by ·Comments Off on Pelts (2006, Dario Argento)

“A lot of bad shit’s been happening around here ever since we started working on this coat. It’s like it’s cursed or something.”

Yes, this movie is about a cursed coat made from the cursed pelts of cursed raccoons, trapped and killed by (an obviously cursed) John Saxon on some cursed land near some cursed ruins behind a cursed old witch’s house.

Terrible music and bad acting in a silly story. What, did Friday the 13th: The Series use up all the cool stuff that could possibly be cursed, so now we’re down to raccoon pelts? At least Master Argento didn’t write it – guy who wrote the novel behind Michael Mann’s The Keep did.

Meat Loaf makes coats and likes strippers (one in particular). Saxon traps a buncha raccoons and raves over how perfect they are, phones Meat Loaf who picks them up and makes a coat to woo his favorite stripper. Oh, and since the pelts are cursed, everyone who touches them kills themselves and/or someone else in a bloody, horrible way.

Should’ve hired the makeup guy from Hellraiser 2, because in the climactic scene when Meat Loaf walks around skinless, it looks very much like he’s just wearing a gory black shirt.

Contains all three of the big MoH signature elements: naked breasts (boy, a lot of them), recognizable actors doing ridulous stuff (meat loaf, duh) and something nasty happening to an eye (lady in coat factory sews hers shut).

Why do the credits use a goofy comic font?
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Meat “Loaf” Aday being creepy:
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Scary raccoon:
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John Saxon (of Tenebre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Mitchell) about to be beaten to death:
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Of course, writing this led me to look up Friday the 13th: The Series on IMDB. Who knew that Atom Egoyan and actor David Morse directed episodes and the writer of Mystic River and The Postman wrote a couple? For that matter, who know that the writer of Mystic River worked on The Postman?!

by ·Comments Off on The Black Cat (2007, Stuart Gordon)

Late into SHOCKtober (Oct. 18th), I have finally unpacked my office enough to uncover the disc holding season two of “Masters of Horror”. Katy’s little brother is joining me for the celebratory kickoff screening, so I choose episode eleven, Stuart Gordon’s entry. It’s been a Gordon-filled month and his stuff is always either effective (“Dagon”) or entertaining (“Dolls”) or more usually both (“From Beyond”). Disappointingly, what we’ve got here is a slow-moving period piece that failed to impress or entertain.

The movie is supposedly based on Poe’s “The Black Cat”, but it’s actually an “Edgar Allen Poe In Love”, where we watch Poe’s visions and dreams that inspire him to write “The Black Cat”. Poe fans on the IMDB comment board enthusiastically rave about all the references to Poe’s life and stories scattered throughout the movie. Sort of a condensed look at Poe, implying that Gordon and usual co-writer Dennis Paoli will not be exploring each Poe work in-depth (this is the second after “Pit and the Pendulum”) as they have been doing for HP Lovecraft (seven films and counting).

Never heard of most of these actors and the only thing that turns up on IMDB is that half of them have been in the “Highlander” series for some reason. MoH trademark eye-gouging is here, but no nudity and I suppose an enthusiastic Jeffrey Combs will have to be our token celebrity casting.

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by ·Comments Off on Dolls (1987, Stuart Gordon)

Part three of my Stuart Gordon run during Shocktober 2007. Never thought I’d rent Dolls, but here I am. This movie predates Puppet Master by two years, Dollman and Demonic Toys by four and five years. Of course, stuff like Devil Doll has been around forever, but I used to see the box art for Dolls and assume it was a Puppet Master ripoff… guess not.

This is a gory horror movie for little kids. I’ll bet it didn’t do very well. A doll-loving little girl with an active imagination has a neglectful father and a wicked stepmother. Their car breaks down outside a huge house in the country owned by an elderly dollmaker couple. Coincidentally, a big doll-loving man-child and two brit-punk hitchhikers he picked up are in the same situation. Who will survive the night? Hint: only those who are pure of heart, treat children with respect, love dolls and don’t attempt to steal from the elderly.

Disturbingly, instead of (or in addition to?) outright killing people, the dolls capture them and turn them into new dolls, with awful little apple mummy heads behind their gentle ceramic faces. There are some doll-sized stabbings and shootings, but sadly no Puppet-Master blowtorches or drill-heads. Story really does play out like a children’s tale, which is just confusing. Kinda cool movie overall, cute and short.

The writer of this thing later co-wrote Honey I Shrunk The Kids with Gordon and Yuzna, and is now writing those badly-animated christian movies.

One britpunk girl starred in A-Ha’s “Take On Me” video. The manchild played the Big Bopper in La Bamba and costarred in Gordon’s Pit and the Pendulum. Gabriel the old man played Toulon in four of the Puppet Master films (heh, typecast as a murderous puppetmaker). The stepmother, awesome at being a completely horrible person, is the electroshock-giving evil doctor in From Beyond who gets her brain sucked out her eye socket by Jeffrey Combs. And the bad dad appeared in the Charles Band-written classic Terrorvision.

Movie starts the same way as Dagon… family vacation threatened by a suspiciously sudden thunderstorm.

by ·Comments Off on Dagon (2001, Stuart Gordon)

Since I enjoyed From Beyond, here’s another Stuart Gordon / Brian Yuzna / HP Lovecraft movie, Dagon (pronounced “DAY-gun”) which was released straight to video in the U.S., for some shameful reason.

Whole new cast and crew for this one, which was set/filmed in Spain. Sadly no Jeffrey Combs, just a nerdy Ezra Godden (who later starred in Gordon’s first Masters of Horror entry) and a lot of Spanish actors, including Francisco Rabal: the film director in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down… the voice of Luis Bunuel in 100 Nights of Simon Cinema… a hit-man in Sorcerer… the guy monica vitti dumps at the start of L’Eclisse… the guy Viridiana ends up with… somebody (dom morel) in The Nun… Father Nazarin… and in his final role, a drunken old man, the only human survivor in a small Spanish town overtaken by the cult of DAGON.

More serious and faithfully Lovecraftian than From Beyond. Some unfortunate-looking digital effect shots of the boat, but all the makeup effects and sets are very good. It’s not exactly a tense, rapid-fire battle of wits and strength, but rather semi-competent Ezra (channeling Harold Lloyd) versus an army of slow-moving dull-witted fish creatures.

Oh yeah, so Ezra is sailing off the Spanish coast with his girl and another couple when a storm hits. He and the girl raft to a deserted town for help. Ezra returns to the boat to find his friends gone (he later turns up skinned to death, she turns up minus one leg and raped by fish-creatures), then returns to land to find his girlfriend gone. He hides at the hotel until the cult comes calling, hilariously escapes using his limited physical abilities and a pocketknife, then crashes with Francisco Rabal who fills him in on some back-story about the townsfolk’s demon-worshipping and eventual devolution into fish-beasties.

Ezra, of course, turns out to be the son of the high priest in this town, and his half-sister is the gorgeous mermaid he’s been dreaming of, who wants him to stay with her and have dirty incestual hot mermaid sex (which may actually be possible, since her legs are just sorta tentacles, it’s not the full-on fish fin). He fights this idea at first and tries to rescue his girl from being sacrificed. When his girl is raped by and then eaten by Dagon, Ezra is given another chance, but opts to set himself on fire instead. Fortunately (for those of us perverse enough to have hoped for such a thing), he’s extinguished and goes on to live eternally underwater with the half-human half-sister in the kingdom of DAGON.

Ezra (left) with girlfriend and evil priest:
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High priestess:
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Francisco Rabal, a fine actor whose final scene in his final film had his face getting graphically ripped off by the evil priest:
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Mermaid love:
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Dagon (left):
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by ·Comments Off on From Beyond (1986, Stuart Gordon)

From Beyond fits in nicely with other 80’s horrors featuring characters who explore the outer limits of bodily experience, like Brain Damage (1988), Hellraiser (1987), Society (1989) and Teen Wolf Too (1987). Maybe it was a topic on everyone’s mind, or maybe they were just getting around to ripping off David Cronenberg. This one has an S&M-tinged sex theme to its body horror (as opposed to the blatantly S&M-drenched sex theme in Hellraiser or the hallucinogenic drug theme to Brain Damage). Movie never takes itself seriously, dialogue and character behavior a bit on the stupid side, still totally worth seeing.

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Movie stars everyone’s favorite lunatic Jeffrey Combs as a research assistant to weirdo Dr. Pretorius in a big spooky house. They succeed in their attempts to create a crazy machine that magnetically taps into the pineal gland, psychically revealing a new dimension of reality where swimming, bitey eel creatures and larger, darker things lurk. One of these things bite Pretorius’s head off, and Combs is committed to an ethically unsound institution by some questionable cops. He is released into the care of an even more ethically unsound psychiatrist, Dr. Katherine (the hot girl from Re-Animator), and taken along with somewhat-competent cop Ken Foree (from Dawn of the Dead!) back to the old house to reignite the experiments for no clear reason. They just hang out doing experiments until Pretorius reemerges all messed up from the alternate dimension and starts to gain control over everything. Oh, also our heroes’ newly-awakened pineal glands make ’em want to have kinky lite-S&M sex with each other.

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The horror and monsters escalate towards the end, there’s a sidetrack visit back to the hospital (where our psychiatrist is just rescued from shock therapy), Ken finally dies (eaten by a million black insects), and Jeffrey and Pretorius destroy each other in the end. Final shot is pretty great, Dr. Katherine going mad, just like Jeffrey apparently did at the end of the opening sequence.

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Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna have built their careers on filming HP Lovecraft stories… you could certainly find worse things to do with your time. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this screenplay isn’t very close to the source material, especially the funny/campy parts.

Wikipedia: “The pineal gland is occasionally associated with the sixth chakra (also called Ajna or the third eye chakra in yoga) or sometimes the Seventh (Crown) chakra. It is believed by some to be a dormant organ that can be awakened to enable telepathic communication.”

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by ·Comments Off on Inferno (1980, Dario Argento)

“Help me. Rats are eating me.”

Rose (not shown here because I didn’t think to get screenshots until after she’d died) lives in a spooky “New York” apartment building above a rare book store run by cat-hater Kazanian. She reads his book about The Three Mothers (which is not such a rare book since he has a few copies in stock). Bumbles around the basement, drops her keys into an underwater room with a portrait of a Mother and some floaty dead bodies, then recovers from that only to be stabbed in the neck.

Kazanian hating on some cats:
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How to die in this movie, in three steps:
1. a hand injury
2. (optional) animal attack
3. stabbed in the neck

Rose’s mustachioed brother Mark is in Rome studying music with his buddy Sara, when he gets a mysterious letter from Rose referencing the Three Mothers book.

Mustachioed Mark, seen here whispering into a hole:
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Mark runs off, freaked out by a cat lady who appears in class, so snooping Sara reads the letter.

Cat Lady, seen here in music class:
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Sara picks up a copy of the not-at-all-rare book in Rome, and stumbles immediately upon another of the three evil buildings that the book mentions. She runs away from an evil alchemist and befriends a man in the elevator who soon gets stabbed in the neck.

Sara’s elevator buddy, seen here under a heavy blue filter:
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A monster catches Sara and dispatches her with a broken window to the neck. I am not kidding.

Snooping Sara shortly before getting her stupid self stabbed:
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Mark goes to “New York” to find his sister, meets her hot neighbor Elise. Elise helps get him caught up on the mystery, then she gets tormented by having stagehands throw cats at her from off-camera, and stabbed to death.

Elise on the set of INFERNO:
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Also in the apartment are an evil nurse who wheels around an evil old man, a nondescript woman (not shown), and a loyal butler.

Mark hassles poor Kazanian, who is later tormented by cats in his bookstore. Kazanian loads the cats into a bag, takes it to the river to drown them, falls down and is nibbled by rats before being stabbed in the neck. His own fault, really.

Back at the mysterious apartment building, the butler is probably evil (aren’t they always?) but I don’t remember for sure… anyway, his eyes are gouged out, breaking the knife-to-the-neck rule set forth by INFERNO in order to keep the “an eye must always be gouged out” general law of Italian horror.

Butler near a birdcage:
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If the butler isn’t the mastermind behind all this evil, it must be the old man, who lives like Phantom of the Paradise in the cellar with his listening devices and his robot microphone.

Phantom of “New York”:
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Wrong again! It’s the nurse who wheels him about! I think the movie is saying that she’s one of the Three Mothers and that she is very evil, but I’m not sure how far her evil extends, or if it’s even dangerous to people who don’t live in this apartment or attend music class or hate cats. But oh my god, when Mark goes downstairs to face her, the movie’s theme song plays with lyrics sung in Latin, and that is great.

One Evil Mother:
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The nondescript woman sets the place accidentally on fire (it’s an “inferno”, if you will), and the Mother is either delighted or horrified by this, hard to tell since at this point she is wearing a rubber skeleton mask, but anyway she throws her hands in the air and Mustache Mark escapes, the end.

My favorite part of the whole affair is the interview on the DVD, where a weary-looking Argento talks about what a difficult and personal film this was, and how he and assistant director Lamberto Bava (dir. DEMONS and DEVIL FISH) and his father Mario Bava (dir. Black Sunday and Diabolik) struggled over this effects shot where a woman dramatically crashes through a mirror and comes out wearing a fakey skeleton costume. Yep, it took the three greatest minds of Italian horror to come up with that one. If only they could’ve got Lucio Fulci (Zombi 2, The Beyond) and Umberto Lenzi (Cannibal Ferox) to make her a better rubber suit.

The underwater bit isn’t bad, which is the same thing I said about Zombi 2. Maybe the Italians should make a whole horror movie underwater.

At least I was so busy marvelling at the silliness of the whole thing that I didn’t notice the dubbing.

Implications of this movie:
– women (or maybe actors in general) are just set dressings to be put in pretty poses and then threatened and stabbed.
– there is something evil, and it’s been around forever, and it is easily defeated by unknowing incompetents, though honestly it’s better off being left alone since it’s not much of a threat to anyone.
– alchemists are scary, cats are evil, architecture is evil

I think Eyes Wide Shut was based on this movie. The atmosphere and pacing, the camera zooms, the drowsily agitated characters, the fake New York, the singing in Latin… it all adds up.

Total Film mag and the They Shoot Pictures List call this one of the best horror movies of the ’80’s, but those people are tripping.

This is a semi-sequel to Suspiria, and Dario Argento’s brand new film Mother of Tears is a sequel to this one starring his daughter Asia (as a woman in trouble) and Udo Kier. Mustache Mark never amounted to much… Rose appeared in Puppet Master and Watchers II… Sara was in something with Marcello Mastroianni and Tom Berenger… Elise has been in all the big Italian horrors and will appear in Mother of Tears… the nurse was in The Beyond… Sara’s blue-tinted friend dubbed the title character in the Italian release of V For Vendetta… the old wheelchair man appeared in The Seventh Victim in 1943… and Kazanian was the husband in Last Year at Marienbad!

by ·Comments Off on Retribution (2006, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Don’t know why I’m frustrated by this, but the movie seems VERY Kiyoshi Kurosawa in themes, plot, pacing and look. It’s nice to see auteurist consistency, but Kurosawa’s not injecting his personality subtly into a studio picture, he’s writing all his own films, so maybe he could stick these themes somewhere else than another supernatural detective story. Those complaints aside, going through the screenshots I was struck again by what a nice looking movie it is… probably superior to the rest of the now decaying J-horror genre, which is again why I wish he’d break out of that genre for good instead of coming back to ghost stories after showing his depth with Bright Future and Charisma. Although, maybe Kurosawa was requested to write this kind of picture by his producers, who have done a whole ton of J-Horror, including the Ring and Grudge series, Reincarnation and Cross Fire… yeah, I’ll go with that.

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Kurosawa fave Kôji Yakusho plays Noboru, an unremarkable detective with a cute girlfriend he sees off and on. A murder is committed, a woman in a red dress drowned in salt water, and the clues point to Noboru. His partner Miyagi suspects him and he begins to suspect himself, but soon there are two other murders to distract them. A high-school kid and an office worker are also found drowned in salt water, but Noboru, playing on a ghostly intuition, quickly finds the murderers: the boy’s father Dr. Takagi, upset at the boy’s out of control behavior, and the man’s secretary with whom he was cheating on his wife.

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The two (three?) are unlikely people to be murderers, but they are all apparently driven to kill by the ghost of the red dress lady, who has been haunting our detective. I think she was either a former inmate at a black asylum on the river or a passer-by who got lost there. The ferry used to pass that building a decade ago, and our hero would see her in the window. The killings are her revenge for being ignored and left behind. “I died, so everyone else should die too”. She’s the collective conscience of the ferry riders, or the guilt of a civilization.

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I’m not sure if our detective killed the woman in red, but he is revealed to have killed his girlfriend. In the end, he alternates between seeing her (ghost) and being able to hold her, and seeing her dead decayed body on the floor, drowned in a pan of salt water. He goes to the black building and confronts the woman in red, who is grateful to be recognized, but carries on her quest to drown everyone in salt water. The final scene is our man wandering the empty city streets, once again (as in Pulse) the survivor of a ghostly apocalypse brought on by loneliness and neglect (and revenge [let’s not forget the title of the film], another of Kurosawa’s very favorite topics).

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Kurosawa reveals the ghost in different ways. Sometimes the detective is haunted in his dark apartment (the usual way to be haunted by a ghost), but sometimes he sees her in broad daylight, disturbingly composited into the shot to give her an otherworldly appearance, and sometimes (as in a great long-shot interrogation scene with Dr. Takagi) she’s in the room with a group of people, but only visible to one (and not to the audience).

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The movie is not too scary as horror (just a few jumpy moments), and it’s only okay as a detective story or a parable about society, but Kurosawa brings his usual mastery to the plotting and camera work, making it the most worthwhile movie I watched this week anyway. It’s not nearly as complicated / incomprehensible as reviews seem to indicate… jeez, are these people playing video games during the movie that they can’t ever follow a story, or am I some sort of narrative expert that I can? The movie portrays Tokyo as a crumbling metropolis besieged by earthquakes, and scenes are set in decayed abandoned buildings and over landfills.

H. Stewart at Film School Rejects writes:

Retribution’s greatest defiance of horror convention is that despite the identical M.O.s of the murders, there is no serial killer afoot, as the police suspect; Kurosawa’s cultural commentary, vaguely similar to that found in Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood, hints that the sorry state of our global society is not the result of one bad individual, one rampaging murderer of the Michael Meyers variety, but as a result of all of our combined actions; nearly everyone in the film is a killer, implying that we are all collectively culpable, not only for the things we do but for the things we don’t do that nevertheless manage to have a pernicious effect on others, even though we might not be conscious of it. … Retribution, coming in the era of the Iraq War, serves to show the devastating result of an unquenchable need for vengeance, and how we’re all responsible.

Our guy and his partner:
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Interestingly, the working title for Rob Zombie’s new remake was Halloween: Retribution, so I just saw two movies in a row named Retribution.

The cinematographer previously worked on K. Kurosawa’s Loft as well as Fatherfucker and Splatter: Naked Blood. Dr. Takagi starred in Princess Raccoon and Kurosawa’s Bright Future. The woman in red starred in Parasite Eve. Detective Toru Miyaji (above, right) was the horse-riding Baron in Letters From Iwo Jima and starred in the first of the 90’s Gamera movies. Harue starred in Udon, which I just missed at Emory last week. Kôji Yakusho (our star Noboru) starred in Cure, Charisma, Doppelganger, Seance, Eureka, The Eel, Shall We Dance, Babel, Memoirs of a Geisha, and appears at the end of Pulse.

One article on this film refers to Loft as a “ghost story/mummy film”. Can’t wait.

by ·Comments Off on Halloween (2007, Rob Zombie)

A Halloween remake (ugh: “re-imagining”) directed by Rob Zombie could not POSSIBLY be bad, could it? No, but it could be average/unnecessary, and that’s unfortunately what it turned out to be. Zombie doesn’t bring his super-gritty foul drive-in approach down here, just serves up a pretty straightforward horror/slasher with maybe a good cast and some good violence, but with no strong artistic stamp or reason to exist.

Malcolm McDowell is at least better than the awful Donald Pleasence as Myers’ psychiatrist, Tyler “Sabretooth” Mane is a fine Michael and regular TV guest-star Scout Taylor-Compton does no harm as Laurie Strode. All the fun is with the side characters: Danny Trejo as the asylum’s janitor, Sheri Moon Zombie as Mrs. Myers. I missed a ton of cameos (Ken Foree, Mickey Dolenz, Udo Kier, Clint Howard, Sid Haig – what was I looking at??) but at least I recognized Dee Wallace (of The Frighteners and The Howling) even if I didn’t know from where. I’ve gotta pay more attention to Sheriff Brad Dourif – he’s been in a buncha movies I’ve enjoyed.

Tons of added back-story about Michael as a troubled young man does not help. I’m sure Zombie has seen plenty of horror sequels along with the originals, and so he oughtta know that eventually every monster gets a humanizing back story (Hellraiser 3&4, Elm Street 6, Phantasm 4, etc) and it never helps – it’s just an excuse to make another movie, a lure to fans that dilutes the mystery of the original concept. Not that the back story segments here are bad exactly, or that the Halloween series could be hurt by them. I’ve considered it to be one of the very worst horror series from part 4 onward, so this movie only helps the series as a whole. It’s just a shame to see the filmmaker behind “The Devil’s Rejects” doing uninspired junk like this in the first place, throwing down with the ceaseless-remake crowd with a dull entry like this one, not even hitting as high or as hard as “The Hills Have Eyes”, or making the Halloween franchise fun and interesting and inventive again like “Bride of Chucky” and “Freddy vs. Jason” and “Alien Resurrection” did. I thought the best, most thrilling part of Halloween was the use of the original theme music written by John Carpenter. Let’s hope that “The Haunted World of El Superbeasto” fares better.

by ·Comments Off on Little Shop of Horrors (1986, Frank Oz)

There were two goals here. I nervously wanted to revisit one of my favorite movies from the 80’s and see if it still holds up for me personally (it did), and I wanted to show it off to Katy and see if she’d like it half as much as I do (she doesn’t).

Reverse Shot deconstructs:
“Though it’s hard to outright accuse Oz of actively perpetuating racism… his insistence on exaggerating the Motown aspects of the three girls and the svengali qualities of Audrey II seem a light mask for the white fear of a black threat ready to corrupt the safe American dream. When weighing Audrey II and the doo-wop girls against the cartoonishly antiseptic suburbia about which the protagonists fantasize, the fight against the plant takes on epic proportion, and an unpleasant metaphorical cast.”

I still dig the music and the movie, campy and racist though it may be. James Belushi, John Candy and Bill Murray are kind of wedged in there, but Christopher Guest’s wide-eyed easily-impressed rose-buying customer slides in perfectly. One of the doo-wop girls played Chris Rock’s mom (?) on “Everybody Hates Chris” and another was on “Martin” and a recent Damon Wayans show. Mr. Mushnik, who died in 1992, was in the 1978 “Heaven Can Wait”. Ellen Greene was Mathilda’s Mother in “The Professional” and appears these days on Heroes and Pushing Daisies. I don’t get why Rick Moranis didn’t outlast the 80’s – he does voices for Disney cartoons now.

EDIT: Dec 2011
Katy likes it better now, thanks to some soundtrack exposure. Maria enjoyed the songs. I dig the fake skies and long shots (with some subtle off-camera costume changes and transformations), but now that I know the ending was changed after test screenings, I can’t help but see the cheap, last-minute alterations (like Audrey 2’s stock-footage explosion) when the whole movie had been meticulously composed up until then. Gotta look up the deleted ending on youtube some time.

EDIT: Sept 2021
This time we showed it to Katy’s mom, who liked it so much that she wants to watch the Roger Corman version next, against my advice. Went with the theatrical version since it was $4 to rent and the director’s cut was $20, but maybe someday.