by ·Comments Off on Diabolique (1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

I’ve seen this – and the remake! – before, but long enough ago that I only had a few images and plot points in my memory. The twist is so good because the cover story is so believable – boarding school principal Michel is married to Christina, having an affair with Nicole, and is a real piece of shit to everybody, the two of them included, so they team up to murder him. Of course, why wouldn’t they? But the real plot is to get the nervous wife out of the way and collect her inheritance. After the murder plot goes wrong in various nerve-wracking ways, she’s finally scared to death by his apparent resurrection.

The happy trio:

Allegedly, Hitchcock wanted to make this before Clouzot bought the rights, so it’s salting the wound that the private detective is named Alfred. He hangs around the morgue looking for cases to investigate, and latches onto this one without anyone asking him to, then busts the two lovers in the last scene. The staging in this is so lovely. I’d have to rewatch Wages of Fear to see which I like better, but should probably rewatch that anyway just for the pleasure of it.

Alfred is Charles Vanel of Wooden Crosses and To Catch a Thief. The nervous wife was played by the director’s nervous wife Véra Clouzot, who did die of a heart attack a few years later. Costars Simone Signoret and Paul Meurisse would reunite much later in Army of Shadows.

by ·Comments Off on World of Tomorrow 3 & Stump the Guesser

World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (2020, Don Hertzfeldt)

Hertzfeldt comes up with his biggest horror yet: embedded-HUD popup ads. A future Emily backup clone contacts a past David and sends him on a disfiguring journey to retrieve secret messages about the clandestine between-time assassinations of various Davids by other Davids. It’s twisty! And excellent, and full of more wonderful quotes, and I’ll be watching these forever.

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Stump the Guesser (2020, Maddin/Johnson/Johnson)

The Odenkirk-looking Guesser (The Editor from The Editor) is renowned for his abilities, but when he runs out of guessing milk, things go bad and his guessing license is revoked. But during this time he falls in love with his long-lost sister, spends some time scientifically disproving theories of heredity in order to marry her, but things go badly at the end when he has to guess which door she’s behind. Some fun leaps of logic and distorted visuals here, but I wasn’t feeling it as much as other Maddin films.

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Accounting for some other things watched recently… The Mads from MST3K have been doing monthly live shows. I checked out Glen or Glenda, a movie that’s so busy explaining itself that it never gets to the movie, and told Neil:

That was… really fun. That’s the most I’ve enjoyed a MST3K-related thing since the end of the sci-fi channel years. I don’t know if it’s because of their obvious affection for the material, or if I’m just in the right mood. I’d never seen the feature either – shame on me, after digging the Tim Burton version for 25 years now (oh you just tried to watch it, is it cringey now? Is it Johnny Depp’s fault?) and the Mads nailed it in their intro when they said this movie has everything, but it also has nothing.

Next was The Tingler, which I already just barely remember (also explainy, features Vincent Price)… then the truly baffling, tensionless version of The Most Dangerous Game called Walk The Dark Street. I think the guy from The Rifleman played the baddie. Then some shorts I should track and name, but am not gonna.

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Hannah Gadsby’s Douglas is her stand-up comedy special to follow Nanette, which was the special to end stand-up comedy, and yet she pulls off the follow-up by creating another perfectly-constructed show and this time being breathtakingly funny. That sounds like a cliche, but I had to pause the show to catch my breath.

And Katy and I watched something called Australia: Land of Parrots, which is everything you’d dream it would be, and I should just play it on a loop.

by ·Comments Off on Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988, Stephen Chiodo)

Glad to see that this holds up. Killer Klowns land in small town and kill almost everybody in extremely circusy ways. Silly, but constantly inventive, with a very high body count and kickass theme song. Looks real good in HD.

The Chiodos have an Alien Xmas special out on streaming this month! Debbie is 80’s horror royalty, also appearing in Return of the Living Dead II and Night of the Creeps. Mike was later in Driving Me Crazy with Billy Dee Williams, and a leprechaun movie from the director of Subspecies. Sympathetic Deputy Dave played DEATHSTALKER in Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell the same year. His shitty, teen-hating cop boss is from Point Blank and Hitchcock’s Topaz. I’m sorry to report that not only did the ice cream truck-driving Terenzi brothers not become major film stars, one of them died this August.

by ·Comments Off on Underwater (2020, William Eubank)

“Structural failure is imminent,” says the same calm female computer voice from all these movies. Before any monsters appear, the underwater base already looks crappy, run down with flickering lights, clear Alien influence. Eubank also made The Signal, which I heard was bad.

Captain Cassel:

Disaster in the deepwater drilling base, Kristen Stewart has to do that movie thing where she closes the blast doors because her coworkers won’t make it through in time. Mamoudou Athie (the punk recluse of Patti Cake$) survives with her, then they rescue Paul (T.J. Miller of a Transformers movie) and meet up with the Captain (Vincent Cassel of Eastern Promises). Together, they go through the motions of an underwater-horror movie, escaping from some underwater Silent Hill creatures that I am not buying and then their Leviathan momma.

Miller is good – I guess he was in the series Silicon Valley, which I skipped. After watching Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body, maybe I should make a thing of it and watch other Transformers stars’ horror movies… let’s see, Shia LaBeouf has Disturbia and Wahlberg’s got The Happening, I dunno. Back to the plot: Rodrigo’s helmet was compromised so he implodes. A Game of Thrones actress is in love with a Short Term 12 actor, giving us more people to root for, as loveless Stewart makes the Ultimate Sacrifice to destroy the monsters. Whatever, it was weird and nice to watch people who are capable at their jobs for a little while.

by ·Comments Off on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968, William Greaves)

Greaves and his crew film in the park (they have permits!) a couple of actors performing a trite scene – but they’re also filming themselves filming these things, and filming the director trying to work things out, and filming the crew voicing their concerns about the scene and the director. It’s an exciting concept, hampered by the small problem of being no fun to watch.

I suppose these are professionals, not hippies, but it’s still 1968 and listening to them talk invites dark flashbacks of Lions Love. And the editing of individual scenes is nice but the overall structure seems slack and random – I want to have examples, but Criterion Channel is mad that I’ve got an external monitor attached, so it’s not letting me review.

by ·Comments Off on Jennifer’s Body (2009, Karyn Kusama)

“Do you know how hard it is to make it as an indie band these days… Satan is our only hope.”

I’m not immune to expectations, and when you hear for a decade that a movie is very bad, then you start to hear that actually it’s maybe quite good, so you watch it and it’s excellent, that weight of the previous decade makes you want to yell that it’s one of The All-Time Great Horror-Comedies, so I dunno if I’m just amped or if this is true. Either way, I had a fine time, and between this and Dellamorte I’ve got a couple new favorites.

Amanda Seyfried is our protagonist “Needy,” with mom Amy Sedaris, boyfriend Young Neil (whose mom is Bonnie from The Player). Chris Pratt is a local cop, JK Simmons is a teacher with a mechanical hand – this great cast must be post-Juno Diablo Cody’s doing, and not post-Aeon Flux Kusama’s. Our lead succubus is of course Megan Fox, proving that she only sucked in the Transformers movies because everything in those movies sucked.

After a music club fire that triggered dark memories of Collectiv, Fox is drugged and kidnapped by the indie band, then virgin-sacrificed to further their career. This works, career-wise, they become huge, but she was not a virgin and so becomes a demonic creature seeking boys and blood and revenge. Loved the goth kid Colin Gray (Kyle Gallner of Red State), didn’t love the very studio sound of the “live” band, but at least the club atmosphere was right on.

by ·Comments Off on Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977, George Barry)

A very honestly eccentric movie. It’s not a horror comedy, but with that title and concept it can’t be intended seriously either. Or maybe it was meant to be a horror comedy (early on, after dissolving a traveler inside its yellow-acid body, the bed eats a bottle of pepto) but forgot to write any jokes. Everyone acts stoned in this, so maybe that’s a clue.

The narrator is a guy who’s been dead for sixty years whose soul is trapped in a painting overlooking a bed, created by a demon to seduce a mortal girl, whom he accidentally fucked to death, and now the lonely bed feeds on hippies who wander in and sit on it, getting dissolved to bones. After a long period of hunger, it eats a bunch of hippies at once and finally falls asleep, which allows the guy in the painting to speak.

I guess the final girl who completes the ritual that banishes the bed is Susan, but there’s also a Sharon and a Diane, and I got them confused. Susan’s brother who gets his hands dissolved to bones was later in some proper movies, and the boy in the painting was apparently a famous rock critic, but otherwise everyone here including the movie itself vanished until the cult kids rediscovered it in the 2000’s.

by ·Comments Off on Re-Animator (1985, Stuart Gordon)

“West killed the corpse.”
“I see how that sounds.”

Academia Horror, an unbelievable horror-comedy that never winks. Even the music is very good, by Richard Band, little brother of Dollman vs. Demonic Toys director Charles.

We’ve got medical school dean Halsey, his student daughter Megan, and her boyfriend Dan… then there’s the boyfriend’s eccentric new roommate Herbert, and his archrival, brain surgeon Dr. Hill. Dan and the Dean (horror royalty Robert Sampson of City of the Living Dead and Netherworld) are fine, but the other three… Barbara Crampton, Jeffrey Combs, and David Gale as Hill… if I was in charge, I’d cast them in every movie.

Opens with Herbert losing his mentor, then Hill losing a patient, and the two face off in the morgue with conflicting beliefs about the nature of life, and I’d forgotten that Hill is also a hypnotist. The autistic West, not great at making friends, gets addicted to his own reagent. The first human he reanimates kills the Dean, so the Dean has to be reanimated – then locked up, since they come back fully mad. As for Hill, West just straight up kills him with a shovel (“plagiarist!”) then reanimates his severed head to prove his methods to the skeptical late doctor, but things… escalate.

by ·Comments Off on Sleep Has Her House (2017, Scott Barley)

Minimal music, wind noise, and… is that a horse? Falling water, reminds of Strata of the Image. Extremely low-light photography, really unsuitable for home viewing.

After a half hour of forests and streams, we are in the sky, and the music amps up. Back to the trees, back to the sky. Lighting changes and motion shifts and zooms so gradual they look like stills. Finally combining the river and the heavens in a shot of a sweet lightning storm. Much of the last ten minutes is quiet and black – just like the other movie I watched tonight – except for a final half-hearted freakout of flickering blue.

This is a screen saver or a meditation app. If you aim for slow cinema, you better not miss.