by ·Comments Off on Quatermass and the Pit (1967, Roy Ward Baker)

The Quatermass movies are like Knives Out, not really sequels, just the continuing otherworldly adventures of Dr. Q – same studio a decade after the last one, but everyone here is new except the writer. The doctor (Andrew Keir, a Hammer guy who tended to play priests and professors) is recruited by a military bomb squad and taken to subway station Hobbs End (“hob was once a sort of nickname for the devil”) where ancient apeman skeletons and a mysterious vessel have been excavated. The film title evokes Poe, but the pit is just a subway tunnel.

Dr. Q and the Colonel

Doing Science:

After they uncover locust aliens who decompose into green goo when the air hits them, the military reluctantly admits this maybe isn’t a nazi bomb, and the doctor thinks Martian insects kidnapped abnormal prehumans and enlightened them. A worker goes down alone and a wind storm ensues, he comes prancing outside with his arms held out like a preemptive parody of Weapons, not clear if he is alien-possessed or just British-terrified – remember, a British person can be driven mad by the smallest inconsistency. The assembled scientists and priests agree that whatever mystery they’ve uncovered, it is Evil.

Roney poses with an artist’s rendering of a big-brained apeman:

Crystal mantis pods:

Reporter Barbara Shelley (Village of the Damned, The Gorgon) is sensitive enough to see the invisible martians so they put a brainwave helmet on her and videotape the psychic visions from her “susceptible brain,” then Dr. Q screens the tape (actually some kids’ home movie of plastic mantises fighting on a rockpile) and tries to convince the government that humans have got alien-inherited genocidal tendencies (partly true). “People don’t believe nothing nowadays unless they’ve seen it on the telly.”

Finally with the station full of TV crews and passersby the ship comes violently alive. The Colonel (Julian Glover, lately of Tar) gets hypnotised by the commotion and melts, everyone else starts doing mob violence, until Q’s science-friend James Donald rides a construction crane to electrocute Mantis Satan and save the world (these movies usually end with Dr. Q identifying some great evil then setting it on fire).

My fifth Roy Ward Baker movie, and if I ever watch a sixth then I’ve officially got problems. Though in its best moments this had shades of Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness.

by ·Comments Off on Scream 3 (2000, Wes Craven)

RIP Liev and his Gossip Girl-friend, as the new killer goes around tricking people with an electric voice-cloner. Lance Henriksen and Roger Corman are working on their Stab trilogy, a cover version of “Red Right Hand” playing on set, when Detective McDreamy comes to investigate why cast members are being killed off IRL. The two casts mix as Parker Posey, playing Fake Gale Weathers, is dating Dewey and tailing the real Gale for character tips, and all the worst characters get slashed as our old team takes their place. They all end up on an old Hollywood mansion as the movie becomes increasingly nonsensical, the closest to Freddy dream-logic these things have been (complimentary), topped by a pre-taped appearance by the rules-explainer-guy who wants to explain how trilogies work in the event of his death in part two. Killer is film director Scott Foley, McDreamy’s Grey’s Anatomy coworker.

by ·Comments Off on V/H/S/99 (2022)

Framing story starts out as some kid’s stop-motion army-guy video, nice.

1. Phony from top to bottom, a punk band goes to the basement venue where another punk band died in a fire three years ago on this very night, and gets murdered by ghouls. Director Maggie Levin “is a filmmaker with rock n’ roll roots” per her bio, argh.

2. Better: sorority pledge (girl from Synchronic) is buried alive as a hazing thing, cops chase off the aboveground girls as a rainstorm is coming through. Synchronic Girl meets a sinister ghost while buried alive while drowning while covered in spiders, oof, and all the other girls get supernaturally leaky-coffin’d next. Director Johannes Roberts made two killer shark movies and a failed Resident Evil reboot.

3. Some underlit Nickelodeon game-show called Ozzy’s Dungeon is Double Dare meets torture porn. Donna competes in a doomed wish-fulfillment game that nobody has ever won, then her surviving family turns the tables on the host, taking him into the victory cave(?) beneath the set to meet the fat-suit wishmaster, but apparently the girl’s wish was to explode the heads of her family members, like a cut-rate version of The Viewing. Directed by Flying Lotus themself.

4. Older brother Dillon of the stop-motion kid is a horny teen who films himself skating and doing pranks. Their friend Boner is an apocalypse prepper – this turns out to be unimportant, as focus turns to the hot medusa across the street who turns the boys into statues for attempting to install spyware on her new imac. Only good joke in the movie is the package delivery service being called DUI. Tyler MacIntyre also made the pd187-approved Tragedy Girls, and looking up the lead actress is how I found out someone remade Castle Freak.

5. Coven is doing a summoning ceremony, but demon Fircus interferes and drags the cameraman Troy and Nate to hell, where they meet Mabel the Skull Biter, the movie’s only good character, and scramble to return to the surface when the coven’s portal opens at midnight. Also the movie’s best segment, the only one that doesn’t look like shit on purpose, so I assume it made the top ten of Vulture’s ambitious V/H/S segment ranking… nope, Dowd got it all wrong. The Winters also made a haunted house livestream influencer movie starring Mabel.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 32: SHOCKtober Revisits Part 2

Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985, Philippe Mora)

Last watched The Howling in 2007, and last watched Howling II on channel 3 at a Motel 6. Howling sequels are famously the worst sequels, but who can remember which is which? Christopher Lee speaks an incantation, but only in voiceover. Despite your sister’s best efforts to control him, Vlad makes a big show of wolfing out and rushing the captives, then some guy with a shotgun easily kills both Vlad and your sister. A woman wearing insane clothes (Stirba!) throws a prop demon at a priest, who turns into a Svankmajer head, then Lee punches her in the stomach and they both spontaneously combust. Now that the… demon cultist werewolf vampires?… are dead, our romantic heroes enjoy a Cars concert. “Punk group: Babel,” man, this is not punk, it’s new wave. Vlad was in two Dollman movies and Lynch’s Dune, seems like a cool guy, and the girl who gets naked was predictably cast 30 years later by Rob Zombie.

Enter Stirba:

Stirba and her demon friend:

Stirba auditioning to be in Rawhead Rex:

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Howling III: The Marsupials (1987, Philippe Mora)

Gentle scenes of Australians enjoying life surrounded by colorful birds, did I get the wrong movie? Lead guy (Bad Boy Bubby’s dad) is surprised by an old friend who says it’s safe to come out of hiding, so BBB’s dad moves to California to teach at a school where all the students wear the same shirt. The worst actor they could find drops in to reveal the secret identities of the professor’s long-lost marsupial friends. That night one of them wins an oscar and transforms into a possum-person on live TV. At least part two had demons killing priests and Christopher Lee and Stirba, I dunno what this is supposed to offer.

The Substance was just a Howling sequel:

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Night of the Demons II (1994, Brian Trenchard-Smith)

I was last disappointed by the original in 2006, pretty sure I’ve seen both these sequels before on VHS. A girl being sexually harassed by a demon gets rescued by… a nun with nunchucks, get it? This is the movie with the holy water balloons and super soaker, I assumed that was Fright Night. They defeat demonmaster Angela with the power of their faith (ugh) then she returns as Golobulus and they simply defeat her again. Cast members also appeared in: Nemesis, Tremors, Dr. Giggles, 976-EVIL 2, Leprechaun in Space, and Slumber Party Massacre 4. At least Angela is the same Angela in all three of these dumb movies, and the director works on Trailers From Hell so I can’t stay mad at him.

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Night of the Demons III (1997, Jim Kaufman)

Angela’s teeth have got crazier, and she’s making the same deal with the survivors to trade one for many, with the same CG snakes backing her up. Hitting her with a car doesn’t help, she just transforms into a sphere of pure love and light, but fails to escape the same way when the kids drag her into a sunbeam. Not one of the Kaufmans you’ve heard of, Jim made an emmy-nominated talking cat movie.

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Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977, John Boorman)

A whole bunch of Linda Blairs, and the priest is hot for a couple of them, while in a different location someone sets themself on fire. The Great Locust arrives and the house starts tearing apart as the priest (Richard “Dr. Faustus” Burton) gets his bearings and rips out Bad Linda’s heart with his bare hands, breaking the curse or whatever. “The world won’t understand… not yet,” says Louise Fletcher (Invaders From Mars) and we still don’t. I remember this movie being very bad – apparently there’s a new feature-length doc arguing that yes it’s bad, but at least it’s also interesting. I ain’t sitting through all that, but I did read the Reveal interview.

Mouseover to transform Linda Blair:
image

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Exorcist III (1990, William Peter Blatty)

Serial killer Brad Dourif and detective George C. Scott are playing Silence of the Lambs mind games in the psych ward – this is a restored version with VHS-quality deleted scenes reincorporated. Dourif has sent a demon-possessed catatonic nurse (she’s also a murderer in Creepshow) to murder Scott’s family. He gets home in time for the nurse to attack him instead, then she just stops, so Scott returns to the hospital to shoot Dourif with a gun, apparently an effective method of dealing with demonic possession. Did we know that before his Exorcist movies Blatty wrote the Tashlin romp The Man from the Diners’ Club?

Comin’ at ya:

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The Guardian (1990, William Friedkin)

While Exorcist III was in production, what was original Exorcist director Friedkin working on: an even worse movie about an evil tree cult. With help from the confounding editing, hero mom hits evil nanny Jenny Seagrove (also narrator of the New Order rock doc) with her car. The cops then tell the upset parents (nobodies, though dad was in House 1 and 2) that none of this happened. Sorry I missed Miguel Ferrer, not sorry Sam Raimi dropped out of this to make Darkman, and anyway the bloody man-with-chainsaw-versus-sentient-tree climax would be nothing new for Sam. It was all worth it for this review .

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Friday the 13th (1980, Sean S. Cunningham)

Looks like the last surviving camp counselor is fixin’ to get slain by Jason’s Mom. Nobody knows how to close doors quietly in movies. J’s M here’s-johnny’s her way into the hidey closet and gets a frying pan to the skull for her troubles. The showdown continues outside, where J’s M is cleanly beheaded by a machete. I don’t know much about horror movies so I’ll assume that’s the end of it! Oh, the (un)dead kid attacking her in a canoe afterwards was just a dream… or was it?? The mom had been in John Ford and Anthony Mann movies, and this was the director’s follow-up to a couple of kids-playing-sports movies.

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Friday The 13th Part 2 (1981, Steve Miner)

If the clumsy guy in the one-eyed cloth-bag mask is Jason, he sure grew up fast. I appreciate both movies using loon sounds whenever the action moves outdoors. Again the sole surviving girl fights back with superior weapons (a chainsaw), then tries a new tactic, putting on his dead mom’s sweater and threatening him maternally. Her friend Paul does not help her kill Jason with a machete, but he does gallantly carry her over a puddle afterwards. Ending is fun, macheted zombie Jason smashing through the window and grabbing her, then inexplicable half-minute coda where she’s fine but Paul is missing. These movies were not built to last, or to be viewed by adults – when Howling II looks better than your movie, you have fucked up. Miner went on to make House and Warlock and… Soul Man.

Comin’ at ya:

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Friday The 13th Part 3 (1982, Steve Miner)

Jason’s got his iconic hockey mask and is smashing up a barn trying to find the final girl who got away. She hit him with a shovel then lynched him, of course that didn’t work. A guy arrives and gets dismembered in under a second, then the girl finds an axe and gives the iconic hockey mask its iconic axe-hole. She wakes up in a boat the next morning to the sound of loon calls and gets pulled into the water by a zombie the cops didn’t see, precisely like the first movie.

Comin’ at ya:

by ·Comments Off on It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987, Larry Cohen)

Very first character is an asshole cab driver, the second is a cop who mutters to the camera how many weeks he’s been on the force (six), movie seems off to a bad start then they’re both immediately killed by a newborn mutant baby, yay.

Where did my friend go?

The plot is: the dad of a mutant baby has a viral moment in a courtroom, the gov’t decides to exile the dangerous babies to an island instead of exterminating them, a few years later the dad with nothing left to lose joins a scientific(?) expedition to the island (“surely they’ve developed a language of their own”) where everyone else is killed and he helps the mutants escape to the mainland then he and his ex run off with the only surviving baby.

Karen burns her ex’s tell-all book:

But the movie is less about plot than it is about letting dad Michael Moriarty go hogwild. Between his early courtroom antics, his late no-fucks-given mode, and his ability to psychically communicate with mutant babies, it’s his show. She’s not in it much but it’s funny to watch a Karen Black movie the day after not seeing her in The Devil’s Rejects. Cohen throws in new ridiculous plot points (sympathetic Cubans smuggle Moriarty to Florida, the last adult mutant lives just long enough to hurl ten cops off a rooftop). Easily the best of the Alive trilogy, all those times I wanted to rent this video in the late 80s, I was right.

Moriarty freaks out Maniac Cop star Laurene Landon:

by ·Comments Off on The Devil’s Rejects (2005, Rob Zombie)

After 3 From Hell, I’m revisiting the original movie and this sequel for probably the last time. Part one was a good time, introducing a Texas Chainsaw-style murder family who slaughters tourists. Part two is just torture and torment (our three killers and their pursuer William Forsythe taking turns as torturers and torturees), part three is needless rehash.

Along the way Brian Posehn gets killed, the guy from The Hills Have Eyes is hanging out with Ken Foree, Danny Trejo and someone else call themselves The Unholy Two, a film critic is called in to analyze character names (all stolen from The Marx Bros), Callahan from Police Academy substitutes for Karen Black, and everybody dies (or DO they).

by ·Comments Off on Alien: Romulus (2024, Fede Alvarez)

Fede specializes in remaking beloved horror movies by aping the style of the originals and repeating their most famous line of dialogue in a slightly different context. He doesn’t fare as well creatively with Alien as he did with Evil Dead. He also made The Girl in the Spider’s Web so this is technically his second bad sequel to a not-great* David Fincher movie. Meanwhile this week everyone’s watching the new Alien prequel TV series from the guy who made se/pre/quel series of Fargo and X-Men.

A new group of British-accented attractive young people is stuck on a sunless planet in debt to the Evil Company, until they have the good idea to board a doomed low-orbit space station and loot it of cryo-pods to escape their fates. But it has been abandoned by everyone except Fake Ian Holm due to alien infestation. The first of the bozo thieves gets chestburst only four short minutes after getting facehugged, then the aliens multiply extremely quickly, while lead girl Cailee fights for her friends, her life, escape, and her defective robot friend who sometimes gets possessed by pro-company programming.

Featuring the stars of Priscilla, The Long Walk, Feline, and Madame Web, it’s all expensive-looking at least, though Fake Ian Holm looks like shit. I love how analogue all the space tech is: lights flickering, vidscreen color separation, audio recordings slowing down. The final boss is a skinny new alien-human hybrid, as if part 4 never existed, which I’m sure a lotta people would prefer.

*For the record:
Good: 1, 2, Resurrection, Prometheus
Bad: 3, AvP, Covenant, Romulus

by ·Comments Off on Uncle Kent 2 (2015, Todd Rohal)

A self-conscious sequel, Swanberg directing the first act (in which Swanberg tells Kent he doesn’t want to make a sequel and Kent should make it without him), then Rohal taking over as Kent explores simulation theory, wonders whether his reality is real, then takes charge when the apocalypse comes to comic con.

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Get This Party Slammin’ is a very pandemic-looking home time-lapse movie in which Kent wakes up at 10:42pm and energetically cuts his own hair in the bathroom.

Rat Pack Rat (2014)
Woman with newspapered-over windows hires a Sammy Davis impressionist off craigslist to entertain and possibly masturbate/mercy-kill her bedridden son Steve Little. Star Eddie Rouse was a David Gordon Green regular who died the year this short came out, the mom’s only other credit is one of the few Bob Byington movies I haven’t seen. Jennifer Prediger of the Uncle Kent series is also a Byington regular. Kent was in another Swanberg joint with Jane Adams called Build The Wall, which I guess I’ve gotta watch next.

by ·Comments Off on 28 Years Later (2025, Danny Boyle)

Dad and son leave their tidal island home for a coming-of-age venture into zomb territory, and when their short trip gets derailed and extended they end up meeting skull collector Ralph Fiennes, a doomed Swede, and evil acrobat messiah Jack O’Connell. Second-most interesting part of this movie is learning that the rest of the world is normal modern, with internet and uber eats, and only England is zombie-quarantined – the most interesting is that Boyle is image-making here, not just telling a family/zomb story, and this has got more trick shots/edits in the first four minutes than the entirety of last week’s zombie junk The Sadness. Ends weirdly because they’re setting up a sub-trilogy, so the kid and his dad (Aaron T-J of one of the bad Godzilla movies) and other weirdos will return, but the kid’s mom (Bikeriders wife Jodie Comer), an elite zombie defender with terminal brain cancer, will not.