by ·Comments Off on In My Skin (2002, Marina de Van)

Marina stumbles around the backyard of a party, later realizing she’s cut her leg open, then she keeps fucking with it so it can’t heal properly. Becomes increasingly obsessed with her skin and what’s underneath – at a business dinner she’s too distracted by her own arm, has to go to a nearby hotel and cut herself up. She stages the arm injury as a car crash so her boyfriend won’t know it was done on purpose, and he acts appalled by all this, but we know actor Laurent Lucas loves it since he’d later get his own leg torn up in Calvaire then play the dad in Raw. Marina’s journey ends in disappointment that the skin she’s been removing can’t live its own life without her.

Marina also made a bodily possession movie with Monica Bellucci and one about someone’s furniture coming alive and attacking them. Her jealous coworker-friend here is Léa Drucker, the aging-backwards wife of Incredible But True.

Dennis Lim, who ties this to Cronenberg’s Crash:

Without deploying reductive backstory or simplistic psychology, this fearless movie illuminates Esther’s pathology as an extreme response to the mind-body split. Her destructive dislocation arises from perceiving her body as an external object that she also happens to inhabit … Esther recoils into herself, and the film unflinchingly follows. De Van again uses close-ups – this time split-screened – for the climactic bout of mutilation. By this point, the images are wholly abstracted and disembodied – they evoke a trancelike oblivion, a state of self-immersion so complete that all perspective vanishes.

by ·Comments Off on The Eternal (1998, Michael Almereyda)

Nora and Jim are drunkenly in love, “but she had never told him the truth.” They take their son to Ireland, where her brother Christopher Walken is looking after grandma Lois Smith, and is incidentally tending to an ancient druid mummy which eventually comes alive and kills him. The couple’s son is allowed to play with the ancient dagger he found under their bed, while local girl Alice hangs around and narrates, and mom merges with the bog witch, and things get out of hand.

Family portrait through Guinness:

The lead couple was good at least – Mom is Alison Elliott of The Underneath (and Elle Fanning’s mom in 20th Century Women), dad is Jared Harris, who is son of King Richard Harris, and is not Sean Harris from Mission: Impossible. Based on Bram Stoker’s mummy horror The Jewel of Seven Stars, previously adapted by Hammer and by Fred Olen Ray and by Mike Newell. All these adaptations have been poorly rated, so maybe we should stop trying. This one doesn’t work, the whole vibe is off.

Almereyda in Filmmaker:

Well, it was supposed to be fast and cheap, but it became expensive and slow … It’s entirely in color, and it’s almost entirely in focus, not counting some flashbacks shot in Super-8 … I had some hopeful feelings about [horror] but I think it’s a wrong swerve for me … Genre is a way of traveling through familiar terrain, but I always hope to get someplace new. I may have only one life, but I’m hoping to make many movies, and many kinds of movies. If they’re true to themselves, there’s a way that they don’t have to exclude each other.

by ·Comments Off on Wendigo (2001, Larry Fessenden)

Family on vacation, local hunters unhappy at family for hitting a deer they’d been tracking, pink hat Otis will get his revenge – my second Otis movie of the week. Though afraid of the deer hunter, the family settles into their vaca home and gets settled: Patricia Clarkson here between The Green Mile and a Carrie remake, dad would appear in Jennifer Lynch’s Chained and the Dawn of the Dead remake, and their son, Middle Malcolm’s little brother.

The kid is given a wendigo figurine by the Phantom Indian of a store intown, then there’s a gradual ramp-up of displaced-Indians imagery. Both parents intended a getaway but have work stuff come up. Some sweet stop-motion/photo-montage scene transitions keep the movie lively and mysterious, then Otis shoots dad and kills the sheriff with a hammer, glimpses of deer creatures and antler mazes as the camera rushes the doomed people.

I was wondering if you could make a whole week of Malcolm in the Middle horror movies… Malcolm’s in teen gamer flick Stay Alive, Reese starred with Dee Wallace in Invisible Mom II, Francis did a kidnapping thriller, the mom did a Manson family thing, and dad was in a haunted novelist story and sci-fi horror Dead Space… so Dewey here is the champ.

tfw malcolm in the middle isn’t on TV:

by ·Comments Off on In a Glass Cage (1987, Agust Villaronga)

We try to keep Shocktober light and not end up watching psychosexual nazi stories, I don’t know how this keeps happening. A visually striking Spanish movie about ugly shit, the Apt Pupil of its time.

Nazi pedo (who was also in The Boys From Brazil, appropriately enough) is stuck in iron glass lung, cared for by wife Griselda (Almodóvar regular Marisa Paredes) and kid Rena. Then crazy Angelo moves in with his weird eyebrows claiming to be a nurse, actually a witness to the nazi’s final victim before the suicide attempt that landed him in the lung. I thought it a revenge plot but Angelo tells the old guy he wants to be his protege, so, no good guys in this. Nice giallo-lite as he stalks the wife through the house and hangs her, then he starts kidnapping random local boys and reenacting murders from the man’s journals in nazi cosplay. This is almost worth it for the way the music tears itself apart in the climax when Angelo is killing his idol and taking his place.

Rena is okay with Angelo wrecking the place:

by ·Comments Off on The Body Snatcher (1945, Robert Wise)

Following up Curse of the Cat People, it’s clear that Wise didn’t have a firm handle on things yet. The whole aspect that this is Scotland in the 1800s is very weak, while the plot is just the Burke and Hare story but set two years later, so the characters being murdered keep redundantly mentioning the more famous murders.

Karloff is the local snatcher, bringing bodies to medical school for Dr. Henry Daniell (Kirk Douglas’s brother in Lust for Life). Lugosi plays an idiot foreigner who gets killed shortly after the singing homeless girl. The doctor gets spooked and dies in a rainy carriage crash, and that’s the end of that. I think the last Val Lewton horror I’ve got left is Bedlam, another Karloff period piece, oh boy.

Frilly doctor is standing pig-center:

Frank vs. Drac:

by ·Comments Off on Vampyres (1974, José Ramón Larraz)

Ripoff: the lesbians get shot to death before credits. But lesbians never truly die, they remain undead in a fancy British house near the graveyard, luring in dudes who wake up alive minus some blood. Disagreeable couple Harriet and John (he’s one of the Zed twins) camp outside and get involved. The second half is mostly boring, watching everyone else slowly realizes what we’ve known since the opening title. Vampire Miriam was in Lisztomania, their last victim has been in 20 major films, Larraz moved back to Spain and made some movies with shabby posters which are all on Tubi.

by ·Comments Off on Quatermass 2 (1957, Val Guest)

Either the pre-credits scene was filmed by the Manos second unit or this is gonna be a baaaad movie. Chris has been hit in the face by a molten meteorite and isn’t feeling too well… meanwhile, Dr. Q is mad that the money men won’t fund his moon base, so he goes driving and just finds a moon base out in the desert (this influenced everything from Contact to Moonbase 8). After watching this guy grouse through the first Quatermass movie, I’m perversely following his adventures in order to get to the higher-rated third one. Val Guest, who is still not Val Lewton, somehow made four other films in the under-two years between Quatermasses, including They Can’t Hang Me (which is not The Man They Could Not Hang).

Sub-assistant Marsh (Stepford Wives director Bryan Forbes) gets face-impregnated by a meteor-egg, and everyone scoops up the deadly meteorites with their bare hands to investigate. Inspector John Longden (an early Hitchcock regular) pawns them off on a senator, then they bounce to a reporter (Sid James of The Lavender Hill Mob) – most of the movie is watching an impassioned person trying to convince a skeptical Brit about a crazy alien conspiracy. Finally they start blowing up domes and a giant blobby beast (it means to win Wimbledon) lumbers after them, until they blow it up, too.

by ·Comments Off on The Royal Hotel (2023, Kitty Green)

Julia Garner from The Assistant and Jessica Henwick run out of money on an Aussie cruise and find work at a rural bar to pay their way home, but none of the men turn out to be friendly. I thought this would be horrorish, maybe a bit, but the women hold their own and burn the fuckin’ place down after the men turn on each other.

Bad Dudes: Hugo Weaving is the drunk owner, Toby Wallace (The Bikeriders) takes them swimming, Daniel Henshall (The Babadook) is dangerous from the start, James “Teeth” Frecheville only saves them because he wants them for himself, and cruise shipper Herbert Nordrum basically turns out worse than Teeth. We like Carol the cook, anyway, and this will be more rewatchable than The Assistant.

by ·Comments Off on Theater of Blood (1973, Douglas Hickox)

RIP Anthony Hickox – on the day he died, I watched a film by his father. Vincent Price is in disguise as a fake cop, not helping some housing bigwig evict murderous squatters. Turns out Price is back from the near-grave, having suicided in front of the critics association after losing an acting award, rescued by cartoonish winos and become their king. Daughter Diana Rigg handles his above-ground affairs while Price contrives new ways to kill his tormentors (beheading in sleep, being fed their own beloved dog on a fake game-show set) in connection with his Shakespeare roles. They don’t necessarily deserve to die for thinking Price is a cheesy actor, but for other reasons, they mostly do. In fact it’s annoying that the boring critic Ian Hendry gets to survive, but I can’t stay mad at a movie that stages a swordfight on trampolines.

I forget which Shakespeare play this was: