Shocktober Revisited: Mini-Reviews!

 Sometimes, horror movies get rolled up in other quick reviews, and accordingly can be missed. The following quick takes are from various points over the years, so the quality of the review(s) can vary wildly:

Die, Monster, Die! - Based on H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space in the same way that The Haunted Palace is based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (loosely), this AIP production has some effective imagery, but finds a way to drag on long enough to make 78 minutes feel like two hours. It's not lacking in atmosphere, and Boris Karloff certainly gives as much as he possibly can (which is saying something, as the actor was in poor enough health that he spends most of the film confined to a wheelchair), but I had trouble remembering much about the film hours after finishing it.

 Lovecraft's town of Arkham, Massachusetts, is relocated to England so that American student Stephen Rinehart (Nick Adams) can travel to the Whitley manor on the outskirts of town. Nobody in Arkham wants to talk to him about the Whitleys, nor will they provide him with any means of transportation, so Rinehart has to walk. It gives us the opportunity to see the desolate lands on the outskirts of the manor, and what looks like a huge crater, surrounded by dead trees that crumble to dust when touched. After dodging a bear trap at the gate, he enters the Whitley manor to find himself unwelcome by its patriarch, Nahum Whitley (Karloff), despite having been invited by Nahum's daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer).

 Something is obviously very wrong at the Whitley house, and Nahum's wife Letitia begs Stephen to take Susan away (they were students at an unnamed university in the U.S.), against Nahum's objections. Letitia is bedridden and refuses to let anyone see her, and Nahum is opposed to taking her to a doctor in town. Their maid went insane and lurks around the grounds under a black veil, and their butler Merwyn (Terence de Marney) is barely capable of lifting silverware without collapsing. A strange glow is coming from the (locked) greenhouse, and it's rumored that Nahum's father, Corbin Whitley, practiced black magic (because, you know, it kind of makes it sound like it's connected to The Haunted Palace, maybe?), which seems to be confirmed from the artwork scrawled in the cellar of the mansion.

 Unfortunately, for all of the mystery surrounding the Whitleys and what writer Jerry Sohl cobbled together from The Colour Out of Space and more topical concerns (circa 1965) about radiation, Die, Monster, Die! is mostly a movie about wandering around a spooky house with candles until something jumps out. Audiences who bemoan "jump" scares in modern horror films will roll their eyes at no less than three such moments in Die, Monster, Die!, all of which have the bad form to continue well after it's clear they aren't scary. There are some nice images - the matte painting of the meteor crash looks very good, and the "zoo" of deformed creatures / aliens (it's never very clear) in the greenhouse "shed" make an impression, but the pacing of the film drags on endlessly.

 Lovecraft fans will, in all likelihood, not enjoy the explanation given to why the meteorite causes strange and horrible things to happen to the vegetation (SPOILER - it's Uranium) or the way that Die, Monster, Die! devolves into a "we have to fight the monster before we escape," wherein Boris Karloff is replaced by a stuntman wearing a glowing prototype of the "Green Man" outfit under his suit. I honestly can't remember if they even explain what happens to the maid after she tries to attack Stephen and falls down, but it's not the kind of plot point I'm even worried about following up on. While I've seen worse adaptations of Lovecraft stories, I'd be hard pressed to say I've seen one that's more of a slog to get through than this one.

Terminal Invasion - Cranpire's love of this film used to vex me. Admittedly, I'd only seen it in pieces on the Sci-Fi Channel and it looked like their run of the mill crap, just with Bruce Campbell. Now that I've watched the whole thing, I can understand why he enjoys it so much. Kind of.

I'll give credit where credit's due: director Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13th) is a more competent director than most of the "Sci-Fi Original" stable of no-names. Terminal Invasion is a cross between Pitch Black and John Carpenter's The Thing, with a small dose of Assault on Precinct 13 thrown in for good measure, and Cunningham rises to the occasion. For what's essentially a ripoff of other sci-fi / horror movies, it's pretty good. There's certainly no fat on this movie, so every scene exists to set up something later.

The story takes place on a snowy night while a small band of travelers are trapped in a charter plane lobby. Campbell is a criminal being transferred who ends up in their midst, along with some nasty alien invaders disguised as humans. You can figure out where it goes from there if you've seen any of the movies above.

What I appreciated about Terminal Invasion is the way it sets up twists in the story based on things you assume to be true at the beginning. While I was pretty sure I knew who was an alien and who wasn't (and was mostly right), there's at least one genuine surprise halfway into the movie. Cunningham uses the limited geography of the terminal to telegraph plot points later, which I find to be rare of Sci-Fi Originals.

That being said, this is still a made for TV movie, and it shows. Most sets are over-lit so that shooting can commence from any angle, so even the dark scenes are pretty bright. The cgi, while used sparingly, is still five or six steps below the early Nasonex commercials. At least twice during Terminal Invasion, the movie "Fades to Commercial", and it looks silly without actual commercials.

However, most of these are acceptable if considered in the context of how Terminal Invasion came to be. The unfortunate cost cutting exercise comes during "attack" scenes involving the aliens. The camera is normally pretty stable, but when the aliens attack there's a postproduction "herky-jerky" effect that just looks dirt cheap.

Still, with expectations set properly, Terminal Invasion is pretty good for what it is, and I'd probably watch it again. Bruce is pretty good despite having to play the "stoic" type for most of the movie. Not many wisecracks to be seen here, but there is some decent gore and Terminal Invasion would be good times with a six pack and your buddies.

Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie - Tim Burton continues along his path of "things you recognize, re-imagined by a director you really used to like" by adapting the long running gothic soap opera Dark Shadows and his own short film, Frankenweenie, but this time it's stop-motion animated and three times as long.

Are you ready for the shocker? I actually liked Dark Shadows more than Frankenweenie. Nobody else did, but Dark Shadows isn't nearly as horrible as I expected it to be, and instead of nonstop jokes about the 1970s, it's a surprisingly atmospheric and violent meditation on family ties. That said, it has too many characters, superfluous cameos that really don't move the plot forward (Alice Cooper, I'm looking at you), and while it's better than I was prepared for, that doesn't mean it's even close to the best Tim Burton is capable of. I suppose after being disappointed by Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Corpse Bride, the idea of a marginally entertaining Tim Burton film was refreshing. That said, everybody else seems to hate it, so be warned.

 Frankenweenie could be better if Burton could figure out how to stretch a 30 minute short film into a full narrative, but he didn't. Basically the structure of the original Frankenweenie has been elongated and stitched together with a clever pastiche of Joe Dante-esque "monsters run amok" - including the best (and possibly only) Bambi Meets Godzilla reference I can remember. Unfortunately, the first forty five minutes drag so much that it's more of a relief than a delight when the reanimated pets wreak havoc all over New Holland. I will say it was nice to (hear) Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short, and Winona Ryder return to the Burton-verse, but ultimately Frankenweenie overstays its welcome before it has the chance to be any fun.

 Zombeavers - I didn't go into Zombeavers expecting it to be any good. This sounds counter-intuitive with what I said earlier in the recaps about trying to avoid bad movies, but I didn't watch Sharknado and this seemed like it might be an acceptable substitute. I mean, it couldn't possibly get better than the poster, or the inherently stupid premise, right? It would quickly get lazy and then I would get bored, like I normally do with Syfy Originals or movies that look like that (*coughTheAsylumreleasescough*).

 So imagine my surprise to discover that Zombeavers is a (slightly) higher budgeted version of a movie like Blood Car or Rise of the Animals. True, this is not a scrappy, home made production - how could it be with a "From the Producers of American Pie, Cabin Fever, and The Ring" on the poster? - but it has the same anarchic spirit of those movies. At times, it's actually as bad as those can be, but what helps Zombeavers (a lot, actually) is that every time you think it's not worth sticking through, something you wouldn't expect either happens or comes out of someone's mouth. Either the film takes a truly unexpected turn - which it does - or one of the characters has a line that evokes a "wait, what?" and you don't mind sticking around.

 I felt like I was in pretty good hands during the prologue, which features Bill Burr and an unrecognizable John Mayer (yep, "Your Body is a Wonderland"'s John Mayer) as drivers hauling around chemical waste and shooting the shit, often in increasingly strange ways. They eventually hit a deer, which leads to a barrel of said chemicals rolling down into a stream and to (dun dun DUUUUNNN) a beaver dam. Because, yes, this is a movie about zombie beavers. Or Zombeavers, if you will. Also, there are three college students: Mary (Rachel Melvin), Zoe (Courtney Palm), and Jenn (Lexi Atkins), who are having a "girls' weekend" in order to forget about Mary's boyfriend Sam (Hutch Dano) cheating on her. But he shows up anyway, with Tommy (Jake Weary) and Buck (Peter Gilroy) in tow, so it becomes a slightly uncomfortable couples weekend. With Zombeavers.

 You might struggle through the "set up" part of the film, and I nearly turned it off while the girls were on the way to the cabin, but some of the lines are so out of left field that I stuck with it. The tone is borderline surreal, from the "is this serious" hunter (Rex Linn) that they run into, to the neighbors near the cabin (Brent Briscoe and Phyllis Katz), who turn out to be way more savvy about kids than you'd expect. And there's a bear, but mostly, it's the Zombeavers. Which look like nothing more than marginally articulated puppets and are hilarious. You see, sometimes a cheap looking monster can elevate a B-Movie from "that was okay" to "that was amazing," and the titular zombified beavers are worth the price of admission. It doesn't hurt that Zombeavers gets even weirder when the "rules of infection" kick in, but the monsters are the stars of the show. Stick around after the credits - which include a song about the movie that puts Richard Cheese to shame - for an even better zombie related pun. If it sets up a sequel, I could be onboard with that, but if not, well played, Jordan Rubin...

 John Dies at the End -This is a faithful adaptation of David Wong's novel by Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep), at least for the first half. The film gets to about the halfway point in the book, and then realizes it has thirty minutes to wrap up the rest of the story, so liberties are taken. Honestly, I didn't mind them, because I knew what was being condensed and most of the spirit is kept intact.

 That said, I totally understand why people who haven't read John Dies at the End don't like the movie. There's a sense of context that's missing from the film as it hurtles towards its conclusion that further confuses the comedy / horror tone and probably loses a lot of people. If you haven't read the book, I wouldn't watch the movie at all. You're going to hate it because of how it collapses in the last thirty minutes. If you have read the book, know Coscarelli mostly made sensible changes (not going to Vegas, diminishing Amy's role in the overall story, dropping certain elements of Korrok's plan), and made at least one I don't really understand (changing Molly's name), and two I don't know how I feel about (no Fred Durst and John's band doesn't sound nearly as bad as I thought it would). I dig John Dies at the End, and if it ever happens, I'd watch This Book (Movie?) is Filled with Spiders, although with what they had to do on a low budget here, I can't imagine that ever happening. That's a shame.

 World War Z - One could suppose that if Warm Bodies was a zombie movie for teenage girls, then World War Z is a zombie movie for people who vaguely know the word "zombie" in popular culture. It's not even really a horror movie - more of an action / disaster hybrid with a redesigned third act that inches towards suspense but still ends up like a tamer 28 Days Later. And I watched the "unrated" version, for the record. I can only imagine how toothless World War Z must have been in theaters. Still, it has a scrappy, amiable charm for a big budgeted blockbuster studio "tent pole" movie.

 Based almost not at all on the book of the same name by Max Brooks, World War Z is the story of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a retired UN investigator living with his family, until the zombie outbreak begins, that is. Then the Deputy Secretary General Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena) brings him back in to travel around the world and see what caused the outbreak, from South Korea to Israel and eventually to a World Health Organization research center in Ireland. Separated from his family, and with continually dwindling support, Gerry finds that the zombie outbreak is capable of overcoming even the most fortified of cities, and unless they can find a cure, humanity is doomed.


 World War Z is essentially a travelogue designed to show off various big action set pieces, which director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace) does fairly well, and which Brad Pitt responds to with a reasonable sense of urgency. The zombies are sometimes people in makeup but are usually great swaths of CGI mayhem, particularly during the siege of Jerusalem. The movie makes an abrupt turn in the section in Ireland, due in large part because the delay in World War Z's release had everything to do with the third act not working, so they scrapped the original ending in Russia and went with a more sparse, claustrophobic ending. It works, although you can see loose threads of plot line in the film as a result - the main example is Matthew Fox's UN soldier who doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose other than to help move Gerry's family around, but who in the original version "takes" his wife and daughter as his own. Now it just seems like an oddly high profile casting choice for a minor role at best. Doctor Who fans already know the prescient casting of Peter Capaldi as the WHO Doctor (that IS how he appears in the credits).

 There's not really much else to say about the movie. I thought it was watchable, if mostly average. The story behind the movie is more interesting than the finished product. The survival bits near the beginning and towards the end are good, but have been done better before. All of the big action sequences are bombastic and if you like explosions and zombies and some degree of violence, the unrated cut is certainly worth your time. It's popcorn fare through and through, which is fine and dandy every now and then, but I can't imagine that I'd be all that enthused for World War Z 2.

The ABCs of Death 2 - is like V/H/S 2 in that it takes everything that worked about the first film, jettisoned most of what didn't, and was more fun to watch. The premise is still the same: twenty six directors each receive a letter from the alphabet, and have free reign to come up with a 2-3 minute short film that conveys a word and, in some form or fashion, death. The ABCs of Death had some interesting entries ("Unearthed" was a good one), but leaned heavily on scatological humor ("F is for Fart" was the tip of the iceberg, it turned out), and then there were the "oh, I didn't need to see that, not ever" letters. Like "Libido" and "Pressure." It turns out there are things you might want to un-see, and several of them are in The ABCs of Death.

The ABCs of Death 2, by comparison, has nothing as traumatic, and I would suspect it would play a lot better with an audience than the first one did. Watching that one at Nevermore, there was a lot of... shall I say, stunned silence as the film went on. There are certainly some "what the hell was that?" parts in the sequel, but nothing you're going to apologize for exposing someone to. The only thing that comes close is the last segment, "Z is for Zygote," which is centered around an already unforgettable image that closes on an even more disturbing note. I know that people don't like "P is for P-P-P-P-Scary!" but I thought it had an unhinged quality, somewhere between the weirder Betty Boop cartoons and Black Lodge-era David Lynch, that worked for me.

 As with the first film, you'll find highlights ("A is for Amateur") and lowlights ("V is for Vacation"), but there's nothing in The ABCs of Death that comes close to 2's "M is for Masticate," a slow motion gross out with a wicked joke at the end. There's also "D is for Deloused," which reminded me a bit of a Brothers Quay short. I'll leave most of the discovery for you, but if you kind of liked the first film, I strongly suspect you'll enjoy this one more.

 Horns - I feel like there's a better movie somewhere in Alexandre Aja's Horns. Maybe it got lost in the editing, or maybe it's just inherent in the adaptation of Joe Hill's novel, but the finished product just don't quite work. It's as though Aja made a bitterly funny, black comedy, and also made a more generic, teen-friendly story of good and evil, and then smashed them together at the worst possible junctures. For the opening twenty minutes of Horns, you're probably going to think the movie is great: it has a wicked mean streak, Daniel Radcliffe is spot on as a guy everyone thinks is a murderer, that embraces the horns he grows and the power that comes with it. The way people react, first telling him their darkest fantasies and then acting on them when he says they should, is often hilarious.


 And then we hit the first of what turn out to be several, lengthy, flashbacks, giving us the backstory of Ig (Radcliffe) and Merrin (Juno Temple), leading up to her death - the one everyone assumes Ig is responsible for. Everyone, including his family - played by James Remar, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joe Anderson - is positive he did it and that he's lying, with the exception of his friend, Lee (Max Minghella). The "whodunit" is pretty easy to work out for yourself, even if Aja, Hill, and screenwriter Keith Bunin throw in a number of red herrings. I bet, without telling you anything else, you can guess who the real killer is. That's not the problem, so much as the flashbacks that put the mystery together. There's a massive tonal shift from black comedy to slightly tragic story of temptation and of good and evil (on a biblical scale), and for some reason, ne'er the twain shall meet in Horns.

 I can understand how it might have worked in Hill's novel - which I haven't yet read, but plan to - but as a film, the structure of the story is at times jarring and disruptive. Maybe there was no way to properly balance the two in a film, because Horns alternates between wicked and bland, between clever and obvious, without ever finding a good middle ground. There are some fantastic moments sprinkled throughout the film, and the cast is game for anything, playing both the best and worst versions of themselves as they encounter "evil" Ig, but Horns gets away from them. It's never quite the movie that it could be, so I'm left feeling ambivalent with the end result.

 The Innkeepers - From Ti West, the director of The House of the Devil, comes another slow burn horror film where tension continues mounting and the sense of dread is palpable. Instead of replicating the horror of the early 1980s, West's "haunted hotel" follow-up is set squarely in the present, and he's just as adept at creeping you out with slow tracking shots, suggested noises, and believable characters you relate to. Sara Paxton's Claire is a young woman without much of a clue what she want to do or be, who becomes way too interested in Luke (Pat Healy)'s hobby: ghost hunting. She's fixated on finding the spirit of Madeline O'Malley, a bride who killed herself in the hotel in the 1890s.

 On the last weekend that the Yankee Padler hotel is open, Luke and Claire trade off shifts, watching over the last remaining hotel tenants - former actress / new age guru Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis) and a mysterious Old Man (George Riddle) - while they hunt for evidence of O'Malley's presence. West doles out the scares slowly but surely, and only towards the very end do things go the way most horror films go. In fact, if there's any fault to be found in The Innkeepers, it's that what comes before and after the climax of the film are undermined ever so slightly by what we know HAS to happen, even if the subtle clues of why it happens don't always add up. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the film is an example of the kind of movie 1408 could have been, one that eschews cheap histrionics and trickery and deliberately ratchets up the "willies" factor.

 Fans of The House of the Devil are going to find a lot to love about The Inkeepers, but if you like your horror fast and relentless, this may seem a little slow for your tastes. For me? Let's just say I had to watch something else after I finished it, because I wasn't going to bed.

Horror Fest VIII (Day Three): The Wolf Man, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, and John Dies at the End

 "Even a man who is pure of heart
     and says his prayers by night
         may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms
            and the autumn moon is bright"

 That's the poem uttered three times in the first twenty minutes of The Wolf Man, so that audiences won't forget that the movie they came to see (The Wolf Man) is about a man who becomes a wolf. The man in question is Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) although you wouldn't know that from the opening credits, which bill Chaney as "The Wolf Man." I must imagine that when The Wolf Man ran on television during the 1950s and 60s that its opening looked familiar to children: title cards introducing the characters play over a brief clip of them from some point in the film, a template of sorts for most TV sitcoms and many dramas.

 Back to the poem for a moment, because the one takeaway I had from watching The Wolf Man this time is that Lawrence Talbot isn't really a man who is "pure of heart" at all. In fact, he's kind of sleazy: not only does he use his father's telescope to spy on Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), but he then uses that information while in her father's pawn shop to put the moves on her. He gives her some business about being psychic, but even when he eventually comes clean about how he knew about her earrings, it's still in an unrepentantly smarmy fashion. It's no wonder that she doesn't want to go with him to the gypsy camp and brings along her friend Jenny (Fay Helm).

 It's a good thing that Talbot buys a cane with a silver wolf's head, because the gypsy woman Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya) is hiding a secret: her son, Bela (Bela Lugosi) is a Dracula... no, wait. That's not right. He's also a wolf man, and while reading Jenny's fortune, Bela realizes she's his next victim. He sends Jenny away, but she can't run fast enough and he attacks her in wolf form (more like German Shepherd form, but you get the idea) and Talbot is injured while killing said wolf with his cane.

 I'm being a little unkind to The Wolf Man, one of the Universal Classic Monster movies that I was always the fondest of, and I do feel bad about that. I had always remembered Lawrence Talbot as something of a tragic figure, something that continued as long as Chaney reprises the role in various quasi-sequels (House of Frankenstein, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein), but it's hard to feel too sympathetic about a guy who clearly doesn't care that Gwen already has a boyfriend and who behaves in such an underhanded way when he meets her. Perhaps it's supposed to be charming, but when he reveals that he has a telescope and she says "from now on I'll be sure to draw the curtains" and he tells her not to, that's just creepy.

 Talbot is more sympathetic in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, to be sure; after having been killed by his father (Claude Rains, the Invisible Man himself), Lawrence is placed in the family mausoleum, where he at least has peace (as promised by Maleva upon his death). That is, until the two graverobbers show up and break in, looking for jewels. They open Lawrence's coffin and move some of the wolfsbane so they can take his ring (but not before saying the poem for people who might not remember) but seeing as it is a full moon, after all, it's hard to keep a dead werewolf down...

 Revived and apparently immortal, Talbot is found in Cardiff and taken to a nearby hospital with head trauma (the cane wound that killed him) and he's patched up by Dr. Mannering (Patric Knowles) while the authorities try to figure out who their mystery man is. Lawrence Talbot has been dead for four years, so the man in the hospital can't possibly be who he claims he is. And the following night a police officer is murdered by a wolf, something that Talbot seems to know about.

 In The Wolf Man, Sir John Talbot and the authorities regard Lawrence's claims of being "dangerous" as an illness of the mind, but Dr. Mannering seems much more willing to accept his "affliction," although there's quite a while between when they are together in the story. Lawrence leaves the hospital (and Wales) to track down Maleva and find a way to die. He has no interest in being cured, only in no longer living - which is fair, considering that he was dead.

 Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man opens the scope of the first film considerably, and by necessity. Maleva is not only somewhere in Europe, but she's also nowhere near where the two of them need to be in order to help Lawrence. Maleva has heard of a man, named Frankenstein, who might be able to help Talbot, so they travel to Vasaria, the (fictional) home nation of the Frankenstein family, only to find that Ludwig Frankenstein is dead and that the burnt down castle has been abandoned.

 The person I was watching Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man with had not seen Ghost of Frankenstein, which caused a bit of a conundrum here, because until Baroness Elsa Frankenstein (Illona Massey) mentions that the experiments killed her father AND her grandfather, it's not stated in the film which Frankenstein is dead when Talbot arrives. As this is a sequel to both The Wolf Man and Ghost of Frankenstein, it's a good idea to be caught up on both series. (They do play it a bit fast and loose with chronology, though: in The Wolf Man you can clearly see cars driving around town, but by Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man either there are no cars in Eastern Europe and Cardiff or Lawrence was dead for four years and traveled backwards in time. By the same token they have a hydroelectric dam in Vasaria - they mention that it powers the equipment in the castle - so it's anybody's guess)

 At any rate, Talbot finds Frankenstein's monster (Bela Lugosi) frozen in ice and thaws him / it out in the hopes of finding some way to end his existence, and ultimately decides to contact the only surviving Frankenstein (Massey) to see if she can help him. The Baroness is not a scientist and wants nothing to do with the family, but during the Vasarian equivalent of Oktoberfest, Dr. Mannering finds Talbot and the merry band settle in at the castle to see if energy can be drained from Talbot and the monster, finally killing both of them.

 The villagers are, understandably, weary of any activity involving a Frankenstein. They have good reason to be, as Mannering can't help but try to bring the monster back to full strength. Lucky for him (and us), they choose to experiment during a full moon. Well, that's a little fuzzy. I'm not sure if it's a full moon or if the experiment causes Talbot to turn into the Wolf Man (which Chaney is again billed as), but what's important is that the monster smackdown ensues to close out the film. How the Baroness and Dr. Mannering (and, I'm hoping, Maleva) manage to escape the exploding dam above the castle is a manner of movie convenience, but the two monsters presumably perish in the ensuing flood - as would everyone in the village below.

 Interesting tidbit time: Bela Lugosi and Patric Knowles appear in both The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, albeit playing different roles each time. Ilona Massey, who plays Elsa Frankenstein, replaces Evelyn Ankers, who played Elsa in Ghost of Frankenstein, because it might be a little weird for the woman who played Gwen Conliffe to also be Baroness Frankenstein. All of the monster (Lugosi)'s dialogue was cut from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, which makes it tricky to understand why it walks arms outstretched. The reason? In Ghost of Frankenstein, the monster is blind as a result of receiving Ygor (Lugosi again)'s brain. Vasaria, is, by the way, a post-World War II replacement for Germany, where the original Frankenstein was set, created by writer Curt Siodmak.

---

 Finally we come to John Dies at the End, the best possible adaptation of David Wong's novel that Don Coscarelli could make with the budget he had. That's not a knock on the movie, because I can't imagine it would be easy to faithfully adapt that book considering how many crazy, outlandish, and disgusting moments are on nearly every page. Without the money to clear the many songs mentioned in the book, or to include Fred Durst, or to even be able to include the section in Vegas (it should happen instead of going straight to the mall, for those who have only seen the movie), let alone what happens AFTER David and John come back from the dimension Korrok originates from, it's impressive how close to the book John Dies at the End is. The first hour or so picks up all of the major beats with only a few omissions (where David works, Amy's brother, and some of the names of characters in the film).

 As much as I want to resist the temptation to compare the book to the movie, it tends to happen without trying. So many people I know read John Dies at the End (how can you not when someone describes it as "GrossBusters"?) and while I'm glad that the movie works for audiences who haven't read it, I have no idea how it would play if I didn't know where the story was going. It's a collection of some of the stranger moments you'll ever see onscreen. I am impressed that Coscarelli turned what is an episodic structure in the book and made it more streamlined (mostly by dropping some of the detours) even if the ending is... abrupt.

 I would imagine even if you hadn't read the book, the sudden leap from "things from another dimension that invade people and cause them to explode" to "welcome to the dimension of Korrok" must be a little jarring, even in a film where a guy's mustache flies off and attacks our hero. The last section of the film happens so quickly and is so packed with exposition that I'm kind of impressed it works at all. The coda during the credits eases things a bit, and the resolution to Arnie's frame story is surprisingly bittersweet for a movie so ready to shrug off the bizarre with "what's next?"

 And yes, it still plays well the third time. I suspect it will the fourth, fifth, and so on, to boot. John Dies at the End may not be the level of "cult" film of Coscarelli's Phantasm series or as beloved as Bubba Ho-Tep, but I suspect that it will grow an audience for a long time on home video. It's just a shame that Coscarelli killed one major character, making a This Book is Full of Spiders adaptation very, very difficult, if not out right impossible. Then again, if they ran out of money for the spiders scene in John Dies at the End and had to animate it, there's probably no chance you could make This Book is Full of Spiders into a movie (the scope is considerably larger). But read both books, if you haven't. It isn't going to hurt the movie one bit.

 Horror Fest VIII has come to a close, and I'll tell you it's been a good year for the Cap'n and Fests. Bad Movie Night was a blast, Summer Fest 5 had some great moments, and Horror Fest VIII may be my favorite to date, rivaling only III and V. I'm looking forward to next year - I hope you are too.

Nevermore Film Festival Recap (Day Two)

 Welcome back to Cap'n Howdy's coverage of the 14th annual Nevermore Film Festival. Today was a lineup I'd been looking forward to - another collection of short films (from North America this time), a partially "found footage" film about ghosts, and the double feature of a classic (Dawn of the Dead) and a newer film that might end up with its own "cult" following down the line (John Dies at the End).

 The Cap'n started the day with They're Coming to Get You, Barbra!, a selection of ten north American shorts that ran the gamut from scary to funny to darkly whimsical and bizarre. Here's a brief description of each, with accompanying links (they were actually harder to locate online than their foreign counterparts):

 T is for Trash - from what it looks like online, "Trash" began its life as a submission for The ABCs of Death, but I'm glad that Nevermore included it as a short in its own right because it deserves to be seen in its own context. If its possible to call something "a bizarro world take on Boxing Helena," Trash fits that description. When you think you have a rough idea where the story is heading, something very unusual happens, and I have to say I liked it.

 Till Death Do Us Part - a clever horror comedy dealing with a couple having cold feet on their wedding day, exacerbated when their exes show up for the ceremony - as zombies. Did I mention the film is set in 1985? It's not a crucial detail, but it adds to the humor a bit.

 The Stolen - less of a horror movie and more of a dark fairy tale, one that happens to include fairies. A little girl helps a boy after her brother locks him in a cage, and he promises to grant her wish. The final image, while sudden, is effective and unsettling.

 Sandwich Crazy - the first of two short films in the lineup made with the involvement of Hobo with a Shotgun director Jason Eisener, Sandwich Crazy is a twisted Faustian tale about a man with no ambitions, a magic microwave, and talking, bleeding, vegetables. You'll laugh, you'll gag, you'll laugh some more. (Note: the link does not take you to the actual Sandwich Crazy short - I can't find it anywhere online - but another short film that uses some of the same puppets and has a similarly bent sense of humor.)

 Blue Hole - "inspired by a true story," this short is about a lake that the Devil lives in, and if he drags a loved one down, the only way to get them back is with a sacrifice. Three couples learn the hard way that not every bargain is one worth making...

 Take That - is the story of a veteran with an overbearing wife and a friend who wants to make his evening. When he decides to finish up at work, his buddy calls the service anyway, and our hero gets more than he ever wanted to deal with. I wasn't gaga with this film, but it did at least make an effort to keep the protagonist virtuous.

 Torturous - in this twist on "torture porn," a career counselor finds himself in a Hostel-esque room with a "drill" specialist, one not too happy with his job. Can he talk him into a change of career before it's too late? This leans more heavily on the comedy, but there's one impressive gore effect that helps keep the stakes high. The ending is great.

 Klagger - I enjoyed this low key film about a surveyor who walks into a building scheduled for demolition only to discover he's not alone, and the other party isn't interested in talking things over. It has a nice twist at the end and some effectively utilized country music to add to the atmosphere.

 Game - the second Eisener involved short has the edge over Sandwich Crazy for me, only because it takes your expectations of what kind of film you think you're watching and turns it on its head. It shifts from being a straightforward, fairly stark "killbilly" story into something much stranger. I don't want to spoil it, so I hope at some point the short will be available to watch online.

 Lot 66 - returning NC director Robert W. Filion brings us the tale of a man afraid in the dark, alone in his new house. Everything seems to be going well enough until he starts getting messages from a stranger who claims to be wandering around the house... and then the power goes out. It was a little heavy on stylized CGI and the ending reminded me of current events, which contributed to my ambivalence towards the short.

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 The second feature for Saturday was The Casebook of Eddie Brewer, a British film that blurs the line between "found footage" and traditionally narrative horror. Eddie Brewer (Ian Brooker) is a paranormal investigator being followed by a film crew for a special on hauntings, and they join him for two major cases: one involving a mother (Bella Hamblin) and her daughter Lucy (Erin Connolly), who have been experiencing phenomena reminiscent of a poltergeist. Eddie suspects that Lucy's "imaginary" friend, Grimaldi, might be responsible, but to what end?

 Eddie is also called into a renovated building being used by the government because of strange sounds coming from a "hole" in the basement, but it becomes clear that the activity isn't limited to that area. Before long, the staff are dealing with an increasingly hostile force, one that has a particular interest in Brewer, and may have something in common with Lucy's "friend."

 Unbeknownst to Brewer, the documentary producer (Natalie Wilson) has arranged for skeptic Dr. Susan Kovac (Louise Paris) and a team of paranormal investigators to join him at the end of the investigation. Brewer, who works alone and with outdated equipment, is infuriated, but the confluence of events involving Lucy and a message that Grimaldi sends the investigator leave him no choice but to join the rest for a wild night of paranormal activity.

 I was rather impressed with The Casebook of Eddie Brewer, which alternates between the footage being shot by an unseen cameraman (director Andrew Spencer) and a third person, omniscient perspective. Appropriate to the narrative, the bulk of actual "ghost"-related events happen when the documentary camera isn't on, bolstering the case for Kovacs and increasing the doubts of the crew that anything is actually happening, even as it becomes clear to the audience that something horrible is afoot. It takes a moment to adjust because both styles use the same camera, but Spencer is careful to mark points in the film when it's clear which perspective we're watching from.

 The way that the two investigations dovetail is also handled in a clever way, if not one that is always clear near the end. When Casebook goes all out, beginning with the arrival of a psychic medium, Spencer manages to keep the various narrative threads and suddenly swollen cast together in a sensible way, and the imagery is chilling without being too outlandish for the limited scope of the story. Of the two feature films I hadn't seen prior to coming into Nevermore, I'd say that The Casebook of Eddie Brewer was my favorite.

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 After returning to the lobby for a snack and to meet up with friends for the double feature, I settled down in Fletcher Hall to see George Romero's Dawn of the Dead on the big screen for the first time. I'd seen it at home and in classrooms and at parties, but I've never seen it in a theatre, and it turns out that's because it's not an easy thing to do for festival programmers. Producer Richard Rubinstein has, until recently, fiercely resisted Dawn of the Dead being show, but he finally agreed and Nevermore's most requested vintage horror film was ours for the viewing.

 I don't want to say much more about Dawn of the Dead because I've written about the film before here in the Blogorium, but I'd like to share something curious that happened when I saw this with a large audience.

 Dawn of the Dead is, perhaps, the best "zombie" movie in the sometimes cluttered subgenre, even if I prefer Night of the Living Dead. It's a close first and second, but while I side with the stark simplicity of the first film, Dawn of the Dead is continually rewarding with repeated viewings, as without fail I find something I'd never noticed. And this time it wasn't even the "neglige" zombie (and geez, she must have been cold)* - no, this time I was exposed to a different side of the humor inherent in Dawn of the Dead.

 Having seen it in small groups and in academic settings, I was used to what I thought were the bulk of the "jokes" in Dawn of the Dead, many centered around consumerism and the juxtaposition between commercialism and the undead. What surprised me more were the periods when the audience, in unison, reacted to scenes I had always read as somber or bleak with laughter. For example, when Roger and Peter are discussing Fran's pregnancy and the possibility of ending it (while Fran is in another room), the audience began laughing, and laughed even harder when Romero cut to Gaylen Ross' reaction shot as she overhears them. I had never considered the moment funny, but the inherent comedy in that uncomfortable conversation opened my eyes to yet another reading of the film. Perhaps Dawn of the Dead is even more intentionally comedic than I had thought.

 You're not going to go wrong watching this movie with a large group of strangers, especially ones not familiar with the gruesome Tom Savini-created special effects. If you can see Dawn of the Dead in a theatre, if that opportunity ever presents itself, I highly recommending doing so.

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  The final film of Day Two, and the second part of the double feature, was the festival's debut of Don Coscarelli's John Dies at the End. Several years ago, they included Bubba Ho-Tep in their programming, so audiences were looking forward to seeing what the director of Phantasm had in store for us after ten long years (I'm counting John's debut on VOD as its release date, because I saw it in December of 2012).

 I wrote about the film briefly during my 2012 recap, and finally had the chance to see it with a crowd equally composed of folks who had and had not read the David Wong-penned novel the film is adapted from. Unfortunately, I didn't get to talk to many people who hadn't read the book after the film ended, but everybody seemed to enjoy the alternately disgusting and hilarious story of two slackers who save the world from an alternate universe's resident demon, Korrok.

  What I didn't mention last time was the inspired casting of Paul Giamatti as Arnie and Clancy Brown as Doctor Marconi, who along with Chase Williamson's David and Rob Mayes' John keep the film moving at a brisk pace. I also enjoyed the cameos by Doug Jones, Daniel Roebuck, and especially the Tall Man himself, Angus Scrimm, whose character hints at a set of antagonists dropped from the story during the adaptation from novel to screen. I'm still sad that Fred Durst isn't in the film.

 As I mentioned to friends after the film was over, given some of the changes and the relatively low budget of John Dies at the End (he doesn't, by the way. SPOILER), I can't imagine how This Book is Full of Spiders (Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It!) could ever happen, but I'd welcome it. And I'd watch it. The continued adventures of Dave, John, and Amy in the demonic cesspool that is Undisclosed** are something I look forward to more of, whether on paper or the big screen.

 By the way, if you want to see John Dies at the End now, it's available On Demand. If you're thinking of just pirating the film, David Wong has a special warning for you:



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 This ends my coverage of the Nevermore Film Festival, but if I can cajole some of the good folks I attended with to add reviews of some of the movies I didn't see (Found, Dead Weight, the long-form shorts), I'll put them up some time soon. It was a great time with lots of fans of horror, and I'm looking forward to the 15th anniversary next year!


 * Seen easily in the parking lot when Fran is watching Peter and Stephen move trucks in front of the entrances, and again later in the film.
** By the way, it's not "Undisclosed" in the movie - it's identified as Sherwood, Illinois.

Retro Review: A List of "Sword and Sorcery" films I've Seen (or Think I've Seen)

 So while I was working on the Your Highness review, I made a concerted effort to think of every movie that falls into the "sword and sorcery" category that David Gordon Green's movie is paying homage / gentling mocking. If you saw the review, I narrowed it down to Conan the Barbarian (have seen) and Krull (have not seen). I also mentioned The Barbarian and the Princess because, if I remember correctly, the VHS has a four-breasted woman on the cover. It turns out that such a movie does not exist, because it's actually called The Warrior and the Sorceress. Again, I'm not really an expert on this subgenre.

 While thinking carefully about it, I realized I could name a few other movies that I've seen part of, all of, or think I might have seen when I was younger. Here is a list with any thoughts that possibly come to mind with them.

  Masters of the Universe - A He-Man movie has to count in some capacity. I've never seen Masters of the Universe, but it was playing in the background during a birthday party / sleepover I went to. That and A Nightmare on Elm Street, I think.

 Circle of Iron - Hey! I actually reviewed this movie - it's a kung-fu, sword and sorcery, parable sort of thing, but there's lot of loincloths and warriors and stupid crap with David Carradine as a leopard dude.

 Deathsport - So I watched the first thirty minutes of this Roger Corman produced ripoff of Roger Corman's Death Race 2000. Instead of cars, there are motorcycles, but first peasants ride around on horses and avoid mutants, and David Carradine is rocking a loincloth / cape combination but also shoots some kind of weird laser gun. Technically it's more "post-apocalyptic" but it reminded me of some of the dumber "sword and sorcery" shit.

 Willow - I saw Willow when I was young, and even then it seemed like a pretty weak knock-off of Star Wars, but with witches and Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer. I seem to remember the whole two headed dragon growing out of some sort of sac grossed me out and I haven't watched it since.

 Cave Dwellers - I saw it on MST3k.

 The Scorpion King - from the director of A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: The Dream Warriors and the pro-wrestler-turned-crappy-cgi-effect formerly known as The Rock. This isn't even a guilty pleasure - I openly enjoy this silly movie that's part Conan the Barbarian, part Conan the Destroyer.

 The Beastmaster - I'm not positive I ever saw all of Don Coscarelli's The Beastmaster. I'm not even really sure I've seen some of this movie, or at all. Maybe I just know what it is.

  Dragonslayer - Like Willow, I saw Dragonslayer and it creeped me out in parts. Specifically the parts with Peter MacNicol.

 Ladyhawke (?) - Forgive me, because I don't remember many swords. I guess there probably were, but mostly I remember Matthew Broderick from War Games and I remember not knowing who Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer were.

 The Lord of the Rings - These movies don't count, do they? I kept finding it on lists, along with Highlander and Excalibur, which I guess kinda technically count. Your Highness does borrow a few helicopter shots of our heroes on their journey, one of which reminded me of a similar shot used in the trailer for The Hobbit.

 Jason and the Argonauts / The 7th Voyage of Sinbad / Clash of the Titans - The Ray Harryhausen triptych of movies I guess are unmistakably "sword and sorcery" or at least "sword and Greek mythology" films. I saw all of these as a kid (funny how I didn't see many of these films after age nine...) and the robot bird Simon in Your Highness is most definitely a nod to that stupid robotic owl in Clash of the Titans. I forgot its name and don't know that I need to know it. I'll pretend its name is Archimedes, which I'm pretty sure is the name of the owl in The Sword and the Stone.

 The Black Cauldron - Speaking of Walt Disney, I never even considered this movie to qualify, but more than one list mentioned both The Sword and the Stone and The Black Cauldron. I saved The Black Cauldron for last because at least I have a story about this movie.

 I saw The Black Cauldron when it opened in theatres and was apparently the one kid in the world that didn't think it was the nadir of Disney animation (see: Waking Sleeping Beauty). In fact, I couldn't wait to rent the VHS tape when it came out... which was funny, because it DIDN'T come out on videocassette. Not until I was in high school, as a matter of fact. Like Song of the South, The Black Cauldron simply vanished from the lips of anyone involved with The Walt Disney Corporation for the rest of the 1980s. It took the better part of a decade before anyone could watch it again. I still don't really get the "sword and sorcery" categorization, mostly because I always connect that subgenre with the desert, but I guess it does fit in.

 Do you like how I mentioned two different Nightmare on Elm Street movies even though they are in no way topically related to these films?

 So I guess there were more movies than I led you to believe yesterday, although I've seen maybe three of them in the last ten years in their entirety. Several of them I only saw once, when I was pretty young, and they didn't make much of an impression. That might explain why Your Highness was slightly perplexing to the Cap'n.

From the Vaults: Blogorium Review - Equinox

(Return to) Equinox: A Journey (Back) Into the Supernatural

Weird times call for weird movies, so in a movie that makes sense only to the Cap'n, I gravitated back to Equinox: A Journey into the Supernatural.

Once upon a time, I wrote this about it:

Equinox: A Journey Into the Supernatural is a very interesting film...

wait.

let's take that back a step. It would be a great film if it weren't for the actors, who often deliver stilted dialogue that just barely matches their lips and sounds like it was recorded in someone's bathroom.

That being said, the premise and much of the execution of Dennis Muren and Mark McGee's 1967 movie is very promising. They set things up quickly and try their damndest to keep things interesting until a kicker of an ending, and the idea of a book that unleashes demons from hell is always fertile ground to explore. (speaking of which, the thought that Sam Raimi hadn't seen this movie before he made The Evil Dead is right up there with Terry Gilliam never having read 1984 before making Brazil)

In a nutshell, four (presumably) college age students are headed to a party up in the mountains, and decide to visit one of their professor's in his cabin, only to discover a mysterious castle and a book that monsters really want to get their hands on. But it's wrapped up in such a way that the frame story brings the dread fast and pays off in a way that must've seemed very clever in 1967.

Muren has much love for King Kong and Ray Harryhausen, and he cooks up some pretty impressive stop motion beasties to populate the set pieces, as well as a practical but very cool vision of the afterlife and hell. Knowing what he's done since certainly doesn't hurt matters, but as a start this was pretty keen.

This is not to say the movie's a-ok, cast aside. It could stand to be twenty
minutes shorter, and it's only 71 minutes as is. Inordinate amounts of time are spent with our four leads saying "you're probably right" or "that sounds best" after questioning the thing they were going to do in the first place. The middle of the movie would be best served by some tightening, but for a first timer, the promise outweighs the stumbling blocks.

Of course, this is assuming audiences ever saw Muren and McGee's version. See, they sold it to Jack Harris, the B-Movie producer who made The Blob a hit, and he sat on it for three years, before hiring Jack Woods to recut and reshoot parts of the film and release it as Equinox in 1970.

So how is the Jack Woods cut of Equinox?

Awful. Unbearably terrible, and missing everything that works about the
original. For one thing, they felt audiences wouldn't be able to follow the movie, so at every opportunity, there's voice-over or ADR to explain every mundane plot point until it's readily apparent what's going to happen. This is ignoring the new footage, of course, which also serves the purpose of explaining plot points, and replacing the central plot about the book's power and replacing it with Director Jack Woods playing as wizard named Asmodeus who exists in the movie only so the director could molest his female lead.

The cast does their best to blend old and new footage together, and since they don't appear to improved as thespians, you generally don't care. But by condensing the opening and losing much of the location and dread, the movie derails any payoff later, and instead changes the ending into "bad guy chases the kids" and dulls the impact of the final shot. Oh, and the voiceovers... Yeesh!

Criterion's done a nice job with both cuts of the film, with the 1970 cut looking the better of the two. The newer footage stands out over the original material, but overall it isn't as rough as the 1967 version, which suffers from heavy print damage and what looks like three or four scenes culled from a beaten up VHS version of the movie. That being said, they're both perfectly
watchable, provided you're interested in this kind of thing.

I agree with most of this, but will add the following caveats having listened to the commentary:

1) I hadn't realized that the movie was made on 16mm film stock and shot silent. This explains a) the lack of overlapping dialogue and b) why the audio sounds so strange. Most of it stays close to the script but was likely ADR'd in less than ideal conditions. The movie does get props for using a theremin though.

2) The pacing can be wildly erratic. Since they only had 30 seconds worth of film for each shot, the editing is actually pretty good, although Muren admits that "if I had been able to, I would have removed one or two frames from the beginning and ending of each scene".

Still, the opening moves at a pretty quick pace and sets up a mystery you'd like to know more about. Unfortunately, it takes a long time (in a short movie) to get back to the monsters. Once the stop motion gets kicking again, the relatively young filmmakers do keep things well integrated and it is fun. That second act just drags a bit much.

3) While I still think that The Evil Dead perhaps unconsciously borrows from Equinox, the co-writer admits the "book from hell" came from Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon. I suppose that all of this could have been floating around in the ether when Sam Raimi headed to Tennessee, but Equinox and Evil Dead share a number of intertextual links, and as the "Dead" series go on, it adds onto the "professor in the cabin unleashes a book of the dead" with a frame story (Army of Darkness) and more stop motion monsters (Dead by Dawn). The "other dimension" sequence also visually presupposes Phantasm by almost ten years.

4) The Jack Woods cut / extended version is as sleazy now as it was when I reviewed it the first time. One gets the impression Woods was trying to mimick the Roger Corman "cheapie" formula but got mixed up. There's none of the T&A but all of the lecherous older man on younger woman action. In that regard it's a little more like the Al Adamson films of the 70s. It takes away some of the punch of "a dimension you shouldn't meddle with" by adding Woods' sorcerer character to boot, but no one says you have to watch it. The picture is just better.

It's fun to go back to something you reviewed two and a half years ago and take what you've learned in the interim. Equinox is unfortunately not the kind of movie that would work in a "group" atmosphere, ala Horror Fest, because of its erratic pacing. It is, however, enjoyable to watch by yourself if you have a soft spot for home-made horror.

Remakes I Wouldn't Mind Seeing Trailer Sunday

Phantasm


Krull


Pirates


Six Pack


Silent Night, Deadly Night 2


Rawhead Rex


Outland

From the Vaults: Blogorium Review - Phantasm

editors' note: The Cap'n originally wrote this during a period decrying the persistent remakes of horror films, well known and obscure, which should provide some context for the opening paragraph.

To step off of the high horse soap box I constructed and spend most of my time on, there is one film in that realm of "remakes" that I have to say I wouldn't be angry if it was slotted for a redo. Don Coscarelli (he of Bubba Ho Tep and Beastmaster fame) mused aloud last year that he was thinking about remaking his breakthrough film Phantasm, and using it as a
springboard for more Phantasm films.

Here's where you'd expect me to get all tangent-y about how that's a terrible idea and blah blah blah, except that in the case of Phantasm, that's not such a bad decision. Phantasm is a neat little horror movie with some really good ideas, and as a slice of late seventies cheapie movies, it's pretty good.

The problem with Phantasm is that frequently its imagination outweighs its budget. The effects range from pretty cool (the sphere, the glimpse of another dimension) to pretty embarassing (the bug thing, the funeral parlor near the end) and it's clear that Coscarelli had a lot of trouble shooting and editing the film. There are sections where he relies on characters talking while the next scene begins in order to convey what's going on, or to literally explain what's happening in certain sequences. There are all kinds of strange logic and temporal leaps where characters are there one minute, and then we jump to the same place several minutes later and they're gone (I'm thinking specifically of when Reggie comes over and fights the bug and then vanishes) that really hamper what could be a hell of a movie. This isn't unique to the first Phantasm, but the other three seem to develop more smoothly as Coscarelli gets more comfortable behind the camera.

I really do believe that if he were able to go back and take the things that work about Phantasm without the constraints he had the first time around Don Coscarelli could really make the movie a cult classic. All the pieces are in place, they just need a little finesse. The news, however, is that a remake is less likely than the prospect of a fifth Phantasm, which is also cool, since in the wake of Bubba Ho Tep (and the forthcoming Bubba Nosferatu*) it sounds like Bruce Campbell would be part of any future installments of the Tall Man horror franchise.

*make that the still forthcoming Bubba Nosferatu, which also doesn't have Bruce Campbell, narrowing the possibility of a Campbell / Phantasm crossover...

Summerfest 3 Day Three: Matinee Quadruple Feature!

Welcome to day three of Summerfest, wherein the Cap'n and his intrepid fest fanatics spent the afternoon with four films heretofore unseen during marathon activities. I could probably do write-ups for each one of these movies and go on forever, but I need to get to McDonalds before the rest of our maniacs arrive so the McGangbang Challenge can really come to pass (photo evidence to follow). Ergo, here are four short summaries with highlights of each film:


Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead - I intentionally chose the third Phantasm film because unless you're planning to show all four films in one sitting, any one of the sequels will be as confusing as the others to first time viewers. To wit, when Kevin asked "why is he shrinking that corpse?" the only logical answer Phillippi could give him was "because the Tall Man needs them to be small when they cross into the other dimension," which is exactly the case, but makes no sense unless you're really trying hard to follow the Phantasm films. The series is a bit like watching a dream unfold, and the logic of the Tall Man and Michael's story is better left unexplored. It's easier to follow Reggie's story, which is how these films hook you in and prepare you for the sometimes nonsensical inter-dimensional elements.

Cheerleader Camp - It seemed only fair to include another summer camp-esque slasher movie, particularly since The Burning was really more "summer camp" than "slasher", and Cheerleader Camp (aka Bloody Pom Poms) is truly a bizarre and awkward movie. It tries so hard to cram disparate elements together: borderline-camp black comedy, periodically gory kills, goofy teen comedy, murder mystery, hallucinatory dream sequences, and Leif Garrett. In the end, it's kind of like mashing up Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp, Heathers, The Disorderlies, Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid, and VH1's Behind the Music into one overstuffed platter. Since you can call the "twist" about 15 minutes into the movie, the only thing left to do is enjoy the union of movies that just shouldn't fit together and make jokes about how much older Leif Garrett looks than the rest of the cast (funny tidbit: he's actually the same age or younger than half of the girls). Oh, and you have to hear the cheerleader "rap" (skip to the one minute mark):




ThanksKilling - Oh my goodness. I don't want to say too much about this right now, because we're going to watch it again later tonight (ThanksKilling demands a large audience), but this movie is like the demented, cheaper, step-brother of Blood Car. Its brilliance is the willingness to embrace how stupid a talking rubber turkey is on the part of the filmmakers, and then not to care and push onwards. Every moment the turkey's onscreen is gold (except, perhaps, for when it's radioactive and therefore glowing green), and there are moments in this film I guarantee you'll never see anywhere else ("I found this feather and an extra-small gravy flavored condom in her room!")


The Gate - For those of you who saw The Gate when you were younger and forgot about it (or just have hazy memories), watch it again. This is a disturbing kids' movie. Seriously. The things that happen to Stephen Dorff's Glen (I swear I never heard anyone call him Glen, so we just called him Billy) are the stuff of childhood abandonment nightmares: his dog dies, his sister basically ignores him (save for when her friends make him levitate into a lightbulb, which he shatters with his head), his best friend is dragged into the wall by a zombie repairman, his parents leave for the weekend (or are killed), only to return and dissolve in front of him, and to top it all off, his treehouse is torn down to reveal a gate to hell with a giant demon that sticks an eyeball in his hand.

Really? People thought this would be good for kids to watch? And how do I know that kids watched it? Because I saw this movie and so did just about everyone else I know born between 1977 and 1982 (the film came out in 1987). I hadn't seen it in years, but it's one nightmarish situation after the other, each escalating until Glen witnesses the literal creation of "hell on earth" and has to save the world by himself with a toy rocket. That's as close to whimsical as the movie gets, since it's really unclear whether his parents actually left or were murdered by the little demons running around in his house and backyard. I will say I was impressed that Glen's friend Terry (Louis Trip) was listening to Slayer and Iron Maiden at... let's be generous and say 11 (despite the fact that Trip was 14 when the film was made, it's clear that Glen and Terry are supposed to be preteens at best, and I'm leaning closer to 10 or 11 for Glen).

How do I know Terry was listening to Slayer? Well, other than the subplot about listening to Satanic metal albums, Terry is wearing not one but two different Slayer t-shirts during the film. It's really no wonder this generation turned out as warped as we did, considering that the "children's" entertainment we think fondly of is as demented and traumatizing as The Gate.

Up next: I'm going to put on Return of the Living Dead for the folks here and then go buy something no human should ever consume... the dreaded McGangbang.

Speaking of Lists...

I've noticed that just about everyone and their sister is compiling lists of "Best Films of the Decade", since 2009 closes out the first ten years of the new millennium. The Cap'n thought this seemed a bit foolhardy at first, but in the spirit of keeping up with the Joneses, I started making a list of movies I thought were very good, great, had some personal impact on me, or were simply films I've seen repeatedly since their release in 2000.

After filling up the back of two envelopes with just what I had in the Apartment That Dripped Blood, I decided it was in fact a foolhardy notion. Considering how many of these lists are already out there, it seemed best to just abandon the idea altogether. But then again, I had those envelopes, so why not salvage something out of them?

What I came up with are ten movies that I'm pretty sure aren't on any other "Decade's Best" list, but that should be considered anyway. All of them are included strictly for personal reasons, but if you haven't seen any of them, I recommend you check each out.

In no particular order, my top ten films from 2000-2009 No One Else Is Going to Mention are:

Lost in La Mancha - A thoroughly captivating documentary about the making and unmaking of Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. At times painful to watch, as nature and bond companies slowly destroy Gilliam's dream of making his re-imagining of Cervantes a reality. After La Mancha collapsed, Gilliam made the heavily re-edited Brothers Grimm, the darkly inaccessible Tideland, and despite the death of Heath Ledger, he completed The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which is opening soon.

(Other documentaries worth checking out: Dark Days, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, The King of Kong: A Fist Full of Quarters, and Hell's Highway.)

Spider - Lost in the shuffled between eXistenZ and the career resurgence of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises is a great little character study from David Cronenberg. Ralph Fiennes is a muttering, shuffling ball of schizophrenia in the story of a man trying to recreate a murder from his past. The only problem is keeping straight what's real and what's conflated, a challenge for Fiennes and for the audience, but one worth taking on.

(Other brain benders worth pursuing: The Prestige, Birth, The Chumscrubber, and INLAND EMPIRE.)

In Bruges - Still a criminally underseen film from 2008, In Bruges manages to switch from an amusing - if vulgar - comedy to a much more emotionally resonant film, due in no small part to the pairing of Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell. Ralph Fiennes also appears as a force of nature crime boss, and when his orders aren't adhered to, Bruges lights up with profanity and gunfire. Also the sort of film where every incidental detail has some bearing on the plot, which is not spoiling anything.

(Other crime movies you might dig: Sexy Beast, The Departed, Collateral, and Snatch.)

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - Shane Black's return to Hollywood after a self imposed sabbatical brought about one of the purest and most enjoyable neo-noir detective films in the last ten years. Too bad nobody saw it. Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer are at the top of their game in this twist on detective films, one that is as frequently hilarious as it is randomly violent. Few films can make not one but two great jokes out of losing a finger, and that's but one of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's many charms.

(Other neo-noirs worth pursuing: Brick, The Ice Harvest, The Lookout, and The Man Who Wasn't There.)

May - Lucky McKee's debut film was so far beneath my radar that until a chance encounter with the dvd in Hollywood video, I didn't even know May existed. I suspect it remains that way for many of you, but Angela Bettis' May is one of the great characters of the last decade, in a film which is disturbing, sad, and darkly funny in equal measures. Some people take issue with the last few moments of the film, but I can't imagine this fractured fairy tale ending any other way.

(Other under-the-radar horror films worth your time: Roman, Bubba Ho-Tep, Black Sheep, Slither, and Fido.)

This Film is Not Yet Rated - Kirby Dick's expose on the practices of the MPAA's arbitrary rules for how a movie earns its ratings had an impact beyond informing the viewer of a hidden Hollywood practice: the MPAA subsequently took strides to be more transparent in their ratings systems, and loosened the criteria for appealing NC-17's. Like Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, This Film is Not Yet Rated actually translated into a change in the way businesses operate. Plus, it's a great documentary.

(Other, additional, documentaries in need of seeking out: In the Realms of the Unreal, Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth, Not Quite Hollywood, and Stephen Toblowski's Birthday Party.)

O Brother Where Art Thou - The Coen Brothers movie I saw four times in theatres. I dragged everyone I knew to see this film, in Cary and in Greensboro, and I can't tell you how many times I've watched it since. O Brother is a joyous film, one that weds Preston Sturges to The Odyssey in a sensible and entertaining way, one with music that outlasts the "bluegrass revival" fad that sprung up in its wake. I'm convinced that without this combination of George Clooney and The Coens, we might not have the goofy, affable alternative to his otherwise serious and politically conscious films.

(Other films that owe their existence to O Brother Where Art Thou: Leatherheads, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Burn After Reading, and Intolerable Cruelty)

Ginger Snaps and Ginger Snaps: Unleashed - A one-two punch of revisionist werewolf lore that films like Twilight could learn a thing or two from. The premise of Ginger Snaps, that lycanthropy could parallel the beginning of menstrual cycles, could have fallen flat on its face, were it not for the utterly believable bond between Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins as sisters Ginger and Brigitte. In the rare instance of a sequel as good, if not better, than the original, Unleashed shifts the metaphor from puberty to drug addiction, leaving Brigitte's transformation - punctuated by ghostly visits from Ginger - to the realm of a lucid nightmare. The final moments of the film (which situate Ginger Snaps: The Beginning firmly in the realm of fairy tale) take Unleashed beyond mere sequel and into the canon of great horror films.

(Other trope-shifting horror films you ought to seek out: Martyrs, The Orphanage, Let the Right One In, and The Mist.)

Primer - Made for next to nothing, Primer is a well thought out science fiction film about the paradoxes of time travel, constructed in such a way that the audience is constantly one step behind the narrative. What makes primer so special is how conceivably realistic the film is, even when the apparent hazards of time travel manifest themselves towards the end. It spawned a series of other imitators, but for my money Primer is still the king of the mountain.

(Other science fiction films you may have missed: Timecrimes, Serenity, A Scanner Darkly, and Moon.)

Blood Car - I include this because sometimes a film so embodies pure anarchy that it must be included on a "Best Of" list. Blood Car has something to offend everyone - vegetarians? check. people who love animals? check. fans of My Girl? check. people squeamish around blood? check. people who consider themselves to like children, the disabled, the elderly, are prudish about sex, who think gas prices are too high? something to offend everybody. And Blood Car does it gleefully. A genuine example of "cult" movie, one so difficult to find that people are clamoring to review Terminator: Salvation for an extra copy I have. Not since early John Waters have I had so much fun having my senses assaulted.

(Other movies like this: There aren't any. Just rent Blood Car.)