by ·Comments Off on The Timekeepers of Eternity (2021, Aristotelis Maragkos)

Perfect example of a whim of an experimental concept getting painstakingly taken all the way, the arthouse festival-film equivalent of those people who create live-action remake videos of Mario Kart games. In Stephen King’s The Langoliers, the villain’s extreme “idle hands” anxiety has him constantly tearing paper, so Maragkos has printed the 3-hour TV version onto copy paper and ripped and torn it into an hour-long edit.

Cool concept, but the problem with your source material being a 1990’s TV movie is that your experimental film feels a lot like a 1990’s TV movie, which is quite bad, especially when the never-idle Bronson Pinchot is onscreen. Billy Crystal’s wife in City Slickers is top billed, for some reason. Dean Stockwell plays a mystery writer who has Got It All Figured Out (RIP Angela Lansbury). Frankie Faison is here to be the Black guy who gets killed first. There’s a blind Shining-child who helps out by feeling the spooky vibes. Not gonna blame King (who cameos) since I remember digging the original story, and despite all the clunky dialogue, the new version is worth the ride.

by ·Comments Off on Who Can Kill a Child? (1976, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador)

This opens with scenes of death camp nazis bulldozing bodies… Indian starvation camps… mutilated Korean War orphans, and so on, a Faces of Death montage. Feels like an poor way to set the tone for your stupid horror movie, but it turns out they’re making a more socially conscious version of Village of the Damned, and the kids’ psychic murder rampage is payback for all the needless child death caused by adult decisions.

English couple travels to a Spanish island for vacation, having never heard of the Spanish language or culture before, and they happen to arrive on the day the kids rise up against adults. A good British person, he’s obsessed with never telling his pregnant wife what’s happening – when he witnesses the kids string up an adult as a human piñata and attack it with a scythe, he insists to her that it’s nothing, and everything’s fine. This is his fatal flaw, since he becomes convinced that the kids are monsters and she doesn’t, so she wrecks the car when he tries to run them down while escaping. Her own baby attacks her from inside, and he gets a Night of the Living Dead ending when a postman from the mainland sees him killing a kid and shoots him.

Serrador made The House That Screamed, which I didn’t love, but this was on some horror lists and proved to be good and messed-up. The lead guy was in Dr. Phibes Rises Again and his wife in The Secret of Seagull Island. DP José Luis Alcaine has been an Almodóvar regular since Volver.

by ·Comments Off on Village of the Damned (1960, Wolf Rilla)

Cool opening as everyone in town passes out, and all the women wake up pregnant. But – oh no, it’s British – so we cannot say the word “pregnant,” it wouldn’t be proper. The men are understandably upset since nobody in Britain has had sex in years, but life must go on, all the babies are born heavy with strange eyes, growing fast and blonde, and the grown-ups make the best of it.

Alan (Michael Gwynn, a priest in Scars of Dracula) visits town to see what’s up, checks in with his friends George Sanders (All About Eve narrator, Voyage to Italy husband) and Barbara Shelley (Quatermass and the Pit) and their new alien son David. The kids are psychic, resistant to authority, and tend to make adults who threaten them commit suicide. As an unexpected tie-in to our Hellraiser-themed month, their intelligence is tested using a complex puzzle box. The angry drunks at the bar think mob violence is the solution, but it’s not – it’s sending George Sanders to the schoolhouse with a bomb, trying to guard his thoughts from psychic intrusion until it goes off. In the Defining Movies book, Chris Fujiwara praises the ending, the crumbling wall superimposed over Sanders’ eyes “shows the process of thought – the gradual erosion of the man’s concentration.”

The author’s Day of the Triffids was filmed the year before with Howard Keel, and more recently with Eddie Izzard, while this was remade a few times, the latest coming out just a few months ago (and now I need to check out the John Carpenter version). Rilla is mainly known for this – looks like he made some naughty indies in the 1970’s.

Sanders, matching the curtains:

by ·Comments Off on Books of Blood (2020, Brannon Braga)

This SHOCKtober we are counting down the days until the new Hellraiser Remake comes out, and starting the celebration with this Clive Barker adaptation. Seems odd that another Books of Blood semi-anthology TV movie would come out so soon after the last one, instead of like a Masters of Horror-style Books of Blood series, or a Weaveworld adaptation, or really anything else. Trying not to focus on the fact that this (smells like content) movie and the new Hellraiser are both “Hulu originals,” maybe there’s still hope.

Kicking off the anthology framing story, hitmen Yul Vazquez (War of the Worlds) and Andy McQueen (Clifton Hill) are after the Book. But we’ll get back to them in a bit – first, Jenna (Britt Robertson of Scream 4) is sad since her parents don’t understand her, is off her meds, runs away since mom is “sending her back to the farm.” Jenna’s x-men superpower is she can loudly hear the sounds of people eating. She stops in an internet cafe and books an airbnb (what year is this?) in a spooky house with hosts Freda Foh Shen (Ad Astra) and Cronenberg regular Nicholas Campbell, has a noise-cancelled sleep paralysis nightmare and pukes CG bugs, then discovers the walls are full of people (“we relieved them of their eyes and tongues”).

You’d be depressed too if you lived in this house without curtains:

Airbnb hosts:

Next, a professional fraud-debunker (Anna Friel, not of Stephen King’s IT, but of Pierce Brosnan’s I.T.) is confronted by a “speaker for the dead” (Rafi Gavron: Aarfy in a previously-unknown Catch-22 miniseries). This guy seems to be the real thing, and Anna is convinced until he drunkenly admits his scam. Alas, the dead have highways, and the boy gets cut up by ghosts, becoming the valuable “book” the stupid hitmen think they’re looking for. And the depressed girl from part one goes back to the spooky house to be relieved of the burdens of seeing and speaking and be buried alive in their floor.

Have I mentioned that the dead have highways?

From the producers of Stallone’s Lock Up, King’s Dark Tower, King’s Bag of Bones, the Barker Dread, Final Destination, Unstoppable, Cabin in the Woods, and Family Guy (those are all different producers). The director worked with a more distinguished cast than this one on the series Cosmos, aka that show everyone thought I was talking about when I used to recommend the Zulawski movie.

by ·Comments Off on Death Trip (2021, James Watts & Kelly Kay)

Happy SHOCKtober! Kicking off the season with a tried-and-true concept: a group of young people goes on a rural getaway, and things go badly. We’ve got ominous “no trespassing” signs and creepy neighbors, but the mumbly young people keep on smoking their drugs and being generally not smart, building ill will in the viewer until halfway through I started looking forward to their violent deaths.

The movie likes to punctuate scenes where nothing dramatic happened with shock flash-forwards of our kids screaming and bloody. Kelly gets killed by a wood-wielding drifter, but wakes up just fine. It’s less dialoguey than these tend to be, with more drunken screwing around, and the music is all over the place, from strings to Drive.

In the end the terror is within – it’s not the creepy neighbor but cabin host Garrett who starts killing people, and clumsily trying to kill more. He’s not much of a murderous mastermind, and it turns into an awkward wrestling match on the ice. Maybe not an enduring classic but a good time with some subverted expectations.

The look of a killer:

by ·Comments Off on Apollo 10 1/2: A Space-Age Childhood (2022, Richard Linklater)

Linklater very suddenly diving into his decadent old-man era, sitting on the porch and proclaiming “when I was growing up, things were like this and that, we used to do the following activities, let me list every TV show we ever watched.” I’d think it a low-effort tossed-off nostalgia fest for the streaming circuit, but the work involved in making an animated feature rules out that theory.

by ·Comments Off on Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022, George Miller)

Three stars, raved the critics, “so garishly digital.” Two and a half stars, “a little boring.” But I see “the Idris Elba genie movie from the Mad Max guy,” and I can’t help myself, I go to the movies and watch it, expecting to be absolutely delighted. Who was right, me or the critics? I was right. Katy is not as easily delighted as I, DNF.