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Opens with mournful music and slow pans across a seaside fishing town… you’d never know what you were in for, if not for the credits “screenplay by Dan O’Bannon” and “effects by Stan Winston.”

“Welcome to Potter’s Bluff,” say the townspeople as they trap and murder a vacationing photographer and, later on, a horribly comic-drunk fisherman. Sheriff Dan and his buddy Harry (Robert Englund!) investigate.

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Harry puzzles over the murders with his loving wife (Melody Anderson, star of the previous year’s Flash Gordon, seen below pretending to be a zombie for the amusement of her grade-school class).

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Killings continue, and why is Dan seeing the victims around town, alive and well? And what’s up with the coroner, who has a suspicious amount of screen time talking about the pride he takes in his work?

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The big reveal (all big reveals should be accompanied by the madman, arms outstretched, displaying films of his crimes from hidden projectors all over his office) is that these townspeople were dead, lovingly touched-up and reanimated by the coroner to live happy undead lives – including Dan’s wife, whom Dan kills…

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… and including Dan himself!

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Wonder if the people who saw this felt that the following year’s Blade Runner was a ripoff. Sherman made a movie in the 70’s called Death Line that sounds awfully like Midnight Meat Train, a Rutger Hauer/Gene Simmons flick, and the ill-fated Poltergeist III.

by ·Comments Off on Book of Blood (2008, John Harrison)

“The dead have highways…”

It’s the only line I remember from the (very) short story, so of course it’s spoken five or six times in this 90-minute movie. I watched this in hi-def, only perhaps the third feature I’ve watched at home in HD (hello, The Fall and Night of the Creeps), and the first where I’ve sat close enough to the screen to notice how awesome it is. Actually sometimes I forget, it’s not that HD is awesome, it’s that SD is terrible and it has been hanging around far too long. Down with the tyranny of standard-definition… we welcome our new masters! I’d love to welcome them further but I can’t afford blu-ray or a nice TV – this $200 widescreen computer monitor will have to do for the next few years.

Oh, right, the movie… so as we’ve discussed I am a sucker for movies based on Clive Barker stories. I’ll watch any old shit as long as his name is attached (except the made-for-TV shit and Underworld/Transmutations). Therefore, Book of Blood, based on the titular story which served as an introduction to his anthology, and another I don’t remember called “On Jerusalem Street.” This was halfway decent, not as much a waste of time as Midnight Meat Train, maybe even worth watching. That’d be the first Barker-related movie to hit the high mark of “worth watching” in nine years, so this is a big deal.

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The plot doesn’t sound so great: mystical whiz-kid Simon (TV’s Jonas Armstrong) is taking some college course in supernatural hoo-ha (lucky bastards – all my courses were about operating systems and design fallacies and thermodynamics and Thomas Kuhn) taught by over-serious Mary (Sophie Ward of the Crispin Glover Crime and Punishment – yes, there is such a thing and I must see it), who hangs around haunted houses in the evenings with tech guy Clive Russell (supposedly in Spaced and Neverwhere, but I don’t remember him). They find a house that is seriously badass haunted and they pay Simon to sleep there while they monitor the goings-on. Sure enough, he is haunted as hell, but they fail to record it because Simon’s actually faking the whole thing, jamming their signals and scrawling on the walls because his parents didn’t pay him enough attention.

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The action stops for an hour or two while each character recites his or her traumatic back story. There’s the same scene of a guy with big headphones and a shotgun mic walking around a haunted house as in Spooked. I love that.

Finally the actual ghosts have had enough of this, haul Simon to the CG-riffic GHOST REALM and take turns carving their stories into his skin. Simon escapes back into the framing story – have I mentioned there is a framing story? – in which a dude is stalking Simon at a restaurant. The dude captures him, listens to his story (that’d be the bulk of our movie), kills Simon and removes his skin, then drowns when his cabin fills with Evil Dead amounts of blood and the door won’t open (funny how the doors never open). Who hired the dude to skin Simon? Could it be Mary, the only other character in the movie? Yes!

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by ·Comments Off on Bizarro Saturday Morning: Halloween edition

More 16mm screenings from Clay, Halloween-themed this time. Clay showing seasonal shorts reminds me of Robyn Hitchcock’s halloween show where he joked that since he’s only playing songs about ghosts and death, nearly half his catalog is disqualified.

The Skeleton Dance (1929, Walt Disney) was the first in the Silly Symphonies series, with good music-visual sync, but too much repeated animation. No spoken/sung dialogue, wordless skeletons playing in a cemetery until the sun comes up.

Runaway Brain (1995, Chris Bailey) is an excellent, fast-paced Mickey Mouse short with a mad scientist voiced by Kelsey Grammer, beaten for an academy award by Wallace and Gromit. Seems like nobody around me had heard of this before.

The Tell-Tale Heart (1953, Ted Parmelee), animated with some abstract imagery, overlapping shots and sharply-drawn characters. Has a deservedly high reputation, but beaten for an oscar by Disney’s Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom.

Betty Boop’s Hallowe’en Party (1933, Dave Fleischer) – always great to see a Betty short. Her party is pretty tame – kids bobbing for apples and singing like the birdies sing (tweet, tweet tweet) – until a bully shows up and she attacks him with her secret cache of ghostly evils. Full of amazing animation and visual ideas, beautifully synched to the music. I gotta get me a whole pile of these cartoons someday. I asked Wikipedia when the apostrophe disappeared from “hallowe’en” but it didn’t know.

Naturally the show was also full of TV episodes and classic commercials – Count Chocula vs. Franken Berry, of course, also a kids vehicle that looks suspiciously like the Wacky Wheel Action Bike (“you can’t ride it! you can’t ride it!”) and an awesome PSA warning kids to stay away from blasting caps.

Of the TV shows, we’ve got a Popeye the Sailor episode where an evil robot-popeye robs banks, the adventures of Goodie the Gremlin, who helps people invent the steam engine, airplanes etc. instead of tormenting people like the other gremlins want, a Spider-man episode where Green Goblin gets his hands on a book of voodoo spells, and a hilarious, surreal episode of Ultraman (featuring benign fluffy chattering Pigmon monster in a recording studio, giant plumed lizard monster with heat-seeking feather missiles, and the usual bonkers dialogue). Then the lower-tier corny garbage shows: a cartoon Sinbad the sailor, some dimwit monster who shoots smoke out of his head, Beany and Cecil meet the invisible man (1962, produced by a post-Warners Bob Clampett) and a Hal Seeger-created short called Batfink, in which BF and his dim pal Karate fight a magician.

by ·Comments Off on Angst (1983, Gerald Kargl)

Wow. I wasn’t prepared for anything this intense and realistic. Shaky follow-cam, extreme high and low-angle shots, extreme closeups and even the strap-on camera from Pi illustrate the adventures of a psycho killer released from prison and anxious to kill again. The filmmaker follows our man closely, obsessively – even the music is with him, speeding up intensely as he escapes from a failed abduction, then lowering tempo as his pace slows.

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Erwin Leder (Das Boot, Taxidermia) is amazing, creepy as “the psychopath.” There’s no arguing with that noun – all he thought about in prison was killing, and all he sees around him are potential victims. His beautiful plans of glorious murder come off disgusting and clumsy, as he runs around a wealthy household eventually murdering a mother and her daughter and disabled son, caught because of a car accident a half hour later with the bodies in the trunk. All of this is captured in real-time, with the psycho’s thoughts and plans audible (and hardly any spoken dialogue – none of the hostage-screaming to which we’re accustomed). It’s one of the most impressive feats I’ve seen in a serial-killer movie – the movie being engrossing and accomplished without imparting any of its glory to the killer himself, who remains a vile embarrassment.

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IMDB’s trivia insinuates that director Kargl does not exist, and is a pseudonym for award-winning writer/cinematographer Zbigniew Rybczynski, but an online interview with Kargl reveals that he only made one feaure, went deeply into debt, then directed commercials for years. So this is a one-off movie, and it’s uniquely wonderful (well, if getting inside the head of a psycho killer and watching him work is your idea of wonderful).

by ·Comments Off on The Beaches of Agnès (2008, Agnès Varda)

A chronological romp through Varda’s life and work. Exciting and wonderful and gorgeous and traumatic and mischievous. More inter-intra-self-referential than even 101 Nights of Simon Cinéma, which of course this references more than once. The perfect summary and closer to Agnes Varda Month, and possibly to the great woman’s filmmaking career (we’ll see).

EDIT Aug 2019: Nope, she had at least three more features in her. Watched this with Katy, and it turns out it’s great no matter how many/few Varda movies you’ve seen previously.

by ·Comments Off on Toy Story double-feature

Time out from Shocktober to watch some Pixar films in 3D – coincidentally the only two Pixar films I’d not seen in theaters. The 3D effect works nicely, but I didn’t find it especially amazing or engrossing here, not as much as with Coraline. Seems like a plain ol’ 2D double-feature would’ve been equally effective.

I was hoping Katy would be wowed by the sequel, but it was late and she was tired. In fact, it was too late… after the tenth time the toy dinosaur told us to go buy snacks during the intermission segment, I went to buy snacks only to find that the snack bar had closed.

The barbies in part 2 are awesome, but the ones in Small Soldiers have got ’em beat.

I still think the “When She Loved Me” song is pretty.

by ·Comments Off on It’s Alive (1974, Larry Cohen)

Oh, man. I was really expecting a classic, great horror film, something at least as awesome as God Told Me To. After all, this had sequels and a remake. That adds up to horror classic, right? But I guess even Maniac Cop had sequels and a (sorta) remake, so no guarantees. Not that It’s Alive sucked – it’s got that 70’s low-budget 16mm look which I always mistake for gritty realism, and an interesting central dilemma: a couple’s child turns out to be a murderous monster, so they help in the manhunt for the creature, but parental emotions win out and they end up trying to protect it.

Glimpse of the creature:
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Dad: John Ryan of the Wachowskis’ Bound, Class of 1999:
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Mom: Sharon Farrell of Out of the Blue, The Stunt Man:
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Ultimately more exciting than the plot were the 70’s fashions on display.
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This one brings back memories:
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My favorite shot, by far:
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Stinger: “Another one’s been born in Seattle.”

by ·Comments Off on In Sickness and in Health (2008, John Landis)

The vibe I’m getting so far from Fear Itself is “lazy.” This was pretty bad, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of bad I should hold against John Landis – he just turned in the same lazy work as everyone else on this doomed TV series. If I’m gonna blame someone for this mess, it’s writer Victor Salva, the controversial convicted pedophile behind Powder and Jeepers Creepers (I didn’t know he wrote it, so this is coincidental timing to the current Polanski brouhaha). The other three episodes (almost forgot I watched Family Man last year) at least had some aspirations to horror, and they made sense, while this one’s more plot-hole than plot.

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The idea is that it’s the wedding day of Maggie Lawson and James Roday (costars of a show I’ve never heard of called Psych), everyone’s telling her it’s too soon to marry this guy (we never find out how soon), then she gets an anonymous note delivered via the hard-of-hearing priest (played by The Cigarette Smoking Man) that says:
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“Person?” Strangely phrased, think I. She runs around acting panicked, has a pointless scene with new hubby’s red-herring uncle Marshall Bell (of Starship Troopers, Nightmare on Elm Street 2), while we tolerate sluggish pacing and tons of church imagery. In the end we learn that SHE is a serial killer and the warning, written by her mysterious brother, was intended for the husband… the kind of twist ending which, rather than making all the puzzle pieces fit together, invalidates the whole rest of the movie, like some stupid anti-Sixth Sense. Well, at least we got to see how the Cigarette Smoking Man has been doing since X-Files ended (he doesn’t smoke anymore; it’s not allowed on network television).

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by ·Comments Off on Pin… (1988, Sandor Stern)

I watched this at random because I had it… but why did I have it? I don’t know! It’s an unremarkable little made-for-TV-looking movie (lots of close-ups!), more of a slightly-disturbing drama about coping with mental illness than a horror flick. Kinda looks like it was aiming to be a prestige suspense flick – certainly it’s not as crappy as your usual horror movie (or your usual made-for-TV mental illness drama) but only climbed the ladder as high as “slightly better than average” before losing steam.

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Kids grow up in a small town with physician ventriloquist father who gives them important father-to-child talks through his skinless doctor dummy Pin. His daughter grows into a normal girl, but the son Leon grows into mildly psychopathic David Hewlett. After the parents die in a car crash, Leon refuses to accept that Pin isn’t a real person. Brings him home in a wheelchair, and the sister tiptoes around the matter, trying to have a normal school and love life until Leon kills his aunt (never proven) and his sister’s boyfriend (caught red-handed).

traumatic event, Leon catches a nurse using Pin as a sex aid:
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Sandor Stern, screenwriter of the original Amityville Horror, would go on to direct its third sequel (the one about the haunted lamp). David Hewlett is good in this, and was rewarded with starring roles in Cube, Nothing and Scanners II. In fact, almost everybody here would go on to bigger and better things. His sister, Cynthia Preston, would star in Prom Night III: The Last Kiss. Dad Terry O’Quinn would become the star of TV’s Lost (stopping along the way to star in Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy and My Stepson, My Lover) and mom would appear in Gothika, the murdered boyfriend in Hard Core Logo and Larry Fessenden’s Fear Itself episode, Aunt Dorothy in Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster, and even teenage backstory Leon would star in Terence Davies’ adaptation of Neon Bible.

T. O’Q:
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