by ·Comments Off on Demons 2 (1986, Lamberto Bava)

Sally dances to Morrissey then goes to her room to watch horror movies alone during her own birthday party, relatable. She finds a TV movie about other young people uncovering demons (some idiot hellraisers a dead demon by bleeding into its open mouth) – but this is not the movie Demons. Then a demon videodromes through the TV, demonogrifies her, and she murders all her party guests then… melts(?), and her cursed acid blood plays hell on the apartment building below. Everyone acts like they’re the character in a TV commercial who needs a miracle product to perform a simple task, and no miracles are here, just the manic unstoppable demons of an Evil Dead movie.

Movie is properly disgusting – a demon child breaks into a woman’s apartment then convulses as an Audrey II-mouthed rubber alien bursts out of his chest and chases the woman around until defeated by a murphy bed. There’s an elevator shaft escape, an ineffectual parking garage showdown, and the hetero couple ends up at a quirky movie theater TV studio (which is maybe supposed to evoke the movie theater of Demons 1 but really only reminded me of Scanners 3). Among the doomed women is Asia Argento. Half the crew followed this with Dario Argento’s Opera and prospered, the other half made Graveyard Disturbance and did not. Speaking of Opera, I wrote “Argento characters never behaving like actual humans makes the movies more phantasmagorical,” and that’s sure true of the dialogue here – but I’ve never been to Italy, and what if the people there are really like this?

Hetero couple triumphant:

by ·Comments Off on Toute Une Nuit (1982, Chantal Akerman)

Anthology of night scenes and into the next morning, mostly involving couples getting together or not – one her most lovely and compulsively watchable dream-films, looks to be an influence on Claire Denis and Tyler Taormina.

by ·Comments Off on Decoder (1984, Muscha)

Some fabulous images in here, this Muscha is a real visionary. It’s also the movie that knocked me unconscious the most times this year, so many times that we have a running joke that “watching Decoder” means going to sleep early.

Mostly we follow a guy with floppy hair (FM Einheit, a Neubauten percussionist). He’s either a slacker punk kid or a secret agent, or possibly the former who falls into being the latter. He ends up stealing some dissonant noise tech and turning it against the dominant burger restaurant chain, which gets him hunted by a world-weary government agent with access to total surveillance (New Yorker Bill Rice of Sleepwalk and Vortex).

A tape-dissonance operative standing in front of Fassbinder’s death notices:

The guy from Soft Cell shows up to sing “Sleazy City.” They can’t afford computer graphics so they film arcade games off a screen. Sometimes a guy with a hidden face talks in the voice of William Burroughs. The surveillance operatives are always watching a Fritz Lang movie on one screen (so am I). When cornered on a subway car, our guy starts drumming on the walls, the cop falls down covering his ears but nobody else in the car seems to mind. Also: death frogs.

by ·Comments Off on Pirates (1986, Roman Polanski)

Sex criminals are suddenly in the news, so let’s see what Polanski made before Frantic. A decade after Fearless Vampire Killers, this director with a great talent for composition and psychological drama insists on going in a direction where he has no talent at all: the action comedy. He’s aiming for Goonies meets Airplane and ending up with flabby, lifeless spectacle.

Walter Matthau (doing an accent) and his sidekick Cris Campion (Day of Reckoning) are shipwrecked pirates, rescued by the Spanish, and the first half of the movie is them figuring out how to turn the tables on their rescuers/captors (led by The Doctor of Kill List) and conquer the ship. When they succeed a fellow mutineer tries to rape the lovely Charlotte Lewis (The Golden Child) but he is killed by Cris, because sex crime is not okay! Ends right where it started, with pirate and sidekick stranded on a lifeboat (this was nine months after After Hours came out).

Krank is as shocked to be here as you must be to see him:

by ·Comments Off on Poltergeist (1982, Tobe Hooper)

The perfect 1980s movie. Mom smokes pot while dad reads a Reagan book. The family is snacking constantly! Family members are introduced while asleep, the dog making the rounds of the household eating snacks out of their hands and beds, and then no amount of haunting can make them lose their appetites. Horror movie I watched at a formative time and haven’t really revisited in forty years – fortunately it holds up.

First casualty is the family bird, who dies before we even meet her. The chairs-move-by-themselves bit escalates quickly to the tree/clown/closet/TV horror night, then the family calls in a university team (led by Beatrice Straight of Chiller) who faithfully documents the haunting but is in way over their heads. When the house gets too dangerous the other two kids are sent away and the great Zelda Rubinstein is summoned to provide self-contradictory advice, successfully rescuing Carol Anne from the TV dimension. Then they do not leave the house immediately: Coach Dad takes a late meeting at work (the real estate company that built the neighborhood on a graveyard) while the house attempts to eat the others. Then in part two they’re followed by an evil preacher and Coach gets possessed by a tequila worm, and part three was maybe set in a city parking garage? Maybe we’ll revisit these next shocktober.

The member of the research team who decided not to come back:

Mom is JoBeth Williams of The Big Chill:

by ·Comments Off on The Stuff (1985, Larry Cohen)

Not much backstory – we go from the stuff being discovered in a hole in the ground to its mass marketing within four minutes, then get to business following Moriarty, an industrial spy working for an ice cream company threatened by the stuff’s sudden popularity. Obviously primo Cohen, though the first time I watched I wasn’t yet a Moriarty-head and didn’t groove on its wavelength.

When your family has all enjoyed the dessert product and wants you to have some too:

Moriarty accrues teammates along the way: marketing exec Andrea Marcovicci (The Hand), some kid who fled his zombified family, and M’s old friend Chocolate Chip Charlie (Garrett Morris of Cooley High). Feels at times like they’re the only survivors of a stuff-pocalypse, but when the tide finally turns against the sentient brain-eating alien dessert product and our heroes force its distributors to eat stuff, there are enough unaffected people to revolt and reclaim humanity and the TV news tells us “the casualties were in the thousands.”

The team in an unguarded moment, right before Chocolate Chip gets melted:

Moriarty and the girl find the stuff mines – fortunately he brought along timed explosives. They go to see a crazy recluse racist colonel worried about commie infiltration – he’d send in the army to blast stuffies with machine guns. Stuff addicts become empty vessels who crack apart when punched – the effects range from cheap and hilarious to nightmarish (some beautiful shots of antigravity flaming stuff).

Nightmare on Stuff Street:

by ·Comments Off on O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985, Piotr Szulkin)

Stratified society in a post-apoc bunker, Jerzy Stuhr is a fixer who goes everywhere, sees everyone, and knows that the bunker is on the verge of physical collapse and the ark that’s supposed to arrive to save us all doesn’t exist. As great as the others I’ve seen by Szulkin.

by ·Comments Off on Altered States (1980, Ken Russell)

Pre-Big Chill William Hurt and Post-Close Encounters Bob Balaban are doing isolation chamber tests in 1967, Hurt appreciates the trippy demon visions he experiences in the tank, and shares his thoughts on the matter while his girl Blair Brown is trying to make love to him.

A decade later Blair is leaving socially awkward Hurt while he’s heading to Mexico to try mushrooms (to open ancient physiological pathways in human consciousness), which take him to another place that he can’t remember when he sobers up. So he heads back into the isolation tanks, enlisting angry skeptic Charles Haid (pre-Nightbreed!) to observe.

Now on mushrooms in the tank, Hurt witnesses the birth of mankind and bodily regresses to gorilla-state. None of the others (not even lab tech John Larroquette) can deny something crazy is happening here, so Hurt keeps it up, getting arrested for monkeying at the zoo. But he goes in too many times and hellraisers himself into a primordial vortex (even more impressive since Hellraiser hadn’t been invented yet), leading to some major fluid/space/video effects.

Honestly weird movie, surprising that Cronenberg didn’t make this. A small part of the runtime is rapid editing of trippy imagery, larger part is a guy turning into an ape and wreaking havoc, mostly it’s intellectuals talking rapidly at each other. Criterion says Russell was picked after 26 others had passed and the results made everybody mad at him, haha.

by ·Comments Off on Special Effects (1984, Larry Cohen)

Having a very Larry Shocktober. This one’s not as good as It’s Alive III, more like Murder a la Mod without the mods, but it fits in nicely with the meta-slasher Scream movies. And despite a lower budget, crappy music and some shady editing tricks, it’s a much more lively doppelganger movie than Enemy turned out to be.

Enemy would burst into flame if exposed to this much bright color:

Zoe Lund (Ms .45 herself) plays two characters with at least three names. First she’s an aspiring actress working in a nudie club, pushy but not smart, getting herself into the apartment of famed/troubled filmmaker Eric Bogosian (the Talk Radio guy), whose kink is murdering girls on camera (see also: Dangerous Animals).

Bogosian in his Freddy Krueger sweater:

He can’t be that bad, he’s got a cockatoo:

Now things get twisted, as the detective (the cabbie killed in opening scene of Island of the Alive) is convinced the girl’s estranged husband killed her, so the director offers to help by making a film in which the murderer husband will relive his crime on camera, casting a lookalike (Zoe Lund again, as a do-gooder with a His Girl Friday voice) as his/their victim. The cop is offered a technical advisor position, gets obsessed until the director bars him from set for interfering. Happy ending: New Zoe falls for Dead Zoe’s husband even though he’s a dick, and they electrocute the director in his own pool.