Horror Fest IV Day Two: Matango and See No Evil

We kicked off Friday with a double dose of not-goodness by watching a one-two punch of Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People and See No Evil. Both were, shall we say, underwhelming.

If there's anything to be gained from Matango, a movie where nothing happens until the 75 minute mark (and the mushroom monster doesn't appear until nearly the 45 minute mark), it's that the producers of Lost may have borrowed from its playbook. Allow me to explain: at first, Matango looks like a Japanese Gilligan's Island, but once their schooner crashes and they land on Dinosaur Island Mushroom Island, they spend the next hour debating how to survive, they find a crashed vessel from long before, and there are flashbacks.

Eventually you see the smoke monster Matango, and people go crazy eating the mushrooms and then (SPOILER ALERT) becoming mushrooms themselves! The one survivor makes it back to Japan and is in an insane asylum. At the very end it turns out he too is turning into a mushroom person. (WHAT A TWIST!)

The only thing See No Evil has that Matango doesn't is more violence in roughly the same running time, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Oh sure, there are some decent kills, and maybe the gimmick of a hulking brute with a hook and chain that steals peoples' eyeballs could work, but not in this movie.

For some odd reason, See No Evil thinks it would be funny to let the characters you like the least live until the end, and everyone else dies. The twist involving a character you can see coming a mile away had most of us saying "well, duh" when they finally got around to the reveal.

I guess WWE Superstar Kane isn't that bad, but since all he has to do is skulk around and drag people, there's not much room to gaffe it up. The direction is a mess: Gregory Dark, a former video and porn director steals liberally from the Saw camera tricks playbook. Alas, if you've seen one speed ramp, ill placed jump cut, and "attached to character" cam, you've seen pretty much all you're going to.

Oh well, things are headed to an upswing next, as we watch Terry O'Quinn in The Stepfather.

To Be Continued... If I can only remember why.

Don't you hate it when you tease something like this:

"1. I am always looking for something new to show in between movies at Horror Fest (more on that subject later this week)."

but by the time you come back to it three days later, you can't remember exactly what you meant by "more on that subject later this week"? I knew I made a mental note to come back to that for today's entry, but I'll be damned if there's that much to talk about. Oh well, let's give it a whirl...

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One of the things I'd like to do with Horror Fest is expand the viewing pleasure beyond simply movies. There have always been episodes of TV shows playing between films and in the last two years or so Dr. Re-Animator became a fixture of breaks (to the chagrin of many of you) but that's really been the extent of it. I've tried finding good "horror only" trailer reels and it's not as easy as it sounds.

The one good dvd I did find was All Monsters Attack!, a disc devoted to Sci-Fi Monster movies that sorta fits the bill. The 42nd Street Forever discs each have horror movies, but they're split up in between other exploitation films so it can be tricky using those.

In my quest to find horror-related ephemera, I found a dvd from Something Weird Video called Monsters Crash the Pajama Party that may be exactly what I've been looking for. The dvd itself is three-and-a-half hours of short films, trailers, drive-in shorts, horror musicals, educational shorts, photo montages, and something called Hypnoscope that comes with 3-D glasses. Plus there's Tormented, a Bert I. Gordon joint from 1960.

Monsters Crash the Pajama Party may be exactly what I've been hunting for, as it's the sort of disc you can press "play" on and switch back to between the films proper. I'm not certain if there are more discs like this, but if so I'd like to check them out for future use, as it really can augment the experience.

The one other thing I've been trying to find with relatively little success is the Silly Symphonies cartoon about the musical skeletons. The Diz pulled that particular volume of Symphonies years ago and, the dummy that I am, I sold it.

Also, if you happen to see any good "Horror Host" material on Youtube, send it my way. I'm quite certain I can incorporate it into the Fest.

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So... that's about it. More than I expected, but still this feels like a lot less than what I teased. Hrm.

Oh! Voting ends on Sunday, so get any final plugs in. I'm going to cut the next bracket down to one week as to get more of you to jump on the business of choosing your Fest, so keep your eyes peeled!

What...is....Latitude Zero????

Lately, the craziest dvds have been coming into the store. Maybe it's just that I have more access to dvds as a file-er than I used to, or maybe it has something to do with the recession, but films I had no idea existed are frequently passing through the conference room. Latitude Zero is one such movie.

At first, I wasn't paying too much attention. It looked enough like anime to a quick glance that I simply began filing, until I saw the words Citizen Kane.

That's normally enough to stop me from ignoring any dvd coming through, but this use of Kane was in reference to Joseph Cotton, who stars in both that film and this one. This intrigued me, since it was reasonably clear from the back this was some variety of Japanese fantasy film / Man-in-Suit picture. When Cesar Romero's named followed, I was hooked already. Truthfully, I haven't seen much of him outside of the Batman tv show, but that's a strange one-two punch for a movie of this ilk. The fact that it's a Toho picture from the director of Gojira and Matango only sealed the deal. I need to watch this.



The plot seems like a cross between Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Destroy All Monsters, with a dollop of Journey to the Center of the Earth thrown in for good measure. Maybe it was the guy in the bat suit. Maybe it was the volcano(?) explosion or the super-sub battle. Or...

Maybe it was the FLYING LION in the movie*!

How could I not find out what this is all about? Sometimes I'm really glad to work where I work, or many amazing - and not so amazing - movies wouldn't (literally) pass through my hands. Perhaps Latitude Zero will be the movie I break in the new place (wherever that is) with. Perhaps you'll see it in a future "Bad Movie Night". I can't say for sure now, but I'm excited to find out...



*thanks to DVD Drive In for the lion picture. Credit where credit's due.