by ·Comments Off on Pro-Life (2006, John Carpenter)

Movie starts and I am happy. Remote women’s clinic picks up a girl in trouble, then her father, a possibly dangerous anti-abortion religious nut with three gun-happy sons, drives up. Window rolls down… it’s Ron Perlman! You do not mess with Ron Perlman!

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Turns into a precinct/assault movie, which I have no problem with, but uh oh, where’s the horror? Oh, the girl was raped by demons, and her demon baby is about to be born (spoiler: it’s a flesh-colored spider with a doll head) and nothing can stop that and its demon father will rise up from the ground to claim the baby!

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So, pretty stupid. I could at least forgive it that, but that twice, twice!, a character (perlman, one son) comes up against the demon in a hallway of the clinic during the assault, gives an uh-oh look, camera cuts to demon looking all demony… then nothing. Did that low-rent demon suit not offer enough freedom of movement to take a swipe at a guy’s head? Anything? Anyway, girl shoots her baby and demon wanders off. Movie manages not to be an adequate comment on abortion, religion, clinics, fanatics, motherhood or demons.

Percussive score written by Carpenter’s son is the worst movie music I’ve heard since Goblin was in business.

Movie still gets points for having Ron Perlman in it.

by ·Comments Off on Night of the Creeps (1986, Fred Dekker)

1988: I was eleven, and all sorts of wonderful horror movies would play on TV… Deadly Friend, Chopping Mall, House, Prom Night, TerrorVision… and one of my favorites was Night of the Creeps. At the time I didn’t know it was a retro/parody/tribute sort of thing… didn’t realize the comedy in horror films (Freddy’s puns aside) was sometimes intentional, and didn’t catch the references to Night of the Living Dead, the tribute to cop-on-the-edge stories, or the smooth sci-fi/horror/comedy blend (which I enjoyed in such klassics as “Killer Klowns From Outer Space”) because I was too busy being actually scared by “Night of the Creeps”. The jokester kid who figures out how to stop the brain-slugs (fire/heat), then gets infected himself and crawls away to the boiler room to do himself in? One of the most terrifying things I’d ever seen on TV.

Unbelievably, when I rewatched it today, the movie was still good. Not as scary as it used to be, but clever and high quality. There wasn’t a better killer-alien-slug movie made before or since.

Things I’d forgotten: the b/w 50’s flashback intro and the whole detective character, but not much else. Either it’s very memorable or I watched it more times than I probably should’ve in the 80’s.

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Lead characters are named Romero, Hooper, Cronenberg, Carpenter, Cameron (James? for Aliens?), Landis and Raimi – cute. He casts John Carpenter alum Tom Atkins as the troubled detective, and Joe Dante fave Dick Miller as the police armorer (even giving him Joe Dante/Roger Corman stock character name Walter). I did not notice George Clooney, rumored to have a bit part as a janitor.

Funny, Fred Dekker also wrote “House”. I’ve always thought the poster for “Creeps” (zombie hand opening a door) evoked the “ding dong, you’re dead” poster for “House”. And of course, Dekker wrote/directed another TV fave of my youth, “Monster Squad”, before killing his career with “Robocop 3”.

This is unique: referencing your NEXT film rather than your previous one
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Fake though it looks, it used to scare me:
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Your stars, Rusty Griswold from “European Vacation” and an extra from “Porky’s”:
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Below: David Paymer as “young scientist”. This film was released the same month Paymer blew minds as “Larry, scientist” in George Lucas’s acclaimed “Star Wars” trilogy follow-up “Howard the Duck”
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Dick Miller doesn’t want no trouble:
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by ·Comments Off on Dream Cruise (2007, Norio Tsuruta)

“Washingtonians” may still be the stupidest episode of this “Masters of Horror” season so far, but this one is outright the worst. The others have been falling over themselves trying to find a new twist (“I know! george washington was a cannibal! oooh, killer ice cream man and if you eat his ice cream you TURN INTO ICE CREAM!”), but this one gives us no reason to watch, recycling three tired old horror concepts and adding no new style or twist or excellence:

1. guy is afraid of a thing [water] and must confront that thing [go on a boat ride with his boss and boss’s wife whom guy is secretly sleeping with].

2. guy and boss have killed people in the past [guy’s brother drowned, boss killed his ex-wife] who come back as ghosts to haunt them.

3. things keep happening that were just a dream… or were they???!???!??????!!!?

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Guy’s dead brother wasn’t killed on purpose so in the end he helps take care of the malicious dead ex-wife. Still, guy and boss’s wife are left floating out in the ocean at night, and guy is bleeding from the leg, so I hope sharks eat them before morning.

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I only half paid attention. Writer of Ring/Dark Water (who is starting to seem obsessive about drowning) and director of Scarecrow and Ring 0. The boss played the lead in “Audition” and the not-as-good white guy starred in “Captivity”.

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by ·Comments Off on The Screwfly Solution (2006, Joe Dante)

Made me more upset/queasy than any episode since “Cigarette Burns”, and includes possibly the worst stabbing scene I’ve ever watched. No sense of humor here, it’s a dark, pure horror, sort of unexpected from the usually jolly Joe Dante. Definitely the most successful movie from this season so far (still got 5 episodes to go), more so than the relatively lighthearted “Right To Die”.

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Elliott Gould (of American History X and the Oceans movies) and Jason Priestly 90210 are scientists called in by the military to explain/study a spreading phenomenon of mass murders by men against women, seemingly tied to a hormonal virus similar to that manufactured to exterminate the screwfly. The disease spreads, seen through the eyes of Priestly’s wife Anne, until she’s one of the only surviving women, catching a glimpse in northern Canada of the “angels” that started it all.

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Really a dreadful and well-made little apocalyptic movie, a mini masterpiece up there with “Homecoming” and “Cigarette Burns”.

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by ·Comments Off on Shorts round-up

Hellraiser Prophecy
Holy crap this was bad. I’ve avoided fan films for this long, so why did I watch this one? Oh yeah – I’ll watch anything in the Hellraiser series. I’m sure this guy was proud of his fan script, trying to tie the Leviathan thing from Hellraiser 2 together with the lead character who I don’t remember from Hellraiser 4 and introducing Lucifer himself into the Hellraiser world for a collision of different hells. That’s all fine and good – the mistake was to actually shoot the thing, with dismal actors who stumble over their lines and no sense of skill or vision behind the camera, just some series-aping tribute bits with the chains and some good makeup and costumes on the cenobites. Guess I’m not sorry I watched it (only 20 minutes long) but I won’t be checking out the hour of DVD bonus features.

Flowers and Trees
First technicolor cartoon AND first oscar-winner for best animated short (probably no coincidence) is a disney “silly symphonies” musical. Two trees (a nasty gnarled one and a strong young one) compete for a beautiful girl tree, and there’s a forest fire and singing and stuff. Like a popeye episode, but with plants.

Super Mario Movie
Clever: guy hacks a super mario bros. cartridge and turns it into a “movie” installation piece. It’s over-long at 15 minutes, but cute. The “plot” is that Mario is trapped inside an old game cart in a closet somewhere while the code is starting to break down. Like Rejected, but in 8-bit.

Hyas and Stenorhynchus & Love Life of the Octopus by Jean Painlevé
These are a lot cooler looking than I thought they’d be. The Yo La Tengo music works fine – I was going to try synching up the live versions, but I don’t suppose exact timing matters much in this case. Katy is grossed out by the idea of octopus sex.

by ·Comments Off on The Washingtonians (2007, Peter Medak)

Opens on a dark highway that looks suspiciously like the one in “incident on and off a mountain road” and maybe “pick me up”.

Stupid story that just gets more ridiculous as it goes. Guy moves into his grandparents’ old house with his family, finds scroll written by George Washington talking of eating children and carving forks out of their bones. Finds out it’s true and there’s an evil secret group devoted to keeping this secret and carrying on the eating/carving while wearing powdered wigs.

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A seems-familiar-but-I-guess-he’s-not-after-all Saul Rubinek plays the professor friend who summons the swat team at the end. Our male lead starred in “8mm 2”, his wife is a cartoon voice actress named Venus, evil lead was in MST3k-featured “The Dead Talk Back”. Based on a short story by a guy named Bentley. Aaaand our director, a 70-year-old Hungarian, made “The Ruling Class” and “Species 2” (those are really his horror-master qualifications?) and is supposedly now filming his next movie in Atlanta.

MoH motifs: skinlessness (not really, but someone does get threatened).

Closing joke after the news gets out and Washington has been nationally discredited, “they switched georges”:
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by ·Comments Off on Right To Die (2007, Rob Schmidt)

Director of so-what teen-horror “Wrong Turn” (and upcoming cary elwes starrer “The Alphabet Killer”) brings a surprisingly great episode to the so-far dismal second season of Masters of Horror. Inventive, not over-long, good performances and great makeup effects.

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Dentist MARTIN DONOVAN, who I am so happy to see again, is a very bad husband who lights his wife on fire after a car accident (revealed through flashbacks) then tries to pull her life support so he can carry on with his girlfriend/receptionist Robin Sydney (of gary busey horror “the gingerdead man”, heh).

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Some problems come up. The wife’s mother starts a(n underdeveloped) media war against Martin to keep the wife alive. Martin enlists lawyer Corbin Bernsen (not the washed-up catcher from major league [that was tom berenger] but the grumpy old veteran player) to get the wife unplugged. But a bigger problem is that whenever the wife flatlines, her ghost comes after Martin (and sometimes Corbin) and tries to kill him. So Martin has to turn a 180 and try everything to keep his wife alive, even if it means skinning his girlfriend when a donor doesn’t come through in time. Fabulous ending, he misses the clock, she dies, and he resignedly walks into his house where the ghost is waiting.

MoH motifs: naked breasts, skinlessness (those two unfortunately collide), recognizable actors doing silly things, that one dark highway that I see in every episode.

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by ·2 Comments

Interesting movie, pretty good. Funny how I can rent a movie looking for an entertaining horror one night, and it’s not scary or entertaining so it’s crap. Eight years later I can rent the same movie as an auteurist curiosity and it becomes “interesting movie, pretty good”. Was I right before, or am I right now? Fortunately it’s all opinion and nobody cares, so I can change my mind and justify things all I like.

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Clearly one of Cronie’s body-horror origin stories. Porn star Marilyn Chambers was cast for financial reasons (not political/commentary as often supposed) because producer Ivan “Ghostbustin’-ass” Reitman thought she’d be a bigger funding draw than the unknown Sissy Spacek. Then as shooting was beginning, Spacek’s other movie came out (see shot above). Oopsie.

Chambers capably plays a car accident victim who has a medical procedure (see two quotes below) that somehow lead her to grow a very sexual-looking little bloodsucking rabies-zombie-virus-transmitting armpit-mounted appendage. It’s nuts, but still not nuttier than the ice cream man movie I just watched.

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Nice looking movie, grimy and low-budget but well composed. When the characters have believable behavior, it always helps a horror movie… of course it’s one of the rarest things in the genre.

Chambers stays with a friend, goes out at night finding people to kill/infect. Is finally caught killing the friend (above) and gives herself up to one of her zombie victims in remorse, ending with the “night of the living dead” reminiscent close, an army cleanup crew tossing her body into a garbage truck.

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Senses of Cinema’s A. Allinson, in his barely-decipherable Cronenberg piece, says “Coinciding with the AIDS outbreak, Chambers, walking virus, is an apologetic martyr of “very experimental surgery” going wrong”.

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Film Freak interviews Cronenberg:

FF: “Rabid is home to your first major statement about body-modification–plastic surgery.”
DC: “Yes, and ironically enough what I invented in that movie has recently come to pass in stem cell research. Not that I think of prophecy as my métier, but we invented this neutral tissue that would become whatever tissue it came in contact with and that’s the basis of stem cell research, sort of the universal organic loam–so I have to take a little credit. (laughs) I suppose that there were some intimations even in my earliest work, Stereo and Crimes of the Future, about technology altering the body and there’s some of that in Shivers too. The plague in that film is an artificial one, of course, the result of an experiment gone wrong, and it occurs to me now that it was also meant to replace damaged organs. I hadn’t thought of that in years.”

Reminded me of the Dafoe scene in Existenz:
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No interesting cast/crew stories besides Cronie and Ivan Reitman. The murdered friend turned to cartoon voice acting, and one of the cops tracking Marilyn co-starred in Shivers.

Watched this the same week we went out to Nightmare Before Christmas. Neither movie is kind to Santa.
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by ·Comments Off on We All Scream For Ice Cream (2007, Tom Holland)

From the non-auteur behind the classic horror hits “Fright Night” and “Child’s Play” and the less classic S. King adaptations “Thinner” and “The Langoliers” (also writer of Psycho 2). This is from the writer of “The Fury”, which makes me a little less excited to see that one.

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Holland must not have been allowed to adapt King’s “It”. Here we’ve got a story about grown men being hunted down by a killer klown, with flashbacks of these guys as young kids doing bad things together. Sounds like “It” to me. But this one adds exciting story elements that “It” never had, such as that the young kids once conspired to kill a retarded ice cream man, and that the ice cream man comes back as an evil klown and if the now-grown-men’s KIDS fall under the klown’s spell and eat a special ice cream bar, the men will turn into ice cream and melt and die.

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Ridiculous story, reasonably well acted/directed, not a bad thing to half-watch while I’m doing something else, like writing these entries.