by ·Comments Off on Terrifier 2 (2022, Damien Leone)

A year after part one, teen Sienna is dressing as Non-Copyright-Infringing Victoria Secret Wonder Woman for a halloween party with her friends while her little brother Jonathan is going through a (timely) nazi phase and discovering The Backstory relating to their dead artist father and killer klown Art, when his hero comes around and terribly torture-kills all of their family and friends. Looks slick, and I like Art’s new imaginary girlfriend, but all of this feels like an Elm Street sequel where each scene last too long. I was annoyed much of the time, but can’t stay mad at my best friend Art The Clown.

The girl has a musical advertisement dream sequence:

by ·Comments Off on Out of the Dark (1995, Jeffrey Lau)

Parody of The Professional, I think, but instead of a hit man Leon (Stephen Chow) is a crazy guy who sees ghosts. Blondie from Fallen Angels is there, and Sammo Hung-reminiscent police captain Lo Hung (apparently no relation). A very silly movie – not really sure how it escalates into cops getting chainsawed to death, it’s not important, nor should we interrogate why the survivors make magic hats out of newspaper and fly safely away from the evil ghost at the end.

by ·Comments Off on Special Effects (1984, Larry Cohen)

Having a very Larry Shocktober. This one’s not as good as It’s Alive III, more like Murder a la Mod without the mods, but it fits in nicely with the meta-slasher Scream movies. And despite a lower budget, crappy music and some shady editing tricks, it’s a much more lively doppelganger movie than Enemy turned out to be.

Enemy would burst into flame if exposed to this much bright color:

Zoe Lund (Ms .45 herself) plays two characters with at least three names. First she’s an aspiring actress working in a nudie club, pushy but not smart, getting herself into the apartment of famed/troubled filmmaker Eric Bogosian (the Talk Radio guy), whose kink is murdering girls on camera (see also: Dangerous Animals).

Bogosian in his Freddy Krueger sweater:

He can’t be that bad, he’s got a cockatoo:

Now things get twisted, as the detective (the cabbie killed in opening scene of Island of the Alive) is convinced the girl’s estranged husband killed her, so the director offers to help by making a film in which the murderer husband will relive his crime on camera, casting a lookalike (Zoe Lund again, as a do-gooder with a His Girl Friday voice) as his/their victim. The cop is offered a technical advisor position, gets obsessed until the director bars him from set for interfering. Happy ending: New Zoe falls for Dead Zoe’s husband even though he’s a dick, and they electrocute the director in his own pool.

by ·Comments Off on The Ninth Gate (1999, Roman Polanski)

Of course I watch The Gate regularly, and have even seen The Gate 2 a couple times, but I never got a hold of parts 3-8, so it’s hard to draw connections here. Depp wears glasses throughout, so I assume he’s the Glasses character from the first two movies (Louis Tripp), continuing to investigate demonic texts, sent from “New York” to Europe by Frank Langella to authenticate a satanic book.

Whenever Depp finds new information or studies a new copy of the book, somebody ends up dead and something ends up missing, but he gains a floaty guardian angel in Emmanuelle Seigner and persists. The movie is all talk for eighty minutes until she floats down a staircase and karates a would-be thief – not that I’m complaining because it’s also a rare classy film about ancient books in an otherwise low-rent Shocktober.

Depp into trouble:

The best scene is this Spanish guy playing twins:

After we’ve lost Bookseller Bernie (a Depp buddy from Donnie Brasco to Public Enemies) and devilbook owner Fargas (of Pieces) and the probably-evil Baroness (Weisz’s mom in The Deep Blue Sea), Langella thinks he’s obtained all the devil’s power, and stupidly tries to prove his invincibility by setting himself on fire. After he burns up, Depp carries on his mission, and maybe the world ends, I dunno. This was the same year as Sleepy Hollow and The Astronaut’s Wife, the year he slipped from interesting actor to movie star.

by ·Comments Off on Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014, Spike Lee)

Managed to watch this two-hour movie in only ninety minutes (by skipping ahead whenever a scene got boring). Mostly a dry, bad movie with an awkward, academic tone that Spike has no talent for, but with little punctuations of brilliance (and the finest opening titles since 25th Hour). The music is good anyway, often the only good thing happening.

The plot: there existed an addiction to blood. Besides being a Ganja & Hess remake, it’s a stealth Red Hook Summer sequel. Snoop from The Wire gets murdered, crazy servant Rami Malek gets killed at the very end, doctor Joie Lee is spared. In the decade since this came out, Dr. Hess (who looks like Jamie Foxx crossed with Chidi) abruptly quit acting in movies, while Ganja has at least been on British television.

by ·Comments Off on Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974, Francesco Barilli)

Silvia runs a lab of brightly colored liquids in bubbly beakers, and in the evenings she alienates her boyfriend then has traumatic flashbacks to the time she saw her mom having sex with some guy. Paura all around. You gotta watch at least one nonsensical Italian movie per shocktober.

Finally something happens: friend Francesca shows up dead in the tub. “They said the water must’ve been too hot… her heart couldn’t handle it.” Then Silvia splits in two, her adult and child selves having a conversation like the poster of The Tale. Young Self kills the neighbor’s cat, Older Self kills the neighbor. They murder a few more sexual harassers, and all seems to be going well, then Young Self pushes them off a roof, leading to a culty final scene where the men she’d killed gather around her body and eat her guts.

Barilli also made Hotel Fear (Pensione paura), his cowriter worked on Who Saw Her Die?, and the DP shot the Carmelo Bene movies and Padre Padrone. Older Self is Four Flies star Mimsy Farmer, and oh no, Young Self grew up to star in Ghosthouse.

Follow the trail to the titular perfume:

by ·Comments Off on Enemy (2013, Denis Villeneuve)

“Very slow and brown” is all I wrote originally. Is there more to say? The two Jakes are married to Sarah Gadon (Antiviral) and Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds), and all that really happens from their doppel-discovery is they end up wife-swapping, then maybe one couple crashes their car and the other becomes spiders, or more likely a single Jake is having an identity crisis and/or an affair. Please bring us an HD remaster of the Kurosawa movie instead.

by ·Comments Off on Bring Her Back (2025, Danny & Michael Philippou)

People seem unhappy with this movie because it’s full of cliches, is All About Trauma, and it torments and abuses and murders children. But I had a pretty good time watching Sally Hawkins learn about demonic resurrection rituals on bootleg VHS then bumble around until her plan gets so out of control that she kills herself. Also fun because both Foster Mom Sally and her cat-strangler son are dangerous, and we don’t learn until late that she has got him possessed by demons and wants to do the same with her new blind ward Piper, painting P’s older brother Andy as a problem child to get him sent away. And her cat is named Junkman, pretty good name.

by ·Comments Off on Quatermass and the Pit (1967, Roy Ward Baker)

The Quatermass movies are like Knives Out, not really sequels, just the continuing otherworldly adventures of Dr. Q – same studio a decade after the last one, but everyone here is new except the writer. The doctor (Andrew Keir, a Hammer guy who tended to play priests and professors) is recruited by a military bomb squad and taken to subway station Hobbs End (“hob was once a sort of nickname for the devil”) where ancient apeman skeletons and a mysterious vessel have been excavated. The film title evokes Poe, but the pit is just a subway tunnel.

Dr. Q and the Colonel

Doing Science:

After they uncover locust aliens who decompose into green goo when the air hits them, the military reluctantly admits this maybe isn’t a nazi bomb, and the doctor thinks Martian insects kidnapped abnormal prehumans and enlightened them. A worker goes down alone and a wind storm ensues, he comes prancing outside with his arms held out like a preemptive parody of Weapons, not clear if he is alien-possessed or just British-terrified – remember, a British person can be driven mad by the smallest inconsistency. The assembled scientists and priests agree that whatever mystery they’ve uncovered, it is Evil.

Roney poses with an artist’s rendering of a big-brained apeman:

Crystal mantis pods:

Reporter Barbara Shelley (Village of the Damned, The Gorgon) is sensitive enough to see the invisible martians so they put a brainwave helmet on her and videotape the psychic visions from her “susceptible brain,” then Dr. Q screens the tape (actually some kids’ home movie of plastic mantises fighting on a rockpile) and tries to convince the government that humans have got alien-inherited genocidal tendencies (partly true). “People don’t believe nothing nowadays unless they’ve seen it on the telly.”

Finally with the station full of TV crews and passersby the ship comes violently alive. The Colonel (Julian Glover, lately of Tar) gets hypnotised by the commotion and melts, everyone else starts doing mob violence, until Q’s science-friend James Donald rides a construction crane to electrocute Mantis Satan and save the world (these movies usually end with Dr. Q identifying some great evil then setting it on fire).

My fifth Roy Ward Baker movie, and if I ever watch a sixth then I’ve officially got problems. Though in its best moments this had shades of Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness.