by ·Comments Off on Curse of Chucky (2013, Don Mancini)

A respectable and effective back-to-basics story, cutting itself free from the previous sequels by simply setting a new Chucky loose in a house full of new victims, then belatedly explaining how the various movies tie together.

Delivery of a mysterious doll, screaming ensues, and gramma is dead and the doll forgotten. Wheelchair single mom Mika (Fiona “daughter of Brad” Dourif) is joined by her horrible sister (“Mother Mortis” of the Insidious series) and her husband (a Hallmark Christmas movie actor) and the local priest (Adolfo Martinez of sci-fi rip-off The Terminators) so we’ll have more people to kill off. The priest suffers a car-accident decapitation, the babysitter is electrocuted via laptop and horrible sister is stabbed in the face. Husband thinks Mika did all this, until Chucky smashes his face with an axe. Mike decapitates the doll but that’s ineffective, and he wheelchairs her through the second-floor railing. While she’s bleeding out he explains that he was close with her late mom, and she’s the one who called the cops leading to the toy store chase at the beginning of part one. Now that we’ve established continuity we can have late-movie cameos by Jenny Tilly and the original Andy, all still alive at the end as Mika is shipped to the hospital for the criminally insane.

by ·Comments Off on Uzumaki (2000, Higuchinsky)

Rewatching this standout from the great J-horror wave in anticipation of the troubled new animated version. At the time I enjoyed this enough to check out Higuchinsky’s follow-up (Long Dream, not as cool as The Jaunt) – now the mix of bizarre happenings with cool lighting and soft-focus soap opera reminds me of House.

Kirie’s boyfriend knows the town is spiraling and suggests they run away together but she doesn’t take him seriously and stays until it’s too late. His dad (Ren Osugi, Nightmare Detective chief, Shin Godzilla prime minister) becomes dangerously spiral-obsessed until he suicides in the washing machine, and mom (Keiko Takahashi, star of Door) develops extreme spiralphobia as a result. Meanwhile kids are becoming snails and growing mad spiral hairstyles. A reporter talks to the kids and does some research, has a breakthrough, and before he can tell them, Kirie’s ridiculous classmate who likes surprising people (Sadawo Abe of Yatterman) jumps in front of the reporter’s car and they both die. Closing apocalypse is shown via stills, presumably from the comic.

The lead girl showed up a decade later in Norwegian Wood. Denden is the local cop – I think he shot his partner in Cure – and among the schoolkids are the stars of Ring Virus and Ring Spiral (appropriately). Potentially useful list of “the best horror cartoonists” found on Lboxd: Ito, Burns, Carroll, Umezu, Corben, Freibert.

by ·Comments Off on The Happening (2008, M. Night Shyamalan)

I figured double-featuring this film maudit with The Sixth Sense would mean that at worst, only half of my evening would be wasted. Most people agree this is terrible, but as an established Trap enjoyer, maybe I’d join the sickos calling it a masterpiece? Turns out I’m in an even smaller group: those who thought it was fine. A solidly constructed, terrifically shot thriller showcasing the most idiotic human behavior. Maybe idiocy is the point – this isn’t humanity at its finest, it’s the same dummies who choked the planet into violently defending itself – but there’s no excuse for those two stupid boys knocking at the cabin until they get shotgunned, or for Zooey Deschanel. All told, a slight improvement on Long Weekend (The Happening of the 1970s, which shows up on best horror lists).

Opens with the Cabin in the Woods girl on a park bench as the mass suicides begin in the densest cities and spread into ever less-populous spaces. Marky (whose brother Duddits was in Sixth Sense) is dismissed by Principal Cameron, then he and Zooey take colleague John Leguizamo’s daughter so John can go on a doomed hero mission towards his wife in New Jersey (the garden state, oh no). The three get a ride from hotdog-obsessed plant growers. Marky tries to make everything about himself, but the hotdog husband (Turturro’s evil brother in O Brother) has a good sense of what’s going on, while TV news hosts blame the government. Later they get a meal from an ornery white-haired woman (The Horde’s psychiatrist in Split) who refuses all news from the outside.

“Be scientific, douchebag” – the movie has a healthy sense of humor about itself, Marky talks to a plastic plant like it’s holding him hostage, and of course characters try to run away from the wind. Some disquieting death scenes via gun and glass and lawnmower, multiple oblique 9/11 references. Victims’ language malfunctions right before death – this the same year as Pontypool.

Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope calls it “deeply stupid”:

This idea of needing to split off from the herd to survive is endemic to the apocalypse sub-genre, but it has a greater significance for Shyamalan. Simply put, the guy has an isolation fetish … when Elliot concludes, “We’ve got to get away from other people,” it’s more than a plot point: it’s the author’s rallying cry.

by ·Comments Off on The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shyamalan)

Most notable thing here after watching Trap a couple times last month is how still and quiet this is, a properly haunted-feeling movie completely unlike M. Night’s post-Signs style. Besides being seen as a weird loser at school, Haley Joel is always swinging between unease and complete terror as he’s visited by the recently-dead. Child psych Bruce helps HJ develop ghost communication strategies, and HJ helps Bruce realize that Duddits Wahlberg murdered him last year and that’s why Bruce’s wife Olivia Williams doesn’t speak to him anymore. Toni Collette is too young in this – she’s excellent as HJ’s mom but doesn’t look Collette-ish enough yet.

by ·Comments Off on Long Weekend (1978, Colin Eggleston)

Good tagline: “Their crime was against nature – nature found them guilty.” This refers to the lead asshole, on a camping trip with his unwilling wife, who trashes and destroys and kills every natural thing he comes across. He flicks wildfire cigs out the window and runs down a roo before they even arrive, then shoots a manatee he thought was a shark, is always brandishing axes and missile weapons.

Can these matching jackets save their marriage?

The wife didn’t want to be here in the first place, won’t let him touch her because she has a headache this year. He persists, both with her and with his camping-by-brute-force mission. An eagle attacks him, weirdly, then a possum bites him, righteously. A half hour before the movie’s over we’re still in anything-could-happen mode. After the wildlife frustrations and the wife threatening to exit the campsite and the marriage, husband kills her with a speargun, then he tries to fuck his way out of the swampy forest in a 2WD Nissan. At this point we know he’ll die – and he does in the funniest way, getting run down by a truck when a cockatoo attacks its driver.

When not spending time with the horrible humans the movie offers a parade of cool creatures. This was the back half of my Australian weirdo-horror double-feature. From the writer and cinematographer of Roadgames, Eggleston later made a (bad?) vampire movie featuring the expectant husband from Body Melt.

by ·Comments Off on Body Melt (1993, Philip Brophy)

I love finding uniquely bizarre movies like this one, wacko in all the best ways. Our pharma villain is introduced nude, injecting her man with a serum that will turn him goopy by sunrise. After looking up an address on his rad computer, he makes it all the way to the cul-de-sac where he was trying to warn(?) the residents that they’re all unwitting test subjects of the secret drug.

It’s vacation time, and the cul-de-saquers head out on their adventures. Slick-haired Paul (narrator of the Adam Elliot shorts) goes to the airport and sees people who aren’t really there. Two young guys on a road trip stop to get a new windshield where freaky kids are eating kangaroo adrenal glands. Family of four start melting (the son dies unrelatedly in a freak skateboarding accident), while the pregnant couple stay home and experience placenta-attacks. I’m not sure of the drug’s intended purpose, but the lead scientist’s ex-partner (father of the gland-chewing kids) ran off with the special ingredient that makes people not explode. Too much raver music, otherwise a perfect movie, the sole feature by a gang of art weirdos.

Did I mention it’s Australian?

by ·Comments Off on Blade I & II

Blade (1998, Stephen Norrington)

I didn’t intend to watch Blade within a week of The Blade, but when you need a Kris Kristofferson memorial screening in SHOCKtober it’s either this or The Jacket. Snipes and Kris hella cool, perfect genre writing by Goyer, and expensive-looking, New Line’s money put to good use. Wesley’s stunt double gets a good sword fight, even some wire jumping. The hair and music is very 1998 (complimentary) and so is the cutting (derogatory), with judicious use of instantly-dated CG in the finale.

Donal Logue gets set on fire in the first fight and the movie makes a running joke of destroying him over and over. He’s a henchman for sneery Stephen Dorff (who hasn’t been in a good movie since Public Enemies but as the kid from The Gate he will always be a horror prince), who disagrees with vampire lord Udo Kier’s strategy of lurking in the shadows, preferring to rise and enslave humanity. Dorff uses a PowerMac with OS7 to AI-translate the ancient texts to enable his plan.

Meanwhile Blade and Kris gruffly help prevent a hot Donal-victim (N’Bushe Wright of Fresh and Dead Presidents) from vamping out while sleuthing Dorff’s plan. Unfortunately Blade turns out to be the plan, his daywalker-blood required to bring about an apocalypse. Dorff sunrises Kier to death, and bullet-dodges (the year before The Matrix came out). Movie portrays police as the dumbest people on the planet. Norrington went on to direct The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and after that travesty he deservedly never worked again.

–
Blade II (2002, Guillermo del Toro)

Guillermo’s fourth feature and it’s still showy-expensive, a harsh transition from the practical 1998 to the CG 2002. Worse and less coherent than part 1, more of a horror. The lighting and colors are cooler anyway, but it’s got overstuff’d sequilitis (adding ten new characters and giving short shrift to Snipes-Kristofferson).

The Man:

After a rescue operation, Blade works on rehabilitating vamped Kris, while Kris’s old job is being filled by vamp-spy Scud (Cigarette Burns), a fan of Powerpuff Girls and Krispy Kremes, making me wonder which production designer was from Atlanta. Meanwhile some new immortal vampire-hunting creatures are running amok out there. Either Resident Evil 4 (game) ripped off the head-splitting creature design of Blade II (movie), or vice versa, or they both ripped off a third thing. Our guys team up with way too many elite vampires (including Ron Perlman and Donnie Yen) to fight the new beasts, tables are turned and poor Wesley’s blood gets harvested again, nearly everyone dies, and thus far I have avoided literally every Ryan Reynolds movie so let’s keep that going and not watch part three. In the Elm Street tradition, the only blu extra I watched was the Cypress Hill video.

Ron explodes someone using pure love and light:

by ·Comments Off on Last House on Dead End Street (1977, Roger Watkins)

Looks and sounds like shit right from the start, with spectacularly out-of-sync sound recording. Manos: The Last House on the Left Hands of Fate, about a misanthrope making snuff films, made by a (presumed) misanthrope and looking like an actual snuff film. “This isn’t my cup of tea. I’m not interested in art.”

Dirtbag Bill, about to drill-kill:

Terry, who looks like Dirtbag Bill Hader, gets out of jail for drug dealing and says he’ll show ’em all. Filmmaker Bill isn’t getting much play from his softcore lesbian dramas and blackface whipping scenes. They kidnap some people and murder them on camera, then a voiceover tells us they were all apprehended, ok. An incoherent, possibly evil movie. The cinematographer later shot Avengers: Infinity War, which makes sense.

Despite this movie’s rocky/aborted release it definitely predates the Misfits song:

by ·Comments Off on Night of the Living Dead Remake (1990, Tom Savini)

“This is hell on earth.” Produced by the guy behind the Death Wish sequels and opening with Johnny and Barbara recast as worse actors, this remake is starting out looking like a bad idea. Romero had already returned to the Dead with Day and Dawn, and the first couple Return movies had come out in the 1980s, but inexplicably there were no straight remakes of the public-domain original NotLD until Romero initiated this one, handing the reins to gorehound Savini, whose new zombie designs attempt to offer a reason for this movie to exist.

They’re coming to get you:

Tony Todd soon arrives with a second reason. A theoretical third would be Barbara (who had costarred with Savini in Knightriders), rewritten as a stronger character who does more than just cower in the corner, and even survives the movie, but I dunno. The original movie had the character behaviors and dark ending appropriate for its moment, and this one’s doing its own late-80s thing (but maybe still set in 1968 – hard to tell in a farmhouse).

Local kids, Tony, the normally basement-bound Coopers:

Local kid Tom is a horror regular, having appeared in at least five sequels including a Mark Hamill Watchers, and his fiery death at the gas station is a big improvement over the original version (and just as stupid), so, movie has three and a half reasons to exist – that’s more than most movies. The mean baldie in the basement who endangers them all and is righteously murdered by Barbara at the end later became a Rob Zombie star.

Do not shoot at the lock on the gas pump: