by ·Comments Off on The Lords of Salem (2012, Rob Zombie)

“Bleed us a king”

Whoa. The witchiest, most satanic movie of our time. House of the Devil cries back home to its mother while Lords of Salem goes out and burns down the neighborhood. Zombie knows how to build atmosphere, but his movies have also had portions of gleeful camp and self-awareness until this one, risking playing it straight up to a final burst of 1970’s psychedelia.

Sheri Moon Zombie is a Salem radio DJ alongside her sometime-boyfriend, beardy Jeff Phillips, and Rob Zombie regular and Dawn of the Dead star Ken Foree. But she starts to have headaches and experience weird visions and dreams after receiving a record by the titular Lords.

Meanwhile in way-back-story, Sheri’s ancestor Reverend Hawthorne (Andrew Prine, deputy of The Town That Dreaded Sundown) tortured and burned a bunch of suspected witches to death. In typical movie fashion, the modern witches (led by Sheri’s landlady and her “sisters”) now want revenge through the Reverend’s descendant, using her to summon some great evil. But atypically, they succeed. Local historian Bruce Davison (deadly dreamer of The Lathe of Heaven, mighty morphin’ senator in X-Men) learns more and more about the history and current events then is suddenly killed by Sheri’s landlady (Judy Geeson of To Sir With Love) and her two “sisters”, Dee Wallace (House of the Devil, The Frighteners) and palmreader Patricia Quinn (Rocky Horror). The Lords “concert” begins, everyone in attendance ends up dead with Sheri missing, and the Devil only knows what happens next.

Funny that Bruce Davison’s role was suposed to be played by Bruce Dern since I thought Meg Foster rather looked like Dern – until she got naked, which she did often. Saw Sid Haig’s name in the credits and kicked myself for not having recognized him, but IMDB says he was cut. It also says there were no digital effects, but I guess that doesn’t account for the melting-Jesus animation in one of the freakout scenes. Good use of a couple VU & Nico songs, speaking of those.

–
Oct 2023: Yep, it’s a good one.

by ·Comments Off on V/H/S (2012)

Sample dialogue: “Fuck” “What the fuck” “Shut the fuck up” “Fuuuck”

I still think Betamax would be a catchier and scarier title (though I enjoy saying “I watched V/H/S on DVD”). This is a world where “online” exists, as do digital cameras, even tiny digital HD cameras with mics that hide invisibly in a pair of eyeglasses. So how come the movie opens with a bunch of miscreants filming their dirty deeds on VHS cameras? Since the kids have more than one VHS camera, the movie thinks it can edit as rapidly between angles as it wants (though not as rapidly as the sick-inducing trailer). These miscreants, clearly valued for their experience with analog cassette technology, are then hired to break into an old dude’s house and steal his special VHS tape. Each time a lone kid “finds” the tape (it was in the VCR, dummies) and watches a segment, he winds up missing. Fortunately once we’re through the stupid framing story (by Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, the duo behind A Horrible Way to Die) there’s less rapid editing in the single-camera stories within.

Unexplained why the camera-glasses sometimes show text reversed:

Amateur Night
Clint wears his videoglasses out to the bar with buddies Shane and Patrick and they pick up a couple girls and go to a hotel. Lisa passes out and the guys reluctantly decide not to rape her, so they aim their attention at large-eyed Lily, who has only ever said “I like you” quietly to Clint all night long. It’s unclear how/if she and Lisa were friends, since Lily turns out to be a hellbeast who kills them all, but not before Clint falls down the stairs and breaks his bones trying to escape. Written/directed by one of the guys who made The Signal

Yay, East Atlanta:

Second Honeymoon
Stupid couple Joe Swanberg and “Stephanie” are on a road trip, taking a vacation video which plays like an actual vacation video. This is a compliment to realism but an insult to cinema. While they sleep, a drifter girl breaks in and films them sleeping, which is honestly creepy. Then more vacation video. Then the girl again, but this time she straight-up kills Joe Swanberg. Turns out the girl (Kate Lyn Sheil of Impolex) and “Stephanie” knew each other, and this was a terrible plot to kill him and escape together. Writer/director Ti West also made The Innkeepers and House of the Devil, and I might be finished watching his movies.

Hotel intruder:

Tuesday The 17th
Ooh, a good segment for once, by Glenn McQuaid (I Sell The Dead). Wendy with traumatic past returns to wooded scene of horrible murders with three friends – but they’re not very good friends, and she invited them as bait to the killer, who appears as a red-stocking-headed glitch on her videocamera. “Why can’t I film you?” she asks, but it never explains if she can see him with the camera lowered. The camera also sees dead people, presumably from her last voyage to this spot, making this the only segment that uses the handheld camera for something interesting (the other stories would be no different if their characters had no cameras at all).

Digi-glitch-monster hovers over a victim:

The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger
Guy witnesses his girlfriend’s haunted house in their nightly video calls. She seems to be going nuts, seeing little people (we see them too) and digging in her arm with knives looking for foreign objects. Turns out the “boyfriend” is setting her up, has implanted a tracking device in her arm and is letting aliens lay eggs in her, or something. Directed by Swanberg, written by Simon Barrett (A Horrible Way to Die).

10/31/98
Another good one, written/directed/starring five guys who walk into a seemingly empty house looking for a halloween party, finally stumbling upon some attic ritual where rednecks have got a girl tied up. After some pretty awesome supernatural stuff happens, they rescue the girl, who proceeds to unleash supernatural stuff upon the survivors (then she gets their car stuck in front of a train). Didn’t recognize any Atlanta scenery, but someone is told to take Spring street.

by ·Comments Off on A Horrible Way To Die (2012, Adam Wingard)

A Horrible Movie To Watch

Okay, I’ll try a little harder. Sarah (Amy Seimetz of Joe Swanberg’s Silver Bullets and Alexander the Last) meets a nice guy (Joe Swanberg himself) at an AA meeting. Turns out he’s in a group of serial killer super-fans, and they want revenge on Sarah for turning in her serial killer boyfriend (AJ Bowen from Marietta, murderous son in House of the Devil) – who I think kills them all, having just been released from prison. I dunno, slept through the middle third, sick with the flu and angry at the movie for looking so terrible. At the end of certain shots and scenes, the cameraman appears to get confused then pass out, adding the only stylistically unique element to the movie. I actually came to enjoy those moments, to look forward to them, wondering if one of the two cameramen is narcoleptic or if this is an effect anyone would plan. Wingard (from Alabama) contributed to recent horror anthologies The ABCs of Death and V/H/S.

Joe:

NY Times liked it, calling it “commentary on our willingness to tune out evil for the sake of emotional connection.”

by ·Comments Off on The Hole (2009, Joe Dante)

My sole SHOCKtober feature this year. Still upset that I missed this in its one-week, Atlanta-only theatrical run. It opened with no publicity on a week that I didn’t check the papers assuming nothing was playing. Anyway I was determined to watch Joe Dante’s newest, excited despite the average-ish reviews it got. And it’s a pretty average movie – imaginative, but still a gentle teen horror flick about growing up and overcoming your fears.

Gearing up to battle evil:

Bringing to mind The Gate and The Handsome Family, two boys with a hard-working mom (Teri Polo, Dan’s girlfriend in Sports Night) and violent, imprisoned dad team up with the hottie next door (Haley Bennett of Kaboom) and find a bottomless hole in the basement of their new rental house. This is where the 3D effect would shine – all the experimental lowering of things into the camera/hole.

Teri:

Killer Klown – good puppetry in this movie:

The kids’ darkest fears start following them around town (except older boy Dane who is afraid of nothing). Neighbor Julie is haunted by her best friend who died when they were younger. Little Lucas is just afraid of clowns. After Dick Miller’s wasted silent cameo as a pizza guy, the kids venture to the abandoned glove factory “Gloves by Orlac” to ask former homeowner (and holeowner) Bruce Dern (a couple decades after The ‘Burbs) what is up – but he’s little help and is soon silenced by the Hole.

Dick:

Bruce:

Dane has a fear after all, that his dad will come back and beat the hell out of his family, so the movie turns nightmarish as he battles his Danzig-looking father (played by “one of the tallest actors in Canada”) in a CG-assisted Caligari-house. Fears conquered, the hole becomes a simple crawlspace.

Dante’s version of kids today hasn’t changed much since Explorers – it’s definitely set in the present (The Killers and Jonas Bros are mentioned) but these boys’ ideas of fun include sketching, reading books (including the other Dante’s Divine Comedy) and throwing the ol’ baseball around (though they do have a Playstation).

Good gag: the kids turn away when mom comes home, missing the giant eyeball recorded by the camera they lowered into the hole:

Someting Dante and I have in common: Morristown!

From the nerdist interview:
“When you’re shooting for 3-D, do you feel a bit like John Goodman in Matinee?”
JD: “I always feel like John Goodman in Matinee.”
…
“So if there were a hole in Joe Dante’s basement, what would come out of it?”
JD: “Financing for my next picture!”

by ·Comments Off on The Innkeepers (2011, Ti West)

It’s a nice change that Ti West makes old-fashioned, slow-moving, simply-plotted horror films, but I think he goes too far in that direction. I didn’t like House of the Devil either, but at least the ending of that one was overall less lame. Here he gives the lead girl an inhaler (assuming nobody in the audience has ever seen a movie before), allows crappy, predictive string-drone music to detract from the decent cinematography, and sets up a boring haunted-hotel scenario with dense characters who do things like go down to the basement when they’ve been warned not to.

Claire and McGillis:

Claire (Sara Paxton of Last House on the Left Remake) costars with Pat Healy (a Ford brother in The Assassination of Jesse James), who was the one character I kinda liked, because he’s so flaky. He runs a terrible-looking website about hotel ghosts, but he’s lazy as shit and doesn’t seem too excited about ghost-hunting (turns out he invented all his ghost stories). And at the end, after declaring his love to Claire and saying he’ll do anything for her, he flees the hotel in terror, leaving her to die alone (from ghosts? or asthma? we’ll never know!)

1980’s starlet Kelly McGillis plays a surly washed-up actress and spirit-healer, Tiny Furniture‘s Lena Dunham has one scene as the annoying girl at a coffee shop, and George Riddle, looking like a death-bed Gene Hackman, is an old man who wants to die in the room where he stayed on his honeymoon.

Claire stalked by undead Gene Hackman:

by ·Comments Off on Brainscan (1994, John Flynn)

Not a bad little virtual-reality teen horror movie. Well, okay, it’s quite a bad little virtual-reality teen horror movie, but Trevor and I have sentimental attachment to the stupid thing. So how could we pass up watching the edited-for-television version (“I’m in deep stuff”) at Dolly’s house?

Edward Furlong continued frittering away his Terminator 2 goodwill after Pet Sematary II and before his brief 1998 resurgence, appearing as a troubled (dead mom, metal albums) video gamer who gets a demo disc of an immersive VR experience, a shoddy Existenz starring a punk clown called Trickster. In first-person, Eddy stalks then knifes a sleeping neighbor. His gaming buddy Kyle knows too much, so Ed goes back the next night and wakes up hearing that his friend has died (we don’t watch this part). Next he tries to rebel against Trickster and stop the killing, but Tricky wants Ed to take care of his crush Kimberly. Another killing spree ends with a vigilante neighborhood watch group shooting Kyle’s dad, I think. But Ed wakes up and everyone’s still alive – it was all part of the game experience. So he trashes his room a bit, then hands off the disc to a hated authority figure, and all ends well.

Written by Andrew Walker, who specializes in convoluted serial killer stories (Se7en, Sleepy Hollow, 8mm), mostly pretty tame but with a few scenes that seem like inspirations to later works (Lost Highway, an Aphex Twin video). The actors who played Furlong’s friends Kyle and Kimberly would go on to appear in nothing much, and nothing much, respectively, but the killed dad was in Scanners, which is the movie people always think you’re talking about if you mention Brainscan.

by ·Comments Off on 2000 Maniacs (1964, Herschell Gordon Lewis)

It is my dad’s fault that I’ve wanted to see this for so long, since he mentioned it years ago. I figured it’d be pretty bad, but I didn’t count on it being a self-conscious bit of low-budget camp horror-comedy. So it’s a stupid, terrible movie but still impossible to hate (I have more of a savage dislike for it).

The fateful barrel:

“The South’s gonna rise again,” says the corny-ass song over the introduction, and that’s just what the movie’s about. Some lost travelers on their way to Atlanta get redirected to a rural town and crowned the guests of honor in a Civil War revenge ceremony, killed in various inventive ways, usually in broad daylight before a crowd of cheering townies. One is crushed by a giant rock in a carnival game, another is ripped apart by horses, and in the most famous scene (to my dad, anyway) a guy is put inside a barrel full of nails and rolled down a hill. Twist ending: the couple who escapes returns with law enforcement, but the town has vanished, leaving only a plaque saying that the whole place was leveled by the Union army during the war (apparently inspired by Brigadoon, if “inspired” is the word).

Oh and one girl’s arm is just chopped off:

Lots of banjo music, obviously. The cameraman is zoom-happy and everything looks cheap, but at least it was shot with direct sound, which you can tell since the background hum changes dramatically with every edit. This likely puts it technologically above such contemporaries as Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned and Antonioni’s Red Desert. I distracted myself with the horrible accents (shot in Florida but somehow devoid of authentic Southerners) and character names (Terry Adams! David Wells!).

One detail about the South the filmmakers got right:

An advertising man, Lewis also made The Wizard of Gore and Blood Feast, and producer David Friedman oversaw two Maniacs sequels in the 2000’s.

by ·Comments Off on The Cabin in the Woods (2012, Drew Goddard)

This is one of my favorite things – I went back and watched it again, to be positive. Goddard (wrote Cloverfield, worked on Lost and Buffy) and producer Whedon (who is having a big month) manage to make it seem easy, blending horror and comedy, movie and meta-movie more excitingly than Scream did, forming a sort of horror-movie construction-kit. It gradually reveals its scheme while telling us why this is all necessary, and when the stock characters realize that they’re stock characters and break out of the model, they knowingly and misanthropically unleash Lovecraftian armageddon.

The Virgin: Kristen Connolly

L-R:
The Scholar: Jesse Williams of Grey’s Anatomy
The Athlete: Chris “Thor” Hemsworth
The Slut: yellow power ranger Anna Hutchison
The Fool: Fran Kranz of Whedon’s Dollhouse

Not pictured: Richard Jenkins and West Wing star Bradley Whitford push the buttons manipulating our stock characters to their doom. Brian White (IMDB specifies that he’s their 34th Brian White) is the new guy, Amy Acker (also Dollhouse) runs the chem department, and an uncredited Sigourney Weaver runs the whole show.

Writer/director Goddard:

The truth is, this movie does comment on a horror movie, but that wasn’t our goal. We wanted to comment more on who we are and what part horror plays in us as a people. If you keep that in your sights the whole time, it’s easier to find the balance, because then your movie is just becoming about commenting on the human condition and not worrying too much about, “What is this saying about the genre or the films?” It’s much more just, “What are we saying in general?” That’s the sort of thing you have to hold firm to.

July 2024: Watched again. Catching up with the cast… Final Girl Kristen Connolly was in Ben Affleck cuck drama Deep Water. Chris “Dementus” Hemsworth didn’t get any major roles until recently. Since Much Ado, Fran(z) was in Bloodsucking Bastards and The Dark Tower. Wolf girl Anna Hutchison was in an alien invasion thing with a lesser Hemsworth and a Nick Cage vengeance movie just called Vengeance. The Scholar is a Grey’s Anatomy lifer who played a ghost in the Jacob’s Ladder remake Goddard made Bad Times at the El Royale, and cowriter Joss Whedon was cancelled for being toxic then his final film was erased by Snyderverse fans

by ·Comments Off on The Ward (2010, John Carpenter)

In 1966 Oregon, Kristen (Amber Heard of Drive Angry 3-D) burns down a house, is arrested, sent to The Ward at a psychiatric hospital, given mean looks from the nurse and orderly, but patience from the doctor (Jared Harris, the guy who isn’t Iggy Pop or Billy Bob Thornton in my favorite scene of Dead Man). She gradually gets to know her fellow patients, none of whom are real because the movie has a massive Tyler Durden ending. The ghost story (“Alice is killing us one by one”) and murder mystery (“who killed Alice?”) are all Kristen/Alice coming to terms with her identity, after some traumatic shit went down in that farmhouse from earlier.

Here’s Meryl Streep’s daughter again (as Emily, the one who also wants to escape) with much more to do than in Larry Crowne. We’ve also got Danielle Panabaker (of Friday the 13th Remake) as Sara the sexy one, Laura-Leigh as Zoey the girly pigtails one, and Lyndsy Fonseca (of the Femme Nikita TV show) as Iris the smart one. Some traumatic electroshock therapy and murder by medical instruments, the most easily-escapable psych ward ever, and the non-MST3K version of Bert I. Gordon’s Tormented on a television set.

It’s all pretty boring, an average 2010-era teen shock-horror flick, sub-Drag Me To Hell, except for one cool bit at the end with editing to the beat of the doctor’s metronome.