by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 33: SHOCKtober Revisits Part 3

Shocker (1989, Wes Craven)

Lawnmower Man-esque story of an electrocuted guy (Mitch “Skinner” Pileggi) who becomes electricity. Our hero (Michael “Tanner” Murphy) jumps inside the television to chase the guy through a montage of TV shows, like a crappy Sherlock Jr. Tanner harnesses the power of the TV Remote Control to gain the upper hand. Someone’s head goes through a TV set (two years after Dream Warriors) while I’m watching this wearing my Videodrome shirt.

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Deadly Friend (1986, Wes Craven)

First I had to rewind far enough to see Momma From The Train’s head get exploded by a basketball, presumably the main thing people remember from this movie. D.F. (OG-Buffy Kristy Swanson) dives out a second-story window to kill Tom (of biker flick Savage Dawn), then she attempts suicide-by-cop, melts into her true robot form and kills Paul (of Little House on the Prairie) offscreen. Murder-bots turning on their owners is a timely topic since I also rewatched M3GAN tonight – after that movie’s expertly uncanny droid, this one’s robot is just a girl wearing too much eyeshadow. It’s always remarkable how bad the ADR was in 1980s movies, like nobody knew what “sounding natural” felt like, or could replicate it using any existing recording equipment.

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976-Evil (1988, Robert Englund)

No recollection what this is about, maybe a blend between Pillow Talk and Unfriended? Mrs. Wilmouth is being devoured by her cats, then Big Hair Angela is molested by Mrs. W’s goblin child. The goblin is called Hoax – his cousin Spike (the only actor who’d return in the sequel) distracts the kid then tosses him into hell, which is in the backyard. I kinda like that every single line reading is awkward, makes the movie less generically bad and more specifically bad.

devil in a sweatervest:

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Fright Night (1985, Tom Holland)

Piecing together what’s happening based on having watched the remake five years back… the vamp Chris “Jack” Skellington is too dentally distorted to recognize, old Roddy McDowall is fighting him back but the nerdy boy Herman’s Head Charlie gets bitten after a really nice bat transformation, while in the basement his girl Amy has already turned vampish. Smashing the windows to let the sunlight in is also how they won in From Dusk Till Dawn, the green-burning vampire skeleton pretty sweet. Coda: everything’s back to normal, Roddy on TV, the kid making out with his girl, and vamps living next door awaiting the sequel. Hoax from 976-EVIL is in this, but either he’s dead by now or I can’t recognize him without the demon makeup. Holland is best known as codirector of The Timekeepers of Eternity.

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Prom Night (1980, Paul Lynch)

There are a lotta kids at this prom and I don’t care to figure out who they all are. Thugs beat up the prom king and steal his crown, then the movie gets its Carrie blood-bucket moment when the masked killer rolls the false king’s severed head out on stage. Hero vs. Villain fight ensues, awkward choreography but a nice disco song. The queen was Jamie Lee Curtis??

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The Kindred (1987, Obrow & Carpenter)

Hat Guy has arrived to collect his killer mutant baby or whatever, says the mutant beastie is John’s brother, but there’s no convincing John, who electrocutes the thing until it explodes and takes Hat Guy with it. Rubber baby beasties attack until Brad (The Hills Have Eyes 2) blows up the whole damn house. Fortunately his dead girlfriend Sharon (of Crawlspace) is somehow alive in the crawlspace. Very gloopy gloppy movie. Nobody seems to like it, but I remember it being good, oh yeah, I was eleven. The directors had made two others together, and separately Obrow did a Dean Koontz adaptation with multiple Twin Peaks actors and Carpenter did a Luke Wilson/Ken Marino ghost movie.

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Fiend Without a Face (1958, Arthur Crabtree)

“They’re becoming visible!” Stop-motion spine/brain creatures climbing trees, cool, apparently caused by “the atomic plant,” so Jeff is going to go blow it up. “Perhaps I can control them” says the professor moments before he’s killed by brains, which make funny sputtering ketchup bottle sfx when they’re shot. Post-explosion, the brains immediately melt – this is one of the goopiest 1950s movies, the Kindred of its time.

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Alucarda (1977, Juan López Moctezuma)

Bloody naked Justine savagely claws at a religious lady – they’ve come to a truce when the lady’s idiot doctor friend comes in splashing around beakers of holy water, J gets skeletonized and the lady bitten. As a result(?), young supervampire Alucarda speaks the magic words that cause all nuns to burst into flame. There is a lot of screaming! Al has a holy water protection field, and these bozos only had one idea, but fortunately Al is a girl, and these last two movies have demonstrated that girls’ reaction to horror is to scream and be useless to stop it, so Al goes mad from her own fiery destructive wrath and vanishes. Director made the also not-great Mansion of Madness, Al was recently in a netflix movie called Grumpy Christmas.

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Phenomena (1985, Dario Argento)

Uh oh, Jennifer Connelly is stuck in a maggoty flooded dead body dumpster, someone has been watching Poltergeist. The man chained up nearby breaks his own thumb to escape the cuffs (a common tactic lately) and attack Jen’s cackling tormentor, but Jen escapes on her own. It’s not an Italian movie until we encounter a horribly dubbed child, and this one’s got a scary face and a halberd. Jen’s terrified screams summon a swarm of flies that eat the kid’s mutant face off. She tries to escape by boat but is so technically unhandy, the boat explodes leaving her trapped in a ring of fire, then she’s saved by a razor-wielding monkey. Every line and edit and action seems a little odd – I think this is what makes Argento’s movies stand out, and I didn’t understand his vibe when I first watched this on VHS.

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Session 9 (2001, Brad Anderson)

I remember this and The Machinist being a big deal, a hot new Anderson on the scene, but haven’t thought about either one in a long while and never watched his follow-ups. Gordon is lobotomizing guys through their eye sockets while dreaming that an imaginary labcoat guy is responsible. We’re doing the post-Fight Club pre-Shudder Island thing of revisiting all the past kills with the knowledge that our delusional protag was the killer all along. Seems like a just-alright indie movie in retrospect.

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Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988, David DeCoteau)

Think this was more USA Up All Night than Channel 11 Shocktober. Our intrepid heroes (a hotgirl and nerdy Calvin) are searching a foggy warehouse for she-demons, manage to clumsily set Evil Babs With Unidentified Accent on fire after she kills Nude Victim Lisa offscreen. Some more stuff happens, it’s not worth recounting. The lighting and acting are very bad – there’s boobs, but USA wouldn’t have shown them, so why did anyone watch this? We get a demon puppet, at least. Nude Victim was later in Puppet Master 3, Babs is from Slumber Party Massacre, and our heroes were both in Nightmare on Elm Street 4 the same year.

by ·Comments Off on Szamanka (1996 Andrzej Zulawski)

Movie is off like a shot, the credits and characters both in a big hurry to get going. Iwona (a non-actor, whoa) is a chaos demon who should be followed by a cleanup crew at all times, Michael (star of Blind Chance) is a creep professor whose fiancee is out of town, and together they get the amour fou in this sordid missing link between Possession and Cosmos. Possibly the most sex-crazed Zulawski movie, though with too much synth and marching band music.

He is an anthropologist studying a just-unearthed shaman mummy, so I figured it would awaken and kill them all. I did not see it coming that she would smash his head and Hannibal his brains, then a minor character would set off a small nuclear bomb.

by ·Comments Off on Rumours (2024, Maddin/Johnson/Johnson)

A different sort of thing for Maddin, his most restrained feature. More Bunuelian perhaps, tricking viewers with a political arthouse drama with Cate Blanchett then gradually accumulating unnatural quirks until the giant brain in the woods is only a distraction from whether sentient pedo-hunting AI has Lawnmower-Manned all communications in an apparently depopulated Germany. Seven world leaders were in a gazebo hard at work crafting the most bland and vague statement they could, when they found themselves cut off from outside contact. Each one gets their standout moment, but Canada (the most emotional and least respected) steps up during the crisis, triumphantly editing and reading their final statement aloud to the masturbating bog people.

Germany is the Australian Blanchett, Canada is Roy Dupuis (I think he’s the woodsman who yells “strong men!” in Forbidden Room, which also features a giant brain). UK is late Shyamalan fave Nikki Amuka-Bird, USA is the inexplicably British gent Charles Dance (who I just saw in The First Omen). Then there’s Italy (I got nothing on Rolando Ravello), France (Denis Ménochet, the violent PTSD guy in Beau Is Afraid), and Japan (Takehiro Hira of the new Shogun). They come across two suicidal European Union workers: Zlatko Buric of Triangle of Sadness, and Alicia Vikander, subject of the best joke in the movie (they think the brain’s influence has got her speaking in ancient lost languages, but it turns out to just be Swedish).

by ·Comments Off on Get Out (2017, Jordan Peele)

Daniel Kaluuya (my favorite Black Mirror actor) is dating Allison Williams (my fourth-favorite Girls actress), comes to visit her parents Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford and brother Caleb Landry Jones (Antiviral) in an aggressively white suburb. At first there’s the socially-awkward but not overtly threatening kind of racial tension: dad brags about his Obama support and all the white family’s employees are black. But things get weirder after the mom hypnotizes Kaluuya and now he can’t tell if he’s being paranoid or if there’s a conspiracy, until it’s too late and he’s tied to a chair in the basement being prepped for brain surgery, so the highest bidder (blind Stephen Root) can flee his aging white body and live fifty more years inside Kaluuya’s.

A finely crafted thriller, and I’d never in a million years guess it was from the writer of Keanu. I could tell that Peele had made a super-effective movie when the white Nebraska audience at my crowded screening erupted in cheers when Allison Williams got shot (or maybe she’s just their least-favorite Girls actress as well). Betty Gabriel (The Purge 3) and Marcus Henderson (Insidious 4) play the grandparents play-acting as servants (she’s especially good – coldly suspicious then briefly vulnerable). Keith Stanfield (Short Term 12 and Atlanta, Snoop in Straight Outta Compton) is the party guest who yells the title line at Kaluuya when a camera flash wakes him from “the sunken place.” And comedian Lil Rel Howery is Kaluuya’s buddy in the TSA who gets all the best lines.

Some of the reception has focused on whether it’s a scary/effective horror movie, which is the same kind of horror-purist bickering that lowered appreciation for Cabin in the Woods and The Witch. Come on everyone, break out of your genre holes. Peele more accurately calls it a “social thriller,” and says he’s working on four more.

Alan:

One minute in, this movie that will play every mall in America makes it viscerally clear that it’s not black guys who are scary – it’s neighborhoods packed with sheltered dopes who quake at the very thought of black guys … Get Out is searing satire, with scary/comic riffs on slavery and assimilation, but it’s also a smashing crowd-pleaser of a horror film, complete with mad science, cult-like crazies and a creep-out homage to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin … But even as Peele brings the house down, we see the serious toll of all this horror on Chris’ face and body. Neither the movie nor anybody watching can take it all as a joke.

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April 2024: Rewatched on a whim… now I’ve got a whim to rewatch US and NOPE. Peele might be the major filmmaker whose first three features’ titles have the fewest letters.

Presumably Stephen Root never wakes up… it’d be even worse if he does:

I forgot about the scene where Howery explains his theory to the police:

by ·Comments Off on Brainiac: The Baron of Terror (1962, Chano Urueta)

I didn’t set out to watch Brainiac: The Baron of Terror – nobody does. But these blog posts don’t write themselves. Sometimes when I’m sitting and writing about horror movies, I wish I was simply watching more horror movies, so I’ll half-watch some half-assed movie while writing. I doubt this one even makes it up to quarter-assed, so I’ll be brief.

Is this set in Spain, or did the Spanish Inquisition make it to Mexico? Very promising opening: in 1661 the Baron, who has magical powers to release himself from his chains (so, why doesn’t he simply escape the inquisitor?) is sentenced to burn, swears he’ll take his revenge in 300 years. Not a bad looking movie (except for a ludicrous optical effect of a comet) or story. But then comes the revenge, wherein the Baron puts on a silly hairy rubber mask with a long plastic tongue and puts his hands on his victims’ shoulders until they fall down. Supposedly he is sucking out their brains with the evil tongue, which he then stores in a canister and eats when needs some quick energy. At the end our hero discovers the canister, and I figure he’ll chuck it against a wall and the Baron will lose his magic, but instead two guys with flamethrowers bust in and torch the Baron – didn’t see that coming.

Heroes: Rubén Rojo of King of Kings and Rosa María Gallardo of Los secretos del sexo débil

A few translation problems: the grand inquisitor accuses the Baron of using spells “for clumsy and dishonest purposes,” and later an astronomer states “This is the most interesting thing about what I am telling you.” From the director of Blue Demon vs. The Infernal Brains (the guy had a thing for brains) and starring the movie’s own producer as the Baron.