FTP: The Wax Mask (1997)

DECEMBER 16, 2023

GENRE: GIALLO, MAD SCIENTIST
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

There’s kind of a heartbreaking moment on the bonus features for The Wax Mask (Italian: Maschera di cera), where Sergio Stivaletti notes that the movie never got a fair shake from horror fans. Not a direct quote because I don’t have the patience to go back and find where he says it (more on that soon) but the gist is “It was never seen as the exciting debut movie from a FX artist they liked – it was always the movie Lucio Fulci was going to make and I replaced him when he died.” And he’s right; you’d be hard-pressed to find a single review or article about the film from the past 25 years that doesn’t practically lead with “This was supposed to be a Fulci comeback movie,” which is unfair to Stivaletti (for those not privy to the history: Fulci died weeks before production was set to begin). The closest equivalent I can think of would be A.I. being directed by Spielberg instead of Kubrick, but it’s not like the ‘berg was making his debut, you know? We trusted him.

But one thing that’s not mentioned as much is, you know, it’s very likely the movie wouldn’t have been very good with Fulci calling the shots, either. At that point he hadn’t made a good flick in over a decade, and the Italian film industry’s decreased interest in horror (Stivaletti notes it may have been the only major Italian horror film being produced at that time, saying they were more interested in distributing American disaster movies of the era) meant that they weren’t afforded the same resources they had access to in the early 80s. With the story being a period piece, I feel it always would have come off as underwhelming at best, and (ironically) some of the film’s only real memorable moments were apparently things Stivaletti added that wouldn’t have been in Fulci’s version anyway.

I mean don’t get me wrong, the movie’s not terrible – at times it’s actually fairly entertaining. It’s just one of those things where the names you see in the credits (in addition to Fulci, who wrote the majority of the script, it was also co-written and produced by Dario Argento) elevate expectations. If you snipped off the opening titles and showed it to someone without context, they’d probably walk away thinking it was a decent enough spin on House of Wax, where a reporter and the museum’s new employee work together to solve the mystery of why those wax figures look so darn realistic and if it has anything to do with a string of disappearances. There are a few gory murders, some goofy mid-90s CGI shots that I find charming now (man did they love their morphing FX back then!), frequent sex scenes with actual nudity (also charming since such things don’t exist anymore), and a fiery climax that gave off low-key Hammer vibes. Nothing too exciting or memorable, but, you know, it’s fine!

That said, it never really looks all that well, which kept me at arm’s length. Cinematographer Sergio Salvati was Fulci’s DP for a number of his classics, but sadly it looks more like Salvati’s later work with Full Moon (including the OG Puppet Master), where everything is over lit and soap opera-ish. Honestly if it wasn’t for the time discrepancy I’d swear it was shot on video, so again I can’t help but think if Fulci had survived I’d have the same issues with it that I do under Stivaletti’s watch, and if anything I give him a little more benefit of the doubt since he’s a first timer whereas Fulci would have no excuse for it to look this phony (with the fact that it’s supposed to be 1912 even harder to buy when it looks like they shot it with something they bought at Circuit City). And as I mentioned, one of the best things in the movie is an out of nowhere Terminator-esque scene where the villain, revealed to basically be a robot wearing human skin, is melted down to his exoskeleton and chases the heroes for a bit as the fire rages behind them all. It’s delightfully batshit, offering the movie the sort of energy that it could have used throughout in order to offset its deficiencies.

Stivaletti, Argento, producer Giuseppe Colombo, and a couple others (none of the lead actors, alas) are on hand for a retrospective documentary that is annoyingly broken into several different featurettes, despite having the same people in all of them. Like I get that they want to pad the bonus features menu (indeed, I was kind of overwhelmed when I first loaded it up), but why not just have each interview separate? They obviously put together a 80ish minute doc and then cut it all up – next time make that “we need more bonus features” call before wasting the time of the editor who saw their work split into chunks. Especially since you kind of have to watch all of them anyway to get the context of what they’re talking about; like one just discusses the cast and even a child could be able to detect that it’s lacking a proper intro and stops suddenly. Also they’re all in Italian with non-burned in subtitles, so you can’t even cheat and fast forward at 2x (while reading fast) to get through them all. There’s a solid interview with Alan Jones about some of the project’s history and reputation, and a vintage featurette of Argento on the set, where it seems there was some Spielberg/Hooper/Poltergeist kinda stuff going on re: who was actually directing at times. And there’s a commentary, which is fine – I was most engaged by the Italian Stivaletti speaking English and occasionally asking moderator/Severin guru David Gregory to translate (“It’s a… word joke?” Stivaletti questions, with Gregory deciphering what he meant: “Play on words”). It’s cute! Oh and somewhere in there (again, if it wasn’t all broken up I might be able to find it again easier) Argento tells a delightful story about the lead actor Robert Hossein hooking up with one of the film’s actresses, only for her husband to catch them. But Hossein, thinking fast, told them they were just rehearsing their love scene and she was naked so she could start getting used to being undressed on camera. Hahahah, what a legend.

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FTP: The Vault of Horror (1973)

OCTOBER 3, 2023

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

I could have sworn I actually saw The Vault of Horror before, but I apparently just got it mixed up with the half dozen other early ‘70s horror anthologies, which explains why I always get Vault questions wrong at horror trivia. To be fair even when I started watching it it seemed like I had already seen it, because the setup was so similar to Tales From The Crypt’s, with a bunch of dudes (well, Crypt had Joan Collins among them) finding themselves grouped together under mysterious circumstances and proceeding to tell their individual stories about how they might have gotten there. I mean it's technically a sequel as it's from the same producers and based on the same old comic series, so I can't fault it for taking a "if it ain't broke..." approach.

Luckily I found it to be just as enjoyable as Tales, so at least it’s worthy of the name. As I’ve said in the past, I tend to like few anthology films as a whole; the hit or miss ratio inherent to such things makes them hard for me to recommend when all is said and done, making me wish you could just extract a segment (say, "The Raft" from Creepshow II) and not deal with the rest. This also makes me less likely to revisit any of them, though since Vault is packaged together with Tales (via Scream Factory) I took another look at that one, and since it had been nearly 16 years since I last saw it (holy crap I’ve been here for a long time) it was basically like a first time watch, and I even enjoyed the story I didn’t like as much the first time around.

As for Vault, the protagonists are even bigger jerks than the ones in Tales, which at least had the good sense to introduce a few sympathetic characters (Peter Cushing’s, for example) to mix along with them. Here the closest we get to a decent person ends up murdering her jerk husband and cutting his corpse into pieces which she then stores in a bunch of labeled jars – hardly a role model. But I was in the right mood for all the crass behavior, so I had a good time cackling at how reprehensible these people were and then cheering for their demises; a movie with no heroes but plenty of crowd-pleasing moments. The first story exemplifies this attitude the best; it’s a pretty short/simple tale of a guy who wants to find his sister regarding the family inheritance, but not to split it – he kills her so he can have it all (he also kills the PI who tracked her down). Then he treats himself to a celebratory dinner, only to discover everyone in the restaurant is a vampire, all of whom proceed to place a valve in his neck and use him as a blood keg. And that’s it! I love it.

The next one is the one I mentioned, where the lady kills her husband – but he had it coming, as he was an insufferable ass who marries this younger woman only to make her miserable by being so obsessively neat and tidy, screaming at her for things like not buying more tomato sauce even though he has a (complicated) checkmark system in place to ensure that things are replaced when used. I was delighted by this one too, but it also made me feel a bit bad, because I’ve definitely scowled at my wife for not telling me we were out of this or that. Guess I won’t ever do that again, so thanks for setting me straight, fifty year old horror movie. (Still, I’m glad she didn’t watch it with me and point it out, as I’d feel worse!)

The next one was the seemingly obligatory weak link, about a jerk magician and his jerk wife going out of their way to show the audience how a rival magician was pulling off his tricks, then killing the man’s daughter in order to steal a “magic rope” trick that appeared to be the real deal. It felt drawn out compared to the others, and the ending was both abrupt and puzzling (a dead character resurfaces with no explanation – magic, I guess?). And the next one wasn’t exactly a slam dunk either, but was at least pretty short, involving a guy being buried alive as part of a scam only for his partner to leave him there to keep all the money. There’s another twist after that, resulting in what’s probably the most comical of the five stories, but it’s too slight to really register as a highlight.

The final one is pretty great though, focusing on an artist who has been told by the critics and dealers that he’s no good, only to discover that they were lying to him in order to sell his (apparently good!) paintings at high prices and not tell him about it. So he strikes a deal with a voodoo doctor that allows him to paint someone, then do something to the painting that will happen in reality to the person depicted in the painting (so if he paints a guy and then lights the painting on fire, the guy will be suddenly immolated). This leads to some amusing death scenes and a howler of an ending, when the guy leaves his own self-portrait out in the open (he can’t put it away or else he feels like he’s suffocating) and it’s destroyed by paint thinner, heh.

Alas, the disc has no real extras (same for Tales) except for an alternate version of the movie which, best I can tell, censors the gory ending of the vampire restaurant story, and also presents it at a different aspect ratio (it was shot open matte, so while the 1.78 image is the one preferred by the filmmakers, the open one actually has more information at the top and bottom). For reasons I can’t discern, one disc has Tales and Vault, with the other version of Vault on a second disc? Why not put both Vault versions together on one disc for easier comparison? Bizarre decision. But that’s it beyond trailers; no historian commentaries or anything like that, which is a shame as it was an interesting trend in the early ‘70s that basically died out, something a historian could have gone over in detail along with pointing out the original Gaines comics the stories came from and such. Oh well.

But hey, it’s the best time of the year for these sort of movies, as they’re fun but fiendish, and also if you’re like me and find yourself too busy to watch too many movies at home, it’s certainly easier to break up your viewing into chunks with an anthology than it is for a traditional feature. So it’s a bad "Pile" movie, because I’m going to keep it, but I’m glad I finally saw Vault (it’s been in said pile for several years, again because I thought I had seen it already and therefore it would be a rewatch) and gave Tales a second look. Plus, having recently seen an anthology where the segments were all over the place with regards to tone and quality, it was nice to watch one with a little more cohesion.

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FTP: Uncle Peckerhead (2020)

SEPTEMBER 25, 2023

GENRE: COMEDIC, HERO KILLER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

For the most part, the worst thing I can say about Uncle Peckerhead is that it often reminded me of two better movies. Luckily, both of them are relatively obscure compared to the movies most small budget horror films ape (i.e. Conjuring or whatever the newest hit slasher was), so it’s possible one could watch without having seen them, and maybe you’ll be more engaged by what it has to offer. But if you’ve seen Green Room and/or Eddie the Sleepwalking Cannibal, be prepared for a lot of déjà vu.

Luckily it’s not as hard to watch as Green Room (even if star Anton Yelchin didn’t ultimately die of a gruesome accident in real life, I don’t think I could ever watch his arm injury scene again), it’s just got a similar backdrop: a very poor punk band trying to make a go of it when playing for next to nothing and stealing gas from other cars in the parking lots they often sleep in. The scene where that film’s The Aint Rights plays to a pizza parlor has a very close cousin here, and the plot also kicks off in the same way, when our hero goes back inside the club and sees something they weren’t supposed to. The key difference is that what they weren’t supposed to see there was your standard murder, and here it's their roadie, Peck, turning into a zombie monster and devouring the greedy promoter that just ripped them off.

And that’s where the Eddie the Sleepwalking Cannibal element kicks in, as Peck seemingly means our hero band (a trio named Duh) no harm, and is actually a pretty helpful addition to their band, so they kinda let his murderous ways slide (and occasionally help cover up evidence of such digressions) as their band is getting more successful due to his influence – he’s quite good at selling merch, for example! But you know how this sort of story goes – they’ll enjoy the success for a bit, and then realize it’s not right, so their ally turns into a foe. So maybe Little Shop of Horrors would be a more apt comparison, but the dry humor and the fact that the monster is a person (not a plant) had me thinking more of Eddie, so I’m sticking with it!

But that said, it’s a pretty fun watch. The trio of band members (two girls, one guy) are likable and easy to root for, and honestly could have made for the basis of a straight indie comedy without “Uncle Peckerhead” worked into the mix. Since they never have money for a motel they often crash at rando’s houses, giving the film a steady stream of new faces/dynamics, and their rivalry with an emo band led by a pretentious Jared Leto type provides the film with its funniest moments (though as an old school Simpsons fan I would cite an out of nowhere Poochie reference as my favorite gag). It’s never really laugh out loud funny, but it provided pretty of amiable smiles, which is fine – if the comedy part of a “horror comedy” is a total failure (and many are), it drags the whole movie down, so getting decent results in that half of the equation is something of a win on its own.

It’s just too bad that the ending is garbage! I won’t spoil it outright, but it tonally didn’t fit with the rest of the movie to my eyes, sending me out on a downer instead of another wry smile that the previous 85 minutes had been providing with regularity. I’m not sure why they went the way they did with it, but man, it’s been a while since I’ve seen so much goodwill get tossed out the window at the 11th hour. I’d almost rather it sucked the whole way through, at least it’d be consistent. I guess I see the intent, that at the end of the day the band deserves some punishment for what they allowed to happen, but it swings too far into the other direction and ends abruptly to boot, leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Your mileage may vary of course, but be prepared for some whiplash.

The disc comes with a group commentary (arranged via Zoom or something, as it was recorded in the early days of the pandemic – at least we know they’re smart!), to which I couldn’t always tell the participants apart but they have a good chemistry and never fall silent, loading the track up with production stories, the occasional jab at each other’s expense, and praise upon the other crew members, many of whom wore multiple hats on the production. A short film about a demon that has a few of the same cast members is also included; the back of the blu-ray promises it’s in the same universe as the film but I don’t see how that’d be possible with the doubling performers. There’s also an 11 minute compilation of Duh’s music if you’d like to listen without the movie’s audio distracting from it. A fairly low-key release for a similarly enjoyable but ultimately just shy of a must-see movie.

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FTP: Teen Wolf Too (1987)

AUGUST 28, 2023

GENRE: COMEDIC, WEREWOLF
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I've had Teen Wolf *and* Teen Wolf Too sitting in the pile since they came out from Scream Factory 5-6 years ago, upgrades from a barebones double feature release on DVD that must have made their fans very happy. But I was not among them; I saw the first film as a kid and didn't think much of it then, and never bothered with the sequel. And it turns out my 6-7 year old self was correct in thinking the first one wasn't very good, but what I only now realized was that watching them back to back did the sequel no favors, since it's pretty much the same movie that wasn't that good in the first place.

I mean, honestly, if more people actually saw the second film (in which original star Michael J Fox is only mentioned; new star Jason Bateman is said to be the character's cousin) it'd probably be namechecked along with Home Alone and Hangover sequels for being so lazy when it came to plot points. Bateman's character turns into a werewolf when stressed, butts heads with the head of the school he attends, ignores the "girl next door" type who is in love with him in favor of a snobby girl, becomes popular due to his werewolf antics helping him with a sport (basketball there, boxing here), etc. At no point does the film even try to do anything different, and eventually I realized that perhaps it wasn't Bateman's substitution that was the problem, but that it gave the filmmakers license to repeat everything, whereas with Fox at least they'd have to give him SOMETHING different to do unless they wanted to just give the character amnesia.

But at least they allowed Bateman to play a different character, as others weren't so lucky. The wacky Stiles returns with a different actor, as does Coach Finstock, who (as with the first film, at least for me) is the only one who got any laughs out of me. The actors playing Coach look and act a lot alike, but the two Stiles are very different, which makes me wonder why they bothered saying it was the same character if it wasn't going to be the same actor and they'd have different vibes (beyond a general "the cool buddy" presence)? It's not the only odd decision in the movie, but it's one that will likely bug people the most. The only two people who DID return are Mark Holton as (oof) Chubby, and James Hampton as Fox's character's dad, who is Bateman's uncle (Bateman's parents are vaguely dead, another recycle from the first which had Fox's mom's unexplained death), neither of which I assume were enough to make up for Fox's absence among fans (nothing against Bateman, of course. He's fine.)

The only real change is that it seems they decided since the first one wasn't that funny anyway, they'd just largely omit jokes altogether this time around. There are a few antics and sight gags here and there, and again the Coach is amusing because he's always so checked out (Bateman asks if he has any advice while the former is getting his ass kicked in the boxing match, and Coach replies "No?" as if he didn't even understand why he was being asked - it was my only audible laugh for the entire film), but mostly it's just kind of coasting through each scene and setpiece as if the sheer silliness of a guy (occasionally) becoming a wolf would be enough of an audience pleaser. I mean, it barely worked the first time around, and now we don't even have the novelty? It's the rare sequel that would actually work slightly better if you hadn't seen or even been aware of the first movie at all.

It's also odd that they don't really explore the werewolf legacy, as you'd expect a sequel to get into the mythology of such things. But honestly I feel Bateman spends even less time than Fox did in wolf mode (he once again opts to have his final sports match in human form, leaving the wolf out of the last act entirely), though the design is pretty bad and there are no transformation effects to speak of, so whatever. At one point Hampton transforms into a wolf and then back to human in between cuts (Bateman asks him to do so, as he's embarrassed about it all), so apparently it's something that only takes about a second or two. Outside of the repeat of the school head being threatened by a werewolf who is protective of the lead (Hampton in the original, Bateman's teacher here, played by Kim Darby), one could tune in to the final 20-25 minutes of this movie and not even realize it was about a werewolf at all.

The weirdness continues into the bonus features, which are presented as interviews with a few key players (director Christopher Leitch, a few of the supporting actors), but have clearly been broken up from a longer retrospective (which is what was offered on the first film), as the participants appear in the other folks' interviews as well, as do people who worked on the first movie and a film historian type. I assume they wanted to make the package more attractive by touting five bonus features instead of just one, but I mean... I'm pretty sure the people that wanted this movie were going to buy it regardless. None of them were particularly enlightening beyond the relief that no one seems to be of the illusion that the movie was very good, though the new Stiles does note that he was originally doing improv that the director liked, and perhaps would have made the movie funnier, but the producers didn't care for it and told them both to just stick to the script from then on. No new ideas or creativity allowed onscreen in Teen Wolf Too!

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FTP: 11.22.63 (2016)

JULY 24, 2023

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

I can’t say with 100% certainty, but in my head, “The Pile” began with the blu-ray of 11.22.63, seven years ago. As I’ve explained, most of the discs in the pile were either won at trivia, blind buys, or – most common – unsolicited review copies. And by unsolicited I mean I didn’t ask for them; some studios just send stuff out to everyone on their list, while others only do it when you ask. Well, 11.22.63 was one I requested, but it unfortunately arrived at the worst possible time: when I was suddenly forced to move in the summer of 2016. Like most Los Angelenos, we were renting the place we were living in, and the owner decided she wanted to sell it, and while it would have been nice to just buy it ourselves and spare ourselves a move, we couldn't afford it. So I had to scramble to find a new place with as much free time as work would allow (my wife, who works in the mental health sector, couldn’t really join the “fun” as her day job is much harder to suddenly take time from), and thus I didn’t have much time to watch an eight hour series in a timely manner.

I tried though! I distinctly remember getting the PS4 connected to my TV and watching the first episode one night after a long day of unpacking at the new place (even more specific: my couch was at an awkward angle as unpacked boxes were in the way), hoping that maybe I could do one episode a night and get a review up within a reasonable adjacency of the time of its street date. Except I passed out before I even got through that whole episode (in my slight defense, the premiere was a double length affair), and then something came up the next night, and the next, and before I knew it the street date had long passed and I hadn’t even finished the premiere. And by that point, other things I had requested had come along for review, and rather than let THOSE slide too I just sort of backgrounded 11.22.63 for a rainy day, promising to get to it eventually. Well, that day has finally come!

The funny thing is that I never intended to review it here at HMAD; having read the book I knew it wasn’t horror, despite being from Stephen King. No, I was going to use it as one of my infrequent but welcome “mainstream” pieces on Birth Movies Death, where I wrote about non horror things outside of my usual Collins’ Crypt piece for the week. Obviously that isn’t a possibility anymore (insane that it’s been over three years now since the site died twice), and I probably could have just finally watched it to satisfy my weird feeling of guilt of requesting it only to let it sit there, but since it’s such a legacy player in “the pile” I figured (along with the King connection) it’d be fine to say a few things here and, at long last, fulfill my promise to the publicist who for all I know doesn’t even work there anymore.

Anyway, it’s a pretty faithful adaptation of the book, at least in general. Both tell the story of Jake Epping, an English teacher who is shocked to discover that the reason his buddy Al is able to sell hamburgers so cheap at his diner is because he time travels to the past to buy them. Thanks to a wormhole of sorts in the diner’s backroom closet, Al (and then Jake) is able to transport back to a specific point in time in 1958; whether he stays there for five minutes or five years, he’ll come back to a minute or so later in his own time, and if he steps through the wormhole again, it’ll just be that same moment in the past, every time. Al has decided to use the ability to prevent the assassination of JFK, but he develops cancer and dies before being able to complete the job, passing on the idea (and his notes and such) to Jake. So Jake steps through the hole prepared for a very long journey, but finds a new love named Sadie that distracts him from the mission, and also makes him not want to return to his own time. He also discovers that the past does not want to be changed, so his attempts at following Lee Harvey Oswald and getting proof he was the shooter are always derailed in some way, forcing him to stay until the actual day in question rather than just shoot Oswald immediately and go home (the story wouldn’t work with RFK, or Lincoln, or any other notably assassinated leader where the killer was clearly identified).

I must admit it wasn’t my favorite of King’s books; the weirdly long time frame (five years in between his arrival and the assassination; the show changes it to three) kept the book from feeling very urgent the way the best time travel stories do, and so it just got kind of draggy (it’s also over 900 pages). The show does attempt to speed things up a bit by reducing the number of years in between, but even with that it still feels drawn out, as if King (or the writers of the show) couldn’t decide if they were making a legit procedural about what preventing the assassination would entail (following George de Mohrenschildt! Tracking Oswald’s attempt on General Walker!) or a love story about a man who travels back 50 years and finds himself more at home than he ever was in his own time. Having it played both ways just muddles things up, something the show actually makes worse by inexplicably having scenes from Oswald’s perspective, when Jake isn’t even around. King decides to go with “Oswald acted alone”, which is for the best, but it makes these scenes weirder than they already are with the POV shift, as if they want us to have sympathy for the guy.

They also made the curious decision to upgrade the character of Bill to a full lead. In the book, Bill is barely even a supporting character; he’s a guy who helps Jake kill Frank Dunning (an abusive father to one of Jake’s students) and then has a heart attack and exits the story. Here, his backstory is the same, but after Frank is killed Jake takes Bill along for his quest, telling him he’s a time traveler and having him pose as his brother as he helps keep tabs on Oswald while Jake goes to work and/or romances Sadie. Then Bill starts falling for Oswald’s wife, which causes friction between the two. I assume this was all an effort to give Jake someone to voice what was inner monologue in the book and give it a little more visual variety since it’s a TV show and not a book, but it doesn’t fully work, and at a certain point it’s clear the writers never really figured out what to do with him. There are some other minor changes here and there (for one example, Jake and Sadie kill her psycho ex, whereas the man killed himself in the novel), but this is the biggest and also least successful.

Of course, the biggest issue with the show was the casting of James Franco as Jake. Even disregarding his icky personal life, he’s just the completely wrong choice for this character. The ideal would be Tom Hanks or Bill Paxton/Pullman circa 1995 – an everyman who you can imagine being the sort of kid who would have gone to a Presidential parade, watched the astronauts coming home on TV, etc. You know, that quintessential all American good boy who grew to be a good man. This isn’t a skillset Franco possesses; to be fair he’s actually putting in a decent performance, but it’d be like Weird Al giving 110% to play Abraham Lincoln or something. There’s just no getting around the fact that Franco is best used as a weird/stoner kinda guy, and the role is written for a completely straight arrow. Even some of his Apatow-verse cronies would have been a better option; Jason Segel or Paul Rudd can/have shed their comic persona to solid effect, but Franco never has, and it’s baffling he’d make his biggest attempt to do so here, with a preconceived character that drives nearly every second of the story.

That said, it still more or less works. The suspense scenes (Sadie’s ex attacking, everything with Frank Dunning, the assassination sequence) are all well executed, and the rest of the cast is pretty on point; Josh Duhamel was shockingly scary as Dunning (Duhamel being another actor who’d make more sense to cast as Jake), and I believe Sarah Gadon may have been put on this earth to portray the ideal 1960’s blue eyed blonde. And it was great to see Kevin J. O’Connor as the “Yellow Card Man”, the mysterious person who seems to be aware that Jake is traveling through time. Chris Cooper also shines as Al, though obviously due to the story’s nature he isn’t in it that much (the use of flashbacks to keep him around isn’t particularly successful). And the 60’s setting is pretty well depicted; there are quite a lot of exteriors but I was never taken out of it by poor VFX or obvious anachronisms (cue someone pointing out a 1962 car in a 1961 scene or something dorky like that – those people need lives. Just keep cell phones and Starbucks out of the hands of a 1960s character and I’m fine). I think a six episode structure (as opposed to nine, as the premiere is double length) would have been better as it would streamline the Bill/Oswald stuff that seems extraneous, but after so many examples of the books being robbed of their souls due to being cut down for movies it seems weird to complain that a King adaptation left too much in.

But most importantly: I can finally get rid of it. And now the oldest movie in the pile is, I believe, only like 3-4 years old. That’s some real progress.

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FTP: Darlin' (2019)

JULY 17, 2023

GENRE: CANNIBAL, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

OK just to note quick before I ramble: I mostly enjoyed Darlin’, finding it the best of the loose trilogy featuring Polly McIntosh (who also wrote and directed this entry) as “The Woman”. But I find nothing about it as fascinating as the existence of this franchise, as the first film (2009’s Offspring) was based on a book that was a sequel to another book (Off Season) which has yet to be adapted, and then 2011’s The Woman was more of a spinoff from Offspring as opposed to a traditional sequel, as it only featured (you guessed it) The Woman and an otherwise completely different plot and mostly new creative team. And then Darlin' was a spinoff from that, once again retaining McIntosh’s character but going into different territory yet again. So it's a spinoff of a spinoff of a sequel to an un-adapted book! I kind of hope it keeps going, with McIntosh eventually inside the plot of a Bond movie or something.

Darlin’ also retains another character from The Woman, as Darlin’ was one of the daughters of the family that had her tied up in their shed. The Woman killed the son and the two parents in that film, taking off with their three girls (Darlin and Socket, with Peggy sort of just going along by choice), but since eight years have passed they recast Darlin’ and left Socket out entirely (Peggy is once again played by Lauren Ashley Carter, though only makes a couple of quick appearances in flashbacks, where – spoiler ahead – we learn that she died giving birth to the baby she was carrying). So this one is a two-hander, as Darlin’ and The Woman are split at the beginning of the movie and follow different journeys, with the now feral Darlin’ being taken in by a church orphanage and rehabilitated while The Woman makes (reads: kills and eats) her way around trying to reconnect with her. It’s MOSTLY standalone, but while you certainly don’t need to see Offspring it might help to at least read a Wiki on The Woman to really follow the story, as despite the long gap between films and the “spinoff” nature (not to mention this one doesn’t come from a Ketchum novel) McIntosh’s script doesn’t fully explain their relationship, and Darlin’s explanation of where Socket and Peggy went (which occurs far into the movie) is a bit hard to follow due to her broken English, so having the context of who they were will help fill in those gaps.

But what’s most important is that this movie is far less grim and unpleasant as the first two, with only scattered moments of on-screen violence and even less of the sexual assault that permeated those films. No one in the world will be shocked to learn that the Bishop who runs the orphanage is preying on his young charges, but thankfully we are spared any overt depictions of it, and the lone scene of a man trying to force himself on a woman is quickly interrupted by The Woman, who takes care of the jerk in rightfully short fashion. This allows the characters themselves to shine through without constantly alienating a chunk of the audience as the first two did, though if you’re squeamish at the sight of cannibalism then you should be warned that there are a few quick shots of such practices. I’d say the entire movie has about the same level of violence/face eating as Lecter’s escape sequence in (ahem, Best Picture Winner) Silence of the Lambs, so if you can handle that you should be fine.

That all said, the real issue here is that the two narratives don’t really complement each other all that well (two in a row!), and it’s never fully clear what one wants from the other. Early on it seems Darlin’ wants nothing to do with The Woman, but we don’t get enough of what happened between the end of The Woman and the beginning of this one for that to really land, and likewise with Woman’s communication skills rather lacking it’s difficult to parse out exactly what she plans to do once she finds Darlin’ again. It seems she wants to “rescue” her, which is understandable enough, but given that the movie seemingly takes place over several months it’s unclear why she’s taking her time with it. It finally becomes more clear near in the third act, when she tries to kidnap a baby, but that renders a lot of the earlier scenes feeling somewhat aimless. The script also pads itself out in a rather silly manner, as a caring nurse is taking Woman to Darlin’, only to get in a car wreck. The man survives, but The Woman just runs away and hooks up with a group of homeless women for a while rather than finish what she was doing. It’s like when you’re playing Zelda and are proceeding toward a tower to unlock or something, only to get distracted by a shrine and a sidequest to find someone’s horse.

Still, it’s always engaging enough; even though they’re both quick to tear off someone’s face or bite off their finger, both are still sympathetic in their own way, and it’s not hard to root for them against pedo church leaders and such. Both McIntosh and Lauryn Canny give excellent performances with a minimum of dialogue (McIntosh just has her grunts, Canny eventually speaks but in very short bursts), and I was also happy to see Nora-Jane Noone from The Descent (she played Holly, the young punk-y one) as the lone kind nun at the orphanage, as she’s basically playing the same role as Sister Margaret in Silent Night, Deadly Night, in that she wants to help this troubled sort but slowly realizes it may be a lost cause. Plus, again, it’s so much less unpleasant than its predecessors, I was mostly just happy to watch a movie in this world without feeling the need to shower after. I’d be very curious how someone who hadn’t seen the others would respond to it; I can imagine someone seeing this one first and then discovering this fact after. “Wait, so the movie where someone’s lip is eaten off is the LEAST disgusting of the series?”

The blu-ray has a few bonus features; one is called “Deleted SCENES” (plural) but there’s only one, and I had to chuckle when I saw it because I specifically noted “wow, that’s an awkward edit” at the point of the movie where it was removed, and it also makes more sense out of a later scene, so it really should have stayed in. Then there’s a 20ish minute making of piece, which is nothing special but it’s nice to hear McIntosh and Canny speak normally. McIntosh also provides a commentary, which is quite good but weirdly runs out of synch, seemingly getting worse as the film goes on – by the climax, she’s reacting to things that we saw 30 seconds earlier, which makes the comments somewhat confusing at times (“Her family rallies around her” she says over a shot of Darlin’ seeing The Woman’s homeless women pals for the first time, but actually referring to the nurse and nun characters who had run up to help her several seconds earlier). I also winced in sadness at a comment about a particular scene that had to be revised on the day because a storm hit their location and it would have been a safety issue for her camera crew… which was led by none other than Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer who was unfortunately killed on (someone else’s) set in 2021 due to lax safety protocols. Truly a terrible reminder of the tragedy, but at least we were assured that McIntosh (a first time director) had enough brains to ensure her crew’s safety came first, unlike the dummies on the other project that I’ll never ever watch.

Basically it’s a decent movie, but I can’t help but wonder if part of my warm feelings are due to my dislike of the previous two entries, giving this one a little bump that it might not have received had I gone in completely ignorant of its predecessors. The script lacked focus and never quite found its footing when dividing lead character duties between the two women, and the geography/time was never clear enough to understand why they weren’t able to reunite sooner. These are things that should derail a movie for me, but I wasn’t watching anyone get tortured, and none of the film’s well-meaning characters are killed in meanspirited ways, so I walked away with “this is pretty good!” kind of feelings despite having several concerns. I guess it’d be like how you’d probably never drink Faygo if you had other options, but it would taste absolutely delicious after a week in the desert.

What say you?

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FTP: All-American Murder (1991)

JULY 8, 2023

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

Sometimes I get a plot synopsis of a movie in my head that is so far from what it actually is, I have to wonder where exactly I got the idea and if I’m having a stroke of some sort. All-American Murder has been sitting in the pile for nearly two years now, and despite the presence of Christopher Walken (and ‘90s crush Josie Bissett), I kept shrugging it off, because of its plot of a professor who teaches a class about serial killers and how he encourages one student to commit his own. But that isn’t even remotely the plot! Where the hell did I come up with that? It’s so damn weird, and it’s not the first time it’s happened.

No, this is actually a giallo-esque college slasher about a “bad boy” type (Charlie Schlatter) who falls for the most popular girl on campus (Bissett) and then becomes the chief suspect when she is murdered. But head cop Walken takes a strange liking to him and gives him 24 hours to clear his name, so it skirts into buddy comedy territory at times except with Walken and the one-time Ferris Bueller, which is an amusing concept even without the Argento-tinged death scenes, where folks are killed by drills, snakes, and – yes! – even a black-gloved killer stabbing someone in the back. Add in Walken’s usual off-kilter performance and you have a recipe for a movie that is basically begging for my love and affection. Hell it even has a power ballad on the end credits that could have subbed in for “Sword and the Stone” from the Shocker soundtrack.

I also had to laugh that I had never heard of the film and then spent an additional two years ignoring it after it arrived from Vinegar Syndrome (who no longer sends me things unprompted, so finding such minor gems won’t be happening anymore, alas), because my only real criticism of the film, besides some uneven pacing (after Bissett’s murder there isn’t another for a while, and then they happen in quick succession) is that it was pretty easy to guess the killer, something that would not have been the case if I watched it 30 years ago like I should have (at the time I also crushed on Bissett’s fellow Melrose Place-r Amy Locane and thus tracked down a DTV horror movie she made*, why didn’t I do the same for the lovely Jane Mancini?). It’s something that would have worked great on the page, and assuredly shocked the hell out of anyone reading the script, but on-screen there’s something a little too obvious to me about how Bissett’s death scene plays out that tipped me off almost instantly who the culprit was. I don’t want to spoil it, so I can’t go into further detail, but suffice to say it’s one of those things that I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t seen 11,000 movies over the years, a couple of which tried something similar.

But otherwise it’s pretty fun! Sometimes the script is a bit too slick for its own good, where every character is fighting to be the one with the memorable lines in a scene, but there are enough good ones to forgive it. I mean, one of Walken’s earliest lines is “I never forget a face, especially if I’ve sat on it,” which is so hilarious it buys the movie leeway for a dozen eye-rollers. And the supporting case is great too; Richard Kind as a far more suspicious cop, Joanna Cassidy as the dean’s wife who is also Schlatter’s lover, and JC Quinn from Maximum Overdrive and The Abyss as that most obligatory of school slasher characters: the creepy pervy janitor red herring! And Schlatter is an engaging enough lead; it’s obvious why he got the gig on the Ferris Bueller show and I’ve enjoyed his performances in other things (I used to watch Diagnosis Murder reruns over the summer when I was in Maine without cable/video games; it was an enjoyable procedural), so it was fun to see him going through the motions that any number of Argento protagonists have played out. It’s at its best when he’s interacting with Walken of course, but seeing him race around with the ticking clock, talking to people who mostly think he did it, is pretty involving.

VS’s blu-ray has a pair of interviews, one with Schlatter and the other with the film’s cinematographer, both of whom spend a lot of their time talking about Walken (Schlatter’s impression is a cut above most!) and Ken Russell, who was originally set to direct. It’s funny, I just watched Tommy for the first time a couple days before, and Russell has said that’s his most commercial movie, but this would have cleared it I think – it’s got odd touches of course, but it’s at its core a pretty conventional murder mystery, and at no point does anyone get covered in beans or get molested by Keith Moon. The only other bonus feature is a commentary with the Hysteria Continues guys, and it did little to change my mind that these folks – while well meaning and obvious fans of the genre – are really not insightful or interesting enough to warrant being on so many tracks. More than once I found myself rolling my eyes at their frankly kind of stupid comments, like when one mocks a character for having her name on her door in her dorm, as if this wasn’t a common thing (“Maybe she forgot her own name?” he ponders – it’s so people can find her easily in a sea of identical doors in a giant hallway). They also repeatedly bring up how the film was compared to Twin Peaks upon release, confused at how anyone could make that connection, prompting one guy – who hasn’t even seen the show! – to explain to the others that it’s probably because Bissett’s character is, like Laura Palmer, supposedly the perfect girl next door but after she dies people discover she was into some far from wholesome lifestyle behaviors. Which I thought was pretty obvious, but it somehow went over all their heads. And that’d be fine if they were just some goons with letterboxd accounts, but when they’re repeatedly tasked with being the top listed bonus feature on an expensive blu-ray, I can’t help but wish VS (and Arrow, and whoever else hires them) to spread that wealth and get other podcast/historian types to contribute on the regular, maybe give these guys a little more time to prepare. Not everyone can be Troy Howarth or Jarret Gahan, but they can certainly at least be a little more perceptive than, well, me.

Anyway, not a movie you need to own as its rewatch value is fairly low, but definitely worth a look. I don’t need to tell you that the post-Jason Lives/pre-Scream period for slashers was not particularly glutted with solid options, so to find one that had completely passed me by was a wonderful little treat. It’s also worth noting that this was a year before Walken’s big-screen comeback with Batman Returns, which is what set him a track of pretty much all villain roles (or at least, ones that really played up the eccentricities), so seeing him elevate this pretty normal cop role while actually remaining a sympathetic ally to the hero is such a novel sight to behold nowadays. AND he sings “Feelings” in a scene that was apparently cut from the video (probably for clearance issues), so there’s another good reason to track it down.

What say you?

*It’s called No Secrets and I assure you it isn’t worth any effort.

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FTP: Motivational Growth (2013)

MAY 16, 2023

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

One thing that frustrates me about the indie horror scene is how often I see things that really aren’t that much different from the big studio offerings, at least in terms of the stories they are telling. Sure, the films from the Screen Gems and Paramounts of the world will boast bigger stars and production value, but it’s nice when there’s a distinction re: what they’re about. Which is to say I can’t imagine a movie like Motivational Growth coming out on 3,000 screens with trailers for the newest Marvel sequel attached, and that’s exactly what I want from my indie horror. Not all the time, of course – there’s always some room for the generic slashers and possession tales at any price point! But it’d be nice if things like this movie were the norm, not the exception, when it came to very low budget genre offerings.

Because this is a movie about a guy named Ian who never leaves his apartment and has a talking mold growth in his bathroom that encourages him to get his life together, a plot that kicks off when his only friend, Kent, dies. And Kent is a vintage television set.

So, yeah. Weird movie, right? And admittedly, it’s not exactly one I’ll be pulling off the shelf all that often – it can be a bit repetitive, for example. Writer/director/editor Don Thacker comes from a short film background (and has made several more since) and that sort of shows; you can almost hear him wondering how to get things padded out to 90 minutes at times, especially given the fact that the film never leaves the confines of the apartment (save for some hallucinated scenes in which Ian sees himself as a character on some old (fictional) TV shows). So it’s a lot of “someone shows up and talks to Ian, who makes them leave before talking to The Mold for a bit before someone else interrupts” kind of circular plotting, and the film is even broken up into ten chapters, which we learn on the commentary was implemented in case he couldn’t get funding for a feature and had to break it up into ten shorts. There’s a plot, and it’s building toward something, so it’s not like you can just remove this or that chunk, but it still occasionally suffers from the weight of that episodic structure.

But it’s a movie about a talking mold! And said mold is voiced by Jeffrey Combs (somewhat misleadingly given name above the title prominence on the cover; he never actually appears in the film), who gives a terrific performance, injecting it with enough personality that you grow to like him/it while also retaining more than just a hint of malevolence. A phoned in vocal turn or one that was simply too far in either direction could have been disastrous for the movie, but Combs absolutely nails it. And it doesn’t hurt that The Mold is a practical effect, brought to life through puppetry and forced perspective type filmmaking as opposed to a CGI effect, which also could have made the movie less than bearable. It’s a perfect marriage of effect and performance, the likes of which we rarely see outside of, I dunno, The Muppets or something. Also, speaking of effects, it's a pretty goopy film at times; it's not EXACTLY body horror, but it skirts on the lines and wouldn't be totally out of place on a shelf with such fare. There's a decaying corpse that legit left me kind of icked out, which doesn't happen all that often.

And going back to the indie stuff, even if you were somehow left with the impression that this was a cynical cash grab, or the result of a few tech bros looking to double their crypto fortune by throwing together that looked good on a spreadsheet, the bonus features more or less all revolve around the fact that this was Thacker’s dream project, with everyone working to fulfill his singular vision. In interviews, behind the scenes pieces, and the commentary (where he’s joined by Combs and lead actor Adrian DiGiovanni), the filmmaker speaks of his influences, the biblical motifs he threaded throughout the narrative, the reasons he wanted to do The Mold practically and why he went to the trouble of casting/recording Combs first to make sure DiGiovanni’s performance would always be in proper tune with his. Even Combs admits he doesn’t understand everything in the film, and that’s a good thing! Better than showing up to rattle off a few lines as the unseen madman in some Saw knockoff, right?

So in short: more like this, please. Again, it’s not my favorite movie of the year or anything like that, but it was completely unique (even some mild comparisons to Little Shop of Horrors or Bucket of Blood type “kill to improve your life” stories are suggesting a very different kind of movie) and never left me in a position of “OK I know how the next five minutes are going to play out, let me look at my phone for a bit.” All I really want from this lo-fi stuff is to realize when it’s over, or even at some point during, that it’s NOT going to be one of those movies that I end up rewatching (and maybe even re-reviewing) in six or seven years because even if I was entertained, it was so “stock” (respect to Lars) that I’ve forgotten I’ve seen it. Short of a brain injury or some kind of degenerative disease, there’s no way I could forget having seen the talking mold movie with a random Game Genie reference. Well done, Mr. Thacker.

What say you?

P.S. Great chiptune score! Per the commentary it was actually recorded with an NES, somehow. Love it.

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FTP: Hansel and Gretel Get Baked (2023)

APRIL 21, 2023

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

I've had Hansel and Gretel Get Baked in "the pile" for probably six years at this point, always thinking "I'll watch it on 4/20, because lol" and then forgetting about it. But with my renewed purpose to actually get through said pile once and for all, I was determined to finally get it over with this time around, though I didn't get to start it until late* and naturally I fell asleep, watching most of it on the morning of 4/21, which actually marks a different celebration (Happy birthday, Antonio Bay!). But whatever, one more pile movie down!

If you don't know by now, I'm not a drug user. I enjoy alcohol (though I've also cut back there!), but have never found any interest in drugs - I had an edible during a bachelor party and took the smallest possible hit off a joint a few years ago, and that is the entirety of my drug consumption in my 43 years on this planet. I've always figured that I'm weird and rambly enough as is, so drugs would just exacerbate those (not always welcome!) habits. Plus I'm allergic to cigarette smoke and figure pot would produce the same effect (in that I find it hard to breathe and my voice starts to sound like that of a demon), so... yeah. Just not my thing!

So naturally I'm not really the target audience for this sort of thing, which if you haven't guessed by the double meaning title, turns the familiar fairy tale heroes into modern day stoners. Well, Gretel is; Hansel doesn't partake, but he gets nearly "baked" (meaning cooked) so it's not false advertising. Anyway, the witch has a special strain that is much desired, and while she has a guy selling on the streets for her, some folks - including Gretel's boyfriend - just stroll up to her door (in Pasadena!) and ask to buy it, at which point she lures them inside and kills them. With each victim she gets younger, so when she first appears she's clearly a younger actress in (not great) old age makeup, but by the halfway point you'll hopefully recognize Lara Flynn Boyle, who seems to be enjoying returning to evil woman territory (The Temp hive, rise up!).

But... that's pretty much all there is to the movie. Someone comes to her door, she gets them inside, gives them some tea or something, and then kills them. Eventually the filmmakers toss some zombies (previous victims) and an evil dog into the mix, but it does little to alleviate how repetitive and glacial the pacing is, despite the seemingly (sorry) high energy premise. I swear a full third of the movie involves Boyle (who never leaves the house) talking to someone at the front door, which made it difficult to find my place this morning as I rewound the Blu-ray (it had resume play, bless them) as every third scene looked the same. People at the door, Gretel (Molly Quinn) wandering around looking for her boyfriend, Hansel (Mike from the Twilight movies, the poor sod) looking for HER, repeat. Eventually some rival drug dealers get introduced, but as with the zombies, it's just a brief interruption to what is an otherwise shockingly low energy and monotonous movie.

It's also not particularly funny, which was surprising. I don't mean "That joke was awful" unfunny, I mean it simply didn't have too many jokes. Boyle tosses in some sinister puns and there's the occasional weird joke, but I was expecting an Idle Hands type tone, and I have to admit I was kind of relieved it wasn't like that. Not that it worked as an actual scary movie or anything, but with the repetitive structure I feel the movie would be completely unbearable if I had to put up with a lot of mugging and puns and poorly edited physical comedy. That it was relatively played straight was, ironically, one of the film's few good points.

And if you were attracted to the thing by seeing Cary Elwes' name on the cover, don't get too excited - not only is he only in the first scene, but he's almost unrecognizable as a nameless meter man, sporting coke bottle glasses and a dorky haircut - he kinda resembles Milton from Office Space. On the other hand, Boyle is in it more than I expected, so that was nice, even if she had to wear that awful makeup for the first half. The makeup isn't the only visual blemish, I should note; the transfer on this Blu is horrendous, as nearly every dark scene has that crushed grey/halo effect going on - I've seen VHS tapes that looked better.

But I mean, I wasn't expecting it to be good, and in fact I figured it'd be some Gingerdead Man level atrocity. That it was merely forgettable and dull was a strangely pleasant surprise. And it inches me one step closer to being rid of the ugly little plastic shelving tray that houses the "pile" from atop my record collection, and once I watch that last disc, I can get another cube and in turn, have room for more records! Thanks, Hansel and Gretel Get Baked.

What say you?

*Because I went to a screening of the first two episodes of Amazon Prime's new Dead Ringers series, which modernizes/enhances the story from the book (and yes, subsequent Cronenberg film) while also making Beverly and Elliot into women, played by Rachel Weisz. And so far it kinda rules? It's funny, dark, sexy... kinda fires on all cylinders, and Weisz is clearly having the most fun she's had since, hell, maybe The Mummy Returns? All episodes drop today, I highly encourage it even if you're crying foul at "remaking Cronenberg" (who, at that time, was coasting on his success from remaking The Fly, so).

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Last Gasp (1995)

APRIL 12, 2023

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

For whatever reason, whenever I would request a film for review from the good folks at Vinegar Syndrome, they would send everything they were putting out that month (I assume this is their standard practice, but don't want to speak for everyone!). And that is a nice way to pad out the collection and occasionally find a gem that wasn’t on my radar (like Cemetery of Terror, or pretty much anything from director Ruben Galindo Jr), but also means I end up with a lot of their filler like Last Gasp. This thing has been sitting in the “pile” (now an actual shelf) for two years because it didn’t sound particularly interesting, but I like star Robert Patrick, so I kept it around for a proverbial rainy day. Which finally came today.

The thing about Patrick is that he is a terrific character actor, rightfully respected and a “get” for movies and shows that need someone who offers his particular “you’re not sure if you can trust this guy” presence (X-Files in particular benefited from this, as he was replacing Mulder on the team but taking over skeptic duties from the now believer Scully). But that skill isn’t utilized here – in fact it’s downright wasted for a story in which his character is proven to be a jerk in his first scene. He’s a real estate developer in Mexico where the locals keep killing his builders for invading their land, so after promising a proper burial for the latest victim (which he instead has the body tossed in a river) he hires a guy to just kill all the locals to solve the problem. The mercenary eggs him on to finish one guy off himself, and then he is possessed by the man’s spirit.

This prompts him to kill people (while painted up and wearing next to nothing like the jungle-dwelling locals, which is slightly problematic but gives Patrick a chance to show off his physique), but… he already had no problem with that, nor was he an innocent victim like Larry Talbot or whoever. The actual hero of the film is Joanna Pacula’s character, who is introduced much later as the wife of a man who disappeared while working on Patrick’s project. Perhaps if we met her first and then gradually learned what was up with Patrick’s character, there’d be some engagement to her plight, but since we have all the answers long before she does (hell, mostly before we even MEET her), there’s little reason to invest yourself in the narrative. They don’t even tease out the mystery of her husband’s disappearance – a randomly inserted flashback tells us he’s dead not long after we even knew he existed, having been killed during one of Patrick’s possession sprees. Weirder, the movie spends like 20 straight minutes with a PI she’s hired to find the man, and we stick with him as if he’s the actual hero of the movie. To be fair, it’s (spoiler for 30 year old movie ahead) slightly surprising when he is killed at the end of the first act, but again this would only work if we hadn’t already known everything. When he dies it isn’t a “oh wow, he’s dead!” moment, it’s a “So why were we focusing on this guy for long?” one. It’d be like if Psycho started out with Norman tending to his mother’s corpse in lieu of the hotel scene with Marion and Sam, but still wanted us to be shocked when she died in the shower.

I assume that the original script was indeed told more from the Pacula character’s perspective, only to be carelessly reworked to get Patrick – still high on his T2 fame – front and center in the proceedings, but unfortunately no one thought to simply make him a decent guy in the process, which would at least give us the sort of American Werewolf in London type tragedy at its center. Who cares if he’s possessed by a vengeful spirit when he was already scummy to begin with? Why are we watching a PI look for a missing car for a man we already know is dead (and also who killed him)? It’s just a baffling approach that renders the movie inert nearly from the start. The only reason to keep watching is – because this was a mid-90s pay cable movie – to enjoy the occasional sex scene, since such things are so rare nowadays. Not that I need nudity to enjoy a movie, but it’s such a taboo thing now that it sadly rates as a novelty whenever I watch an older movie and see it presented so casually, not unlike how odd it looks to see Bruce Willis smoking in an airport in Die Hard 2.

In other words, if our country hadn’t gotten even more prudish than it already was over the past 30 years, this movie would have literally nothing going for it. VS didn’t even bother to produce any new extras of note, which is pretty telling too since they always have at LEAST a commentary or lengthy interview with one of the movie’s principles. Here all we get are some outtakes and the trailer, which does indeed make it look more like a man struggling with a curse than it ever comes off in the finished film. What a dull, pointless movie.

What say you?

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FTP: House on the Edge of the Park (1980)

JANUARY 31, 2023

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

Unlike most “pile” movies, I remember exactly when I got House on the Edge of the Park – it was my prize for winning horror trivia at last year’s Overlook Film Festival (donated from the good folks at Severin). And it’d probably stay there for a lot longer if not for two things: the fact that I just this week booked a flight and hotel to *return* to this year’s incarnation of Overlook, and the recent passing of director Ruggero Deodato, who died in December at the relatively young age of 82. I must admit I’m not a huge fan of Deodato's work, but I was a fan of the man himself – he was a “character”, as they say, and there aren’t a lot of such types left (read: filmmakers who feel free to speak their mind candidly, not worrying about who might take offense to their personal beliefs). And so, knowing perfectly well I probably wouldn’t enjoy the movie all that much (what little I knew about it compared it to Last House on the Left, a film I have zero intention of ever revisiting), I pulled it out of the pile just to basically get through the movie and then dive into what I was more interested in: the interview with Deodato (presumably one of the last he ever gave for this sort of thing) and the full length documentary on the auteur, housed on a second disc.

But for context and such, I had to watch the film, which I must admit wasn’t as grim/unpleasant as I feared. It really never gets much worse than the opening scene, in which David Hess (as Alex, but basically just a slightly more personable Krug) rapes and murders a woman (the actor’s real life wife at the time!) in her car. After that it’s relatively tame by the standards of these things – without giving too much of its 43 year old plot away, there is only one other death in the film and most of the subsequent sexual scenes are “consensual” in the movie’s own weird way (one woman resists at first, then plays along and even kind of takes control, another goes all Stockholm and aggressively pursues the guy you assumed would be assaulting her). Gray area stuff, basically, as opposed to the fully abhorrent scenes in Last House and other films in this sub-genre. But even the Hollywood remake of Last House left me feeling more in need of a shower after than this did, which I wasn’t expecting.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s still pretty dark at times (Hess slashing up a late arrival to the party is pretty rough, but she survives), but instead of reveling in violence it’s a sort of home invasion thriller, where Alex and his buddy (Giovanni Lombardo Radice in his first film) are a pair of mechanics who are invited to a party by a snobby couple, as a sort of thank you for fixing their car. Once they arrive they realize they’re looked down upon by the socialites, but while Radice’s character (a bit of a simpleton) tries to fit in, Hess of course takes offense to their attitude and starts terrorizing them. But again, it’s not about a body count – in fact it actually gets pretty repetitive: someone tries to escape, Hess or Radice chases after them and threatens them, then they are dragged back to the living room with the others. There are isolated moments of humiliation (when one guy tries to overpower him, Hess roughs him up a bit, tosses him in the pool, and pees on him – I mean, if you HAVE to be peed on by your attacker, there’s no better place to have it happen, if you think about it. Just duck under the water!), but the average shot of the movie is everyone just kind of hanging out while Hess drinks their booze.

Ultimately there’s a twist of sorts, but it doesn’t do enough to change the fact that this is too clearly a quickly made movie without enough of a story or characterization to remain compelling throughout its runtime. The last thing you should feel with one of these things is kind of bored, but while I was grateful that it wasn’t assaulting my senses with unpleasantness, I just didn’t connect to it either. Radice’s character unsurprisingly starts turning on Hess’, but Deodato doesn’t go far enough with it – Radice never commits to siding with the rich folks, so his protests against his friend are about as effective as merely shaking his head in disappointment as opposed to making much of a difference either way. And Hess’ character is too generic a psycho to pull you in the way something like Henry or Red Dragon might, but Deodato doesn’t really add much dimension to the rich people either, so it’s just all rather flat. As repulsive as Last House is to me, at least it has the intriguing concept of the coincidence that the villains end up at the home of the girl they just killed – the similar element here is left as a twist in the final few minutes, so it’s too little too late.

But like I said, it was all just precursor to what I was more excited about: Deodato Holocaust, in which the director holds court and walks us through his career (kind of like that Friedkin doc). It’s a bit uneven, as he obviously spends more time on his bigger films (this, Cannibal Holocaust, Cut and Run) while glossing over others, but there’s a lot of great stuff in here, including a funny anecdote about something he has over James Cameron. I kind of wish his collaborators were on hand to offer their own stories, but perhaps now that he’s passed on they can be wrangled for something that mixes tribute with "now we can laugh about it" kind of stories like the ones he was always happy to offer about them. Indeed, I recommend watching his new interview specifically about House, because he withholds an actor’s name from a story about the man’s coke habit nearly derailing a production, but in the full length doc he’s happy to share (and I was surprised to see who it was!).

House’s disc also has an archival interview with Hess, a long one with Radice, and a historian commentary, which along with Deodato’s own interview fill in much of the film’s backstory and why it’s so threadbare (long story short: it was shot with leftover money from Cannibal’s budget, in two weeks). Radice’s dog makes an appearance in his piece, which is something I’m always delighted by in these things, being reminded that even though we look up to them and maybe stood in line for their autographs or something, they still get annoyed at their pets like everyone else. The soundtrack is also included, making this a fairly exhaustive package for a movie that should fully satisfy anyone who loved it. I, on the other hand, will see that it goes to a good home at a reduced price. I wouldn't even keep Last House if not for my love of Craven demanding a complete filmography on my shelf (Carpenter being the only other one); I certainly don't need to own a minor copycat.

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FTP: Gags The Clown (2018)

JANUARY 23, 2023

GENRE: MOCKUMENTARY, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

The only thing easier to find than a bad killer clown movie is a bad found footage movie, so the deck was pretty stacked against Gags The Clown even before I found out it was based on a viral phenomenon, giving me unpleasant flashbacks to Slender Man. But to my pleasant surprise, it got out from under the shadow of all those red flags and turned out to be a pretty good little chiller; the sort of thing that, back in the regular days of this site, I would be grateful to for being above average and giving me something to remember. Hell it might have even ended up in my book!

The key reason that it works, beyond wisely not giving Gags any kind of (likely annoying/underwhelming) backstory, is that the creative team of Adam Krause and John Pata (former directed, latter produced, both wrote) understand that having multiple POVs in this sort of “found footage” movie (they dislike the term, and they’re right that it’s not, but I’m referring to it as one for the sake of brevity) keeps it from ever getting too dull, with minimal “why are they filming?” moments that have derailed so many others in this sub-genre. Our characters are a news team tasked with covering the ongoing appearances of the creepy clown around town, a trio of teens who are using the hysteria to play pranks, a right-wing podcast host who wants to be a hero for his viewers, and a pair of cops who are on patrol the night Gags has seemingly upped his game. And they each have different, motivated ways of depicting their POV – the podcast guy is streaming live, the cops have their body cams, the teens are just filming everything with their phones, etc. There are occasional uses of security cameras and such to give a different view on the proceedings, and every now and then I wasn’t quite sure what camera was being used, but for the most part it’s a very well thought out way of telling the story in a non-cheating way but without too much of the tedium that proves to be a crutch for so many of its predecessors.

And (minor spoiler) eventually all of the characters converge in a single area, so it actually feels like a true ensemble film as opposed to something more episodic and disconnected, which it seemed it might be at first. But unlike Mockingbird, which had a similar structure (and also involved a creepy clown), the tone doesn’t change wildly between these segments, while the aesthetic itself does, so we get some variety in the proceedings but no whiplash from suddenly feeling like a different kind of movie, as Mockingbird did whenever it cut to the guy pulling off Jackass-style pranks. The POV might keep changing, but there is a genuine sense of mounting escalation to the proceedings, and even when they all meet up it doesn't feel like a forced "well let's get to the ending" decision, but a natural one. It's really well done in that regard.

That said it does get a bit repetitive at times, in particular with the right-wing guy (who reminded me of my old coworker, which made me chuckle) who – another spoiler here – turns out to be all talk, which was obvious from the start since he was clearly modeled after Alex Jones/Bill O’Reilly type of “tough guys” who were also afraid of putting a mask on during the height of the pandemic. But knowing he’d get what he deserved kept it afloat, and with three other teams to check in with, at least we’re never with him for too long. I just wish his story had more pull throughout; it’s not until he comes face to face with Gags that his storyline becomes more compelling.

The disc has a ton of extras, including the short film that they were making when all those viral photos surfaced back in 2016 (which, amusingly, was more traditional found footage and felt almost as long as the movie despite being a fraction of the length). There’s also some charming footage of the premiere in Wisconsin; a nice reminder that the film was an independent/regional production that came together from good natured people who were happy to help the filmmakers. Indeed, on the commentary, they note that a certain scene was supposed to be shot at a local fun park, only for the owners to turn them down – it was apparently the only time they were denied anything by their neighbors (luckily, a local traveling carnival was happy to help, turning on all the rides the night before they opened so they could have proper production value, with the carnies all going along with whatever was asked of them). Maybe because the right-wing guy had me thinking a lot about all the division in the world (especially in the pandemic era, which this predated), it served as a nice reminder that most people are inherently good and willing to help their fellow man. Thanks, Gags.

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