by ·Comments Off on Two Evil Eyes (1990, Argento & Romero)

Watching this and Body Bags together, an anthology of anthologies, two horror kinda-features from the head and tail end of Tales From The Crypt‘s cable run.

We open with the segment by Romero, not in his prime era. It’s his least scary zombie movie, and this seems like a half-hour script padded out to an hour since the actors say everything at least twice. I get that they’re trying to modernize a Poe story, but without that Corman/Price flair it feels like a TV episode. “Sick stuff always turns out to be rich people.” Adrienne Barbeau (after her John Carpenter heyday) is keeping her rich husband alive long enough to transfer everything into her own name with help from her hypnotist boyfriend. Husband dies too soon, and they consider Weekend-at-Bernies-ing him but settle for tossing him in the basement freezer (my second frozen body of the week after Crimes of the Future). Since he died while hypnotized and is still responding to questions, the doctor has got an open channel to the afterlife, very exciting for him until the scared wife just shoots the zombie husband in the head. Two cops arrive at the rich guy’s house to investigate, then when the spirit of the zombie husband kills the hypnotist in his sleep the same two cops arrive at his hotel – there are only two cops in NYC. At least it’s fun that everyone here except Dr. Boyfriend was in Creepshow.

Dr. Boyfriend and his comatose patient:

Argento’s half opens with police photographer Usher (Harvey Keitel) shooting a woman who died by pendulum, this is more like it. Harvey’s wife brings home a cat, he kills it to photograph its death then when she rightly accuses him he attacks her in a mezcal rage then dreams of being sentenced to the Ga-ga pole treatment at a ren faire. Of course she knows he killed the cat because she finds the photo book he published of its murder, and when she brings home a new cat he kills his wife with a cleaver and bricks her up to rot within the walls. When yet another cat alerts visiting cops to the body Harvey kills them and then, as foretold by prophecy, accidentally hangs himself trying to escape out the window while handcuffed to a dead cop.

The cat’s distinctive mark:

Good cast – the landlords are from Psycho and The Seventh Victim, the wife’s music student from Maximum Overdrive, one cop is McDowell from Coming to America, and the hotgirl he meets at a bar is a Warholian who played “Diane Paine” in a sports slasher. Released the week after the Living Dead remake, with a cameo by Savini as a madman. It still feels like a Crypt episode, but a good one.

Usher’s wife, dream sequence version:

by ·Comments Off on A Chinese Ghost Story II (1990, Ching Siu-Tung)

The second half of my Joey Wong ghostly double-feature. This picks up Leslie’s adventures from the first film, even opening with a previously-on, but there’s no important continuity. Part one kicked off my Tsui Hark craze last October, and I’ve watched at least ten of his movies since then – he produced this while working on the troubled Swordsman. And this is really good, thanks in part to magician Jackie Cheung taking over the story. A pretty silly movie, it looks like it was made in a week, but by geniuses.

Wrongly-imprisoned Leslie escapes and lets people mistake him for his celebrity writer cellmate. He quickly antagonizes Jackie, meets the doppelganger of his late ghost-girl Joey and her little sister (Michelle Reis, hot alien of Wicked City), and the team fights various monsters trying to rescue her dad. They’re able to convince the elite swordsman Waisee Lee (star of The Big Heat) that dad (who played the evil tree in part one) isn’t a traitor, but when the swordsman explains this to the golden high monk (Wong Fei-hung’s dad) it doesn’t go over well, and the monk reveals himself as a massive demon. Fortunately the swordsman from part one is nearby (Wu Ma, also appropriately of Encounters of the Spooky Kind). He and Jackie get swallowed by the monster and explode it from within, Leslie and Joey run off together, and Jackie gets lost in the spirit world like Agent Cooper, but he’ll be in part three so I’m trying not to fret about it.

Temporarily bearded Leslie learns that life is unfair:

by ·Comments Off on Painted Skin (1992, King Hu)

I’m no King Hu expert, but his final film feels flabby and dated, not so much a late masterpiece. Horny Wong (Adam Cheng, played twins in Zu Warriors) falls for hot Joey Wong (the year before she was White Snake) who is actually a gross ghost wearing a human mask while trying to escape from the limbo-cult she’s been trapped in. The energy decidedly picks up when monk Sammo Hung takes up her cause in the last half hour.

by ·Comments Off on Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986, Piotr Szulkin)

Unflappable prisoner is sent from one horrid planet to another, his mission to plant a flag claiming the new world for humanity. But this place has received “heroes” from space before and has a ritual for dealing with them: they’re given booze and prostitutes, encouraged to commit crimes, then sentenced to sitting on long sharp pole. At his first stop, hero Daniel Olbrychski (great, of The Tin Drum) is attacked by a severed arm and served fingers instead of hotdogs, then his preferred girl has been replaced by an annoying new one, so he plots to find his original girl and exit this shitty planet. Inspirational, I’ll have to check out more by Szulkin. Having just rewatched Crimes of the Future, I appreciate when a sci-fi movie makes do with a minimum of shabby locations. Everyone here has also been in Wajda and Kieslowski movies, particularly the hero’s handler Jerzy Stuhr.

by ·Comments Off on Wolf’s Hole (1987, Vera Chytilová)

I think it’s a commentary on society? Bunch of kids are chosen for a special skiing getaway, which starts out bad (the road’s out and they have to bribe a ski lift operator to get onto the mountain) and gets worse (the lead ski instructor calls himself Father, says he’s a space alien and the kids need to choose one to be sacrificed). But the kids are all dumb assholes (they start a foodfight with their dwindling supplies), and the counselors are terrible (one ends up dead inside a snowman).

The kids discuss what’s going on and what to do about it, while Father (also of Ikarie XB1 and The Devil’s Trap) is always lurking unnoticed in a doorway. When the movie wants to set a mood, the camera stalks the snow surface to stuttering music, and when we’re lucky there’s a sweet shot of reversed time-lapse ice melt. Father says their alien blood is frozen, so the gang-affiliated kid burns down the cabin and they all flee, but the lift is too heavy to hold them all, so they leave their coats behind (and one sacrifices their hearing aid, come on) and escape together, with no dumb kid left behind.

Ten of the eleven kids:

by ·Comments Off on Scream 2 (1997, Wes Craven)

Wes Craven got sent to diversity training after the first movie, and this time Drew Barrymore and her doomed bf are played by Jada Pinkett (Demon Knight) and Omar Epps (Dracula 2000), who get killed during the premiere of the movie Stab based on Cox’s character’s book about the events of part one. This sort of meta-spiral inevitably leads to the Cinderhella scenes in Detention.

Neve is at college now, even more traumatized than she was in the last movie, with boyfriend Derek and roomie Hallie, who will both end up in Mission to Mars after failing to survive this movie. Also not surviving: Jamie Kennedy (this is for the best, he’s much less charming here than in part one) and sorority sister Buffy, who gets a big solo scene.

Or maybe Buffy is the Drew Barrymore, I dunno:

Arquette comes to campus after the killings start, crippled from getting stabbed in the first movie, as does Cox of course, and they are cute together. Her new cameraman Joel (Duane Martin of The Faculty) quits his job before getting killed, amazing. Jamie explains the sequel rules (bigger setpieces, higher body count) and Wes leans into the clever references with Friends jokes and generic Hollywoodized scenes of his own movie in Stab (feat. Luke Wilson as Skeet Ulrich), and there’s even a play-within-the-play (Neve is playing Casandra for drama teacher David Warner), which gives us a location for the final showdown.

They’ve kept the tradition of ghostface getting beat up in every encounter, and that of ghostface being two people. Everyone thinks it’s Neve’s boyfriend again but he’s innocent, fake-tortured by frat guys to a Jon Spencer song then murdered by film student Timothy Olyphant (Dreamcatcher), the crazy Lillard-type partner of Skeet’s revenge-seeking mom Laurie Metcalf. The ending needs work – we are asked to believe that a high-stacked pile of stones in a college theater production is made of actual stones. Liev Schreiber, wrongly imprisoned for Neve’s mom’s murder before part one, just wants TV interviews and fame and cash, keeps getting overlooked because of the second wave of killings so he will presumably get fed up and become the killer in part three.

Liev found your cat:

by ·Comments Off on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981, Walerian Borowczyk)

Walerian: I’m making a fancy-dress period-drama based on classic literature.
Serious Actors: sign us up!
Walerian: the plot is fourteen people in a large house get fucked to death by a beast.

Some actors’ dialogue is in sync on the French soundtrack, Patrick Magee’s in sync on the English, and Udo Kier is never in sync, so there’s no correct way to watch this. I chose English, excited to see the Prisoner guy, until I realized that Patricks Magee and McGoohan are different people. Of course Magee is the tormentee-turned-tormentor of A Clockwork Orange, so still pretty cool. Let’s avoid the Waxwork movies this year, we don’t need Patrick Macnee getting mixed up in this.

ARE Magee and McGoohan different people? Does the editor know?

I feel I’ve formed a satisfying triangle this SHOCKtober between Udo Kier starring in this beast-with-killer-penis movie, Udo Kier starring in Flesh for Frankenstein, and all the dick jokes in Young Frankenstein. Dr. Udo Jekyll has a nice transformation scene in the bathtub, but there are no cool makeup effects – Hyde is just a different actor. He stalks his party guests while they panic (General Magee shoots the coachman then dejectedly confesses), belatedly getting around to killing the General and his daughter, then Udo’s girl Fanny (a Walerian regular, unfortunately for her) becomes Hyded as well and kills her mom. I appreciate that Paul Duane enjoys Borow movies – Rosenbaum says diversity of opinion is healthy for the culture – but to me they are stupid and bad.

Fanny Osbourne will have her revenge on Seattle:

Hyde shoots some arrows into the General, his daughter doesn’t seem concerned:

by ·Comments Off on Horrors of Malformed Men (1969, Teruo Ishii)

Wild 1920’s-set mad-scientist movie. The title and concept are more fun than the experience of watching it. I fell asleep with my finger on the screenshot key and had to delete ten thousand files the next day.

Can’t say you weren’t warned, I’m superdeformed (dig it):

Young doctor (lead actor from the also-nutty Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell) escapes from an asylum, seeking a half-remembered island, and finds a doomed circus girl who also half-remembers it. He makes his way to the shore right as his doppelganger dies, so he pretends to be that guy, saying “actually I’m still alive,” then hangs out with his weird family and sleeps with his sister.

Chair goals:

He makes it out to the family island and finds his madman web-handed dad who deforms people, and hopes to one day deform everyone… one at a time I guess, since he doesn’t have a Magneto-scale operation here. Dad reveals various hidden identities and plots and backstories – such as when he locked his wife in a cave, and she fed on the crabs that fed on her dead lover – then a cop who’d been posing as a family servant explains some more.

Dad is a disability-rights advocate:

But it’s true he has issues:

After all this, the young doctor’s sister-lover reaches the correct conclusion: “We will embrace atop the fireworks mortar. We will scatter magnificently across the great sky.”

by ·Comments Off on Rumours (2024, Maddin/Johnson/Johnson)

A different sort of thing for Maddin, his most restrained feature. More Bunuelian perhaps, tricking viewers with a political arthouse drama with Cate Blanchett then gradually accumulating unnatural quirks until the giant brain in the woods is only a distraction from whether sentient pedo-hunting AI has Lawnmower-Manned all communications in an apparently depopulated Germany. Seven world leaders were in a gazebo hard at work crafting the most bland and vague statement they could, when they found themselves cut off from outside contact. Each one gets their standout moment, but Canada (the most emotional and least respected) steps up during the crisis, triumphantly editing and reading their final statement aloud to the masturbating bog people.

Germany is the Australian Blanchett, Canada is Roy Dupuis (I think he’s the woodsman who yells “strong men!” in Forbidden Room, which also features a giant brain). UK is late Shyamalan fave Nikki Amuka-Bird, USA is the inexplicably British gent Charles Dance (who I just saw in The First Omen). Then there’s Italy (I got nothing on Rolando Ravello), France (Denis Ménochet, the violent PTSD guy in Beau Is Afraid), and Japan (Takehiro Hira of the new Shogun). They come across two suicidal European Union workers: Zlatko Buric of Triangle of Sadness, and Alicia Vikander, subject of the best joke in the movie (they think the brain’s influence has got her speaking in ancient lost languages, but it turns out to just be Swedish).