“It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.”
I remembered noir detective Harrison Ford tracking rogue artificial humans Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah through a future city, but did not remember the replicants convincing childlike inventor/toymaker William Sanderson to bring them to their maker Terrell (Joe Turkel wearing stop-sign glasses). First time watching the “final cut” edition on blu-ray, and it was glorious.
Finally, Live-action Teen Cartoon Miike gets mixed-up with Bloody Horror Miike. Starts off in a Battle Royale classroom, a fake-looking CG toy playing a game of freeze-or-die with the terrified suit-wearing students, until sole survivor Shun (Sôta Fukushi of Blade of the Immortal) pushes the button on its back. He meets up with the survivors from other classes for the next challenge, basketball vs. a giant cat in the gym, where we meet ruthless brown-haired Amaya (The Great Yokai War star Ryûnosuke Kamiki), then Shun is paired with his ex Takase for a round-robin guessing game, then she’s killed in the next round, in which a truth-obsessed polar bear gets them to turn on each other. Finally a rooftop-sunset game of kick-the-can pits Shun against the transparently evil Amaya. All this is taking place inside a giant alien cube hovering over major cities, which has kidnapped and murdered all the country’s children in order to teach a valuable lesson spoken by a wise old dude at the very end, which I spaced out and didn’t pay attention to.
“The broken are the more evolved.”
Three girls get kidnapped by Kraftwerk James McAvoy, who turns out to be one of many James McAvoys, collectively calling themselves The Horde. Light-haired Haley Lu Richardson (Columbus) wants to fight, dark-haired Jessica Sula (The Lovers) is freaking out, and Anya Taylor-Joy (The VVitch) had a hunter or survivalist father, stays cool and follows orders. Horde’s psychiatrist (Betty Buckley of Carrie, Frantic) seems to admire him, and knows more than she lets on. I had my doubts about watching a multiple-personality McAvoy thriller but M. Night knows how to put a movie together, and now that he’s lost The Visit handheld camera gimmick, this was a damned good time, with a hell of a surprise cameo at the end.
A very silly mermaid comedy-horror. It’s got songs, but I’m not sure I’d call it a musical… and the songs aren’t great, so I wouldn’t want to. A couple of hot young mermaids, Silver and Golden, get a job at a nightclub and things get increasingly complicated. Silver (Marta Mazurek of recent nun-drama The Innocents) falls in love with a human (blonde Jakub Gierszal of Dracula Untold) while Golden (Michalina Olszanska of Christopher Lambert concentration camp drama Sobibor) kills and eats local humans. I maybe lost track of some of the characters, but Silver gets a legs/fins transplant and fails to make Jakub love her, so turns into seafoam, then Golden takes swift revenge.
Golden is the dark-haired one and Silver the golden-haired, of course, here surrounding Kinga Preis, title star of Four Years With Anna:
Legs/fins surgery:
One of the key films leading to my lifelong horror fascination, and a movie that it’s now obvious I should never have watched in theaters at age nine. Fun to rewatch now – it holds up beautifully. The dialogue is funny and well-written, and the leads are charismatic, which should immediately place it near the top of any 1980’s horror list. The horror element itself is interesting too, as Jeff Goldblum examines his transformation scientifically then slowly loses himself into Brundlefly, killing nobody and only threatening his journalist girlfriend Geena Davis at the very end. Creature effects are top-notch – it deservedly won a makeup oscar over Legend. The only unfortunately dated element is slimy John Getz (McDormand’s man in Blood Simple) as Geena’s boss, who saves her from Brundlefly at the end.
Cop brings injured dude to near-abandoned rural hospital, bringing to mind that Southbound episode from last year’s SHOCKtober, or Attack on Hospital 13. Then hooded cultists appear outside and they discover a portal to hell in the basement, and things get interesting. The pre-credits scene has rural folks setting a dude on fire, and we’ve been at the hospital only six minutes before a possessed nurse murders a patient, so there’s not much time for setup – I’d barely get a handle on any particular character before they’d be killed in some horrible way.
As Filipe Furtado said more eloquently on Letterboxd, Stuart Gordon it ain’t, but Lovecraftian horror and blatant Hellraiser ripoffs (as opposed to bland official Hellraiser sequels) are always welcome.
The codirectors have done art and effects for Guillermo del Toro films and are buddies with the guys who made The Editor. Our cast includes Art Hindle (The Brood), the BBC interviewer from Pontypool, at least two people from Survival of the Dead, and Knives Chau from Scott Pilgrim.
A few of the most beautiful shadow-moments and one of the greatest monsters in all silent cinema hung around a flabby retelling of Dracula – it’s maybe my fifth-favorite Murnau film, but I was happy to watch it on the big screen with an excellent, tightly synchronized live band, Invincible Czars.
Part of a Late Horror Masters’ Lesser Works double-feature. Opens with a disclaimer about the treatment of the movie’s monkeys, but they never appeared to be in any convincing danger, except maybe in the final scene. No mention of the treatment of the movie’s parakeets. Monkey tricks are the primary reason to watch this movie, except for George Romero and/or Stanley Tucci completists.
Allan’s car accident:
Allan and monkey giving the same steely expression:
Moody Allan (Jason Beghe of One Missed Call Remake) is badly crippled, so his monkey-researcher friend Geoffrey (John Pankow of Talk Radio) donates a brain-eating monkey to service-animal trainer Melanie (Kate McNeil of The House on Sorority Row) to get Allan a furry helper buddy. Brain-eating monkey in a George Romero movie – what could go wrong?
Mad scientist Geoffrey:
Geoffrey’s boss Stephen Root:
Moody Allan is a bad influence on the monkey, who starts to murder everyone who she perceives as a threat – first setting fire to Allan’s ex (Lincoln NE’s Janine Turner of Northern Exposure) who has run off with his doctor (Stanley Tucci), then electrocuting Allan’s annoying mom (Joyce Van Patten of Bone), killing Geoffrey via drug injection, and most horribly, murdering the parakeet of Allan’s hateful catetaker (Christine Forrest, Romero’s wife). After she threatens Melanie in a rage, Allan manages to dispatch the monkey using only his neck and mouth. We also get a monkey-surgery dream sequence and blurry monkey-POV shots. Mostly dullsville compared to the space vampires. My birds reacted to the monkey chatter, but not to the parakeet.
In memory of two recently-departed horror directors, who made some of the best horror films in history, I caught up with two of their worst pictures…
To begin with, a bullshit voiceover lets us know that this spaceship, created with colored lights and 1980’s computer graphics, has some inexplicable gravity technology – just trust us, we’re on a spaceship but there’s gravity. I don’t recall Star Trek worrying themselves with explaining the ship’s artificial gravity, except when it broke in the sixth movie.
Discovering nude-vampire crystals inside the space anus:
Fallada, looking like an apocalyptic preacher:
“I almost have the feeling I’ve been here before” as they fly into a giant vaginal-looking tunnel. Astronauts discover nude, crystal-encased space vampires and bring them home via a badly failed first mission plus a second rescue mission. The sole survivor of the first mission is Steve Railsback (later of Scissors and Alligator II: The Mutation), who couldn’t help but sexually harass the female alien (Mathilda May, later of some Chabrol and Demy films) and becomes psychically connected to her. Railsback works with Peter Firth (Tess, Equus) and alien-invaded doctor Patrick Stewart to track down the vampire girl, while dapper white-haired Professor Fallada (Frank Finlay, one of Richard Lester’s Musketeers) and barely-competent Dr. Bukovsky (Michael Gothard, Oliver Reed’s executor in The Devils) try to contain the evil – and fail utterly, as most of London falls to the vampire-zombie plague.
Patrick Stewart Replica:
Return of the Living Dead Zombie Phantom Alien Vampires:
More perverted and apocalyptic than most 1980’s horror movies, at least. The movie’s pretty okay, but the concept is cool as hell, so it’s got my respect. Tobe’s follow-up to Poltergeist, produced by Cannon Films, cowritten by Dan O’Bannon, who made Return of the Living Dead the same year, which ties into our next filmmaker…