by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 29: SHOCKtober 2024 part two

Is this our first SHOCKtober to feature two separate Last Ten Minutes roundups?
I’m not gonna look through the archives to find out!

Late Night With The Devil (2023, Cairnes Bros)

This got decent reviews, I avoided because of its AI scandal. A talk-show guest is getting carol-anne’d into the video realm, her priest and mom suffer grievous neck injuries and someone I’m going to assume was the show’s Andy Richter gets melted by the split-headed beastie, then the show resets and host Jack is back on set disoriented, experiencing time as clip-show. I guess demons Lawnmower-Manned the airwaves. An owl-headed ceremony leads him to a reunion with his dying wife, then wow it ends on “Keep It Warm” by Flo & Eddie. The host was David Dastmalchian, a regular of Batman and Antman movies.

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Smile (2022, Parker Finn)

With part two in theaters it’s time to admit I’m never gonna watch this. I don’t exactly know what it’s about but I bet someone smiles at the end. Sosie (of a Manson movie) is having the childhood trauma talk with her alive-again mom, who then becomes an overly tall hair-monster with a spooky Lawnmower Man voice. She sets the beast on fakey-fire, then goes home and explains her trauma to her man Kyle (one of the Red State kids, with a Downhill Racer poster). But she was dreaming that part, and now the hair-monster takes both their heads apart, and this must have cured her trauma because she smiles.

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Maxxxine (2024, Ti West)

Shootout at the Hollywood sign – this must be Bobby Cannavale dying in her arms, and another cop has been stabbed in the eye by her dying serial killer father, bringing postscript fame to her acting career, and the story fizzles out on her next movie set with Liz Debicki. On one hand I was right when I decided Ti West was bad 14 years ago, on the other, I don’t learn from my mistakes and watched two more of his features plus two anthology segments and the tail ends of four others. Why can’t I just leave Ti West alone?

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Civil War (2024, Alex Garland)

Ballistic and vehicular mayhem, the press is on the scene, and Dunst seems to know something the soldiers don’t, so her team wanders straight into the White House. The soldiers in the ensuing shootout are awfully accommodating to the photographers, then Dunst gets shot rescuing her reckless comrade. In the end they’re just like me, wanting to get real close to an action movie and take screenshots. Nick Offerman would be a pretty good pick for President irl.

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Men (2022, Alex Garland)

Suitably creepy and cool-looking as Jessie Buckley is chased by a little car with a maniacal driver, then encounters a nude forest god which gives anal birth to a screaming pregnant man-baby which gives alien-egg birth to… I’m guessing Rory Kinnear from Peterloo, who gives spinal birth to a bloody mutant Rory, who gives oral birth to, finally, a different guy (Paapa Essiedu). I looked up the word “portentious” to make sure that’s what this is, and, yup. Definitely a more suitable Annihilation follow-up than Civil War was, though in between he made the computer conspiracy series Devs.

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Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022, Halina Reijn)

I can’t believe these fuckin streamers. They’re computer programs, supposedly learning about you and recommending stuff to your tastes, but when I hit play on this it showed a promo for Maxxxine, the movie I just watched twenty minutes ago. It couldn’t be too hard to improve on this system. Anyway, Borat’s daughter and Amandla “The Hate U Give” Stenberg are still alive in a house full of their dead friends, having hushed talks in poor lighting. It’s nice of Bakalova to give us latecomers a tour of all the deaths we missed, then they play with their phones for a long while. The director’s Nicole Kidman age-gap follow-up is getting better reviews than this did.

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Paranormal Activity 3 (2011, Joost & Schulman)

Also, it’s unpleasant enough to type in the search field using the Roku’s NES-style direction pad, is it too much to ask for the rows of letters to wrap around, so I never have to hit left-arrow six times in a row? First-person-cam dad can’t find his family, but finds occult artwork in the dining room and a coven in the garage (the witches from part 5?). His wife knocks him down with gallows-swing-attack, and one of his daughters is a beastie, then a psychic witch snaps him in half. Not as jump-cutty as part two at least. The directors made the Catfish doc.

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Paranormal Activity 4 (2012, Joost & Schulman)

This one’s well-lit and in color. Wow, did anyone realize all these movies have the same girl in them? I figured each movie was about a different family. This one’s got static cameras in each room, and the jumpcuts are back. Mom gets psychically hurled into the ceiling then Johnny Exposition arrives with internet research on covens, but a longhair girl JCVDs his neck. The surviving girl seems decently famous, starring with Vince Vaughn in Freaky, but she doesn’t survive for long, the coven having grown to a mob of hundreds of suburban women. Instead of fun songs over the closing credits (Civil War had “Dream Baby Dream”) these just have a low rumble.

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Cell (2016, Tod Williams)

Prime movies have ads now? Fuck that, guess we’re skipping Paranormal Activity 6 and Five Nights at Freddy’s, but we gotta check out the ad-free Cell to complete our series of Lawnmower Man references. John Cusack is telling his kid the story of Orpheus and saying goodbye to his team before driving away in an ice cream truck and discovering that the transmission tower is surrounded by a very-CG mob of zombified cellphone addicts. He fires all his shotgun shells into one teenager and locates his own cell-poisoned kid within the mob, then blows the truck and tower and everything sky high – or does he??!? I was sorely tempted to read this book at one time, but went with The Ruins instead, damn. Movie looks like shit – this was Williams’s follow-up to Paranormal Activity 2 (a coincidence, I swear).

by ·Comments Off on Body Bags (1993, Carpenter & Hooper)

An improvement on Two Evil Eyes from the start, owning its TV-anthology aspirations with Carpenter playing a cryptkeeper mortician. The episodes are light and funny and quick – importantly, they’re a half-hour shorter. Firstly, Anne (of Netherworld) arrives to work the overnight shift at a gas station and Wes Craven is her first customer, a bad sign. It turns out that machete murder Robert “son of John” Carradine is visiting the station tonight, and she’ll end up fighting for her life.

Inspirational bathroom art:

Next, Stacy Keach is self-conscious about his thinning hair despite girlfriend Sheena “U Got the Look” Easton’s reassurances. He tries wigs and dyes and comb-overs then calls infomercialist David Warner, who gives him rapidly-growing long natural hair, to Sheena’s approval. But the new hairs are tiny medusa snakes that scream when cut, and Warner and Debbie Harry are aliens taking over humanity through their hair.

Patient Keach and Nurse Harry:

Part three opens with baseballer Mark Hamill crashing his car and losing an eye because he unbuckled his belt to reach for a tape of The B-52’s Cosmic Thing, then doctors Roger Corman and John Agar (of The Mole People) give him a transplant and he sees visions from the eye’s original owner. This came out between “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” and the simultaneous release of The Eye and My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, and becomes a domestic abuse serial killer thriller, losing the campy fun in its second half, which is all good as a Mark Hamill showcase but less satisfying as the culmination of a feature film.

We’re the dead meat club:

This was meant to be Showtime’s answer to Tales from the Crypt, but out of cowardice they didn’t pick up the full series, which is why today Showtime barely exists as a Hulu add-on and the crypt-embracing HBO is still putting out quality work like The Sympathizer and Ren Faire.

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: