Summerfest 4 Recap

 I know, you're thinking "Wait, what Summer Fest? How did I not hear about this?" Well, the truth is that Summer Fest 4's gestation has been long in the conceptual phase and sudden in its transition to reality. The Cap'n didn't really know when (or if) Summer Fest was going to happen this year. After last year's abortive attempt to get things off the ground, this year's marathon of all things schlocky and horror came together so quickly I barely had time to contact friends in town, let alone ones from further away.

 Also unlike previous Fests, I limited Summer Fest 4 to one day, which had its pros and cons. The downside is that, as usual, I programmed more movies than we had time to watch, but the upside is that we ended up with all killer, no filler. I'll get into a breakdown of what we watched shortly, but as Summer Fest 4 was a consensus "hit," I may have finally landed on the formula five years in to its existence.

 Horror Fest was always designed to showcase classic horror films, creepy flicks, and generally crowd rousing flicks throughout horror history. Summer Fest was designed, in concept, to be a looser affair - we would watch horror comedies, B-movies, ridiculous failures, and "what the hell were they thinking?" movies. Summer Fest introduced us to Blood Car, Terrorvision, Hillbillys in a Haunted House, ThanksKilling, and Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, as well as noble failures like The Descent Part 2, Uncle Sam, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, My Bloody Valentine 3D, and Alien Apocalypse.

 For a while, I tried to mix in more recognizable horror and slasher fare into summer programming, with mixed results. The Friday the 13th films are a natural fit (summer camp), but The Prowler didn't work so well, the legendary Troll 2 fell flat, and while Creepshow and Shaun of the Dead were fun, they felt out of place. This year, by hook or by crook, I decided to just go crazy with the picks, and as you'll see, they epitomized what's great about Summer Fest.

 The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 - Just to clear things up immediately, this is the sequel to the original The Hills Have Eyes and not the sequel to the remake of The Hills Have Eyes. Made in 1984, right after the surprise success of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven apparently decided to cash in on his horror clout by writing and directing a sequel nobody was asking for.

 Where do I start with The Hills Have Eyes Part 2? Should I mention fact that Bobby and Ruby, two characters from the first film, return for no real reason. Bobby doesn't even go back to the desert, so the scene where his psychiatrist tries to convince him to is just an excuse for a flashback to the end of The Hills Have Eyes. Meanwhile, we DO follow the rest of the Yamaha Dirt Bike Racing team (with their "Super Formula" racing fuel) into the desert and down the same unmarked road because they forgot about daylight savings time!

 Ruby (the member of the cannibal family who did escape) is all grown up and Beast (the dog who attacked Michael Berryman's Pluto) join the team for no apparent reason, although it does mean we get a DOG FLASHBACK once the team's bus runs out of gas and they find an abandoned (?) mine. Of course, it's not abandoned, because Pluto is joined by Papa Jupiter's brother, The Reaper. They promptly steal a dirt bike to separate the team and then start killing them. But NOT eating them. No, Reaper likes to kill people and then dump them down a mine shaft (Pluto tells Ruby that before her character just disappears).

 Look, The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 is a terrible movie. There's a major character that is blind and while we may not have been the most attentive audience members, we didn't realize she was supposed to be blind until halfway through the movie, just before she says it. Honestly, it seemed like Craven forgot he needed to make it clear she couldn't see, so suddenly a character who was walking around a moving bus with no problem is groping around the mysterious cabin late in the movie (but climbing down a ladder and up a rope despite not knowing where they go). Oh, and she's also psychic. Sometimes. This is as unnecessary a sequel as they come, but we had a blast trying to make sense of the mess.

 Carpool - A short film I first saw at the Nevermore Film Festival, a young woman is harassed by her boss until he accidentally dies and she tries to sneak the body out. Things compound as witnesses get in the way and her lust for murder grows. I think it's a little bumpy but overall pretty enjoyable.

 The Galaxy Invader - I first heard about this from Red Letter Media, who holds it up as a great "bad" movie, and I have to concur. Don Dohler's ridiculous movie about an alien who lands in the woods near the most dysfunctional hillbillies and yokels Maryland can produce. The alien isn't even that hostile, as he happily leads a college student and his professor into the woods after they rescue him. For a "Galaxy Invader," he (it?) only behaves with hostility when a gang of backwoods psychos try to capture / kill him.

 In truth, the "Galaxy Invader" isn't the most interesting part of the movie, as the perpetually dysfunctional Montague family provides most of the entertainment. Joe, the father with a t-shirt that has three of four large holes in it, chases his oldest daughter into the woods with a shotgun after she accuses him of ripping off her boyfriend's father. And it's not the first time he's tried to KILL his daughter after an argument at the breakfast table. It's a good thing that Joe and his 40-50 year old son JJ find the "Invader," shoot him, and steals the power source for his ray gun.

 Joe decides to sell it to Frank Custor, a dubious guy with a habit of smoking a magic cigar (the size constantly changes), drinking a can of Busch (unsolicited product placement), and wearing a hat that doesn't really fit. Instead of buying it, Custor talks Joe into putting on a flannel shirt (holes still showing) and going to the local watering hole to find more yokels to hunt the alien, who steals the power source from JJ (but doesn't kill him). In all honesty, the nonsensical domestic drama is more of the focus in The Galaxy Invader than, well, a Galaxy Invader, but the cheapness, bad acting, shoddy direction and cheesy special effects make it worth watching after kicking back a few.

 Tub - I don't want to say too much about Tub because it's better that you find this short film online and see what happens when a guy accidentally knocks up his... bath tub.

 Rise of the Animals - I must admit that I'm a little surprised that Rise of the Animals is regarded so poorly on IMDB and by user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes*. After watching the pre-credit sequence, I had hopes that it would be the low budget splatterfest of the Fest like Blood Car and ThanksKilling before it. It's not quite on the level of those two, but Rise of the Animals has a "can-do" attitude, a healthy sense of humor, some amusing puppet work, and sparingly bizarre CGI to keep moving things along. I'd put it up with last fall's The Puppet Monster Massacre as a no-budget wonder that uses the cheapness to its advantage. It has some memorable characters, decent gore, and we had a good chuckle as it continued to tell a story of animals deciding to start killing people, often in horribly violent ways.

 Blarghaaahrgarg - From the makers of Banana Motherfucker, a short I was unable to catch at Nevermore (but Neil has been raving about) comes the story of an exterminator who ends up facing down a, uh, booger monster. A booger monster with a ravenous appetite, terrible digestion, and a propensity for murder. It's a fast paced, gross, and funny, even for people who hate reading subtitles.

 Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies - Ah, The Asylum. They specialize in releasing knock-offs of movies playing in theaters (like Transmorphers and American Battleship) designed to trick people too lazy to pay attention. I call it "Grandparent / Uncle" syndrome, where family member who vaguely remember you wanting to see Transformers and see a movie that looks kind of like what they heard, so they buy it for you. They also were responsible for Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, a former Summer Fest movie.

 To be honest, I don't plan on seeing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter but when it was suggested we watch this instead of Demons, the consensus was "well, why not?" I mean, if it sucked, we could turn it off. We didn't turn it off, but that doesn't mean it didn't suck.

 Sure, I could nitpick the anachronisms (the concrete in Fort Pulaski and corrugated steel in Savannah where the zombie outbreak happens) or make fun of the misuse of the Secret Service or the idea that Lincoln mentors both Pat Garrett and a young Teddy Roosevelt while secretly fighting zombies in Georgia - much to the chagrin of Stonewall Jackson (I am not making this up) while John Wilkes Booth is a double agent in the Secret Service as "John Wilkins." And Porkins, I can't forget Porkins. I could mention the single shot rifles that don't need to be reloaded, or the secret prostitute that Lincoln has a history with (but her daughter isn't Lincolns, never fear, they wouldn't go THAT far).

 But instead, let's talk about the fact that early on it's established that Abraham Lincoln kills zombies with a collapsible scythe he keeps in his jacket. He repeatedly tells his Secret Service that shooting zombies in the head makes too much noise and they should find ways to sever the head, but he seems to forget about the only cool weapon in the entire movie for most of the movie. Lincoln is even shooting at the undead during the climactic battle when they blow up Fort Pulaski to wipe out all the zombies in Georgia and save the union. Then he makes the Gettysburg address, is bitten by a zombie, and sends Booth a letter asking him to assassinate him. That is why we continued watching, because writer / director Richard Schenkman clearly spent fifteen minutes on Wikipedia researching history before making this film. Kudos to him, because it's probably better than most Asylum films.

 But really, what is that saying? It's saying that fake beards go a long way. Yup.

 The Beach Girls and the Monster - No short film in between this time, we went straight for the money! And by money, I mean a sixty-six minute movie with so much padding I think it could have been an episode of Scooby Doo. See, the gyrating beach girls who hang out with surfers and beatniks and at least on ventriloquist are being attacked by a monster who strangles them, slashes them, and then leaves their breathing corpses in the sand.

  Well, one beach girl. There is a lot of jiggling and gyrating, in the tame way a 1965 movie can be, but most of the plot is about Richard Lindsay (Arnold Lessing), the son of Dr. Otto Lindsay (Jon Hall), who also lives with his stepmother Vicky (Sue Casey) and Richard's sculptor friend Mark (Walker Edmiston), who injured his leg in some kind of accident before the movie begins. Richard abandoned his plans to follow Dr. Lindsay as a Marine Biologist and instead bums around on the beach with Mark, and his girlfriend Jane (Elaine DuPont), who is probably much younger than he is.

 Vicky tries hitting on Richard even though he's probably also older than her (but younger than the even older Mark, who looks like he's pushing a midlife crisis) but is spurned. Dr. Otto doesn't like those beach girl "tramps," but mostly stays in the background. In a beach monster suit. SPOILER.

 Anyway, with all of that dramatic tension, we still have time for an extended opening credit sequence of dancing bikini girls (set to the music of Frank Sinatra, Jr.), a gratuitous surfing montage (from a projector Mark shows Richard), another dance sequence, a song and dance sequence complete with bad ventriloquism (he has a fake beard on) and baby-voiced singing, that climaxes with the beach monster killing a guy who looks like Roy Scheider, Mark getting blamed, and then Mark stealing a police car.

 It all climaxes with some of the worst rear-projected driving I've ever seen but is pretty damn funny in a "what were they thinking?" way. Again, not a good movie, but one that was fun to watch.

 A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4: The Dream Master - So the fourth Nightmare on Elm Street movie was by far the highest quality film we watched on Saturday night. What does that say? Well, that The Dream Master is actually pretty good anyway, and director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Deep Blue Sea) took what could have been just a generic sequel opportunity and used his mad Finnish powers to make an inventive, visually interesting, sometimes clever expansion of the Freddy-verse.

 Also, it has a karate montage early in the movie, and the guy who does it loses to an invisible Freddy in his dream (budget shortfall).

 So yeah, Nightmare 4 is no A Nightmare on Elm Street, or even Nightmare 3, but I feel like The Dream Master has a lot going for it. After Freddy kills off Kincaid (Ken Sagoes), Joey (Rodney Eastman), and Fake Kristen (Tuesday Knight filling in for Patricia Arquette), he then sets his sights on Alice (Lisa Wilcox) and her friends, but what he doesn't know is that the shy girl is going to be tougher to kill than he expected. Definitely tougher than the girl he turns into a cockroach, the girl with asthma he sucks the air out of ("want to suck face?"), or the guy he invisible karate's to death.

 But seriously, Harlin brings some energy to the film and comes up with some interesting visuals, like the kaleidoscope tunnel, the chest of souls (including naked Linnea Quigley in her only Elm Street appearance), and the dream loop that Alice and hunky Dan find themselves in as Freddy goes roach motel on Debbie (Brooke Theiss). He may even foreshadow Deep Blue Sea by turning Freddy's hand into a shark fin (Deepest Bluest) during an unconventional beach assault dream. It's definitely the most MTV-friendly of the Elm Street movies, but by the time you get to a third sequel I'm impressed that The Dream Master is as enjoyable as it is.

 Also, Nightmare 4 is notable for the soundtrack collaboration between Sinead O'Connor and MC Lyte. I did not see that one coming. Oh, and the Fat Boys with rapping Freddy. I saw that coming.


 So that was Summer Fest 4, which does not have a poster. Maybe I'll come up with one, but in the meantime it was a good time had by all. The cheese factor was exactly what it needed to be, and there wasn't an outright stinker in the whole bunch. Mission accomplished!


* To be fair, Rise of the Animals 3.3 on IMDB is rated higher than The Beach Girls and the Monster and Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies.

From the Vaults: The Exorcist

editor's note: the following was - I think - partially written for a class on horror films, and potentially reshaped halfway through to be included in the old blog as a quasi-retrospective on the Exorcist series. I'm going to check it against the old essay and include both versions. Warning, they represent the Cap'n in a very early stage, and probably aren't up to what you've come to expect from the Blogorium.

Film Report:

William Friedkin’s The Exorcist

Evil is a palpable presence. This is clear from the opening moments of The Exorcist, even if we are not yet aware of its intentions. A dig in northern Iraq brings Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) into direct contact with evil, in this case the demon Pazazu. Pazazu’s visage is buried in the earth and displayed prominently as a statue, but his power permeates Merrin’s world. Clocks stop, beasts rage, and ominous signs point to the arrival of evil incarnate. But not in Iraq; this evil will manifest itself much closer to home.

In Georgetown, Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) lives with her daughter Regan (Linda Blair), her assistant Sharon (Kitty Winn), and assorted servants. The MacNeils are displaced people in a world coming apart; Chris is divorced and living in the Washington D.C. area while her home is being rebuilt in Los Angeles. She’s also in the midst of shooting a film about student riots, another sign of the times. The world is in upheaval, and Chris’s world will undergo a further change soon, beginning with sounds in her attic.

Regan is a normal girl; she likes horses, art, and loves her mother. But all this moving disrupts her social world, and at the cups of puberty, Regan is all alone. Chris pays little attention to Regan’s imaginary friend Captain Howdy, but soon her strange behavior becomes too much to ignore. Although it may be no surprise that Regan knows how to curse (her mother frequently utters profanity), when she urinates on the floor during a dinner party and complains of her bed shaking, Chris realizes something is amiss. Little do Regan and Chris know of the journey into the abject that lies before them.

Chris is not the only person in Georgetown suffering a crisis of conscience. When we meet Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller); he is dealing with the crippling blow of his ailing mother’s death after being committed to a psychiatric facility. Damien is himself a psychiatrist, and his faith is waning from the shifts he and his mother faced; her death is but another test he is incapable of dealing with. Meanwhile, his church is shocked when a statue of the Virgin Mary is defiled with a phallus and overly phallic breasts, reminiscent of Pazazu.

Regan’s condition continues to worsen, and her behavior continually breaches what could be considered abject: she vomits bile, curses, mutilates herself, and violently masturbates using a cross. She is sexually uninhibited in her language, either by her own virtue or that of a demon who claims to possess her. Whether it is Regan or this demon speaking, her actions are beyond that of the abilities of doctors and psychiatrists. Their horrendous tests amount to no reasonable answer for her condition, and when Chris’s director / love interest is murdered (possibly by Regan), they attempt one last option; hypnosis. Even while under hypnotic suggestion, Regan is openly hostile towards men and attempts to castrate the psychiatrist. As a last ditch effort to avoid committing Regan to an institution, one doctor recommends the possibility of an exorcism.

Chris turns to Father Karras for assistance, but he is at first unconvinced that Regan is actually possessed. The demon inside of Regan claims to know Damien’s mother, and reacts to tap water as though it were Holy Water. However, when she begins speaking in languages which Regan does not know, and one Karras discovers to be backwards English, he suspects this may in fact be possession. Damien does not believe the demon’s claims that it is the Devil himself, but the demon speaks fearfully of a priest called Merrin. Regan appears to plea for help from inside her own body, now wracked and cut from self mutilation and filthy from vomit. The church agrees to allow the exorcism, on the condition that Merrin oversees it.

For Chris, Regan, Father Karras, and Father Merrin, the final act of The Exorcist is a journey into the abject itself. Karras and Merrin are instruments designed to restore the natural order, and Regan / Pazazu / Captain Howdy is the abject, which must be faced and rejected in order to do so. Their ritual, an exorcism, will not be easy. Regan hurls profanity, telling Karras “Your mother sucks cocks in hell!” and implying the two priests are homosexuals, challenging order. Merrin remains unfazed by her display of language and her attempts to distract him by spewing bile, but Karras cannot ignore her, and Merrin casts him out of the ritual. When Damien returns, he discovers that evil prevails; Merrin is dead, and Regan, unbound from her bed, sits laughing. In a fit of rage, Damien attacks the girl, begging the demon to enter him, and as it does, he casts himself out her bedroom window, plunging down the same stairwell that killed Chris’s lover. The ritual is complete; order is restored.

Finally, with her daughter returned to her and the natural order back in balance, Chris and Regan leave Georgetown, presumably to Los Angeles. Regan has no memory of what happened, and Chris will perhaps no longer utter profanity or take the Lord’s name in vain, but the cost of facing the abject will sit heavy on them both. The Exorcist warns us that evil is everywhere, and we cannot simply ignore it. Only by facing evil can we hope to understand or even defeat it.

---

The Exorcist

William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin knew that had something on their hands when adapting Blatty's book, The Exorcist, but perhaps no clue of the impact it would have on horror to come.

The Exorcist, regardless of what came before or since, is rightly considered a benchmark of horror because it deals with demonic possession in a sober and disturbing light. While Rosemary's Baby came first, The Exorcist is from beginning to end an exercise in mounting terror, the inability to a mother to help her daughter in the face of evil.

The Exorcist works because it shies away from explaining too much, instead only disproving every other possibility for what ails Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair). The problem isn't brain damage: there is no lesion. The problem isn't psychiatric: Regan will not respond to conventional therapy, or even hypnosis. As the outer world spirals out of control, so too does Chris MacNeil's (Ellen Burstyn) world, her daughter, on the cusp of puberty, becomes the very definition of the abject.

This evil is not unprecedented, however. Father Lankaster Merrin (Max Von Sydow) senses the presence of the demon Pazazu while digging in Northern Iraq, although he will travel a great distance to come face to face with it.

Because much of The Exorcist is about people and how they deal with the world, Regan's transformation is that much more terrifying. Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) losing his mother becomes a tool for the demon inside of Regan to torture him. Father Merrin's heart condition is a weapon with which it can wage war on him. And Regan takes special care to corrupt her relationship with her mother, leaving no choice to but choose exorcism.

The Exorcist spawned three sequels (well, two, if you want to get technical about it) and a refurbished "Version You've Never Seen" in 2000, which is more of a writer's cut, since it reinserted a number of sequences Blatty felt were important, including a jarringly happy ending and the quite disturbing "spider walk" sequence. While Exorcist II: The Heretic is considered one of the most ill conceived sequels of all time, The Exorcist III: Legion at least attempts to re-establish the series, even if Blatty's results are less than desirable.

Then there is the matter of The Exorcist's prequel, or should I say prequels. At this point it is public knowledge that Paul Schrader (writer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) shot a prequel to The Exorcist called Dominion, which producers Morgan Creek felt wasn't scary enough. So Schrader was fired, the film tucked away and go to Hack Director Renny Harlin (Deep Blue Sea) was hired to re-shoot 90% of the film and release it as The Exorcist: The Beginning.

Among Harlin's many changes are ill conceived fight sequences, a shoddy sandstorm, the wholesale replacement of characters, and a ridiculous showdown between the Devil and Father Merrin (Stellan Skarsgard) inside an ancient church in Africa. No, really.

So it would stand to reason that Schrader's more sober take on the prequel is the superior version. Well, yes and no. It's true, Dominion is better than Exorcist: The Beginning, but it doesn't keep it from being too sober and too laconic for its own good. The final confrontation between Merrin and the Devil is still undercooked, and the movie takes a little too long getting anywhere before puttering out after two hours.

The good news is that The Exorcist is still potent, although it depends greatly on your own personal feelings. Some people find the movie deeply disturbing; others find it unintentionally hilarious (the Version You've Never Seen does little to dissuade this with a subplot involving ritalin, which is now so common as to be considered a joke) but The Exorcist is still worth watching, even thirty three years later.

I'm just a mark for this crap.

editors note: Okay, lesson learned. Apparently when I thought I've posted something from the iPod, it doesn't always mean it has posted. Oops. Well, here's last night's post, a dispatch from out-of-townsville.

Many of you have commented to the Cap'n about his curious habit of purchasing cheesy action movies on Blu Ray. It started as a half-joke, brought about by the availability of movies like Commando and Predator in HD, but has slowly escalated to include the early films of Steven Seagal, Tango & Cash, and yes, Universal Soldier. I've also augmented this with other, more recent, cheese-tacular movies like Death Race and Punisher: War Zone. But then I had to take it just a step further.

Now I seem to own multiple films with wrestlers, and not like Roddy Piper in They Live (which I will totally buy on Blu Ray), but current or very recent WWE Superstars. Earlier tonight I left Cranpire trick me into thinking that by spending ten more dollars for Walking Tall and The Marine was somehow a better deal than just buying Walking Tall.

(To be fair, he was distracting me with a much more worthwhile one-two punch of cheesy action movies: Point Break and Road House, but guess who bought the wrong two-set?)

I should have seen this coming. Maybe it was the fact that I have every movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson I want (sorry, Southland Tales and The Game Plan*), or that I didn't hesitate to pick up See No Evil (starring Kane) or The Condemned (starring "Stone Cold" Steve Austin). But really, The Marine? Look, I already have 12 Rounds as a sort-of torture device for Barrett.

Admittedly, I was more interested in 12 Rounds because of the presence of auteur Renny Harlin, he who directed Deep Blue Sea, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Driven, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Cliffhanger, The Covenant, Exorcist: The Beginning, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, and yes, Cutthroat Island**. That madman can make good ideas and bad bend to his own special brand of retarded, even if they star the charismatic-less John Cena.

On the other hand, now I have a copy of The Marine, a movie I have no intention of ever watching again. Ugh. I'd rather own Under Siege: Dark Territory and Navy Seals than watch The Marine once more.

So what am I missing, niche market? There are enough of you out there who know of something I must not have to fill in the gap. What other gems am I missing starring WWE superstars that you wouldn't watch but it makes sense for me to own? Or am I better off just counting down the days until The Postman hits Blu Ray.

That's right. The Postman. With Kevin Costner. And Tom Petty.

Or would you rather I wait for Over the Top? Oh wait, they come out the same day. Snap!




* Yes, that does mean I do have The Scorpion King, The Rundown, Walking Tall, Doom, and Race to Witch Mountain.
** Which I will NOT own on Blu Ray, no matter how much Barrett tells me I will.