by ·Comments Off on Night of the Living Dead Remake (1990, Tom Savini)

“This is hell on earth.” Produced by the guy behind the Death Wish sequels and opening with Johnny and Barbara recast as worse actors, this remake is starting out looking like a bad idea. Romero had already returned to the Dead with Day and Dawn, and the first couple Return movies had come out in the 1980s, but inexplicably there were no straight remakes of the public-domain original NotLD until Romero initiated this one, handing the reins to gorehound Savini, whose new zombie designs attempt to offer a reason for this movie to exist.

They’re coming to get you:

Tony Todd soon arrives with a second reason. A theoretical third would be Barbara (who had costarred with Savini in Knightriders), rewritten as a stronger character who does more than just cower in the corner, and even survives the movie, but I dunno. The original movie had the character behaviors and dark ending appropriate for its moment, and this one’s doing its own late-80s thing (but maybe still set in 1968 – hard to tell in a farmhouse).

Local kids, Tony, the normally basement-bound Coopers:

Local kid Tom is a horror regular, having appeared in at least five sequels including a Mark Hamill Watchers, and his fiery death at the gas station is a big improvement over the original version (and just as stupid), so, movie has three and a half reasons to exist – that’s more than most movies. The mean baldie in the basement who endangers them all and is righteously murdered by Barbara at the end later became a Rob Zombie star.

Do not shoot at the lock on the gas pump:

by ·Comments Off on Final Destination 5 (2011, Steven Quale)

Funny from the start, “Practical Pictures presents” and then a titles montage of very non-practical effects. Opening death-escape setpiece is a company (called Presage, lol) retreat aboard a bus on a collapsing bridge, and based on the first death (Intern Candace impaled on a sailboat mast Flesh For Frankenstein style) I assume this was shot in 3D like the last one.

Premonition Boy is Sam – he’s a lousy salesman at the company moonlighting as a promising restaurant cook. Law & Order veteran Courtney Vance can’t prove the kid caused the bridge collapse, decides to keep tabs on things, but is in the wrong movie and can’t keep up. And then off we go: gymnast Candance flips into a catastrophe crunch and all her bones explode in front of boyfriend Peter, then horrible PJ Byrne (of a Mary Lynn Rajskub Charles Manson movie) gets his head smooshed by a Buddha during acupuncture, and Tony Todd tells the rest of them they’re doomed.

Hotgirl Who Is Useless Without Her Glasses opts for lasik, oh no, gets her eye burned out AND falls out the window. It’s always more than one thing – they go through hell, not a simple lawnmower rock to the head. Newbie factory supervisor Arlen (of a Friday the 13th remake) “kills” disgruntled union man Brent (The Damned Thing), possibly saving his own ass, as the kids are re-figuring out the death-plot everyone figured out in previous movies. Then shithead boss Koechner (Run Ronnie Run, Piranha 3DD) catches a simple wrench to the head, ok.

When your job is to watch people mock you on video:

When your horror movie is anti-union:

Peter with the dead girlfriend decides to kill everyone, they thwart his plan at Sam’s restaurant kitchen (a place full of intriguingly dangerous implements), the cop gets in the way and dies, and now the weird death-logic they’ve devised (or invented) means the final couple (Sam is TV’s Harvey Dent, Emma of Frozen) gets to live natural lives and move to Paris together – but the movie is a sneak prequel as they board the flight with the kids from part one.

Quale worked on Titanic and The Abyss, the writer did some ill-advised remakes then hit the big time with Arrival, and I’m all caught up on Final Destinations until (potentially) next year.

by ·Comments Off on Scream (1996, Wes Craven)

Opens with long takes stalking an increasingly upset Drew Barrymore, who tells the horror-trivia mystery caller/killer that the first Nightmare on Elm Street was great but the rest sucked, a confident/funny move from Craven. I last watched this the week before it opened wide, and liked it. But 1996 being the greatest year in human history for music and cinema (aka when I was 18), and having seen tens of thousands of teenagers murdered in horror movies since then, it’s hard to remember anything that happened past Drew’s terrible death, or to know whether this will still hold up (it does, now looking forward to the sequels).

Killahs:

Students who are vaguely bummed after the death of Drew and her barely-seen boyfriend: chaste ’96 Neve and her ever-patient boy Skeet, Rose and her boy Lillard, and lone wolf Jamie Kennedy, very funny as Randy the horror guy. Neve is still recovering from her mom’s violent murder a year ago, and being bothered about it by reporter Courteney Cox, who’s befriending Rose’s brother Deputy Arquette for access. Then they all start getting calls and visits from ghostface killahs and slinging blame around (to Jamie: “Maybe your movie-freaked mind lost its reality button”). Also good from Rose: “You’re starting to sound like some Wes Carpenter flick.”

Wes Carpenter, school janitor:

The kids always have alibis because the killer is both Skeet and Lillard. If I watch this again I’ll have to see if either of them walks with difficulty after the fight scenes, because Ghostface gets hit in the nuts in almost every encounter. So it’s a fun twisty mystery horror-comedy, with some absolute psychopaths at the center – they kill Neve’s mom and the school principal, kidnap her dad, and intended to slaughter everyone at the climactic party. I would’ve risked death to be at that party (Republica on the stereo, Prom Night on VHS, popcorn and original flavor Doritos).

Not returning in the sequels due to their deaths: Matthew Lillard, who went on to be Shaggy and also SLC Punk… Rose McGowan, who was only doing this between Araki films… Skeet: The Newton Boys then Ride With The Devil then nothing… Cox’s cameraman W. Brown: Deadwood… Drew Barrymore: Donnie Darko… and Henry “Winkler” Fonzarelli: Barry.

by ·Comments Off on Torso (1973, Sergio Martino)

Opens with a threesome sex scene over the credits, nice. “Torso” turns out to be code for “boobs.” This was technically pre-shocktober, part of Criterion’s giallo series from which I also watched Who Saw Her Die? and The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

Someone is strangling hot young people with scarves. Flo goes out to a sex commune and gets drowned and mutilated in the swamp on the way home. The local scarf vendor (of Toby Dammit, also a good scarf movie) knows who bought the murderscarves but instead of telling the cops he calls the killer to blackmail him, then is immediately smooshed by a car. Mostly this raises the question of why a weirdo running a scarf kiosk keeps his customers’ phone numbers.

Suzy Kendall (kidnapped girlfriend of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and macaw:

A group of hot girls decide to take a trip to the country after failing to locate their friend Stefano (Roberto Bisacco of Stavisky), presumed scarf murderer – though after watching more than one giallo, we know the most suspicious guy is least likely to be the killer, and sure enough when Stefano finally shows up he’s been scarf-strangled.

Jane’s car has Chicago (not Illinois) plates:

Jane wakes up and the others are dead, then hides while the killer hacksaws them. Their professor John Richardson (victorious hero of Black Sunday) is the baddie, and the moment he’s discovered he narrates his entire traumatic triggering backstory which involves a Mac & Me-esque cliff fall. Some guy fights him and saves her, I’m not sure who. Have I mentioned that all the dialogue is super ridiculous?

Girls who need a vacation:

What girls do on vacation:

by ·Comments Off on A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 (1989, Stephen Hopkins)

They’re done with sequel numbering, but I’m not – it’s part five. A few years ago I watched four and a half of these in a month, but as much as these movies repeat themselves, it’s better to put a year or two between them. Opening titles sex scene with our survivors from part four, hell yeah, but things are amiss – Alice almost gets showered to death, and has a backstory vision of Freddy’s birth story (a nun assaulted by an asylum full of maniacs). Freddy always “dies” convincingly then comes back inexplicably in the next one, and the gimmick here is he can visit Alice while she’s awake through the dreams of her unborn child.

Prince of Darkness this ain’t:

Alice has four friends with diverse interests, ideal for getting murdered in character-appropriate ways in the first half of a 90-minute movie. Generic Saved by the Bell-lookin’ Boyfriend Dan gets beat up by his self-driving car then Tetsuo-the-Iron-Man‘d by a Freddycycle… anorexic model Greta gets force-fed… Mark gets Take On Me-d into his comics… star diver Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter of Popcorn and Miracle Mile) actually lives, releasing the momma nun’s spirit (she’d been sitting long-dead in some abandoned church), then Alice’s baby uses vomit-attack on Freddy, who once again loses/frees the souls of dead high schoolers.

It’s slightly less goofy than the previous one, but no better. Has Freddy always called every woman bitch? Final showdown where Alice rescues her baby from Freddy on Escher-stairs feels like a Labyrinth ripoff. Hopkins had a good 1990s career, including Judgment Night. The writer did House III the same year, and was a member of Sparks. Rosenbaum raved: “zero-degree filmmaking … flaccid editing.”

You can tell a movie has no prestige when its blu-ray extras are just music videos by The Fat Boys and Whodini. The former is from Mondo director Harvey Keith, opens with a very awkward sketch, making me doubt my memories of the Fat Boys’ great acting talent in Disorderlies. The three then run around a very well-dilapidated movie house pursued by Freddy. Good use of movie clips in the song, and Englund gets to rap. The Whodini is a much better song, has twin dancing Freddies on a staircase, and the band wisely doesn’t go inside the horror house, just dances on the porch.

by ·Comments Off on House of 1000 Corpses (2003, Rob Zombie)

Tourists stop at Captain Spaulding’s then foolishly decide to check out the nearby grounds of the Dr. Satan killings. Momma Karen Black was delightful – don’t think I knew who she was last time I saw this.

RIP Jennifer Jostyn (The Brothers McMullen), Rainn Wilson (Super), and the cooler and less condescending Chris Hardwick (RZ’s Halloween II). Final (but still doomed) girl Erin Daniels was on The L Word, her also-doomed dad played a cop in Humanoids from the Deep (alongside Deputy Walt Goggins), and Sheriff Tom Towles (Fortress) will sorta have his revenge in part two.

by ·Comments Off on In a Violent Nature (2024, Chris Nash)

Monster follow-cam, like if Ben Russell made a horror movie. Maybe this was an experiment in distancing and de-emphasis – like, what if a crazed zombie stalking and slaughtering a group of sexy young people was just one of many things occurring in the life of the forest. Looking for his stolen locket, our zombie monster starts by killing the wrong guy, an asshole trapper. Strange to see this kind of thing with no music score. Maybe they didn’t know or couldn’t afford anyone who could pull off groovy stalker-tension music. They didn’t manage to write or deliver any good dialogue so maybe they should’ve done without that too. This movie’s major outcome was getting me to immediately rewatch The Cabin in the Woods, and it’d been too long since I’d last seen that, so, thank you.

by ·Comments Off on Where the Devil Roams (2023, Poser/Adams/Adams)

Unpromising beginning with dodgy compositing and fake film distress as we’re told a long poem, then a bridge that reminds me of The Empty Man (everything reminds me of The Empty Man). Watching this after When Evil Lurks because I keep getting them confused with their similar titles, and Lurking definitively beat Roaming. This movie certainly does roam. Its three leads (family of hopeless carnie thief/murderers with a terrible musical act until they steal a better one from a devil-dealing finger-traumatist) are a real family, also the movie’s directors. They’d previously made Hellbender (metal music/witchcraft) and The Deeper You Dig (clairvoyant murder-suspense).

The devil-dealer is Mr. Tipps, who nightly cuts off his fingers for the crowd, then sews them back with cursed thread – he stole the thread originally, so it’s only fair that our trio steals it from him later. The girl of the family is said to be mute but I didn’t realize, since she sings in their act. The mom kills somebody in each town they pass through, and I can’t tell if this is supposed to be vigilante justice or if they’re just remorseless criminals. Dad gets WWI flashbacks when he sees blood (and is incidentally afraid of birds), so has to be blindfolded during the crimes, and eventually during their circus act. So it’s set in the past (1920s?) but doesn’t feel authentically past-tense, more of an antique shop present. The parents eventually get some limbs chopped off by an axe girl at a home they invaded (played by their other IRL daughter) and the dad becomes catatonic, but still performs his nightly onstage dance to the girl’s alt-rock song.

by ·Comments Off on When Evil Lurks (2023, Demián Rugna)

An ancient evil is going to be born into the world unless two dummy brothers can stop it (spoiler: they cannot). The movie is torn between needing to explain itself so we know the stakes, and wanting to withhold information for suspense. So we’re told there are seven rules to follow (that’s more than twice the number of rules for Gremlins so you know it’s serious) but one rule remains secret until the end. And since there are set rules for demon possession, and specialists with suitcases of equipment, and the local cops and government have procedures in place, we know this has all happened before, elsewhere, so if this particular demon gets loose it’s probably not the end of the world, just maybe of this town. But despite all this knowledge and procedure, the dummies keep losing ground, because (per Matt Lynch) “everyone in this forgets what’s happening to them every three to five minutes.”

Still it’s a good gruesome, apocalyptic time at the movies, and the actors are game for its grievous head injury theater.

Two attempts to shoot evil with a gun:

This is Argentina so of course somebody was in La Flor – that’s lead brother Ezequiel Rodríguez, a go-to demonic horror guy lately between Legions and The Witch Game. Brother Demián Salomón is right there with him, starring in Satanic Hispanics, Welcome to Hell, and Into the Abyss. Somebody needs to look into the current wave of Argentine horror. These guys discover the neighbor’s tenant’s kid has become demon-bloated so they drive it some hours away so it can become someone else’s problem. Too late: it gets to the neighbor, and to Ezequiel’s wife (who kills one of her kids) and dog (who kills another). The brothers drive off with the remaining (possessed, autistic) kid and their mom, pick up a demon hunter, and head to the Village of the Damned where they’d dumped the body. The spooky kids there defeat the exorcism plot pretty easily, barely even moving around much, a new evil is born, and the autistic kid eats his grandma.