Creature From the Black Lagoon Gets a Hickey
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Supernatural Fiction Readers discussion
[REC 3]: GENESIS (2012)
Any movie that waits nearly 25 minutes before running its title card is certainly glorying in its willingness to push against expectations. And so the Spanish film franchise that served us up rabid zombie-like infecteds attacking people in close and inescapable quarters (and which spawned it's own American remake franchise that decided to go in a slightly different direction) gives us a wealthy wedding party at a sprawling, posh, walled-in villa where one uncle arrives late, not feeling very well after being bitten by a dog... and, we're off!
Okay, well, it's not a bad film but it's not all that good either - or perhaps, it just gives us more of the same (so much for the pushing expectations), while shifting tone from the first two installments a bit more than it should. Is it another hand-cam film? Yeeeees... until 20 minutes in, when someone angrily smashes the ever present recorder and then we're back to straight-ahead film-making (with occasional detours to infra-red cam for the ubiquitous air-vent crawl). Reality, by the way, always has better production values and constantly smooth camerawork. There are some visual nods (as in REC2) to Lamberto Bava's DEMONS and DEMONS 2, but the film tries to make the familiar proceedings a bit more interesting by eventually treating everything in a vaguely sub-Tarantino, tongue-in-cheek mode (or is that tongue-through-cheek?) - cue guy dressed in a suit of armor and a demure bride in bloodied wedding dress wielding a chainsaw like an avenging angel! Much like QUARANTINE 2: PEOPLE RABIES (not the actual title, but too good not to use), this should be the installment that kills the franchise, but I believe they have one more planned (REC4: APOCALYPSE).
Don't get me wrong, there's some good moments here (let's just say a bus full of children do not have a good time at the wedding, and the guest appearances by "Spongejohn Squarepants" and a music rights bureaucrat looking to ferret out music license infringements at the wedding) but also some unevenly handled stuff (those who contend that there was no supernatural aspect to the virus as portrayed in the previous films - despite definite plot details in REC2 - will be unable to make that claim now, thanks to scenes involving holy water, a full-length mirror and the inventive use of a PA system). Also, despite my presuppositions from the "GENESIS" name, this is not actually a prequel but instead is taking place concurrent with action of REC and REC2. In the end, it's an amiable time waster (with a silly melodramatic ending) but nothing you haven't seen before.
BLOOD BATH (1966)
This AIP (American International Pictures) quickie (currently streaming on Netflix) is legendary as being a Roger Corman patch-up job built around some atmospheric bits from a Yugoslavian film (OPERATION: TITIAN) that Corman bought. These would be shots of a mysterious caped, slouch-hatted figure creeping through the cobblestone streets of an old Eastern European town (thus - instant production values!) and occasionally attacking people. Around this, Jack Hill shot some footage in Venice, California. Later Stephanie Rothman shot more footage with a slightly altered script, confusing the intended plot even more.
In some way, this is a pretty typical horror plot - crazed artist kills his models and produces artwork as a result. But is he haunted by a curse placed on an ancestor and driven to kill, or does he turn into a completely different looking person who is also a vampire (thus enabling the marrying of shots of a different actor)? Both and neither and both! "Are you suggesting Sordi is a vampire who abducts women?" Max the beatnik asks - even the film doesn't know.
Antonio Sordi (the enjoyable William Campbell of DEMENTIA 13 - who always seemed to have an Irish Tony Curtis vibe going, to me), who maintains a studio in a Gothic bell tower (in Venice, CA?) once run by his family, is famous for painting a series of well-selling "Dead Red Nudes" - morbid posed still-lifes (literally!) of murdered women - but is haunted by bizarre dreams (one of the best bits of the movie, they replicate the spooky empty desert landscapes of Salvador Dali paintings, haunted by a mocking femme fatale, and feel like images from the unconscious) even as he attempts to maintain a relationship with ballerina Dorian (Linda Saunders) (who may be the reincarnation of Erno Sordi's - Antonio's cursed ancestor - betrayer). Meanwhile, he's also transforming into a vampire creature and prowling the city day and night (!), killing women. Some local seedy beatniks, lead by dumpy little painter and artistic blowhard Max (Carl Schanzer - reminding me a lot of Ernie Kovacs), eventually figure out that something is up and try to intervene.
No one could seriously recommend this rag-tag, choppy and uneven film - or at least not without some caveats. Some of the killings are well-done (some not so much). Sordi's nightmarish cleaver attack in his studio on model Daisy that starts the film has shocking amounts (for the time, natch) of flowing blood, and an assault at a party that culminates with death in a swimming pool - presaging a similar bit in THE NIGHT STALKER (1972) - uses eerie near-silence nicely. Also good is the stalking (the killer momentarily foiled in his pursuit by unexplained costumed revelers who dig his vampire outfit!) and death of Daisy's sister Donna that ends on a carousel (why she thought to "hide" on a carousel we must leave as a mystery for the ages). And those obsessive dreams previously mentioned are very striking. There's an alternatively bombastic and plunky Ronald Stein theremin score opening the film.
As in Corman's BUCKET OF BLOOD, far-out artistic pretensions are the subject of gentle ribbing. The beatniks - including Sid Haig - dig on a metronome with a picture of an eyeball pasted to it, and Max pontificates on his theory of "quantum art" created with his quantum gun (which oddly predicts William Burroughs' shotgun paintings by a few decades) but they all also rally to become unlikely heroes in the end (a face-off on the pilings under a pier is both goofy and kinda cool), mostly because they pay attention. Donna (Merissa Mathes) is a very attractive beatnik chick!
At a slim hour and 6 minutes it still feels padded but if you like films from this period, or Corman's stuff, or just enjoy moody black and white films of creeps prowling the streets at night, you should check it out.
MAD MONSTER PARTY? (1967)
Probably one of the least seen of the Rankin & Bass puppetoon musical presentations(as it was a feature film and not a made for TV movie like RUDOLPH, et al.), this has been a personal favorite my entire life and I can remember going to a church basement showing with my sister Susan when I was a teenager just for chance to see it again after many years of it being MIA on video. There is now a DVD available of this charming film that serves as a good marking point for the end of the first wave of Monster Kids, the generation that grew up with the Shock package of old Universal horror films on television, that grew up with "The Monster Mash" and Aurora models and horror hosts (technically, I'd be part of the end of the second wave of Monster Kids or the beginning of the third wave).
In the grand tradition of the "monster rally" (Universal films latter entries of multiple monsters in the same film, that continues even today in films like FREDDY vs. JASON) and Bobby Pickett's "Monster Mash" (and myriad knock offs), comes this children's musical comedy horror film wherein Baron Boris Von Frankenstein (grandly voiced by Boris Karloff), head of all the world's monsters, calls a convention on his Caribbean island to unveil his latest discovery and announce his retirement. Invited also is his nebbishy, allergy-ridden nephew Felix Flankin (currently a pharmacist's assistant in Vermont). Mayhem results as Dracula and The Monster's Bride (wonderfully voiced by the late Phyllis "Ha-HAH!" Diller - she even refers to The Monster as "Fang"!) plot with (and against) the Baron's personal secretary, sultry femme fatale Francesca (voiced by Gale Garnett and possibly the most...uh, "pneumatic", puppet Rankin & Bass ever designed) and his crawling zombie major domo Yetch (voiced by Allen Swift ala Peter Lorre) to steal the Baron's formula and rule all the world's monsters. Oh, and besides all the aforementioned characters, The Werewolf, The Mummy, The Hunchback, Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man and The Creature From The Black Lagoon are also on hand, along with assorted zombie bellhop flunkies, carnivorous plants, blob-like pets, a skeleton acid-rock band ("Little Tibia and The Phibias") and the Baron's demonic chef Mafia Machiavelli... and a surprise party crasher late in the game (the pseudonymous - due to licensing problems with RKO no doubt - "It").
This is a purely fun film and a great way for kids to enjoy monsters. There's some good songs (the title piece, sung by Ethel Ennis, Baron Frankenstein's philosophy of life "Stay One Step Ahead" by Boris Karloff, and Francesca's sultry declaration of love, "Never Been A Love Like Mine Before"), some not so good (The Bride's song to the The Monster, "You're Different", sung by Phyllis Diller, and Francesca's number during the attempted seduction of Count Dracula, the ragtimey "Our Time To Shine" - you *will* see Dracula tap dance!) and some dumb fun (the acid-rock "The Mummy" wherein, surprise surprise, the aged, brittle creature is the first one out on the dance floor to shake his mouldering stuff to a tune that endlessly repeats "IT'S THE MUMMY!"), not to mention the excellent, jazzy harpsichord and horn driven incidental pieces by Maury Laws. The puppetwork is excellent throughout - the designs are wonderful (check out the hollow clothes of The Invisible Man, the manly chin of Dr. Jekyll, the moon-like crater-face on Yetch, the Mummy's hideous teeth, the redesign of a potbellied Creature From The Black Lagoon, not to mention "It" - all design work by EC Comics superstar Jack Davis!) and sequences (the scene of Francesca sinking underwater in the moat, the early bit of Baron Frankenstein being showered with sparks when charging his new discovery with lightning, and yet again the final biplane assault on "It").
Baron Frankenstein, The Monster, his Bride, Dracula, Felix, Francesca, "It" and Yetch are the prime stars here - most of the other monsters get little bits of business but not much else (most of them don't speak at all, just grunt or howl or moan - although The Invisible Man sounds like Sidney Greenstreet and Dr. Jekyll seems to have made his peace with Mr. Hyde). The humor isn't very sophisticated (this is Rankin and Bass, after all!) but there are occasional funny and subtle jokes (Francesca thinks much too loudly in one scene and her request that Felix go on without her as they flee.. "just leave me something to read" she says, cracks me up every time), including one bit of foreshadowing so subtle I never picked it up until just this viewing (and I've probably seen this film twenty times at least). Adults may also raise an eyebrow at Yetch's rather obvious masochistic personality type, not to mention the fact that it takes Francesca being slapped (twice!) out of hysterics before she realizes she loves Felix.
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Finally, for the spoiler zone, while I may be stretching things a bit (view spoiler)[ it's probably worth mentioning that a film that has the old-style Universal monster types wiped out by an atomic explosion at the climax, only for the audience to discover that the two human identifier characters, Francesca & Felix, are in fact not human at all but android constructs built by Baron Frankenstein as the culmination of his "Monster" experiments... well, that's pretty resonant and sharp, whether by design or accident. And that subtle hint I mentioned earlier - "Franc"esca and Felix Flankin("stein") - it's right there in their names! I'd caught an earlier bit (where Felix isn't able to lift Francesca - leading to another sly line - "I didn't want you to think I was an easy pickup") quite a while ago, but not that one (hide spoiler)]. It always brings a smile to my face and you should watch it at Halloween with the kids!
LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY (1976)
Some films have no need for sequels - and some get them anyway. VIDEODROME and DON'T LOOK NOW are lucky. ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968), not so much. Oh, this made-for-TV movie has nothing to do do with the actual book sequel Ira Levin penned years later (how could it, chronologically?) but obviously someone in the mid-70s said "ROSEMARY'S BABY made a lot of money, let's do a movie about the baby grown up!" - and thus you get this ungainly titled telepic, rendered from now on as LWHTRB (because we've all got ways to spend our time, right?). Obviously, a MFTV movie isn't going to get Polanski on board, so you get the original film's editor, Sam O'Steen, to direct. You can't get Mia Farrow back, so Patty Duke takes the role of the unlucky Mom. George Maharis subs for John Cassavetes as scheming hubby Guy Woodhouse. Ray Milland (always a treat to watch) takes Sidney Blackmer's role as Roman Castevet (nee Steven Marcato) but, hey, Ruth Gordon is back, for good or ill, as Roman's wife Minnie (for ill simply because the filmmakers play up Roman and Minnie as bickering oldsters, stretching a good joke from the film into a shtick).
Despite the need for no sequel, I've always felt that ROSEMARY'S BABY sets up a nice little nature/nurture argument at its end - can the love of a good mother overcome the ultimate in (spiritually) bad genetic programming? Well, the likelihood of a made-for-TV film from the 70's answering that question in any serious way is practically nil, but will they gnaw at it for 100 minutes (while pushing a secret agenda I'll get to in a moment)? Why yes they will... in classic 3 act structure, no less!
"THE BOOK OF ROSEMARY" - so Rosemary kidnaps her own 8 year old boy (Adrian, nee "Andy" - or, as you might remember, "Jenny" if he'd been a girl) from his black nursery full of spooky satanic toys and goes on the run. She hides in a synagogue and then calls ex-hubby Guy (living the high life as a Hollywood mogul, his reward for turning his wife into the Devil's brood-mare) and demands money from him to help her disappear. The country-wide (worldwide?) cult was expecting such a move, though, and a Rosemary ends up whisked away on a driverless, empty bus after trusting cultist Marjean (Tina Louise, Ginger from GILLIGAN'S ISLAND!) who then takes over raising Adrian. 20 years later "THE BOOK OF ADRIAN" finds him (Stephen McHattie - looking a bit like James Woods) grown and living at Marjean's casino (thus, this film is taking place in the then-future year of 1988!), a troubled young man seething with anger but tempered by kind memories of his lost mother. He drives recklessly and picks a fight with some bikers - which allows us to see that he can, much like The Incredible Hulk, be driven to the point where his eyes glow and he, uh, "Antichrist's-out", I guess, displaying strength, viciousness and mind powers (but he has no idea he's the Antichrist, you see). Roman, Minnie & Guy show up at Adrian's anointing ritual/acid-rock party which goes badly when his best friend is electrocuted by his (legal) Dad and a drugged Adrian also receives a hefty jolt, setting up... "THE BOOK OF ANDREW" finds our titular character now an amnesiac being treated by a pretty nurse who later drugs and rapes him, revealing she's also a cult member (they're everywhere!). The movie ends with Adrian, conflicted, confused and fearful, on the run - attempting to find his mother and solve the mystery of his origins.
I like to play a game when watching MFTV movies from the 70's that's called "what if this was a pilot?" - because many ended up being, whether intended to or not (FANTASY ISLAND & THE NIGHT STALKER come to mind). This game is usually helped by the open endings many of these films had - DEVIL DOG: THE HOUND FROM HELL ends with many more demonic puppies being spread through the suburbs, and one could imagine Richard Crenna chasing them down week after week like some virtuous dog catcher - and if that seems stupid, you haven't seen a lot of 70's TV shows (lucky you). Make no mistake, LWHTRB is not very good (although the occasional moment - the bus scene and the acid-rock freakout - are kind of cool), but one can honestly see the potential groundwork of a TV series being laid here, something like the aforementioned THE INCREDIBLE HULK, with our conflicted Antichrist wandering the country, learning to trust and fear, cast into the wilderness like his earlier Christian analog as he searches for his loving Mother while hounded by the law, a satanic cult and the random manifestations of his own evil nature - like some flip side of GODSPELL. It might have been interesting... who knows, it might have even been good (it certainly has more potential than that terrible OMEN IV tv-movie/pilot from the 90s - the Devil's Granddaughter? seriously?). What could it have been called? LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY: THE SERIES just doesn't trip off the tongue (and, besides, he's not a baby). ADRIAN ONE: SON OF SATAN might be better, as that's the name his amnesiac self finds on his driver license (a cute joke callback to one of my favorite moment's in the Polanski film, as Mr. Castevet crows "the year is ONE!" at Adrian's birth). But it was not to be, and maybe that's for the best - all we have is this silly little piece of 70's TV horror, barely up to the task of shining the curled toe shoes of the Polanski masterpiece, let alone topping it.
Ahhh, TV... "you always were a headache and you always were a bore" (to paraphrase William S. Burroughs).
THE HOUSE THAT WOULD NOT DIE (1970)
Yet another made-for-TV movie let-down. Based on the 1968 women's Gothic novel Ammie, Come Home by Barbara Michaels, this was an elusive one to see until it recently turned up on YouTube. Not worth the wait says I. Directed by reliable talent John Llewellyn Moxey (THE NIGHT STALKER, THE STRANGE AND DEADLY OCCURRENCE) and starring, in her first TV role, Barbara Stanwyck (c'mon, do I really need to say anything?) this is TV movie New England Gothic to the hilt. Stanwyck is Ruth Bennett, a Government employee who has recently inherited "Campbell House", a Revolutionary War era home (in Gettysburg, the internet tells me, I don't remember that detail being mentioned). She moves in with her niece Sara Dunning (Kitty Winn) and they make the acquaintance of unctuous Anthropology Professor Pat McDougal (Richard Egan) - who takes an interest in Ruth - and his mustachioed student Stan Whitman (Michael Anderson Jr.) who takes an interest in Sara. Cue two old medium ladies, seances, old paintings, mysterious winds and fogs and shouting voices in the night ("Ammie, come home!"), dreams and visions of settler times (did Puritans ever get more of a workout for horror purposes than the 1970s?), superimposed faces, slow-motion and that 70s staple, uncontrolled fits of passion. Cue also Sara going into trances, as she's seemingly possessed by the spirit of Ammie. There's a mystery to be solved here and it has to do with a secret scroll in the attic, a sealed cellar and the solution to who is actually possessed by whom.
But seriously, this is weak tea. There's a nice, eerie opening with a POV camera prowling around the empty house as the soundtrack plays out the ghostly sounds of a murder from hundreds of years ago, and one of the seances has a nicely timed scream but, seriously, that's about it. On top of the expected shenanigans, there's also the old "rationalist college Professor versus spiritualist beliefs" claptrap, all seemingly to fill up time. It's a real snoozer as Sara seems to have no chemistry with that drip Stan and Stanwyck has nothing to work with (sample dialog "Looks like an old scroll! This could be the key we're looking for!" - said scroll, though from the 18th Century, is as supple and flexible as modern paper and can have old ink easily scraped from it - but that's just being petty, I'll admit) and the ending has to mine a just-out-of-reach can of mace for suspense. In a way, very much influenced by DARK SHADOWS, as it's not really about scares but moody, historical atmosphere and mystery. The title is nonsensical (and, btw, the title got contracted to THE HOUSE THAT WOULDN'T DIE at some point in later re-release, go figure!)
THE HAUNTING OF JULIA (aka FULL CIRCLE) (1977)
This is on Netflix streaming and here's the thing with this - I should have loved watching this movie. I love the time period and approach (70s atmospheric horror), I love Mia Farrow and her look at this time (still sporting the ROSEMARY'S BABY Vidal Sassoon haircut), heck - I had totally forgot about this film and, while preparing to watch it, thought maybe it was really a psycho-drama masquerading as a supernatural film and that's why it's faded into the past but - no, it's a spook movie! I even had vaguely disturbing, if muddled, memories about it from long, long ago showings on HBO (and the Straub paperbacks' cover). Everything was in place but, in the end, no dice!
Adapting Peter Straub's
(creepy cover, huh?), this movie has Julia (Farrow) moving into a new London home after being released from a mental institution where she's been for a couple of months after the horrific death of her young daughter (she choked to death and Julia attempted a last minute tracheotomy with a kitchen knife - this was pre-Heimlich - see also THE LEGACY - was there some kind of popular news incident where someone was saved with a makeshift tracheotomy around this time?). After some half-glimpsed sightings of a young girl, Julia begins to think she's being haunted by her daughter (her creepy-ass "harlequin clown version of the clacking monkey cymbals" toy keeps showing up) but then wonders if perhaps it's the ghost of an earlier tenant, a young girl who died in that very house (also choking to death), was by all accounts a quasi-sociopath and may be tied-up in the mutilation murder of a small boy by her group of child friends back in the 1940s. Meanwhile, an innocent turtle gets the knife, a seance has a suddenly dramatic coda and Julia's friends (Tom Conti), acquaintances (Robin Gammell) and husband (Keir Dullea) start to meet nasty endings.
It's all very DON'T LOOK NOW and it's not terrible or anything but Richard Loncraine is no Nicolas Roeg. It's filled with atmospheric moodiness - old, shadowy homes and bleary, grey watery November light filtered through cold air and dead trees during outside shots. It even has a moog synthesizer type score by Colin Towns which is half very good and half kind of silly (that noodly 70's synth sound is not frightening - suprisingly, the nice parts sound similar to Keith Emerson's music for Dario Argento's INFERNO from a few years later). There's some effective moments - Julia's daughter's death that opens the film is *horrifying* as it captures the suddenness of such a terrible event and her parents' complete helplessness. There's a nice bit with creepy hands caressing Julia in her sleep, the final moments are both tense and appropriate in their melancholy (Julia finally gets what she's wanted the whole movie) and - it has to be said - the final image is morbidly poetic and powerful and the viewer just have to look at it, freeze-framed forever, as the end credits roll (I imagine people turning from the screen in the movie theater, cringing as they head out with this enormous, creepy image hanging over their shoulders behind them) (I won't spoil it by posting it here - you'll have to see the movie for yourself).
But, having said all that, it's also a movie that just doesn't gel or hang together well or something (for me - it seems to be a forgotten-gem favorite of a lot of people on the internet). There's this very loosey-goosy, vague thing that 70's eerie continental horror did very well (again, think DON'T LOOK NOW) and that requires you to kind of pay attention and track whispery dialog, but when it doesn't work well (as I feel it doesn't here), you're left with some nice moments but a strange feeling of choppiness and disconnectedness - no flow to the proceedings which should (especially given the alternate title) feel inevitable. I'd normally say "maybe it was just me" but I really wanted to like re-discovering a lost gem in this film. Ahh, well...
PHANTASM II (1988)
The original PHANTASM (1979) is certainly in my top 5 personal favorite horror films. There are better horror films, deeper horror films, more popular, more resonant horror films to be sure, but I saw PHANTASM at exactly the right age under exactly the right circumstances. As a low-budget, inventive creepfest with a surprisingly sharp exploration of a pubescent boy's fear of the adult world underlying the plot, nothing beats it. The movie needs no sequel - as the nightmare/dream logic of the story engulfs our young hero at the end, the movie fulfills its promise to be a rollicking, extended horror comic-book tale, and such things never end well for the main character...
Except, 9 years later (director Don Coscarelli having had some success with BEASTMASTER) Universal wanted a new horror franchise... and here we are. I saw this in the theater when it came out. How could I not? I watched my beat-up videocassette of PHANTASM before heading out to the local cinema. It is currently streaming on Netflix, for those interested. You can stay away from PHANTASM III (trust me on this) but die-hard fans of the original may be interested in PHANTASM IV: OBLIVION - it's not very good either, but inventive use of old footage allows it to vaguely begin to recapture some of the weirdness of the initial film. It ends on a cliffhanger - there is no PHANTASM V.
PHANTASM II picks up immediately (literally) after the ending of the original, then flashes forward about 8 years (during which young boy Mike - originally played by Michael Baldwin - is replaced by a buff James LeGros as the same character, newly released from a mental hospital). After teaming up with the always affable Reggie The Ice-Cream Man (Reggie Bannister, returning from the original, and always fun to watch) - we're off on the road for scenes of the duo creeping around cemeteries and funeral homes in an attempt to scotch the unfathomable plans of the strange, evil Tall Man (Angus Scrimm - still a great boogeyman - he would have made a great live-action version of horror host Uncle Creepy!) and his horde of crushed-corpse death dwarfs, pick-axe wielding gravers and, of course, certain shiny flying objects (now, newly upgraded!).
I guess if you *had* to turn PHANTASM into a franchise, this wasn't a bad way to do it (not that you *had* to, though). What PHANTASM II does is it takes a very effective, very personal little low-budget horror film and expand it into a typical 80s horror franchise vehicle (much like what was done to the original A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) - and, in doing so, loses some of the heart and soul of the original. But as a compromise, it's acceptable. Mike Baldwin's absence is sorely felt (not that Le Gros is *bad*). Coscarelli still shows he has a deft hand at occasionally conjuring a strange, dream-like mood (there's some very nice hazy, golden sunsets here) and throws in a few scenes, shots or framing nods for fans of the original (In one moment, Mike wakes up with his head right on the line in the center of the road, just as in a similar moment in the first film - reinforcing that deja-vu dream vibe), but it's still obvious that the director (or the studio?) had become enamored of the over-lit, glossy look and slick feel of a lot of 80s horror films (NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3, from the previous year, seems to be an influence, with some plasticy looking special effects, jokey dialogue and money thrown around on elaborate sets that still look like sets). On top of that, the horror-slapstick-comedy styling of director Sam Raimi (he's even name-checked in the film during a sight gag involving a bag of cremains) are embraced. Now, I enjoy Raimi's style and films, but it's never something I wanted to see too much of in other horror films, as a little goes a long way and it sets the tone of a film as decidedly "goofy" (and thus, the threats are less threatening and more "fun house"). In a sense, since the PHANTASM series does have some strange, horror comic-book trappings to its story, I guess it kind of makes sense - but in that sub-genre sense, PHANTASM, to me, was more like a bizarre European story in HEAVY METAL MAGAZINE, than a cackling, broad, EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN/CREEPSHOW or TALES FROM THE CRYPT-type horror comic book.
So there's some action horror, jump scares and a generally jokey tone - watch our blue-collar, suburban shlubs suit-up like Rambo to confront the Tall Man! Reggie builds a quadruple-barreled shotgun! People get kicked (and worse) in the nuts! It's okay, I guess (Bannister does a great job selling the humor) but it's also leagues away from the strange, brooding, low-budget but visionary and yet oddly real-world menace of PHANTASM. There's too much tough-guy action (even if humorously postured), many of the jump-scares don't work, Paula Irvine as Mike's telepathic love interest Liz is passable but bland (much like Le Gros, to be honest) and Samantha Phillips as mysterious hitchhiker Alchemy isn't given much to do except get naked and deliver one of the most stilted single lines I have ever heard in a mainstream movie (when they're standing at the front door to the bed and breakfast - you'll know it when you hear it). The telepathy aspect, in general, just seems included as lazy storytelling. The music underscores *every* moment you should expect to be scared, just in case you missed it and forgot to be scared. There's also some facile religious imagery (dead priest, a cross wrapped in barbed wire, upside down crucifix necklace) that seems kind-of out of tune with the original.
To be sure, there are some things that work - the Tall Man gets to deliver some good lines (one in particular - "You think when you die you go to heaven? You come to us!" - resonates with the first film's revelations of his secret machinations and implies that the world Mike glimpses in both films has informed Mankind's ideas of the afterlife for a very long time) and there's a nice weirdo special effects moment right before the meltdown climax that, again, implies much strangeness still to be learned (I also like how the Tall Man crushes one the silver spheres as if it were made of aluminum foil!). The spheres themselves get to show some new (gruesome) tricks and I have to applaud Coscarelli for not making *every* sequence that could be potentially gory play out on the screen (in particular - the "man with hand stuck to door" payoff, shot only in passing, and the crematorium scene - which shows just enough through a small window). Little details like the scene/s with the butterfly hatpin are also welcome and I like the implications of the Tall Man moving across America, using up and killing small towns as he enslaves the dead (I'll resist the obvious political point). And, yes, the ending is pretty good as well - the kind of ending, in retrospect, the film had to have.
As I said, PHANTASM III is eminently skip-able (the Raimi-isms are turned up to 11, IIRC). Mike Baldwin returned for III and IV, so while the latter is also not too good (having to continue the story forward from III) there's a notable aspect to it - the deployment of unused footage shot during the first film but never incorporated in the final production. It appears in IV not as flashbacks but instead, rather cannily, suggests that perhaps the entire PHANTASM series *is* all just a dream and Mike is still in his hometown in 1979, a young boy trapped in the throes of a nightmare, desperately trying to wake up. Perhaps he actually is. We'll never know, and perhaps that's all for the best...
Excellent review, Shawn. Phantasm was definitely one of my favorites. I think I saw it, like 'Dawn of the Dead' first at the drive-in movie theater near my house in Fort Bragg. While a tailgate party & smooching with my girl friend was fine for the latter movie, several of us went back to see Phantasm & seriously watch it because we weren't sure we'd caught it all. The second time around, we still weren't. That was awesome.I think you're a bit generous with PII. The fact that they upgraded the flying death balls was enough to turn me off. Those were so PERFECT in the first one. The 'upgrade' wasn't.
Tech Republic Geekend has a list of The top 10 sci-fi horror films of all time here:http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/geek...
8. The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)
The first person who implies the 2008 Keanu Reeves remake is the superior version gets a Gort to the brainpan....
It just couldn't be better put.
;-)
Werner, I want you to take special note of this one.
1. Alien
This requires no explanation. Ridley Scott's masterpiece of body-violating, unknowable malevolence set loose upon a working-class crew of relatable stiffs is the apex of horror sci-fi....
It's quite a good list. I won't say I agree with it entirely, but I never do. I actually preferred the Donald Sutherland remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" & the 50's version of "The Fly", but that's just me.
Thanks for the link, Jim. (Note taken! :-) )I haven't ever watched ANY of the films on that list. Yes, I know, my education's been neglected. :-) On the whole, my tastes in movies don't run to the purely horrific (in any genre). I've seen and appreciated --maybe "liked" isn't exactly the right word!-- a few that were genuinely horrific and chilling, like the Harvest Home miniseries based on the Thomas Tryon novel, and The Cry of the Banshee with Vincent Price (though neither of those are SF), but it isn't my staple fare of choice.
Werner, all the films on that list are must-see movies. If you don't watch anything else, you should really make an effort to see all of them. They're not just horror, but foundation movies for the genre.I was a bit disappointed not to see "Blade Runner" on the list. The best horror element is somewhat controversial & depends on the cut, unfortunately. I can understand why Jay left it off the list.
Hmmmm! Well, Jim, you probably have a better feel for my tastes than some of my Goodreads friends who haven't known me as long do; and I respect your critical judgments on books and films (even if I sometimes don't agree with them :-) ). So, if you'd recommend these that highly, I'll keep an eye out for them in the various venues where I buy or rent movies, and let you know my reactions! (If I don't like any of them, I promise that I won't sue you. :-) ) I don't think any of them will disappoint you, Werner. If you watch a couple & decide I'm wrong, tell me so. I thought you'd like Matt Helm better than you did. Nah, Jim, I was just teasing you about suing. :-) Even if I don't like a particular book or movie, I generally appreciate the broadening nature of the experience.Your (re-)introduction of me to Matt Helm actually wasn't a flop by any means; remember, I gave one of the Helm books I read (as well as another Hamilton book) four stars, and the other one three. I've got one more Hamilton book waiting to be read (maybe next year); if it's as good as the other two, I'll be declaring myself an official Hamilton fan. So you didn't steer me wrong!
Of course, it's apt to take awhile before I put your movie recommendations to the test. Availability in this area can be hit or miss, and I don't get a lot of time for watching movies, what with my schedule. :-(
Thank you very much, Jim! Earlier (back in 2008-2010), I've posted on this thread about the first three movies in Hallmark's made-for-TV Good Witch series, starring a perfectly-cast Catherine Bell as the title character. For any of you who are, like me, fans of the series, I wanted to let you know that all three will be airing tomorrow, starting in the morning, and followed by the fourth one (which I didn't know existed!) the Good Witch's Family, made in 2011. Then, at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time, they'll be showing the premiere of the brand-new The Good Witch's Charm. Halloween season fun for the whole family! I think tonight "Mockingbird Lane" premiers. Looks like a new "The Munsters" is a series. I set the DVR to record it. I'm not holding out much hope, although I did like the original Munsters. My wife and I saw Part II of Breaking Dawn this weekend, at our local theater. Again, it's produced by Meyer herself, and the production values are very similar to those of the preceding adaptations of the series. This time, though, she outdid herself near the end with a stroke of genius (IMO) that would require a spoiler warning to describe. It's fair to say, I think, that Twilight fans are going to be talking about this one for a long time; and probably fair to say that opinion will be divided, with some of it (even from long-term fans --my oldest daughter says she's still "traumatized") unfavorable. But I'm very much in the favorable camp! I've said before that I think that for the book series, Breaking Dawn is the crown of the saga; now I'd say the same for the film series. 
SOLE SURVIVOR (1970) - a made for tv film inspired by the same events that inspired the TWILIGHT ZONE episode "King 9 Will Not Return" - the finding of a WWII bomber in the Libyan desert in 1958 - this takes a slightly different tack than the TZ episode. In one strand, Richard Basehart is the only survivor of the long-missing flight, and now a Brigadier General, after he bailed out over the Mediterranean (as planned, or in an act of cowardice?). He accompanies military brass (including William Shatner) to the just discovered (in 1962) crash site to try to figure out what exactly happened (did the rest of the crew bail into the sea or are their bodies still waiting to be recovered from the desert?). Meanwhile, we're also privy to the ghosts of the crewman who are trapped in the desert, hoping to be discovered and "taken home" so they can move on to their rest. Guerdon Trueblood's script is very Rod Serling - this isn't a horror movie or even dark fantasy, really, despite the ghosts - it's all about the various character's feelings and fears and motivations and how they rub up against each other. It rarely even rises to, say, "eeriness" (there's very little-to-no music but great use of the sun-blasted, blanched desertscape), but is compelling as human drama. The presentation of the ghosts is very interesting - they're aware that they're dead, they can occasionally move objects and they're aware of time passing (they've been in the desert for 17 years) and do things like play baseball to keep themselves from going mad, desperately hoping they'll be found and the mystery solved. There's also a very nice ending. I enjoyed it! Also stars Vince Edwards.
noted here for THE SHINING parts!
DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (2002) (aka Opération Lune) - a french tv "documentary" that sets out to prove that not only were the moon landings faked, but they were faked by Stanley Kubrick! It's a deliberate attempt to show just how manipulation of file footage and specifically cut interviews, along with an authoritative narrative, can make anything seem plausible (there's a deliriously wonderful bit where the filmmakers totally tip their hands to the fakery - it's the APOCALYPSE NOW part with the Vietnamese natives complaining about the CIA guys! Subtitles can be made to say anything!). Lots of fun!
Then there's ROOM 237 (2012), currently on Netflix, in which a bunch of obsessed Kunrick fans spend a lot of time telling you about the hidden meanings in THE SHINING, while the documentary makers supply them with all the footage they need (often to their argument's disadvantage - at least twice, we're left with statements that the footage shows something that it obviously does not). There's so many example of lazy thinking and lazy language that it could serve as a good film to show in a "Limits of Interpretation" class. The laziness of language comes in the unrestrained desire to have any commentator's pet theory be the "real" reason behind the film, the "real" subtext", "the "real" intent - as if a complex and detailed filmmaker like Kubrick couldn't have just taken advantage of serendipitous details and tonal background points and riffed off of them, without it being intended as a deeper meaning, just a nice resonance. The inability of these fans to just realize that Kubrick liked visual symmetry and there's no deeper meaning to dissolved tracking shots that mirror placement of objects and a TV lacking a cord - because any cord placed in the shot would disrupt the symmetry - this lack, and the strange, strange fascination with the real-world geography of the building - as if any director worth his salt making a haunted house movie *wouldn't* try to subtly disconcert the audiences sense of space and location - it just boggles me. The most flat footed assertion - "ghost stories are about the past impinging on the present" - uh, duh. The most fruitful for thought (at least for me) - the tying of the twins to Wendy, symbolically and the concept of Danny exploring the house while "exploring" the "headspace" of his parents and the adult world. That was pretty good. I felt it was telling that so many of the obsessed initially didn't like THE SHINING on seeing it and felt that there *had* to be something *more* there than a genius like Kubrick just making a horror movie with the simple intent of scaring an audience - this is stated fairly directly by at least two of the commentators and seems like an unfortunate offshoot of the "Cult Of Kubrick" phenomena. A genius just *cannot* make a fairly straight-ahead film (or as straight ahead as Kubrick could make a film). It reminds me of how my old lesson from anthropology class - "we are pattern seeking animals" - was eventually supplanted by my personal augmentation - "we are pattern FINDING animals". Given a Kubrick, and the rich and detailed work he produced, it's inevitable that the product could act like a Rorschach blot for some people. Kudos for all the other film clips (other Kubrick and DEMONS!) and a soundtrack created by someone who obviously really liked the theme from PHANTASM and Goblin's music for DAWN OF THE DEAD. I do worry that this film could end up damaging the general population's perception of attempts to examine film in serious and detailed ways, giving them a lazy handle to grab for when they hear or read anyone's attempt to examine a film in depth. But such is the way of the popular culture - it continues to provide easy outs for the intellectually lazy.
681 posts! I'm gonna be a while. Because They were going to be taken off of Netflix on October 15, I rewatched a number of Mario Bava films in quick succession: BLACK SUNDAY, KILL BABY KILL, BAY OF BLOOD, BARON BLOOD and LISA AND THE DEVIL.
BLACK SUNDAY (1960) is the acknowledged classic here and is still a wonderfully atmospheric slice of European Supernatural Gothic (for some reason, the scenes with the trapdoor pit in the hallway always get my attention) and a brilliant showcase for the stunning Barbara Steele.
I like all the burnished ambers of fire-lit rooms in the color scheme of KILL BABY KILL (1966) but while I dig it's scenario of a small European town haunted by the malignant ghost of a little girl, and really enjoy particular scenes, there's something about it that tends to rub me the wrong way.
LISA AND THE DEVIL(1972) has a wonderful dream/nightmare atmosphere of stagnant time loops and obsession and feels like some European Fantastique novel, the scenes of Elke Sommer in the streets of Toledo are very cool (I love the switching between the actors and their mannequin counterparts that Bava keeps doing, constantly throwing you off balance and creeping you out) and you have to love Telly Savalas and that stunningly odd ending (the final shot of Sommers real state revealed actually shocked me this time).
BARON BLOOD (1972) - man, what a fun movie - great locations (old castle, marble and wrought iron interiors, long hallways, foggy streets), a cool monster (an undead, sadistic Baron in a cape and broad hat) and a story that manages to be all Gothic Hammerisms while still being set in current times. I love Eva's (Elke Sommers, again) stained glass jacket that she's wearing in some scenes and the mix of natural lighting outside and atmospheric colored lighting inside. I love how Christina the psychic bravely looks her own death straight in the eye and how Alfred Becker (a glowing and affable Joseph Cotten) glides into shot when his name is first announced. Heck, I just love this movie. It's not perfect but it also does a great job of keeping the seamy undertone of the evils of sadism bubbling under the surface.
I love all the old antholgy shows. Grew up with Alfred Htchcock Presents, Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff's Thriller which the collection is available on DVD now from Amazon.Also watched the shows my kids watched,Are You Afraid Of The Dark and Monsters,Night Gallery,One Step Beyond.For Horror films,I love those British ones by Hammer Films,and love Asian Horror,because the ones I've seen are not full of filthy language and sex, like American films,including remakes of theirs,and reading subtitles doesn't bother me in the least.Probably the best ghost story I've ever watched is The Maid, but also love A Tale Of Two Sisters,The Eye,Dark Water, and The Ring ,all in the Asian version which I get from my library.All surpass the American remakes except possibly Dark Water which is a decent remake.
I have one DVD that I would really love if it wasn't the worst video/audio transfer ever made and that's~
Wes Craven's :Chiller... Corporate exec Miles Creighton dies, and is cryogenically frozen in the hopes that he can be revived. 10 years later, the procedure is a success, and Miles returns--without his soul.
The nerve-tingling story of a man brought back to life...without his soul!
I skimmed through "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" last night. I should probably watch "Young Frankenstein" tonight. My favorites for the season. Yup, I love me some MFTV movies - the good and the not so good. Made on limited budgets, with oft times uninspired direction, wooden acting and sausage-machine writing - all true, but when you were a kid in the 70s it was a chance to see a new scary movie in prime time (usually with my mom) so I have a great affection for the stunted offspring of cinema and the boob tube and I keep searching out ones I missed or occasionally re-watching old ones I love....Like DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK (1973) which terrorized me as a child and which, I believe, is one of the best scary movies for kids out there. Nothing directly violent happens and yet the movie has such a sinister tone - with those shrunken little prune-faced homunculi plotting against Kim Darby, William Demarest (Uncle Charlie!) making ominous warnings and Jim Hutton (Ellery Queen!) being totally oblivious) - and what a chilling ending! The Del Toro produced big budget film remake is too overblown and CGI-Gothicized for such a small scale, intimate story - it;s not bad, but I'll take Sid & Marty Krofft lookin' imps in fuzzy costumes and those awful faces hands down! Still a fun, creepy film!
CRUISE INTO TERROR (1978) which I finally caught up with after one random viewing when I was 11 years old. It was always the "Anti-Christ in the breathing mummy case" movie to me and watching it as an adult, I have to say that while it's pretty stultifying in that typical MFTV way (90 minutes in which almost nothing happens!) it does hold a certain goofy appeal because only in the late 1970s could you get a telefilm which combines elements of THE OMEN (antichrist, chanting, mysterious deaths), THE EXORCIST (ex-drunk priest questioning his faith), The Bermuda Triangle and a mummy's curse and do it with a straight face. Small cabin cruiser breaks down over a sunken Egyptian temple off the shores of the Yucatan where the Devil's son is buried. Yup. A pretty good cast (John Forsythe, Lee Meriwether, Hugh O'Brian, Stella Stevens, and Ray Milland - always fun to hear him deliver dialogue - as the radical Egyptologist, among others) are pretty much wasted but I will say that the central image I remembered from the film since I was young - that of a stunted Egyptian sarcophagus that breathes when no one is around - is still pretty creepy!
DAUGHTER OF HORROR (aka DEMENTIA) (1955)
I've wanted to see this weird horror/surrealist art film/noir hybrid for many years and finally made the time recently. Probably most famous as the film being watched in THE BLOB when the creature attacks, and then slightly less famous for featuring a mocking, omniscient voiceover from none other than a young Ed McMahon, this is one strange bird.
A voice tells us about madness over a night-dark cityscape and shows us a dingy room in an apartment building where an attractive young woman in black frets on her bed while in a dream (an empty beach, an engulfing wave). She awakens with a start and, after removing a large switchblade from a drawer, proceeds to make her way through the darkened city streets, moving amongst the dregs of society and strange, threatening figures (lunging drunks, vicious cops, a dwarf selling newspapers) before being buttonholed by a slick looking sharpie (a pimp?) who "introduces" her to a fat rich man in a big limousine (very Orson Welles). They end up back at his ritzy apartment where, when he finally deigns to touch her, she proceeds to stab him and throw him from the balcony.
Then it's pursuit through the eternal Noir City Nightscape (grasping the man's severed hand which clutches her necklace - a clue to her identity), chased by a detective who exactly resembles her Father (seen in an earlier dream sequence wherein she commits patricide) until she finds refuge (or does she?) in a seedy basement beatnik jazz joint (" a drug dream of forgetfulness") featuring jazz music by Shorty Rogers & His Giants ("new concepts in modern sounds!"). It all finally collapses into a threatening nightmare image of grasping hands before returning to the hotel room from the start, giving us the classic ending which you can surmise, and then topping it with a bit of gruesome imagery...
I really enjoyed this. While never a traditional "horror" film it touches on many images and concepts resonant with the genre, at times bringing to mind CARNIVAL OF SOULS, David Lynch films, those cityscape backdrops used as fade-outs in some TWILIGHT ZONE episodes, various noir films, UN CHIEN ANDALOU, even Corman's BLOOD BATH. I would also make the argument that it's very like a typical episode of old time radio's INNER SANCTUM (and a bit of THE WHISTLER) brought to film - did I mention that there's no dialogue, just the creepy, omniscient narrator and the eerie, unrelenting music of avant-garde/futurist composer George Anthiel? - as the mocking voice rambles on about insanity ("guilty, guilty, guilty!!" "Run, run, run!") - all crossed with surrealist imagery like an empty beach straight out of Dali, a severed hand in a flower basket, a dead man thrust through a barred window, a newspaper headline (MYSTERIOUS STABBING!) that haunts here every move, a figure with a black face (her "demon") that guides her through dreams of her past, more black/blank-faced figures ("ghouls of insanity") who stand mute witness in an alley to the rich man's corpse. A sequence of pursuit through darkened streets by a probing, inescapable police spotlight is particularly nightmarish. Have I mentioned the movie is only 60 minutes long?
The film promises to take us "into the mind of a woman who is mad" and it certainly seems to do that, the action occupying some weird, nightmarish nether-zone where our main character, The Daughter Of Horror, is alternatively panicked or smug and sardonically haughty, reacting to the scenes of degradation around her with mocking laughter (the tenant below her abuses his wife, a cop beats a drunk bloody while both laugh at the man's pain - even the servant of the rich man laughs at his master's murder) as she moves through the night. It is a world occupied by sinners and greedy, violent sensualists, herself included and feels like something you groggily awake to in the wee hours, the television flickering some strange Midnight Horror Show only half-remembered, before dropping off again to sleep. Track it down if that sounds like your bag!
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES (2014): 
After having given up on the PA series after the water-treading of Part 4 (and perceiving MARKED ONES as an easy cash-in on the franchises' Hispanic audience), I wasn't planning on seeing it. And yet, here we are. This ends up being the film Part 4 should have been, aggressively upping the incident factor and expositional plot content (for good *and* ill) instead of squandering the momentum that Part 3 had built on the same tired, tentative strokes that already got the series where it was (and just re-inscribing the coven imagery of 3 but on a larger scale). As I've said before, the PA series tweaked the found footage model to accommodate long stretches in which very little happened, and yet the weight of suspense that *something* WOULD happen was palpable. This rather perverse reinvention of the traditional suspense approach (ala Hitchcock), justified by the plot and format, returned a much needed sense of brooding menace to the modern horror film's prosaic settings that had been lost to quick MTV cuts and flashy effects (the unnerving subsonic drone, as a cue, helped as well). PA1 only seemed to be fumbling with learning the new trick, while PA2 really exploited it and PA3 worked its retro angle to help expand/solder on a sorely needed (for a franchise) backstory trajectory for a series whose format didn't really lend itself to plot.
THE MARKED ONES is to be lauded for changing the increasingly similar settings and range of characters (here, embracing a different cultural milieu and deploying some new folk magic) and ramping up the actual incidents (it actually goes a little too overboard in this department, stretching the verisimilitude - careful what you wish for, I guess). Oddly, it also chooses to retrogress, in a way, doing away with the static surveillance cameras and returning to hand-held (I can only assume that at this point found footage movies aren't even worrying about why a character would continue recording as incidents occur and escalate - he keeps filming because it's a hand-held camera movie, no other reason). Here, Oxnard resident Jesse buys himself a video camera and starts documenting strange events centering on his downstairs duplex neighbor, an old lady everyone thinks is a witch. A *lot* happens in this film, much of it details tying into the previous films - for good (a return to the now abandoned "coven house" from Part 3 and that distinctive outdoor corridor to the bungalow) and bad (an ill-advised and clumsy temporal curveball that bring us back to the actual last few minutes of PA1 to no great effect). It's not a great film, but it is better than PA4 - but it still leaves me less than expectant for PA5, if/when that happens.
WAKE WOOD (2011) - an Irish film from the new Hammer Productions, this has a nicely concise and atmospheric opening and evolves into a nice human-scale, heart-rending horror film - a variation on "The Monkey's Paw" as a couple (Patrick Daley & Eva Birthistle) lose their daughter (Ella Connolly) to a vicious dog attack on her birthday and take up the offer of a small town to use an old pagan folk ritual to resurrect her - for three days only. But something goes wrong.
This has some really nice pagan/folk magic imagery and details (a great abacus scene and I love the details like the resurrected being bound to the town - and what happens when you try to violate that rule) as well as a great rural English, rainy dreary atmosphere. Also nice - the brutal, physical reality of the ritual (which requires another dead body). There's also an excellent soundtrack by Michael Convertino. The movie becomes, perhaps, not as subtle as it could have been, relying on standard "evil child" imagery and a twist/twist ending but still, it's a good watch.
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TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE (1990) - Haven't watched this since I saw it on the big screen and it's pretty much as I remember. The framing story (Deborah Harry as a suburban witch being told stories by a little boy, Scheherazade-style, to distract her from cooking him, Hansel & Gretel-style) does a good job of setting up the same comic-book horror tone as CREEPSHOW without the calculated visual aesthetics of that film. But any anthology is judged by its stories. Here, the initial tale, an adaption of Arthur Conan Doyle's, "Lot No. 249", is the best - adding EC level gore/revenge to the original's revived mummy scenario (Steve Buscemi - who by evidence here should have joined Jeffrey Combs in playing weedy Lovecraft protagonists at this stage of his career - is great in his creepy young scholar role - "I hate Zuni aesthetics" should be my new put-down!) which features some nice, Egyptian embalming details to heighten the horror (watch Buscemi fist a mummy!), some classy disorientating shadow work, a DAWN OF THE DEAD clip on TV, a nice image of a mummy batting away thrown flowers and all-around 80's horror goofiness. The mummy may be the slightest bit rubbery (and this movie reminds me that the biggest oversight in mummy stories is the inability of the protagonist to follow big, muddy, shuffling footprints) but the film has the courage (if dubious story-sense) to disassemble its mummy-on-screen! I liked it.
"The Cat From Hell", a Stephen King story, is very CREEPSHOW, with color-tinted flashbacks and goofy imagery like a prop cat clamped to someone's face - but still fun if taken with the right attitude for a story where a hit-man (David Johansen) is hired by a wealthy man (William Hickey) to eliminate a bad-omen black cat. Goofy fun. "Lover's Vow" is an updating of a Lafcadio Hearn story better adapted in KWAIDAN (1965) and following one of the basic folkloric horror formulas of the supernatural figure that forces an oath that eventually gets broken. Too long by half, it has some nice gargoyle imagery, though. TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE was never a very good TV show (sorry) but it had a certain sensibility that worked occasionally and this film does a reasonable job capturing that.
Here is a 15 minute TED Talk on parasites causing host behavior that is awesome. For instance, a wasp lays eggs in a caterpillar, they hatch & 'kill' it, but it hangs around defending them - a zombie body guard! http://video.ted.com/talk/podcast/201...
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)
On a whim, re-watched this movie 15 years after seeing it for the first and only time on release. Still like it, still think it holds up. Clearing away all the reactionary clutter of hype that tints a lot of general opinion - it's a flawed but successful film for which, interestingly, its greatest strength is its greatest weakness - the ramshackle, aimless approach (problematic for some desiring a more structured story) accentuates the atmosphere and mood of the slowly encroaching threat (projected here onto civilization's default screen of the "wilderness") while, arguably, becoming too meandering and frustrating for the audience at points (because it is, in some sense, promising us the trajectory of a story, the outcome of which is both already known and yet undetermined). As this approach took off post-big box office (found footage became the "slasher film" of the aughts, cheap and easy to make, with little need for name actors or flashy effects) my contention over time became that found-footage horror best achieved its successes by deliberately jettisoning artful/directorial composition (which in a lot of horror had become lazy/familiar/slick gestures) for a reinforcement of verisimilitude and the *immediate* reality of threat, rediscovering, thanks to imposed economic limits, the fruits of small gestures, subtly, atmosphere and human pacing/scale - when done *well* of course.
Here, the details like the paganistic stick figures, personality friction, human teeth bundles and the extremely effective sound production (I imagine this movie is best experienced in a cinema - despite the nauseous handheld jiggle on the big screen - or at home in a completely dark room with a good surround sound system), as well as a rather sharp understanding of how folklore works its magic by being fragmented and associative (rather than a straight narrative), combine to capture a rather old school horror idea of characters being "pixie-led" and, eventually, "panicked" with the audience always distanced and spectating, on the outside of what is an internal emotional experience for those onscreen (just like watching documentary footage). The confessional and climactic scenes are both excellent standouts (I love how the ruined, overgrown house in the woods offers no comfort and is still just as much "wilderness" as the forest). A good film, I think, to test audience's ability to embrace approaches not normally found in mainstream horror films (at times, more reminiscent of art cinema tactics - cinema verite, unlikeable but realistic characters, a realization that the longueurs of the middle section are mostly deliberate - a literary comparison might be to see whether a Stephen King reader could find enjoyment in Algernon Blackwood: not all will) and perhaps a good, spooky movie for tweens that can give them some intensity while training them about expectations and cinematic variety. Not something I'd need to re-watch very often but quite solid, although I still have very little desire to re-experience the sequel...
MYSTERY & IMAGINATION: "The Open Door" (1966): one of the few surviving episodes of the ITV black& white supernatural anthology show that adapted classics, I found this surprisingly enjoyable - I say surprisingly because I was lucky enough to have recently read the Margaret Oliphant story it was adapting and, seeing how early tv is stage-bound and the story mostly takes place outside - well, they had a really good stage set of a an outdoor ruin built for this one! The story itself is something of a sentimental ghost story in which a father (Jack Hawkins) finds that his son has been so overcome by a nocturnal experience of a haunting in the local ruins (a legend he doesn't believe in) that the boy may die from the stress.
The haunting consists of the voice of a young boy pleading to be let inside a home, just near a now dilapidated, free-standing stone wall. While the climax is typically overwrought and weepy, the actual moment of the first experiences of the spectral cries is quite well done (and was the best thing in the original story - really captured how disturbing it would be to hear something that isn't there, in the dark wilderness at the dead of night). A testament to how commitment to story and atmosphere can overcome format limitations - very enjoyable.
Polish Television: "Carmilla" (1982) : spurred by the announcement that the next Video Watchdog will feature an overview of all the various filmed versions of Le Fanu's famed story, I decided to finally watch this oddity that has been sitting on my drive for a long time. It's a strangely compromised artifact - a b&w Polish TV adaption with no subtitles (marked on screen with a TVP Archiwum imprint, it feels a bit like early episodes of DARK SHADOWS), that was then mucked around with by some film school editor as a showcase for applying cheap video effects (so we get scenes reversing and repeating, screen shakes, tint additions, lame music "stings" and classical/opera overlaid, etc.), so it's something like a video palimpsest and any judgements I make must be taken with a big grain of salt. Having said that, it's pretty close to the original text with wan, youthful, tightly-coiffed Laura (Monika Stefanowicz) befriended by dark haired Carmilla (Izabella Trojanowska) after the latter is dumped on Laura's family by a mysterious "carriage accident" (off-screen, of course, this is tv). Trojanowska has classical, angular features to contrast nicely with Stefanowicz's softer, rounded child-like look. The scene with the local pedlar warning about vampires, oddly, is played directly to the camera and there's a lengthy flashback of the staking of a toothy male vampire by use of some strange trip-wire staking device. Carmilla's full-on vampire attack scene, once Laura's defenders have marshaled their forces, is striking and shocking - a moment of quiet, a strange noise and then a jump scare! The exhumation of the Karnstein crypt takes place during an (in-studio) snowfall and boy do the townspeople relish the chance to stake the monster! It even has a creepy coda with pale, downcast eyed Laura, hair finally hanging free, creeping from her room to stare at her sleeping nurse's exposed throat! It would be cool if an original source, subtitled version of this showed up one day.
Two found footage/mockumentary/hand-cam films in new hyper-compressed review mode: The Mirror (2014)
I've been one to champion hand-held camera horror against increasing frustration with the format – it may sacrifice visual artistry for form, granted, but when the filmmakers are actually thinking about what they're doing, and use their small scale scares and heavily controlled pacing well, it can work a treat (one could argue that hand held applies the same discipline that the classic English ghost story subgenre applies to the horror fiction genre – small gestures, "cozy" scares). Sadly, that is not the case for this British found footage film, which has a bunch of flatmates deciding to win the James Randi challenge by buying (off the Internet) a supposedly "haunted mirror" and then filming around the clock to see what happens in the apartment. A found footage version of OCULUS then?
Well, not so much. Initially, one of the guys starts sleepwalking (with a go-pro camera strapped to him), then starts acting squirrely and hiding that footage from the other two (made a plot point and then dropped – so no horrifying reveal there) before heading out of the apartment to assault people at night. The film's only definitive moment of horror is given away by the poster – not much else happens, the friends bicker and squabble endlessly in seemingly improvised scenes, no scientific rigor is applied (so much for the Randi award), and the mirror itself is visually unimpressive (that's even commented on). The ending apes BLAIR WITCH to no good effect. This might have been good if they'd thought it out better ahead of time, and paced/plotted more resonant events instead of just presuming that shaky cameras and nothing much happening equals "scary". 90 more minutes of your life, folks…
As Above, So Below (2014)
Taking its title from the famous Gnostic precept, this is yet another hand-held cam film in which intrepid and reckless young "rock star" archeologist (is there any other kind? This one knows martial arts!) thinks she has discovered the hiding place of Nicholas Flammel's alchemical "Philosopher's Stone" in the catacombs below Paris. As I've said before, found footage films seem to me to work best when they embrace their limitations and focus on detail – sadly, this film has a large–scale, ambitious and goofy kind of plot, very comic book horror (Dan Brown meets Indiana Jones – all secret riddles and sliding door mechanisms and death traps) not very well-fitted to the format restrictions.
Weird things happen as the group descends into the increasingly more ancient passageways, but a lot of it is… well… goofy and comes off as silly (plus, it's that old bugaboo "past sins catching up with you"). I did like the weirdly inverted imagery of the finale (to go up you must go down) but it was too reliant on spookshow "scares", broad exposition and uninteresting characters.
some more hand cam cinema (both contain supernatural installments): V/H/S/2 (2013)
Re-watched this on Netflix and, much like its predecessor (and like most horror anthology films), this found footage portmanteau film is a mixed bag. The stories (guy gets digital prosthetic eye and sees ghosts, cyclist with helmet cam runs across – and gets subsumed by – zombie outbreak, documentary crew just happens to film at cult compound on the "the big day" and kids at a sleepover undergo alien abduction) vary in strength but also suffer in the details. "Clinical Trials" has the best conceit with its "bionic" eye but trades on worn out j-horror imagery. "Slumber Party Abduction" is the most straight-ahead and unimaginative, with no plot so much as a bunch of stuff that happens exactly as you'd expect – but with aliens!
"Safe Haven" is ostensibly the strongest – the cult environment is creepily conveyed, Epy Kusnandar is excellent as the focused but insane "Father" and some of the imagery in the compound once "doomsday" comes is powerfully disturbing – but I also felt they loaded in a little too much into the scenario by the end. I favorably likened the Harpy story "Amateur Night" from the preceding VHS to a solid comic book horror tale in the style of Warren's old CREEPY magazine, and here "Safe Haven" came off a bit like a runner up from CREEPY's "weak sister" EERIE magazine, with a great start undermined by a silly ending. Honestly, despite how played out zombies are, I got the most enjoyment from "A Ride In The Park" as it did a good job of being inventive, unsettling (the initial encounter), disturbing (the birthday party) and then emotionally human (the climax). VHS: Viral coming any day now.
VHS: VIRAL (2014)
Third installment (now with more monster penis!) kind of goes off the rails with an overambitious frame narrative and three stories. "Dante The Great" is a fun, well-done tale of a stage magician who discovers a real magic cloak, and the mayhem that ensues. The stage magician is a staple of horror films - LORD OF ILLUSION (1995), THE MAD MAGICIAN (1954), WIZARD OF GORE (1970) – so it was fun seeing it updated here, although the documentary approach to filming bog spectacles really chafes against the small-scale, hand-held cam aesthetic and I still think that Montag from WIZARD OF GORE could take out Dante ("I will show you reality... AS IT REALLY IS!). "Parallel Monsters" has a basement scientist open a doorway to a parallel universe next door, inhabited by his exact double – but when they agree to explore each other's worlds for 15 minutes, it quickly becomes apparent that despite surface similarity, these worlds differ quite drastically from each other – goofy and unpretentious sci-fi monster horror. "Bonestorm" seems to be the most contentious entry as it takes a bit of time setting up a bunch of stoner skaterats who travel to Tijuana to film a session at a hug culvert, only to run afoul of sinister hooded figures (think Ossorio's BLIND DEAD) who have been using the site for their own satanic ends... so it's a fight!The actual idea and *look* of the scenario is pretty cool, real-world "urban" horror set in a sun-blasted concrete hole in the desert sprawl. Sadly, the execution gets in the way as the multiple, varied POV cameras confuse the action and the fight goes on for too long, eventually beginning to resemble something like a first person shooter game. The climax is also weak, borrowing imagery from the "bionic eye" and "father segments of VHS2. There should have been a fourth segment "Gorgeous Vortex" but it was pulled at the last minute.
And then there's the frame segment, the jarring, fragmented, hysterical and irritating "Vicious Circles", which moves us out of the strange house loaded with videotapes of the first two installments and gives us a camera obsessed boyfriend joining a media circus police chase of an ice-cream van through the streets of LA because his girlfriend has somehow become involved. But the chase, which has crowds pouring into the streets to video it (and thus with camera in hand), coincides with a strange viral video sent to people's phones showing stuttering, shattered footage of screaming and decaying people (along with flashes of scenes from previous installments, including the Harpy girl from VHS and "Father" from VHS2) – images which enthrall and damage the viewer. As the ice cream van makes huge circles through the city, possibly transmitting this footage to phones in a feedback loop, the city explodes with deadly accidents, explosions and random murder. The climax doesn't earn its VIDEODROME pretensions (more resembling the lesser DROME homage of the TV transmitter ending of DEMONS 2) because it's barely built a coherent narrative for the audience (I had to go back and rewatch, pausing and examining all the frame sequences, to even tease this out) and the finale is particularly ham-fisted, baldly abandoning the chase scenario for a big switch marked "upload", a loop of a girl saying "let's go viral" and an Iphone jammed in a mouth, none of which justify the half-assed, perfunctory storytelling that gestures toward social commentary. And in getting there, at times, it's nearly impossible to tell what's happening on screen (you *will* have a headache unless you're under 18 years old) – the jumbled ideas further complicated by two short vignettes set in the city (gang party violence and revenge porn comeuppance) that fold in unexpectedly and end abruptly (the first, in particular, is like a cartoonish leftover from THE ABCS OF DEATH) – why? Possibly to replace the missing segment and pad out the runtime? I laud the filmmakers for trying something ambitious but this was all over the place and so, as always, judgment comes down to the segments, all of which have weaknesses and none of which approach "Amateur Night" from the first installment. Not terrible but not a home run by any means.
A few recent film watches...7500 (2014)
People get on plane, shifty guy coughing up blood dies on plane, plane experiences turbulence, strange things start to happen. Is it a remake of mftv staple The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973)? Not exactly. Directed by Takashi Shimizu (Marebito, Ju-on: The Grudge) this is a surprisingly limp and ineffective movie that has sat on the shelf for 2 years. It's difficult to say a lot without giving too much (of the familiar plot) away but this would have made an effective 30 minute Twilight Zone or yet another misfire in the career of M. Night Shyamalan –
- almost nothing happens to the uninteresting characters and when it does, it's incredibly budget conscious (the main repeated image of horror is a hand reaching out of fog to grab you. I'm not kidding) – not that one needs a big budget to pull of scares but this film has almost nothing going for it… and proceeds to go nowhere with it. Conceptually, there's a nicely eerie image conjured during the final reveal, but as it gives away the "twist", it can't be dwelt on until the end, and then explanations get in the way. 90 minutes of your life, folks…
The Monster Club (1980)
Re-watched this anthology film on a whim. Yup, still has 3rd tier rock bands (infectiously catchy theme song, though), bad puns and cheap monster masks for the crowd scenes at the titular club. Yup, still has Vincent Price and John Carradine semi-slumming in the frame story. Yup, still adapts three stories by the prolific R. Chetwynd-Hayes (the British Robert Bloch, for my money) to mediocre effect. Yup, I still like it, although I can't make an argument for it. The best story is the first, "The Shadmock" which tells a standard EC comics revenge narrative about a women who dares trying to cheat a lonely and sensitive monster by tricking him into thinking she loves him as much as he does her – too bad about the flesh-melting whistle (worth noting that the Hayes story this "adapts" is actually nothing like the plot shown here and is quite effective and creepy itself). James Laurenson (as Raven, the overly moody, capital-R-Romantic Shadmock) is quite good (his introduction blown a bit by overplaying his supposed "repulsiveness" when he just looks like a weedy English guy).
"The Vampire" in which a young boy unknowingly helps a vampire-killer (a fun Donald Pleasance) zero in on his night-working father from the old country (shades of that old Meteor's song "My Daddy is a Vampire"!) feels too broad in its comedy. Actually, I quite like the eerie and atmospheric (if also clumsy and cheap-jack) last story "The Ghouls" where a brash film director (Stuart Whitman) find just the right little town for his next horror film, a strange, fog-enshrouded hamlet called "Loughville"… oh sure, it's pure comic book horror and pretty hastily assembled at that, but I enjoy its honest ramshackle qualities. I don't imagine anyone younger than me could enjoy this film as anything but camp, though (and, it must be said, the frame story is definitely intended as such).
The Fog (1980)
Re-watched this as a birthday present for myself. There are certainly *better* John Carpenter films, no doubt but this is a personal favorite. I love the (pardon the pun) atmospheric qualities is has, I love the soundtrack (one of the first vinyl purchases I ever made – from Camelot Records in the Ocean County Mall), I love how committed it is to cramming in as many literary (and nautical) ghost story tropes as possible ("Something that one lives with like an albatross round the neck. No, more like a MILLSTONE. A plumbing stone, by God! Damn them ALL!"), I love Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) and how the film captures the now nearly-vanished feel of local, late-night radio, I love the opening where, after John Houseman tells his folktale, a wave of inexplicable and random poltergeist phenomena crashes through Antonio Bay for just an hour!
Hell, I love the fact that there's technically no main character – just a bunch of people stuff happens to! The movie will always suffer from a "ghost story/real world" logic conflict (simply put – if the ghostly pirate crew of the Elizabth Dane are just killing people to make their quota, it seems likely they could have killed 5 people more quickly by attacking the statue ceremony, but if they're deliberately killing descendants of the 5 conspirators, then its unlikely any of our main characters - Stevie just moved there from Chicago! - are ever in any real danger) but I love it all the same.
Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch (1982)
Probably my second favorite film in the Halloween franchise after the original (and none after that, although HALLOWEEN II has some moments), this is always on the receiving end of brickbats for deviating from formula and featuring a non-slasher story with no Michael Myers. And the story, conceived by Nigel Kneale (THE STONE TAPE, QUATERMASS), is pretty goofy as well, when a toy-seller's mysterious hospital murder leads a boozy doctor (Tom Atkins, see also THE FOG) and said toy-seller's daughter (cute little Stacey Nelkin) to the isolated coastal town of Santa Mira (you may remember they had a problem with alien pods back in the 1950s, don't ya know) to investigate the business practices and mask/toy factory of Irish millionaire Conal Cochran, who is gearing up for the biggest, most nasty Halloween prank ever pulled!
This is the kind of film where you have to play along with the movie and just enjoy it – Atkins is reliably stolid as hard-drinking Dr. Challis, the isolated/corporately locked-down town is eerie and I always find Dan O'Herlihy's Cochran equally sinister and truly possessin' o' the Gaelic charm: his expositional speech explaining the plot and the true meaning of Halloween ("the dead might be looking in…") is wonderful and his final act of applause is a great character touch. Plus, any movie where the main plot is predicated on violating one of the big horror film taboos on a mass scale (although granted, we never see it, just a demonstration) has something going for it. I always think of it as John Carpenter film although it was directed by his right hand man Tommy Lee Wallace. Yes, the studio-mandated extra killings are a bit perfunctory but, all in all, a nice pulpy slice of pumpkin pie (bugs, snakes and all)!
The Blood On Satan's Claw (1970) 
This was a perennial on the tri-state area's 4:30 Movie back in the day (gotta love that lurid title!) and, as a kid, was one of those film you remembered watching without remembering exactly what the hell it was about – and an adult revisit explains why pretty clearly. This is an enjoyable slice of rural horror (helped by filming in really old houses and using leftover costume-drama costumes, like a lot of British period horror films of the time) with a lilting, eerie score (although also clunky at times) and a cool set-up (farmer plows up the horrible and unidentifiable remains of "something" in a field – which then disappears), a neat trajectory (local people start going mad, evidencing patches of hairy skin or whole inhuman claws, and the local youths start a witchy orgy group in the woods as a "witchcraft panic" takes over) and then seems to lose its way (or budget) and becomes a bit muddled. If I recall some old issue of Video Watchdog correctly, the director or writer was replaced halfway through and the rather neat idea (some kind of Wood-Devil is slowly being reassembled out of "parts" manifesting on locals) got lost in the shuffle.
There's a nice "mass psychology" feel at times ("witchcraft has been discredited"), but that's also undercut by a paucity of village-as-community scenes. Beautiful landscapes! The ending is lackluster to be sure (a grainy face off against some vague, easily dispatched monster) but this has a lot of country charm and weirdness going for it.
Haunts of the Very Rich (1972)
A made for TV movie from T.K. Brown III's novella Рyou could call this the anti-Fantasy Island and be mostly right. A bunch of people (newlyweds, disgruntled businessman, aging lady-killer, doubtful priest, nervous breakdown survivor) find themselves on a jet to an expensive, mysterious island resort "The Portals Of Eden" (the plane's windows are blacked out), presided over by the smooth Mr. Seacrist (Moses Gunn). Cracks appear in the fa̤ade almost immediately: snakes in the sheets, a storm knocks out power, all the fish are dead, no one hears the radio mayday calls, the water dries up, the food disappears (Seacrist assures them their deposits will be refunded). And... turns out all of the guests had near-death accidents recently. Then, staff members, followed by Seacrist and the Priest, start dropping dead or bugging out. As the social amenities disappear, the pressure makes the vacationers crack and interpersonal frictions develop.
There's a nice feeling for rotting opulence here, and slow suffering through attrition. The plot turn is, of course, what you think it is ("In a place like this—" "There IS no place like this!") BUT, surprisingly, the characters conceive of that idea fairly early (a suicide that doesn't succeed helps) and then spend the rest of the film debating it and having their suspicions confirmed or undermined (a rescue plane lands, twice! – or does it?). This isn't an amazing film or anything (it's a made for tv movie, with all that entails upfront), and it suffers from the ending being a non-visual fait accompli that must be arrived at regardless (and here is handled rather weakly and perfunctorily) but it's a well-acted piece of dark fantasy (Ed Asner, Robert Reed, Cloris Leachman, Lloyd Bridges, Anne Francis) that should be lauded for excellent pacing (even with the hasty wrap-up).
WER (2013) 
Not a found footage or mockumentary so much as a modern "shaky-cam" film (although there is heavy usage of various surveillance and video footage) this has a human rights lawyer in Frances tasked with defending a hulking, hairy, taciturn brute accused of massacring an American family camping on his land. The suspect is heavily guarded and considered highly dangerous but the forensics evidence suggests a savage animal killed the family and some historical details suggest a frame-up from the Government, interested in obtaining the land. And the forensic guy, scratched by the prisoner, starts to get sick…
I'm not sure how I felt about this modern werewolf (actually, wolf-man, to be pedantic) film – we have to suffer through the usual nonsense about porphyria because I guess enough time has passed that the next generation has never heard it, and the film seems undecided about what it wants to actually say – or perhaps it doesn't want to say anything, just deliver a bunch of (admittedly exciting) action horror CGI sequences and a climax that echoes the Jack Nicholson vehicle Wolf (1994). The acting is so-so and the plot felt like it was treading water at times. Not amazing, not bad, just an average film that does what it's doing and that's it.
HORNS (2014)
From the novel by Joe Hill, this may be sold as a horror film but (despite a harrowing scene or two) is more along the lines of a dark fantasy/mystery (with, due to its lumber-town setting and certain events, echoes of TWIN PEAKS). Ignatius "Ig" Perrish (Daniel Radcliffe), assumed by outraged locals and overzealous media to be the murderer of his longtime girlfriend, has to contend with the overnight growth of devil horns (only vaguely perceived by most) along with the ability to influence those around him to indulge hidden desires and unconsciously divulge the truth. This is a promising set-up and the film isn't that bad, but after having some fun (and generating some emotional drama) at the expense of people's worst selves, it still has a whole second hour of plot to walk through as we get multiple flashbacks of the night in question and an eventual solution to the mystery.
All the actors are game, there's some good music (much Bowie love) and Alexandra Aja has a nice eye for scenery but this also felt a bit bloated and wasn't helped by the overly flashy and spectacle-driven CGI climax to what is, at its heart, a quiet, interior tale of moral responsibility for one's actions. Which, given that its from a big studio, is par for the course.
THE BORDERLANDS (2013)
Something of a rarity, this is a found footage film that actually engages some adult topics and occasionally pauses for realistic, human discussion about the issues it raises. Moreso, the characters (two of whom work for the Vatican) come across as real people with religious beliefs and honest doubts/flaws, not just the usual stock representation of such people that you get in most horror films. Now, it also features the usual jump scares, loud noises, jarring video edits and smears, small-scale shocks and half-glimpsed creepy imagery of the subgenre, to be sure, but this felt, to me, like one of the more successful attempts to ride on the coattails of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. A team comprised of secular tech-guy Gray, veteran Vatican investigator Deacon and Vatican bureaucrat Mark are sent to examine and document claims by a local priest Father Crellick that strange poltergeist phenomena are occurring in his old, rural, nearly unattended church. So they set up cameras and recording equipment and get down to it but strange events (a horrific act by local hooligans, a death, the discovery of a hidden door) eventually lead them to call in a Vatican archivist. One of the nice details is that the ostensibly agnostic tech guy Gray ("I believe in… things") is far more willing to believe in strange events than the cynical, weary and skeptical debunkers from the Church who have seen lots of fakes and deluded people ("we get a lot of time-wasters"). Deacon, in particular, is excellently portrayed by Gordon Kennedy as a conflicted, humane man – alternatively kindly, sly, boozing, aggressive and wounded, he reminded me a lot of Oliver Reed at his best and his natural chumminess with Gray moves the film along nicely. There is, surprisingly, some quite well-handled discussions of faith and gullibility, a subtext about sleight of hand magic tricks, some slow building of ominous dread and some real moments of creep (that horrific act previously mentioned, unnerving shots in full darkness lit only by flashlights, the ethereal cries of an infant, varied creaks, rustles and rumbles) but this is a found footage film, so don't expect spectacle horror, even with the climax.
I'd like to talk about that climax (hopefully without giving anything away) because, as evidenced online, it seems to be one of the most contentious aspects of the film – it either frustrates or "makes" the movie for many viewers. It's almost a truism to say that, post-BLAIR WITCH, almost all found footage films end the same way, mostly because the very conceit of the film suggests it. Of course, it all comes down to those last moments and sticking the ending, and the restrictions created by the logic of the plot often mean there is little chance for clean endings that let us know what happened to everyone and which answer our questions. Sometimes, these endings can be masterfully chilling through the momentum of the set-up and climax (BLAIR WITCH) or through horrific captured images (LAKE MUNGO, HOME MOVIES) and often they can be abrupt, frustrating and disappointing. The climax to BORDERLANDS may be both – I liked it and felt it had a nightmarish claustrophobic quality (the lead-in to it mirrored earlier with the chase through the woods at night scene) but I can also see why others found it unsatisfying (in particular, I wish I could get confirmation on the last two lines of dialogue spoken, as I found them very affecting if I, in fact, heard them correctly). Probably one of the better horror films I've seen this year, this has a nice air of English Ghost Story and Rural Horror about it.
THE EVIL TOUCH – "The Lake" (1973) 
Australian anthology show in the vein of TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED, ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS or THRILLER. I'd love the chance to see more episodes because anthology shows should be judged by their best episodes, not just random episodes (as this one, available on YouTube, is). Still, here is "The Lake" in which Robert Lansing is a middle-aged executive with a shrewish wife and a mistress (his secretary). Luckily, shrewish wife goes overboard during vacation trip to the mountains and Lansing deliberately doesn't save her and instead hold her under water. Then it's call the cops, spring the news on the mistress, and… cue haunting voices calling his name, with the eventual return trip to the lake for a poetic, if predictable, ending that was weak when INNER SANCTUM did it on the radio in the 1940s.
I'm sure there are better episodes. Anthony Quayle as the host is no Rod Serling or Alfred Hitchcock, he's barely even a John Newland as, standing in a smoky nowhere zone, he warns us about "the touch of evil in all of us" – cue jazzy, swingin' theme music.
HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II (1988) 
So, this showed up on Netflix and I figured, having watched the original film *fairly* recently (within the last 2 years), and not having seen the sequel in quite a while, to give it a spin. There will be spoilers. The original film is quite a nice little oddity – essentially a domestic psycho-thriller with strange & abstract demonic mythology folded in to provide exotic spice, it works a treat because the Cenobites are just so compelling, visually and conceptually.
HELLBOUND, like a few other horror film sequels (HALLOWEEN 2 comes to mind) picks up mere moments after the catastrophic ending of the predecessor (the house catching fire seems to have been ignored as we see police exploring it, finding bodies and recovering a blood-soaked mattress),with Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) awakening at the Channard Institute, whose titular brain-surgeon head (Kenneth Cranham) seems very interested in her story of inter-dimensional torture demons (as he's got a collection of cenobite boxes and archival records of his own, so obviously he's been researching this stuff for a while). Channard's obsessions, Kirsty's vision of her dad suffering in Hell and the bloody return to life of murderous step-mother Julia (Clare Higgins) force all the characters (along with mute, puzzle-solving asylum patient Tiffany) into a pell-mell quest through the labyrinthine corridors of Hell itself where sadistic Uncle Frank (Sean Chapman), Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and his clutch of Cenobites, and their bizarre ruler, Leviathan, all await.
The first film is, at its edges, so odd that the sequel spends a lot of time sketching out events to get the audience up to speed, then loads in all kinds of new stuff on top as well (Channard's secret asylum snake-pit and his transformation into a Cenobite, Ashley's Dad supposedly trapped in Hell for no good reason, Leviathan and whatever Julia's and the Cenobites' goals are). All of this is cast through a bigger-budgeted lens than the first film so, while HELLRAISER made a virtue of its small scale, here the proceedings are "opened up" into an Escher-esque Hellscape (which is still claustrophobic and confining, what with endless running down stone corridors, so it retains that "interiority" feel) and this works for and against the film as well. It's not at all interested in realism or subtlety, nor is it as slickly plastic and cartoonish/jokey as a lot of 80's films of the time were (well, that's not totally true, as Dr. Channard is given some out-of-place quippy puns to deploy post-Cenobite transformation –"The Doctor will see you now!", etc.) — instead, it occupies a third space of intense gore (lots of screaming, insanity, razored skin-flaying, bugs, rotting bodies, crying babies and blood), big-budget surreal effects (ala NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: THE DREAM WARRIORS) and an odd, removed European stateliness (secret passageways, twisted family dynamics, dank madhouses – here, Hell is essentially an infinitely recursive version of the "Gothic Castle" that contains within it all past moments, or at least the bad ones), a nightmarish fairy tale. Christopher Young's by turns darkly lilting and tollingly ominous music remains a strong, dreamy, atmospheric positive.
There's some great imagery here: the totemic blood-stained mattress (very Clive Barkerish in being ground-zero for extreme passions) birthing the skinned Julia's return in the role of sadistic psychopomp that Uncle Frank occupied in the first (the effects work here is amazing – skinned Julia is not only a masterpiece of special effects but of lurid symbolism – all raw sensory nerves exposed), Julia wrapped in nearly pristine white bandages leaving bloody tracks all over Channard's clean, prissy orderly home as a thunderstorm rages outside (deliberately, I assume, recalling Universal classic horrors THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and THE INVISIBLE MAN and some Surrealist works), the signature imagery of interstitial spaces creaking open anywhere and the presence of the cool blue/black leather/bone white reserve of the majestically creepy Cenobites.
Laurence, Higgins & Bradley are all as good here as they were in the first but sadly, while Pinhead and especially Julia are given more to do, Kirsty has noticeably less, and that remains a problem for these films. Laurence is very good at filling out what is essentially an underwritten character but while Ashley is likeable as our main audience-identifier, she doesn't really drive the plot so much as react to things and remains mostly a cipher. Despite Uncle Frank's cajoling and The Cenobites' noting that, regardless of her protests they *do* seem to keep meeting up with her and why is that?, we never get any sense that these intimations of her character's darker desires are actually true. Kirsty is just kind of a vague (if certainly dedicated) blank. In contrast, Julia, who was originally intended to become the focus of the continuing films (possibly as a Cenobite in training?) before Higgins opted out, has loads more character as a cold, calculating, ambitious Evil Queen driven by strange desires for power.
The films' unwillingness or inability to actively explicate its strange mythology works in its favor as well – one can infer and intimate grand concepts from evocative details (the true forms of the Cenobites revealed on their "deaths" and their inability to recall once being human – "remember all your confusion", Leviathan as a geometric, rotating black-lighthouse at the center of a geometric hell). On the other hand, it also leaves enormous plotholes for Dr. Channard who (even with his stop-motion eyeball/scalpel/flower-fingers) is another weak character both in Cenobitic design (his late-in-the-film entrance into the asylum scene is noticeably clumsy) and motivation (why do the Pinhead and the others attack Channard – aren't they all working for Leviathan? Why does reminding them of their human lives leave them open to physical attack? The answer is unimportant, they just do and it just does). The good doctor's endless gassing-on at the climax even allows Kirsty's extremely unlikely plan to succeed – and why does it succeed anyway? Again, no real answers.
In the end it's a big, muddled phantasmagoric spectacle that's never exactly scary but occasionally disturbing and breathtakingly grotesque at times (the image of "skin as a human suit" is recurrent). Nothing makes much plot sense but then nothing really *has* to as long as everyone keeps running around. As a big-budget, quasi-psychedelic dark fantasy it gives hints at what a live-action version of Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath might have looked like if made at the time.
HELLRAISER III: HELL ON EARTH (1992) 
Wherein the HELLRAISER franchise fumbles the ball and dead-ends, at least conceptually, the series. One could argue that, much like THE EXORCIST or PHANTASM, HELLRAISER was not a film that needed, or would even benefit from, becoming a franchise. Sure, the elements were there to be exploited and expanded on (namely, Pinhead and the Cenobites) but one could equally argue that what made the Cenobites intriguing was their inventive strangeness and that further exposure would strip the mystery away (much like The Tall Man in PHANTASM). HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II juggled that ambiguity ball rather nicely (even if also abusing it for lazy plotting) but here, the series squanders its chance to go somewhere. HELLRAISER III needed to be the film that set some kind of trajectory for the overall concept and gave it a visionary vehicle – instead, it spends all its precious time recovering from the events of HELLBOUND and while it should be given kudos for engaging in its own continuity (where many other franchises just ignored theirs), it ends up essentially spending a whole movie to set everything back to zero. And, while doing it, makes us endure a not very good film that merges quippy 90's big-budget goofery (exploding cars! a shitty rock club! exploding storefronts! cheap jump scares! explosions!) with monster/slasher film dynamics.
J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt), impresario of "The Boiler Room" nightclub, likes dark artworks and so comes into possession of a strange piece of statuary that actually contains the last vestiges of Pinhead (killed in the preceding movie). When some splashed blood activates the Cenobite, he begins Faustian dealings with the club owner in order to gain sacrificial victims and manifest wholly in the real world. Meanwhile, TV reporter Joey Summerskill (Terry Farrell) sees a bizarre cenobite-related death at a local hospital and eventually tracks down a friend of the deceased, club-girl Terri (Paula Marshall) who possesses the all-important Lament Configuration box and ends up directing the reporter to the strange goings on at "The Boiler Room". And why is Joey suddenly having dreams of a British World War One soldier?
Well, it's honestly a step-down for the franchise. Weaker actors (although you can tell Bradley is having a ball as Pinhead), lower budget, less imagination. As I said, the *idea* that they carry over from HELLBOUND isn't bad (Pinhead's emotional human "soul" separated from his sinister Cenobitic "shell") and occasional imagery is good (Pinhead's cajoling, roaring face in the column is pleasingly surreal, if a bit goofy) but the chief Cenobite's darkly philosophical bon mots feel wasted on a dullard douchebag like J.P. and tip us to the fact that this once oddly majestic character is operating under reduced circumstances.
Captain Elliot Spencer (Doug Bradley again, natch) as a walking plot exposition machine is pretty lazy and Terri is the healthiest looking, best-dressed homeless club kid I've ever seen. The film's decision to have Pinhead slaughter a nightclub full of people and then create a squad of half-baked Cenobites of his own to go on a low-scale rampage of blowin' stuff up downtown while quipping zingers (essentially turning this into a cheap monster movie with an unfrightening, pyrotechnic action-horror climax) is depressing and unimaginative. Heck, the *movie* even acknowledges how weak this is with Pinhead's line that his new Cenobites like "CD Head" and "Camerahead" are "a shadow of my former troops" – he ain't lying! Also, Pinhead's character is just not shot in a way that gives him his former grandeur and power and, while that may even be a deliberate choice to reflect the plot, it doesn't work – he feels and looks *reduced* and that works against the movie
But wait, there's more – that pyrotechnic ending still leaves the film with 20 minutes to go and so we get a "Pinhead desecrates a church" scene (I'll admit it, the "mocking the crucifixion pose" is pretty good) and the inevitable "re-merging" climax (with some good and not so good CGI).
And that's it. After this there was HELLRAISER IV: BLOODLINE in 1996 (about which the less said the better), and then it was on to direct-to-video hell wherein Pinhead would show up in the last few minutes of some noir scenario to deliver the twist-ending TWILIGHT ZONE punchline over and over ("this IS the other place!"), and eventually the final indignity of a contractually mandated movie thrown together to retain rights. There's been talk of a remake of the original but, with the way things have been going, an announcement of HELLRAISER: THE TELEVISION SERIES wouldn't surprise me at all. Heck, that might even work! Marvel Comics did some interesting (if at times silly) things with their HELLRAISER comics series when it was running (especially when they tied it to their NIGHTBREED series – with Leviathan and Baphomet as opposing sides of the same coin). And a glance at Wikipedia tells me I may have guessed right…
976-EVIL II (1992) 
I decided to rewatch this fairly awful straight-to-video mess because I had fond memories of watching it with good friend back in the day and us both marveling at how, for a lousy movie, it did have one really inventive scene. That particular scene got brought up recently in conversation with another good friend and so I did some searching on the nets and here we are!
Spike Jones (Patrick O'Bryan), handsome young leather-jacketed biker (and survivor of the first film) – and, yes, the screenwriters play off his name by including at least one "Fedelbaum" reference – rolls into Slate River where the local college Dean, Prof. Grubeck (Rene Assa), has just been arrested for a string of serial murders. But while he's ensconced in his jail cell, Grubeck uses astral projection to continue killing and to stalk hot young student Robin (Debbie James) whom he is obsessed with, Grubeck having gained these powers through a Faustian deal brokered using the titular Satanic phone horoscope service. Can Spike and Robin stop his evil plans in time?
976-EVIL (1988), which I saw in the theaters (instead of living an actual adult life), was a terrible mess – directed by Robert Englund, it played off of then-current fears of Satan and new technology to tell an overly familiar story of put-upon nerd getting revenge after becoming Satanically corrupted (see also EVILSPEAK and TRICK OR TREAT) and, iirc, had (like much 80s horror) a jokey, quippy tone and some glossy special-effects ending involving a plastic, cartoonish "pit of hell" set. Eminently forgettable.
The producers waited a few years to spit out a cheap sequel, and this is a perfect example of the kind of lame fodder that thrived in the direct to video market. I was astonished to discover, on doing some checking for this review, that Spike was a returning character (although I guess one could see this film, and especially the ending, as karmic reward for his character's actions in the first one). What this really is, almost inevitably, is an attempt to create a "Freddy"-type character for a franchise that was never to be: Prof. Grubeck – when astral projecting – has a monstrous, demonically decayed appearance that "mirrors his true soul" and uses his ill-defined powers to kill his victims in goofy ways while he rattles off the lame pun-zingers, just like Freddy. There's all kinds of other slick, cheezoid artifacts of the time — conspicuously gratuitous nudity in the first 3 minutes, a music-video-looking strip-club scene, bad dialogue ("What are you, the Easy Rider or the Galloping Gourmet?" queries Robin. "Both" quips Spike), dumb threats (flying frozen food! killer oven! guns that shoot themselves!) and special guest star Brigitte Nielsen as the very horror-hostess-like proprietor of an occult book shop that should have been called the Deus Ex Machina but sadly was not. On the (very minor) plus side, there's a pretty good car chase/crash sequence ("Pushin' Too Hard" by The Seeds plays on the radio!), Debbie James is trying really hard with a lousy role and Rene Assa really enjoys hamming it up as Grubeck.
And then there's that scene I mentioned earlier – a very "Freddy-esque" moment of cartoon reality where Robin and her friend argue over whether to watch IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE or NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and said friend ends up getting sucked into the tv and trapped in a mash-up of both films. Goofy but inventive, I'll give it that! But, seriously, a movie that is never frightening or even spooky and no one ever really needs to watch unless you absolutely must see everything.
Recently, I watched the movie adaptation of Cornelia Funke's novel Inkheart (which I've never read), starring Brendan Fraser and Helen Mirren, on DVD. I'm not sure if it would classify as supernatural or not; it's never explained whether the ability of the "silver-tongues" to conjure people and objects into and out of books is magical or a natural psychic gift. (The book may offer more explanation.) Anyway, it's a well-done film of its type, suitable for all ages. JESSABELLE (2014) 
Jessie (Sarah Snook), recently injured in a crippling car accident that killed her husband and unborn child, recuperates at her distant, grumbly father's home in Lousiana's bayou country. She sees ghostly female figures, finds a voodoo shrine in the swamp and uncovers a cache of videotapes left by her long-deceased mother and recorded for her daughter to see. The ghost continues to aggressively manifest, cultists threaten, wizened old servants are interviewed, voodoo dreams occur and a tiny coffin and skeleton are found…
Sadly, while this starts out okay, if familiar (jumpy female ghosts, attack scene in a slimy bathtub), its ominous SKELETON KEY vibe is undermined by too many plot twists and "gotcha" moments that mark it as a PG-13 horror film for teens. Any movie where ghosts tie a person up should maybe seriously rethink what it's trying to do.
i loved this film. LEGEND OF THE WITCHES (1970)
Interesting artifact documentary of the time, beautifully shot in black and white and just 72 minutes long, this lays out the basic tenets of Alexandrian Wicca as they were being promoted into the popular consciousness of the time. It's a nice little snapshot with all the expected elements (over-reaching claims of historicity, semi-exploitational teasing shots of naked covens cavorting and "shocking" rituals incorporating Christian symbols) but the nature-sensitive direction and cinematography by Malcolm Leigh, and the clipped, dry, authoritative narration make the paganistic proceedings seem not only valid but intriguing and enticing, while never coming across as cheap propaganda (good music as well!). I imagine many a trippy young man or women joined a local coven after partaking of a showing of this (or THE WICKER MAN) on a boring afternoon. The filmed rituals may get a bit long in the tooth (although the blindfold ritual was fun) but a visit to a Cornish "witchcraft museum" and quasi-psychedelic focus on the use of "new technology" (strobes, projections, dream-machine spirals etc.) to induce trance states are very cool. A neat little slice of history preserved forever, I found it charming.
A FIELD IN ENGLAND (2013) 
Well, not a horror film, exactly, so if you're expecting that you'll be disappointed (I'm not exactly sure what I'd call it – Wikipedia uses historical psychological thriller and that's kinda close, although "thriller" implies a bit more structure than this intends to give – maybe historical occult art film? Deeply creepy at times, regardless). Also, if you dislike art-house films, or use the term pretentious with much frequency, you'll probably want to give a miss to this challenging and interesting film. Despite the framing, you're not getting a traditional narrative here – it's one of those movies that places a lot of weight on the viewer, elides important plot information and deals pretty heavily in ambiguity, so there's your warnings. It's a confusing film at times but if you just kind of give in and let yourself get swept up, though, it has a lot to offer (although subtitles do help for important dialogue details), so I'll perhaps sketch out a bit more of the plot than usual.
Set during the English Civil War (think WITCHFINDER GENERAL), this assembles a group of characters in the titular setting. Ostensibly, the meek and intelligent alchemist's assistant Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) has been sent to apprehend the alchemist's *former* assistant, domineering O'Neill (Michael Smiley) who has absconded with some important occult papers. But O'Neill has gathered a man name Cutler (Ryan Pope) and two peasants (Friend - Richard Glover and Jacob - Peter Ferdinando) to assist him in his plan to locate and recover a great "treasure" in the field (part of this plan involves promising the peasants a trip to the ale house and then dosing their stew with psychedelic mushrooms). The movie is broken into a number of somewhat inexplicable (if visually arresting and imaginatively engaging) scenes, which the overall plot turns on but which are difficult to unravel in the moment (the film precedes these scenes with bizarre posed tableauxs). O'Neill must first be "engaged" by the other characters – that is to say either "retrieved from" or "joined in" some indeterminate "other state" in the field where he (imperceptibly) awaits the others - and this is accompanied through a head-spinning tug-of war sequence. Then, Whitehead must be forced (through hideous but unknown means that are hidden from view in a tent but which involve a lot of screaming) to enter some altered state of mind that allows him to detect and indicate where the "treasure" is. As the two peasants dig away, violence erupts, individuals are killed (or are they?) and (after ingesting a massive amount of psychedelic mushrooms himself, from which he previously abstained) Whitehead must face down O'Neil in some kind of reality-bending psychic/occultic battle. And after that – well, your interpretation of the ending rests on what you think may have actually been going on the whole time.
As I've said, this is a very odd film and not for everyone. The decision (or financial requirement?) to shoot in a crisp black & white sets a solidly antiquated, removed tone and provides an otherworldy, overcast uniformity to the proceedings (and, surprisingly, the movie does not play the WIZARD OF OZ card and shift into full-blown color once the psychedelics kick in). And, believe me, that heavy psychedelic sequence is extremely powerful and must have been incredibly disorienting to see on the big screen (the film starts with a strobe warning for epileptics, in fact). Equally as powerful are the initiatory "tug-of-war" and unnerving "tent" moments – the former seems to come out of left-field as the film has been solidly set in the real-world up until that moment (and perhaps that's the point, intending to unbalance and ambush the viewer in a way similar to that which the secretly dosed peasants might be undergoing) while the latter is disturbing in a way that is hard to articulate aside from saying that Shearsmith's facial expression, combined with the slow-motion and ominous tone, are deeply creepy.
Despite what some have said online, I found the acting uniformly solid, with Glover in particular calling to mind Baldrick from the BLACKADDER tv show. If you're in the mood for something *really* different, you might want to give this a try.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE GHOST DIMENSION (2015) 
Why did I even go see this? I actively disliked PE 4 and the trailer for this looked terrible. I even had a free ticket for CRIMSON PEAK but, in all honesty, I wasn't in the mood for an ornate Gothic romance. So, there I am...
I thought the original PE was okay and felt PE 2 knowingly built on its strengths. But then PE3, even with a good ending, seemed like a holding pattern and when PE4 failed to move the story forward in almost any way, well, I felt like they'd used up most of the goodwill the series had generated. But PE 4.5 (aka THE MARKED ONES), was a little more enjoyable, amping up the effects in unexpected ways for good and ill (a needlessly silly time travel ending). So, there I am...
How to make a PEV: Take all the PE movies and put them in a blender. Fold in a reduction of POLTERGEIST, and lightly flavor with dashes of ROSEMARY'S BABY (secret cult) and Arthur Machen's "The White People" (childhood innocence slowly corrupted). Now drain off the cream and serve with plenty of jump scares (in place of the nailed-down suspense tactics of the predecessors) and even more amped up effects than MARKED ONES. Serves: no one.
Seriously, this is the kind of film that almost cannot satisfy by definition. It has two concerns which twine clumsily between each other during the whole film - retelling PE and its iterations yet again with little to actually add, and confusingly weaving together its back-story of witch cults and evil spirits that has been haphazardly strewn throughout the series. I'm sure it all "makes sense" (but only to die hard fans), as the film itself can't make that backstory work in any natural way and has to rely on some of the clunkiest expositional dialogue it's ever been my displeasure to hear (4 people wrote this thing?). A massive turd of a movie, let's hope we don't have to suffer through any more until the inevitable PE: THE RETURN cash-in in a decade. (In my attempts to always find something nice to say, I will note that while I did not see this in 3D, its conceivable that may have added an interesting visual layer, if little else).
TALES OF HALLOWEEN (2015) 
I generally love horror anthologies but this year's Halloween offering already has a lot of strike's against it, as the tone of the whole affair is that joky, cartoonish, extra-gory approach that, while it's a standard modern default (see THE ABCS OF DEATH) for a lot of filmmakers (having had its influential heyday during the 80s), rarely ever works for me, personally, unless its Sam Raimi behind the wheel.
The tongue-in-cheek (through cheek?) comic-book tone has its occasional advantages - it can allow for some fun, stylish visual excess (see CREEPSHOW) and hyperkinetic energy (see Raimi) but it limits your story options as well - since everything's a goof, you can't really feel much for the characters in any of these 10 scenarios (vignettes more often than actual stories) and while the overlapping of characters and situations may also yield some occasional fun, in truth this is almost inevitably going to rely on that lazy standby, hyperviolent gore, to punctuate most of the goings on. There are occasional flashes -"The Night Billy Raised Hell" is a fun idea but plays its comical sound effects (SPROING!) a little too broadly for my tastes. "Grim Grinning Ghost" is probably the most straightforward, atmospheric piece here, playing its familiar urban-folkloric story out to its inevitable conclusion. "Ding Dong" is a strangely muddled mixture of effective hyper-stylization and gropings towards psychological depth that works 3/4 of the time. But almost all the others are like Bizarro ABCs Of HALLOWEEN shorts, squandering good set-ups (the old style horror host versus new-blood death metal neighbors in "This Means War", which can't think of where to take its set-up but in the easiest direction) or monster concepts ("Sweet Tooth") on gory, goofy stories that go nowhere (chuckle as unkillable Jason clone fights aliens to a bloody finish, guffaw at the umpteenth retelling of O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief", this time with monsters).
I might also mention that this as an anthology where the programming of the stories should have been paid more attention to - ending on the flat climax of attack-of-the-killer-pumpkins v seems an avoidable mistake when the film could have finished powerfully (and undercut a lot of its preceding goofiness) by swapping up the truly vicious and nasty child-killers of "Trick", which was the only piece here that actually disturbed and generated scares (that shrieking homage to TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE panic jump cuts was especially effective, at least for me). Bonus points for Adrienne Barbeau quasi-reprising her Stevie Wayne persona from THE FOG, to act as a semi-framing device, though.
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Creature From the Black Lagoon Gets a Hickey
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/62308-supernatural-films-and-tv?page=14
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