Shocktober Review: In the Mouth of Madness

 True story: the Cap'n has often mentioned, but never officially reviews John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. There's no good reason why I haven't; it was on my "Top Ten Horror Movies" list, I played it for college students during a pre-Horror Fest III event, and generally speaking I think of it fondly. Hell, when I picked up the Blu-Ray, I thought I'd throw it on just to check out the picture quality and ended up watching all the way until Sutter Cane first appears. The phrase "this is reality!" comes up frequently in conversation with friends (to be fair, we talk about Lovecraft quite a bit). For its twentieth anniversary, it only seems fair to actually talk about In the Mouth of Madness, my second favorite entry into Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy."

 Many years ago, back in the early days of the internet, I remember going to an H.P. Lovecraft fan site and looking at the "adaptations" section, only to find that the entry for In the Mouth of Madness goes out of its way to insist that Carpenter's film is in no way "inspired" by Lovecraft and was clearly more influenced by Stephen King. Because, uh, King is mentioned by name in the film? Because it sort of sounds like his name? I hadn't laughed that hard since a Cliff's Notes knock-off insisted that MacBeth's "parade of Kings" was in no way Shakespeare flattering the royalty because "he was above such things." So In the Mouth of Madness is not directly lifted from a Lovecraft story (true), but it shares locations, character names, and thematic elements that come from his stories. Let's not forget the direct passages from "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Haunter in the Dark" attributed to Cane. It's as clearly tied to the concept of "cosmic horror" as Guillermo Del Toro's Hellboy is, and that doesn't get brushed away into the broom closet.

 Perhaps it's because In the Mouth of Madness is Carpenter at his most unabashedly pulpy (at least, until Vampires). This is the last of his great run that began with Halloween and came crashing down with Village of the Damned (the less said about Ghosts of Mars and The Ward, the better), but as I mentioned in the Horror Fest III recap, it's "quaintly 90s." It represents the last of an era of "contemporary" horror films that don't have any version of cell phones, the internet, or digital anything. I'm not actually sure how you would make In the Mouth of Madness today, as some intrepid Sutter Cane fan would have easily found (and posted) the map to Hobb's End online well in advance of the publication of his final novel.

 That's also why In the Mouth of Madness still works, because at first, we're not entirely sure what's happening to John Trent (Sam Neill). We know he's in an asylum (Arkham, if you were curious), and that he's been admitted under the care of (sic) Dr. Saperstein (John Glover) - hello, Rosemary's Baby reference - and that "things are really going to shit out there." When Dr. Wrenn (David Warner) comes to visit, we're introduced to the flashback of how insurance investigator Trent ended up unleashing the "Old Ones," with the help of literary agent Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) and, inadvertently, Arcane publisher Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston). But it's a slow burn - aside from the framing device, most of the first thirty minutes of In the Mouth of Madness are procedural. This is punctuated with moments of violence, or hallucinations and, in one case, and old Carpenter favorite - the "double dream" fake-out.

 Well before we're aware how much influence Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) has over the story we're being told, a sense of unease permeates In the Mouth of Madness. It's arguably more effective than Prince of Darkness, which attempts to set the same kind of tone of foreboding menace. Carpenter and screenwriter / former New Line President Michael De Luca (who often doesn't get the credit when discussing this film) wisely frame the film through the perspective of the pragmatic John Trent. He's trained to spot a con, to find the angle in any story too good to be true, and the "disappearance" of Cane in anticipation of his novel In the Mouth of Madness is one he can't pass up. Not that, if you take the ending at face value, he ever had any choice, but his stubborn insistence on what is "real" juxtaposes nicely with the increasingly impossible world he finds himself in. Paired with Styles, Trent becomes the Dana Scully to her Fox Mulder, in some improbably warped version of The X-Files.

 Cane's novels have an "effect" on readers, one that slowly works on Trent as he does "research" - Carpenter sets up the overlapping dreams as being grounded in reality (an overzealous cop beating some kid in an alley) and slowly distorts it, introducing imagery we'll see later in the film. In the Mouth of Madness benefits greatly from multiple viewings, as Carpenter and De Luca set up much of where the story's going well before Trent and Styles leave to find "Hobb's End," the fictional town that Cane is believed to have disappeared to. There are a number of other, smaller, details, like Trent's asylum and hotel room number or the color of everyone's eyes being tied directly to something Cane says that you might not catch the first time through. In many ways I think that Carpenter improved on the weaknesses of Prince of Darkness and made In the Mouth of Madness a stronger film for it. This could, to be fair, also have something to do with my affinity for Lovecraft, whose influence hovers over every minute of the film.

 This brings us back to the distinction between Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft. In the Mouth of Madness presents us with a sort of hybrid of the two - a wildly popular horror writer whose fiction is tied together by a sense of impending doom. It's an unofficial version of Lovecraft's mythos, to be sure, but De Luca and Carpenter are treading into the territory of the "normal man who stumbles into a vast conspiracy of cosmic proportions and goes mad" almost from the end of the opening credits. This is not a story of good vs. evil (which, I would argue is a hallmark of King's novels, if not his short stories), but of inevitability, of humanity realizing its insignificance in the presence of the "Old Ones," for whom Cane is a conduit. (If you're SPOILER averse, I'd skip the next sentence) As tends to be the case for the poor sap who wanders headlong into the Mythos, Trent eventually succumbs to his own madness, embracing his fate and transforming in a final audio cue. His hysterical laughter while watching the film-within-a-film (that is the film we're watching) is all the more telling. He's just a pawn. Embrace the change.

In the end, Carpenter might have one too many visual or editing flourishes (the kid on the bike, for example), but In the Mouth of Madness is one last great salvo from a director who would largely fall off of the cinematic map by the end of the 1990s. Sam Neill is great as the hard boiled-ish type who slowly but surely melts down in the presence of something more ancient, more powerful. I've always been shaky about Julie Carmen as styles, but as time passes I find her less grating. And how can I finish without mentioning Wilhelm Von Homburg, aka goon from Die Hard but more importantly as Vigo the Carpathian? He has a small role in Madness as the father of a boy that Cane takes in Hobb's End, and his two scenes ("Cane! Give me back my son!" and "I have to, he wrote me this way") are memorable in a film full of chilling moments. It's certainly the most pessimistic of the Apocalypse Trilogy, but if you're going to follow The Thing and Prince of Darkness, why leave any trace of hope?

Cap'n Howdy's (Back)Log: Documentary Recap!

   While it may come as a surprise to readers that the Cap'n spends time watching more than just schlock, more often than you'd expect I'll sit down and watch a documentary. What you may notice is that I don't often write about them, usually because I don't feel like rehashing what they're about. Ultimately, the question is whether there's something new to learn about the subject that you didn't already know (if you knew anything about it in the first place), and I suppose that most of the below succeed in that category to one degree or the other. In this instance, I'm including these mini-reviews to let you know they exist, because I hadn't seen or heard too much about them prior to screening.

Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters - It's hard not to see this movie and draw parallels to The King of Kong, because they are, in essence, about the same thing. Tetris fan Pat Cotri discovers that while there are a number of rankings on various sites, there has never been a tournament to determine a champion for the game, so he organizes one and invites various "masters" from around the world to compete. Looming over the entire event is the question of whether Thor Aackerlund, the legendary wunderkind of the Nintendo World Championships of the 1990s, will return from a self-imposed exile in order to join the tournament.

 Where Ecstasy of Order differs from The King of Kong is that there's no "David vs. Goliath" angle, ala the Billy Mitchell / Steve Wiebe high score battle. These are evenly matched players who accomplished extraordinary feats with the game of Tetris (the NES version, for those curious), including the rumors that Thor not only reached "Max Score" but has more lines than anyone on the "Kill Screen," - the point at which lines begin to fall so fast it's nearly impossible to line them up.

 Rather than deal with human conflict, Ecstasy of Order centers around technique, about the approach to Tetris, and about the many ways players accomplish feats most of us didn't know where possible. It becomes a bit hypnotic, and that's well before the demonstration of the "invisible pieces" version of Tetris appears in the film. I won't reveal who does and doesn't make it to the tournament, let alone who wins, but I appreciated the level of respect among competitors. The title of Tetris Master is no misnomer in this case.


 Rewind This! - A documentary about VHS tapes and the people who love them? Yes indeed, my friends. Designed as a love letter of sorts to a (mostly) defunct staple of home video, Rewind This both covers the history of the videotape, its rise and fall, and the fanatics who go out of their way to collect the obscure and the bizarre releases that will in all likelihood never be released again. As somebody who grew up during the era of home video (and who has more than a few VHS tapes at home), it's nice to see that the love for the format still exists, even though tapes have a worse chance than vinyl of enduring over time. The very things that come up about why VHS is so endearing - the tracking lines, the wear over parts of the film replayed repeatedly - are the very reason that they don't last. Tapes wear out, break, and can sadly be erased at a moment's notice.

 Now that hasn't stopped me from keeping the ones I have (and coveting the one VCR I own that still works) but the truth is that it's harder to maintain this medium. The nostalgia factor and the access to titles that, quite frankly, have and probably will only exist on tape is the driving thrust behind the documentary (not to mention a continuing thread on series like Red Letter Media's "Best of the Worst" or Everything is Terrible), so it was nice to see a celebration like Rewind This!. VHS essentially launched home video, and it was (and, I suppose, is) the longest running format to date. After all, DVD barely made it ten years before Blu-Ray began chipping away, and who knows how long that has before digital or the next innovation takes over? Eventually we may come to a point where the tapes no longer play, and Rewind This! might go from a love letter to an archive of a lost era, but in the meantime, it really got me jazzed to fire up the VCR again...

 41 - I didn't know much about George H.W. Bush - as a President or as a man - when I watched 41 so in that regard this HBO documentary was informative. It's much more focused on Bush as the man rather than as the public servant, and surprisingly doesn't cover much of his time as President (or, for more obvious reasons, his period in the CIA). If you don't know much about him or his family history, it's certainly worth checking out, but don't expect much in the way of political gossiping, ala Clinton's My Life. Other than a very curt mention of how he "doesn't want to talk about" Ross Perot and the 1992 election, Bush is remarkably magnanimous towards most of the people he worked with. You also won't learn too much about what he thinks about George W. Bush, or Jeb for that matter, but there's plenty about the dogs. I don't mean to undersell the documentary as fluff, because it really isn't - you'll learn a lot about Bush's personal history and home life, but there's a limit to the political lessons to be gleaned from the experience.

 Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic - Showtime produced a rather thorough documentary about the life of Richard Pryor, from his earliest stages of comedy right up until his premature retirement due to advanced MS. I must admit to being surprised at how much of Pryor's career I wasn't aware of, in particular the period before he dropped out of comedy to reinvent himself in anonymity out west. There's a great deal more to the "freebasing" incident that led to burns all over Pryor's head and body than one would think based on more cursory career retrospectives, and certainly more about how he lived after MS sidelined him (something even a heart attack couldn't do earlier in his life). I'm not sure that I'd ever seen footage from the failed attempt at Live on the Sunset Strip that preceded the concert film we all know, but it's fascinating to see his awareness that it's just not happening. My only gripe is that among all of the other comedians, celebrities, friends, and lovers interviewed, I don't understand why Dave Chappelle was included if he only appears twice in the documentary, for a total of less than two minutes. Both times he appears the comments are more conjecture than insight, and it seems like a waste of Chappelle to bring him in only to add nothing.


Necessary Evil: Super Villains of DC Universe - My familiarity with the villainy of the DC Universe is mostly limited to Batman, with a smattering of Superman and Green Lantern antagonists thrown in for good measure. Other than knowing the names Manta Ray, Black Adam, Reverse Flash, and Gorilla Grodd, I don't know much of anything about them. I'd like to say this documentary helped, but while a lot of DC antagonists are included, the focus sways heavily on psychoanalytical reasons for villains to exist and how each DC hero's rogues gallery is uniquely suited towards them.

 This is not to say that the documentary, narrated by Christopher Lee, isn't interesting, but if you're looking for more than the most cursory discussion of major villains, you might wish that this could be spun off into a series. Lex Luthor and the Joker get most of the screen time, and that's not actually that much, because at a little over 100 minutes, there's more of a focus into breaking them down into types with the occasional brief overview of characters like Man-Bat or Harley Quinn (again, Batman characters I already knew about).

 I'm not certain who this documentary is for, either, considering that many of the participants - including DC executives, artists, writers, voice actors, and people who on the surface have next to nothing to do with the comics (WWE Superstar CM Punk shows up once specifically to mention Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, and nothing else!) - talk about major characters as though fans have never heard of them. Doomsday's entire first appearance is covered, up to the death of Superman and an explanation of what happens if you kill Doomsday. Perhaps Necessary Evil was designed as a primer for readers of DC's new-ish "52" re-launch. I'm not sure. It's fun to watch, but I must admit that it amounts to little substance by the time it ends.


Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown - There's a lot of substance at hand in this documentary about one of the titans of horror writing. Yes, Stephen King sells more and Clive Barker is more disturbing, but the influence of H.P. Lovecraft permeates every crack and crevice, every darkened hallway of horror to this day. What I wasn't expecting from Fear of the Unknown, what turned out to be the most welcome, was how in depth the coverage of Lovecraft's personal life and how they influenced his writing. The documentary moves in a basically chronological fashion through his life, but takes detours to analyze major stories in depth with a who's who of writers, directors, and historians.

 Among the interviewees are Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi, writers Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Peter Straub, and directors John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, and Guillermo del Toro, all of whom bring a wealth of knowledge about the author and his stories. Carpenter tells the story of how, as a child, he read The Rats in the Walls in a horror anthology and its lasting effect on him. Much to my surprise, the racist tendencies in Lovecraft's writing isn't glossed over and discussion and contextualization of his opinions on immigration appear throughout Fear of the Unknown, often with a more frank and less apologetic tone than might be expected. The analysis of the stories is most welcome and the participants go well beyond rehashing the Elder Gods mythos in bringing insight to Lovecraft's many phases of writing. Also, make sure to watch the extra interviews if you pick up the disc to hear Carpenter discuss In the Mouth of Madness, Gordon explain why his adaptation of Shadow Over Innsmouth is called Dagon, or about del Toro's (currently) aborted attempt to adapt At the Mountains of Madness.


Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony - Well, maybe this should be called "the Extremely Unexpected Pre-teen to College-Aged Male Fans of My Little Pony," because at least at the outset, that's what Bronies seems to be about. This documentary is all over the place, and while I suppose it is enlightening, I'm not sure what audiences are supposed to take away from it, other than adults watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

(After doing a little research, it looks like the documentary was originally going to follow John de Lancie at conventions (he appears on the show as the voice of Discord) but when the Kickstarter campaign ended considerably more successful than anticipated, the scope changed. I'm not sure it was for the better.)

 Bronies is a schizophrenic film, one that starts with a montage of teenage guys talking about how weird it is that they like My Little Pony ("it's for little girls") and then later the persistent argument is that it shouldn't be weird but gee, isn't it so weird you guys? It's never a Trekkies level of "freak show" documentary* but I really think that if people didn't continually mention how weird people must think it is even though it's totally not and we should get over being prejudicial about the fact that adults watch cartoons for kids, the message might just sink in for itself. Seriously, all the documentary really needed was the scene where the dad of one Brony who doesn't know how to feel about his son liking the show talking to another dad who embraces his son's fandom. It says more than a dozen talking heads repeating ad nauseum that "there's nothing 'weird' about it" and that bullies should stop picking on Bronies. Yes, we got it. Please can we not keep reminding the audience that it's not weird that people are geeky about things. Most of them - particularly ones who are inclined to watch a documentary about Bronies - are going to move past the "weird" phase quickly.

 That said, the increased scope does mean that while the focus is all over the map, there is more of an international vibe to the film. Bronies follows an Israeli DJ who makes music based on the show, a couple in Germany who make their own figurines, a young man in England with Asperger's who travels to Manchester for his first convention, and stateside, a fan from a small town in North Carolina who is incessantly bullied for proudly displaying his fandom for the show. Hearing what the show means to all of them is worthwhile, and while I don't necessarily think it's "weird" for adults or young adults (we don't really meet adult fans until well into the movie) to like a cartoon, I get that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is probably viewed differently than Invader Zim or SpongeBob Squarepants (shows that started airing when I was well into my twenties).

 Interviews with de Lancie and voice actor Tara Strong are valuable, as well as insight from creator Lauren Faust, but I think Bronies tries too hard to be too many things - a late inclusion that "oh yeah, adult women like My Little Pony: Friendship is magic, too!" seemed, well, odd, as though the focus needed to shift once more well into production. This is a side note, but I could tell it was a Kickstarter funded production when the movie ended with nine minutes to go, and sure enough, eight of those nine minutes were names of people who helped to fund Bronies. I hope they don't mind that I skimmed that part - normally I watch the entire credits of a film out of respect for the people who made it, but even the Cap'n has limits. Still, enlightening, I guess, in that I a) had no idea there was a new My Little Pony show (and I worked in a toy store!) and b) that it had unexpected adult fans. Good on you, Friendship is Magic!

* In truth, nothing is ever as strange as the Trek-themed dentist, and yes, I get that initially My Little Pony cosplay just looks like neon "furries," but I've seen weirder examples of fandom. Like Steampunk. Yeah. Steampunk Comic Book Cosplay. That is a real thing.

Shocktober Revisited: Halloween H20 and Halloween Resurrection

 Originally, I had planned a Retro Review for Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, but  after doing some cursory research on the film I realized that I don't remember Halloween 6 at all. I saw it once, in the fall of 1995, and was surprised to discover Paul Rudd played Tommy Doyle in the film. Until I watch The Curse of Michael Myers again (or can locate the "Producer's Cut" mentioned online), there's really no point in revisiting a film I can't recall.

 Which brings me to Halloween: H20 and Halloween Resurrection, two movies I've barely seen again since the first time I watched them. They did, however, leave a greater impression on my mind than Donald Pleasance's final film appearance, and since I enjoy one of them more than anyone else seems to and really hate the other one, it's fitting to comment on the close of the pre-remake sequels to John Carpenter's Halloween. This one-two punch will leave the Cap'n with only Halloween 3, 5, and 6 to cover in the Blogorium*.

For those of you looking for a series recap, here's one in 60 words or less: Michael Myers kills his family, goes to a sanitarium under the care of Doctor Loomis, escapes, tries to kill Laurie Strode, fails, tries again, is replaced by an evil toy mask manufacturer, returns, tries to kill Laurie's niece Jamie, fails, tries again, fails, tries again, succeeds, but is then foiled by Loomis and a grown up Tommy Doyle**.

 Then there was a three year break, leading us to 1998, twenty years after the first Halloween. We move from Haddonfield, Illinois to somewhere in Northern California, where Keri Tate (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the dean of a private school with her son John (Josh Hartnett) and boyfriend Will (Adam Arkin). The funniest thing is that Keri Tate is a dead-ringer for Laurie Strode, and we discover that (SPOILER ALERT) she IS Laurie Strode. Laurie faked her death to keep Michael from chasing her (which is good, because Michael instead decided to wipe out the rest of her blood relations), and she'd been pretty successful avoiding (SPOILER ALERT AGAIN) her brother for the last twenty years. That is, until Doctor Loomis (the late Donald Pleasance, heard in narration) dies and Michael just happens to find his house and discover exactly where Laurie is. He also kills some kid (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) with an ice skate.

 Anyway, school's out for fall break(?) and Laurie's colleague Norma Watson (Janet Leigh, who is Jamie Lee Curtis' mother, which is technically a SPOILER for family tree detectives. I won't spoil that her father is Tony Curtis. Oh, crap) drives off in a car that looks a lot like Marion Crane (Janet Leigh)'s car from Psycho***. Michael begins stalking the campus, killing off students dumb enough to watch Scream 2 (gee, I wonder why? We'll get to that in a second...), and John and Molly (Michelle Williams) find the bodies and become "next" on the kill list. Unless Laurie, Will, and security guard Ronny (L.L. Cool J) can stop Michael.

 Why am I being so glib about H20? Well, the more I think about the film - based on a treatment by Scream co-creator Kevin Williamson - the stupider it seems. It's funny, because I guess I overlooked how stupid and obvious these references were when I was 19 (something the people who saw it with me did not), and the Cap'n instead focused on the Laurie Strode / Michael Myers story line. To be fair, that is the only thing H20 has going for it: the film decides to pretend that Halloween 4, 5, and 6 never happened****, which you can debate the relative merits of, I guess, in order to focus on the lethal sibling rivalry. The ending, where (SPOILER ALERT) Laurie decapitates an ambulance driver Michael's head is still a satisfying close to their story, one that the following film manages to ruin in the first five minutes.

 It's worth noting that even at the time we were impressed that L.L. Cool J took five or six rounds to the chest from a revolver and walked away at the end of the film. I don't remember if they said he was wearing a vest, but why would a prep school security officer need to?

Anyway, back to the way that Resurrection mangles everything, even making people who didn't like H20 say "well, at least that one didn't kill Laurie Strode." Oh, (SPOILER ALERT). Yeah, in addition to retrofitting H20 so that Michael somehow does a switcheroo with an ambulance driver before Laurie can lop his head off with an axe, they leap forward in time to an asylum where Laurie's been locked up, waiting for Michael to wander in unabated. Sure enough, they tangle, she tries to kill him (hanging? maybe?) but he stabs her or something and she falls from the roof of the asylum in what is the least effective death of a Final Girl since Jason Vorhees followed Alice Hardy back to town for some apartment complex murderin'.

But wait! That's the BEGINNING of Halloween: Resurrection, a movie that gets EVEN WORSE before Busta Rhymes drops some Kung Fu on Michael Myers. That does happen, by the way, and you don't need a SPOILER ALERT because we both know you don't have to watch this film.

So what, pray tell, could the plot of the 8th Halloween film be if the villain kills the Final Girl in the opening of the film? How about a webcam reality show about some stupid contestants wandering around the Myers house? Sound good? Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) and Nora Winston (Tyra Banks) sure thought so, and their web company, DangerTainment, is sponsoring this MTV's Fear knock-off. A group of college students (including Katee Sackhoff, Sean Patrick Thomas, and Thomas Ian Nichols) who "won" the chance to be on this show, wander around the house looking for clues about Michael Myers. Want to guess who has nowhere else to go after he killed his sister? Want to guess who isn't happy to find people in his childhood home? Want to place bets on whether a charred Michael Myers opens his eye for the final stinger in this turdstorm of a sequel?

The 19 year-old Cap'n may have been kind to H20, but the 23 year-old knew he hated Resurrection well before the halfway point. I remember not liking Halloween 6, but that's not as clear to me as the hatred for the last gasp of the Halloween franchise after Miramax squeezed everything left out in 2002. In retrospect, had I watched Resurrection again before Rob Zombie's Halloween, I might have been kinder, even with all of the idiotic "I'm gonna skullfuck you" dialogue. It's like the Weinstein brothers perceived a certain formula from H20 (a handful of "hot" young actors from better movies*****, a popular rapper, some referential dialogue, and whatever the newest fad was) and recycled it into a crappier version, a xerox of Kevin Williamson's already growing stale pop culture screenplays.

 Halloween: Resurrection is what people are complaining about when they talk about how awful sequels are, and devoid of the one consistent narrative thread between the first seven films (okay, six, since Halloween III isn't about Michael or his family tree), there's nothing worth investing your time in. I honestly can't say I've seen a moment of the film since we saw it on the big screen, and I know I've watched parts of H20 on cable. If one was on, the other one must have been at some point. After part 8, there was a five year layover, and then Zombie took over. At the time I write this, Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer (My Bloody Valentine 3-D, Drive Angry) have pitched a Halloween 3D to the Weinsteins that they may eventually get to after rebooting Hellraiser (you read that right), but for now, at least I can say that Rob Zombie's Halloween 2, for as many detractors as it has, is a MUCH better movie than Halloween Resurrection, and it's probably better than H20. Now who would've thought I'd ever say that?



*For write-ups of Halloween (kind of), Halloween II, Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween the Remake and Halloween 2 the Remake, follow the respective links.
** This much I gathered from IMDB's coverage of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.
*** SPOILER: It IS Marion Crane's car from Psycho.
**** In the interest of fairness, Williamson's original draft did include 4,5, and 6 as continuity, and writers Robert Zappia and Matt Greenberg wisely dropped the subplot.
**** And by that I mean American Pie and Save the Last Dance, and eventually Sackhoff would be in Battlestar Galactica but I'm not giving Bob and Harvey any credit for that one...

Shocktober Book Review Revisited: Shock Value

Since we're officially into Shocktober now, the grand month of Horror Fest(s), I thought I'd kick things off with one of Cap'n Howdy's rare book reviews. Today I'm looking at Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and and Invented Modern Horror by Jason Zinoman. It explores the period between Rosemary's Baby and Halloween, when outsiders made a huge impact on the way audiences experienced horror films, revitalizing the genre and ushering in a new era we're still feeling the effects of today.

 When Shock Value appeared on my radar, the only concern I had was that this might be old hat for the Cap'n. I'm a big fan of that particular era of horror, and have been soaking up books, interviews, and DVD extras about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Last House on the Left, Halloween, Alien, and Night of the Living Dead for years. I'm always interested in more analysis, but I had trepidations that Shock Value might bear no new fruit for a horror fanatic. Fortunately, I was well off base.

 Almost immediately Zinoman surprised me with a story in the Rosemary's Baby chapter, about a Vincent Price appearance on the Mike Douglas show where the horror icon was unable to defend the genre that made him famous (or, perhaps, was not interested in defending horror) from attacks by Dr. Fredric Wertham, the same man who killed EC Comics in the 1950s. I must admit that I had never heard of the debate, or of its impact in the transition from Old Horror to New Horror. Zinoman's coverage of the development of Rosemary's Baby also provides a nice counterpoint to the what Robert Evans presents in The Kid Stays in the Picture, his memoirs of developing pictures for Paramount.

 Shock Value is filled with surprising moments, including the aborted collaboration between John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper that eventually morphed into Halloween. I was particularly fond of the reactions the major figures in New Horror had to each others' work: for years, I suppose I considered Brian De Palma and Alfred Hitchcock to be mutually exclusive - that one simply mimicked the other, so it was (rightly or wrongly on my part) revelatory to hear that the Master had seen De Palma films before he passed (and didn't like them, to wit). Dan O'Bannon's fall out with John Carpenter after Dark Star produces a great deal of animosity on the former's part, especially to the success of Halloween. Sean Cunningham's reaction to Carpenter's slasher film is classic, and the way that Rosemary's Baby formed what The Exorcist became to William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin (along with the extended explanation of how the "Version You've Never Seen" came to be) were all stories I thought I knew well, but Zinoman finds a way to bring a fresh perspective.

 Speaking of Halloween, I'm a little curious about the construction of Zinoman's analysis of the film. Generally speaking, what successfully separated New Horror from Old Horror is the ambiguity of motive from the villains, a reflection of the uncertainty of America during and immediately after the Vietnam War. It's not that element that bothers me, but the way Zinoman frames Halloween - a success in spite of its "sloppy" mistakes. One or two of his assertions sent me back to the film, particularly the breakdown of Carpenter's opening sequence. For some reason, Zinoman chooses to fixate on the perspective shot of Michael Meyer's knife when he's stabbing his sister (a choice that identifies the audience and director's interest rather than the character). However, Zinoman treats this paragraph as though it's the first time we've seen the knife in the film. That wasn't how I remembered it, so I checked, and sure enough...

 The audience is already aware that the (to that point unseen killer) is carrying a knife, and we know what to expect when Michael arrives and his sister recognizes him. The shock of the murder is on her part, not the audiences. Zinoman's point is well made, but it's a sloppy mistake in a critique of "sloppy" moments in Halloween.

 My only other issue with Shock Value is that Zinoman echoes the central thesis of Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls at the end of the book. He arrives at the conclusion that the seminal voices of New Horror peaked in their early years, and have struggled to match, let alone surpass, their original masterpieces. Like Biskind, Zinoman highlights the struggles of many of the creative forces to move forward with any success (highlighting the failure of Romero's projects between Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, or O'Bannon's reputation as an intrusive curmudgeon kept him unable to parlay his involvement with Alien to anything until Return of the Living Dead. The controversy surrounding Tobe Hooper and Poltergeist isn't glossed over, either). Wes Craven is given the Scorsese-like pass of the "exception to the rule" because of the Scream series re-invigoration of horror in the late nineties (although A Nightmare on Elm Street is given a lukewarm reaction for its innovative first film and watered down sequels)..

 I take umbrage with this in part because I disagree with the premise of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and Zinoman mostly chooses to ignore the fact that John Carpenter had varying degrees of success in and out of horror through Vampires, not limited to The Fog, Christine, or In the Mouth of Madness. He scarcely "topped out" after Halloween and The Thing with an immediate (or even steady) decline attributed to Hooper and Cunningham and Romero. It makes me wonder whether the curious exclusion of Sam Raimi (save for a brief mention of The Evil Dead director during the "end of Horror's New Wave" portion of the epilogue), and the cursory inclusion of David Lynch and David Cronenberg during O'Bannon's "body horror" chapter.

 Overall, Shock Value has more than enough going for it that I'm willing to overlook minor quibbles like the Halloween analysis or the ambivalent closing. I was initially concerned that the book might be a retread of stories I'd heard in other documentaries (or from the directors / writers / producers themselves in other books), but you'll be pleasantly surprised by the more obscure anecdotes and the depth of insight into some of the heavily covered entries. Horror aficionados shouldn't hesitate to pick up Shock Value, even if you're positive you know what you'll find inside.

Shocktober Revisited: So You Won't Have To - The Thing (2011)

 It's almost too easy to beat up on The Thing - it's a movie with no purpose. From the big dumb cgi alien to the big dumb climax in the big dumb space ship to the between-credits sequence that's there to remind people that the END of this film is the BEGINNING of John Carpenter's The Thing, there's no reason for this movie to exist. If you thought to yourself "who gives a shit what happened to the Norwegian station?" when you realized this was a prequel and not another remake, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and writer Eric Heisserer didn't do anything that's going to make it worth your while. Their answer, apparently, was "pretty much the same thing that happened in the first remake."

 Let's get that out of the way right up front, by the way: I'm tired of reading reviews that call this a "remake" of John Carpenter's The Thing and then conveniently neglect to mention that Carpenter was remaking The Thing from Another World. Have any doubts about that? Watch the title screens of both films. Technically all three films present themselves as adaptations of John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" but the 2011 iteration is explicitly set right before the 1982 version. The newer Thing is designed to be linked to the first remake, which adapts the premise if not the structure of The Thing from Another World. John Carpenter's The Thing is a superb remake, and one of the arguments everyone uses when defending "good" remakes, because it is, in its own right, a fantastic horror film. It's prequel, on the other hand, is awfully familiar. Oh, and awful.

 To be honest, if the film didn't keep shitting its pants trying to be grosser or creepier than The Thing everybody loves, it might be okay. Then again, the reason everybody calls it a "remake" is because the story is so close to what happens in John Carpenter's film. After a promising opening where the Norwegian crew discovers the frozen spaceship and "thing," we meet Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a bio-paleontologist invited to attend a "discovery" on short notice by Dr. Sandor Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) and his research assistant Adam (Eric Christan Olsen). We already know what the "discovery" is, because if we've seen The Thing from Another World and / or The Thing, we've seen the outline of the ship and the frozen specimen. This time we get to see the ship, which at first seems novel but then becomes ridiculous at the end of the film.

 Well, you can guess that they bring the specimen back to the base camp, it thaws out, starts killing / absorbing people, and before we know it no one can trust each other. First they pull a "bait and switch" about who the Thing has "copied" in a helicopter attack scene that defies narrative logic. Okay, I'm willing to accept that the Thing is (SPOILER) just trying to get back to its ship and not headed for society like Kate worries it will. That's fine. But why, when in the helicopter, does the Thing freak out and attack the guy we thought was "infected" and cause the copter to crash, presumably killing it and the two American pilots (Joel Edgerton and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). But wait! They aren't dead, so Kate doesn't trust them. Could one of them be the Thing that survived and (for no good reason) returned to the camp?

 The paranoia that works so well in Carpenter's film is nonexistent. Why? None of the characters are remotely memorable. It's hard to care about who is or isn't the Thing when your protagonists are two pilots who should be dead, three scientists who behave suspiciously, a bland research assistant and a gaggle of interchangeable Norwegian victims-to-be. I give Mary Elizabeth Winstead credit for trying to keep everything together, and I will also concede that the film wisely doesn't try to make her into a Jack MacReady surrogate. That said, she's constantly pushed into the background of scenes by characters I could care less about and I didn't buy the "sad" ending before the film remembered it needed to bridge to a much better film.

 Because they couldn't use the "blood" test again, there's a half novel but half baked attempt to develop the absorbing powers of the creature. It can't mimic non-organic material, so Kate decides the best way to see who is and isn't human is to - it's so much stupider typing it - check everyone's mouths for fillings. Seriously. They set up the Thing's evolution but couldn't figure out how to parlay that into an interesting way of generating suspense. Why? Because FOUR people don't have fillings and only one of them is the Thing, but we don't find out which one until a silly fight scene between the pilots and the scientists.

 A word on the effects - I was under the impression that 2011's The Thing was to have more "practical" special effects and less CGI. What I didn't realize was that was limited to corpses. The work by Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. is appropriately disgusting, but it isn't freakish or disturbing like Rob Bottin's effects. They also don't move - the practical effects are for corpses, of fused Thing/human hybrids or half absorbed corpses or charred remains. Anything that moves is bad looking CGI that seems like it was borrowed from Dead Space. Things look even stupider in the ship, where the Thing looks like a rejected monster from Men in Black II.

Who was this movie made for? I can't imagine people who have seen The Thing from Another World or The Thing sitting through the entire film. Only people with a passing knowledge of Carpenter's film would even stay engaged, but most of the connections at the end would be lost on them. I actually give a pass to selling it as "from the producers of Dawn of the Dead" because in theory, it could have been different enough of a take on the premise that using Zack Snyder's remake as a basis for comparison. Had the film lived up to that concept, maybe I could understand why it exists.

 For a brief moment in the first thirty minutes, I thought there might be something watchable in The Thing. It turned out that there was, and it was John Carpenter's The Thing. Why I watched the watered down, CGI "enhanced" version is anyone's guess. Well, the truth is that I said "what the hell" and rolled the dice. Never has the term "craps" been more appropriate. Let's just say I watched it So You Won't Have To and leave it at that.

Shocktober Revisited: Documentaries - Going to PIeces; The Rise and Fall of the Slasher FIlm

 Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film is a pretty good documentary, if a little light on content. Truthfully, it's a pretty good overview of the genre (with the exception of never mentioning Black Christmas and only showing clips of it during a montage of kills), but you could make much longer pieces about any number of sub-sections they spend time on. Sure, there are plenty of lengthy docs about the Friday the 13th series and at least three really good Halloween documentaries, and more Tom Savini featurettes than you can shake a stick at. Still, there's some interesting stuff tucked into the middle section of the movie, including the first acknowledgment of Splatter University's existence I've seen. Some lesser discussed slasher and post-slasher movies get their due; movies like The Prowler, Sleepaway Camp, He Knows You're Alone, and April Fool's Day. Even something as shitty as Return to Horror High gets a quick mention.

As noted above, many devotees to the genre are going to wonder why certain movies don't get as much attention (Alice, Sweet Alice, Black Christmas, and a deeper investigation of Suspiria's influence) and the transitional music is a little distracting, even if it is by Harry Manfredini (he of the ch-ch-ch kill-kill-kill). There's sort of a lull between A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, but the movie is so front heavy you might not notice.

There's also the curious style of interviewing people: the director really must have wanted something different, because some interviewees are constantly walking or being circled by the camera (the editor of Fangoria and Greg Nicotero stand out) and the camera is sometimes uncomfortably close to people like Tom Savini and Robert Shaye of New Line. Still, the line up of people interviewed is pretty impressive. Of particular note are Felissa Rose (the original Angela from Sleepaway Camp) and Fred Walton, who defends April Fool's Day and its twist ending, insisting that Paramount decided to market the film as a slasher movie. Oh, and kudos to Going to Pieces covering the feminist angle on Slumber Party Massacre during the "Critic Bashing" section.

You may not have the same problem that I did with this, but the movie itself would not play from the dvd menu. In fact, nothing would; I had to press stop and then play again to get the film itself to play. None of the special features would play either, which bummed me out because there was a bonus interview with Bob Clark, director of Black Christmas (and, incidentally, A Christmas Story) which leads me to believe there was some coverage of Black Christmas cut from the film. Bummer.

At 88 minutes, Going to Pieces is possibly too short, but if you're a fan of slasher movies or want to give somebody a good primer on the genre, it's certainly worth watching. Some of the stories won't be new, but the inclusion of lesser known entries and the people who made them more than cover for old anecdotes. If you can get the dvd to play, it comes Recommended.

Now bring on the follow-ups!

Horror Fest VIII (Day Two): Prince of Darkness

 It’s been almost a decade since I last watched Prince of Darkness. In fact, the last time I did was followed by the first time I saw Visiting Hours, which turned out not to be such a good idea for Visiting Hours. I suppose I should watch the latter again now, because Prince of Darkness is pretty good but nowhere near as great as I remembered it being.

  For those of you who follow John Carpenter to any degree (or just read the end of the last recap), you are probably already aware that Prince of Darkness is the second part of what he calls the “Apocalypse Trilogy.” If you’re just a casual fan of his movies, you’ve probably heard of the other two films – The Thing (has not played at a Fest… yet) and In the Mouth of Madness (Horror Fest III) – all of which deal with the end of the world in some capacity. At the risk of spoiling both films, let’s just say they don’t end well for the protagonists. Prince of Darkness has the, shall we say, “happy” ending of the three, if you can call it that.

 Thematically, The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness deal with different aspects of the human experience: in The Thing, it’s the inability to trust one another, and with In the Mouth of Madness, it’s about notions of reality. Prince of Darkness is about the uneasy space between science and religion, and Carpenter poses some intriguing questions but doesn’t always get around to addressing them.

 Writing under the pseudonym Martin Quatermass (the first of several references to the British science fiction film series), Carpenter ties together quantum physics with religious prophecy and makes a somewhat uneasy mix, largely because of the uneven nature of the film. Donald Pleasance plays a priest invited to see a dying colleague, who passes holding a metal box. Inside the box is a key that unlocks the basement of the Godard Church, where the “Order of Sleep” has been keeping something ancient and almost certainly evil in a large glass container. Convinced that this green liquid is a physical manifestation of the “prince of darkness,” he contacts Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) to investigate its origins.

 Birack teaches quantum theory at Kneale University, and brings along his PhD students (including cast members Jameson Parker, Lisa Blount, and Dennis Dun) to help him study the cylinder.  (It’s worth pointing out that while Parker’s Brian Marsh says something to the effect of getting his “doctorate” in physics, there’s also a scene where Birack says “now I know none of you have your degree in this” which puts a puzzling  conundrum about how old these students are supposed to be). At the church, they set up equipment and meet a number of other scientists, including chemists and microbiologists led by Caler (Jessie Lawrence Ferguson) and Dr. Paul Leahy (Peter Jason), as well as a theologian (Ann Yen), there to help translate a book resting near the green liquid. Of concern to almost everyone inside is an ominous – and growing – contingent of the homeless outside of the church, including Alice Cooper (billed as “Street Schizo”).

 Undoubtedly there’s some creepy imagery (nature also seems to respond to the presence in the basement, so there’s a lot of creepy crawly business and one great scene involving beetles) and admittedly some novel combination of religion and science (one of the many discoveries in the book are a set of equations that go beyond what any of Birack’s students recognize). The hook comes halfway into the film, when a collective “dream” sets in: we later discover that it’s a transmission from the future (1999!) sent to warn people in the present that they have to stop the coming of Satan and the release of the “Anti-God.” It seems to change slightly every time we see it, but would be served better had it not been introduced so late into the narrative.

 The problem with Prince of Darkness is that there are so many good ideas swirling around that it’s disappointing when most of them go undeveloped. Blame it on a cast that keeps growing in the first thirty or forty five minutes, to the point that we’re continually being introduced to people and just barely aware of what purpose they serve, other than to (SPOILER) be possessed. The grand “plan” to release the “Anti-God” isn’t really clear until nearly the end of the movie and is resolved so quickly that it barely has any impact. Moreover, it’s meant to be a “tragic” ending for Marsh, but Jameson Parker has more of an impact for his rockin’ (if uneven) mustache than his chemistry with Lisa Blount’s Catherine. It’s also puzzling that the most obnoxious character ever – Dennis Dun’s Walter – makes it all the way through the movie when his “type” is usually marked for death from the first inappropriate comment.

 I don’t actually mind that Walter lives – it’s a good bit of misdirection for Carpenter – but the why of who is and isn’t possessed is unclear and the seemingly endless discussions between Pleasance and Wong about their respective fields don’t add any insight to either position. Prince of Darkness has some good ideas knocking around, but Carpenter (as he would later admit) doesn’t quite know what he wants to say about them. The end result is a very good premise that’s diluted in the execution, giving the film a somewhat earned cult status among John Carpenter fans. It’s certainly worth watching, but for my money the weakest entry in the “Apocalypse Trilogy.”

 Up Next: Speaking of Satan, how about Rosemary’s Baby?

Shocktober Revisited: A Tale of Two Halloween II's (Part One)

 So let's talk about the sequel to John Carpenter's Halloween. You know it as Halloween II.

Or, as the trailer puts it: "More of the night He came home".


Yes, that's what it really says, and it should give you a pretty good indication of the kind of sequel Halloween II is. It is, after all, a movie John Carpenter drank his way through writing. Believe me; it shows.

The Cap'n used to really like Halloween II, and without watching it for several years, I held it in pretty high regard. It was one of the first ten dvds I ever owned (along with Ghostbusters, Mallrats, Jaws, and Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn) and I've held it fondly in my memory, at least until three days ago.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm going to err on the side of "yes, Cap'n, we've seen Halloween and Halloween II," so recapping the film is not necessary. Instead, I'm going to share my revised thoughts on the film, pros and cons, then provide a "wish list" of sorts for things from Halloween II I'd like to see in Rob Zombie's H2.

To be kind, let's start with things I did like:

- The opening recaps the last five minutes of Halloween quite nicely for audiences (it was three years between the first and second film) and quickly gives urgency for Dr. Loomis to find a very alive Michael Myers loose in Haddonfield.

- Starting and ending the film with "Mr. Sandman" is an inspired move. The song can, under the right circumstances, be rather ethereal and creepy (see Nan Vernon's version in Zombie's Halloween remake.) As it plays over a crane shot re-introducing the Jarvis house, you're in the frame of mind that this Halloween is anything but nostalgic.

- The early way Michael stalking scenes are handled well; a combination of first person perspective shots and well placed lighting that reveal Myers at exactly the right time. My favorite is when Michael slowly un-dissolves from the darkness in Dr. Mixter's office. The entire sequence with the Security Guard, Mr. Garrett, is also well executed.

- Some of the kills are pretty cool, particularly the inventiveness of the hospital murders. I'm thinking specifically of the "Tub" sequence, the hypodermic needle kills, and the blood drawing of Mrs. Alves.

- For a while, it looks like Halloween is going to address not merely Laurie and Dr. Loomis, but Haddonfield in a broader sense. Much of the first half of the film is about the way the citizens react to the murders of Halloween and the possibility that a killer is loose in their city. The "wake" for Annie at the Myers house does hint at a deeper movie than Halloween II ends up being, which is unfortunate. Had they not dropped so much of that depth, the film may have been better.

- I love that in order to throw a red herring into the Loomis chase of Michael that Halloween II just arbitrarily kills a guy who coincidentally looks exactly like Michael Myers. What's more, it's not enough to pin him against a truck with a police car; there has to be a huge explosion and lingering shots of faux-Michael burning to death.

- Speaking of burning, I do like the final shots of the film: one of Laurie in the ambulance and then a comparably lingering shot of real-Michael facedown in the hospital, burning to not-death (as we discover in Halloween IV).


Now, unfortunately, there are the cons.

- Many of the things I like about Halloween II are undone by its last 40 minutes, which are almost exclusively in the hospital. Key to the problems of Halloween II is the fact that Laurie Strode has nothing to do. So miniscule is her role in the film that the script frequently finds excuses for Laurie to pass out, lapse into a coma, or simply hide out when no one is looking for her, just to get her character out of the film.

- As a result, the "cat and mouse" elements of the film with Michael and Laurie, when they finally do happen, are awkward and unnecessarily drawn out. Since the geography of the hospital is never clearly established (I think we're supposed to believe that the Maternity Ward, Rehab Room, and Laurie's room are on the same floor of a three story hospital), the two chases involving Laurie and Michael just don't make any sense.

_ The other kills Michael commits in the hospital are also riddled with sensical errors. While drowning the nurse in a "boiling" tub, Michael's right hand spends as much time in the "scalding" water as her boiled face does, yet it's perfectly normal throughout the movie. In fact, the hand Michael puts in the boiling water is the same one he wields his knife with, so you see quite a bit of how not "scalded" it is. The one character (Paul) who doesn't die in the hospital has a great fake out that never gets a payoff. He slips and falls in a puddle of blood, and it splashes up on his mouth, making Paul look like another victim. Rather than use this to any effect in the chase scenes, Paul simply appears later, getting into the exact car Laurie happens to be hiding in. Then, he inexplicably passes out on the horn and disappears from the rest of the movie. One or two of these things might be acceptable by "slasher" standards, but to come one after the other for 40 minutes is too nonsensical to accept.

- Of course, there are a lot of things in Halloween II that don't make sense in a "bad" way. I can live with the random killing of a teenager to keep Loomis and Laurie apart, but there are a lot of "convenient" things that pile up on top of each other in such a way that you can't suspend disbelief near the end. Among them: Laurie is unable to scream for Loomis until after he goes in the hospital, the extent of her injuries change depending on how convenient it is for her to escape, Loomis is given a crucial piece of information while being dragged out of Haddonfield by a Marshall and then decides to commandeer the car at gunpoint, so he can finally confront Michael, knowing the truth about why he chose Halloween to return.

- And oh my, is it a BAD reason. For some reason I used to defend the "Laurie is Michael's sister" plot "twist" in Halloween II, at least until Halloween: H20. When it became a central plot point in Rob Zombie's Halloween, I stepped back, and watching the awkward way the twist is handled, I can't defend it any more. When Loomis finds out that Laurie was adopted by the Strodes after Michael's parents died, he says the following (verbatim):

"Geez! Don't you see what he's doing here in Haddonfield? He killed one sister fifteen years ago and now he's trying to kill the other!"

The line is delivered so flatly by Donald Pleasance that I had trouble not laughing. Carpenter's script sloppily handles this "twist" by introducing terrible flashbacks while Laurie is in the hospital that deliver ham-handed lines like "Laurie, I'm not your real mother" and a shot of young Laurie visiting Michael in the asylum. You know, the same asylum that Dr. Loomis spent fifteen years studying Michael, and yet he a) never saw Laurie visit Michael, and b) doesn't know about this extension of the Myers family because "it was sealed by the Governor two years after Michael was locked up to protect the Strodes."

Suddenly I find myself longing for Daeg Faerch calling baby Laurie "Boo" before slaughtering his family of trailer trash.

Speaking of which, having watched the sequel to Halloween, here are a few things I'd like to see Zombie include in his sequel to the remake:

- I'm really hoping that this "Hobo" Michael plot device means that we're going to get more of the citizens of Haddonfield in H2. Certainly, considering that the cast has only grown with more people in town (including Margot Kidder, Bill Moseley, Daniel Roebuck, Mark Christopher Lawrence, Caroline Williams, and Howard Hesseman), I can hope that the scale of H2 reflects the promise abandoned by Halloween II.

- Truthfully, since he's already hinted at the hospital massacre, is it too much to ask for the arbitrary kill to throw Loomis off of Michael's trail? It's such an out-of-left-field move for Halloween II that I can picture Zombie borrowing it.

- Could there maybe be a twist where Laurie isn't Michael's sister? Maybe it's Annie instead? That's so dumb it might actually work!

- While it's not technically from Halloween II, is there a way to incorporate the police reaction from Halloween IV? One of the things I loved about that movie is that instead of the local cops not listening to Dr. Loomis, instead they mobilize to keep everyone safe and it still fails. It was a great twist on the slasher convention from a sequel that's honestly better than part II.

- One final request that I know won't happen, but could H2 at least try keeping Loomis and Laurie together for more than three minutes? It's not that I find the two of them combined are much more effective (I mean, Loomis shoots Michael 13 times and Laurie shoots him twice to no avail) but to be honest I minded Scout Taylor-Compton less when Malcolm McDowell was also on-screen.

You know what? It almost doesn't matter if none of that happens because we have "Ghost Deborah Myers", played by Sheri Moon-Zombie, which I still contend is crazy enough to make H2 vaguely watchable. While it shouldn't be that hard to make H2 better than Halloween II, I remain skeptical.

"V" is for Village of the Damned (1995)

 John Carpenter had a rough go at it in the 1990s. From 1980 to 1988, he racked up a filmography that any sci-fi or horror director would kill to have half of: The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Starman, They Live, Prince of Darkness, Christine, and Big Trouble in Little China. And that was following up bringing the world Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and what the hell, let's throw Elvis in there for good measure. For all intents and purposes, regardless of their box-office success, Carpenter had cemented himself as an all time genre Hall of Famer.

 Which is good, because the next ten years wouldn't have anywhere close to as good a run. Because I haven't seen it in years, I'll withhold judgement on Memoirs of an Invisible Man, a movie I faintly remember enjoying, but aside from In the Mouth of Madness, you'll be hard pressed to name one of his movies that anybody really likes. There's Escape from LA, a grab-bag of terrible ideas that makes one long for the stripped down New York setting; and of course Vampires, a movie that I happen to appreciate for its trashy, "movies for guys who like movies" approach, but the Cap'n also understands that I'm in a very small minority on that one. I don't even try to defend Vampires to most Carpenter fans. But I still wouldn't consider it the low water mark of his 90s output. That distinction belongs to the disaster that is Village of the Damned.

 I understand that nobody thought The Thing was going to be any good, so Carpenter attempting another remake, also of a well-regarded sci-fi / horror movie (this time from 1960) was probably met with mixed expectations. The Thing is, bar none, one of the best examples of how to remake a movie the right way (or re-adapt, if you prefer), and is frequently cited every time somebody defends Hollywood's propensity for remaking films. Fair enough, but this wasn't 1982, and while In the Mouth of Madness is more well regarded today, I don't see anybody crawling out of the woodwork to argue that John Carpenter's Village of the Damned deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the original. Or at all.

 In the small town of Midwich, California, everything is just fine. Doctor Alan Chafee (Christopher Reeve) is heading out of town for the day while his wife, Barbara (Karen Kahn) is getting ready to show a house for her realty company. Jill McGowan (Linda Kozlowski), the school principal, is getting the fair ready for town, and her husband Frank (Michael Paré) is off to pick up the helium for the balloons. Everybody is having a nice, small town kind of day, when shadows overhead that seem to be whispering cause everyone and everything to collapse for six hours. Alan returns to find a police barricade and a line that marks where it isn't safe to cross, along with scientist Dr. Susan Verner (Kirstie Alley), who is very interested in this unexplained phenomenon. When everybody wakes up, no one seems to know what happened or why, but there have been a number of casualties (including Frank). Stranger still, many of the women in town are pregnant, and the children they give birth to are... different.

 While John Carpenter's Village of the Damned, like The Thing, still credits the book as the initial source material (in this case, The Midwich Cuckoos), the original screenwriters of the 1960 version are also credited, so let's not pretend this is a page one re-adaptation. That might have helped. Hell, anything might have helped, because I'm not sure what John Carpenter was thinking with this movie. It's not just that Village of the Damned isn't a successful remake or that it was a bad idea - no, John Carpenter's Village of the Damned is a terrible movie.

  Unless he was secretly trying to make a Neil LaBute / Nicolas Cage-style Wicker Man "secret" comedy, Carpenter failed in almost everything he was trying to do with Village of the Damned. Instead of being eerie, the kids are obnoxious. Instead of their actions being unsettling, they're unintentionally comical. I haven't laughed so hard when I knew I was supposed to be disturbed since 8MM, but I couldn't take Village of the Damned seriously. We're not even talking "campy" here, because it's too stupid and clumsy in its execution to really accept at face value. The shots of the children, especially when they're too young to talk, are begging you to make "yeah, that'll teach you" voices or mob style threats in children's voices. I know I shouldn't be, but Carpenter does such an awful job of making them seem menacing that there's no alternative.

 Oh, and the eye glowing. I know, that's not new, but the multi-colored, not entirely clear what purpose it serves because everybody who gets it dies right up until the very end when it abruptly changes purpose. Suddenly they need it to really read your mind and not just force you to impale yourself on a broomstick or set yourself on fire. I guess it's all a matter of thinking of a brick wall very, very hard that trips their powers up. In the meantime, it's the standard "green," "orange," and "red" varieties, all of which end with an adult doing the suicide mambo so there's no clear evidence the evil alien children (SPOILER) did the deed. Even though every single adult speaks openly to each other that they know what's going on. Attaway to build suspense, Carpenter!

 The parents don't help, because rather than be intimidated by the clearly alien children, they're first and only reaction is to be annoyed. That includes the preacher, played by Mark Hamill (who had recently worked with Carpenter on Body Bags), whose death scene, involving a rifle, is laughable at best. It's nothing compared to the psychic battle of wills between Christopher Reeve and his "daughter" Mara (Lindsey Haun) at the end of the film, which results in some of the most unintentionally ridiculous faces I've ever seen him make (and we're talking about the star of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace here). The scene where the children take out an entire police force, the military, and a helicopter is borderline parodic, and still I can't bring myself to believe that's actually what Carpenter was trying to do.

 Village of the Damned isn't quite the nadir of Carpenter's career (that still belongs to the reigning champ, Ghost of Mars), but it's not a good movie. It's not even a "so bad it's good movie" - it's just awful. Nothing works, from the acting to the kills to the head scratching collaboration between Carpenter and Dave Davies of The Kinks. Think jangly guitars and droning synthesizers and you'll have some idea of how mismatched the pairing is. I guess the only upside is that the two main children still have careers: Thomas Dekker, who played David (the only "good" alien child) was in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Lindsey Haun had a recurring role on True Blood, so it's nice to know that John Carpenter's stupid movie didn't ruin everything. It's probably better that people remember In the Mouth of Madness and (sometimes) Vampires, because the rest of the decade was pretty much a wash for him, and the new millennium didn't get much better...

 Up next: "W" is for Weekend!

Happy Crom Day to You!

 Interesting tidbit: thirty years ago today (May 14th), Conan the Barbarian opened in theatres (and, I can hope, Drive-Ins) across the country. The Cap'n was a little too young to see Conan the Barbarian (being three years and exactly one month old), so I missed out on that and the rest of the "Class of '82," what has become a semi-legendary year for geek cinema. That's how geeks characterize it now, because I don't remember it being a big point in pop culture during the 80s or 90s, but it's all good. Starting in 2007, when the "Class of '82" turned twenty five, retrospectives kicked in, and now we're at the thirty year mark, which is right around the age of people who pay attention to things like this. Like me.

 Well, that got away from where I wanted it to go. Anyway, so if you aren't in the mood to check it out, here are some of the movies released in 1982:

 The Boogens
 Annie
 Death Wish II
 Victor / Victoria
 Rocky 3
 Six Pack
 The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
 Zapped!
 Yes, Giorgio
 Halloween III: Season of the Witch
 Tootsie
 Gandhi
 48 Hours
 The Verdict
 The Toy
 Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
 One from the Heart
 Visiting Hours
 Airplane 2: The Sequel


 Wait... what do you mean "that's the wrong list"? What the hell is wrong with that list? I like those movies. Geeks like The Boogens, right? What do you mean "they haven't seen The Boogens?" That's not my problem! They love Rocky 3 and Death Wish II and 48 Hours! Hell, some of them will even defend the indefensible, like Zapped! and the misguided but I guess not unwatchable Halloween III...

 Okay, fine. It's true that the list above is an "alternate" list I compiled while I was trying to get the "canonized" releases right. Honestly, I'm standing by the assertion that about half of them still fit in just fine with the actual "Class of '82" which includes:

 Conan the Barbarian
 E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
 Blade Runner
 John Carpenter's The Thing
 First Blood
 Das Boot
 Friday the 13th Part III (in 3D)
 Porky's
 Cat People
 The Sword and the Sorcerer
 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
 Poltergeist
 The Secret of Nimh
 Tron
 Pink Floyd: The Wall
 Fast Times at Ridgemont High
 Class of 1984
 The Beastmaster
 Eating Raoul
 Creepshow
 Q: The Winged Serpent
 The Last Unicorn
 The Dark Crystal

 I included movies like Das Boot and cult films like Eating Raoul and Q in this list because they're frequently mentioned, but like Halloween III I suppose they could go on either list. It's a shame more of you haven't seen The Boogens though...

 Now, that is an impressive lineup. It comprises the list of movies that many people my age watched on home video along with the likes of Ghostbusters, The Goonies, and Back to the Future all the way through adolescence. I can only imagine what it must have been like to see Conan the Barbarian one week and then to see The Road Warrior the next. To be old enough to really take in a summer filled with that many cherished entries into "geek" cinema is something I can only envy from afar. I wasn't old enough to even be cognizant that Ridley Scott was adapting Philip K. Dick and John Milius would set the bar for "sword and sorcery" films that hasn't ever really been matched in the 80s, 90s, or 21st century. And it was the second of three "sword and sorcery" films just that year!

 To wonder what the guy who made Halloween, The Fog, and Escape from New York was going to do with The Thing from Another World or how Paul Schrader was going to reinvent Cat People. Most of all, to see it with fresh eyes, in a world devoid of the internet and where cable television didn't have the range of coverage it does now. By the time I'd heard of most of these movies, it was through people who had already seen them or through movie guides. By the time I knew what Season of the Witch was, I had been warned that it didn't continue the Laurie Strode / Michael Meyers story and was therefore a "mistake." On the other hand, Blade Runner's failure and stature as something of a "cult" phenomenon allowed me to approach the 1992 "Director's Cut" with intrigue.

So looking back at the way these films were released, it's understandable how Tron, Blade Runner, and The Thing were all swept aside by the "summer of E.T." Steven Spielberg had a massive hit on his hands, and Scott's narrative-ly dense dystopia and Carpenter's misanthropic and nihilistic alien invasion film weren't exactly going to fit in with a friendly extra terrestrial eating Reese's Pieces. Tron? Well, it took twenty eight years for Disney to even consider making a sequel to its "world inside a computer" film, and it fared about as well. I happen to like Tron, partly because of its place in my childhood but also because as I grew up more of it made sense and it's really not a "one sitting" kind of movie. E.T., on the other hand, has a little something for everybody, and in one go-round.

 There are so many different things you could talk about here, like Star Trek II getting everything fans wanted right where The Motion Picture didn't (again, this is based mostly on what I understand, as I was introduced to Star Trek films through Wrath of Khan and not The Motion Picture) or the way that the otherwise formulaic sequel Friday the 13th Part III introduced the iconic image for the series (Jason's hockey mask) while also having just about every "point something at the camera" 3D gimmick you can think of. You had the first John Rambo film, Sylvester Stallone fighting Mr. T, the first Mad Max film most Americans had seen (and without dubbing), the movie that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger as an action star, two legendary comedies, and George Romero and Stephen King's homage to EC Comics.

 Okay, so I poked a little fun at the beginning, but it is clear why 1982 was such a rich year for revisiting. Most of those films were regulars at the Howdy household, at least during age-appropriate periods. Some of them were discoveries in high school and in college because of their release in proximity to the rise of home video. It was hard not to know they existed because whether I'd seen them or not, the box covers were at both video stores in town. Filling in the context came later, and being nostalgic for a period that I lived through but couldn't participate in after that. I get why so many geeks of my generation fixate on this particular year.

  But the real takeaway here - other than wishing Conan the Barbarian a happy 30th birthday / anniversary - is that you should see The Boogens. Seriously - it's a pretty good slasher movie with kinda goofy monsters but you don't see them until the very end. It's one of those under represented horror films that deserves its day. And if you're not the horror type - and honestly, if you're reading this blog I don't know how that's possible - there's always Six Pack. Kenny Rogers, Diane Lane, Anthony Michael Hall, Erin Gray, an RV full of orphans and a grizzled stock car racer. Or something like that. It clearly doesn't suck is what I'm saying here.

So You Won't Have To: The Thing (2011)

 It's almost too easy to beat up on The Thing - it's a movie with no purpose. From the big dumb cgi alien to the big dumb climax in the big dumb space ship to the between-credits sequence that's there to remind people that the END of this film is the BEGINNING of John Carpenter's The Thing, there's no reason for this movie to exist. If you thought to yourself "who gives a shit what happened to the Norwegian station?" when you realized this was a prequel and not another remake, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and writer Eric Heisserer didn't do anything that's going to make it worth your while. Their answer, apparently, was "pretty much the same thing that happened in the first remake."

 Let's get that out of the way right up front, by the way: I'm tired of reading reviews that call this a "remake" of John Carpenter's The Thing and then conveniently neglect to mention that Carpenter was remaking The Thing from Another World. Have any doubts about that? Watch the title screens of both films. Technically all three films present themselves as adaptations of John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" but the 2011 iteration is explicitly set right before the 1982 version. The newer Thing is designed to be linked to the first remake, which adapts the premise if not the structure of The Thing from Another World. John Carpenter's The Thing is a superb remake, and one of the arguments everyone uses when defending "good" remakes, because it is, in its own right, a fantastic horror film. It's prequel, on the other hand, is awfully familiar. Oh, and awful.

 To be honest, if the film didn't keep shitting its pants trying to be grosser or creepier than The Thing everybody loves, it might be okay. Then again, the reason everybody calls it a "remake" is because the story is so close to what happens in John Carpenter's film. After a promising opening where the Norwegian crew discovers the frozen spaceship and "thing," we meet Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a bio-paleontologist invited to attend a "discovery" on short notice by Dr. Sandor Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) and his research assistant Adam (Eric Christan Olsen). We already know what the "discovery" is, because if we've seen The Thing from Another World and / or The Thing, we've seen the outline of the ship and the frozen specimen. This time we get to see the ship, which at first seems novel but then becomes ridiculous at the end of the film.

 Well, you can guess that they bring the specimen back to the base camp, it thaws out, starts killing / absorbing people, and before we know it no one can trust each other. First they pull a "bait and switch" about who the Thing has "copied" in a helicopter attack scene that defies narrative logic. Okay, I'm willing to accept that the Thing is (SPOILER) just trying to get back to its ship and not headed for society like Kate worries it will. That's fine. But why, when in the helicopter, does the Thing freak out and attack the guy we thought was "infected" and cause the copter to crash, presumably killing it and the two American pilots (Joel Edgerton and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). But wait! They aren't dead, so Kate doesn't trust them. Could one of them be the Thing that survived and (for no good reason) returned to the camp?

 The paranoia that works so well in Carpenter's film is nonexistent. Why? None of the characters are remotely memorable. It's hard to care about who is or isn't the Thing when your protagonists are two pilots who should be dead, three scientists who behave suspiciously, a bland research assistant and a gaggle of interchangeable Norwegian victims-to-be. I give Mary Elizabeth Winstead credit for trying to keep everything together, and I will also concede that the film wisely doesn't try to make her into a Jack MacReady surrogate. That said, she's constantly pushed into the background of scenes by characters I could care less about and I didn't buy the "sad" ending before the film remembered it needed to bridge to a much better film.

 Because they couldn't use the "blood" test again, there's a half novel but half baked attempt to develop the absorbing powers of the creature. It can't mimic non-organic material, so Kate decides the best way to see who is and isn't human is to - it's so much stupider typing it - check everyone's mouths for fillings. Seriously. They set up the Thing's evolution but couldn't figure out how to parlay that into an interesting way of generating suspense. Why? Because FOUR people don't have fillings and only one of them is the Thing, but we don't find out which one until a silly fight scene between the pilots and the scientists.

 A word on the effects - I was under the impression that 2011's The Thing was to have more "practical" special effects and less CGI. What I didn't realize was that was limited to corpses. The work by Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. is appropriately disgusting, but it isn't freakish or disturbing like Rob Bottin's effects. They also don't move - the practical effects are for corpses, of fused Thing/human hybrids or half absorbed corpses or charred remains. Anything that moves is bad looking CGI that seems like it was borrowed from Dead Space. Things look even stupider in the ship, where the Thing looks like a rejected monster from Men in Black II.

Who was this movie made for? I can't imagine people who have seen The Thing from Another World or The Thing sitting through the entire film. Only people with a passing knowledge of Carpenter's film would even stay engaged, but most of the connections at the end would be lost on them. I actually give a pass to selling it as "from the producers of Dawn of the Dead" because in theory, it could have been different enough of a take on the premise that using Zack Snyder's remake as a basis for comparison. Had the film lived up to that concept, maybe I could understand why it exists.

 For a brief moment in the first thirty minutes, I thought there might be something watchable in The Thing. It turned out that there was, and it was John Carpenter's The Thing. Why I watched the watered down, CGI "enhanced" version is anyone's guess. Well, the truth is that I said "what the hell" and rolled the dice. Never has the term "craps" been more appropriate. Let's just say I watched it So You Won't Have To and leave it at that.