by ·Comments Off on We Are What We Are (2010, Jorge Michel Grau)

Oh whoops, I thought I heard this was really good, but now I see all C-ratings from criticwire. Maybe I heard that about the gender-reversed remake by the Cold In July guy. Anyway, when a remake is available it’s usually a sure bet to watch the original first, and I thought a Jorge Michael Grau horror would be a nice tie-in with the Jorge Grau horror (no apparent relation) I just watched – a GRAUsome double-feature to go with SCOTtober.

A man dies at the mall, and his family pretty much falls apart, immediately losing their watch-selling business, starting fights and calling attention to themselves. Older Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro, the dad from Here Comes The Devil) is supposed to be the new leader, which violent, impulsive brother Julian resents. Dad used to bring fresh bodies to his cannibal wife and kids, and he apparently never trained the rest of them in the art of not being noticed, so the two boys perform some blatant attacks and end up bringing home a prostitute, but mom doesn’t approve of prostitutes and brings the body back to her vindictive friends. The movie also follows Let Sleeping Corpses Lie‘s lesson that cops are absolutely the worst – corrupt and terrible at their jobs.

A few interesting shots and good performances but mostly the movie is being purposely obscure and no fun, as if actng weird about its cannibal violence can turn it into Dogtooth. Played at Cannes alongside The Silent House, Sound of Noise and Bedevilled. Grau made Ingrown in the first ABCs of Death, has a new agoraphobia thriller called Big Sky.

by ·Comments Off on Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974, Jorge Grau)

Or Don’t Speak Ill of the Dead, or The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue – all good titles, but I’m going with the name on the Anchor Bay box that used to stare at me from the shelves, unenticing with its generic cover art. Turns out it’s quite a good zombie movie, tense and well-photographed. It’s just like Night of the Living Dead but with a couple extra locations (incl. Manchester Morgue), but the hidden social message in this one is that cops are just the worst. They’re bad at their jobs, abusive, intolerant, and finally cold-blooded murderers.

Zombie Prime:

They stay at The Owl Hotel. Pet owl:

Shaky start as George (Ray Lovelock of Queens of Evil and Oh, Grandmother’s Dead) meets Edna (Cristina Galbo of The House That Screamed and The School That Couldn’t Scream) when she runs over his motorcycle, then they squabble over where she’s going to drive them. Good enough dubbing, better than any Italian movie. But these two aren’t very exciting. Fortunately, they agree to visit her sister Katie (Jeannine Mestre of Jesus Franco’s Dracula) and Katie’s husband Martin (Jose Lifante, a desk clerk in Dagon), who hate each other and live near the field where some jerk scientists are pumping radiation into the ground to keep pests away from crops, which also turns babies and the recently-deceased into violent killers.

Martin’s hobby is taking photographs of his naked, afraid, drugged-out wife and hanging them around the house:

Our heroes, trapped in the morgue with the only decent cop, PC Craig:

Martin is crushed to death by a wandering zombie, and enter Sgt. Aldo Massasso (of The Suspicious Death of a Minor), who immediately blames the wife because she’s a heroin addict and has her locked up in hospital. The movie’s zombie mythology gets weird, as we’re told zombies can’t be photographed, and “they transmit life to each other through the blood of the living.” Martin eventually resurrects and kills his wife, but the movie is mostly focused on biker George’s attempts to escape zombies and tell the damned scientists to turn off their machine, and the Sarge’s attempts to arrest George and Edna, who he’s now telling everyone are satanists. In the end George is screaming towards a zombie-infested hospital in a stolen police car pursued by bigot cops to rescue the woman who wrecked his motorcycle and ruined his weekend, and I’m wondering why he bothers. Then Katie is infected and set aflame, and George is shot by the cops (have I mentioned Night of the Living Dead lately?).

Things don’t end well for PC Craig:

Nor for Edna:

Jorge Grau previously made Violent Blood Bath and The Legend of Blood Castle. Cinematographer Francisco Sempere also shot Blind Man’s Bluff and Death Will Have Your Eyes. Cowritten by Sandro Continenza (Crimes of the Black Cat, Hercules and the Captive Women) and Marcello Coscia (Virgin Killer, Tex and the Lord of the Deep).

by ·Comments Off on The Nightmare (2015, Rodney Ascher)

Self-reflexive documentary interviewing a few people who suffer from sleep paralysis, during which they feel like they’re awake but unable to move and being tormented by malevolent entities in their room. Ascher’s movies are always a pleasure to watch – the sound, editing, and reenactment footage are all great here. It includes occasional behind-the-scenes footage – slates, the camera resetting for a creepy move behind a wall, the “entity” actors prepping a shot – as if to remind us that they’re reenactments.

Arguably not a horror movie, but it’s the first movie since Candyman that I’ve been afraid would follow me out of the screen into the real world, since some people begin experiencing sleep paralysis after hearing stories about it. Therefore it is one of the most effective horror movies ever. Also disturbing in the way that it ends – one sufferer finds Jesus and quits having nightmares, the others have some ideas but it seems like their torment is still ongoing.

A. Nayman for Cinema Scope:

[Ascher] suggests that the sorts of visions common to sleep paralysis are actually deeply embedded in the collective subconscious. Exactly how they got there in the first place is a question that The Nightmare doesn’t really try to answer, but its entire M.O. is baldly provocative. Like the haunted TV broadcasts in Ascher’s beloved Halloween III: Season of the Witch or the cursed videotape in The Ring, it’s a film that means to infect its audience with its imagery.

by ·Comments Off on The Quatermass Xperiment (1955, Val Guest)

Cool enough sci-fi/horror, but I can’t wait to watch the sequels to figure out how/why they built a franchise around the title scientist, a grumpy, arrogant guy who is poor at damage control. He sent three astronauts into space with nobody’s approval because he doesn’t enjoy paperwork or oversight. Two come back liquified, and the third is mute and insane, with mighty morphing abilities.

Nice landing:

Dr. Quatermass (QUAY-tur-mass: Brian Donlevy, Preston Sturges’s McGinty, also in Curse of the Fly) is soon joined by another terrible character, Police Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner of The Ladykillers) investigating the disturbance and deaths, who describes himself as a “plain simple bible man” with “a routine mind,” not a phrase that goes well with the melting spaceman mystery. Meanwhile things get weirder with the surviving astronaut Carroon (Richard Wordsworth, great-great-grandson of the poet), who’s admitted to the hospital where he smashes a cactus and his hand absorbs it, becoming a giant cactus hand, with which he kills and liquifies hospital people. Carroon’s wife Judith (Margia Dean, small roles in the first couple Sam Fuller movies) decides to free her husband from the hospital with help from a doomed private investigator, setting Cactus-Carroon loose on the city.

Carroon smash cactus with man-arm:

Carroon smash chemist with cactus-arm:

Finally the team follows the trail of smashed and dessicated bodies, none of which are blamed on Quatermass for conducting his space experiments irresponsibly, and discovers that Carroon has transmogrified into a giant octopus, which is something they know how to set on fire, thus ending the madness. It’s explained that an intelligent energy-based life form invaded them in space, a possible influence on Interstellar.

Helpless burning octo-carroon caught on TV camera:

Based on a TV miniseries from a couple years prior. Val Guest made over 20 movies in the 1950’s, and is not Val Lewton, producer of The Seventh Victim and I Walked With a Zombie, though I get them confused. Produced by Hammer Films a couple years before Curse of Frankenstein kicked off their monster-movie era.

by ·Comments Off on Crimson Peak (2015, Guillermo del Toro)

Can’t figure out why this was made – straightforward haunted-house murder story with predictable twists, feeling at times like a remake of The Devil’s Backbone minus the evocative wartime setting. One character sees ghosts that lead her to the truth behind some murders, ghosts have similar look to the earlier film, phantom blood emanating from cracked-china holes in their translucent faces. But it’s undeniably a beautiful film, sumptuously designed with gorgeous candlelight and shadows and snowy mist, falling leaves, costumes, big creepy crumbling house, and so on. Nice iris-out effects complete the period look. Definitely good to see Guillermo returning to his gothic-horror roots – an enjoyable film to soak in, leaving me satisfied without that post-Martian malaise.

Mia Wasikowska has become a fave of scary/creepy movies (Stoker, The Double), plays a bookish New Yorker with rich dad Jim Beaver (TV’s Deadwood and Supernatural). Incestuous baron siblings Loki (Mia’s Only Lovers Left Alive costar) and Jessica Chastain (Take Shelter, Interstellar) are in town raising funds for their clay-excavation machine. Loki marries Mia and takes her home to England where she discovers he does this a lot, and the bodies/ghosts of his previous rich-girl wives are buried in red clay pools in the basement. Pacific Rim star Charlie Hunnam is Mia’s friend from home who comes to her rescue. Did I mention that Jessica Chastain is an axe murderer? That’s something you don’t expect.

by ·Comments Off on The Martian (2015, Ridley Scott)

Every year a new Jessica Chastain movie where Matt Damon’s left all alone on a planet. A Ridley Scott movie with screenplay by Drew Goddard, I was expecting the light tone, the relentless science (this movie loves science), the upbeat ending, the highly convincing Martian landscapes, but I wish the visuals were half as impressive as those in Prometheus. Maybe I needed to watch the 3D version.

Wounded Damon is left on planet by Chastain and Michael Peña and crew, NASA head Jeff Daniels argues with project head Chiwetel Ejiofor and something head Sean Bean on what to do, with further ground help from Kristen Wiig and Donald Glover and Eddy Ko.

I completely enjoyed this at the time, so not sure if it’s the movie’s fault or some other reason that I turned on it a few days later, deciding it was formulaic entertainment and that all movies look the same and I need to start watching new kinds of things before I start boring myself. I’m looking at showtimes for Crimson Peak and Bridge of Spies and Coming Home and Truth and Sicario and Beasts of No Nation and thinking “ugh, how awful” and pondering going on an avant-garde spree (or at least a Nagisa Oshima spree) instead. It’s probably just a phase. In the meantime, The Martian is my Birdman of the year: convincing in a theater, troubling immediately afterward.

by ·Comments Off on The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967, Roman Polanski)

Fortunately Polanski has more kinda-horror movies so I can continue the spree of his films which I started last Shocktober. Made between Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, this one’s not quite up to their level. The lighting and composition are extremely lovely, but this aims to be a horror-comedy, and the editing’s too slow for comedy or action. It helps that when shots go on way too long Polanski will sometimes speed up the film, but he refuses to cut away for so long that sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t know what editing’s for. This approach would work well for the slow-burn dread of Rosemary’s, and I’ll bet viewers who watched this goofball movie at the time were ill-prepared for what would come next.

Polanski and Sharon Tate:

Our lead comedy duo is Professor Abronsius (the excellent Jack MacGowran of The Exorcist and Age of Consent) and his dim assistant Alfred (Polanski). They’re hunting vampires, hanging out at an inn where Alf lusts after hot innkeeper’s daughter Sharon Tate (of Eye of the Devil) and the locals downplay vampire activity, even denying there’s a castle nearby, which is of course home to dramatically well-dressed Count von Krolock (Ferdy Mayne of Pirates and Frightmare) and his handsome son Herbert (Iain Quarrier of Cul-de-sac), who are planning an attack on the town. The bumbling interlopers rescue the kidnapped Sharon and escape, but too late, as she has been turned and attacks Polanski in the back seat while the professor drives off. Great closing narration: “That night, fleeing from Transylvania, Professor Abronsius never guessed he was carrying away with him the very evil he had wished to destroy. Thanks to him, this evil would at last be able to spread across the world.”

Our heroes:

Count and son:

Also featuring innkeeper Alfie Bass (a ghost in The Bespoke Overcoat), his wife Jessie Robins (known to play characters named Fat Woman, Large Woman and Bertha), maid Fiona Lewis, who I just saw in Dr. Phibes Rises Again, and as the count’s hunchback, boxing champ Terry Downes.

Trying to blend in:

by ·Comments Off on Ganja & Hess (1973, Bill Gunn)

“I dreamed you murdered me.”

Bizarre movie. Stumbly, natural dialogue. Inexplicable character behavior and barely-explained story. Trippy dissolves and music make you feel like the whole movie is a dream sequence. I can’t tell if it’s artistic, indulgent, or (probably) both.

Love this shot of saxophonist behind lamp, making it appear that he’s hitting a giant bong, a visual metaphor for this movie:

George Meda (director Gunn) meets Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones, star of Night of the Living Dead), and according to plot descriptions I’ve read elsewhere, turns him into a vampire, but I thought Hess was a vamp all along and that after trying to kill him with an ancient dagger, George shoots himself to death. The shooting works out for Hess, who drinks George’s blood then throws him in the wine cellar.

George suicide:

Ganja:

George’s widow (unbeknownst to her) Ganja (Marlene Clark of Switchblade Sisters) arrives later and makes herself right at home, seducing Hess and being abusive to his butler Archie (Leonard Jackson, title star of Super Spook). Soon they get married (does she have to prove to anyone that her previous husband died?), he stabs her with the knife and they’re vampires together, and now I get it, the knife turns people into vampires? Some sex and blood and nudity later, I think Hess gets a religious mania and maybe kills himself, leaving queen vampire Ganja to find new beaus and victims.

Too many sidetracks, like George telling a horrible story then ending up drunk in a tree, introducing Hess’s son who is then never seen again, and an energetic preacher. But it gets credit for having a completely different feel than other vampire movies I’ve seen, even the similarly dreamy (but far more sleek and story-driven) The Hunger. Gunn was a playwright and screenwriter, also made a never-released wife-swapping movie and a barely-released soap-opera satire. Spike Lee is a fan, remade this as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus last year.

by ·Comments Off on Altered (2006, Eduardo Sanchez)

According to legend, two guys wrote and directed a found-footage horror movie in 1999 that went viral and grossed a zillion dollars… and the two guys were never heard from again. The studio botched a sequel the following year, and the market flooded with more found-footage horrors and Scream-influenced self-conscious horrors and combinations thereof.

But wait, Myrick surfaced in 2007 with a couple generic looking horrors, and Sanchez did likewise with Altered, which I belatedly discovered after enjoying his bicyclist-helmet-cam V/H/S/2 segment. Sure, this is a movie where a bunch of violent rural drunks capture an alien who then escapes and torments them, and one guy is over-secretive and has explanations that never properly make sense, and the alien looks like a green-rubber reptilian thing, but it’s kind of a good movie. The action is confusingly shot, but most of the movie is banter between frightened dudes, which Sanchez and cast are quite good at orchestrating.

L-R: Wyatt, Otis, Duke, Cody

Drunkenly hunting aliens: bulky Duke (Brad Henke of Palahniuk adaptation Choke), beardy Otis (original Blair Witch kid Michael C. Williams) and wild-eyed loose-cannon Cody (Paul McCarthy of Stuck, not this one, and Keyhole, not that one). They bring their captive to the hideout shack of their formerly-alien-abducted friend Wyatt (Adam Kaufman of alien-abduction miniseries Taken) while his girlfriend (Catherine Mangan of Monster) is over, and much backstory is gradually revealed while they argue, lose the alien, tie and tape up the girlfriend (who was only in the movie because somebody belatedly realized before filming that there were no women anywhere) and finally get hunted by their former captive while trying to act like nothing’s up when sheriff James Gammon (Paps in Cabin Boy, the coach in Major League) comes to visit. The alien kills the sheriff, pulls Otis’s guts out (the one scene I’m sure I’ll remember), and finally Wyatt is forced to use his Scanners powers to subdue it.

Woman:

Wyatt vs. Alien scan-off:

Sanchez and cowriter Jamie Nash have a new bigfoot movie called Exists. Cinematographer Steve Yedlin did all the Rian Johnson movies including Looper and possibly an upcoming Star Wars.