Shocktober Revisited: Carnival of Souls

Is there a statute of limitations on SPOILERS? I feel like if a movie has been out in the world for, oh, say, fifty-two years, that it might maybe be okay to discuss the big "twist" without fear of ruining it for everybody. Particularly a movie like Carnival of Souls, which has been in both the public domain and also the Criterion collection for quite a while. I know that a lot of you have probably heard of the film but maybe haven't seen it, but there's no point in writing about Carnival of Souls this late into the game without discussing what makes it so unique for its time. And that means directly addressing the end of the film, when the creeping sense of unease finally overtakes you.

 So here's what I'm going to do: consider this your SPOILER warning, because I'm diving in. The Blogorium has been around too long not to have included Carnival of Souls, and the Cap'n isn't going to shy away from twists and turns. Continue at your own risk if you haven't seen the film (and you should).

 Still with me? All right, let's get into it. I've always found Carnival of Souls has a lasting effect particularly because it's such an unorthodox "ghost story." Astute viewers of today can no doubt figure out that there's no way Mary (Candace Hilligoss) survived the car crash and somehow emerges from the river, to the surprise of the rescue crew and onlookers. We know, in fact, that she didn't at the very end of the film when the tow truck pulls the car out and her body is next to the other two girls, but it raises the question: what is the rest of the story? Is it a dream in the moments before death? Does her spirit escape, and try to carry on as before, only to be pursued by the spirits of the dead? She interacts with other people who are very much alive, who have scenes that Mary doesn't appear in, including the next to last moment at the carnival.

 In most horror movies - and certainly all of the great ones - atmosphere is key. Carnival of Souls excels at atmosphere, in particular the way that the mundane world Mary settles into is interrupted by phantoms who follow her at every turn. Arguably, the use of organ music is a dead giveaway when the shift is going to happen - which is forgivable, considering that it isn't nearly as egregious as, say the "monster" theme from Creature from the Black Lagoon. The organ music is also unsettling at times, as it too straddles the line between the sacred and profane. That it is Mary's chosen profession is all the more appropriate considering the trajectory of Carnival of Souls.

There's something to the phrase "spiritual insouciance" in the IMDB synopsis - there's something to the idea that Mary refuses to die that makes the deliberately dreamlike second half of Carnival of Souls so alluring. She skips town, takes a job as an organist at another church, but is constantly drawn to the dead, the abandoned, the profane. The moments when she "ceases to exist" are really quite something, especially for 1962 (remember, this only two years after Psycho, and Mary dies even sooner than Marion Crane). Carnival of Souls has an illusory quality, juxtaposed with the very normal world of working and having a landlady and fending off your randy neighbor. Mary is torn between two worlds - one she's desperately trying to avoid - and the matter of fact shift between one and the other gives the film a kind of proto-Lynchian vibe. It's not entirely clear where Herk Harvey and John Clifford are heading with the story.

 Many ghost stories have characters who interact with the dead, but the protagonist is often alive or, in the case of something like The Sixth Sense, has a spiritual guide who is alive that introduces them to the world of the undead. Mary is our main character, and most of the film is told specifically from her perspective. She's haunted by the "The Man," (Harvey) who she attempts to avoid everywhere except at the carnival, where she's inexplicably drawn. It's there, after all, that she (and the audience) is revealed the truth - during their dance macabre (sorry, I couldn't help myself), The Man's partner is none other than an equally ghoulish version of Mary. She runs, they pursue her, she disappears.

 Which makes sense, but the following scene, when the Minister (Art Ellison), Dr. Samuels (Stan Levitt), and the police go to the carnival the following day and trace her footprints out to the water, where they stop. It's not the first time we've seen Dr. Samuels or John on camera without Mary in the shot, so there's some argument to be made that this represents objective reality, and yet they considered Mary to be a living, breathing person among them. In that respect, Carnival of Souls differentiates itself from films both before and after that deal with ghosts, poltergeists, or the like. It's reminiscent of the story of the woman in white, hitchhiking to the dance she never lived to see, but on a larger scale. This ghost refuses to believe she's dead - not in an ignorant way (like The Sixth Sense), but in a determined sense to stay alive.

 On some level, Mary knows she's deceased - her attraction to the abandoned carnival (filmed at the abandoned Saltair Pavilion outside of Salt Lake City) is linked to the idea of something (or someone) existing past their purpose. She intermittently flirts with John Linden (Sidney Berger), her neighbor, alternating between a need for human contact and some distant understanding that he has nothing to offer her. Mary's destiny is with The Man, her partner in the dance of the dead, if I may drop all subtlety. Her at times inexplicable behavior is much clearer at the end, when it's obvious that these are the last whims of a dead woman, one who slipped free from the afterlife. For a little while, anyway.

 To this day, Carnival of Souls is best viewed late at night, when the mind begins to wander, and when its dreamlike logic is more effective on viewers. That, at least, is how I prefer to introduce it to people. Its influence stretches far beyond its familiarity with most audiences - one will be hard pressed to find people who haven't heard of it, but many of them still haven't seen it. It's presence in the public domain no doubt muddies the water - along with Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls can be found bundled with any number of cheapie monster flick from the 1950s and 60s, doomed to be downgraded by association, a fate a film this good doesn't deserve. It's somewhat amazing that this is the only feature Herk Harvey ever made, but if you're only going to make one, we should all hope it's a Carnival of Souls.

Shocktober Revisited: The Evil Dead Series

 editor's note: this includes portions of reviews from various points in the Blogorium history.


 Other than a mention in the closing notes of Horror Fest V, you might be surprised to see there's no review of The Evil Dead anywhere in the Blogorium. For that matter, there's even less about Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn: it merits less than a sentence and a half in the Horror Fest III recap. In my defense, early Fest recaps were written between movies, usually during smoke breaks for others, so you'll find much of that coverage to be, frankly, lacking. It feels unfair to not give them a proper discussion, considering the lengthy Retro Review for Army of Darkness (see below) and their place in Cap'n Howdy's arrival to watching horror films regularly. Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell are, in many ways, responsible for the person I am today. If I can talk about how Oz: The Great and Powerful is, in many ways, a family friendly remake of Army of Darkness, surely there can be some digital space carved out for the films that made both of them household names. Well, very particular households. Like ones who signed up for Starz after Ash vs. Evil Dead was announced.

 (note: I have left the Army of Darkness Retro Review largely untouched, which should be amusing considering that both the remake and Ash Vs. Evil Dead have rendered the first paragraph moot)


 The Evil Dead is, I'm reasonably certain, the last of Raimi's "Dead" trilogy that I saw, although it's very likely I'm not alone in saying that. Unless you were old enough to have seen them in the order they were released, odds are you came into the films with the second or third film, and then worked backwards. It's an understandable way of doing things: Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn and Army of Darkness are more comedic in tone, while The Evil Dead plays it largely for horror, bringing a few uncomfortable chuckles as the narrative continues. The first time I experienced any part of The Evil Dead may have been late at night one weekend, back when Syfy was The Sci-Fi Channel, back when their "original programming" consisted of Sci-Fi Buzz and they didn't mind showing horror movies to pad out their schedule.

 My memory of it is vivid: I came in at the very end of the movie, right before Ash (Campbell) kills Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) and Scotty (Richard DeManincor) by burning the Necronomicon. I can specifically remember the stop motion, clay-faced Scotty beginning to melt as he falls forward and hits the cabin floor, before the rest of his skin bubbles off and he becomes a skull in a goopy pile. I'm not even sure if I stuck around for the ending, when the "camera on a 2x4" manifestation of evil catches Ash and it cuts to black, but it's likely I did. When you start watching The Evil Dead, from wherever you start, it's hard not to finish. It's even harder when it comes to Dead by Dawn, but we'll get to that shortly.

 What I've come to appreciate over the years about The Evil Dead, and why it's still my favorite of the three (in a very hard "choose your favorite child" scenario), is the immediate sense of dread for the protagonists. Cheryl, Ash, Scotty, Linda (Betsy Baker), and Shelly (Theresa Tilly) have no idea how doomed they are as they drive up to the "cabin in the woods" for the weekend. We've already seen a seemingly untethered camera floating through the swamp, and Raimi is continually warning us with distorted visual and audio cues that something very bad is going to happen. The exaggerated attention paid to the porch swing hitting the wall, boosting the sound to a ludicrously ominous level, hints at what he'll do again in Drag Me to Hell. But most of The Evil Dead isn't played to for laughs.


 The visceral quality of the film still gets to me - when Linda takes a pencil to the ankle, I cringe. Every time. I know it's coming, but it still works. It's hard not to mention the "tree" scene, because that's clearly the moment that Raimi oversteps his boundary, even by his own admission. It doesn't stop him from making a more comical version of it in Dead by Dawn, but there's nothing funny about what happens to Cheryl in The Evil Dead, and that's really what kicks off the horror. I always found it interesting that Ash and Cheryl were siblings, because it gives The Evil Dead a different level of connection than in the prologue to Dead by Dawn (and, I suppose, Army of Darkness). It's the only time we find out his real name is Ashley, because only his sister is going to call him that, and he's more fiercely protective of her after she's violated in the forest.

 While Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness increase the budget (and scope), I'm quite fond of the grimy, no budget aesthetic of The Evil Dead. There's something to its low-fi ambience, to Raimi's inventive ways around budget limitations, and the sound design that sets the first film apart. It's more assured than the rough draft short film, Within the Woods (which is functionally the same story, only Campbell is evil), and provides the groundwork for a lot of what became Sam Raimi auteur-ial flourishes. If there's anything that keeps it from being the classic it ought to be, it's that people often come to it last, and in doing so are often disappointed that Ash isn't as central a character as they've become accustomed to. He is, in many ways, like Ripley is in the first half of Alien - a member of the gang, but hardly the focus of the story. There's very little of the wisecracking, boomstick wielding lunkhead-turned-hero that people expect. But I don't hold that against The Evil Dead, and neither should you.

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 Before I ever saw Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, I can remember reading the review in Mick Martin and Marsha Porter's Video Movie Guide. It described Dead by Dawn as "less of a sequel and more of a remake," which was sort of the conventional wisdom passed around about the film until the internet came along to set things straight. Had Raimi been able to use footage from the first film, Ash's trip to the cabin with Linda (now Denise Bixler) might have simply been a recap, picking up immediately after the camera hits him. In truth, I've always been tempted to cut the two (well, even three, really) films together into a super-cut, since the seams are actually very easy to locate.

 Dead by Dawn is still technically a horror movie, but Raimi's fondness for slapstick comedy (particularly The Three Stooges) comes through more in the sequel, and it's a much easier entry point for the series. Not as easy as Army of Darkness, which is how I imagine most of you came in, but it's a great way to ease someone into gory movies. After Evil Dead 2, show them some early Peter Jackson, and they can handle just about anything. Well, maybe not the pencil to the ankle. Or Martyrs. But Martyrs is really an outlier. Where was I? Oh, yeah, Dead by Dawn. So the first twenty minutes or so retells The Evil Dead, just without Cheryl, Scotty, and Shelly. It's just Ash and Linda, and the words are spoken on the tape and she's still possessed and he still cuts her head off with a shovel and buries her. And then the film goes bonkers.

 I actually really like the way that Raimi continues from where The Evil Dead ends to where Dead by Dawn begins in earnest: Ash doesn't die, he's just prohibitively possessed and can't leave. The bridge is still destroyed, and the "force" is still trying to find him in the cabin. But it doesn't, in one of the more amusing scenes: it's chasing him through the cabin, and all of a sudden loses him, and just gives up for a while. Then Linda comes back, and we're introduced to the chainsaw in this version (as well as Freddy's glove, if you're looking carefully in the toolshed), and what will become the hallmarks of the Ash most people know start. It's also a tour-de-force for Bruce Campbell, who spends the lion's share of Evil Dead 2 by himself, fighting with furniture, blood, and most notably, himself.

 There are people out there who don't know who Bruce Campbell is, or at least have never seen him on-screen, and without fail you can win them over by showing them Evil Dead 2. His gift for physical comedy, his willingness to go all out to sell a gag, is impressive to say the very least. Campbell makes you believe his hand is possessed and he has no control over it, and the scene where "it" drags his unconscious body towards a meat cleaver always impresses me. Sure, the sound design for the hand helps, as does the editing, but Campbell is doing the lion's share of holding up Evil Dead 2 for the first half of the movie, so much so that it almost loses steam when everybody else shows up.

 It's probably important to clarify the "almost" - it's not as though the movie was only going to be Ash, because while he's been going nuts in the cabin, we've already met Annie (Sarah Berry), Ed (Richard Dormeier), Jake (Dan Hicks), and Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley). Annie is the daughter of Professor Knowby (John Peakes in flashbacks), whose voice we hear reciting passages from the Necronomicon. She's on her way back to the cabin, so eventually there's going to be a crossing of paths, and since Ash has reduced the cabin to a smashed up bloodbath, it's not really a surprise she leaps to conclusions. Also, he shot Bobby Joe - accidentally and through the door, but it doesn't help his case. Their presence shifts the direction of the movie quite a bit, but it does lock Ash in the basement, where he meets the Deadite version of Knowby's wife, Henrietta (Ted Raimi). That's a plus.

 Aside from providing Raimi with more bodies to do horrible things to (Bobby Joe swallowing a projectile eyeball, Ed getting hacked to pieces, and the many times Jake is hurt after he's been stabbed with the Kandarian dagger), the only purpose that any of the other four characters serve is to bring the passages from the Necronomicon that can banish the demons in the woods. And yeah, Ash isn't really in any state to do it by himself, so I get more characters, but there's a marked shift in the film after they enter the cabin that doesn't really resolve until three of them quickly exit the narrative. Ed gets possessed, eats some of Annie's hair, and gets an axe to, well, everything. Bobby Joe gets Raimi's cleaned up version of the "tree" scene, and poor Jake gets abused repeatedly before being torn asunder by Henrietta. And then the pages end up in the basement.

 This, if you watch the series backwards, is when Ash finally starts to meet the iconography that fans of the series associate with him. How he goes from barely functioning to able to craft his chainsaw arm is better left unquestioned, but when I saw Dead by Dawn recently on the big screen, the moment brought loud cheers, many before he even had time to say "Groovy." Much of this is where I base the "people watched The Evil Dead series backwards" theory on: not only is that how I did it - I had a VHS tape of Army of Darkness, and then a friend bought me a copy of Evil Dead 2 - but it was as though everybody was waiting for the Ash they knew to show up.

 I'm tremendously fond of Evil Dead 2 - it's the last entry in the original trilogy (to date) that makes any effort to be a horror movie, even if it's also largely a comedy. The film is a great way to introduce someone to horror, because you can ease them into over the top gore while giving them something to laugh at, so they don't get too squeamish. It's a fantastic showcase for Bruce Campbell, and if I'm being honest, it's better than Army of Darkness. Maybe not as quotable as the third film or as visceral as the first, but a happy middle ground. The effects from the fresh off of Day of the Dead KNB still hold up, and it has maybe one of the best puns to go along with cutting your hand off that you're ever going to see.

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I saw an article a few weeks back perpetuating the cycle of "will Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi ever make Evil Dead 4, or will they just remake it?" where Campbell had been interviewed for something he's doing with Burn Notice and he casually mentioned that he'd read the screenplay for the ED remake. The person writing the article included some commentary about how they'll eventually "wake up" and realize that people want Evil Dead 4 and not an "idiotic redo."

The argument has been going on since a remake was announced some seven years ago, and the great "will there be an Evil Dead 4" has been kicking around since 1993's Army of Darkness, but really kicked into high gear when the director's cut arrived on DVD around 2000. This is not actually another editorial about the relative merits of ED 4 vs. ED: R, but instead will dance around elements that consistently appear in said arguments, based on the 18 year history the Cap'n has with Sam Raimi's third journey into the battle between Ash and the Deadites.

I wasn't allowed to see Army of Darkness in February of 1993, and it wasn't because the News and Observer panned the film - it was that pesky "R" rating. It was the same reason I couldn't see The Crow a year later, and why the 14 and then 15 year-old Cap'n had to wait for my Dad to "check them out" to see if they were fit for consumption*. After Dad laughed throughout Army of Darkness, he told my mother it was "too silly" to seriously corrupt my already corrupted mind**, and I was allowed to begin watching The Evil Dead films in the opposite order.

Yes, I saw Army of Darkness first; then Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn; then, eventually, The Evil Dead. I'd been aware of the other two thanks to Carbonated Video, but if you think they had trouble letting me watch the tamest, least horrific of the three, just imagine if I'd tried to rent anything from the "horror" aisle.

As I've mentioned before, horror comedies were my gateway into harder edged films of the genre, well beyond the Universal Classic Monster films that populated my youth. The violence in Evil Dead 2 is so extreme, so impossible to take seriously, it ceases to horrify and instead induces laughter.

Similarly, the blood geyser in Army of Darkness (anyone familiar with the film knows exactly what I'm talking about) became the great ice-breaker in high school - just throw on Army of Darkness in the dressing room during plays and watch as every single cast member shifts their focus from last minute line memorization to Bruce Campbell involved in skeleton-related slapstick. The film (which is honestly harmless in just about every measure you'd gauge "horror" by) was a great introduction to crazier movies, not only Raimi's other films, but Peter Jackson's gross-out trifecta of Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Dead Alive.

Now I've mentioned that Army of Darkness has a Director's Cut, and that it had a VHS and DVD release in '99 / 2000 (respectively), but the funny thing is that I already knew it existed well before it came out. Though I cannot recall why or how I found it, clips of the original ending were already available on the internet in 1997, albeit in postage stamp-sized Quicktime files that took hours to download on a 28.8 modem. This, coupled with the launch of BC Central - the original version of Bruce Campbell's official website - allowed the high school era Cap'n to pursue more information about the "two" Army of Darkness's.

When I say "original" version of Bruce Campbell's website, I don't mean this. That's what BC Central became (the original domain name is now up for sale, I just checked), but in the beginning, Bruce recorded .wav files that were embedded into the page and shared personal anecdotes (many of which ended up in If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor). He also had an email address to send questions to, and back in those early days of the "internet," Bruce Campbell would respond personally to your email (things were different back then, you see).

Logically, having seen the original ending where Ash oversleeps and finds himself in a post-apocalyptic London, I thought I'd be the clever fellow who emailed Bruce asking why they'd changed the ending. While the email is lost to time, I still remember what he replied:

"We didn't change it - the studio did. Cheers, Bruce Campbell"

That's all; I didn't say he wrote long responses, but he did respond, and in all fairness Bruce Campbell did answer my question, which was poorly worded to be sure.

Okay, so the Director's Cut was out there, including on a bootlegged VHS tape we had a copy of in college from a video store that no longer exists but still doesn't have to be "out-ed," and it entered the rotation with the likes of Clerks, Cannibal! The Musical, and Pecker***.

Over the last 15 years or so, I've had a copy of Army of Darkness in just about every iteration you can find: the 1996 VHS release, the Universal DVD, on Blu-Ray, and even on HD-DVD. Oh, and then there are the numerous Anchor Bay releases, of which I only didn't have the "Bootleg" edition, in part because I still had the "Limited" edition with the Theatrical and Director's Cuts. You'll find pictures of all of them scattered around this Retro Review.

With time, I've come to prioritize my Evil Dead preference in the opposite order I saw them: The Evil Dead is a relentless, disturbing, graphic horror film that I enjoy more every time I see it; Dead by Dawn is basically the same movie but with the disturbing replaced with some seriously wicked black comedy, a more enjoyable experience but hints at the direction Raimi was going in; Army of Darkness is essentially a series of one-liners with a dash of Ray Harryhausen "horror" in the guise of an adventure film. There's nothing scary about Army of Darkness, and one will find the 90% of "Ash-holes" prefer the Ash from the third film to the other two - he has the better catchphrases. I watch Army of Darkness less than the other two, but the Cap'n still appreciates its role in dragging me back into horror.

As to whether a remake or sequel happens (or, more likely, doesn't) I must admit I don't give it much thought. Drag Me to Hell was by and large as close as we're going to get to an "Evil Dead" -type film from Sam Raimi, and to be honest, I'm happier with that than a continuation of the "give me some sugar, baby" that closed out the Ash saga.

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 And then there's the remake. Oh, I know, Sam Raimi didn't direct it: he merely produced it, along with Bruce Campbell and Robert Tapert, thereby giving it their tacit "seal of approval", but you didn't really think I was just going to pretend it didn't exist, did you? I may not like it very much, but Fede Alvarez's reboot-sequel-thing can technically be argued to continue the story, thanks to some specific visual cues, and who knows what's in store after Ash vs. Evil Dead...

 The presence of "the classic" - Sam Raimi's 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 - covered in vines seems to indicate that this is the same cabin that Ash was in at some point, although it's not clear that he ever left based on the film. The grittier, less "comedic" approach Alvarez brings to the remake allows for certain elements from The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 to be reused - the tree rape (even more uncomfortable), losing a hand (even more graphic), and the chainsaw (more blood), while pushing the boundaries of Deadites in different directions. Now they're self-mutilating demons, not unlike the possessed Ghosts of Mars, and you should never want me to have to compare your movie to Ghosts of Mars. Ever.

 It's no secret that I don't like Evil Dead, and I've tried to give it another chance. I kind of like the idea that Mia (Jane Levy)'s friends bring her to the cabin to detox, and they don't listen to her when things get nasty because she's prone to lying in order to use. Unfortunately, that plotline is all but abandoned halfway through the film, and it's never really explored enough to be more than a device to kick off the movie. The idea that the Necronomicon has been in the cabin and that people try to keep it out of the hands of others is a good one, but is again not especially well developed. Instead it seems to provide a good excuse for Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) to bleed on the book. I don't really think that addressing the raining blood third act or the Abomination (the, uh, ultimate manifestation of the Deadites) is worth getting into. Or why Mia needs to rip her own hand off - not cut, like literally tear it off - in order to get away. that's just how this Evil Dead rolls.

 Here are my original thoughts, from a recap written in 2013. I think they cover how I feel about the tone of Evil Dead pretty well:

  I get that people like that the remake of The Evil Dead is really violent. Like non-stop, unpleasant, close-up on the gore violent for most of the movie. Got it. I 100% don't believe the continued insistence that the effects are practical and that there's "almost no digital effects" in the movie. Sorry, I've seen it twice and you can see the digital effects, even during parts of the commentary where the director claims there aren't. But that is another argument for another day. The problem with Evil Dead isn't that it exists - there can and are good remakes of horror films out there, so I'm willing to put aside my affection for the original and let this exist in its own right.

 The problem with Evil Dead is that it's extremely violent, and nothing else. If you're looking for a movie where people are slowly, painfully mutilated, with long shots of the aftermath where they're half-crying and half in shock while removing needles or nails from their skin, good news - you'll find it in spades in Evil Dead. There's no humor, no characters, not much in the way of plot (that isn't abandoned, anyway), but lots of moments designed to remind you that this is a remake of The Evil Dead. Just one that's grittier and gorier and more hardcore. Because that's all horror fans care about, right? Oh, also just throwing Bruce Campbell onscreen after the credits to say "Groovy" in silhouette., because you gotta have Bruce, right?  It's no secret why the best and worst reviews of this film said the same thing: "It's REALLY violent." That's all there is to Evil Dead, and it's not enough.

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 For now, that's all there is of The Evil Dead series. That's going to change in a little over a week, when Raimi, Tapert, and Bruce bring Ash back for a new series. They've hinted it could be more than just a one-off, but I'm looking forward to seeing how Ashley J. Williams has been living in a post-Army of Darkness world. Well, also one where they aren't allowed to say "S-Mart" or have a metal hand because Universal won't let them use anything specifically from Army of Darkness. I've tried to steer clear of learning too much about it, but Bruce is looking good and it appears to be tonally similar to Dead by Dawn. Bring it, I says. Then I'll have to update this sucker again...

* The issue for The Crow was the "raped" part of "criminals rape and kill the hero's girlfriend before killing him."
** Long time Blogorium readers are already aware that the Cap'n had been exposed to Blade Runner, Downtown, Aliens, and Animal House at a much younger age. For that matter, they would take me with them to see the much harder "R" Alien 3 later that year...
*** Sorry, I know we had to watch more than those movies, but for the life of me I can't think of one right now and I know we DID watch Pecker at least once...

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.

Shocktober Revisited: Death Spa and Killer Workout

 editor's note: this review originally appeared as part of the Summer Fest 5 coverage.


For whatever failings Prisoners of the Lost Universe has (and there are many), Death Spa and Killer Workout were the palette cleanser we needed to get back on track for Saturday. While it is rare that I'll program one movie, let alone two, sight unseen*, I had enough faith in the slasher movies of the 1980s not to let me down and went in blind. And I'm glad I did.

 Death Spa is not in the traditional sense what one would call a "slasher" movie, although it shares a similar structure. It also doesn't actually take place in a spa, necessarily, which disappointed one attendee who looked forward to "killer facial peels" and other "spa"' related kills. Nevertheless, while it commits two cardinal sins of "false advertising," the movie is bizarre enough and and of itself to compensate.

 If I were to compare Death Spa to anything, I guess you could call it a spiritual successor to Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. It isn't quite as formless as Death Bed, but amidst the three or four competing plots in Death Spa, there's definitely a "this gym / health center / indoor swimming pool is haunted and is killing people." A ghost is using the totally automated system against people who go there, seemingly at random. To say much more about who the ghost is or what it wants would spoil parts of the movie that generate the most "what the hell?" moments.

 Fortunately, there's a bunch of other crap in Death Spa I can talk about that's just as weird. Like the group shower scene where the spa shoots tiles at naked ladies, or the killer fish (yes, a killer fish in a gym). There's the package loading ramp at the bottom of the stairs in the basement that serves no purpose, or the "Parologist" (I'm assuming he studies haunted rocks) hired by the owner to investigate the haunting. There's the conspiracy to shut down the gym before the big Mardi Gras party (no amount of killings will close this Death Spa!) and the question of whether the place is haunted or if somebody is killing people in order to make it look like it is.

 SPOILER ALERT: It's both. Yes, on top of the ghost, there are people also killing random gym members to make the owner look bad. And the owner's brother-in-law has an, um, "unhealthy" relationship with his dead sister. The dead sister who set herself on fire after a miscarriage left her wheelchair bound (the flashbacks to this are unto themselves strange enough to recommend Death Spa).

 There's so much going on in Death Spa that I can't possibly cover all of it, and yet it manages to hang together well enough that you want to know how the hell it's going to resolve them. And it does. Well, kind of. But even that's fun to watch too. Also, Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead, From Beyond) has an extended cameo where he only has to appear at the beginning and the end of the movie and gets to live (SPOILER).

---

 Killer Workout (Aerobicide) is, by contrast, a more straightforward slasher movie, but one with its own particular set of charms. It follows an extremely basic structure: a long montage of an aerobics routine featuring some, *ahem*, chesty ladies (sometimes also a morbidly obese guy in overalls riding the exercise bike), then a conversation with owner Rhonda Johnson (Maniac Cop's Marcia Karr), and then somebody being murdered, usually with gym equipment. Although not always: sometimes the killer uses and over-sized safety-pin (shades of Student Bodies).

 There's some procedural work done by Detective Lieutenant Morgan (David James Campbell), and an undercover agent posing as a new employee (Uh, I forgot his character's name and IMDB isn't helping), but mostly it's a slasher movie from the 1980s, which means some creative kills, a twist-y backstory for the killer, and lots of nudity. Actually, not as much nudity as you'd expect, and a lot less than Death Spa, but there's MUCH more time devoted to the aerobics routines Jaimy (Teresa Vander Woude) puts together, many of which appear to offer no exercise value whatsoever. So while you don't get as much nudity, there's a lot more jiggling.

 But don't worry, ladies, there's also a lot of guys in impossibly short shorts too. This unintentional recurring motif of Summer Fest was perhaps never more in evidence than during Killer Workout.

 What really helped Killer Workout as a companion piece to Death Spa was the weird touches, like David James Campbell's unfortunately high-pitched voice, one that in no way matches his imposing physical presence. It made it nearly impossible to take him seriously, all the way up to his final scene that must have, in some abstract way, inspired the series Dexter. There was also the guy we nicknamed "Johnny Pervo" with his pervo mustache that we later realized was two different characters that just looked alike and both happened to be sleazeballs.

 And then there's the "twist" of the film, which the Cap'n will immodestly admit I called twenty minutes in, about who the killer is. What I didn't realize until the "reveal" was it tied into a prologue most of us had forgotten about involving a tanning bed accident. Unlike Death Spa, Killer Workout doesn't have a supernatural angle, but it does have what one viewer described as "pudding tits."

 The two films do share some interesting connections, though: both Death Spa and Killer Workout close on freeze-frames of the villain, implying that both of them secretly won (well, in Killer Workout, it's flat out saying they did). And in Killer Workout, the reputation for murder makes the gym a target for vandals, one of whom spray paints "DEATH SPA" on the window... interesting...

 Up next is a blast from Horror Fest past with the return of Kingdom of the Spiders!



* Not since the Matango / See No Evil debacle at Horror Fest IV.

Shocktober Revisited: The House That Dripped Blood

Since it is October, and since Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium could be described as "horror themed" in its layout, I guess I should make with the reviewing horror movies that won't be a part of our annual celebration in two weeks. Fortunately for you, dear readers, I have a shelf full of horror flicks waiting to be discussed. We'll start this semi-regular column with 1971's The House that Dripped Blood.

I've made no secret of my love for anthology films, specifically those coming from Amicus Productions, so it was a surprise to me to discover that I'd never gotten around to watching The House that Dripped Blood. It turns out that House is a pretty good addition to their collection of supernaturally based horror films. The cast is great, the direction is atmospheric, and most of the stories work in context.

Like most anthology films, you get four stories with a bit of a wrap-around, and House that Dripped Blood covers most of your horror bases: Spectral Killers, Vampires, Witchcraft, and evil museums / shops of mystery. The stories, by Robert Bloch (author of Psycho) are:

1. A writer (Denholm Elliot) and his wife move into the house in question so he can finish his macabre masterpiece. When his creation, a mad strangler named Dominick, starts to appear in and around the house, he's convinced his grip on reality is slipping.

2. A recently retired businessman (Peter Cushing) moves into the house, and while wandering the nearby town, finds a wax museum of horrors. He becomes obsessed with a figure of Salome that reminds him of a long lost love, and when a visiting friend goes missing, the terrible secret of the museum comes to light.

3. A not-retired businessman (Christopher Lee) and his daughter (Chloe Franks) come to the house to get away from the city. When a tutor (Nyree Dawn Porter) begins to connect with the distant and sheltered child, her true nature comes to light, with terrible consequences.

4. An actor and horror-buff (Jon "The Third Doctor" Pertwee) and his co-star (Ingrid Pitt) rent out the house while he's filming Curse of the Bloodsucker. Convinced that his cape looks too cheap, he visits the mysterious Theo Von Hartmann's shop and buys an authentic vampire cape. Maybe a little too authentic, as he discovers when he puts it on.

The wrap-around story involves a detective (John Bennett) investigating the disappearance of Pertwee's character. The owner of the house, Mr. Stoker (John Bryans) shares the mysterious history of the tenants. When Inspector Holloway finally goes to the house, he finds much more than he expected in the basement...

I think the third and fourth stories were my favorite. Admittedly, the Jon Pertwee story gets quite silly in the middle (especially when he puts the cape on after midnight and reacts hammily to his fangs and... flying), but it is salvaged by Holloway's visit, one that ties up the film nicely.

The first story, about the writer and his mad killer, suffers from a rushed ending, one that relies on you paying attention to a last second development based on a character you just met. The set up is wonderful, and most of the lingering architectural shots and creepy ornaments does soften the weak ending.

Despite the really trippy dream imagery in the second story, the ending just doesn't make sense. Something happens to the wax figure that, if what the owner says is true, would render it impossible to be fixed in time for the last shot. The final image, on the other hand, is a pretty good one.

Despite the fact that the film (rated PG) is virtually bloodless, there's plenty of atmosphere and suggested horrors to raise a bit of a chill. This is more evident in the witchcraft story with Christopher Lee, which relies entirely on suggestion for its gruesome finale. The House that Dripped Blood isn't as gory as Tales from the Crypt or From Beyond the Grave, and it might come off as a little tame compared to what was to come. However, taken with the much earlier Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, I think House fits the Amicus m.o.

Finally. the title is a little misleading, because while the film is about four tenants who died (separately) in the same house, at least two of the stories really have nothing to do with house as evil. They attempt to tie everything together with Stoker directly addressing the audience (something that seemed strangely familiar, although I'm convinced I've never seen this before), but if you're willing to put the misnomer of the title aside, it's a fun little spookshow you could probably scare children with - and not scar them permanently.

Shocktober Revisited: A Nightmare on Elm Street

 editor's note: this review originally appeared in 2011.

Last week the Cap'n stated that "I've seen A Nightmare on Elm Street many times." This is true, but it has fairly been pointed out that I've never reviewed the film. Ever. I reviewed the excellent Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy; I handed off the write up for Freddy's Dead to some guest bloggers (while it makes sense in its own way, the review really only resonates if you'd been in the room during the screening); and I scared you off of the remake, a film I've dubbed "Shit Coffin 2" with good reason. While there's no review for it, one of the proto-Horror Fests featured A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: The Dream Warriors. The series has been a long-standing part of my (semi)adulthood.

So why no review for the film that started it all? The movie that pushed New Line over from the home of John Waters and Reefer Madness to the eventual home of The Lord of the Rings*? The movie that took character actor Robert Englund (Dead & Buried, Galaxy of Terror) and thrust him into horror movie icon-dom? I don't have a good reason.

The Blogorium is a place where I generally try to cover movies I haven't seen; since its inception, I've attempted to give reactions to movies flying under the radar or to put my two cents in on major releases. I tend to save movies I've seen multiple times for "fest" coverage, but A Nightmare on Elm Street has never played Horror Fest for the simple fact that nearly everyone I know has seen it. The goal of Horror Fest has been to mix in lesser known films with some favorites that didn't get much attention, particularly sequels.

A Retro Review does give me an opportunity to talk a little bit about my history with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and not only the times I did see it, but at least three times I could have seen it, but didn't. Our paths have crossed several times since 1984, when I was five and A Nightmare on Elm Street was released, so let's take a look back after a brief recap of the plot.

Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss), Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp) and Rod Lane (Jsu Garcia, although listed as "Nick Corri") are four teenagers in Springwood, IL; separately, they've been having similar nightmares about a gloved killer with burnt skin and a red and green sweater. Their nightmares seem to be bleeding over into reality (literally), and Tina fears for her life. As the teenagers start dying off, Nancy appeals to her parents Marge (Ronee Blakley) and Lt. Donald Thompson (John Saxon) to come clean about the history of Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a child molester killed by mob violence who swore vengeance from beyond the grave. Can Nancy stop Freddy from killing all of the children of Springwood in their sleep, or is there no way to protect yourself in your dreams?

By the time I was in late elementary school and in middle school, A Nightmare on Elm Street was on VHS and readily available to kids with parents less judicious in their rental habits. There were a few times where I was at a friend's house and A Nightmare on Elm Street was on, but I opted not to watch it (like most "scary" movies). I don't think I actually watched all of A Nightmare on Elm Street until I was in high school (during the budding horror phase of my geekdom) and I remember two things distinctly: the "joke-y" Freddy is almost wholly absent in the first film, and the "arm" scene (you all know the one) looked really stupid.

The latter isn't really worth pointing out, as it seems to be the consensus opinion of most Nightmare fans, and even some of the crew on the film. The former, on the other hand, was a bit of a surprise considering what I knew of Freddy from popular culture. Whether you watched the films or not, it was impossible not to know who Freddy Krueger was, either from Halloween costumes, appearances on MTV, or in songs like The Fresh Prince's "A Nightmare on My Street." The prevailing image of Freddy I had was a wise-cracking villain, one who delighted in torturing his victims and dropping cringe-worthy puns.

That Freddy isn't really in the first film. In fact, he's "Fred" Krueger for most of the movie, a creepy, malevolent entity capable of striking at our most vulnerable point. He had a mastery of dreams but didn't use it to play into a character's main attribute (or "gimmick," as it increasingly became with the sequels). Most of the dreams, in fact, take place in familiar places (boiler room aside) and rely on one or two lingering images (cutting fingers, a body bag being dragged down a hallway, the goat at the beginning of the film). Glen's death isn't tied specifically to a character trait, but instead are iconic in their own right (the two most memorable, Glen and Tina, take place in or around their bed).

Revisiting the film over the years I was more impressed with the nuance that Wes Craven (The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes) weaves into the film - there's a brief conversation between Rod and Glen that makes it clear they've had nightmares as well, but both are too embarrassed to tell the girls. I also appreciate the Psycho-esque fakeout about who the protagonist is - the film opens with Tina, and certainly seems like the film is focused on her, and not Nancy, up until Tina is brutally slashed from floor to ceiling by Freddy.

I was also impressed by the logical reason why the "adults" refuse to listen to their children; their complicity in Krueger's death gives them incentive to "hush" any investigation of what happened, and why a phantom killer (they don't believe in, by the way) is picking off their children, one by one. Similarly, I appreciate that Nancy is more resourceful than the average "Final Girl"; many of horror's most famous survivors become that way by accident, by default because everyone dies around them. Nancy, unlike Laurie Strode or Alice Hardy, is proactive in curtailing Freddy's killing spree, and her plan to drag him into the real world - a real world laced with home made traps, by the way - beats the usual "run and hide until finally killing the monster" motif.

The film makes the most of a low budget, save for two moments: the aforementioned "arms" scene in the alleyway, and the final "stinger" involving Nancy's mother being pulled into 1428 Elm Street through the door window. The image would be more potent if it weren't so clear that Blakley has been replaced by an immobile dummy and awkwardly sucked into the door.

From there on out, I sometimes have trouble disentangling elements from the first Nightmare and its sequels, many of which are linked by characters or continuing stories (1, 3, 4, 5, and New Nightmare could be considered to be one extended narrative, and if you really push it, Freddy's Revenge). Every now and then I think about showing A Nightmare on Elm Street during Horror Fest, because I don't think its status has lessened with time, and almost everything the remake does is a half-assed retread of the original film, and I'm not showing THAT any time soon. Maybe it's time to finally consider the first Nightmare, the limited but still potent slice of horror, one that appeals to basic fears without the cheap jokes that came later.



* There's an extra on the Nightmare on Elm Street disc called "The House that Freddy Built," focused on this exact narrative, just to make it clear this isn't conjecture on my part.

Shocktober Revisited: More Brains and Swallowed Souls

editor's note: this was originally posted in November of 2011.
 
 I finally caught up on some horror documentaries, specifically More Brains: A Return to the Living Dead and Swallowed Souls: The Making of Evil Dead 2. The former you might have heard of; the latter is more incentive to pick up Lionsgate's 25th Anniversary Edition of Sam Raimi's splatter classic.

 Dan O'Bannon fans will be elated and disappointed while watching More Brains - the film reunites most of the surviving cast and crew members (including the special effects artist fired halfway through the film), but until the very end, O'Bannon - who passed in 2009 - is absent from the oral history of Return of the Living Dead. There's a lot of talking about O'Bannon, often in conflicting narratives (he was too demanding, too aloof; he was easy to work with and open to suggestions), but only in the closing moments does the writer / director have a chance to speak to the film's cult status. In what was his final interview, O'Bannon is candid about the audience embrace of the film and its legacy, and makes a knowing comment about "if I die tomorrow" before the film goes to credits.

 The story of the making of Return of the Living Dead from John Russo (producer / writer of Night of the Living Dead)'s original pitch to the decision of Hemdale Films to hire Dan O'Bannon to write and direct the film as a horror comedy, from casting to premieres, is an affair filled with gossip, contradictory stories, and debates about whether Clu Gulager really threw a can at the director in a fit of rage. I'm tempted to share anecdotes from the cast, or to mention the ongoing bad blood between the production designer (William Stout) and first make-up effects (William Munns) over the inadequate zombie masks and "headless zombie" appliance. The memories are sometimes contentious, sometimes defensive, but always entertaining. More Brains: A Return to the Living Dead is well worth the time of fans of Return of the Living Dead.

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 Meanwhile, I'd like to thank a video store in the mall that will go unnamed until later this week for erroneously placing two copies of the 25th Anniversary Blu-Ray of Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn the weekend before the disc is actually released (it comes out tomorrow). I've bemoaned the endless re-releasing of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films on DVD before, and we're seeing the first instance of "double-dipping" in high definition for the trilogy. As Anchor Bay closes (or whatever is going on with Anchor Bay) and their catalog is divvied up by Image Entertainment and Lionsgate, we're likely to see another release of The Evil Dead before long, and I find it hard to believe that Universal's underwhelming "Screwhead Edition" of Army of Darkness is the be-all-end-all of HD releases.

 But for now, let's look at the Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn 25th Anniversary double-dip. As a sucker for supplements, I must admit the list of extras seemed very promising - collections of featurette's about the casing, effects, conception, direction, and filming. When I put the disc in, I didn't realize that all of these individually listed extras were part of one 98 minute documentary, Swallowed Souls. It's reminiscent of segments of Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, and is broken into chapters complete with claymation vignettes to bridge them.

 Like More Brains, the primary element lacking in Swallowed Souls is the presence of Sam Raimi. It's not as though his presence isn't felt, because the "making of" footage shot by Greg Nicotero features young Sam Raimi in abundance, but he's noticeably absent from the proceedings. On the other hand, the doc features an abundance of newly shot interviews with Bruce Campbell, who speaks candidly about Evil Dead 2 and shares stories I don't think I've heard anywhere, including in If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. Swallowed Souls also prominently features the rest of the leads of Evil Dead 2: Sarah Berry (Annie), Dan Hicks (Jake), Kassie Wesley (Bobbi Joe), Richard Dormeier (Ed) and Ted Raimi (Possessed Henrietta). Hearing their perspective on making the film is in and of itself a treat - many of them had no idea what they were in for.

 The entire makeup effects team, including Mark Shostrom (From Beyond, A Nightmare one Elm Street Part 2) and the first time in years that I've seen all three members of KNB (Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, and Howard Berger) on camera talking about a project they worked on together*. Their camcorder footage, which documents the conception of Evil Dead 2's effects all the way through the film's production, are a treasure trove of unseen footage from Wadesboro, North Carolina in 1986. They gleefully exploit their creations and play around with camera tricks, mimicking Raimi's "evil force" camera shots.

 So here's where it gets tough - do you want to drop another $14 for Evil Dead 2 to see an admittedly great "making of" documentary? If you still have the Anchor Bay disc, you'll notice that The Gore the Merrier is still included, the commentary is still included, and I'm not sure that the picture is that much different. The price is fair so if you don't already have Evil Dead 2 on Blu-Ray this is a no-brainer, but wary double dippers are going to have to ask themselves if the making of justifies buying the film again. I will say that if it were released on its own, Swallowed Souls would be worth picking up in the same way as Halloween: 25 Years of Terror or His Name was Jason are. Evil Dead fans, prepare yourselves for the impending moral quandary. I don't regret it, but I also have the added bonus of picking the disc up early...


 * Since Kurtzman moved on to create his own production company, it's common just to see Nicotero and Berger appearing in "making of" documentaries that KNB did makeup effects for.