by ·Comments Off on Heretic (2024, Scott Beck & Bryan Woods)

“That South Park musical kinda makes fun of us.” Hugh Grant invites in a couple of mormon girls who don’t quite talk like real people, but maybe that’s the point. He quickly proves to be weirder than they are, with his dogeared bibles of all religions and specific theological questions they can’t answer, his never-seen but oft-mentioned wife, the metal in his walls preventing cell signals. Hugh puts on a Hollies LP and calls the Book of Mormon a “zany regional spinoff edition” of the Bible over “The Air That I Breathe,” then drops the gentle facade and locks them in his Barbarian basement with an apparently dead woman. Resurrection, afterlife, and simulation theory are proposed, the girls realize they need to outwit Grant at his own theological game and call out some inconsistency in his story, leading to a final showdown which kills Sophie Thatcher (of the new Companion), leaving only the quieter Chloe East (Wolf of Snow Hollow) alive to escape, no thanks to Elder Topher Grace who’d been searching for them. Decent movie, we should cast Hugh Grant as a verbose psychotic in more movies.

by ·Comments Off on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)

Two siblings and three of their buddies take a lil roadtrip to see if their slaughterhouse grandpa got dug up in the reported wave of grave robbings. This is something I’d completely forgotten: they’re not lost tourists, the Leatherface family is their own family’s next door neighbors. Of course they’re still new-age hippies who’ve lost touch with their roots, but they’re not such sheltered city folks that they won’t stop and pick up a freaked-out and bloody hitchhiker.

Leatherface sits down and takes a breather:

Kirk (sledgehammered) later did set decoration for The Craigslist Killer, Pam (slaughter-hooked) became a catalog foot model, and Jerry (also sledged) left the movie business. Wheelchair-bound Franklin, who sits nice and still while being surprise-chainsawed, was in the next year’s Race With the Devil. With a half-hour left, his sister Sally is the last one alive, getting subdued by a gas station guy with a broom and brought home for dinner before her famous escape. Sally was in Tobe’s Eaten Alive, the hitchhiker became a voice actor for Power Rangers, only the gas station guy returned for the sequel, but all of them – especially Leatherface Gunnar – were haunted for decades by the fangoria fanbase.

by ·Comments Off on Flesh for Frankenstein (1973, Paul Morrissey)

Paul Morrissey died at the tail end of SHOCKtober so I immediately put on his masterpiece. Mad Scientist Udo Kier is building a race of zombie superpersons with his equally mad assistant Otto, while the doctor’s wife is having a barely-secret affair with houseboy Joe Dallesandro, who is disturbed to see his late buddy’s head atop Udo’s monster.

Beautiful movie, full of Cronenbergian wound-fetishes and guts comin’ at ya (it’d be so sweet to see the 3D version). I can’t remember the Frank family’s two children having any lines but they’re lurking behind walls and windows in every scene. All the people and monsters tear each other apart through malice and/or incompetence, and after Udo’s incredible disembowelment, Joe is still alive but a captive of the psychotic tots (she’s the girl we saw die in Who Saw Her Die, soon to star in Demons).

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 29: SHOCKtober 2024 part two

Is this our first SHOCKtober to feature two separate Last Ten Minutes roundups?
I’m not gonna look through the archives to find out!

Late Night With The Devil (2023, Cairnes Bros)

This got decent reviews, I avoided because of its AI scandal. A talk-show guest is getting carol-anne’d into the video realm, her priest and mom suffer grievous neck injuries and someone I’m going to assume was the show’s Andy Richter gets melted by the split-headed beastie, then the show resets and host Jack is back on set disoriented, experiencing time as clip-show. I guess demons Lawnmower-Manned the airwaves. An owl-headed ceremony leads him to a reunion with his dying wife, then wow it ends on “Keep It Warm” by Flo & Eddie. The host was David Dastmalchian, a regular of Batman and Antman movies.

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Smile (2022, Parker Finn)

With part two in theaters it’s time to admit I’m never gonna watch this. I don’t exactly know what it’s about but I bet someone smiles at the end. Sosie (of a Manson movie) is having the childhood trauma talk with her alive-again mom, who then becomes an overly tall hair-monster with a spooky Lawnmower Man voice. She sets the beast on fakey-fire, then goes home and explains her trauma to her man Kyle (one of the Red State kids, with a Downhill Racer poster). But she was dreaming that part, and now the hair-monster takes both their heads apart, and this must have cured her trauma because she smiles.

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Maxxxine (2024, Ti West)

Shootout at the Hollywood sign – this must be Bobby Cannavale dying in her arms, and another cop has been stabbed in the eye by her dying serial killer father, bringing postscript fame to her acting career, and the story fizzles out on her next movie set with Liz Debicki. On one hand I was right when I decided Ti West was bad 14 years ago, on the other, I don’t learn from my mistakes and watched two more of his features plus two anthology segments and the tail ends of four others. Why can’t I just leave Ti West alone?

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Civil War (2024, Alex Garland)

Ballistic and vehicular mayhem, the press is on the scene, and Dunst seems to know something the soldiers don’t, so her team wanders straight into the White House. The soldiers in the ensuing shootout are awfully accommodating to the photographers, then Dunst gets shot rescuing her reckless comrade. In the end they’re just like me, wanting to get real close to an action movie and take screenshots. Nick Offerman would be a pretty good pick for President irl.

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Men (2022, Alex Garland)

Suitably creepy and cool-looking as Jessie Buckley is chased by a little car with a maniacal driver, then encounters a nude forest god which gives anal birth to a screaming pregnant man-baby which gives alien-egg birth to… I’m guessing Rory Kinnear from Peterloo, who gives spinal birth to a bloody mutant Rory, who gives oral birth to, finally, a different guy (Paapa Essiedu). I looked up the word “portentious” to make sure that’s what this is, and, yup. Definitely a more suitable Annihilation follow-up than Civil War was, though in between he made the computer conspiracy series Devs.

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Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022, Halina Reijn)

I can’t believe these fuckin streamers. They’re computer programs, supposedly learning about you and recommending stuff to your tastes, but when I hit play on this it showed a promo for Maxxxine, the movie I just watched twenty minutes ago. It couldn’t be too hard to improve on this system. Anyway, Borat’s daughter and Amandla “The Hate U Give” Stenberg are still alive in a house full of their dead friends, having hushed talks in poor lighting. It’s nice of Bakalova to give us latecomers a tour of all the deaths we missed, then they play with their phones for a long while. The director’s Nicole Kidman age-gap follow-up is getting better reviews than this did.

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Paranormal Activity 3 (2011, Joost & Schulman)

Also, it’s unpleasant enough to type in the search field using the Roku’s NES-style direction pad, is it too much to ask for the rows of letters to wrap around, so I never have to hit left-arrow six times in a row? First-person-cam dad can’t find his family, but finds occult artwork in the dining room and a coven in the garage (the witches from part 5?). His wife knocks him down with gallows-swing-attack, and one of his daughters is a beastie, then a psychic witch snaps him in half. Not as jump-cutty as part two at least. The directors made the Catfish doc.

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Paranormal Activity 4 (2012, Joost & Schulman)

This one’s well-lit and in color. Wow, did anyone realize all these movies have the same girl in them? I figured each movie was about a different family. This one’s got static cameras in each room, and the jumpcuts are back. Mom gets psychically hurled into the ceiling then Johnny Exposition arrives with internet research on covens, but a longhair girl JCVDs his neck. The surviving girl seems decently famous, starring with Vince Vaughn in Freaky, but she doesn’t survive for long, the coven having grown to a mob of hundreds of suburban women. Instead of fun songs over the closing credits (Civil War had “Dream Baby Dream”) these just have a low rumble.

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Cell (2016, Tod Williams)

Prime movies have ads now? Fuck that, guess we’re skipping Paranormal Activity 6 and Five Nights at Freddy’s, but we gotta check out the ad-free Cell to complete our series of Lawnmower Man references. John Cusack is telling his kid the story of Orpheus and saying goodbye to his team before driving away in an ice cream truck and discovering that the transmission tower is surrounded by a very-CG mob of zombified cellphone addicts. He fires all his shotgun shells into one teenager and locates his own cell-poisoned kid within the mob, then blows the truck and tower and everything sky high – or does he??!? I was sorely tempted to read this book at one time, but went with The Ruins instead, damn. Movie looks like shit – this was Williams’s follow-up to Paranormal Activity 2 (a coincidence, I swear).

by ·Comments Off on Two Evil Eyes (1990, Argento & Romero)

Watching this and Body Bags together, an anthology of anthologies, two horror kinda-features from the head and tail end of Tales From The Crypt‘s cable run.

We open with the segment by Romero, not in his prime era. It’s his least scary zombie movie, and this seems like a half-hour script padded out to an hour since the actors say everything at least twice. I get that they’re trying to modernize a Poe story, but without that Corman/Price flair it feels like a TV episode. “Sick stuff always turns out to be rich people.” Adrienne Barbeau (after her John Carpenter heyday) is keeping her rich husband alive long enough to transfer everything into her own name with help from her hypnotist boyfriend. Husband dies too soon, and they consider Weekend-at-Bernies-ing him but settle for tossing him in the basement freezer (my second frozen body of the week after Crimes of the Future). Since he died while hypnotized and is still responding to questions, the doctor has got an open channel to the afterlife, very exciting for him until the scared wife just shoots the zombie husband in the head. Two cops arrive at the rich guy’s house to investigate, then when the spirit of the zombie husband kills the hypnotist in his sleep the same two cops arrive at his hotel – there are only two cops in NYC. At least it’s fun that everyone here except Dr. Boyfriend was in Creepshow.

Dr. Boyfriend and his comatose patient:

Argento’s half opens with police photographer Usher (Harvey Keitel) shooting a woman who died by pendulum, this is more like it. Harvey’s wife brings home a cat, he kills it to photograph its death then when she rightly accuses him he attacks her in a mezcal rage then dreams of being sentenced to the Ga-ga pole treatment at a ren faire. Of course she knows he killed the cat because she finds the photo book he published of its murder, and when she brings home a new cat he kills his wife with a cleaver and bricks her up to rot within the walls. When yet another cat alerts visiting cops to the body Harvey kills them and then, as foretold by prophecy, accidentally hangs himself trying to escape out the window while handcuffed to a dead cop.

The cat’s distinctive mark:

Good cast – the landlords are from Psycho and The Seventh Victim, the wife’s music student from Maximum Overdrive, one cop is McDowell from Coming to America, and the hotgirl he meets at a bar is a Warholian who played “Diane Paine” in a sports slasher. Released the week after the Living Dead remake, with a cameo by Savini as a madman. It still feels like a Crypt episode, but a good one.

Usher’s wife, dream sequence version:

by ·Comments Off on Scream 2 (1997, Wes Craven)

Wes Craven got sent to diversity training after the first movie, and this time Drew Barrymore and her doomed bf are played by Jada Pinkett (Demon Knight) and Omar Epps (Dracula 2000), who get killed during the premiere of the movie Stab based on Cox’s character’s book about the events of part one. This sort of meta-spiral inevitably leads to the Cinderhella scenes in Detention.

Neve is at college now, even more traumatized than she was in the last movie, with boyfriend Derek and roomie Hallie, who will both end up in Mission to Mars after failing to survive this movie. Also not surviving: Jamie Kennedy (this is for the best, he’s much less charming here than in part one) and sorority sister Buffy, who gets a big solo scene.

Or maybe Buffy is the Drew Barrymore, I dunno:

Arquette comes to campus after the killings start, crippled from getting stabbed in the first movie, as does Cox of course, and they are cute together. Her new cameraman Joel (Duane Martin of The Faculty) quits his job before getting killed, amazing. Jamie explains the sequel rules (bigger setpieces, higher body count) and Wes leans into the clever references with Friends jokes and generic Hollywoodized scenes of his own movie in Stab (feat. Luke Wilson as Skeet Ulrich), and there’s even a play-within-the-play (Neve is playing Casandra for drama teacher David Warner), which gives us a location for the final showdown.

They’ve kept the tradition of ghostface getting beat up in every encounter, and that of ghostface being two people. Everyone thinks it’s Neve’s boyfriend again but he’s innocent, fake-tortured by frat guys to a Jon Spencer song then murdered by film student Timothy Olyphant (Dreamcatcher), the crazy Lillard-type partner of Skeet’s revenge-seeking mom Laurie Metcalf. The ending needs work – we are asked to believe that a high-stacked pile of stones in a college theater production is made of actual stones. Liev Schreiber, wrongly imprisoned for Neve’s mom’s murder before part one, just wants TV interviews and fame and cash, keeps getting overlooked because of the second wave of killings so he will presumably get fed up and become the killer in part three.

Liev found your cat:

by ·Comments Off on Alice, Sweet Alice (1976, Alfred Sole)

Alice is a creepy kid who loves masks and torments her popular little sister Brooke Shields. After Brooke is murdered in church and her mom’s shitty sister is repeatedly stabbed in her legs and hands, Alice is brought in for questioning. The parents take her home against psych recommendations, and more people get stabbed, but the masked raincoat killer has been the family’s psycho-catholic housekeeper (a Spike Lee regular)… all along? It’s confusing since Alice wears the same getup, but given the movie’s half-giallo half-Don’t Look Now influence, it’s probably meant to be confusing.

Unlike Tucker & Dale we got real filmmakers in charge, though you wouldn’t know it from checking their other credits – Sole made porn and did production design for the Wishmaster and Donnie Darko sequels, the producers and DPs made nothing, and the editor cut The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. But for a brief moment in the mid-70s they made a beautiful slasher film in which the vibes are so far off.

by ·Comments Off on Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010, Eli Craig)

Not the most excellently made movie, but it gets pretty far on a great concept, good writing and charming leads. Due to a misunderstanding, eight vacationing college kids believe two yokels are killers, while our guys (Alan Tudyk and Escape Room‘s Tyler Labine, both of whom need to be in more movies) think the incompetent kids are a suicide cult since they accidentally kill themselves whenever they encounter something pointy. Cerie from 30 Rock is the only one who understands them, while the alpha “Chad” (murderous goth of Final Destination 3) is their biggest threat.

Our heroes:

Okay the policeman’s death was a little bit their fault:

Cerie attempts peace talks:

The goth ain’t having it:

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.