by ·Comments Off on Seed of Chucky (2004, Don Mancini)

Follows through nicely on its opening Psycho reference, not just a fakeout joke. Appalling CG is something I’m getting used to this month after Final Destination 4. But oh no, the first scene was a first-person murder fantasy by an ugly doll, and this is a meta making-of a Chucky movie. Jennifer Tilly as herself: “I’m an oscar nominee for god’s sake and now I’m fucking a puppet.”

Young Seed is trans, feat. a nice Glen or Glenda reference, and voiced by Pippin himself. Cool-looking movie with good dollwork, but Bride hit the horror-comedy sweet spot and this one is just cheesy. John Waters plays the paparazzo stalking Tilly, whom the adult dolls are trying to knock up, while their messed-up doll-baby protects/threatens them. Feels like a lot of British people were in this. Seed finally boxing-helenas Chucky’s limbs before beheading him, but let’s see, Chuck will be back – Curse comes next, then Cult, then I am not watching the TV series.

by ·Comments Off on Orphan (2009, Jaume Collet-Serra)

I’d originally written this off, already know how it ends, but after the prequel and The Shallows I reconsidered. Good movie, from the showy opening scene transitions on through the surprising kills, even with advance knowledge that Esther is not an orphan child but a short adult psycho killer.

Horror specialist Vera Farmiga (The Conjuring, The Nun) is the psycho’s ex-alkie adoptive mom, already a mom with Peter Sarsgaard to deaf girl Max and older Daniel. First death is unfortunately a bird, then while terrorizing schoolkids and enlisting Max as an ally, Esther finds the time to knock off suspicious nun CCH Pounder. She burns down the boy’s treehouse with him locked inside, finishes the job in hospital, and conspires to make Vera seem crazy and abusive. Dad gets stabbed to death, should’ve believed his wife over the soviet psychopath. Supposedly Esther is drowned in the frozen pond, but the movies never permanently close the door on a good villain.

The critics raved: “one of the most genuinely deranged modern horror films” … “[Jaume] gleefully overcooks this with Farmiga’s eager and crucial assistance” … “[Sarsgaard] has been cast as the most clueless oaf patriarch in the history of the horror genre.”

by ·Comments Off on Four Roald Dahl Shorts (2023, Wes Anderson)

narration: Swan > Henry > Rat > Poison
visuals: Henry > Rat > Swan > Poison
story: Henry > Rat > Poison > Swan

The Swan:

Poison:

Richard Brody:

Anderson has long mastered the lesson that Godard delivered from Breathless onward: that viewers can remain deeply engaged in the events of a drama even while being pulled outside of that drama by fillips of form or fourth-wall-breaking winks and nods. Here he stands that notion on its head; he never breaks the framework of classically realistic drama because he never establishes it in the first place. It is not a question of characters breaking the action to address the camera but the reverse, and, for this reason, the direct address comes off as natural and central, and the acted-out drama as strange and supplementary. Ever since Rushmore, Anderson’s work has been an ongoing reproach to the unquestioned dramatic realism of even most of the great filmmakers of the time, and these four new shorts both heighten the audacious inventiveness of his wondrous artifices and sharpen their powers of critical discernment to a stinging point.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar:

The Rat Catcher:

by ·Comments Off on A Chinese Ghost Story (1987, Ching Siu-Tung)

Bad move to watch an awesome HK movie near the start of Shocktober, because now I’m off-mission listing HK movies I need to see, considering a TsuiHarkTober rebrand. Leslie Cheung, incompetent in his job as a tax collector, is told he can sleep for free in the spooky old temple infested by stop-motion skeletal zombies. Meanwhile White Snake herself, Joey Wong, is a hot ghost girl doomed by a giant tree called Old Evil to lure men into becoming new stop-motion skeletal zombies.

Joey with her evil stepmom:

“The bearded guy killed your sister. Let’s report him.” Wu Ma is in every kung fu movie but gets a rare big role here as the bearded guy. After Leslie meets the hot girl (Hsiao-tsing, aka Siu Sin, which sounds just like “Susan”) he gets the bearded guy invested in rescuing her soul and defeating the spirit so she can be reincarnated. They spend a long time fighting a gigantic tongue in the woods… cool movie.

by ·Comments Off on The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939, Sidney Lanfield)

Oft-adapted Sherlock Holmes story – there are three versions just on my must-see list – but I’ve never known what it’s about until now. In fact I’m struggling to recall if I’ve ever seen any Holmes movie, besides the time I watched the first half of Wilder’s Private Life. It’s set on the southwest peninsula of English on the “moors,” AKA the heath, which are either highlands or lowlands, tundra-related, and don’t seem very well defined. Now I’m suspicious about other vague British landscape terms: fens and bogs and derries and what not.

But on these particular moors, Sir Charles is dead, and young Richard Greene (tormented zombie of Tales from the Crypt) has arrived to inherit the estate, asking for assistance from Holmes (Basil Rathbone, evil mesmerist of Tales of Terror) and unimpressive mustache guy Watson (Nigel Bruce, third-billed in Limelight) because of the suspicious wolfy deaths in the area.

Colorful characters: suspicious John Carradine looks after the house, Barlowe Borland is a sideburnsed maniac who enjoys suing his friends, and beardy Dr. Mortimer (Lionel Atwill, star of Doctor X and The Devil is a Woman) is like oh btw I dabble in the occult, and a minute later they’re all having a seance.

Then there’s pretty girl Wendy Barrie (Dead End) and her brother Morton Lowry, a murderous dog-keeper. His dogs bump off a local convict who’d stolen Basker’s clothes. Holmes is seemingly absent from all this, having sent Watson ahead, but has actually been observing in disguise.

Watson, his unamused friends, Holmes:

Killer on the heath moors:

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:

Though only billed respectively second and fourth… Rathbone and Bruce’s immediate success spawned the only long-running Holmes film cycle. Rathbone brings unprecedented authority to the part, conveying both the arrogance accompanying Holmes’ intellectual superiority and the irony necessary to complement Sherlock’s full mystique. Meanwhile, scene-stealer Bruce, not quite as (in)famously bumbling as later Watsons, deserves credit for solving an eternal dilemma: his endearing interpretation humanizes the duo’s relationship in a manner similar to Watson’s exaggeratedly humble narration of the stories, and gives the doctor something to do when not participating in the action, just admiring his friend’s brainy prowess.

by ·Comments Off on Demons (1985, Lamberto Bava)

I remember thinking this was quite bad when I saw it on VHS twenty-plus years ago, and it probably is, but all qualitative analysis goes out the window when you’re watching Demons in a sold-out theater with Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin performing the soundtrack live. In fact it’s a solid horror movie once you throw out the idea that characters or dialogue or motivation or logic matter. What matters is that people are trapped in a theater full of demons – most will be killed horribly and/or turned into zombie demons themselves, and a few might survive. And after the credits roll, you forget which ones survived and why, as Goblin performs a full set of hits synched to music videos of kills from Argento, Romero, and Deodato movies.

Internet says the two who escaped through the hole in the roof caused by a helicopter smashing through the roof (!) are Urbano Barberini (the killer cop of Opera, who’d previously motorcycled through the theater cutting down zombies with a sword) and Natasha Hovey (who turns demonic and dies over the end credits). The victims are gathered by invitation of Michele Soavi to watch a movie about a demonic plague caused by a cursed mask, as the same scenario plays out in the theater. Some hopped-up punks break into the place only to become extra victims. A bloody, oozy, gory good time with a big crowd, and even Claudio was laughing at some of the English line deliveries. I haven’t seen Bava/Argento’s part two, and an attempt to make part three resulted in Soavi’s great The Church.

Hovey inviting doom from Soavi:

Victim #1:

Getting to the chopper:

Brutality in front of 4 Flies and No Nukes posters:

by ·Comments Off on Night of the Living Dead (1968, George Romero)

New restoration looks terrific. Half the cast gets killed by their own zombified family members (coward Cooper and wife are eaten by their kid, the guy who says they’re coming to get you Barbra comes and gets Barbra), and the young people die due to fiery incompetence while escaping in the truck. We all remember what happens to Duane. I still haven’t played the commentaries but I watched some video extras, and Duane would like everyone to know that he’s totally fine – in fact extremely completely fine – not talking about the movie.

by ·Comments Off on The Raven (1963, Roger Corman)

Corman the year after The Intruder and Tales of Terror, same year as X, lightens things up with a very silly Poe comedy. Based on the opening poem and magician Vincent Price casually drawing with light in his living room, you don’t get a sense of the movie’s tone, but as soon as the raven transforms into Peter Lorre you know what you’re in for.

Adventurers Price, Lorre, and their kids Jack Nicholson and Olive Sturgess:

Rival magician Boris Karloff has got the traitor Lenore (Hazel Court), and speaking of traitors, Lorre has been sent to retrieve Price by claiming to be in trouble. There’s a henchman named Grimes; Price zaps his brains with magic finger-bolts. Lorre gets turned into goo during the ensuing magician’s duel, I think the kids survive, and Price goes back to his happy place: giving soliloquies to birds.

Price and the gang are all good but the real MVP is the trained raven:

by ·Comments Off on Mill of the Stone Women (1960, Giorgio Ferroni)

Sharp costumes and production design on a gorgeous blu-ray, a nice change of pace. Ferroni made this long before Night of the Devils, but not a horror specialist, made mostly adventures and westerns in between. In the 1920s Hans has come to write a research article in a historic mill full of remarkably realistic (uh oh) sculptures of people being murdered. He meets up with cute Lottie, but becomes obsessed with the secretive Elfie, daughter of millmaster Wahl. He discovers that Dr. Bolem also lives at the mill because Elfie is afflicted with a secret made-up illness: she’ll die if she gets too excited. In the very next scene, a secret meeting with Hans, she gets upset and drops dead.

Elfie’s first appearance:

Elfie hitting on Hans:

Turns out Elfie has recurrent death syndrome and her dad and the doctor keep bringing her back by stealing blood from local girls, then Wahl turns the dead girls into new exhibits for his horror windmill. They drug Hans so he loses his object permanence then they declare him insane and send him away so he won’t discover their mad science. Meanwhile they’ve got their eyes on his girlfriend Lotte’s especially rare blood. Hans sends the cops, but no need, the dad and the doctor feud to the death, and the mill burns.

Nice touch: local girl Liana Orfei pretends to be a statue for a drawing class:

Liana ends up as expected, Wahl adding final touches:

Hans was later in Night of the Damned… Elfie of euro-spy Operacion Gigante… Wahl of Christopher Lee non-horror Secret of the Red Orchid… Lottie in Clouzot’s Inferno and the Christopher Lee Hands of Orlac… and Dr. Bolem was Mabuse in the last Lang film.