead of now being the king of late night or whatever it is one could work their way up to after landing a cushy gig peeling the onions or measuring out tablespoons of sugar on a cooking show.

The movie was directed by Jack Perez, who botched Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (though perhaps he knew that, as he used a pseudonym) but also helmed the pretty delightful Some Guy Who Kills People, which I caught at Screamfest and even moderated a Q&A with Perez and some of the other folks from the film. Pretty random career, but at least he has seemingly escaped The Asylum's clutches; hopefully he will continue to find success in the genre. I don't think he'll go on to be our next John Carpenter or anything, but if he can make a decent "mockbuster" (one of the few), I think he can be counted on to deliver the goods on a more respectable production (i.e. one that took more than a week to shoot).

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Don't Answer The Phone (1980)

MAY 2, 2011

GENRE: SERIAL KILLER
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

Considering that it’s not known by any other title, it’s surprising how little the phone actually factors into Don’t Answer The Phone, which is sort of like Maniac crossed with Play Misty For Me for a while, but ultimately the phone call part of the story is just sort of phased out, with most of the film focused on either our nameless killer wandering around Los Angeles killing/raping random women, and two cops trying to catch him.

The cop scenes are far more interesting than the killer scenes, sadly. Since we don’t know any of the women, it’s one of those cases where you know they’re dead as soon as he interacts with them, and the unpleasant/unnecessary rape angle removes whatever sort of “fun” you could have watching them, the way you might enjoy seeing Jason or Freddy take down another dumb teen. But Nicholas Worth’s performance as the killer is borderline comical, so his murder scenes don’t work as grim violence either, because it’s impossible to take them seriously.

But the cop scenes are just a total delight. The two actors have a fun chemistry, and the cheesiness of the low budget production (there’s an amazing montage of the whole force “working around the clock” to solve the case, which includes a shot of one cop randomly pointing to Silverlake, a locale that doesn’t appear in the film) just adds to the fun. There’s also an extended sequence where they track a lead to a massage parlor that seemingly houses a little bit of everything; when word of a raid breaks out, we see guys in submissive wear, drug dealers, cross-dressers, a nun (?), and god knows what else bursting out of their rooms and out of 1st floor windows. Plus the drug dealing types, in a panic, get cocaine all over the place, so one guy’s trying to flush it, another’s trying to salvage what he can, and one of the random hookers begins sort of snorting it out of thin air and off of the guy’s head. It’s just insanity, and the fact that it doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with the movie just makes it more fun.

Because really, the actual movie kind of sucks. There’s no suspense whatsoever, the killer’s motive is seemingly “he is messed up from Vietnam”, and it’s repetitive to a major fault; I know I’ve said this before, but if you can re-arrange or remove entire chunks of the movie and not affect the story in any meaningful way, then it’s just not the type of movie I care for. I’d probably have a good time watching it half-drunk at a Grindhouse screening, but I’d just as likely get kind of bored there too. I’m sure there’s an audience for these kind of movies, but I just don’t see the point. At least with something like Maniac (which was similarly shot without permits and “starring” a bunch of people who didn’t know they were in a movie, albeit in NY instead of LA), the killer had a real back story and (eventually) had a relationship with another character to give the movie some sense of weight, but this doesn’t even offer that much. There’s a bit where he kills a girl that has some daddy issues, while referring to himself as “Daddy” (and she even calls him “Dad” at one point during the attack), but they never even explain if this was actually his daughter or if she was just playing along for whatever reason.

The movie’s soundtrack is fairly memorable though. The moody electronic score is actually pretty good at times, but they use enough musical stings to make Carpenter blush. In the aforementioned “Dad” scene, they play a sting for his car driving past (twice), and then another for him walking up to the house, another for trying the door, and yet another for peering through a window – all in under about 80 seconds. Some of the sound FX are pretty wonky too, and clearly recorded elsewhere on several occasions; a gunshot in a house sounds suspiciously like it was taken from a Western TV show. Ordinarily I wouldn’t care, but it just adds to the general sense that the movie was literally slapped together by folks who were trying to make a buck by cashing in on the killer craze of 1980.

And to the credit of the moderator from Video Watchdog (it's not Tim Lucas, but some other guy who has the same annoying/detached voice), he actually tries to get director Robert Hammer to admit as much, several times in fact. At one point Hammer discusses a different ending in which the hero would look and see that the killer's body was gone, and the VW guy says "Well that's a ripoff of Halloween", but Hammer claims he hadn't seen it. Yet the guy has the balls to say that the later Halloween sequels, plus the Friday the 13ths and even Scream (!) were all influenced by this film, a comment that almost caused me to throw the disc across the room. The rest of the track is pretty much a chore; Hammer isn't much of a talker, which means the moderator has to keep talking, trying to get stuff out of him in between painful efforts at jokes and tossing in random movie references either to prove how smart he was or just (hopefully) wishing to talk about any movie besides this one. And it's the rare track that actually made me like the movie LESS, because apart from their ballsy approach to shooting (even getting a couple of LAPD officers in a few shots without their knowledge), there is nothing admirable about their efforts here. This wasn't a deep, thoughtful movie that got mangled by intervening producers or anything; it's pretty much the exact movie they wanted to make. When Lucas 2.0 asks what sort of stuff they had to cut because of the budget, Hammer says "some stuff in a church". So that, plus the always annoying "We influenced these other movies" type comments, just left me even colder on the film. However, just to clarify, I should point out that this film came along BEFORE Maniac, so they weren't drawing from it. I don't buy that he didn't see Halloween, though; not for a second.

The only other extra is an interview with Worth, who admits that he thought the script was garbage, but eventually came around and was surprised to discover the film had its fans (as am I!). And it's probably the last filmed interview he did, as he died less than a year after it was conducted, so it's a shame he doesn't spend more time discussing his career in general (he's probably best known as Pauly in Darkman). Oh well. It's not a wholly terrible film, but there's just no substance to it whatsoever; it's only been a few hours and I'm already forgetting half of what happened in it.

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Dolly Dearest (1992)

JANUARY 11, 2011

GENRE: PUPPET, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: NETFLIX (INSTANT)

Sometimes I wonder why there weren’t more Child’s Play ripoffs, but I think Dolly Dearest has the answer – the concept was just too goofy to work more than once. I suspect the reason that the sequels got increasingly silly (I hated the 5th movie) was because the scare factor only worked once, due to it being a rather new idea (having a genuinely good director in Tom Holland didn’t hurt). So it’s not too surprising that Dolly doesn’t really have a lot of doll action and adds a possessed little girl into the mix.

It also pretty much sucks. Writer/director Maria Lease kept switching gears too often; at first she seems to be suggesting that the little girl is possessed or just plain troubled by the doll and possibly might end up being the killer herself, but then the girl disappears for about 20 minutes while we switch focus to the doll factory, where we learn that ALL of the dolls are possessed. Then the movie stops cold so a nun and Rip Torn (playing a Mexican!) can explain everything to mom Denise Crosby. Finally, Torn and the dad who runs the factory decide to put an end to all of this nonsense, again leaving the little girl out of it. Imagine if Andy Barclay just disappeared from Child’s Play halfway through? One could assume she just did these things to distinguish her film from Holland’s, but all it did was make me appreciate that film all the more. Child’s Play is how you do a killer doll movie, and Dolly Dearest is how you don’t.

Having several dolls running around also hurts the movie. It’s funny, when Child’s Play 3 began and showed Chucky’s blood being dripped into a vat of plastic, I figured it would make several Chuckys – now I know what a potentially bad idea that would be. One doll is scary – it can hide, use your “it’s just a doll” attitude to its advantage, etc (I can’t believe I am dissecting this). But with a whole bunch of dolls, it’s just another tiny killers movie like Critters or whatever. Worse, the doll has no personality whatsoever. It utters a few “creepy” lines here and there like “Come play with me!” or whatever, but it’s all generic crap like that, and its signature move seems to be scurrying around in the background while the actor in the foreground looks in the wrong direction.

The humans aren’t much better. Again, Rip Torn plays a Mexican, so there’s some inherent value in that, but the family members are terribly bland, with the exception of the son who is just plain annoying. And poor Lupe Ontiveros, playing one of her several hundred housekeeper roles, is also stuck playing another stereotype – the superstitious Catholic who has to carry crucifixes around at all times and pray in every other scene. She’s also the first to die though, sparing her from being the one to explain everything later (the nun does that – it’s her character’s sister, natch).

And the ending! I’ve never seen something so incredibly botched and sloppy. Sam Bottoms (the dad) and Torn decide to blow up the factory with all the dolls. I’m of the opinion that blowing up an ancient curse wouldn’t work – can’t the giant blob of animated red light that we saw at the beginning of the movie just transfer to something else? But anyway, that’s their plan. And we see the dolls running around and putting out all of the dynamite that they are tossing around, but nothing comes of it! They don’t even seem to notice, and the place blows up good anyway, rendering every single shot of the dolls putting the dynamite out completely worthless. And really, it’s that simple – they just run around with dynamite, blow it up, and the movie’s over. Hell, Torn even survives! I figured the only reason he was in the movie was to provide it with one last death in the climax, since they can’t kill anyone in the family, but no, he runs out with Bottoms and then their stunt doubles jump out of harm’s way. Screw you, movie. I had my heart set on a Rip Torn version of “Ay dios mio!” and you took it from me.

Oh, and you can’t pass off Santa Clarita for Mexico. Even before I double checked on the IMDb, I was like “This doesn’t look like Mexico to me. I’m pretty sure I saw that road on the way to play paintball last month.” Next time I go play paintball I will ask the locals where they shot the movie, and then I will shoot the hell out of that studio (with paint).

And this fucking thing is on the cover of Fangoria, so if Ms. Lease ever does a public appearance I’m going to have to talk to her so I can get her autograph (since I finished my quest to obtain every issue of Fango, I picked up another – getting every cover signed by the director of the movie on it). The hell am I going to say? “Hey, nice to meet you... I really liked, uh... the end titles, because at least they spelled Lupe Ontiveros’ name right on those (they didn’t in the opening credits).”

What say you?

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The Raven (2006)

SEPTEMBER 12, 2010

GENRE: GHOST (?), SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

You know how just about every band releases one really “off” album and you never listen to it, but every now and then you’re like “I don’t remember what it was I don’t like about this... how bad can it be?”, and then you listen and you’re like “Oh right....”? That’s how I am with Ulli Lommel films. I watch about one a year, hate it, and then months later I always figure “well, that last one is bad, but I’ve seen a lot of awful crap since then, so I’ll have a new perspective.” And then it’s just as bad if not worse than the one before. Well, if I may offer dim praise, The Raven might be one of his better films (of the ones I’ve seen), because it at least offers me some nostalgia.

Based on the billboards that pop up in scenes filmed on Sunset Blvd, this movie was shot right around the time I moved to LA. In fact there’s a Masters of Horror billboard in one shot – that show premiered the night I arrived in town. There’s also a Harry Potter and The Goblet Of Fire billboard in another shot, which was one of the first movies I saw here once I had settled in. Memories...

Also, back then I wasn’t watching shit like this on a daily basis.

The most curious thing about his resume is how often he manages to get people to return for his next film. The main girl, one Jillian Swanson, has appeared in like 4 films with the guy – doesn’t she learn? This is the sort of thing that can ruin your career (indeed, after her last Lommel feature, she has only scored but one credit, on an episode of a TV show I’ve never heard of), and she probably could have gone on to better things. She can’t lip sync worth a damn, but it seem she’s a decent actress (compared to the rest of the cast anyway), and attractive; certainly enough to get a 2 episode stint as Drama’s girlfriend on Entourage or some shit.

As for the plot, your guess is as good as mine. Best I can figure, Lenore (Swanson) was raped by this dude, and then she killed him in her tub. Some undetermined time later, he or his ghost comes back, sometimes dressed as a raven (yep), and kills a bunch of her friends, which doesn’t seem to concern any of them all too much. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed during the movie; it would seem like days later but folks would act like whatever they were discussing just happened an hour before. But even so, there are odd events that Lenore just seems sort of puzzled by instead of genuinely concerned, like when one disappears out of a dentist chair even though she was sitting in the lobby and thus couldn’t have missed the girl deciding not to get a filling after all.

The kill scenes are equally baffling. Most of them involve the killer standing there watching the victim for a while (it sounds creepy but it’s just boring, trust me), and then his knife will appear in an impossible place (such as coming up from inside a laundry machine), before they cut to another angle with him holding the same knife to the character’s throat. So are there two killers? One who can fit inside laundry machines and under car seats, and the watcher guy? Who the hell knows/cares.

What does any of this have to do with Poe, you might ask? Well, as a child who looked nothing like her present day self (it seems they actually went out of their way to make this aspect of the movie confusing by casting the least similar looking child on the planet and then never really having a point to any of the flashbacks to boot), Lenore was taken in by a weird old man (Lommel himself I think) who liked to read Poe stories to her. But he died and left her a house, which is a typical Poe-ian plot point, albeit it has no bearing on anything.

In fact there are a lot of “What the hell?” plot points and characters in the movie. In addition to the dentist (TWO of the characters in the movie are going to the dentist on this day, plus they talk about going for a good 5 minutes before it happens), there’s a rock band and recording studio, a body shop, and also a couple of nuns (one of whom sports a wedding ring) who take care of someone who I think is supposed to be Lenore’s sister. She seems like a mute invalid for most of the movie, sitting in her wheelchair, incapable of putting food in her own mouth, but then suddenly starts talking normally, right around the time the nun spills some food on the girl’s shirt and instantly removes it, making this the rare film that offers nudity from a character confined to a wheelchair. If I had to guess, these folks were all investors who wanted to be in the movie, so Lommel worked them in as more or less themselves despite the fact that it’s jarring and pointless.

As with his Zodiac movie (still one of the absolute worst films I’ve watched for HMAD), he occasionally has the killer (or him) narrate some pointless nonsense, like “Skinner kills all bitches!” But this time he has on-screen graphics to accompany these random outbursts. He also takes quite a liking to electrical poles/wires, as shots of them are inserted into the film every 47 seconds or so.

Unsurprisingly it looks/sounds like ass. Some scenes resemble a rather third rate reality show as our characters wander around a location like a body shop, rambling about nothing in particular. Most of the sound is obviously recorded with the camera’s built in microphone, and the picture quality is that of a home video. The cameraman appears in reflections more often than not, and every now and then Lommel inserts shots from a different movie entirely (one shot on film) for some reason. They also spell Poe’s name wrong (Allen instead of Allan) in the credits, but I’m guessing the Poe estate probably appreciates it, as it will only help them prove that they had nothing to do with this nonsense.

The only bonus feature is a trailer. Thank you. But this is an LG release, so there are a whole bunch of trailers. Interestingly, there are back to back spots for The Descent, which is possibly the best horror film of the decade, and Murder Set Pieces, which is inarguably the worst. And also a spot for Open Water 2: Adrift, which inexplicably remains my most popular review. And more nostalgia, Saw III, which opened the weekend I began writing for B-D. So, shit film, but very eclectic trailer reel!

What say you?

P.S. According to Wikipedia, Lommel has since quit making horror films, as he has found Christ or something. Good riddance. I feel bad for Christ.

PLEASE, GO ON...

Mirrors (2008)

AUGUST 15, 2008

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I like how Kiefer Sutherland’s career has worked out. By 2001, his movies were going direct to video, and so he took a TV job as Jack Bauer on 24. And that show was so popular that he was able to return to wide release starring roles in movies like Mirrors, which puts his name above the title and everything. Unfortunately, it’s movies like this that led to his box office clout eroding in the first place. Circle of life...

It’s not a terrible movie by any stretch, but the fact that it’s merely underwhelming and dull is somehow more disappointing. At least with terrible garbage (like what Kiefer’s half brother is starring in) you can have fun mocking it and such. But this movie takes itself too seriously to allow the audience to have any fun, intended or not. Every now and then we are given a taste of insanity (mostly in the film’s final 15-20 minutes, which includes Kiefer holding a gun on a nun, an old woman exploding, and a wonderfully downbeat ending), but for the most part it’s surprisingly dull, which is something you can’t often say about Alexandre Aja.

Maybe it’s some sort of meta-“mirror”-commentary, but this movie is the opposite of his previous two films. Those started out strong and ended weak, due to a badly implemented twist (High Tension) or completely misguided “social commentary” (Hills Have Eyes remake). In Mirrors, we are almost numbed into boredom by the time the movie finally gets going. After a major character is killed (well, major in that she’s famous, but she only has about 7 minutes of screentime), Kiefer pretty much turns into Jack Bauer, shooting stuff for no reason, flipping bitches on the expressway, yelling “Dammit!” every 5 minutes, etc. And again: NUNS AT GUNPOINT.

But until you get there, you gotta watch a lot of half-baked family drama (Kiefer is, naturally, burnt out, and estranged from his family), two lengthy sequences of Kiefer walking around the burned down department store where he works, looking at mirrors and “seeing things”, lots and lots of shots that keep the whole duality/mirror image thing going (just about every shot in the film has some sort of reflective surface), etc. And maybe it is yet another sort of “mirror” type motif, but it seems we get two versions of every scene in the film. Besides the two “store walkthroughs”, there are two scenes of Kiefer going through medical documents and such, two scenes of him driving to talk to some “answers” person in the middle of nowhere, two scenes where his sister tries to give him advice and he brushes it off, etc.

Plus, it’s simply far too serious than any movie about killer mirrors should be. Given how nonsensical the plot is, I really wish some of the actors and Aja (who wrote the script, as usual, with Grégory Levasseur) just had some fun with it, instead of being so dour and upset all the time.

The movie is also strangely lacking in other characters to put in danger. Kiefer’s job is to watch a condemned department building (it suffered a major fire), but he never actually has to do anything. Why not throw in a homeless person or maybe a looter for the mirrors to kill? Kiefer also has a buddy on the force who helps him unravel the mystery via providing him with medical documents and such, but he is kept entirely out of the action. So basically, Kiefer and his family are the only ones ever in any danger, which is to say that there is no danger. If Kiefer dies it won’t be until the end, and since this is an American film, there’s no way Aja will be allowed to kill off the two young kids (ages 6 and 8) or their mother, as that would mean the kids would be placed in foster care or with their burn-out dad, which is a major bummer either way. In the end, more CTU agents are killed in a single episode of 24 than are killed in the entirety of this 2 hour, R rated movie. Not that a body count is essential to an effective horror movie, but if you can’t really believe any of your characters are in any danger, you lose a lot of the potential for suspense, something more problematic when your movie is about a half an hour too long as it is.

On Jim Steinman’s album "Pandora’s Box", there is a spoken word bit about how the main character in the song has to feed people to the hungry mirrors. They show him a reflection and he has to find the person in it, and then let the mirror eat them (this was also sort of the plot for one of the stories in From Beyond The Grave). That song not only has a way more interesting story, but it’s also much creepier than anything in this movie. The first time you see a reflection start to “stray” from its owner, it’s a cool effect; by the 10th time, you just want to get on with it.

I really wanted to like this movie, and there’s definitely a good version of it in there somewhere (it’s partially based on a Korean film; maybe that one delivers). Like M Night Shyamalan, I think Aja is a very gifted filmmaker, but should really allow someone else to write the scripts. It’s kind of ironic that his least disappointing script (if not a particularly great one) was the one he let someone else direct (Franck Khalfoun for P2); maybe it’s time he tried it the other way.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...