tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47139721894824440622024-03-12T23:54:10.150-04:00Cap'n Howdy's BlogoriumCap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.comBlogger1604125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-41792617358157439082015-12-16T17:56:00.000-05:002016-01-01T17:57:17.135-05:00Cap'n Howdy's 2015 Recap(ish): Preamble and Worst of List<br />
As you might have noticed, the lights have been dim at the Blogorium for most of this year. While the Cap'n is still watching movies regularly, it's increasingly apparent to me that I just don't have the desire or drive to keep writing and posting reviews, even sporadically. There are nearly a dozen half finished posts that may never see the light of day, and it's very unlikely that coverage of 2015's Summer Fest or Horror Fest will be appearing any time soon. At a certain point, you have to admit you just don't have it in you anymore, and I'm nearly there. Not being a Twitter kind of guy, I'm not really sure how to spread the word about movies worth seeing or worth avoiding, but unless inspiration strikes (or it's Shocktober), I can't promise you'll see much more from Cap'n Howdy moving forward. <br />
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To be honest, I debated even doing the recap this year, because it's far more time consuming than you'd think - if I'm going to talk about a movie, it's important to me not to just have one or two pithy lines and move on, which was what I used to do and has rendered old posts unreadable - but there are enough films from 2015 that are worth mentioning in one way or the other that it is worth doing at least one more time. Most of them weren't reviewed in the first place, or I hit a wall with the original review (Avengers: Age of Ultron is a great example, as I mentioned in the Ant-Man review). This year I'm going to try to hit a happy medium between "Quick Review" and "too short". To be honest, some of the movies at the bottom of the list just don't deserve much coverage, and I'd like to avoid another six or seven part "middle" section. In years past, that can take weeks to finish, which is why these usually show up in the middle of January.<br />
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Let's start at the bottom and work our way up, but it won't take so long this year. I promise. I thought I had seen quite a few new releases in 2015, until I watched a few recap videos and realized, no, not so much. There hasn't been much that scraped the bottom of the barrel, but when it did... who nelly.<br />
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<i>88</i> - Is it telling that I honestly can't remember much about 88? I saw it early in the year, primarily because you don't see many starring vehicles for Katharine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps, American Mary), but this Memento-esque crime thriller / action / mystery is too disjointed for its own good. It haphazardly jumps back and forward in time, piecing together the mystery of how (Isabelle) lost her memory, her finger, and ended up on the wrong side of some gangsters. The conceit is that she entered a "fugue state" and can't remember what happened, so we're slowly introduced to information in the form of flashbacks, presented out of order to deliberately lead us in one direction, only to pull the rug out. Isabelle is pretty good, as is Christopher Lloyd, playing against type as a sleazy strip club owner / possible drug kingpin, but in the end, it's mostly not worth remembering.<br />
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<i><a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2015/10/shocktober-review-unfriended.html">Unfriended</a></i> - The review from Shocktober tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this movie, which had Horror Fest-ers regretting their "Choose Your Own Trappening".<br />
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<i>Knock Knock</i> - I really considered putting both of Eli Roth's movies on this list, but The Green Inferno is at least viscerally engaging, save for the inexplicable (and jarring) tonal shifts. But more on The Green Inferno later. Knock Knock, on the other hand, was a slog from start to finish, a dumbed down, millennial-ized take on Michael Haeneke's Funny Games by way of Hard Candy without a single character to care about. I don't care who you're supposed to sympathize with in Knock Knock: Evan (Keanu Reeves) or Genesis and Bel - the two girls / women who he cheats on his family with and then tie him up and play "games" - it doesn't matter. All three main characters are horrible people and aren't worth spending 100 minutes with. Seriously. I was tired of Knock Knock halfway through, and it only got worse as it went along, playing with implications of pedophilia and entrapment and casual murder or whatever we're meant to take from the accident that kills his wife's assistant and then is framed to look like killed him. Who cares. There's no tension in Knock Knock, no flair, and Reeves in particular does nothing to elevate his character beyond "guy who deserves something for what he does but behaves like he doesn't" even if you consider the "punishment" the ladies dispense disproportionate. In fact, who cares? It's making me angry even thinking about this movie again. Moving along...<br />
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<i><a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2015/08/quick-review-fantastic-four.html">Fantastic Four</a></i> - While the review covers most of what I would say, the ultimate problem with Josh Trank / 20th Century Fox's mangled hybrid of a movie is that it isn't even bad enough to be worth seeing. It's a movie with interesting ideas that are underdeveloped or simply abandoned halfway through, and then it's just a generic comic book movie. You might have been led to believe it was worth checking out, but you're just going to be disappointed that you wasted your time.<br />
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and now for this year's <b>Best of the Worst</b>... or <b>Worst of the Worst</b> (take your pick)<br />
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<i><a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2015/07/summer-fest-7-recap-day-one-terminator.html">Terminator Genisys</a></i> - While I'll go ahead and link the half-review from Summer Fest, I don't feel like that quite does justice to just what a mess <i>Terminator Genisys</i> is. It's misguided, corporate thinking at is very worst: a story designed to reboot the Terminator series (again) using actors who are currently hot with the "target audience" (?) - Emilia Clarke (<i>Game of Thrones</i>), Matt Smith (<i>Doctor Who</i>), J.K. Simmons (<i>Whiplash</i>), Jai Courtney (Oh, who am I kidding?) - with a director known more for <i>Game of Thrones</i> (Alan Taylor) than the fact that he made the <i>Thor</i> sequel everybody but me seems to hate. Arnold Schwarzenegger is given the most dialogue a terminator has ever needed to spout, plus a few of the lamest "gags" in the series - and we're talking about a post "talk to the hand" series here - and still walks away most unscathed. Well, "upgraded". I guess you make your lead a T-1000 at the end (<b>SPOILERS BECAUSE, WELL, WHO CARES?</b>) so that he can conveniently morph into another actor when Arnold asks for too much money or just doesn't want to do another one. And oh yeah, despite how terrible <i>Genisys</i> was, the braintrust responsible for this mess are planning on keeping that "trilogy" idea alive.<br />
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Let me tell you folks, I am surely interested in seeing who sent "Pops" back to the 1970s to protect Sarah Connor, or who sent the T-1000 to kill young Sarah and also conveniently programmed it to know exactly when and where Kyle Reese would be arriving just in case it failed to kill Sarah Connor and then not find her at all for the better part of a decade. I'm quite keen to see more of Matt Smith as the embodiment of Skynet (now Genisys), and let's not fool ourselves, the inevitable return of Evil John Connor as the T-Whatever. Foiled by magnets! How do they work? I guess we'll also see more of J.K. Simmons as "Academy Award Winner Who <i>Snow Dogs</i>-ed His Way Into This Movie and Does Nothing" in the presumable sequels, set in 2017, because <i>Terminator</i> and <i>Terminator 2</i> no longer happened in this timeline. Actually, none of the Terminator movies are still canon, save for <i>Salvation</i>. Take that, fanboys! The last <i>Terminator</i> movie that failed to kick start a new trilogy is the only <i>Terminator</i> movie that wasn't retconned but Genisys, and that's only assuming that Kyle and Sarah somehow fail to prevent Judgment Day and then travel back to 1984 to have John Connor.... so actually, okay, <i>Salvation</i> is probably out, too. Sorry, Sam Worthington. You were Jai Courtney'ed out of existence.<br />
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<i>Genisys</i> is a movie that's so stupid and poorly constructed that not only does it feel the need to undo the entire <i>Terminator</i> series in an effort to "reboot", it also has to explain it to you every step of the way by excessive monologue-ing. It might have helped if Emilia Clarke or Jai Courtney had an ounce of charisma in their performances as Sarah and Kyle, but they don't. They also have no chemistry at all, and maybe we should be grateful that they can never give birth to the future leader of the resistance. At least Jason Clarke (<i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>) seems to have fun as the Evil John Connornator, so his long, stupid explanations of the new timeline are slightly less boring than listening to Clarke and Courtney bicker incessantly. Clarke and Schwarzenegger are the best parts of the movie, and credit to Simmons, who has nothing to do in the film but gives 110% selling this stupid bullshit. Yeah, I'm reduced to profanity, because that's what <i>Genisys</i> is. Bullshit. I'm going to prescribe to the <i>Back to the Future Part II</i> "alternate timeline" theory and just pretend that Doc Brown and Marty can undo this clusterfuck of a movie and we can go back to a world where James Cameron isn't shamelessly shilling for this garbage. At least until <i>Terminator Mastyr Systim</i> and <i>Terminator Drymcast</i> come out. Did I mention that the producers want "audience input" in making the sequels better? Because they don't know what they're doing with the <i>Terminator</i> films?<br />
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Here's some input: hire someone who can write a good script, then hire a director who can make a good movie. Maybe change the cast based on the best possible actors instead of who's "hot" right now. I know, I know: thinking in "quadrants" and pandering to Chinese audiences is going to make those suggestions literally impossible, but <i>Terminator Genisys</i> makes my brain hurt. Quantum Magnetics. 'Nuff Said.<br />
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That's it. I saw five terrible movies this year. Well, five terrible movies made this year, anyway. There were some other ones, but not from 2015, and the next step up doesn't even come close to how useless these five were. But we'll get to those soon enough. Hopefully I won't have to re-edit this and put The Force Awakens on it... but I did live through <i>The Phantom Menace</i>. And then <i>Attack of the Clones</i>. And then <i>Revenge of the Sith</i>. There are no guarantees anymore...Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-11196974626283784502015-10-31T14:43:00.000-04:002015-10-31T14:43:00.416-04:00Shocktober Review: Deathgasm<br />
<em>Deathgasm</em> is far and away the best discovery of <strong>Shocktober</strong> movie coverage. It's a scrappy, low budget film from New Zealand that wears the influence of early Peter Jackson on its blood-soaked sleeves. It's the second film I've seen this year about a metal band that uses cursed music to bring demons to Earth - the first was <em>MegaMuerte</em> - but of the two I think I'm giving <em>Deathgasm</em> the edge. <em>MegaMuerte</em> gets a lot of points for creativity, and for bringing back puppet monsters, but <em>Deathgasm</em> has such an infectious sense of fun, of not caring about who might be offended, that I can't wait to share it with friends.<br />
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Brodie (Milo Cawthorne) is a young metalhead who finds himself dumped in Greypoint, New Zealand with his fundamentalist Uncle Albert (Colin Moy) and Aunt Mary (Jodie Rimmer) after his mother has an unfortunate incident involving methamphetamines and a mall Santa. Transplanted to a small town that sees him as a total outsider, Brodie is tormented by his cousin David (Nick Hoskins-Smith) at school, but strikes up an unlikely friendship with Dion (Sam Berkley) and Giles (Daniel Cresswell), two Dungeons and Dragons fans who share a similar "outcast" status. Things brighten up for him when he meets Zakk (James Blake) while browsing the metal section at the local music store / fortune teller. Zakk and Brodie share a love of raising hell, listening to brutal metal, and when they break into the legendary Rikki Daggers (Stephen Ure)'s place to try to steal one of the 666 existing copies of HaxanSword's first album, the boys end up with crudely handwritten sheet music instead. Since they're forming a band that Zakk has determined will be called Deathgasm<em><span style="font-size: xx-small;">*</span></em>, it only makes sense to play the music, right? <br />
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Well, maybe they should have boned up on their Latin first, because with a title like "<em>Vocavitique Rex Daemonia Virtutem Fortuna Hymnus Nigrum</em>"<em><span style="font-size: xx-small;">**</span></em>, they probably should have considered translating it first. Brodie eventually does, and it says "Summoning the King of Demons, A Black Hymn for Gaining Power and Fortune" (or, The Black Hymn for short), but they decide to play it anyway. That's after the first attempt, when Uncle Albert begins vomiting blood and the boys nearly pass out. The second time, everyone in Greypoint begins vomiting blood, and the boys do pass out. When they wake up, half of the town have become minions of the King of Demons, also known as The Blind One or Aelos (I think - you don't hear the name clearly). Summoning The Blind One is exactly what a nearby cult was looking for, which is why its leader, Aeon (Andrew Laing) sent Vadin (Tim Foley) to kill Rikki Daggers and steal the music. He failed, so he loses his head and bleeds all over Aeon's custom rug, much to his displeasure. His second-in-command, Shanna (Delaney Tabron), doesn't seem to notice, for reasons that are better for you to find out yourself.<br />
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Brodie has problems beyond raising The Blind One, as David's less conventionally metal-oriented girlfriend, Medina (Kimberly Crossman) takes a shining to him. That doesn't sit well with David, but it gets even more complicated when Zakk inserts himself into their relationship, promising to act as an intermediary when Brodie ends up on the wrong side of a beating. Dion later refers to Zakk as "chaotic neutral", which is probably appropriate, since he intentionally misleads Brodie about Medina and then meets up with her, explaining that Brodie's not interested. It's not the last time that Zakk conveniently removes critical information, but he also comes back to help at a crucial point. The son of a mechanic, Zakk really doesn't seem to care about anybody but himself, so he alternates between good and evil throughout the film. It may be a nerdy descriptor, but Dion's mostly right.<br />
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<em>Deathgasm</em> is, not surprisingly, a very violent movie, one where swords, daggers, chainsaws, axes, <em>Incredible Hulk</em> gloves, twenty sided dice, and musical instruments are used to provide maximum gore as our unlikely heroes try to stop the mess they started. Its sense of humor is, to put it mildly, juvenile, but frankly I don't find that to be very surprising. Writer / Director Jason Lei Howden had been working on visual effects for The Hobbit films, and <em>Deathgasm</em> is very much in the spirit of early Peter Jackson. May I remind you that "I kick ass for the Lord" is still one of the most quoted lines from <em>Dead Alive</em>. With that in mind, it should hardly come as a surprise that Brodie and Zakk battle the possessed Albert and Mary in what amounts to a dildo fight. They are, after all, teenage metalheads, and on the off chance you've never met one, this is fairly representative of their sense of humor and level of maturity. Your mileage may vary as to whether you want to watch an entire movie loaded with dick jokes, rampant profanity, and crude humor, but I find it in keeping with the scrappy, low-brow comedy of <em>Bad Taste </em>or <em>Meet the Feebles</em>. In that respect, it's also similar to <em>MegaMuerte</em>, which has roughly the same plot up to a point, but that film pushes into more twisted directions, including necrophilia. Deathgasm has what is perhaps the only time I've heard someone say the name of the band Anal Cunt out loud in a movie. So, pick your poison?<br />
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I'm not quite convinced that the subplot with the cult is necessary - it actually tends to distract from the main story. Aeon is in what amounts to two scenes before (<strong>SPOILER</strong>) he's murdered by Shanna, who hopes to become the vessel of The Blind One, and she (<strong>BIGGER SPOILER</strong>) is subsequently murdered by Zakk who, in true "chaotic neutral" fashion (<strong>EVEN BIGGER SPOILER</strong>) becomes the embodiment of Aelos. I mean, who didn't see that coming, though? The point is that you could excise the cult subplot, just have Brodie / Deathgasm play The Black Hymn, and have roughly the same story without cutting away from them for characters who barely figure into the film. I guess it does give you an extra beheading plus gratuitous nudity, which in retrospect there's less of than you think there would be in a movie called <em>Deathgasm</em>. <br />
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Other than that, I had a great time watching <em>Deathgasm</em>, perhaps even more so than MegaMuerte. Its tongue-in-cheek, don't-give-a-shit attitude and inventive use of gore (seriously, why did it take this long to use car buffer to tear someone's face off?) make for an infectious sense of fun. As long as you don't mind low-brow humor, and to be honest, I don't when used as earnestly as it is in <em>Deathgasm</em>. Sure, it can be dumb, and clearly I've seen a movie with almost the exact same premise earlier this year, but <em>Deathgasm</em> is highly entertaining. It's one of several New Zealand horror comedies I've seen lately (<em>Housebound</em>, <em>What We Do in the Shadows</em>) that find just the right tonal balance. Also, it's quite gory, and a lot of it looked to be practical, which is sadly lacking in horror these days. If Peter Jackson isn't going to be New Zealand's goremeister anymore, I'm glad that a new generation are picking up the mantle and running wild with it.<br />
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<em><span style="font-size: x-small;">* In one of many instances of characters breaking the fourth wall, Zakk literally grabs the camera to keep it from panning back and forth between him and Brodie and insists that his band name is what they're going with.</span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-size: x-small;">** Forgive any misspellings, I'm transcribing as closely as I can to the handwritten words on the sheet.</span></em>Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-46649203823217729732015-10-30T15:13:00.000-04:002015-10-30T15:13:00.260-04:00Shocktober Revisited: MortuaryI've long wanted to check out <i>Mortuary</i> because of its fantastic trailer. It doesn't tell you much of anything, features no footage from the film, but is short, memorable, and promises a properly spooky film:<br />
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Going into the film, I wasn't sure what to expect based on the trailer, but I guess it wasn't roller skating or people quacking like ducks. The trailer may be misleading (okay, it's blatantly misleading about the actual film), but <i>Mortuary</i> actually has plenty going for it in its own right.<br />
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After Christy (Mary McDonough)'s father , Dr. Parson (Danny Rogers) dies in a pool related "accident," she's prone to nightmares and spells of sleepwalking. Her boyfriend Greg (David Wallace) and his pal Josh (Denis Mandel) are dropping by the warehouse of a mortuary Josh used to work for, when they discover the mortician, Harry Andrews (Christopher George) holding a seance with a woman that appears to be Christy's mother (Linda Day George). The guys are separated, and just as Josh finds what appears to be the body of Mrs. Andrews, he's killed by a mysterious figure in a cape. Greg arrives in time to see someone speeding off in his van, and he and Christy set off to discover what happened to her father, Josh, and what the behind all of these clandestine activities. Is Christy losing her mind? Are Mrs. Parson and Mr. Andrews scheming behind her back? And who is the stranger terrorizing them in the night?<br />
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<i>Mortuary</i> is a pretty straight forward mystery with some clever twists and turns. After a slasher-like set up, the film shifts between Greg's attempts to find Josh and Christy's delicate grip on reality. Is she really being followed at night, or are they part of her walking nightmares? Did Josh really leave to join the Navy (okay, no; we see him die), or is Mr. Andrews colluding with the Sheriff (Bill Conklin) to railroad Greg? And what about Paul Andrews (Bill Paxton), Harry's well-meaning, if slightly loopy son? He has a crush on Christy, but his innocent flirtation and awkward social stylings don't seem to be doing him any favors.<br />
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Even if you've already figured out who the killer is (and it won't be hard about an hour in when they pretty much tell you), <i>Mortuary</i> finds other ways to misdirect you and keep you invested in the mystery for 87 minutes. Just when you think you have it figured out, a revelation shifts your perspective on motives and leads you in a different direction, which I always appreciate. It offsets the slow chase scenes and overlong game of cat-and-mouse towards the end. At the risk of spoiling too much, I'll say the ending is an interesting variation on Psycho, but with a final shot that you might not see coming, even though they set it up briefly.<br />
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I'd like to highlight a young Bill Paxton, who nearly steals the show as the awkward Paul Andrews, a guy who doesn't know much about other people but is an ace around the dead. He's endearing, a little off-putting, and just "off" enough to keep you watching, even when the pace gets a bit sluggish.<br />
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Was I a little disappointed that <i>Mortuary</i> isn't at all like its trailer? Well, yeah. It wasn't the movie I was hoping to see; the one I was promised. On the other hand, <i>Mortuary</i> is still a fun movie from the early 1980s with a more sophisticated plot than many of its contemporaries. The gore is sparing, the body count not high, and the gratudity is pretty limited for 1983, but what is there makes sense in the story. While not exactly what I wanted, I'm happy to say that <i>Mortuary</i> still delivers in its own way.Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-88603957269749989342015-10-29T08:07:00.000-04:002015-10-29T08:07:00.117-04:00Shocktober Review: Spring<br />
When the reviews included phrases like "Linklater's <em>Before Sunrise</em> by way of H.P. Lovecraft," Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's <em>Spring</em> had my attention. It's the sort of combination that doesn't seem like it should work, and for all intents and purposes really shouldn't, but <em>Spring</em> finds a happy medium between those two disparate elements, along with strong undercurrents of early Cronenberg-ian "body horror". It doesn't always gel, and things get just a bit dicey towards the end, when some debatable moments of black comedy enter the narrative, but overall I was quite impressed with the end result.<br />
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Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) just lost his mother, and after the funeral he's drinking with a friend when some guy and his girlfriend decide they want to start something. Evan snaps and gets into a fight, the kind that brings both the guy and the police to his doorstep in the next few hours. Taking a friend up on an offer to leave the country for cheap, Evan takes his passport, a backpack, and heads to Europe while things cool down. He doesn't speak any other languages, only has the money from his inheritance to his name, and knows nobody, but a chance encounter with two British tourists in a hostel takes him to a small coastal town in Italy. Within hours of being there, he's propositioned by Louise (Nadia Hilker), a beautiful student / local, but Evan is a bit more traditional. Instead of hooking up with her, he tells her they can meet somewhere later, but Louise ignores him and leaves. It's a very small town, so their paths cross again, and they strike up conversation. Before long, he's smitten by the worldly young woman, but she has a secret, one that may or may not be linked to mysterious animal - and eventually, tourist - disappearances...<br />
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In a number of ways, <em>Spring</em> is similar in structure to Linklater's <em>Before</em> films: there is quite a bit of walking and talking about life, love, and your place in the world, and there's an obvious parallel about young love (kind of). What I found interesting was that while it's reminiscent of <em>Before Sunrise</em>, both Evan and Louise as characters are more similar to where Jesse and Celine are in <em>Before Sunset</em>. From the outset, we're dealing with damaged characters, who are nursing their own, deeply private, wounds from life, and are accordingly hesitant to share them with each other. It's not until late into the film that Evan actually tells Louise why he's in Italy - she assumes he's just some visitor looking to leave when the holiday season ends - and that's after we have a better idea what's affecting her. I'm being deliberately vague about Louise's condition (and her history) in part because part of what elevates <em>Spring</em> is that you don't know what's going on for much of the film. Besides, I think evoking Lovecraft and Cronenberg should give you some idea what could be happening.<br />
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<em>Spring</em> deviates sharply from the <em>Before</em> trilogy by stretching Evan's courtship of Louise over several weeks, and while it focuses mostly on the two characters, that does mean he has to find somewhere to stay. I'm a bit torn about how helpful Angelo (Francesco Carnelutti) is to the overall narrative of <em>Spring</em> - the elderly widower who takes Evan on as a worker on his farm does help the younger protagonist grow and develop, and it provides a necessary bump late in the film to get him on the road with Louise, but at times Angelo's presence can feel like a distraction from the main storyline. The decision to include this third character helps expand the world of the film, but does take away the laser-like focus Linklater used to such great effect in <em>Before Sunrise</em>. If you're willing to stick it out with <em>Spring</em>, you'll understand why Hilker portrays Louise as distant and brooding as she becomes after she and Evan have sex, but it's an abrupt shift midway through the film. I will say that her demeanor is softened a bit by the mystery of how horror elements figure into the film.<br />
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Then again, if you accept in earnest that two deeply damaged characters are coming together, albeit with great hesitation, the back and forth of their relationship is understandable. Evan is a bit too earnest in his repeated attempts to get Louise to open up, but she has very good reasons. Once it becomes clear why (again, no direct <strong>SPOILERS</strong>), <em>Spring</em> takes a turn, which leads to an ending some feel was underwhelming, although I found it quite appropriate considering the intimate nature of the story Benson and Moorhead are telling. What I found odd was a sudden insertion of black comedy into the proceedings, particularly when Evan and Louise stop in a church for her to take the last of her "medicine". I will admit that I laughed, but in retrospect, the reaction of objective characters observing Evan and Louise felt a bit out of place. It's a good joke, but I don't know if it's one that needed to be in <em>Spring</em>.<br />
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At any rate, <em>Spring</em> comes highly recommended, minor quibbles aside. The body horror element can be quite horrifying indeed, and the sustained mystery of what Louise is (or is becoming) has an intriguing reveal. The subsequent conversations between our two protagonists poses some interesting questions about the nature of being, love, mortality, and identity, most of which play out in intriguing ways. Pucci and (particularly) Hilker are riveting, and the Italian coastline provides some fantastic eye candy. The effects are used sparingly early in the film, but their increased presence - particularly when Evan arrives during a very bad night at Louise's apartment - never disrupts the naturalistic aesthetic of <em>Spring</em>. If you like your horror with a little romance, or vice versa, there's plenty to take away from the film, and for once the combination of "blank meets blank" is accurate without <em>Spring</em> ever feeling derivative. Quite a feat for Benson and Moorhead, who I hadn't realized directed one of the segments in <em><a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2015/10/shocktober-revisited-vhs-series.html">V/H/S Viral</a></em>. Unfortunately, it's only one I half-liked (the skaters who go to Mexico on the Day of the Dead), but <em>Spring</em> more than makes up for that.Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-40054810919099181082015-10-28T11:02:00.000-04:002015-10-28T11:02:00.159-04:00Shocktober Revisited: Galaxy of Terror In my continued efforts to turn left when you're expecting me to go right, I have opted to review <i>Galaxy of Terror</i> (aka <i>Planet of Horrors</i> and <i>Mindwarp: An Infinity of Terror</i>) instead of <i>Ben-Hur</i>. It is true that I watched them back-to-back, and just like you got a write up for <i>Lockout</i> instead of <i>The Cabin in the Woods</i>, we're going to focus on the much schlockier part of a double feature again. The good news is that you don't have to be drunk to enjoy <i>Galaxy of Terror</i>, a Roger Corman produced flick that's just barely different enough from <i>Alien</i> to not be a ripoff.<br />
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The funny thing is that the presence of James Cameron as production designer and second unit director actually lends credibility to the case that <i>Aliens</i> is a ripoff of <i>Galaxy of Terror</i>. It's not a case many people are making, but I'll explain what I mean in a bit. Corman commissioned Mark Siegler and Bruce D. Clark to create a movie about a mysterious planet where something sinister (alien perhaps?) has wiped out an expeditionary crew and is now preying on the rescue team. It's not exactly <i>Alien</i>, but if you were to say "give me a movie that's like<i> Alien</i> but isn't <i>Alien</i>," you might end up with <i>Galaxy of Terror</i>.<br />
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When he loses contact with the last ship sent to the planet Morganthus, the Planet Master (<strong>SPOILER HIDDEN</strong>) informs Commander Ilvar (Bernard Behrens) that the Quest will be dispatched to discover if there are any survivors. The Planet Master assembles a hand-picked team to land or Morganthus: Captain Trantor (Grace Zabriskie), the lone survivor of an older disaster, Baelon (Zalman King), her first officer, Cabren (Edward Albert), Alluma (Erin Moran), a pyschic, Dameia (Taaffe O'Connell) and Ranger (Robert Englund), engineers, scientists, and medics for the team. Also along for the ride are Quuhod (Sid Haig), a weapons expert who specializes in crystal throwing stars, Cos (Jack Blessing), a rookie, and Kore (Ray Walston), the cook. They find what remains of the crew on Morganthus, as well as a mysterious pyramid that hides their deepest fears inside...<br />
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So the first thing I think I should mention is the cast. If you were reading the synopsis and saying, "Wow! He's in this? She's in this? Holy cats, they're all in one movie?" the answer is yes. It's a who's who of "Hey, I know that actor / actress," including people who would become Freddy Kreuger, Captain Spaulding, Sarah Palmer, and the creator of <i>The Red Shoe Diaries</i>. Or, maybe they'd already been Joanie Cunningham, <i>My Favorite Martian</i>, one of <i>Blansky's Beauties</i>, or uh, Eddie "<i>Green Acres</i>" Albert's son. It's an eclectic cast for a film that's best remembered for a woman having sex with a giant meal-worm.<br />
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Actually, for a film made with very little money (somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million dollars), it has a ton of production value, a pretty good story, some interesting (and gruesome) death scenes, and despite the Giger-esque pyramid design, some neat designs. While Cameron was heavily involved in the look of <i>Galaxy of Terror</i>, I don't want to overshadow other Corman team members: Robert and Dennis Skotak, Alec Gillis, Al Apone, R. Christopher Biggs, Brian Chin, Ron Lizorty, Randall Frakes, Tom Campbell, and Rick Moore. It's interesting that some of the people involved in Galaxy of Terror would go on to work on effects for Aliens, because while Morganthus is supposed to be reminiscent of Ridley Scott's "alien" landscape, it looks much more like Cameron's vision of LV-426 from the 1986 sequel.<br />
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Watching <i>Galaxy of Terror</i>, all of the exterior scenes, either mixed with models, rear projection, or both, is eerily reminiscent of the film Cameron would make five years later. While the interior of the Quest looks like a budget-modified version of the Nostromo and the pyramid has designs "inspired" by H.R. Giger (and, at times, <i>Forbidden Planet</i> and <i>The Black Hole</i>), the exteriors of Morganthus are going to seem more like a dry run for the "game over" scene in <i>Aliens</i>. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is an amusing parallel considering that <i>Galaxy of Terror</i> was conceived as a way to cash in on the success of Ridley Scott's <i>Alien</i>.<br />
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Now, it is fair to mention that this is a movie where a giant maggot strips down Taaffe O'Connell, lubes her up, and then has sex with her (and they both seem to be enjoying it). It's a movie undercut by comical sound effects (especially during Bernard Behrens' death scene) and even though the story is more interesting that just being stalked by an alien, the ending is abrupt and anticlimactic. There's a character that, despite clearly still being alive, just disappears before the final confrontation, never to be heard from again. This is, make no mistake, still an exploitation picture, so most of the more intriguing concepts from Siegler and Clark tend to get swept aside for gore and (sporadic) nudity. Corman famously shot most of the "rape" scene because Clark refused to, and both director and writer objected to its presence in the film. In the end, it's such a bizarre scene that I had a hard time being disturbed by it, something I was expecting coming into the picture.<br />
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<i>Galaxy of Terror</i> is a gory, schlocky, occasionally impressive slice of exploitation best enjoyed late at night, after a few beers (well, maybe you do need to be a little drunk) in the company of friends who don't mind their science fiction / horror on the cheap side. It's the kind of movie I'd imagine people who would come to Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium would watch, because why not? Between this and <i>Lockout</i>, it's not even a discussion. Bring on the space monsters!Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-88637594767168765552015-10-27T10:10:00.000-04:002015-10-27T10:10:00.217-04:00Shocktober Revisited: Fright Night (2011)Tonight I'll be taking a look at the 2011 remake of <i>Fright Night</i>, a film I've been looking forward too. That's odd, because I don't usually look forward to remakes, but the combination of an intriguing cast and a vampire-versed screenwriter had me on board. Was it a story worth revisiting? Let's see...<br />
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Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) is a geeky teenager in the outskirts of Las Vegas trying to maintain a relationship with Amy (Imogen Poots), a girl he'd have had no shot with a year prior. It comes at the expense of his life-long friendship with "Evil" Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who has been desperately trying to get Charley's attention. Students have been going missing, and Ed is convinced that Brewster's next-door neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (Colin Farrell) is actually a vampire. Charley is eventually convinced, but it comes too late to help his friends, his mother Jane (Toni Collette), or even Amy. He turns to illusionist Peter Vincent (David Tennant) for help, but it may be too late to stop Jerry from destroying everything important to Charley...<br />
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In the interest of full disclosure, I did not sit down and rewatch <i>Fright Night</i> in preparation for this remake. I have seen <i>Fright Night</i> several times (boy, that sounds defensive, right?), starting in high school and periodically on TV, and I really wanted to show it during a few Summer Fests but could never fit it in. However, I didn't feel like it was necessary to come in to the new <i>Fright Night</i> with the original fresh in my mind. There are a number of changes made between the 1985 version and the 2011 version - some superficial, some significant - and I was intrigued enough by the cast, as well as screenwriter Marti Noxon (<i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i>) and director Craig Gillespie (<i>Lars and the Real Girl</i>) that it seemed like a leap of faith worth taking.<br />
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Strangely, the superficial changes are the ones that aren't so much of a problem: changing Peter Vincent from a horror show host to a Criss Angel-esque illusionist doesn't impact his role in the third act, although it complicates it in the same way a major change to the narrative does. Evil Ed's role in the film is basically the same, although Noxon adds an interesting narrative shift where Charley has outgrown Ed's obsessive nature, to the point that he now has to blackmail Brewster into investigating Jerry. The transplanting of the film to Las Vegas (actually Albuquerque, New Mexico) helps overcome some logistical issues - the neighborhood is sparsely populated with people who often sleep all day and work all night, cell phone reception is terrible, and a vampire like Jerry could easily sustain himself without drawing attention.<br />
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While most of the changes to this version of <i>Fright Night</i> work pretty well, some of them hamper the story with respect to pacing. For example, there's no good reason for Charley to seek out Peter Vincent the magician - his website makes some superficial claims about Vincent being a "vampire expert," but it's not as though Brewster couldn't do most of the work on his own. In fact, he has, as a scene in the school library with Amy makes clear - Vincent only confirms his research. Beyond that, Peter Vincent's motivation for helping Charley and Amy comes waaaaay too late in the film and seems to exist to give Jerry and Peter something to talk about in the basement. Even the reason Vincent's show is called "Fright Night" seems perfunctory.<br />
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It's a similar problem that <i>Fright Night</i> suffers from early in the film - everybody knows Jerry is a vampire, and Colin Farrell is playing him as the slightly creepy guy who toys with his prey, so getting Charley on board takes longer than it needs to. To illustrate the point, both films have a scene where Charley and Amy are about to have sex, but Charley is more interested in Jerry than his girlfriend. In the original, this happens at the beginning of the film, setting up that Brewster is already suspicious. In the remake, it happens at least half an hour into the film, after we've seen Jerry turn Ed into a vampire.<br />
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Pacing and motivation issues didn't actually affect my enjoyment of the film, though; there's still plenty that <i>Fright Night</i> has going for it. The cast is uniformly ideal for their roles, with Colin Farrell being the standout as Jerry Dandridge, a vampire who clearly doesn't feel threatened by Brewster, Ed, Charley's mother, Amy, or Peter Vincent. He's cocky, dangerous, and slightly off-putting - there are weird touches with Jerry that elicited uncomfortable laughter from the audience. Anton Yelchin has an interesting line to walk as a geek who is trying not to be geeky, and Imogen Poots' Amy is a character that shifts from mostly inconsequential to very important as the story progresses.Toni Collette's Jane Brewster doesn't have much to do outside of the chase sequence which is, for all intents and purposes, the centerpiece of this <i>Fright Night</i>.<br />
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Much has been made of David Tennant's Peter Vincent; I've heard people say he's making fun of Russell Brand, that he's too "over the top," and that this Vincent isn't as compelling as Roddy McDowall's. To the last complaint, it is true that Peter Vincent's role in the story feels less significant because he doesn't mean the same thing to Charley that host Peter Vincent did. To those who throw the Russel Brand comparison out there, aside from a British accent, lack of shirt, and what turns out to be a wig, the argument is superficial. He's playing a variation of the "David Tennant" tenth Doctor from Doctor Who. If you haven't ever seen the show, I guess it might be easy not to catch that, but he's much closer to the Doctor in <i>Fright Night</i> than to Criss Angel or Russell Brand. I actually enjoyed Tennant's profane, guarded Vincent - he's not trying to outdo McDowall, or even draw comparisons, and whether he needs to be in Jerry's house with Charley or not, Tennant is a welcome presence at the end of the film.<br />
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A note on the 3-D: I opted to see <i>Fright Night</i> in 2 dimensions, in part for cost but also because an already dark movie made dimmer by glasses didn't seem that enticing to me. There are a handful of silly "at the camera" shots, and it seems clear that the car chase, where the camera circles around inside of the car (similar to Spielberg's <i>War of the Worlds</i>) is meant to be seen with "depth." That said, it really didn't make much of a difference, so I recommend seeing the film without the gimmickry, otherwise you might not be able to make out important sections of the story.<br />
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In summary, <i>Fright Night</i> is an entertaining, if imperfect, re-telling of the other <i>Fright Night</i>, which I have not seen very recently. It's different enough not to bother purists and certainly has enough going for it that I easily recommend the film to anyone looking for a horror movie in the dog days of summer. When I get around to Horror Fest: The Remake (and it is going to happen in the next three years), <i>Fright Night</i> is going to play, and not on the "shitty but kind of funny" night like, well, <i>Shit Coffin</i>. It's somewhere between Piranha and The Hills Have Eyes as remakes go, but let's be honest here, that's not bad company to be in, is it?Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-282234948049741592015-10-26T08:05:00.000-04:002015-10-26T08:05:00.169-04:00Shocktober Review: We are Still Here<br />
Sometimes the tricky thing about your reaction to a movie is timing. For example, if I had chosen to watch <i>We are Still Here</i> before I watched <i>Spring</i> - a movie I'll be reviewing in a few days - I feel like the response to the film would be more favorable than it is. Which is not to say that <i>We are Still Here</i> isn't a good horror movie. It is, but at the time I was still quite impressed with Spring, and by comparison <i>We are Still Here</i> felt a little more, not to be unkind, but run of the mill. It's a ghost story that gets a little too busy towards the end, one that starts out strongly and crescendos into a grand guignol finale without really feeling like it needed to. I've seen a number of really positive reviews for it lately, as well as talking to people who liked it a lot more than I did, and maybe I'm just not giving <i>We are Still Here</i> a fair shake. Well, I'll make my case and let you decide - it still comes recommended and I'm certainly open to revisiting the film.<br />
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Anne and Paul Sacchetti (Barbara Crampton and Andrew Sensenig) are moving into a quiet country home outside of Aylesbury, Massachusetts. Still raw from the death of their son Bobby, Anne is convinced that the house is possessed by his spirit. There are unexplainable events early on, like a photo that he never liked being turned over in the night, or a presence in the basement that takes his baseball mitt. Paul doesn't give it much credence, instead attributing her reaction to grief, and is more concerned when he discovers why this house was so inexpensive. When their only neighbors, Dave and Cat McCabe (Monte Markham and Connie Neer) drop in late one night, they explain that the house once belonged to an undertaker who stole bodies and sold them, before he was forced out of Aylesbury. Paul doesn't put much stock in it, but when a repairman (Marvin Patterson) is seriously injured trying to fix the unreasonably hot basement, the Sacchettis become more concerned that there might be more going on than just a broken furnace.<br />
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Anne invites Jacob and May Lewis (Larry Fessenden and Lisa Marie) to the house, along with their son Harry (Michael Patrick), who was Bobby's roommate in college. Harry and his girlfriend Daniela (Kelsey Dakota) are arriving later, but Anne is hoping that May will be able to contact the spirit in their house and determine if it's Bobby or not. Despite his good natured appearance, Dave McCabe seems to know more than he's letting on, and Cat tries to warn them to leave the house before they make a hasty exit, mid-cocktails. Paul isn't particularly fond of Jacob and May - they're too "new age" and he doesn't approve of Jacob's fondness for marijuana, but he's willing to go along with it if Anne can find some closure.<br />
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If <i>We are Still Here</i> was limited to what was in the house, I might have found it more admirable in its focus. Setting the film in 1979 - although it's really not clear that's the case until well into the film - is an interesting decision on the part of writer / director Ted Geoghegan. It only really settles one question, which is why Harry and Daniela don't make an effort to find their parents or the Sacchettis once they arrive. They find a note and decide to stay at the house, which of course ends as one might expect in this film. Without cellphones, it's obvious why May and Jacob don't investigate much into their non-arrival, but beyond that the film seems to be a throwback mostly for aesthetic purposes. It's not unlike <i>The House of the Devil</i>, but in the ensuing years, making films set in the late seventies or early eighties is suddenly "in vogue." I'm not really holding it against <i>We are Still Here</i>, but at this point I'm not convinced that it services the story in any way.<br />
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To say much more about the plot means going into <b>SPOILER</b> territory, so consider yourselves warned. I can't really get into the (mostly minor) issues I have with <i>We are Still Here</i> without discussing the spiritual activity, and the other part of the film, so <b>SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT</b>. You have been warned.<br />
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So, it turns out that it's not Bobby's spirit, but that of the Dagmars, the undertaker's family who weren't so much run out of town as burned alive in their home by the townsfolk. The Dagmars aren't even really behind the evil, because the house was built over an ancient evil that requires a sacrifice every thirty years or all of Aylesbury will fall into a state of plague. We learn this when Jacob decides to hold a séance without May (she's in town with Anne) and he's possessed by the spirit of Dagmar, which leads to one of the most distracting performances from Larry Fessenden I've seen. From the moment I first saw him in <i>We are Still Here</i>, I wondered why Fessenden was making a conscious effort to physically resemble Jack Nicholson in <i>The Shining</i>. It turns out that's because once he's possessed by the house, Fessenden goes full on Jack Torrance for the remainder of his time in the film, and I'm not convinced that's for the best. He's reasonably subdued earlier in the film, as is the almost unrecognizable Lisa Marie, who I hadn't seen since Tim Burton's <i>Sleepy Hollow</i>. But once Fessenden's resemblance to a famous horror performance becomes a channeling of Nicholson, it began to chip away at the film.<br />
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More of an issue is that not only does the house require a sacrifice, but the whole town knows it, and when our central protagonists are in Aylesbury proper, everyone other than the duplicitous Dave McCabe is so hostile towards them that it's impossible not to know something conspiratorial is shaping up. Still, I didn't expect an all-out assault on the house by the townspeople in the climax of the film, which turns <i>We are Still Here</i> from people vs ghosts to people vs people vs ghosts. It's not hard to guess how things are going to play out as a result, but I'm still a little iffy on the confrontation between Dave and Dagmar. What gets lost, mostly, is the significance of the house, and instead the focus shifts to whether the Dagmars (who I thought were supposed to be representing the spirits that require a sacrifice) have some sort of agency to punish the townsfolk for something I thought they wanted - to become part of the house. The whole sequence unnecessarily complicates the lore of the narrative, so while the extra (some might say excessive) gore is appreciated, I think <i>We are Still Here</i> would have worked just as well without the histrionics.<br />
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And yet, for the first 2/3rds of the film (at least up until the first séance), I enjoyed the atmosphere of <i>We are Still Here</i>. It loses steam in towards the end, but the slow build up and mystery about what's going on (admittedly spoiled by any synopsis you can find online, including IMDB) is worth investing time in. Crampton, Sensenig, and Lisa Marie are quite good, and Monte Markham seems to be having a great time as the duplicitous McCabe. His scene in downtown Aylesbury with Lisa Marie and Barbara Crampton later in the film is great, and even when things fall apart at the end, he almost holds it together. Since you can see it just about anywhere at a very reasonable price (to rent or own), it's hard to not recommend it, with the caveat that I really only enjoyed the setup. Not so much the payoff. Sometime in the near future, I'll give <i>We are Still Here</i> a second chance, without the unfair comparison to a film I found much more satisfying, and perhaps I'll come around. This has been a good year for horror films flying under the radar, and for that alone, <i>We are Still Here</i> is worth your time.Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-84120617253435324872015-10-25T08:02:00.000-04:002015-10-25T08:02:00.246-04:00Shocktober Revisited: Cabin Fever<br />
<em><span style="font-size: x-small;">editor's note: while the Cap'n is waiting to watch The Green Inferno or Knock Knock, here's a look back at Eli Roth's first film.</span></em><br />
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Today the Cap'n will be looking back at a more recent film I have an interesting history with, Eli Roth's <span style="font-style: italic;">Cabin Fever</span>. As the film was partially shot in North Carolina (Mocksville, Danbury, Winston-Salem, and High Point), there was a big to-do made of its release in 2003 at The Carousel in Greensboro: the lobby was covered with camping-related paraphernalia, the insides of the candy displays tainted with bloodstains, and production stills and press information were abundant. I remember this because I saw the film with a soon-to-be roommate in a packed auditorium of gorehounds looking for their horror fix.<br />
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And they got it, in abundance: <span style="font-style: italic;">Cabin Fever</span> is, whatever else it may strive to be, an effective and mostly disgusting horror film. In that respect, I recall being impressed with Roth's first feature length film. As I wrote in a 2003 recap:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1j3pxqaWCSoaNvztgnTrPhun0PSr7W-FBv7OwwBrsVe689b75cagNaMixOSp38ZMYGiCzXvS1sf2s9rERbUiz32InpPQxAPPlj6l6HMXIBqafKWZZsteST3GpeOruv0pHsWnjFpg4gD0/s1600/CabinFeverPoster.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5597485850670517778" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1j3pxqaWCSoaNvztgnTrPhun0PSr7W-FBv7OwwBrsVe689b75cagNaMixOSp38ZMYGiCzXvS1sf2s9rERbUiz32InpPQxAPPlj6l6HMXIBqafKWZZsteST3GpeOruv0pHsWnjFpg4gD0/s320/CabinFeverPoster.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 320px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 220px;" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Cabin Fever - Eli Roth learned a thing or two from Evil Dead. That's crucial to understanding the marketing behind this low budget gem. Cabin Fever is atypical of horror movies, and that bugs a lot of horror fans, but this isn't quite a scare fest. It's a genre bender, pitting the cast of a Teen Sex Comedy in a Cabin in the Woods Horror Movie. While it has problems (the movie doesn't know where to end and stumbles a bit in the final act), it's nevertheless a nice first film to build a career of off, and they marketed the shit out of this movie (when i went to see it, great steps were made to replicate set pieces, "authentic" paraphernalia, etc.) plus it doesn't look as cheap as it was to make, and there are some wonderful nods to past cheapie thrillers.</span><br />
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My compatriot hated the movie. In fact, he still hates the movie, for reasons I can't fault him for. After talking about <span style="font-style: italic;">Cabin Fever</span> several times, I almost totally flipped on the mixed-to-positive review and decided that the film's weaknesses overcame its strengths. I convinced myself that the Peter Jackson blurb on the poster (and subsequent DVD and Blu-Ray releases) was hyperbolic, and that the film's seriously uneven tone rendered the whole experience moot.<br />
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But that wasn't the end for me; for whatever reason, I couldn't shake <span style="font-style: italic;">Cabin Fever</span>, couldn't totally sell myself on the write-off, even if there are serious problems with the movie (which I promise I will actually get to in a moment). So I picked up a used rental copy from Hollywood Video (or Blockbuster, I can't recall), and watched it again. I had the same mixed reaction, and ended up selling the movie when money got tight. But then I'd see it used again somewhere when things weren't so rough. Friends began poking fun at me, asking why I'd keep buying "something you hated"? I didn't have a good answer, so I watched <span style="font-style: italic;">Cabin Fever</span> again last night, for the first time in three or four years.<br />
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The damnedest thing is that for 90% of the film, Eli Roth made a really good horror film. Yes, it has lots of little nods to The Evil Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Burning, and Friday the 13th, but beyond that Roth has the essentials down pat in constructing a solid horror film. He sets up the stakes well, isolates the characters, provides semi-credible reasons why the college students partying in the cabin might have trouble finding help nearby, ratchets up the gore in a disturbing way, and sets the characters against each other without ever feeling forced.<br />
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What doesn't work, the other 10% (with one exception), happens either before they're introduced to the virus or after they try to get back to town. Everything in between the set-up and the closing works fine, save for the introduction of Deputy Winston (Giuseppe Andrews), a moment so atypical of the rest of the film, so reminiscent of <span style="font-style: italic;">Twin Peaks</span> (not coincidentally, as Roth worked for David Lynch prior to <span style="font-style: italic;">Cabin Fever</span>) right down to the specially written Angelo Badalamenti theme, that it grinds the horror to a halt.<br />
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The rest of the major issues come at critical points in setting up or resolving characters, which is why <span style="font-style: italic;">Cabin Fever</span> leaves many with a bad taste in their mouths. I will provide a handy list, which is vaguely spoiler, although at this point in the review I'm taking it on faith you've already seen the film:<br />
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- Bert (James DeBello) and the "squirrel shooting" scene.<br />
- The harmonica guy.<br />
- The really fake deer.<br />
- The lines "because they're gay," "don't be gay," and "what are you, retarded?"<br />
- The "pancakes" kid, his dad, and the strangely effeminate store owner.<br />
- Actually, just about everything that happens at the General Store.<br />
- Marcy (Cerina Vincent)'s opening speech about college.<br />
- A misleading racist joke at the beginning of the film that has a payoff at the end that, at best, feels disingenuous.<br />
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I'm torn about Grim, Eli Roth's stoner interloper that shows up right after Bert, Marcy, Paul (Rider Strong), Jeff (Joey Kern), and Karen (Jordan Ladd) show up at the cabin. On the one hand, there's nothing really funny about his stupid dog joke or the fact that he really only exists so that there's one more body for Paul to find. His dog, Doctor Mambo, could have been anybody's around the lake and the threat would be just as credible. On the other hand, I did laugh at how stupid the dog joke is (sorry, I won't spoil that one for you), and it makes up for the random and sort of pointless "bowling alley" story that Paul tells at the campfire.<br />
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The problem is that the tone of everything listed above is so incongruous with the rest of the film, so decidedly quirky, that it disrupts the horror, and not in a good way. I'm all for breaking the tension with a well placed joke (Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson do it masterfully), but the "jokes" in <span style="font-style: italic;">Cabin Fever</span> aren't so much funny as they are really strange. They don't seem to belong in the same universe as the horror film we're watching, and their presence while audiences settle and and right before they leave do undermine the rest of the movie, which is, again, really good.<br />
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I am aware that the Blu-Ray of <span style="font-style: italic;">Cabin Fever</span> is a director's cut, one that apparently smooths over the jagged edges of the film, and having watched it again and (mostly) enjoyed the experience, I think I'll look into that cut. While I can't find any fault in the criticisms of the Cabin Fever I saw then and again tonight, there is enough of a pretty damn good horror movie inside to keep me from dismissing it again.<br />
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Oh, by the way: while it's not apparently on the Blu-Ray, the DVD has an extra called "Chick Vision" that raises a pair of silhouetted hands over the screen during "scary" parts, and it's actually kind of fun in small doses. I don't know that I could watch the whole film that way, but it might be fun for parties.Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-71755214485109709992015-10-24T06:58:00.000-04:002015-10-24T06:58:00.091-04:00Shocktober Revisited: The V/H/S Series<br />
editor's note: the following reviews originally appeared during coverage for Horror Fests VII and VIII, along with the 2014 Year End Recap.<br />
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We decided to kick off Horror Fest with something I've been wanting to see for a while now, the "found footage" anthology film <i>V/H/S</i>. Normally the Cap'n isn't a fan of the "found footage" genre - the only two I've really enjoyed were <i>The Blair Witch Project</i> and <i>Cloverfield</i> - but I thought the premise sounded interesting and one of the directors involved was Ti West. As you know, as a fan of <i>The House of the Devil</i> and <i>The Innkeepers</i>, I'm on board with anything West has a hand in directing. Also, the Cap'n is a sucker for anthologies.<br />
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The film is broken up into five segments, with a wrap around story that actually advances as the film goes on (which isn't often the case in anthology films):<br />
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"Tape 56" - from director Adam Wingard (<i>A Horrible Way to Die</i>), a group of hooligans who like to videotape themselves exposing women and vandalizing property are hired to break into an old man's house and steal a videocassette. The only problem is that once they get there, the old man is dead and they don't know which tape to steal, so they watch the following stories:<br />
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"Amateur Night" - from director Dave Bruckner (<i>The Signal</i>), three friends head out for a night of drunken sex with camera glasses in tow, but when they bring the wrong girl back to their motel room, the party takes a dark and twisted direction.<br />
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"Second Honeymoon" - from Ti West (<i>The Roost</i>), a couple is sightseeing in Colorado and Arizona when a strange woman begins following them around, and eventually visiting them in their motel room, while they sleep...<br />
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"Tuesday the 17th" - from Glenn McQuaid (<i>I Sell the Dead</i>), a young woman brings her friends up to a lake she visited last year, but her plans may not be as innocent as partying and smoking pot...<br />
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"The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily when She was Younger" - from Joe Swanberg (<i>LOL</i>), Emily and her husband are separated while he's in medical school, but she's having trouble dealing with noises in her apartment and a strange bump on her arm...<br />
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"10/31/98" - from Radio Silence (<i>Mountain Devil Prank Fails Horribly</i>), a guy dressed as a nannycam bear and his friends arrive at the wrong house for a Halloween party, and instead find something more disturbing in the attic. When they intervene, they realize what they stopped wasn't the worst thing that could happen on Halloween...<br />
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I'd heard positive and negative reactions to <i>V/H/S</i>, and I guess I can understand both. People prone to motion sickness from "found footage" movies may as well steer clear, as you'll be ill from the opening shots and it's not going to get any better. The ways that the stories use videotaped footage are, for the most part, clever, although I'd love to hear anybody's explanation of who would videotape a Skype conversation using a camcorder so that the wraparound story characters could watch it. But, if you're willing to overlook certain logical inconsistencies, I guess that for the most part they work.<br />
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The "video glasses" in "Amateur Night" are probably the most successful because they limit our perspective in such a way that the ending is a surprise and it generally explains the age-old "why don't they just turn the camera off" question. This also works in "Second Honeymoon" and "10/31/98"'s favor, and "Tuesday the 17th" relies on keeping the camera rolling to reveal the killer. It's really just the Skype gimmick in "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She was Younger" that strains logic.<br />
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Like most anthologies, there are a mixture of good segments, weaker sections, and one or two really impressive moments that help others to stand out. The ending of "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily" manages to elevate the story beyond a retread of <i>Paranormal Activity</i> territory. The fact that the characters in "Tape 56" are all loathsome assholes is overcome with the slow realization that watching these tapes are causing them to disappear one by one (although the reason isn't necessarily clear until the end), and great makeup effects and a gonzo ending help "Amateur Night" overcome its otherwise uninteresting protagonists. It will also make you second guess any girl who ever tells you "I like you" after a few drinks...<br />
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I suppose that while I didn't necessarily like how lopsided "Tuesday the 17th" was in setting up the story before becoming an all out gorefest, the way the killer is handled was inventive and made the best use of the "videotaped" gimmick.<br />
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Of all of the segments, "10/31/98" was probably my favorite, which is appropriate as they save it for last, after even "Tape 56" reaches its conclusion. When things move from suggested creepiness to all out special effects bonanza (handled really well considering it needed to be integrated with camcorder level video images), the segment earns the aimless first section, and the conclusion is satisfying and appropriately dark. <br />
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Oddly, while West's "Second Honeymoon" suffers from the least motion-sickness inducing camerawork, it may be the most abrupt story conclusion and compared to the other entries is possibly the least satisfying. The "home invasion" elements are quite creepy, and West builds tension in appropriately slow pace, dropping hints about what's coming, but even more so than in The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, the conclusion is too rushed to be satisfying. I understand what he was trying to do, but the twist comes about so quickly and ends immediately afterward, leaving little time to digest what just happened. It doesn't seem unfair that the guy watching that tape says "what the hell was that?" when it ends.<br />
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Is <i>V/H/S</i> going to be for everybody? Probably not. It is a better-than-average anthology movie, which I count as a plus, and as I said mostly makes the best of the "found footage" gimmick, but not all of the segments are good enough to sustain the runtime, even if some of their conceits help keep audiences engaged. I can't really say that it transcends either the "found footage" or anthology subgenre, and it's going to make some of you feel very queasy well before "Amateur Night" kicks into high gear, so consider this a conditional recommendation.<br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V/H/S 2</i> is a marked improvement on just about every aspect of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V/H/S</i>, and this is coming from someone who enjoyed the first film. It’s a weird point of cognitive dissonance for me, because I love anthology films but mostly hate “found footage” films, so <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V/H/S</i> had to overcome its conceit with interesting segments and succeeded half of the time (I largely prefer the first and last entries in the film – the bat-creature and the haunted house). That said, it was too long, stretched the “frame” story too far, and is something I “liked” more than really “enjoyed.” I haven’t seen it again since last year and don’t know that I will any time soon.<o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the other hand, I've already seen the second film twice this year; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V/H/S 2</i> drops the segments, cuts down on the length, and provides a more satisfying overall experience, which is critical for any anthology. The “frame” story, “Tape 49” is more focused and streamlined while still loosely tying in to the first film, and three out of the four “tapes” are winners, with the other one an inspired effort. Let’s take a look at how the film breaks down:</span></div>
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<span style="clear: left; float: left; font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicE_z3pCPz5UEFPuRWc63nu07MLglSlgJ_U3kDKpdACeooje3kcjcrabEhffED4WRtcjU1V4jNkPpy9bs2ccFx3RD9HJzNe4xX0kgH-oAwkMyXjkhj7vxr0J5hwSs9LR4kym_4EvE6X71g/s320/VHS2Poster.jpg" width="216" /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Tape 49” – from Simon Barrett (the writer of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You’re Next</i>), follows a dubious private investigator and his assistant as they break into the house of a missing college student, only to find a familiar setup involving VCRs and TVs in the living room. A laptop video from the missing student suggests that playing the tapes “in the right order” will change you, and they seem to be having an odd effect on the investigator’s assistant.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Phase I Clinical Trials” – Adam Wingard (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The ABCs of Death</i>) directs and stars as an accident victim who receives an experimental artificial eye which is, for research purposes, filming everything. Things seem to be going well until he notices strange goings-on in his house, and a stranger turns up to warn him that the longer he can see dead people, the more they can interact with him. How does she know? Her cochlear implant has the same effect, and it may already be too late for both of them…<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“A Ride in the Park” – from Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Blair Witch Project</i>), a biker has plans for a nice ride through the woods when he runs into a familiar horror monster, and thanks to his helmet camera, takes us on a first-person journey through the “eyes” of the undead.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Safe Haven” – from Gareth Evans (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Raid: Redemption</i>) and Timo Tjahjanto (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The ABCs of Death</i>), a documentary crew is allowed access to the compound of a cult promising “Paradise on Earth.” Little do they realize that their spy cameras will do more than expose what’s going on behind closed doors – their arrival signals the beginning of the end…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Alien Abduction Slumber Party” – from Jason Eisener (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hobo with a Shotgun</i>) comes, well, exactly what it promises. Teenagers put up with their obnoxious preteen brothers and friends, until invaders from another world decide they want everybody, including the dog.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “frame” story benefits from stripping down the main characters to two (there were too many people in the first film) and keeps the in-between segments shorter and to the point. While you might miss it the first time, there are quite a few references to the first film and the “mythology” behind why somebody would collect these tapes. I would imagine this will expand as the series goes on (it’s hard to see why there wouldn’t be more), so it doesn’t feel intrusive and people who hadn’t seen the first <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V/H/S</i> didn’t feel lost in the meantime.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every one of the entries is an improvement over the first film, not simply because they’re shorter (“Safe Haven” is the longest of the four and deservedly so). While it’s still hard to argue why anybody would transfer this footage tape, let alone circulate bootlegged copies, there’s nothing as credibility straining as the “Skype” segment from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V/H/S</i>. “A Ride in the Park” manages to take the overdone (if still wildly popular) zombie story and present it from a perspective you haven’t seen before and mixes in other camera angles in a fairly clever way. “Phase I Clinical Trials” makes good use of a limited perspective “first person” camera and builds some tension with creepy imagery.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If there’s a weak link in the lot, it’s probably “Alien Abduction Slumber Party”, and mostly because it comes after the truly fantastic “Safe Haven.” Evans and Tjahjanto’s tour-de-force is an almost impossible act to follow, and “Slumber Party” is good, even when you consider that Eisener breaks three cardinal rules of movie-making (don’t work with children, don’t work with animals, and don’t kill either if you do). His novel use of the camera attached to the dog makes the frenetic chases near the end more interesting and explains the “why are they still filming this?” problem inherent to “found footage.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The undisputed winner is “Safe Haven,” for reasons I don’t want to spoil for people who haven’t seen <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V/H/S 2</i>, because you should see the film if for no other reason than this segment. It’s an ominous buildup that turns into a rollercoaster of “holy shit!” with a perfect final line that’ll make you chuckle. I didn’t even realize I’d missed the last line until the second time I saw it, which caps off an already impressive exercise in ratcheting up the stakes for a film crew in far over their heads. The rest of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V/H/S 2</i> is icing on the cake, which is not to diminish Eisener’s effort or the conclusion to “Tape 49,” which is more satisfying than the end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V/H/S</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Before we watched <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V/H/S 2</i>, the Cap’n screened “</span><a href="http://vimeo.com/20821765"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Incubator,</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">” a short I saw last year at </span><a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2012/02/nevermore-film-festival-blogorium-recap.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nevermore</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, and “</span><a href="http://vimeo.com/70386747"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One Last Dive</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">,” another short from Eisener that shows just how much you can do with one minute. While I enjoy <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hobo with a Shotgun</i> to a degree, Jason Eisener has to this point really impressed the Cap’n with the short films he’s directed, edited, and produced. Not to bag on his feature length endeavor, but he really knows how to pack a punch in a short film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Remember how <i>V/H/S</i> was too long and only had a few good segments, but the frame story was fairly interesting even though why would you tape a Skype conversation and put it on a tape? And then <i>V/H/S 2</i> was a marked improvement in every way, because it was shorter and the vignettes were more concise and creepier, even if the frame story was kind of a mess? I guess when the time came to make <i>V/H/S Viral</i> - which might as well be "3" based on the end of the movie - everyone involved from the producers to the writers and directors forgot that. <br />
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The wrap around story makes almost no sense until the very end, and aside from an amusing cookout gone wrong, there's nothing but gore for gore's sake until the mysterious van that causes people go turn violent is shoehorned into the <i>V/H/S</i> mythos (such as it is). If clips from the first two films weren't crammed in as cutaways, you wouldn't even know it was supposed to be part of the same series. The "tapes" are abandoned completely, leaving us with a combination documentary / found footage story of a magician whose cape gives him real powers, a trip into another dimension that, initially, looks like ours but really, <strong>really</strong> isn't, and twenty minutes with the most obnoxious skaters you're likely to meet, who are eventually killed by zombies or eaten by a demon the zombies are summoning. <br />
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Of the segments, the second one - "Parallel Monsters" - by Nacho Vigalondo (<i>Timecrimes</i>) is the only one worth watching. That said, it's so over the top that you're liable to start laughing at the "reveal" of how the alternate universe is structured. The Day of the Dead / Skater video only gets remotely interesting near the end, when it's clear they can't kill the cult members in Tijuana. Everything else is an absolute waste of time, and I worry that trying to turn the series from a <i>Videodrome</i>-like vibe to a "viral video" ending (think <em>The Signal</em> or <em>Pontypool</em>, but much worse) isn't going to serve<i> V/H/S</i> well.<br />
Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-61577744651217398782015-10-23T08:01:00.000-04:002015-10-23T08:01:00.240-04:00Shocktober Review: Unfriended<br />
So let's get this out of the way at the outset: yes, <i>Unfriended</i> looks like a terrible movie. A social media-only "found footage" horror film about a ghost that haunts people through their computers. That's it. That's the entire movie. I'm not going to pretend that it's anything other than a bad idea, with obnoxious teenagers yelling at each other, cursing, and (thankfully) being killed off one by one. When I saw the trailer for the first time - in front of <i>It Follows</i>, which has to be one of the worst ideas a studio programmer could think of - my friend leaned over and said "you have one new movie for next year's <b>Bad Movie Night</b>". I can't pretend that <i>Unfriended</i> is in any way a horror movie that's worth your time. And yet, it wasn't as unwatchable as I expected. It's not good, but it was kind of fun, and a little better put together than I'd expected.<br />
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I'm going to tell you right now that I didn't care enough about the characters to remember their names. They're all horrible human beings, broken roughly into the stereotypes of The Girlfriend (Shelley Hennig), The Boyfriend (Moses Storm), The Drug Dealer (Will Peltz), The Slut (Renee Olstead), and The Fat Kid Who Is Inexplicably Making Salsa in His Bedroom (Jacob Wysocki). I think there's also The Girl Who Gets Pulled into the Chat That No One Likes (Courtney Halverson), so someone can die before the other idiots we don't like. They're all having a Skype Chat, along with a mysterious person who is a (<b>SPOILER</b>) g-g-g-ghost! Specifically the ghost of Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), who killed herself after a video of her drunk and passed out and maybe soiled herself or having her period was leaked online. I wonder if one of these assholes did it?<br />
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Tell you what, <b>SPOILERS</b> from here on out. <i>Unfriended</i> is not the kind of movie I feel deserves to maintain a mystery. Of course they were complicit and of course that's why her ghost is cyber-haunting them. There's even a website that Boyfriend sends the main character about how you don't want to be haunted online. Laura forces all of them to kill themselves in thankfully brutal ways (oh, he's making salsa so he can put his hand in the blender!), and let's be honest, they deserve it. Look, the Cap'n is something of a fuddy duddy who still write a blog and can sometimes construct complete sentences. So yeah, internet and texting slang is not my thing. I won't turn this into a "all Millennials suck" thing, but can we address the central premise of <i>Unfriended</i> here?<br />
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I guess this is supposed to be the horror equivalent of "cyberbullying going wrong" because not only does the video of Laura passed out leak, but so does her suicide video, which some piece of shit not only filmed with their cellphone, but also put online. Maybe that's how she cyberhaunts them, I neither know nor care. (Did you know the original title was <i>Cybernatural</i>? I am not making that up) I'd like to address the reaction to the first video, which we see in pieces throughout <i>Unfriended</i>. It starts with the suicide video, because, why wouldn't it? But the video itself, uploaded to YouTube, is okay, drunken and embarrassing. It's a mean thing to do because teenagers are horrible and should be murdered by cyberghosts but most of them grow up to be crushed by life and are therefore less rotten. Not all, but most. Still, the reaction to the "Laura Barns" video on YouTube is, shall we say, excessive.<br />
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"OMG Kill Urself" seems to be the primary comment she got, which is really a big leap to make for a video of being passed out and soiled / bloody. Sure, it's not the best way to look online, but to leap to "you should kill yourself because ha ha look at that just go ahead and commit suicide" stretches the already tenuous credibility of <i>Unfriended</i>. And yeah, I realize I'm talking about a movie called <i>Unfriended</i> which takes place entirely on Girlfriend's computer screen and has Facebook and YouTube and Spotify and Skype and who knows what else I'm forgetting. Yes, I realize the premise is inherently ridiculous, but do teenagers really leap to "Kill Urself" as the only viable option to being ridiculed online? If there was going to be a "straw that broke the camel's back" in the verisimilitude of Unfriendm that would be it. I can't believe I just typed that sentence.<br />
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But here we are, and that's just one of the dumb things these morons do prior to being killed off one by one. My other favorite example is when Girlfriend makes her whole screen visible to everyone else and never turns that function off, but continues having private messages with Boyfriend. I mean, she makes a big point of "sharing" the screen and then never turns it off. They can all see what you're typing, idiot. Of course, so can the audience. I'm not really sure how being a ghost on the web translates into being able to cut off the power in their houses, or to plant a webcam in someone's ventilation, but whatever. At a certain point you just go with it.<br />
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I know I said that <i>Unfriended</i> wasn't as terrible as I thought it would be, and even as mean as mean this review is turning out, I'll give director Leo Gabriadze (<i>Unfriended 2<span style="font-size: xx-small;">*</span></i>) and writer Nelson Greaves (<i>Sleepy Hollow</i>) some credit. They do manage to set everything up early on, from the ways that characters are going to die to flat out telling you who was responsible for the video when Girlfriend tries to report Laura's Facebook page (gee, I wonder who shot the video?). When Girlfriend goes on ChatRoulette to get help (no, really), it's a pretty funny reflection of how hard it would be to get someone to take you seriously. I suppose the game of "Never Have I Ever" that's the climax of the film has what passes for tension in <i>Unfriended</i>. The very end of the movie - which is the only time the camera isn't focused on a computer screen - is arguably one of the better "jump scares" I've seen in modern horror. It at least reinforces the idea that we've been watching the entire movie from first person perspective. So, uh, good job?<br />
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Let's be honest here: <i>Unfriended</i> is not the kind of horror movie you're going to watch seriously. I can't fathom having seen this in a crowded theater without everybody erupting into laughter. Its "R" rating means that the entire target audience for this film couldn't go see it, which is both good and bad. Good that there's an R rated horror movie, but bad that it's this. I can't imagine a room full of adults wanting to subject themselves to <i>Unfriended</i> without copious amounts of alcohol and or drugs (drugs are bad, kids, mkay?), so it's not really clear who this was for. Now that it's on video, I would expect a lot of people are watching it ironically, which might be the best way to watch it. I'm not going to pretend it's a "guilty pleasure" because I didn't really like it. I doubt I would ever watch it again, but I guess it wasn't awful. Just bad in a kind of fun way. That said there are so many better options for "so bad it's good" out there that <i>Unfriended</i> should be reserved for one of those "oh, that's all that's left on Redbox / Netflix that we haven't seen" weekends. Make sure you have plenty to drink.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> * Yes, I just looked this up, and because I don't know what Lucky Trouble is (Milla Jovovich is in it), I will announce to you at the tail end of this review that somehow Unfriended is already on its way to having a sequel. So, uh, thanks, me.</span></i>Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-4788618758409296442015-10-22T08:00:00.000-04:002015-10-22T08:00:06.011-04:00Shocktober Revisited: Rosemary's Baby<div class="MsoNormal" style="border: currentColor; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext .75pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 1.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;">
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<em> <span style="font-size: x-small;">editor's note: this review originally appeared in the Horror Fest VIII coverage.</span></em><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rosemary’s Baby</i> may be based on the novel by Ira Levin (<u>Son of Rosemary</u>) and be produced by William Castle (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tingler</i>) directed by Roman Polanski (I can only imagine what’s going to happen now that I’ve mentioned his name again on this blog), but it’s really the story of a book. And not just any book, because while Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) has a lot of books, including the conspicuously placed copy of <u>Yes, I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis Jr.</u><span style="font-size: xx-small;">*</span>, the most important one appears about an hour into the film.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Of course, I speak of <u>All of Them Witches</u>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Oh sure, the title is an anagram (although not the one Rosemary figures out – for the record, you can make “Hell a Cometh Swift from the title), but for whatever reason, it became the running joke of the rest of the movie. There was a lengthy discussion about follow-up books like <u>Some More of Them Witches</u>, <u>The Rest of Them Witches</u>, <u>That Should Cover Every Last One of Them Witches This Time</u>, and the legally obligated retraction book <u>Not All of Them Was Witches After All</u>, and many a chuckle was had.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I realize that it’s probably disrespectful to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rosemary’s Baby</i> to talk about it this way when I’ve never properly written about the film here before, but sometimes when you’ve seen a movie enough times and you’re with a crowd of people who have as well, instead of focusing on the actual story you begin to fixate on silly details or make jokes. While I often try to give a film its proper perspective on the Blogorium, much of what constitutes a Horror Fest recap is trying to convey the atmosphere surrounding the screening as well.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the record, I was not the first person to make a tasteless John Lennon joke about the Dakota Building. I made the second, and it was in reference to an audience member being unhappy that nothing bad happens to Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) at the end of the film. I responded that she needn’t worry, because “there’s a guy outside waiting for phonies.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There were many jokes and references to Cassavetes films (as actor and as director), to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Planet of the Apes</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harold and Maude</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Midnight Run</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wolf Man</i>, and to Frank Sinatra, Robert Evans, William Castle, and any number of other ridiculous observations, like what was playing at Radio City Music Hall with Fred MacMurray (our theory – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walt Disney’s The Shaggy Dog: The Musical</i>, or Son of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flubber: The Musical</i>). </span><br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(This is a total side note, but since I mentioned John Carpenter’s references in Prince of Darkness, it’s worth pointing out that at the beginning of In the Mouth of Madness,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Glover’s character’s name is Dr. Saperstein, a slight variation on the name of Ralph Bellamy’s character in Rosemary’s Baby.)</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All joking aside (and it’s really the big point at the fest where the audience participation took over, which the Cap’n fully endorses as long as you can still enjoy the movie), Rosemary’s Baby is a great horror movie. It’s so well constructed and so limited to one character’s perspective that even though you know what’s happening to Rosemary and you desperately want her to get away from the Castevets and the conspiracy in The Bramford, you understand why she’s confused and can’t leave. The world is set against poor Rosemary from the outset, in arguably more insidious ways than even Suzy Bannion faces in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Suspiria</i> (it turns out witches, Satan, and issues with pregnancy emerged as the consistent themes this Horror Fest).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her husband is distant and verbally abusive, especially after he gets close with Roman and Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer), her doctor recommends doing nothing when she feels pain during pregnancy, and then her old doctor (Charles Grodin), hands her over to the enemy when she comes to him for help. Her only real ally in the film, Hutch (Maurice Evans), is the victim of witchcraft – as is Guy’s original agent – and the first friend she makes in The Bramford plunges to her death not long after they meet. All the while, Polanski keeps us tightly locked in on Rosemary (although not quite as uncomfortably framed as Catherine Deneuve in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Repulsion</i>) as we slowly move towards June of 1966, when her baby is due. I shouldn’t need to spell that out for you, and it’s not as blatantly stated in the film, but if you do the math from when conception happened to when the baby should be due, it only makes sense.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The use of dream sequences and somewhat ambiguous dream logic (another recurring motif this fest) helps disorient the audience early in the film, so that even forty five years later, it’s not abundantly clear what Rosemary is imagining and what we’re actually seeing when plans are set in motion. The ending still gets me, despite the presence of one of the worst Asian stereotypes since Mickey Rooney’s unfortunate appearance in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Breakfast at Tiffany’s</i>. “<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">What have you done to his eyes, you maniacs!” </span>and, eventually, “You’re rocking him too hard.” It’s unsettling, but inevitable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we jest during <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rosemary’s Baby</i>, it’s only because we like it so. Also, <u>All of Them Witches</u> would want it that way. Hail Satan!</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">* Now, it’s entirely up to you whether Yes, I Can is there because of the Rat Pack connection or just as another subtle hint about the Satanism to come. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the interest of full disclosure, we leaned towards the former.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-69555518763580297872015-10-21T06:51:00.000-04:002015-10-21T06:51:00.190-04:00Shocktober Revisited: Carnival of SoulsIs there a statute of limitations on <strong>SPOILERS</strong>? I feel like if a movie has been out in the world for, oh, say, fifty-two years, that it might maybe be okay to discuss the big "twist" without fear of ruining it for everybody. Particularly a movie like <em>Carnival of Souls</em>, which has been in both the public domain and also the Criterion collection for quite a while. I know that a lot of you have probably heard of the film but maybe haven't seen it, but there's no point in writing about <em>Carnival of Souls</em> this late into the game without discussing what makes it so unique for its time. And that means directly addressing the end of the film, when the creeping sense of unease finally overtakes you. <br />
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So here's what I'm going to do: consider this your <strong>SPOILER</strong> warning, because I'm diving in. The Blogorium has been around too long not to have included <em>Carnival of Souls</em>, and the Cap'n isn't going to shy away from twists and turns. Continue at your own risk if you haven't seen the film (and you should).<br />
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Still with me? All right, let's get into it. I've always found <em>Carnival of Souls</em> has a lasting effect particularly because it's such an unorthodox "ghost story." Astute viewers of today can no doubt figure out that there's no way Mary (Candace Hilligoss) survived the car crash and somehow emerges from the river, to the surprise of the rescue crew and onlookers. We know, in fact, that she didn't at the very end of the film when the tow truck pulls the car out and her body is next to the other two girls, but it raises the question: what is the rest of the story? Is it a dream in the moments before death? Does her spirit escape, and try to carry on as before, only to be pursued by the spirits of the dead? She interacts with other people who are very much alive, who have scenes that Mary doesn't appear in, including the next to last moment at the carnival.<br />
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In most horror movies - and certainly all of the great ones - atmosphere is key. <em>Carnival of Souls</em> excels at atmosphere, in particular the way that the mundane world Mary settles into is interrupted by phantoms who follow her at every turn. Arguably, the use of organ music is a dead giveaway when the shift is going to happen - which is forgivable, considering that it isn't nearly as egregious as, say the "monster" theme from <em>Creature from the Black Lagoon</em>. The organ music is also unsettling at times, as it too straddles the line between the sacred and profane. That it is Mary's chosen profession is all the more appropriate considering the trajectory of<em> Carnival of Souls</em>.<br />
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There's something to the phrase "spiritual insouciance" in the IMDB synopsis - there's something to the idea that Mary refuses to die that makes the deliberately dreamlike second half of <em>Carnival of Souls</em> so alluring. She skips town, takes a job as an organist at another church, but is constantly drawn to the dead, the abandoned, the profane. The moments when she "ceases to exist" are really quite something, especially for 1962 (remember, this only two years after <em>Psycho</em>, and Mary dies even sooner than Marion Crane). Carnival of Souls has an illusory quality, juxtaposed with the very normal world of working and having a landlady and fending off your randy neighbor. Mary is torn between two worlds - one she's desperately trying to avoid - and the matter of fact shift between one and the other gives the film a kind of proto-Lynchian vibe. It's not entirely clear where Herk Harvey and John Clifford are heading with the story.<br />
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Many ghost stories have characters who interact with the dead, but the protagonist is often alive or, in the case of something like <em>The Sixth Sense</em>, has a spiritual guide who is alive that introduces them to the world of the undead. Mary is our main character, and most of the film is told specifically from her perspective. She's haunted by the "The Man," (Harvey) who she attempts to avoid everywhere except at the carnival, where she's inexplicably drawn. It's there, after all, that she (and the audience) is revealed the truth - during their dance macabre (sorry, I couldn't help myself), The Man's partner is none other than an equally ghoulish version of Mary. She runs, they pursue her, she disappears.<br />
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Which makes sense, but the following scene, when the Minister (Art Ellison), Dr. Samuels (Stan Levitt), and the police go to the carnival the following day and trace her footprints out to the water, where they stop. It's not the first time we've seen Dr. Samuels or John on camera without Mary in the shot, so there's some argument to be made that this represents objective reality, and yet they considered Mary to be a living, breathing person among them. In that respect, <em>Carnival of Souls</em> differentiates itself from films both before and after that deal with ghosts, poltergeists, or the like. It's reminiscent of the story of the woman in white, hitchhiking to the dance she never lived to see, but on a larger scale. This ghost refuses to believe she's dead - not in an ignorant way (like The Sixth Sense), but in a determined sense to stay alive. <br />
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On some level, Mary knows she's deceased - her attraction to the abandoned carnival (filmed at the abandoned Saltair Pavilion outside of Salt Lake City) is linked to the idea of something (or someone) existing past their purpose. She intermittently flirts with John Linden (Sidney Berger), her neighbor, alternating between a need for human contact and some distant understanding that he has nothing to offer her. Mary's destiny is with The Man, her partner in the dance of the dead, if I may drop all subtlety. Her at times inexplicable behavior is much clearer at the end, when it's obvious that these are the last whims of a dead woman, one who slipped free from the afterlife. For a little while, anyway.<br />
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To this day, <em>Carnival of Souls</em> is best viewed late at night, when the mind begins to wander, and when its dreamlike logic is more effective on viewers. That, at least, is how I prefer to introduce it to people. Its influence stretches far beyond its familiarity with most audiences - one will be hard pressed to find people who haven't heard of it, but many of them still haven't seen it. It's presence in the public domain no doubt muddies the water - along with <em>Night of the Living Dead</em>, <em>Carnival of Souls</em> can be found bundled with any number of cheapie monster flick from the 1950s and 60s, doomed to be downgraded by association, a fate a film this good doesn't deserve. It's somewhat amazing that this is the only feature Herk Harvey ever made, but if you're only going to make one, we should all hope it's a <em>Carnival of Souls</em>.Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-21217347368816767312015-10-20T08:20:00.000-04:002015-10-20T08:20:00.335-04:00Shocktober Revisited: The Evil Dead Series<br />
<em><span style="font-size: x-small;">editor's note: this includes portions of reviews from various points in the Blogorium history.</span></em><br />
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Other than a mention in the closing notes of <strong>Horror Fest V</strong>, you might be surprised to see there's no review of <em>The Evil Dead</em> anywhere in the Blogorium. For that matter, there's even less about <em>Evil Dead 2</em>: <em>Dead by Dawn</em>: it merits less than a sentence and a half in the <strong>Horror Fest III</strong> recap. In my defense, early Fest recaps were written between movies, usually during smoke breaks for others, so you'll find much of that coverage to be, frankly, lacking. It feels unfair to not give them a proper discussion, considering the lengthy <strong>Retro Review</strong> for <em>Army of Darkness</em> (see below) and their place in Cap'n Howdy's arrival to watching horror films regularly. Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell are, in many ways, responsible for the person I am today. If I can talk about how <em><a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2013/04/blog-post.html">Oz: The Great and Powerful</a></em> is, in many ways, a family friendly remake of <em>Army of Darkness</em>, surely there can be some digital space carved out for the films that made both of them household names. Well, very particular households. Like ones who signed up for Starz after <em>Ash vs. Evil Dead</em> was announced. <br />
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(note: I have left the <em>Army of Darkness</em> <strong>Retro Review</strong> largely untouched, which should be amusing considering that both the remake and <em>Ash Vs. Evil Dead</em> have rendered the first paragraph moot)<br />
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<em>The Evil Dead</em> is, I'm reasonably certain, the last of Raimi's "Dead" trilogy that I saw, although it's very likely I'm not alone in saying that. Unless you were old enough to have seen them in the order they were released, odds are you came into the films with the second or third film, and then worked backwards. It's an understandable way of doing things: <em>Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn</em> and <em>Army of Darkness</em> are more comedic in tone, while <em>The Evil Dead</em> plays it largely for horror, bringing a few uncomfortable chuckles as the narrative continues. The first time I experienced any part of <em>The Evil Dead</em> may have been late at night one weekend, back when Syfy was The Sci-Fi Channel, back when their "original programming" consisted of <em>Sci-Fi Buzz</em> and they didn't mind showing horror movies to pad out their schedule. <br />
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My memory of it is vivid: I came in at the very end of the movie, right before Ash (Campbell) kills Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) and Scotty (Richard DeManincor) by burning the Necronomicon. I can specifically remember the stop motion, clay-faced Scotty beginning to melt as he falls forward and hits the cabin floor, before the rest of his skin bubbles off and he becomes a skull in a goopy pile. I'm not even sure if I stuck around for the ending, when the "camera on a 2x4" manifestation of evil catches Ash and it cuts to black, but it's likely I did. When you start watching <em>The Evil Dead</em>, from wherever you start, it's hard not to finish. It's even harder when it comes to <em>Dead by Dawn</em>, but we'll get to that shortly.<br />
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What I've come to appreciate over the years about <em>The Evil Dead</em>, and why it's still my favorite of the three (in a very hard "choose your favorite child" scenario), is the immediate sense of dread for the protagonists. Cheryl, Ash, Scotty, Linda (Betsy Baker), and Shelly (Theresa Tilly) have no idea how doomed they are as they drive up to the "cabin in the woods" for the weekend. We've already seen a seemingly untethered camera floating through the swamp, and Raimi is continually warning us with distorted visual and audio cues that something <strong>very bad</strong> is going to happen. The exaggerated attention paid to the porch swing hitting the wall, boosting the sound to a ludicrously ominous level, hints at what he'll do again in <em>Drag Me to Hell</em>. But most of <em>The Evil Dead</em> isn't played to for laughs.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFhWTV5c-TfO7LjJP3NuwCvJfGdxi2zs1_xjQOFWjXTVTlc4v5iC_chKCAJ4xSll1itNqYofVkeiRm-r75FRLHBy05h34TJwiCLGetPUc7KdRhQLRpcf4V4FrtGdgXI5otHNrehblMnY_i/s1600/TheEvilDeadPoster.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFhWTV5c-TfO7LjJP3NuwCvJfGdxi2zs1_xjQOFWjXTVTlc4v5iC_chKCAJ4xSll1itNqYofVkeiRm-r75FRLHBy05h34TJwiCLGetPUc7KdRhQLRpcf4V4FrtGdgXI5otHNrehblMnY_i/s200/TheEvilDeadPoster.jpg" width="143" /></a><br />
The visceral quality of the film still gets to me - when Linda takes a pencil to the ankle, I cringe. Every time. I know it's coming, but it still works. It's hard not to mention the "tree" scene, because that's clearly the moment that Raimi oversteps his boundary, even by his own admission. It doesn't stop him from making a more comical version of it in <em>Dead by Dawn</em>, but there's nothing funny about what happens to Cheryl in <em>The Evil Dead</em>, and that's really what kicks off the horror. I always found it interesting that Ash and Cheryl were siblings, because it gives <em>The Evil Dead</em> a different level of connection than in the prologue to <em>Dead by Dawn</em> (and, I suppose, <em>Army of Darkness</em>). It's the only time we find out his real name is Ashley, because only his sister is going to call him that, and he's more fiercely protective of her after she's violated in the forest.<br />
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While <em>Evil Dead 2</em> and <em>Army of Darkness</em> increase the budget (and scope), I'm quite fond of the grimy, no budget aesthetic of <em>The Evil Dead</em>. There's something to its low-fi ambience, to Raimi's inventive ways around budget limitations, and the sound design that sets the first film apart. It's more assured than the rough draft short film, <em>Within the Woods</em> (which is functionally the same story, only Campbell is evil), and provides the groundwork for a lot of what became Sam Raimi auteur-ial flourishes. If there's anything that keeps it from being the classic it ought to be, it's that people often come to it last, and in doing so are often disappointed that Ash isn't as central a character as they've become accustomed to. He is, in many ways, like Ripley is in the first half of <em>Alien</em> - a member of the gang, but hardly the focus of the story. There's very little of the wisecracking, boomstick wielding lunkhead-turned-hero that people expect. But I don't hold that against <em>The Evil Dead</em>, and neither should you.<br />
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Before I ever saw <em>Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn</em>, I can remember reading the review in Mick Martin and Marsha Porter's <u>Video Movie Guide</u>. It described <em>Dead by Dawn</em> as "less of a sequel and more of a remake," which was sort of the conventional wisdom passed around about the film until the internet came along to set things straight. Had Raimi been able to use footage from the first film, Ash's trip to the cabin with Linda (now Denise Bixler) might have simply been a recap, picking up immediately after the camera hits him. In truth, I've always been tempted to cut the two (well, even three, really) films together into a super-cut, since the seams are actually very easy to locate.<br />
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<em>Dead by Dawn</em> is still technically a horror movie, but Raimi's fondness for slapstick comedy (particularly The Three Stooges) comes through more in the sequel, and it's a much easier entry point for the series. Not as easy as <em>Army of Darkness</em>, which is how I imagine most of you came in, but it's a great way to ease someone into gory movies. After <em>Evil Dead 2</em>, show them some early Peter Jackson, and they can handle just about anything. Well, maybe not the pencil to the ankle. Or <em>Martyrs</em>. But <em>Martyrs</em> is really an outlier. Where was I? Oh, yeah, <em>Dead by Dawn</em>. So the first twenty minutes or so retells <em>The Evil Dead</em>, just without Cheryl, Scotty, and Shelly. It's just Ash and Linda, and the words are spoken on the tape and she's still possessed and he still cuts her head off with a shovel and buries her. And then the film goes bonkers.<br />
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I actually really like the way that Raimi continues from where <em>The Evil Dead</em> ends to where <em>Dead by Dawn</em> begins in earnest: Ash doesn't die, he's just prohibitively possessed and can't leave. The bridge is still destroyed, and the "force" is still trying to find him in the cabin. But it doesn't, in one of the more amusing scenes: it's chasing him through the cabin, and all of a sudden loses him, and just gives up for a while. Then Linda comes back, and we're introduced to the chainsaw in this version (as well as Freddy's glove, if you're looking carefully in the toolshed), and what will become the hallmarks of the Ash most people know start. It's also a tour-de-force for Bruce Campbell, who spends the lion's share of <em>Evil Dead 2</em> by himself, fighting with furniture, blood, and most notably, himself.<br />
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There are people out there who don't know who Bruce Campbell is, or at least have never seen him on-screen, and without fail you can win them over by showing them <em>Evil Dead 2</em>. His gift for physical comedy, his willingness to go all out to sell a gag, is impressive to say the very least. Campbell makes you believe his hand is possessed and he has no control over it, and the scene where "it" drags his unconscious body towards a meat cleaver always impresses me. Sure, the sound design for the hand helps, as does the editing, but Campbell is doing the lion's share of holding up <em>Evil Dead 2</em> for the first half of the movie, so much so that it almost loses steam when everybody else shows up.<br />
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It's probably important to clarify the "almost" - it's not as though the movie was only going to be Ash, because while he's been going nuts in the cabin, we've already met Annie (Sarah Berry), Ed (Richard Dormeier), Jake (Dan Hicks), and Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley). Annie is the daughter of Professor Knowby (John Peakes in flashbacks), whose voice we hear reciting passages from the Necronomicon. She's on her way back to the cabin, so eventually there's going to be a crossing of paths, and since Ash has reduced the cabin to a smashed up bloodbath, it's not really a surprise she leaps to conclusions. Also, he shot Bobby Joe - accidentally and through the door, but it doesn't help his case. Their presence shifts the direction of the movie quite a bit, but it does lock Ash in the basement, where he meets the Deadite version of Knowby's wife, Henrietta (Ted Raimi). That's a plus.<br />
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Aside from providing Raimi with more bodies to do horrible things to (Bobby Joe swallowing a projectile eyeball, Ed getting hacked to pieces, and the many times Jake is hurt after he's been stabbed with the Kandarian dagger), the only purpose that any of the other four characters serve is to bring the passages from the Necronomicon that can banish the demons in the woods. And yeah, Ash isn't really in any state to do it by himself, so I get more characters, but there's a marked shift in the film after they enter the cabin that doesn't really resolve until three of them quickly exit the narrative. Ed gets possessed, eats some of Annie's hair, and gets an axe to, well, everything. Bobby Joe gets Raimi's cleaned up version of the "tree" scene, and poor Jake gets abused repeatedly before being torn asunder by Henrietta. And then the pages end up in the basement.<br />
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This, if you watch the series backwards, is when Ash finally starts to meet the iconography that fans of the series associate with him. How he goes from barely functioning to able to craft his chainsaw arm is better left unquestioned, but when I saw <em>Dead by Dawn</em> recently on the big screen, the moment brought loud cheers, many before he even had time to say "Groovy." Much of this is where I base the "people watched <em>The Evil Dead</em> series backwards" theory on: not only is that how I did it - I had a VHS tape of <em>Army of Darkness</em>, and then a friend bought me a copy of <em>Evil Dead 2</em> - but it was as though everybody was waiting for the Ash they knew to show up. <br />
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I'm tremendously fond of <em>Evil Dead 2</em> - it's the last entry in the original trilogy (to date) that makes any effort to be a horror movie, even if it's also largely a comedy. The film is a great way to introduce someone to horror, because you can ease them into over the top gore while giving them something to laugh at, so they don't get too squeamish. It's a fantastic showcase for Bruce Campbell, and if I'm being honest, it's better than <em>Army of Darkness</em>. Maybe not as quotable as the third film or as visceral as the first, but a happy middle ground. The effects from the fresh off of <em>Day of the Dead</em> KNB still hold up, and it has maybe one of the best puns to go along with cutting your hand off that you're ever going to see.<br />
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I saw <a href="http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/24174">an article</a> a few weeks back perpetuating the cycle of "will Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi ever make <span style="font-style: italic;">Evil Dead 4</span>, or will they just remake it?" where Campbell had been interviewed for something he's doing with <span style="font-style: italic;">Burn Notice</span> and he casually mentioned that he'd read the screenplay for the <span style="font-style: italic;">ED </span>remake. The person writing the article included some commentary about how they'll eventually "wake up" and realize that people want <i>Evil Dead 4</i> and not an "idiotic redo."<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRPFeQqe3kb07OcvNPSFXlF7WT7aiO_QZvSa9vYEUh9ZH6Fh-8LIeGaQ_uFHGlzEvt8GCvrmb2DklmIojQVwNGGS8Qoqcw2jvATFUSQ7xchwvVhDHL4DzcpW7lHRPHE3csuYxL9aYwdWg/s1600/AODLE.jpeg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5600065446730739170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRPFeQqe3kb07OcvNPSFXlF7WT7aiO_QZvSa9vYEUh9ZH6Fh-8LIeGaQ_uFHGlzEvt8GCvrmb2DklmIojQVwNGGS8Qoqcw2jvATFUSQ7xchwvVhDHL4DzcpW7lHRPHE3csuYxL9aYwdWg/s200/AODLE.jpeg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 139px;" /></a>The argument has been going on since a remake was announced some seven years ago, and the great "will there be an <span style="font-style: italic;">Evil Dead 4</span>" has been kicking around since 1993's <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span>, but really kicked into high gear when the director's cut arrived on DVD around 2000. This is not actually another editorial about the relative merits of <span style="font-style: italic;">ED 4</span> vs. <span style="font-style: italic;">ED: R</span>, but instead will dance around elements that consistently appear in said arguments, based on the 18 year history the Cap'n has with Sam Raimi's third journey into the battle between Ash and the Deadites.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdUlmcajO4ZOeCO-Hb1rEpEFd6B-cGWRUSyvJAZOJ9aHj7kDnI4eZuZNlQL39tyQCR8KUIsuhi8lsJmypCy64-ER7sGZBoFCaVGEnzs6KW59El3Ff2CKEZBDgDWwUayTaNxVr698tudZQ/s1600/AODVHS.jpeg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5600064370368588482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdUlmcajO4ZOeCO-Hb1rEpEFd6B-cGWRUSyvJAZOJ9aHj7kDnI4eZuZNlQL39tyQCR8KUIsuhi8lsJmypCy64-ER7sGZBoFCaVGEnzs6KW59El3Ff2CKEZBDgDWwUayTaNxVr698tudZQ/s200/AODVHS.jpeg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 111px;" /></a>I wasn't allowed to see <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span> in February of 1993, and it wasn't because the News and Observer panned the film - it was that pesky "R" rating. It was the same reason I couldn't see <span style="font-style: italic;">The Crow</span> a year later, and why the 14 and then 15 year-old Cap'n had to wait for my Dad to "check them out" to see if they were fit for consumption*. After Dad laughed throughout <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span>, he told my mother it was "too silly" to seriously corrupt my already corrupted mind**, and I was allowed to begin watching <span style="font-style: italic;">The Evil Dead</span> films in the opposite order.<br />
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Yes, I saw <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span> first; then <span style="font-style: italic;">Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn</span>; then, eventually, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Evil Dead</span>. I'd been aware of the other two thanks to Carbonated Video, but if you think they had trouble letting me watch the tamest, least horrific of the three, just imagine if I'd tried to rent anything from the "horror" aisle.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbL_v4y5wim89DjipCGm9dMwaR4t-5FMJaFgaUFbyZmbSHBhLuZ1P-4LPIBGnJht3E68sAb6u3jRyA180DHPI1CjkQsPW8TJQmF1mX_c19ifWH2O7e5U_rSpdkWt4ZfrjhQ62lMgN7URc/s1600/AODBoomstick.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5600065442800885042" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbL_v4y5wim89DjipCGm9dMwaR4t-5FMJaFgaUFbyZmbSHBhLuZ1P-4LPIBGnJht3E68sAb6u3jRyA180DHPI1CjkQsPW8TJQmF1mX_c19ifWH2O7e5U_rSpdkWt4ZfrjhQ62lMgN7URc/s200/AODBoomstick.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 148px;" /></a>As I've mentioned before, horror comedies were my gateway into harder edged films of the genre, well beyond the Universal Classic Monster films that populated my youth. The violence in <span style="font-style: italic;">Evil Dead 2</span> is so extreme, so impossible to take seriously, it ceases to horrify and instead induces laughter.<br />
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Similarly, the blood geyser in <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span> (anyone familiar with the film knows exactly what I'm talking about) became the great ice-breaker in high school - just throw on <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span> in the dressing room during plays and watch as every single cast member shifts their focus from last minute line memorization to Bruce Campbell involved in skeleton-related slapstick. The film (which is honestly harmless in just about every measure you'd gauge "horror" by) was a great introduction to crazier movies, not only Raimi's other films, but Peter Jackson's gross-out trifecta of <span style="font-style: italic;">Bad Taste</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Meet the Feebles</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Dead Alive</span>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEHhCjM8vzJpfJqgStx6oUXKpcjw3VXihsyHDrnfWV2yzfEZqhftzJmhzrp5S3hm0x1JR8BbIGOnU3KloFdpG-udLX5lEXwq0DX-Bks_cb6RBx4PTGkjLPjzWcYjuglgeyw0b-gDG0Id0/s1600/AODDirectorsCut.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5600064377693262850" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEHhCjM8vzJpfJqgStx6oUXKpcjw3VXihsyHDrnfWV2yzfEZqhftzJmhzrp5S3hm0x1JR8BbIGOnU3KloFdpG-udLX5lEXwq0DX-Bks_cb6RBx4PTGkjLPjzWcYjuglgeyw0b-gDG0Id0/s200/AODDirectorsCut.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 142px;" /></a>Now I've mentioned that <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span> has a Director's Cut, and that it had a VHS and DVD release in '99 / 2000 (respectively), but the funny thing is that I already knew it existed well before it came out. Though I cannot recall why or how I found it, clips of the original ending were already available on the internet in 1997, albeit in postage stamp-sized Quicktime files that took hours to download on a 28.8 modem. This, coupled with the launch of BC Central - the original version of Bruce Campbell's official website - allowed the high school era Cap'n to pursue more information about the "two" <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span>'s.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHcmfRVxJShRcq3jSSQzPR-hAkcn4-FtiiQCxPqArtwKrxihbDy4uMVtHyOK8iZw-wox051kQoE8wcTwvsosHwFW0qOZQxA7hop1FYSK6hi5v05FgJfRXzVrsN3QoazUP19QsbjRmeIR0/s1600/AODBD.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5600065450992571458" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHcmfRVxJShRcq3jSSQzPR-hAkcn4-FtiiQCxPqArtwKrxihbDy4uMVtHyOK8iZw-wox051kQoE8wcTwvsosHwFW0qOZQxA7hop1FYSK6hi5v05FgJfRXzVrsN3QoazUP19QsbjRmeIR0/s200/AODBD.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 142px;" /></a>When I say "original" version of Bruce Campbell's website, I don't mean <a href="http://www.bruce-campbell.com/">this</a>. That's what BC Central became (the original domain name is now up for sale, I just checked), but in the beginning, Bruce recorded .wav files that were embedded into the page and shared personal anecdotes (many of which ended up in <u>If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor</u>). He also had an email address to send questions to, and back in those early days of the "internet," Bruce Campbell would respond personally to your email (things were different back then, you see).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqkvKe5TfoWQW0tEZZTeC_nub7n_OIyx0mtwNZSJk22sPXN_2sSHVh9oc6H2-kGIpExg3tZRcZKjqpu3jjNclFkIe_7S1B-5VrCLDB1fzu0pNSL4bKroP_hC048DxWxyu1xAq1lY9H9Ww/s1600/AODAB.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5600064371599976530" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqkvKe5TfoWQW0tEZZTeC_nub7n_OIyx0mtwNZSJk22sPXN_2sSHVh9oc6H2-kGIpExg3tZRcZKjqpu3jjNclFkIe_7S1B-5VrCLDB1fzu0pNSL4bKroP_hC048DxWxyu1xAq1lY9H9Ww/s200/AODAB.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 172px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 122px;" /></a>Logically, having seen the original ending where Ash oversleeps and finds himself in a post-apocalyptic London, I thought I'd be the clever fellow who emailed Bruce asking why they'd changed the ending. While the email is lost to time, I still remember what he replied:<br />
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"We didn't change it - the studio did. Cheers, Bruce Campbell"<br />
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That's all; I didn't say he wrote long responses, but he did respond, and in all fairness Bruce Campbell did answer my question, which was poorly worded to be sure.<br />
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Okay, so the Director's Cut was out there, including on a bootlegged VHS tape we had a copy of in college from a video store that no longer exists but still doesn't have to be "out-ed," and it entered the rotation with the likes of <span style="font-style: italic;">Clerks</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Cannibal! The Musical</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Pecker</span><span style="font-size: 78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">***</span></span>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBA72d1xSjkRLOEz07YixVxvHTEQ60ZEIrSKD7th4fcOEgHshzwOaZ3qJ4FpaU7EQYuto_8GTFGOKk0Px_BbwAy5dheIEIKrA3_Es_pkqEVSb8tTP8xhXJErzKN6Z4Bs3hdHDJRGBBSB4/s1600/AODHDVD.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5600064380409796130" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBA72d1xSjkRLOEz07YixVxvHTEQ60ZEIrSKD7th4fcOEgHshzwOaZ3qJ4FpaU7EQYuto_8GTFGOKk0Px_BbwAy5dheIEIKrA3_Es_pkqEVSb8tTP8xhXJErzKN6Z4Bs3hdHDJRGBBSB4/s200/AODHDVD.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 158px;" /></a>Over the last 15 years or so, I've had a copy of <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span> in just about every iteration you can find: the 1996 VHS release, the Universal DVD, on Blu-Ray, and even on HD-DVD. Oh, and then there are the numerous Anchor Bay releases, of which I only didn't have the "Bootleg" edition, in part because I still had the "Limited" edition with the Theatrical and Director's Cuts. You'll find pictures of all of them scattered around this Retro Review.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl383cvCXpRqmDNQtz23yLH5MkD58AnFCqxY24yG6m66rUI6JQYWUjbPBi3xX_fGPzIQ0n_m5L8hAioMZj9bo7O6c9o05OwTebgaRKXVHhsgaZBL6g6LuZF02NazyYAszqLT9IQ1GUvZA/s1600/AODBootleg.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5600065443683962066" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl383cvCXpRqmDNQtz23yLH5MkD58AnFCqxY24yG6m66rUI6JQYWUjbPBi3xX_fGPzIQ0n_m5L8hAioMZj9bo7O6c9o05OwTebgaRKXVHhsgaZBL6g6LuZF02NazyYAszqLT9IQ1GUvZA/s200/AODBootleg.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 137px;" /></a>With time, I've come to prioritize my <span style="font-style: italic;">Evil Dead</span> preference in the opposite order I saw them: <span style="font-style: italic;">The Evil Dead</span> is a relentless, disturbing, graphic horror film that I enjoy more every time I see it; <span style="font-style: italic;">Dead by Dawn</span> is basically the same movie but with the disturbing replaced with some seriously wicked black comedy, a more enjoyable experience but hints at the direction Raimi was going in; <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span> is essentially a series of one-liners with a dash of Ray Harryhausen "horror" in the guise of an adventure film. There's nothing scary about <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span>, and one will find the 90% of "Ash-holes" prefer the Ash from the third film to the other two - he has the better catchphrases. I watch <span style="font-style: italic;">Army of Darkness</span> less than the other two, but the Cap'n still appreciates its role in dragging me back into horror.<br />
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As to whether a remake or sequel happens (or, more likely, doesn't) I must admit I don't give it much thought. <span style="font-style: italic;">Drag Me to Hell</span> was by and large as close as we're going to get to an "<span style="font-style: italic;">Evil Dead</span>" -type film from Sam Raimi, and to be honest, I'm happier with that than a continuation of the "give me some sugar, baby" that closed out the Ash saga.<br />
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And then there's the remake. Oh, I know, Sam Raimi didn't direct it: he merely produced it, along with Bruce Campbell and Robert Tapert, thereby giving it their tacit "seal of approval", but you didn't really think I was just going to pretend it didn't exist, did you? I may not like it very much, but Fede Alvarez's reboot-sequel-thing can technically be argued to continue the story, thanks to some specific visual cues, and who knows what's in store after Ash vs. Evil Dead...<br />
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The presence of "the classic" - Sam Raimi's 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 - covered in vines seems to indicate that this is the same cabin that Ash was in at some point, although it's not clear that he ever left based on the film. The grittier, less "comedic" approach Alvarez brings to the remake allows for certain elements from <em>The Evil Dead</em> and <em>Evil Dead 2</em> to be reused - the tree rape (even more uncomfortable), losing a hand (even more graphic), and the chainsaw (more blood), while pushing the boundaries of Deadites in different directions. Now they're self-mutilating demons, not unlike the possessed Ghosts of Mars, and you should never want me to have to compare your movie to Ghosts of Mars. Ever.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLCgFK7hrFZYDgMYTHUb5dtiRFXnTjzKsc8atTcbnQp42Sd8_ERysFyrGG4xmHQqeWySUFBFDF_Ij2_WA5crBYGea6ZF8GNugd3RWeUJq2l0uPwlWWOPPRYAsPbObOuoEvbur3ZwVzJZWG/s1600/EvilDead2013Posterr.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLCgFK7hrFZYDgMYTHUb5dtiRFXnTjzKsc8atTcbnQp42Sd8_ERysFyrGG4xmHQqeWySUFBFDF_Ij2_WA5crBYGea6ZF8GNugd3RWeUJq2l0uPwlWWOPPRYAsPbObOuoEvbur3ZwVzJZWG/s200/EvilDead2013Posterr.jpg" width="138" /></a><br />
It's no secret that I don't like Evil Dead, and I've tried to give it another chance. I kind of like the idea that Mia (Jane Levy)'s friends bring her to the cabin to detox, and they don't listen to her when things get nasty because she's prone to lying in order to use. Unfortunately, that plotline is all but abandoned halfway through the film, and it's never really explored enough to be more than a device to kick off the movie. The idea that the Necronomicon has been in the cabin and that people try to keep it out of the hands of others is a good one, but is again not especially well developed. Instead it seems to provide a good excuse for Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) to bleed on the book. I don't really think that addressing the raining blood third act or the Abomination (the, uh, ultimate manifestation of the Deadites) is worth getting into. Or why Mia needs to rip her own hand off - not cut, like literally tear it off - in order to get away. that's just how this Evil Dead rolls.<br />
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Here are my original thoughts, from a recap written in 2013. I think they cover how I feel about the tone of Evil Dead pretty well:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjSD0GAcjEPA4X3RL-OrtzO4o7jyUrsaPdiZQe3gTnbBHuAxAcEAtPWpmKg0MlKbFc1EvPpamruGw5dTrM_Arliv74igWo1AFNUlXhJYeIkwvZl4MYF8hC6y1w5wewi60Odc_5gTu52o6a/s1600/51yiGr8PWKL._SL450_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjSD0GAcjEPA4X3RL-OrtzO4o7jyUrsaPdiZQe3gTnbBHuAxAcEAtPWpmKg0MlKbFc1EvPpamruGw5dTrM_Arliv74igWo1AFNUlXhJYeIkwvZl4MYF8hC6y1w5wewi60Odc_5gTu52o6a/s200/51yiGr8PWKL._SL450_.jpg" width="166" /></a></div>
I get that people like that the remake of <i>The Evil Dead</i> is really violent. Like non-stop, unpleasant, close-up on the gore violent for most of the movie. Got it. I 100% don't believe the continued insistence that the effects are practical and that there's "almost no digital effects" in the movie. Sorry, I've seen it twice and you can see the digital effects, even during parts of the commentary where the director claims there aren't. But that is another argument for another day. The problem with <i>Evil Dead</i> isn't that it exists - there can and are good remakes of horror films out there, so I'm willing to put aside my affection for the original and let this exist in its own right.<br />
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The problem with <i>Evil Dead</i> is that it's extremely violent, and nothing else. If you're looking for a movie where people are slowly, painfully mutilated, with long shots of the aftermath where they're half-crying and half in shock while removing needles or nails from their skin, good news - you'll find it in spades in <i>Evil Dead</i>. There's no humor, no characters, not much in the way of plot (that isn't abandoned, anyway), but lots of moments designed to remind you that this is a remake of <i>The Evil Dead</i>. Just one that's grittier and gorier and more hardcore. Because that's all horror fans care about, right? Oh, also just throwing Bruce Campbell onscreen after the credits to say "Groovy" in silhouette., because you gotta have Bruce, right? It's no secret why the best and worst reviews of this film said the same thing: "It's REALLY violent." That's all there is to <i>Evil Dead</i>, and it's not enough.<br />
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For now, that's all there is of <em>The Evil Dead</em> series. That's going to change in a little over a week, when Raimi, Tapert, and Bruce bring Ash back for a new series. They've hinted it could be more than just a one-off, but I'm looking forward to seeing how Ashley J. Williams has been living in a post-<em>Army of Darkness</em> world. Well, also one where they aren't allowed to say "S-Mart" or have a metal hand because Universal won't let them use anything specifically from <em>Army of Darkness</em>. I've tried to steer clear of learning too much about it, but Bruce is looking good and it appears to be tonally similar to <em>Dead by Dawn</em>. Bring it, I says. Then I'll have to update this sucker again...<br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">* The issue for The Crow was the "raped" part of "criminals rape and kill the hero's girlfriend before killing him."</span> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">** Long time Blogorium readers are already aware that the Cap'n had been exposed to Blade Runner, Downtown, Aliens, and Animal House at a much younger age. For that matter, they would take me with them to see the much harder "R" Alien 3 later that year...</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">*** Sorry, I know we had to watch more than those movies, but for the life of me I can't think of one right now and I know we DID watch Pecker at least once...</span></span>Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-71028648658386237192015-10-19T07:41:00.000-04:002015-10-19T07:41:00.091-04:00Shocktober Revisited: Mini-Reviews!<br />
Sometimes, horror movies get rolled up in other quick reviews, and accordingly can be missed. The following quick takes are from various points over the years, so the quality of the review(s) can vary wildly:<br />
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<i>Die, Monster, Die!</i> - Based on H.P. Lovecraft's <u>The Colour Out of Space</u> in the same way that The Haunted Palace is based on <u>The Case of Charles Dexter Ward</u> (loosely), this AIP production has some effective imagery, but finds a way to drag on long enough to make 78 minutes feel like two hours. It's not lacking in atmosphere, and Boris Karloff certainly gives as much as he possibly can (which is saying something, as the actor was in poor enough health that he spends most of the film confined to a wheelchair), but I had trouble remembering much about the film hours after finishing it.<br />
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Lovecraft's town of Arkham, Massachusetts, is relocated to England so that American student Stephen Rinehart (Nick Adams) can travel to the Whitley manor on the outskirts of town. Nobody in Arkham wants to talk to him about the Whitleys, nor will they provide him with any means of transportation, so Rinehart has to walk. It gives us the opportunity to see the desolate lands on the outskirts of the manor, and what looks like a huge crater, surrounded by dead trees that crumble to dust when touched. After dodging a bear trap at the gate, he enters the Whitley manor to find himself unwelcome by its patriarch, Nahum Whitley (Karloff), despite having been invited by Nahum's daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-R2FC2vj8fC_GWpM5lx0lSPTkvu56NNlnqUc4peQhbzglWbjyBm1HLhjaNxt5JzPfuzi9JCtmDkwGKpXJKj41sbst78PszKoXas7uwwgyitS-0LL6CtZL7IyhtWgGI527E5c4wySjOyEm/s1600/DieMonsterDiePoster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-R2FC2vj8fC_GWpM5lx0lSPTkvu56NNlnqUc4peQhbzglWbjyBm1HLhjaNxt5JzPfuzi9JCtmDkwGKpXJKj41sbst78PszKoXas7uwwgyitS-0LL6CtZL7IyhtWgGI527E5c4wySjOyEm/s1600/DieMonsterDiePoster.jpg" width="126" /></a></div>
Something is obviously very wrong at the Whitley house, and Nahum's wife Letitia begs Stephen to take Susan away (they were students at an unnamed university in the U.S.), against Nahum's objections. Letitia is bedridden and refuses to let anyone see her, and Nahum is opposed to taking her to a doctor in town. Their maid went insane and lurks around the grounds under a black veil, and their butler Merwyn (Terence de Marney) is barely capable of lifting silverware without collapsing. A strange glow is coming from the (locked) greenhouse, and it's rumored that Nahum's father, Corbin Whitley, practiced black magic (because, you know, it kind of makes it sound like it's connected to <i>The Haunted Palace</i>, maybe?), which seems to be confirmed from the artwork scrawled in the cellar of the mansion.<br />
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Unfortunately, for all of the mystery surrounding the Whitleys and what writer Jerry Sohl cobbled together from <u>The Colour Out of Space</u> and more topical concerns (circa 1965) about radiation, <i>Die, Monster, Die!</i> is mostly a movie about wandering around a spooky house with candles until something jumps out. Audiences who bemoan "jump" scares in modern horror films will roll their eyes at no less than three such moments in <i>Die, Monster, Die!</i>, all of which have the bad form to continue well after it's clear they aren't scary. There are some nice images - the matte painting of the meteor crash looks very good, and the "zoo" of deformed creatures / aliens (it's never very clear) in the greenhouse "shed" make an impression, but the pacing of the film drags on endlessly. <br />
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Lovecraft fans will, in all likelihood, not enjoy the explanation given to why the meteorite causes strange and horrible things to happen to the vegetation (<b>SPOILER</b> - it's Uranium) or the way that <i>Die, Monster, Die!</i> devolves into a "we have to fight the monster before we escape," wherein Boris Karloff is replaced by a stuntman wearing a glowing prototype of the "Green Man" outfit under his suit. I honestly can't remember if they even explain what happens to the maid after she tries to attack Stephen and falls down, but it's not the kind of plot point I'm even worried about following up on. While I've seen worse adaptations of Lovecraft stories, I'd be hard pressed to say I've seen one that's more of a slog to get through than this one. <br />
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<i>Terminal Invasion - </i>Cranpire's love of this film used to vex me. Admittedly, I'd only seen it in pieces on the Sci-Fi Channel and it looked like their run of the mill crap, just with Bruce Campbell. Now that I've watched the whole thing, I can understand why he enjoys it so much. Kind of.<br />
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I'll give credit where credit's due: director Sean S. Cunningham (<i>Friday the 13th</i>) is a more competent director than most of the "Sci-Fi Original" stable of no-names. <i>Terminal Invasion </i>is a cross between <i>Pitch Black</i> and <i>John Carpenter's The Thing</i>, with a small dose of <i>Assault on Precinct 13</i> thrown in for good measure, and Cunningham rises to the occasion. For what's essentially a ripoff of other sci-fi / horror movies, it's pretty good. There's certainly no fat on this movie, so every scene exists to set up something later.<br />
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The story takes place on a snowy night while a small band of travelers are trapped in a charter plane lobby. Campbell is a criminal being transferred who ends up in their midst, along with some nasty alien invaders disguised as humans. You can figure out where it goes from there if you've seen any of the movies above.<br />
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What I appreciated about <i>Terminal Invasion </i>is the way it sets up twists in the story based on things you assume to be true at the beginning. While I was pretty sure I knew who was an alien and who wasn't (and was mostly right), there's at least one genuine surprise halfway into the movie. Cunningham uses the limited geography of the terminal to telegraph plot points later, which I find to be rare of Sci-Fi Originals.<br />
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That being said, this is still a made for TV movie, and it shows. Most sets are over-lit so that shooting can commence from any angle, so even the dark scenes are pretty bright. The cgi, while used sparingly, is still five or six steps below the early Nasonex commercials. At least twice during <i>Terminal Invasion,</i> the movie "Fades to Commercial", and it looks silly without actual commercials.<br />
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However, most of these are acceptable if considered in the context of how <i>Terminal Invasion </i>came to be. The unfortunate cost cutting exercise comes during "attack" scenes involving the aliens. The camera is normally pretty stable, but when the aliens attack there's a postproduction "herky-jerky" effect that just looks dirt cheap.<br />
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Still, with expectations set properly, <i>Terminal Invasion </i>is pretty good for what it is, and I'd probably watch it again. Bruce is pretty good despite having to play the "stoic" type for most of the movie. Not many wisecracks to be seen here, but there is some decent gore and <i>Terminal Invasion </i>would be good times with a six pack and your buddies.<br />
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<a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2012/05/blogorium-review-dark-shadows.html"><i>Dark Shadows</i></a> and <i>Frankenweenie</i> - Tim Burton continues along his path of "things you recognize, re-imagined by a director you really used to like" by adapting the long running gothic soap opera <i>Dark Shadows</i> and his own short film, <i>Frankenweenie</i>, but this time it's stop-motion animated and three times as long.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYr7UnTJTjClK0J0LOUt4yidxa4liJeHRA3XmmdLzCk8xT8pea1uVOmRzFEMjVa4Fqbc6gik-VOgHQh3MOU3oYTE08jDgsqgLE79t2KU8XDc0_rhDJqzhHwG3k7myO1COs8taVcH21OxRN/s1600/FrankenweeniePoster.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYr7UnTJTjClK0J0LOUt4yidxa4liJeHRA3XmmdLzCk8xT8pea1uVOmRzFEMjVa4Fqbc6gik-VOgHQh3MOU3oYTE08jDgsqgLE79t2KU8XDc0_rhDJqzhHwG3k7myO1COs8taVcH21OxRN/s200/FrankenweeniePoster.jpg" width="135" /></a> Are you ready for the shocker? I actually liked <i>Dark Shadows</i> more than <i>Frankenweenie</i>. Nobody else did, but <i>Dark Shadows</i> isn't nearly as horrible as I expected it to be, and instead of nonstop jokes about the 1970s, it's a surprisingly atmospheric and violent meditation on family ties. That said, it has too many characters, superfluous cameos that really don't move the plot forward (Alice Cooper, I'm looking at you), and while it's better than I was prepared for, that doesn't mean it's even close to the best Tim Burton is capable of. I suppose after being disappointed by <i>Sweeney Todd</i>, <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>, <i>Charlie and the Chocolate Factory</i>, and <i>Corpse Bride</i>, the idea of a marginally entertaining Tim Burton film was refreshing. That said, everybody else seems to hate it, so be warned.<br />
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<i>Frankenweenie</i> could be better if Burton could figure out how to stretch a 30 minute short film into a full narrative, but he didn't. Basically the structure of the original <i>Frankenweenie</i> has been elongated and stitched together with a clever pastiche of Joe Dante-esque "monsters run amok" - including the best (and possibly only) <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpBkc2jK-6w"><i>Bambi Meets Godzilla</i></a> reference I can remember. Unfortunately, the first forty five minutes drag so much that it's more of a relief than a delight when the reanimated pets wreak havoc all over New Holland. I will say it was nice to (hear) Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short, and Winona Ryder return to the Burton-verse, but ultimately <i>Frankenweenie</i> overstays its welcome before it has the chance to be any fun.<br />
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<i>Zombeavers</i> - I didn't go into <i>Zombeavers</i> expecting it to be any good. This sounds counter-intuitive with what I said earlier in the recaps about trying to avoid bad movies, but I didn't watch <i>Sharknado</i> and this seemed like it might be an acceptable substitute. I mean, it couldn't possibly get better than the poster, or the inherently stupid premise, right? It would quickly get lazy and then I would get bored, like I normally do with Syfy Originals or movies that look like that (<i>*coughTheAsylumreleasescough*</i>).<br />
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So imagine my surprise to discover that <i>Zombeavers</i> is a (slightly) higher budgeted version of a movie like <i>Blood Car</i> or <i><a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2012/07/summerfest-4-recap.html">Rise of the Animals</a></i>. True, this is not a scrappy, home made production - how could it be with a "From the Producers of <i>American Pie</i>, <i>Cabin Fever</i>, and <i>The Ring</i>" on the poster? - but it has the same anarchic spirit of those movies. At times, it's actually as bad as those can be, but what helps <i>Zombeavers</i> (a lot, actually) is that every time you think it's not worth sticking through, something you wouldn't expect either happens or comes out of someone's mouth. Either the film takes a truly unexpected turn - which it does - or one of the characters has a line that evokes a "wait, what?" and you don't mind sticking around.<br />
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I felt like I was in pretty good hands during the prologue, which features Bill Burr and an unrecognizable John Mayer (yep, "<a href="http://youtu.be/N5EnGwXV_Pg">Your Body is a Wonderland</a>"'s John Mayer) as drivers hauling around chemical waste and shooting the shit, often in increasingly strange ways. They eventually hit a deer, which leads to a barrel of said chemicals rolling down into a stream and to (dun dun DUUUUNNN) a beaver dam. Because, yes, this is a movie about zombie beavers. Or Zombeavers, if you will. Also, there are three college students: Mary (Rachel Melvin), Zoe (Courtney Palm), and Jenn (Lexi Atkins), who are having a "girls' weekend" in order to forget about Mary's boyfriend Sam (Hutch Dano) cheating on her. But he shows up anyway, with Tommy (Jake Weary) and Buck (Peter Gilroy) in tow, so it becomes a slightly uncomfortable couples weekend. With Zombeavers.<br />
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You might struggle through the "set up" part of the film, and I nearly turned it off while the girls were on the way to the cabin, but some of the lines are so out of left field that I stuck with it. The tone is borderline surreal, from the "is this serious" hunter (Rex Linn) that they run into, to the neighbors near the cabin (Brent Briscoe and Phyllis Katz), who turn out to be way more savvy about kids than you'd expect. And there's a bear, but mostly, it's the Zombeavers. Which look like nothing more than marginally articulated puppets and are hilarious. You see, sometimes a cheap looking monster can elevate a B-Movie from "that was okay" to "that was amazing," and the titular zombified beavers are worth the price of admission. It doesn't hurt that <i>Zombeavers</i> gets even weirder when the "rules of infection" kick in, but the monsters are the stars of the show. Stick around after the credits - which include a song about the movie that puts Richard Cheese to shame - for an even better zombie related pun. If it sets up a sequel, I could be onboard with that, but if not, well played, Jordan Rubin...<br />
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<i>John Dies at the End</i> -This is a faithful adaptation of David Wong's novel by Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep), at least for the first half. The film gets to about the halfway point in the book, and then realizes it has thirty minutes to wrap up the rest of the story, so liberties are taken. Honestly, I didn't mind them, because I knew what was being condensed and most of the spirit is kept intact.<br />
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That said, I totally understand why people who haven't read <u>John Dies at the End</u> don't like the movie. There's a sense of context that's missing from the film as it hurtles towards its conclusion that further confuses the comedy / horror tone and probably loses a lot of people. If you haven't read the book, I wouldn't watch the movie at all. You're going to hate it because of how it collapses in the last thirty minutes. If you have read the book, know Coscarelli mostly made sensible changes (not going to Vegas, diminishing Amy's role in the overall story, dropping certain elements of Korrok's plan), and made at least one I don't really understand (changing Molly's name), and two I don't know how I feel about (no Fred Durst and John's band doesn't sound nearly as bad as I thought it would). I dig <i>John Dies at the End</i>, and if it ever happens, I'd watch <i>This Book (Movie?) is Filled with Spiders</i>, although with what they had to do on a low budget here, I can't imagine that ever happening. That's a shame.<br />
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<i>World War Z</i> - One could suppose that if <i>Warm Bodies</i> was a zombie movie for teenage girls, then <i>World War Z</i> is a zombie movie for people who vaguely know the word "zombie" in popular culture. It's not even really a horror movie - more of an action / disaster hybrid with a redesigned third act that inches towards suspense but still ends up like a tamer <i>28 Days Later</i>. And I watched the "unrated" version, for the record. I can only imagine how toothless <i>World War Z</i> must have been in theaters. Still, it has a scrappy, amiable charm for a big budgeted blockbuster studio "tent pole" movie. <br />
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Based almost not at all on the book of the same name by Max Brooks, <i>World War Z</i> is the story of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a retired UN investigator living with his family, until the zombie outbreak begins, that is. Then the Deputy Secretary General Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena) brings him back in to travel around the world and see what caused the outbreak, from South Korea to Israel and eventually to a World Health Organization research center in Ireland. Separated from his family, and with continually dwindling support, Gerry finds that the zombie outbreak is capable of overcoming even the most fortified of cities, and unless they can find a cure, humanity is doomed.<br />
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<i>World War Z</i> is essentially a travelogue designed to show off various big action set pieces, which director Marc Forster (<i>Finding Neverland</i>, <i>Quantum of Solace</i>) does fairly well, and which Brad Pitt responds to with a reasonable sense of urgency. The zombies are sometimes people in makeup but are usually great swaths of CGI mayhem, particularly during the siege of Jerusalem. The movie makes an abrupt turn in the section in Ireland, due in large part because the delay in <i>World War Z</i>'s release had everything to do with the third act not working, so they scrapped the original ending in Russia and went with a more sparse, claustrophobic ending. It works, although you can see loose threads of plot line in the film as a result - the main example is Matthew Fox's UN soldier who doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose other than to help move Gerry's family around, but who in the original version "takes" his wife and daughter as his own. Now it just seems like an oddly high profile casting choice for a minor role at best. <i>Doctor Who</i> fans already know the prescient casting of Peter Capaldi as the WHO Doctor (that IS how he appears in the credits).<br />
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There's not really much else to say about the movie. I thought it was watchable, if mostly average. The story behind the movie is more interesting than the finished product. The survival bits near the beginning and towards the end are good, but have been done better before. All of the big action sequences are bombastic and if you like explosions and zombies and some degree of violence, the unrated cut is certainly worth your time. It's popcorn fare through and through, which is fine and dandy every now and then, but I can't imagine that I'd be all that enthused for <i>World War Z 2</i>.<br />
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<i>The ABCs of Death 2 -</i> is like <i><a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2013/10/horror-fest-viii-day-one-vhs-2.html">V/H/S 2</a></i> in that it takes everything that worked about the first film, jettisoned most of what didn't, and was more fun to watch. The premise is still the same: twenty six directors each receive a letter from the alphabet, and have free reign to come up with a 2-3 minute short film that conveys a word and, in some form or fashion, death. <i><a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2013/02/nevermore-film-festival-recap-day-one.html">The ABCs of Death</a></i> had some interesting entries ("Unearthed" was a good one), but leaned heavily on scatological humor ("F is for Fart" was the tip of the iceberg, it turned out), and then there were the "oh, I didn't need to see that, not ever" letters. Like "Libido" and "Pressure." It turns out there are things you might want to un-see, and several of them are in <i>The ABCs of Death</i>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0H6_jUzi-qcpNkABxLIG21zAZ4t28R2XjbCoT8Z79N8Qm_mZIRZVMxtwNEBdzsYMjqMSSN99jPh5va7mlCSaQdW_O-zFJ4_n4mspP9vGap5CYnJTltB8Fq0Lt3MIKbBrVdPKULoEt6P5Z/s1600/TheABCsofDeath2Poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0H6_jUzi-qcpNkABxLIG21zAZ4t28R2XjbCoT8Z79N8Qm_mZIRZVMxtwNEBdzsYMjqMSSN99jPh5va7mlCSaQdW_O-zFJ4_n4mspP9vGap5CYnJTltB8Fq0Lt3MIKbBrVdPKULoEt6P5Z/s1600/TheABCsofDeath2Poster.jpg" width="131" /></a> <i>The ABCs of Death 2</i>, by comparison, has nothing as traumatic, and I would suspect it would play a lot better with an audience than the first one did. Watching that one at Nevermore, there was a lot of... shall I say, stunned silence as the film went on. There are certainly some "what the hell was that?" parts in the sequel, but nothing you're going to apologize for exposing someone to. The only thing that comes close is the last segment, "Z is for Zygote," which is centered around an already unforgettable image that closes on an even more disturbing note. I know that people don't like "P is for P-P-P-P-Scary!" but I thought it had an unhinged quality, somewhere between the weirder <i>Betty Boop</i> cartoons and Black Lodge-era David Lynch, that worked for me. <br />
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As with the first film, you'll find highlights ("A is for Amateur") and lowlights ("V is for Vacation"), but there's nothing in <i>The ABCs of Death</i> that comes close to 2's "M is for Masticate," a slow motion gross out with a wicked joke at the end. There's also "D is for Deloused," which reminded me a bit of a Brothers Quay short. I'll leave most of the discovery for you, but if you kind of liked the first film, I strongly suspect you'll enjoy this one more.<br />
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<i>Horns</i> - I feel like there's a better movie somewhere in Alexandre Aja's <i>Horns</i>. Maybe it got lost in the editing, or maybe it's just inherent in the adaptation of Joe Hill's novel, but the finished product just don't quite work. It's as though Aja made a bitterly funny, black comedy, and also made a more generic, teen-friendly story of good and evil, and then smashed them together at the worst possible junctures. For the opening twenty minutes of <i>Horns</i>, you're probably going to think the movie is great: it has a wicked mean streak, Daniel Radcliffe is spot on as a guy everyone thinks is a murderer, that embraces the horns he grows and the power that comes with it. The way people react, first telling him their darkest fantasies and then acting on them when he says they should, is often hilarious.<br />
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And then we hit the first of what turn out to be several, lengthy, flashbacks, giving us the backstory of Ig (Radcliffe) and Merrin (Juno Temple), leading up to her death - the one everyone assumes Ig is responsible for. Everyone, including his family - played by James Remar, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joe Anderson - is positive he did it and that he's lying, with the exception of his friend, Lee (Max Minghella). The "whodunit" is pretty easy to work out for yourself, even if Aja, Hill, and screenwriter Keith Bunin throw in a number of red herrings. I bet, without telling you anything else, you can guess who the real killer is. That's not the problem, so much as the flashbacks that put the mystery together. There's a massive tonal shift from black comedy to slightly tragic story of temptation and of good and evil (on a biblical scale), and for some reason, ne'er the twain shall meet in <i>Horns</i>. <br />
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I can understand how it might have worked in Hill's novel - which I haven't yet read, but plan to - but as a film, the structure of the story is at times jarring and disruptive. Maybe there was no way to properly balance the two in a film, because <i>Horns</i> alternates between wicked and bland, between clever and obvious, without ever finding a good middle ground. There are some fantastic moments sprinkled throughout the film, and the cast is game for anything, playing both the best and worst versions of themselves as they encounter "evil" Ig, but <i>Horns</i> gets away from them. It's never quite the movie that it could be, so I'm left feeling ambivalent with the end result.<br />
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<i>The Innkeepers</i> - From Ti West, the director of <i>The House of the Devil</i>, comes another slow burn horror film where tension continues mounting and the sense of dread is palpable. Instead of replicating the horror of the early 1980s, West's "haunted hotel" follow-up is set squarely in the present, and he's just as adept at creeping you out with slow tracking shots, suggested noises, and believable characters you relate to. Sara Paxton's Claire is a young woman without much of a clue what she want to do or be, who becomes way too interested in Luke (Pat Healy)'s hobby: ghost hunting. She's fixated on finding the spirit of Madeline O'Malley, a bride who killed herself in the hotel in the 1890s.<br />
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On the last weekend that the Yankee Padler hotel is open, Luke and Claire trade off shifts, watching over the last remaining hotel tenants - former actress / new age guru Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis) and a mysterious Old Man (George Riddle) - while they hunt for evidence of O'Malley's presence. West doles out the scares slowly but surely, and only towards the very end do things go the way most horror films go. In fact, if there's any fault to be found in The Innkeepers, it's that what comes before and after the climax of the film are undermined ever so slightly by what we know HAS to happen, even if the subtle clues of why it happens don't always add up. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the film is an example of the kind of movie <i>1408</i> could have been, one that eschews cheap histrionics and trickery and deliberately ratchets up the "willies" factor.</div>
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Fans of <i>The House of the Devil</i> are going to find a lot to love about <i>The Inkeepers</i>, but if you like your horror fast and relentless, this may seem a little slow for your tastes. For me? Let's just say I had to watch something else after I finished it, because I wasn't going to bed.<br />
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Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-32177796883105910092015-10-18T08:18:00.000-04:002015-10-18T08:18:00.166-04:00Shocktober Revisited: Death Spa and Killer Workout<br />
<em><span style="font-size: x-small;">editor's note: this review originally appeared as part of the <strong><a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/search/label/Summer%20Fest%205">Summer Fest 5</a></strong> coverage.</span></em><br />
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For whatever failings <i>Prisoners of the Lost Universe</i> has (and there are many), <i>Death Spa</i> and <i>Killer Workout</i> were the palette cleanser we needed to get back on track for Saturday. While it is rare that I'll program one movie, let alone two, sight unseen<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>*</i></span>, I had enough faith in the slasher movies of the 1980s not to let me down and went in blind. And I'm glad I did.<br />
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<i>Death Spa</i> is not in the traditional sense what one would call a "slasher" movie, although it shares a similar structure. It also doesn't actually take place in a spa, necessarily, which disappointed one attendee who looked forward to "killer facial peels" and other "spa"' related kills. Nevertheless, while it commits two cardinal sins of "false advertising," the movie is bizarre enough and and of itself to compensate.<br />
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If I were to compare <i>Death Spa</i> to anything, I guess you could call it a spiritual successor to <i>Death Bed: The Bed That Eats</i>. It isn't quite as formless as <i>Death Bed</i>, but amidst the three or four competing plots in <i>Death Spa</i>, there's definitely a "this gym / health center / indoor swimming pool is haunted and is killing people." A ghost is using the totally automated system against people who go there, seemingly at random. To say much more about who the ghost is or what it wants would spoil parts of the movie that generate the most "what the hell?" moments.<br />
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Fortunately, there's a bunch of other crap in <i>Death Spa</i> I can talk about that's just as weird. Like the group shower scene where the spa shoots tiles at naked ladies, or the killer fish (yes, a killer fish in a gym). There's the package loading ramp at the bottom of the stairs in the basement that serves no purpose, or the "Parologist" (I'm assuming he studies haunted rocks) hired by the owner to investigate the haunting. There's the conspiracy to shut down the gym before the big Mardi Gras party (no amount of killings will close this <i>Death Spa</i>!) and the question of whether the place is haunted or if somebody is killing people in order to make it look like it is.<br />
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<b>SPOILER ALERT</b>: It's both. Yes, on top of the ghost, there are people also killing random gym members to make the owner look bad. And the owner's brother-in-law has an, um, "unhealthy" relationship with his dead sister. The dead sister who set herself on fire after a miscarriage left her wheelchair bound (the flashbacks to this are unto themselves strange enough to recommend <i>Death Spa</i>).<br />
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There's so much going on in <i>Death Spa</i> that I can't possibly cover all of it, and yet it manages to hang together well enough that you want to know how the hell it's going to resolve them. And it does. Well, kind of. But even that's fun to watch too. Also, Ken Foree (<i>Dawn of the Dead</i>, <i>From Beyond</i>) has an extended cameo where he only has to appear at the beginning and the end of the movie and gets to live (SPOILER).<br />
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<i>Killer Workout</i> (<i>Aerobicide</i>) is, by contrast, a more straightforward slasher movie, but one with its own particular set of charms. It follows an extremely basic structure: a long montage of an aerobics routine featuring some, *ahem*, chesty ladies (sometimes also a morbidly obese guy in overalls riding the exercise bike), then a conversation with owner Rhonda Johnson (<i>Maniac Cop</i>'s Marcia Karr), and then somebody being murdered, usually with gym equipment. Although not always: sometimes the killer uses and over-sized safety-pin (shades of <i>Student Bodies</i>).<br />
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There's some procedural work done by Detective Lieutenant Morgan (David James Campbell), and an undercover agent posing as a new employee (Uh, I forgot his character's name and IMDB isn't helping), but mostly it's a slasher movie from the 1980s, which means some creative kills, a twist-y backstory for the killer, and lots of nudity. Actually, not as much nudity as you'd expect, and a lot less than <i>Death Spa</i>, but there's MUCH more time devoted to the aerobics routines Jaimy (Teresa Vander Woude) puts together, many of which appear to offer no exercise value whatsoever. So while you don't get as much nudity, there's a lot more jiggling.<br />
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But don't worry, ladies, there's also a lot of guys in impossibly short shorts too. This unintentional recurring motif of Summer Fest was perhaps never more in evidence than during <i>Killer Workout</i>.<br />
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What really helped <i>Killer Workout</i> as a companion piece to <i>Death Spa</i> was the weird touches, like David James Campbell's unfortunately high-pitched voice, one that in no way matches his imposing physical presence. It made it nearly impossible to take him seriously, all the way up to his final scene that must have, in some abstract way, inspired the series <i>Dexter</i>. There was also the guy we nicknamed "Johnny Pervo" with his pervo mustache that we later realized was two different characters that just looked alike and both happened to be sleazeballs.<br />
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And then there's the "twist" of the film, which the Cap'n will immodestly admit I called twenty minutes in, about who the killer is. What I didn't realize until the "reveal" was it tied into a prologue most of us had forgotten about involving a tanning bed accident. Unlike <i>Death Spa</i>, <i>Killer Workout</i> doesn't have a supernatural angle, but it does have what one viewer described as "pudding tits."<br />
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The two films do share some interesting connections, though: both <i>Death Spa</i> and <i>Killer Workout</i> close on freeze-frames of the villain, implying that both of them secretly won (well, in <i>Killer Workout</i>, it's flat out saying they did). And in Killer Workout, the reputation for murder makes the gym a target for vandals, one of whom spray paints "DEATH SPA" on the window... interesting...<br />
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Up next is a blast from Horror Fest past with the return of <i>Kingdom of the Spiders</i>!<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>* Not since the Matango / See No Evil debacle at <b>Horror Fest IV</b>.</i></span>Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-32684487594513472362015-10-17T08:15:00.000-04:002015-10-17T08:15:00.684-04:00Shocktober Revisited: The House That Dripped BloodSince it is October, and since Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium could be described as "horror themed" in its layout, I guess I should make with the reviewing horror movies that won't be a part of our annual celebration in two weeks. Fortunately for you, dear readers, I have a shelf full of horror flicks waiting to be discussed. We'll start this semi-regular column with 1971's<span style="font-style: italic;"> The House that Dripped Blood</span>.<br />
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I've made no secret of my love for <a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2009/10/sold-out.html">anthology films</a>, specifically those coming from <a href="http://www.imdb.com/company/co0059622/">Amicus Productions</a>, so it was a surprise to me to discover that I'd never gotten around to watching <span style="font-style: italic;">The House that Dripped Blood</span>. It turns out that <span style="font-style: italic;">House</span> is a pretty good addition to their collection of supernaturally based horror films. The cast is great, the direction is atmospheric, and most of the stories work in context.<br />
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Like most anthology films, you get four stories with a bit of a wrap-around, and <span style="font-style: italic;">House that Dripped Blood</span> covers most of your horror bases: Spectral Killers, Vampires, Witchcraft, and evil museums / shops of mystery. The stories, by Robert Bloch (author of <u>Psycho</u>) are:<br />
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1. A writer (Denholm Elliot) and his wife move into the house in question so he can finish his macabre masterpiece. When his creation, a mad strangler named Dominick, starts to appear in and around the house, he's convinced his grip on reality is slipping.<br />
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2. A recently retired businessman (Peter Cushing) moves into the house, and while wandering the nearby town, finds a wax museum of horrors. He becomes obsessed with a figure of Salome that reminds him of a long lost love, and when a visiting friend goes missing, the terrible secret of the museum comes to light.<br />
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3. A not-retired businessman (Christopher Lee) and his daughter (Chloe Franks) come to the house to get away from the city. When a tutor (Nyree Dawn Porter) begins to connect with the distant and sheltered child, her true nature comes to light, with terrible consequences.<br />
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4. An actor and horror-buff (Jon "The Third Doctor" Pertwee) and his co-star (Ingrid Pitt) rent out the house while he's filming Curse of the Bloodsucker. Convinced that his cape looks too cheap, he visits the mysterious Theo Von Hartmann's shop and buys an authentic vampire cape. Maybe a little too authentic, as he discovers when he puts it on.<br />
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The wrap-around story involves a detective (John Bennett) investigating the disappearance of Pertwee's character. The owner of the house, Mr. Stoker (John Bryans) shares the mysterious history of the tenants. When Inspector Holloway finally goes to the house, he finds much more than he expected in the basement...<br />
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I think the third and fourth stories were my favorite. Admittedly, the Jon Pertwee story gets quite silly in the middle (especially when he puts the cape on after midnight and reacts hammily to his fangs and... flying), but it is salvaged by Holloway's visit, one that ties up the film nicely.<br />
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The first story, about the writer and his mad killer, suffers from a rushed ending, one that relies on you paying attention to a last second development based on a character you just met. The set up is wonderful, and most of the lingering architectural shots and creepy ornaments does soften the weak ending.<br />
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Despite the really trippy dream imagery in the second story, the ending just doesn't make sense. Something happens to the wax figure that, if what the owner says is true, would render it impossible to be fixed in time for the last shot. The final image, on the other hand, is a pretty good one.<br />
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Despite the fact that the film (rated PG) is virtually bloodless, there's plenty of atmosphere and suggested horrors to raise a bit of a chill. This is more evident in the witchcraft story with Christopher Lee, which relies entirely on suggestion for its gruesome finale. <span style="font-style: italic;">The House that Dripped Blood</span> isn't as gory as <span style="font-style: italic;">Tales from the Crypt</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">From Beyond the Grave</span>, and it might come off as a little tame compared to what was to come. However, taken with the much earlier <span style="font-style: italic;">Dr. Terror's House of Horrors</span>, I think <span style="font-style: italic;">House</span> fits the Amicus m.o.<br />
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Finally. the title is a little misleading, because while the film is about four tenants who died (separately) in the same house, at least two of the stories really have nothing to do with house as evil. They attempt to tie everything together with Stoker directly addressing the audience (something that seemed strangely familiar, although I'm convinced I've never seen this before), but if you're willing to put the misnomer of the title aside, it's a fun little spookshow you could probably scare children with - and not scar them permanently.Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-30646708632848427702015-10-16T08:25:00.000-04:002015-10-16T08:25:00.861-04:00Shocktober Revisited: A Nightmare on Elm Street<br />
<em><span style="font-size: x-small;">editor's note: this review originally appeared in 2011.</span></em><br />
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Last week the Cap'n <a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2011/05/i-know-mondays-are-usually-review-day.html">stated</a> that "I've seen <span style="font-style: italic;">A Nightmare on Elm Street</span> many times." This is true, but it has fairly been pointed out that I've never reviewed the film. Ever. I reviewed the excellent <a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2010/05/blogorium-review-never-sleep-again-elm.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy</span></a>; I handed off the write up for <a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2008/11/horror-fest-iii-day-2-most-incredible.html" style="font-style: italic;">Freddy's Dead</a> to some guest bloggers (while it makes sense in its own way, the review really only resonates if you'd been in the room during the screening); and I scared you off of the <a href="http://capnhowdysblogorium.blogspot.com/2010/05/so-you-wont-have-to-nightmare-on-elm.html">remake</a>, a film I've dubbed "<span style="font-style: italic;">Shit Coffin 2</span>" with good reason. While there's no review for it, one of the proto-Horror Fests featured <span style="font-style: italic;">A Nightmare on Elm Street</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Part 3: The Dream Warriors</span>. The series has been a long-standing part of my (semi)adulthood.<br />
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So why no review for the film that started it all? The movie that pushed New Line over from the home of John Waters and <span style="font-style: italic;">Reefer Madness</span> to the eventual home of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Lord of the Rings<span style="font-size: 78%;">*</span></span>? The movie that took character actor Robert Englund (<span style="font-style: italic;">Dead & Buried</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Galaxy of Terror</span>) and thrust him into horror movie icon-dom? I don't have a good reason.<br />
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The Blogorium is a place where I generally try to cover movies I haven't seen; since its inception, I've attempted to give reactions to movies flying under the radar or to put my two cents in on major releases. I tend to save movies I've seen multiple times for "fest" coverage, but <span style="font-style: italic;">A Nightmare on Elm Street</span> has never played <span style="font-weight: bold;">Horror Fest</span> for the simple fact that nearly everyone I know has seen it. The goal of <span style="font-weight: bold;">Horror Fest</span> has been to mix in lesser known films with some favorites that didn't get much attention, particularly sequels.<br />
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A Retro Review does give me an opportunity to talk a little bit about my history with <span style="font-style: italic;">A Nightmare on Elm Street</span>, and not only the times I did see it, but at least three times I could have seen it, but didn't. Our paths have crossed several times since 1984, when I was five and <span style="font-style: italic;">A Nightmare on Elm Street</span> was released, so let's take a look back after a brief recap of the plot.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1EbB4IVs_eaxG0QCg9cupRpwI5cfcx3k4StGYWX6O4eHgyExUEqeypulTxPo4V1fs9auh9BVh2heHSTF5ReNo_S9d1FwkheiCKBNdNVbYOgqWBA2WWVwaYeWdFGt4i2918u51muI_7pE/s1600/ANOESposter.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5605241179555832290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1EbB4IVs_eaxG0QCg9cupRpwI5cfcx3k4StGYWX6O4eHgyExUEqeypulTxPo4V1fs9auh9BVh2heHSTF5ReNo_S9d1FwkheiCKBNdNVbYOgqWBA2WWVwaYeWdFGt4i2918u51muI_7pE/s320/ANOESposter.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 320px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 208px;" /></a>Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss), Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp) and Rod Lane (Jsu Garcia, although listed as "Nick Corri") are four teenagers in Springwood, IL; separately, they've been having similar nightmares about a gloved killer with burnt skin and a red and green sweater. Their nightmares seem to be bleeding over into reality (literally), and Tina fears for her life. As the teenagers start dying off, Nancy appeals to her parents Marge (Ronee Blakley) and Lt. Donald Thompson (John Saxon) to come clean about the history of Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a child molester killed by mob violence who swore vengeance from beyond the grave. Can Nancy stop Freddy from killing all of the children of Springwood in their sleep, or is there no way to protect yourself in your dreams?<br />
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By the time I was in late elementary school and in middle school, <span style="font-style: italic;">A Nightmare on Elm Street</span> was on VHS and readily available to kids with parents less judicious in their rental habits. There were a few times where I was at a friend's house and <span style="font-style: italic;">A Nightmare on Elm Street</span> was on, but I opted not to watch it (like most "scary" movies). I don't think I actually watched all of <span style="font-style: italic;">A Nightmare on Elm Street</span> until I was in high school (during the budding horror phase of my geekdom) and I remember two things distinctly: the "joke-y" Freddy is almost wholly absent in the first film, and the "arm" scene (you all know the one) looked really stupid.<br />
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The latter isn't really worth pointing out, as it seems to be the consensus opinion of most <span style="font-style: italic;">Nightmare</span> fans, and even some of the crew on the film. The former, on the other hand, was a bit of a surprise considering what I knew of Freddy from popular culture. Whether you watched the films or not, it was impossible not to know who Freddy Krueger was, either from Halloween costumes, appearances on MTV, or in songs like The Fresh Prince's "A Nightmare on My Street." The prevailing image of Freddy I had was a wise-cracking villain, one who delighted in torturing his victims and dropping cringe-worthy puns.<br />
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That Freddy isn't really in the first film. In fact, he's "Fred" Krueger for most of the movie, a creepy, malevolent entity capable of striking at our most vulnerable point. He had a mastery of dreams but didn't use it to play into a character's main attribute (or "gimmick," as it increasingly became with the sequels). Most of the dreams, in fact, take place in familiar places (boiler room aside) and rely on one or two lingering images (cutting fingers, a body bag being dragged down a hallway, the goat at the beginning of the film). Glen's death isn't tied specifically to a character trait, but instead are iconic in their own right (the two most memorable, Glen and Tina, take place in or around their bed).<br />
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Revisiting the film over the years I was more impressed with the nuance that Wes Craven (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Last House on the Left</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Hills Have Eyes</span>) weaves into the film - there's a brief conversation between Rod and Glen that makes it clear they've had nightmares as well, but both are too embarrassed to tell the girls. I also appreciate the <span style="font-style: italic;">Psycho</span>-esque fakeout about who the protagonist is - the film opens with Tina, and certainly seems like the film is focused on her, and not Nancy, up until Tina is brutally slashed from floor to ceiling by Freddy.<br />
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I was also impressed by the logical reason why the "adults" refuse to listen to their children; their complicity in Krueger's death gives them incentive to "hush" any investigation of what happened, and why a phantom killer (they don't believe in, by the way) is picking off their children, one by one. Similarly, I appreciate that Nancy is more resourceful than the average "Final Girl"; many of horror's most famous survivors become that way by accident, by default because everyone dies around them. Nancy, unlike Laurie Strode or Alice Hardy, is proactive in curtailing Freddy's killing spree, and her plan to drag him into the real world - a real world laced with home made traps, by the way - beats the usual "run and hide until finally killing the monster" motif.<br />
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The film makes the most of a low budget, save for two moments: the aforementioned "arms" scene in the alleyway, and the final "stinger" involving Nancy's mother being pulled into 1428 Elm Street through the door window. The image would be more potent if it weren't so clear that Blakley has been replaced by an immobile dummy and awkwardly sucked into the door.<br />
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From there on out, I sometimes have trouble disentangling elements from the first <span style="font-style: italic;">Nightmare</span> and its sequels, many of which are linked by characters or continuing stories (<span style="font-style: italic;">1</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">3</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">4</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">5</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">New Nightmare</span> could be considered to be one extended narrative, and if you really push it, <span style="font-style: italic;">Freddy's Revenge</span>). Every now and then I think about showing <span style="font-style: italic;">A Nightmare on Elm Street</span> during <span style="font-weight: bold;">Horror Fest</span>, because I don't think its status has lessened with time, and almost everything the remake does is a half-assed retread of the original film, and I'm not showing THAT any time soon. Maybe it's time to finally consider the first <span style="font-style: italic;">Nightmare</span>, the limited but still potent slice of horror, one that appeals to basic fears without the cheap jokes that came later.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">* There's an extra on the Nightmare on Elm Street disc called "The House that Freddy Built," focused on this exact narrative, just to make it clear this isn't conjecture on my part.</span></span>Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-46988088896808386482015-10-15T08:17:00.000-04:002015-10-15T08:17:00.492-04:00Shocktober Revisited: More Brains and Swallowed Souls<br />
<em><span style="font-size: x-small;">editor's note: this was originally posted in November of 2011.</span></em><br />
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I finally caught up on some horror documentaries, specifically<i> More Brains: A Return to the Living Dead</i> and <i>Swallowed Souls: The Making of Evil Dead 2</i>. The former you might have heard of; the latter is more incentive to pick up Lionsgate's 25th Anniversary Edition of Sam Raimi's splatter classic.<br />
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Dan O'Bannon fans will be elated and disappointed while watching <i>More Brains</i> - the film reunites most of the surviving cast and crew members (including the special effects artist fired halfway through the film), but until the very end, O'Bannon - who passed in 2009 - is absent from the oral history of <i>Return of the Living Dead</i>. There's a lot of talking about O'Bannon, often in conflicting narratives (he was too demanding, too aloof; he was easy to work with and open to suggestions), but only in the closing moments does the writer / director have a chance to speak to the film's cult status. In what was his final interview, O'Bannon is candid about the audience embrace of the film and its legacy, and makes a knowing comment about "if I die tomorrow" before the film goes to credits.<br />
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The story of the making of <i>Return of the Living Dead</i> from John Russo (producer / writer of Night of the Living Dead)'s original pitch to the decision of Hemdale Films to hire Dan O'Bannon to write and direct the film as a horror comedy, from casting to premieres, is an affair filled with gossip, contradictory stories, and debates about whether Clu Gulager really threw a can at the director in a fit of rage. I'm tempted to share anecdotes from the cast, or to mention the ongoing bad blood between the production designer (William Stout) and first make-up effects (William Munns) over the inadequate zombie masks and "headless zombie" appliance. The memories are sometimes contentious, sometimes defensive, but always entertaining. <i>More Brains: A Return to the Living Dead</i> is well worth the time of fans of <i>Return of the Living Dead</i>.<br />
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Meanwhile, I'd like to thank a video store in the mall that will go unnamed until later this week for erroneously placing two copies of the 25th Anniversary Blu-Ray of <i>Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn</i> the weekend before the disc is actually released (it comes out tomorrow). I've bemoaned the endless re-releasing of Sam Raimi's <i>Evil Dead</i> films on DVD before, and we're seeing the first instance of "double-dipping" in high definition for the trilogy. As Anchor Bay closes (or whatever is going on with Anchor Bay) and their catalog is divvied up by Image Entertainment and Lionsgate, we're likely to see another release of <i>The Evil Dead</i> before long, and I find it hard to believe that Universal's underwhelming "Screwhead Edition" of <i>Army of Darkness</i> is the be-all-end-all of HD releases.<br />
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But for now, let's look at the <i>Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn</i> 25th Anniversary double-dip. As a sucker for supplements, I must admit the list of extras seemed very promising - collections of featurette's about the casing, effects, conception, direction, and filming. When I put the disc in, I didn't realize that all of these individually listed extras were part of one 98 minute documentary, Swallowed Souls. It's reminiscent of segments of <i>Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy</i>, and is broken into chapters complete with claymation vignettes to bridge them.<br />
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Like <i>More Brains</i>, the primary element lacking in Swallowed Souls is the presence of Sam Raimi. It's not as though his presence isn't felt, because the "making of" footage shot by Greg Nicotero features young Sam Raimi in abundance, but he's noticeably absent from the proceedings. On the other hand, the doc features an abundance of newly shot interviews with Bruce Campbell, who speaks candidly about <i>Evil Dead 2</i> and shares stories I don't think I've heard anywhere, including in <u>If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor</u>. <i>Swallowed Souls</i> also prominently features the rest of the leads of <i>Evil Dead 2</i>: Sarah Berry (Annie), Dan Hicks (Jake), Kassie Wesley (Bobbi Joe), Richard Dormeier (Ed) and Ted Raimi (Possessed Henrietta). Hearing their perspective on making the film is in and of itself a treat - many of them had no idea what they were in for.<br />
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The entire makeup effects team, including Mark Shostrom (<i>From Beyond</i>, <i>A Nightmare one Elm Street Part 2</i>) and the first time in years that I've seen all three members of KNB (Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, and Howard Berger) on camera talking about a project they worked on together*. Their camcorder footage, which documents the conception of <i>Evil Dead 2</i>'s effects all the way through the film's production, are a treasure trove of unseen footage from Wadesboro, North Carolina in 1986. They gleefully exploit their creations and play around with camera tricks, mimicking Raimi's "evil force" camera shots.<br />
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So here's where it gets tough - do you want to drop another $14 for <i>Evil Dead 2</i> to see an admittedly great "making of" documentary? If you still have the Anchor Bay disc, you'll notice that <i>The Gore the Merrier</i> is still included, the commentary is still included, and I'm not sure that the picture is that much different. The price is fair so if you don't already have <i>Evil Dead 2</i> on Blu-Ray this is a no-brainer, but wary double dippers are going to have to ask themselves if the making of justifies buying the film again. I will say that if it were released on its own, <i>Swallowed Souls</i> would be worth picking up in the same way as <i>Halloween: 25 Years of Terror</i> or <i>His Name was Jason</i> are. <i>Evil Dead</i> fans, prepare yourselves for the impending moral quandary. I don't regret it, but I also have the added bonus of picking the disc up early... <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i> * Since Kurtzman moved on to create his own production company, it's common just to see Nicotero and Berger appearing in "making of" documentaries that KNB did makeup effects for.</i></span>Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-90382868373028431752015-10-14T14:59:00.000-04:002015-10-14T14:59:00.259-04:00Shocktober Review: Blood and Black Lace<br />
<em>Blood and Black Lace</em> might not be my favorite of "Super" Mario Bava's films, but I can certainly acknowledge its place in Italian giallo films. If, on the off chance, you haven't heard of giallo or the long shadow it casts on American slasher films, it might be surprising to discover that they're less strictly horror films and more like police procedurals, punctuated with "murder set pieces". A masked killer will stalk someone (usually a lovely young woman) in the dark, scare them a bit, and then kill them, often with increasingly unique or cruel implements as the film goes on. What distinguishes it from slashers is the balance of screen time devoted to a local detective or member of the police, who is desperately trying to catch the killer before they kill again. In the case of <em>Blood and Black Lace</em>, the ending is also more conventional than modern horror audiences might expect, but still effective.<br />
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The Christian Couture Fashion House of Rome has its share of secrets beyond its latest designs, and a masked killer is taking out models one by one, beginning with Isabella (Francesca Ungaro). After she leaves on a dark and stormy night, Isabella never makes it home, instead strangled to death near a tree. Police Inspector Silver (Thomas Reiner) begins his investigation, but neither Christian Couture house owner Contessa Cristina Como (Eva Bartok) nor her business partner Massimo "Max" Morlacchi (Cameron Mitchell) know anything that would help him. The other models, including her roommates Peggy (Mary Arden) and Nicole (Arianna Gorini), seem hesitant to say anything, and the discovery of Isabella's diary sends ripples throughout the house. What secrets was she keeping, and who was implicated? Who could the killer be? Max? Designer Cesar Lazzarini (Louis Pigot)? Aristocrat Ricardo Morellin (Franco Ressel)? Antique Shop owner Frank (Dante Di Paolo)? Or is it groundskeeper Marco (Massimo Righi)?<br />
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If you're accustomed to slasher films, the procedural elements of <em>Blood and Black Lace</em> might come as a surprise - they significantly diminish the tension you might be used to. When the killer is about to strike, Bava ratchets up the tension considerably, and many of the murders are (for 1964) pretty gruesome. With kills that include and antique spiked mallet, a drowning disguised as a suicide, and one of the models getting up close and personal with a very hot wood stove, I don't think you're going to be disappointed in that department. That said, if you've seen Jean-Pierre Melville's <span class="itemprop" itemprop="name"><em>Le Samouraï</em>, the back and forth structure between cops and criminals will be familiar (and yes, <em>Blood and Black Lace</em> came out first, but I use <span class="itemprop" itemprop="name"><em>Le Samouraï</em> as a good example, particularly in reference to the "lineup" scene in the police station).</span></span><br />
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Despite the grounded, procedural elements, much of <em>Blood and Black Lace</em> has a dreamlike, slightly surreal quality. As with much of the Mario Bava films I've seen, tone is key, and while almost everything is strictly grounded in reality, the camera movement and shot composition lend the film a sense of being unreal. When Bava transitioned from away black and white, he adopted to strong, lurid color scheme of deep reds that borders on expressionistic. While set in the real world, <em>Blood and Black Lace</em> has the heightened quality of a dream world, and the influence of his vivid colors on Dario Argento (especially in <em>Suspiria</em>) is evident. There's a floating, POV camera shot towards the end of the film that moves through the fashion house that reminded me strongly of <em>Suspiria</em>. The camera moves between (or sometimes knocks off) wire-frame mannequins, bathed in red for no apparent reason, as it moves towards someone in the darkness. While what follows is almost too conventional for many horror fans - the ending wouldn't be out of place in a film noir - Bava sets it up as though the supernatural were intruding on the story.<br />
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While I won't delve into <strong>SPOILERS</strong>, it is worth mentioning that you can easily surmise who the killer is just by looking at their face in the mask. There's a split-second reveal of the face during the stove scene, in which the increased clarity of Blu-Ray can confirm your suspicions (you don't even need to pause it), but the mystery of who the killer is ends up being only half of the equation. There's a "twist" to speak of, one that was borrowed decades later by Wes Craven, one that's instrumental to disrupting the "procedural" portion of the giallo. While other directors would take up the giallo over time and sometimes improve on it, there's something to be said for Mario Bava, who created it with <em>The Girl Who Knew Too Much</em> and laid most of the groundwork / rules in <em>Blood and Black Lace</em>. I might prefer <em>Black Sunday</em> and <em>Planet of the Vampires</em>, but there's something to the way he balances tonal dissonance in <em>Blood and Black Lace</em> that's admirable.<br />
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Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-19609526121424843092015-10-13T07:32:00.000-04:002015-10-13T07:32:00.338-04:00Shocktober Revisited: The Addiction Abel Ferrara made <i>The Addiction</i> between <i>Body Snatchers</i> and <i>The Funeral</i> (there's also <i>Dangerous Games</i>, the Harvey Keitel / Madonna movie that most of us didn't see in there as well), the former I have not seen and the latter I have. It was interesting to see Ferrara making another movie set in contemporary New York, especially following <i>Ms. 45</i>, which is a "New York at the cusp of the 80s" and <i>King of New York</i>, the equivalent for the 1990s. This is more of the New York wedged between the end of the grunge era and the beginning of the Wu Tang dynasty. At least, that would have been the case if <i>The Addiction</i> came out in 1994 (the trademark on the credits) and not 1995 (released alongside The Funeral); Maybe Ferrara wanted to draw a sharper contrast to <i>Wes Craven's Vampire in Brooklyn</i>.<br />
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That brings us to the "spoiler" of <i>The Addiction</i>: it's about vampires. Not exactly conventional vampires - they don't really seem to have fangs and they aren't picky about how they get their blood into the system (more on that in a moment), but they have the same attitude of superiority over humans are generally pretty unpleasant. One of them, named Casanova in the credits (Annabella Sciorra) attacks Kathleen Conkin (Lili Taylor) and forces her into an alleyway (wait... this is sounding familiar) and taunts her before biting her neck and having a little snack. Kathleen is traumatized, but lives, and as the days go on, she notices some... changes. Light seems just a little more painful, her appetite for regular food diminishes. She starts vomiting blood. Kathleen has... The Addiction.<br />
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Now if you're wondering if the title means we're going into metaphorical territory here, don't. Remember when I said in the <i>Ms. 45</i> review that Ferrara likes to mix the "trashy with arthouse sensibilities"? Little did I know that the "subtext" in <i>The Addiction</i> was literally just going to be the text, but it's pretty clear the moment you see Kathleen use a syringe to draw blood from a sleeping transient and then inject it into her own veins. I guess I should have known it was coming sooner than that, because Cypress Hill's "I Want to Get High" is in the soundtrack almost immediately (the byproduct, I think, of executive producer Russell Simmons, whose name appears in the opening credits before Ferrara's or screenwriter Nicholas St. John's). It also plays later in the film, just in case you forgot - she wants to get high. So high.<br />
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It turns out that drug addiction is only partially what Ferrara and St. John are going for with <i>The Addiction</i>: I haven't mentioned yet that Kathleen is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of New York (that's what it says...), which kind of explains the fact that the film opens with a slideshow of atrocities committed in Vietnam and repeatedly comes back to a Holocaust exhibit in New York City, often juxtaposed with Kathleen finding new victims. The issue of how humans can be so, well, inhuman, dovetails into her research, or at least with making the allusions to philosophy more explicit. It's one thing to address a character who moves beyond good and evil, but it might be a little too on the nose for her professor (Paul Calderon) to assign Nietzsche in the class she's taking.<br />
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Which is not to say I'm being too critical of <i>The Addiction</i>, but there's not much in the way of subtlety in the film. For some, the breaking point might be when Peina (Christopher Walken) shows up, and turns Kathleen's superiority complex on its ear. She's been prone to taking people, students, guys who leer at her on the street, and physically imposing her will on them (see, the will to power? get it?) while taunting them to "ask me to leave," which she never does. One night, she sneaks up behind Peina, who easily overtakes her and brings her up to his apartment. He's much older than she is and has a better grasp on "the addiction" (yes, that's what they call it in the movie). He's even learned to control it, to mask it, and to "pass" for human. He tells her she's "nothing" and suggests she reads <u>Naked Lunch</u> because "Burroughs really captures what it's like not to have a face." To some, his monologues are going to be the tipping point between "trashy arthouse" and "pretentious," but Peina's role in the overall narrative is a small one.<br />
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The truth is that I can't really defend the philosophical or (later) religious overtones<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>*</i></span> in <i>The Addiction</i> - they are what they are, and barely disguised as anything else. If you aren't as familiar with Kathleen's field of study as I am, it might not be so apparent that this is a Philosophy 101 level<i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">*</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">*</span></i> depiction of the vampire as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch">Übermensch</a>. The good news is that you can also enjoy it as an interesting take on the increasingly crowded genre of vampire movies. It's somewhere between Tony Scott's <i>The Hunger</i> and Chan-Wook Park's <i>Thirst</i> in its ambitions, but Ferrara's low-fi techniques give <i>The Addiction</i> a unique feel. Ferrara shot the film in twenty days, in black and white, and makes the best of chiaroscuro lighting (the criss-cross pattern on Casanova's face during the first attack is particularly striking). <br />
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Lili Taylor is very good as Kathleen, who goes on a more interesting arc than I was expecting from the middle of the film. In a way, there are parallels to the protagonist of <i>Ms. 45</i> - both go from positions of relative innocence (as innocent as a Ph.D. Philosophy candidate can be, anyway) to victims to taking control of their new-found stature, and eventually become indiscriminate killers. There's a scene late in the film when we realize that Kathleen has not simply been abandoning her victims that helps shift the film a bit, and leads to one of the bloodier vampire attacks this side of <i>30 Days of Night</i>. Walken and Calderon are asked to carry most of the leaden dialogue about the nature of being that we maybe didn't need. I'm still on the fence about that, because even for 1994/5 this is a more interesting approach to vampires, and while not exactly novel (and definitely not subtle), it is refreshing considering what passes for bloodsuckers these days.<br />
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By and large, <i>The Addiction</i> is Taylor's movie, but there are a few other characters that make an impression: Edie Falco comes in and out of the story as Jean, Kathleen's fellow PhD colleague. Fredro Starr (of Onyx fame, another group on the soundtrack) has a few memorable scenes as Black, who tries to pick up Kathleen early in the film and regrets it later. Kathryn Erbe (later of <i>Oz</i> and <i>Stir of Echoes</i>) is an anthropology student that Kathleen targets in the library, and the conversation they have after biting / being bitten is the first insight into Conklin's new outlook on life. While he's listed in the main credits, don't expect to see Michael Imperioli for very much in the film: he has one scene as a missionary, although his refusal to follow Kathleen inside is a bit of foreshadowing I didn't necessarily see coming. <br />
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In fact, the ending in general helps <i>The Addiction</i> overcome some of the more obvious allegories of the film, even if the last shot is about as understated as a Slayer album (sorry, no Slayer on the soundtrack, but you do see a Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt early in the film). If you don't mind mixing your vampires with the revelation that "self awareness is the annihilation of self" and enjoy an atmospheric, gritty vampire story, you'll probably enjoy <i>The Addiction</i>. It's also an interesting companion piece to <i>Ms. 45</i> and <i>King of New York</i> as a continued exploration of different sections of New York over time (fashion, crime, education), so on that level Ferrara succeeds. And let's be honest, it's a hell of a lot better than <i>Wes Craven's Vampire in Brooklyn</i>. Low hanging fruit, I know, but I'm still debating the relative merits of <i>The Addiction</i>. On one hand, I liked the execution visually, and the direction of the story was compelling, but on the other hand, it was like listening to a first year philosophy major lecture me about the nature of good and evil. It's a toss-up for now.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><i> * Late in the film, there are some direct quotes from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.C._Sproul">R.C. Sproul</a>, which echo a lot of early Calvinist writings about the nature of man and its inability to rise above sin on Earth. It's a little odd, if only because the end of the film is heavy on Catholic imagery, and seems to suggest the opposite - salvation is possible, or at least forgiveness.</i></span><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> **Is Nietzsche philosophy 101? I came to him from another direction, in a religious studies class about "Masters of Suspicion," but I would gather most philosophy majors know Beyond Good and Evil, if not the rest.</span></i>Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-36253256000907165582015-10-12T13:30:00.000-04:002015-10-12T13:30:00.533-04:00Shocktober Revisited: You're NextFestival screenings are a funny thing: movies can really build or destroy their reputation based on playing at a festival, and sometimes it happens for reasons beyond the creators' control. For example, while I really do like Don Coscarelli's <i>John Dies at the End</i> and I think it does the best possible job it can adapting the book with the budget he had and the time constraints (and there's a lot that didn't make the adaptation), I think it benefited immensely from playing after <i>Dawn of the Dead</i> with audiences at the Nevermore Film Festival last year. I was there, and most of the people who came for <i>Dawn of the Dead</i> (and it was packed) stuck around for <i>John Dies at the End</i>, which played shortly thereafter, and they were already pumped having just seen what is arguably the best of Romero's "<i>Dead</i>" films (it's not my favorite, but I won't argue it's the best constructed). As a result, what is already a very good movie went through the roof because people were excited in the first place.<br />
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I didn't see <i>You're Next</i> in 2011, because I wasn't in Toronto, Austin, San Francisco, Sydney, Los Angeles, or any of the other cities it played it. But apparently audiences went gaga for it. I probably read about it and then, as time went on, forgot about <i>You're Next</i>. Like The Cabin in the Woods, there was a sizable gap between the completed product and release. In the case of <i>You're Next</i>, it finally came out last August, and just recently came out on DVD and Blu-Ray, which is how I saw it. And you know what? It is pretty damn good.<br />
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Crispian (AJ Bowen) is going to visit his parents - Paul (Rob Moran) and Aubrey (Barbara Crampton) - at their fixer-upper house in the woods for a family reunion. He's bringing along Erin (Sharni Vinson), his girlfriend, to meet his siblings: Felix (Nicholas Tucci), Drake (Joe Swanberg), and Aimee (Amy Seimetz), as well as their respective SO's Zee (Wendy Glenn), Kelly (Sarah Myers), and Tariq (Ti West). What none of them know is that three killers just murdered Paul and Aubrey's only neighbors (Larry Fessenden and Kate Lyn Sheil) and are preparing for a little family reunion home invasion. Then again, what the killers don't know is that Erin may be more than they can handle, much to the surprise of everyone else...<br />
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I was already enjoying the set up of <i>You're Next</i> as it built towards the first attack on the family, but the moment that one of the killers (dressed in black and wearing animal masks, like they do in these kinds of movies) breaks through the glass and tries to grab Erin, I was sold. Instead of scream, she plunges a knife into his arm and pins him to the window pane, and the killer is standing there, howling with pain, while she looks for something to finish him off with. Her rationale why they shouldn't hide in the basement and the reaction it gets from the others is also priceless. The tone is just off-kilter enough to to overcome the predictability of the genre, which is always welcome, but Vinson is without a doubt <i>You're Next</i>'s selling point.<br />
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(Also seeing Barbara Crampton (<i>Re-Animator</i>, <i>From Beyond</i>) again is a bonus, who came out of semi-retirement to be in the film, although I honestly didn't recognize her until I saw her name in the credits)<br />
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Coming in, I'd seen the quotes that <i>You're Next</i> was "ground breaking" and that it would change the rules of horror movies, which to be honest is the kind of festival-related hyperbole that increases expectations for a movie beyond where they need to be. <i>You're Next</i> is a really good horror movie, and probably the best domestic "home invasion" entry I've seen in the last decade (at least), but it doesn't reinvent the wheel, gang. It's okay for a movie to just do its job very well. Director Adam Wingard (<i>V/H/S 2</i>) and writer Simon Barrett (<i>The ABCs of Death</i>) made the kind of straight ahead horror movie that audiences will eat up: great kills, some clever laughs, fun characters, and actual suspense. The Final Girl has a novel back story that explains why she knows so much about fighting back (she grew up on a survivalist camp in the Outback), and the "twist" may not be novel (it's taken from the playbook of 60% of all thrillers) but it plays out well. <i>You're Next</i> doesn't need to be described as game changing, because it plays the existing game and does a damn fine job of it.<br />
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<i>You're Next</i> also (apparently) falls into a category I'd never heard of before: "mumblegore." To be honest, I wasn't aware such a distinction was necessary, but the internet does love to create hybrid subgenres, and it was only a matter of time before "mumblecore" horror films had their own category. Other than <i>Baghead</i>, I'm not really certain what else qualifies as "mumblegore," because <i>You're Next</i> is most certainly too well scripted and too tightly directed to be considered a largely improvised, boring piece of shit. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm letting my bias slip through, but I really don't like mumblecore movies. Unless the way they've been made has changed drastically since I endured <i>Funny Ha Ha</i>, <i>You're Next</i> has one scene that even resembles "mumblecore" - the dinner table conversation right before the first attack. <br />
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In the extras on the disc, Wingard and Barrett mention that they wanted each conversation to be distinct from each other and that there were many, many takes to get it just where Wingard wanted it to build to, but even in that I sense a greater sense of control than "just let them act and we'll shoot it." There's still a sense of control in the editing that I don't associate with movies by the Duplass brothers or other directors of that ilk. To be honest with you, I haven't seen <i>A Horrible Way to Die</i> or <i>Pop Skull</i> (Wingard's other horror movies), so maybe that's why <i>You're Next</i> gets lumped in, but I don't agree with that any more than the ridiculous notion that Ti West also falls into that category.<br />
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Maybe that happened because West (<i>The House of the Devil</i>), Swanberg (<i>Drinking Buddies</i>), and Barrett are in <i>You're Next</i>, and (<b>SPOILER</b>) have some of the most memorable death scenes. Wingard does mention in the cast commentary that he wrote many of the parts for his friends (including Seimetz, who could only film in fits and spurts because she was in <i>Upstream Color</i>), which I suppose is something that gets lumped into the "mumblecore" playbook, but <i>You're Next</i> doesn't feel improvised. Once the movie really gets rolling, it's clear that Wingard and Barrett have a plan for every scene and how things are going to play out, which is the antithesis of "mumblecore." So is "mumblegore" a real thing? I don't know, but I'm going to go ahead and declare that if it is, <i>You're Next</i> shouldn't be part of that subgenre. It's a straight-ahead home invasion movie with some slasher influences, and what it does, it does very well.<br />
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<i>You're Next</i> is the kind of movie I would have liked to have seen with a crowd. I'm strongly considering breaking the rule of what plays at Summer Fest so I don't have to wait until Horror Fest in October to show everybody the movie. I would have loved to have seen it at Nevermore, because it plays right into what the crowds there love, but that was not to be. The good news is that <i>You're Next</i> is finally out there, and while it doesn't rewrite horror (and I don't think it was even trying to), it's a hell of a fun movie to watch. Check it out.Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-83297812298327978732015-10-11T07:56:00.000-04:002015-10-11T07:56:00.142-04:00Shocktober Revisited: Don't Go In the Woods M. Night Shyamalan once famously tried to "re-brand" <i>The Happening</i> as a "B Movie" after audiences (and critics) had a chance to see how terribly inept it was. At one point, I had to prove to a friend of a friend that it wasn't the case by showing them the special features on the Blu-Ray, which has Shyamalan lauding his cast and crew on what a terrifying thriller they were making, one that would open people's eyes. Now, I suppose, it's possible that when he saw the finished cut, he revised his strategy, but given his typical stance of believing his turds are golden eggs, I think it was studio pressure to salvage his eco-disasterpiece. But that's just my theory. <i>The Happening</i> does all of the heavy lifting by itself - you decide if this was supposed to be schlocky or just ended up that way as a result of gross incompetence.<br />
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What bearing does this have on <i>Don't Go in the Woods</i> (sometimes with "<i>...Alone!</i>" at the end)? As I learned after watching this 1981 slasher movie, director James Bryan intended the film to be a comedy, and not just a "me too" entry into the subgenre. That would put the film in the same company as <i>Student Bodies</i>, but the problem with this characterization of <i>Don't Go in the Woods</i> is that it's almost impossible to tell while watching the film. Bryan seems (well, seemed - I won't pretend I'm familiar with his <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0116949/?ref_=tt_ov_dr">filmography</a>) to lack any basic semblance of pacing, editing, or sensible shot composition, and somehow makes a movie that's barely 81 minutes feel twice that long. It doesn't work as a comedy or as a slasher film, and yet, is oddly appealing in fits and (blood) spurts.<br />
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One wouldn't be mistaken in assuming there's no plot to be had during the first twenty minutes of <i>Don't Go in the Woods</i>, as Bryan haphazardly jumps from one hastily cobbled together "kill" to the next, in rapid succession. Other than the fact that someone - or some thing - is hunting anyone who wanders into the forest outside of Park City, Utah, there's no connective tissue whatsoever that can be identified. Bryan's notion of setting up a "kill" is to throw a character on screen, without any sense of context, cut to hand-held "POV" shoots of the murderer, and then go straight for the gore. If you get a kick out of seeing the camera run into branches, lose balance, and then unexpectedly cut to a guy losing his arm, <i>Don't Go in the Woods</i> has you covered. We eventually learn that he was an ornithologist (McCormick Dalton), which is relevant in no real capacity, but that is the only one of Bryan's procession of victims we have any sense of back story for.<br />
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Also wandering around in the woods, presumably just to be murdered, are a girl running around (Alma Ramos), a newlywed couple in their customized shag van (pun intended) (Carolyn Braza and Frank Millen), an artist (Cecilia Fannon), a tourist (Dale Angell), his mother (Ruth Grose), a fisherman (Hank Zinman), and a guy in a wheelchair (Gerry Klein) who is, inexplicably, slowly rolling himself up a dirt road. His struggle, including at least two times when his chair tips over, are agonizingly cross-cut with the final showdown between our heroes, the police, and the killer. For the record, my favorite theory about the killer prior to discovering it was just a Killbilly was that it was a "bear with a knife," which is really what it looks like when the artist dies and her toddler-aged daughter disappears.<br />
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Yes, I did mention "heroes," didn't I? Eventually, in the midst of all of this random killing for killing's sake, we do actually meet the four twenty-somethings that one expects to find in a slasher movie: Craig (James P. Hayden) Ingrid (Mary Gail Artz), Joanne (Angie Brown), and Peter (Jack McClelland). Craig is leading the expedition out to a cabin in the woods - relax, we never see it, and it is never mentioned again once the killer shows up - with the rest in tow. He's the natural leader, Boy Scout type, and Peter is the "tenderfoot" who makes mistakes and resents Craig. Ingrid and Joanne are, um, the girls. One of them has short hair and the other one doesn't. To be honest, without looking at them in the movie, I can't remember which is which, but I think Ingrid is the one who lives at the end (<b>SPOILER</b>). Since I'm <b>SPOILING</b>, this breaks with the at-the-time nascent concept of "Final Girl" theory by also having Peter survive, but Craig and Joanne are long dead. Like the rest of the murders, there's no real rhyme or reason for this decision.<br />
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I should mention that in the midst of hiking to a cabin, they spend the night in the woods twice, despite the fact that the cabin is close enough to walk to "by mid-day tomorrow." The killer isn't even stalking them at that point - he's instead murdering another group of campers (Leon Brown, Jr. and Linda Brown, although I could have sworn there were more people). It might have been a clever "bait-and-switch" if it were possible to tell what the hell was going on in <i>Don't Go in the Woods</i>. By that point, Bryan is stretching the story out in all possible directions, also including the morbidly obese Sheriff (Ken Carter). He's responding to the missing ornithologist report, until he just decides to give up in the middle of flying over the woods. No, really, that's what happens. He requests a plane to fly over, in the hopes of seeing, um, something, and then tells the pilot they'll never find the guy, he probably went home. But don't worry, the police and a local militia will be back for the "big" finale.<br />
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Perhaps Bryan's notion that <i>Don't Go in the Woods</i> being a "comedy" comes from the sensory overload of ridiculous, bloody murders that make up the first half of the film. If so, he failed miserably, because there's nothing particularly comical about having the tourist's dead body lying on a rock just above two frolicking teenagers - a shot he returns to after killing the mother. There's nothing particularly tragic or ironic about it, either, because the composition is so in-artful. The closest thing to outright comical happens during the honeymoon - and honestly, you can't even tell they're married until you see it on the side of the van - when, after the couple is slashed thoroughly, the killer decides to flip the van over, into a ravine. And it explodes. I laughed at the audacity, and again when somehow nobody noticed that this happened, despite what is clearly a crowded forest.<br />
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To be fair, I go into most slasher films with a healthy suspension of disbelief. The ridiculous nature of murder set pieces were part and parcel of the subgenre, even in 1981. I can even put up with sometimes amateurish execution, as long as the payoff is worthwhile. What's difficult to reconcile about <i>Don't Go in the Woods</i> is the stunning lack of tension. We barely have time to register that someone is on camera before they're being stalked and summarily slaughtered, and none of it is done with any degree of flair. There's no suspense in the film because there's no sense of geography for the characters, or any attempt to set up anything. If you'd like to make a case that the killer's M.O. resembles the <i>Texas Chain Saw Massacre</i> (and his cabin is clearly designed to) and therefore is somehow meant to make it "random," I'd listen, but then you'd have to explain the ending as something less coherent than "repeating the cycle." What begins as a slasher film slowly devolves into a mishmash of <i>The Hills Have Eyes</i>, but with random asides not unlike the police subplot in <i>The Last House on the Left</i>. And I somehow doubt that Wes Craven or Tobe Hooper would be happy to have their films compared to <i>Don't Go in the Woods</i>.<br />
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And yet, I did say I kind of enjoyed it, didn't I? Well, that is true. It's an excruciatingly boring movie from the halfway point onward, but the random killings at the beginning are amusing in and of themselves. It's a little bit like that DVD, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAvb576e05w"><i>Boogeymen: The Killer Compilation</i></a>, which was just clips of famous monster movies without any semblance placement within their respective films, crammed together. It's not the ideal way to watch a slasher, but the sheer willingness to throw narrative away and just randomly murder people with no rhyme or reason is amusing. And I reiterate: whether intentional or not, the fact that the killer pushes a van off of a cliff (sideways) is humorous. Some of <i>Don't Go in the Woods</i> is so stupid that you can't help but chuckle. The "score," by H. Kingsley Thurber (<a href="https://youtu.be/iL85mWw8hL0"><i>Frozen Scream</i></a>), is a synth-heavy cacophony of "was that the right choice?" Every now and then he provides the punch line for a joke, which is funny in all the wrong ways, especially for the musical "fart" that accompanies Peter soiling himself. <br />
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So, in fairness, while <i>Don't Go in the Woods</i> is frequently an interminable bore, there are moments of sheer stupidity, of incompetence in the direction and writing (how could I leave out Garth Eliasson, he who wrote the story <b>and</b> the script?), that will make you chuckle. If it had, oh, a sense of pacing, let alone a better sense of one, I would be inclined to recommend it, because some of the kills are decent, and before you know what the killer is, there's a sense of baffling confusion. As it stands, I would only recommend it to slasher die-hards who have exhausted most of the better offerings. <i>Don't Go in the Woods</i> isn't bottom of the barrel - it is watchable, if nothing else - but you might find yourself struggling against seeing how much time you have left. Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-28798020577369891552015-10-10T07:44:00.000-04:002015-10-10T07:44:00.271-04:00Shocktober Revisited: The Babadook<em>The Babadook</em> is an often harrowing experience of a single mother raising an emotionally fragile, potentially dangerous son, specifically in the weeks leading up to his birthday. There's also the title character, otherwise known as Mr. Babadook, who writes horrific children's books and sneaks them onto the shelf. Specifically, the shelf of Samuel (Noah Wiseman), much to the consternation of his mother Amelia (Essie Davis). Maybe consternation isn't the right word, especially when the line "whether it's in a word, or whether it's in a look, you can't get rid of the Babadook" turns out to be very accurate. Writer / Director Jennifer Kent crafts <i>The Babadook</i> into a film teetering on hysteria from the word go, and ratchets up the tension. Partly due to the titular menace, but also from the already precarious mental state of Amelia, who can barely coexist with her son.<br />
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It's actually well into the movie before <i>The Babadook</i> becomes any sort of tangible threat, but in the meantime there's plenty of tension to go around. Amelia's husband died while trying to drive her to the hospital, and she's had her hands full with Samuel, who bears the signs of a child who grew up in a household that never moved past "grieving." He's convinced monsters are in the house and builds home made weapons to fight them. When he takes a particularly nasty crossbow to school, Amelia is called in from her job at a nursing home, and in the ensuing argument with the staff, she removes her son from classes altogether. Amelia is just barely functional - she hasn't slept in months thanks to Samuel's night terrors, her coworkers feel she's not keeping up with her duties, and her sister Claire (Hailey McElhinney) refuses to come over to her townhouse. It's too "depressing," and she's far more concerned with keeping Samuel away from her daughter. He's prone to violent outbursts and fits of screaming, and there's something unseemly about his attachment to Amelia. (Note early in the film when he leans in to hug her and she abruptly pushes him away and yells "stop!" What exactly did he do?)<br />
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One night, she lets him pick the book that will lead up to their abbreviate sleep schedule - one that will be inevitably be interrupted when he panics about the "monster" - and Samuel finds an oversized red volume with the title <u>Mister Babadook</u> on the cover. It promises a mischievous, albeit creepy, looking friend, but as Amelia turns the pages, the tone shifts to sinister. There's a promise that "once you see what's underneath, you'll wish that you were dead," and her son is understandably terrified. Now his "monster" has a name, and with homemade weapons and a love of magic, Samuel feels he's the only person who can keep the Babadook from killing his mother. Amelia tears the book up and throws it away, but not long after, it mysteriously reappears...<br />
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If it were merely a film about the issues that Amelia and Samuel face in day to day life, <i>The Babadook</i> would be a film fraught with tension, but the added supernatural element pushes them past the breaking point and into truly frightening territory. Kent wisely avoids jump scares, and instead elevates the uneasy tone slowly but surely. We know something is wrong with both of our protagonists, but it's hard to tell which one is worse off. The world has essentially shut them out - or, one could argue, Amelia has alienated everyone - so when the Babadook enters the picture, there's no one and no thing to help them cope. <br />
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Kent's masterstroke in <i>The Babadook</i> is to switch our loyalty in characters halfway through the film. Initially, our sympathies lie with Amelia, a beleaguered mother with the child from hell. That's something we've all seen, and something does seem to be very, very wrong with Samuel. He's violent, he's anxious, and socially maladjusted. But after he suffers an episode in Amelia's car that leaves him temporarily catatonic, Amelia begs a doctor to prescribe him a sedative for both of their sakes. He reluctantly agrees, and the first night that they both have a good night's sleep is where the swap happens. Having destroyed <u>Mister Babadook</u>, Amelia is alarmed to find it at her front door, with new pages included. We realize that his (its?) focus has changed - <i>The Babadook</i> doesn't want Samuel to "Let Me In," it wants Amelia, and provides a few graphically violent pop-ups of what's going to happen when it does. The second half of the film shifts Samuel to the position of doped up innocent as Amelia grows increasingly indifferent towards his welfare.<br />
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Interestingly, she remains our focal point character - the film never shifts to Samuel's perspective. We instead follow Amelia as she encounters <i>The Babadook</i> overnight and has a series of hallucinations: first at the police station, and then late at night watching television. A series of Melies films from the early days of cinema are transformed to include the Babadook, who resembles Lon Chaney in <i>London After Midnight</i> more than a little bit. She sees cockroaches, first in a hole behind the refrigerator, and then inside of her car, both at disastrously inopportune times. The second, in fact, is a sly mirroring of the incident that set off her relationship to Samuel, although it's possible to not notice it once the film shifts over to "supernatural menace." <i>The Babadook</i> also takes on a more conventional film for horror movies, one that I won't spoil, but that promises Amelia can be normal again. At a cost, of course.<br />
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Eventually Samuel and Amelia come to assert some control over the situation in a tense climax that I'm not going to discuss at all - that's for you to discover, although the coda of the film might come as surprising to some. Kent proposes that some things can't just be wished away, and that instead a balance must be struck between the light and the dark, however tenuous. However, there is an alternate way to read the film, if you choose to take some small pieces of information as meaning more than they seem to. We're above to dive into mild <b>SPOILER</b> territory here, so skip the next paragraph if you'd rather not know anything about <i>The Babadook</i>.<br />
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Earlier in the film, Amelia mentions to Claire's friends that she used to be a writer, but hasn't written anything since her husband died. She has a bad habit of losing track of time due to insomnia, and to see things that aren't there, particularly later in the film. It's true Samuel finds <u>Mister Babadook</u> on his shelf, but who put it there? Near the very end of the film, there's a small moment between Amelia, Samuel, and the Civil Services agents that suggests what we're seeing isn't an exception, but instead the norm. Amelia tells them she always has trouble keeping things together around Samuel's birthday, and he then tells them that this year will be the first time he's ever had a party. If you choose to, particularly based on the "fixed" copy of the book, one could read <i>The Babadook</i> as being a traumatic episode that Amelia is dealing with, perhaps annually. If you opt to read the monster as "not real," or that she wrote the book as a means of cathartic release, then the ending in the basement is also possibly in her mind. On the other hand, I tend to think that the Babadook is a real external force exacerbating her already fractured maternal bond with Samuel.<br />
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(<i>Here endeth speculatory <b>SPOILAGE</b>)</i><br />
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The Babadook is a genuinely creepy movie, one that ought to be on the radar of horror fans tired of endless remakes. It's the second movie I've seen from the same region (<i>The Babadook</i> from Australia and <i>Housebound</i> from New Zealand) that was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale landscape of zombies and kid-friendly monsters. There is such a thing as a renaissance in horror, but you need to be okay with the fact that much of it flies under the radar. You won't get the chance to see it on a big screen most of the time (<i>It Follows</i> being a notable exception), but there's some very good new horror out there, if you're willing to dig a bit. Jennifer Kent's debut put her on my radar, and I look forward to seeing what she makes next.Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-81213086284759331572015-10-09T13:46:00.000-04:002015-10-09T13:46:00.421-04:00Shocktober Review: Cooties<br />
Give <em>Cooties</em> this: it brings an approach to horror comedies that hasn't been done to death before. In fact, it might even be novel in the "evil children" subgenre, because of the way the menace is presented. If you want to call it a "zombie" movie - and I don't, for reasons I'll get to shortly - it's been since Dawn of the Dead that I can really remember a movie that featured undead children attacking adults. But then again, since I'd say this is a little more <em>28 Days Later</em> than <em>Dawn of the Dead</em>, we'll have to put that to the side. Also feel free to school me in all of the "zombie children" movies I am forgetting. The point is that premise-wise, <em>Cooties</em> feels like a breath of fresh air. It's just a shame that so much of the film is uneven, ruining the fun.<br />
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After having a go as a writer in New York, Clint (Elijah Wood) is taking some time to focus in his hometown of Fort Chicken. In a twist, he's living upstairs, and not in his parents' basement, but it's littered with geek friendly posters and toys, presumably when he was younger. Clint is working on his novel, about a guy who buys a killer boat (as a character points out later, "so it's Christine?" and Clint replies, "well no, this is a boat"). Honestly, the book sounds awful from what we hear him working on, but it's supposed to. To make a little money, he signs up to be a substitute teacher at the same elementary school he went to, and on his first day he meets a slightly less than welcoming faculty: P.E. coach Wade (Rainn Wilson), alarmist Rebekkah (Nasim Pedrad), science teacher Doug (screenwriter Leigh Whannell), and, uh, whatever Tracy (Jack McBrayer) teaches. Vice Principal Simms (Ian Brennan) confiscates his phones ("if the students can't have them, neither should we") and crosswalk guard Rick (Jorge Garcia) mistakes Clint for his drug dealer.<br />
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The only person who seems happy to see Clint is Lucy (Allison Pill), who it turns out he knew taught there. They went to school together, and she's very impressed that he's been living in the big city. She's also dating Wade, who introduces himself to Clint by parking him in with a huge truck (there's a running joke about Wade being unable to say "dual rear wheel"). He's hostile to Clint, but he might have a good reason, since Clint is clearly flirting with Lucy, and she's flirting back. But then it's time for classes, and elementary school is not how Clint remembered it. The first student he runs across is named Patriot ("born on 9/11") who wrote "Eat a Cock" on his window and still has his phone. The other students are even less polite, except the girl who has some serious boils on her face. And her hair falls out. Then she bites Patriot on the cheek.<br />
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It turns out she ate a tainted chicken nugget, one we saw during the opening montage, and as Doug surmises later, the disease infected her brain, turning her into a zombie-like rage monster. Doug does imply their brains are dead and turning to mush, but considering how much of Patriot's personally exists throughout the movie, you're closer to <em>Return of the Living Dead Part 2</em> "zombie" territory (see, I remembered another one!). I'm still of the mind it's more <em>28 Days Later</em>, and this is a live virus - traditional zombie rules don't apply. Head shots are not necessary, just violence against children.<br />
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The teachers are trapped inside, while Rick sits in his van tripping on mushrooms. The police are no help and the only parent who arrives at 3:00 is quickly dispatched of, thanks to her inattentive use of phones and tablets. They have to navigate the corridors, and when Patriot lets the infected inside, their options are limited to a <em>Die Hard</em> inspired trip through the air ducts. While Clint and Lucy are trying to get Wade's keys, Doug discovers that the disease only infects children who haven't reached puberty yet, which is why Clint's bite only made him very sick for a few hours. <br />
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<em>Cooties</em> suffers from an unusual tonal dissonance, but not necessarily from the plot. The film itself is more or less a straight up horror comedy, deriving most of its laughs from a combination of vulgarity and extreme violence directed at the children. Where it stumbles is the characters, and it's not clear if that's because of the decisions made by the actors or if it was inherent in Whannell's screenplay. Half of the cast makes a concerted effort not to be stereotypes: the man-child, the meathead coach, the "kooky" science teacher, and the other half just embrace their one note characters. Wilson tries very hard to keep Wade from being the character we immediately expect him to be the moment his truck parks Clint in, but it takes most of the film before there's any kind of validation that he's not just a stock "type". <br />
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I understand that there's a separate, infected / zombie children story and that you need to put things in order, but Clint, Lucy, and particularly Wade aren't fleshed out until late in the film, at which point the scene in the library feels like it's disrupting the narrative, rather than serving it. Compare it with a throwaway line from Doug, given in the middle of explaining what they're up against, that contextualizes his character without a long conversation over walkie-talkies. It's not unwelcome to have a horror comedy that makes the effort to establish its characters a little bit, but the it happens in <em>Cooties</em> is uneven at best. That also, unfortunately, applies to the structure of the film, particularly its third act.<br />
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By necessity, I'm going to have to enter <strong>SPOILER</strong> territory to discuss the end of the movie, so be warned. Skip down a few paragraphs if you just want the wrap up. <strong>SPOILERS AHOY!</strong> <br />
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While I can understand the decision to leave the school for the last act, I'm not convinced it was a good idea. The mad dash out, coupled with leaving Fort Chicken, introducing Danville, the next town over, covering the spread of the epidemic, and creating a new "you're doomed" scenario happens within the span of about ten minutes. In a lot of ways, it removes the tension of the confined space while Clint and company are in the school. It also unsatisfactorily resolves the Patriot story line with an almost perfunctory scene between towns. Yes, Clint has a great callback line and the kill is a good one, but there's something about the sudden change in scenery and the fact that it's resolved so quickly (Wade's truck does all of the work) that renders it less significant than it was built up to be.<br />
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I honestly wouldn't have minded if where they were going had any relevancy other than to demonstrate the virus had spread, but it doesn't. There's a half-hearted attempt to put Doug in the same place as the tainted nuggets, but it's more in the service of getting them into another "oh shit" scenario. The reveal of where they ended up - a Chuck-E Cheese-like indoor playground - is a tense moment, but that too is disrupted almost immediately by the surprise return of the not dead Wade who somehow figured out where they were and is now in Rick's van. (His explanation that "I always know where my truck is" doesn't really give them a pass). Everything is resolved so quickly that there's not really time to appreciate that Wade just immolated an entire jungle gym's worth of infected kids. Again, I appreciate the idea behind it, but the tonal and spatial shift don't really jibe with most of <em>Cooties</em>.<br />
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(<strong>HERE ENDETH THE SPOILERS</strong>)<br />
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Character development bumps aside, there are a lot of things to like about the cast of <em>Cooties</em>. Leigh Whannell, in particular is a lot of fun as the "not quite there" Doug. He's introduced in the teacher's lounge reading a book called <u>How to Talk Like a Human Being</u>, and the payoff for why he's so off-kilter is actually a good one. Novel even, because I can't recall many characters who seem that gimmicky to have such a logical explanation why. Elijah Wood and Allison Pill ground the movie, even if Clint and Lucy are more of a collection of "character quirks" than anything cohesive. Once we finally get to know Wade - two thirds of the way into <em>Cooties</em> - Rainn Wilson has the opportunity to make him memorable and not just stereotypical and runs with it. They fare better than McBrayer, Pedrad, and Garcia, who have pretty much one note to play throughout the film. There's nothing necessarily wrong with their performances, but I doubt you'll remember much about them once <em>Cooties</em> is over. It's a bit like when you realize the (one) police officer who shows up is the guy who played Badger on <em>Breaking Bad</em>: funny for a minute, but quickly forgotten.<br />
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<em>Cooties</em> is a little too lopsided as a horror comedy - it's only really funny towards the end, but when it is, I fully admit that it can be very funny. That is, provided you have a particularly misanthropic streak towards children. There's some tension in the first half that sustains the build up of the "zombie" plague, hampered a bit by character beats but ultimately effective as long as they're in the school. Things kind of fall apart in the last act as the film jumps around, tonally and visually, but in the end <em>Cooties</em> is amusing. Perhaps not memorable, but a fun trifle if you're looking for a decent horror comedy with an ensemble that came ready to play. In that regard, I suppose it's fitting I saw it on VOD: not to denigrate the quality of the "On Demand" movement, but I'm more forgiving of <em>Cooties</em>' problems than I would be having seen it in theatres.Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4713972189482444062.post-52660856605734676402015-10-08T07:51:00.000-04:002015-10-08T07:51:00.932-04:00Shocktober Revisited: The Final TerrorThere's no certainty that people would even know that <i>The Final Terror</i> existed today, were it not for the fact that most of its cast of young stars went on to bigger and better roles a few years later. In fact, <i>The Final Terror</i> was shelved in 1980 and not released for another two years, and only then because it suddenly had "name" talent in it. It's not hard to see why producers might find the film hard to sell - it just barely qualifies as a "slasher" film - but there's a scrappy, underdog quality to <i>The Final Terror</i> that makes it worthwhile. Coupled with some soon to be well known names was director Andrew Davis, who these days is probably better known for <i>The Fugitive</i>, but back then still had a keen eye for visuals, which is important considering the entire movie takes place in the woods.<br />
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Forest rangers Mike (Mark Metcalf), Nathaniel (Ernest Harden, Jr.), Boone (Lewis Smith), Zorich (John Friedrich), and newcomer Marco (Adrian Zmed) are heading up for a weekend of clearing brush and river rafting in the Pacific Northwest<i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">*</span></i>. Against the advice of their mechanic, Eggar (Joe Pantoliano), they decide to bring along some girls: Windy (Daryl Hannah), Melanie (Cindy Harrell), Margaret (Rachel Ward), and Vanessa (Akosua Busia). They also choose one of the most remote paths back to where Eggar is going to take the bus, and during campfire storytelling, Boone shares the story of a crazed old woman who escape from the local asylum and lives in the woods. But it turns out that might not just be a story...<br />
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There's actually nothing supernatural about <i>The Final Terror</i> (which is pretty ambiguous based on its poster what the "terror" is supposed to be - aliens?), and by the twenty minute mark, before anybody's been killed (although Marco goes missing) we have a general idea who the backwoods slasher is or is going to be. You can actually guess even earlier than that based on clues that are not so subtly dropped on the way to the woods, or the fact that one character is clearly more deranged than everyone else. Still, Davis does a good job of misdirection throughout the movie, causing you to wonder if Boone's story is entirely accurate, or if there's a <i>Psycho</i>-esque angle at play. And when the kills do start, they are pretty brutal. There's actually a pre-credit double kill of two unrelated characters that Davis shot when producers informed him the body count (three) was "too low" for a slasher film.<br />
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<i>The Final Terror</i> is nevertheless more "survival horror" than "slasher film," and it hews more along the lines of Walter Hill's <i>Southern Comfort</i> than something like <i>The Burning</i>. Most of the movie is spent with our protagonists trying to outrun the killer and make it back to the bus (their alternative is a 45 mile hike), with military enthusiast Zorich becoming the de facto leader and resorting to survivalist tactics. The end of the film is more or less a showdown in the middle of the woods that, in the ensuing three decades, is unfortunately going to remind a lot of people of Predator, even though <i>The Final Terror</i> had it beat by six years. Aside from a few tense sequences on the bus and a few good kills early on, you'd be hard pressed to really include <i>The Final Terror</i> in the "classic" slasher era.<br />
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On the other hand, you probably noticed in the synopsis just how many names you recognized, even if vaguely. After Zmed's career took off with <i>TJ Hooker</i> and Daryl Hannah figured prominently in <i>Blade Runner</i> (and would make it big with <i>Splash</i> the following year), <i>The Final Terror</i> was deemed worthy of cashing in on, but they're far from the only recognizable names. Joe Pantoliano would appear in <i>Risky Business</i> the same year, and go on to memorable roles in <i>The Goonies</i>, <i>Midnight Run</i>, <i>The Matrix</i>, and <i>The Fugitive</i> (again directed by Davis). Rachel Ward had already appeared in <i>Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid</i> and <i>Sharky's Machine</i>, and would star opposite Jeff Bridges in <i>Against All Odds</i> the following year. Mark Metcalf might not be a name you recognize, but he was both Niedermeyer in <i>Animal House</i> and The Master on <i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i>. Even less familiar names, like Ernest Harden, Jr. went on from <i>The Jeffersons</i> to <i>The Final Terror</i> and would pop up in <i>White Men Can't Jump</i> and <i>J. Edgar</i>. Lewis Smith who, coincidentally, joined the cast of <i>Southern Comfort</i> after filming this, would go on to make <i>North and South</i> and appeared in <i>Wyatt Earp</i>.<br />
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In that regard, it's fun to watch <i>The Final Terror</i> and see so many people on the cusp of stardom or, barring that, recognize-ability. It's similar to <i>The Burning</i>, which was the film debut of Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter, and Fisher Stevens, although the end product is perhaps less memorable. I don't want to give the impression that this film is a long lost gem (although it has been MIA for a while) - at best it's a pretty good thriller / suspense film with some horror elements. It's well shot, has a pretty good pace, and an ending that doesn't disappoint, but I'd hesitate to leapfrog <i>The Final Terror</i> to the top of my "horror" list. Still, I'm glad I got the chance to check it out, and if you've seen everything under the full moon, this one is worth seeking out for a throwback to when "slasher" was a little more nebulous in its formula.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> * I don't recall if it's specifically stated in the film, but The Final Terror was shot in Northern California and Oregon.</span></i>Cap'n Howdyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529887150492149266noreply@blogger.com0