by ·Comments Off on Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948, Charles Barton)

Having watched a Laurel & Hardy short this year and checked out some Three Stooges shorts, might as well revisit these guys, who I haven’t seen since I was eight. I can remember Abbott is the straight man from the “Hey Abbott!” cries in Looney Tunes, but in person he’s got nothing going for him except the name – I’d trade him in for a second Costello.

Hey Ma:

Costello is an idiot delivery boy bringing crates to an upcoming House of Horrors (this part clearly inspired the first half of Salem’s Lot). He’s stalked by both Dracula and the Wolfman, while hotgirl Lenore wants his smooth pliable brain for her Frankenstein. It’s all tiresome and bad except for the use of animation in the vampire bat transformations, which actually look smoother than the CG assists in From Dusk Till Dawn.

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 In the Lost Lands (2025, Paul W.S. Anderson)

Look like somebody wanted to remake Resident Evil 6 – this looks more similar to RE6 than any other movie looks to RE6, even other Resident Evil movies, and Milla is even named Alice again. There’s some Monster Hunter thrown in (they are in the wasteland hunting monsters) and some post-apocalyptic Mad Maxisms. I haven’t been going out to the movie theater this year, missing important big-screen pictures like Nickel Boys and The Brutalist and Mickey 17, but prioritized this because I thought it would be… not great exactly, but fun/cool, and I nailed it.

Deep Lore sourced from an early George RR Martin story, Milla plays a cursed(?) magic mind-control witch, hunting a mighty werewolf alongside softie tough-guy Dave Bautista who thinks he’s hiding his werewolf identity from her, at the behest of Queen Amara Okereke (British theater actress), pursued by fanatical church assassin Arly Jover (Blade). Some good train action, including an escape from dangling railcars that doesn’t hold up great against the last Mission Impossible, some good fire, and too many CG snakes. The queen’s rival for control of the people “the patriarch” is Fraser James of Shopping, Anderson’s longest-running actor. Bautista’s girlfriend is Deirdre Mullins of Mandrake, her equally doomed business partner is the Polish Sebastian Stan. I said if this turned out to be good then I’ve gotta watch Pompeii, and I guess I’ve gotta.

by ·Comments Off on The Wolf Man (1941, George Waggner)

Watched in solidarity with WOLFtober. To their writeup I’ll add that I enjoyed the fact that werewolves can be killed with a silver bullet… or by hitting them with a stick. It’s also good when Lon Jr. comes home to dad Claude Rains’s castle at the beginning, dad’s got a new lens for his telescope and Lon’s like “I happen to dabble in telescope repair.”

Waggner had acted in The Iron Horse. Writer Curt Siodmak is best known as being Robert’s idiot brother, and due to remakes he’s got credits on a Benicio Del Toro movie and on next year’s version made by the Invisible Man Remake guy. Love interest Evelyn Ankers showed up in Frankenstein & Dracula & Invisible Man movies over the next three years, and police chief Ralph Bellamy went on to be the antichrist’s doctor.

by ·Comments Off on Ginger Snaps (2000, John Fawcett)

High quality from the start, the rare perfectly-calibrated teen movie, best I’ve seen since Detention. The writers have watched Harold & Maude a couple times, but the teen sisters’ suicide pact and gruesome fake deaths pay off nicely.

Ginger is bitten by a wolf, which drug dealer Sam then runs over with his van, and now outcast Brigitte tries to save her sister’s life while Ginger makes the most of her new supernatural popularity.

Mimi Rogers nails it as their mom. Chris Nolan a big fan, cast both girls in Insomnia the next year – Ginger also did Bones and Freddy vs. Jason, and both returned for the sequels. Drug Dealer Sam is aka Revenge-Seeking Goth Ian from Final Destination 3.

by ·Comments Off on Eight for Silver (2021, Sean Ellis)

Captain Howard Moon dies in hospital speaking the movie’s title (before it got changed to the generic The Cursed for streaming) after having a silver bullet yanked out of him in aftermath of WWI trench warfare.

Thirty-five years earlier, young Howard’s family and neighbors slaughtered all the gypsies, who had forged a set of silver teeth. The children, living in their fancy house with a mass grave in the yard, are having bad dreams, so they find the teeth and go all supernaturally murdery on each other and become tentacle werewolves, Howard surviving only to get killed in the war.

Crappy jump scares, and unforgivably long since it keeps repeating itself. I didn’t care about Anthropoid and this didn’t get great notices – can’t recall why I prioritized it, besides a masochistic urge to watch British movies during SHOCKtober.

by ·Comments Off on Joel Potrykus shorts

Coyote (2010)

Josh Burge plays an unhealthy loser in this, if you can imagine. Josh wakes up next to a body by the river, walks back to the derelict house he stays in, lip-syncs(?) a song by Chance Jones then listens to Paul Simon and Minor Threat and shoots heroin. Wakes up by the river again, steals and pawns a boombox, smokes crack while playing a stolen tape of french songs, becomes a werewolf, goes out and kills a couple guys, just a regular week.

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Thing from the Factory by the Field (2022)

“You were like in love with Michael Jackson last year. You’re not deep, or dark or whatever.” Teens starting a band bring the new, square girl in town to a field for an initiation ritual. Liz shoots her crossbow into the air and happens to hit a minor demon, then finishes it off with a rock. Now they’re worried that Liz will go to hell, so the churchy new girl takes charge, saying it’s not a sin to kill for hunting, so someone has to eat it. Not very snappy until the end, the whole thing having been a setup for a McDonald’s joke. Made me feel a little ill, so it’s partly successful.

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Visited Joel’s vimeo page… I didn’t watch “Joel Calls Indie Film Type Dudes” yet, but did watch him goofing on Radiohead with an electric toothbrush.

by ·Comments Off on The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020, Jim Cummings)

Charming little small-town murder-mystery, with plenty of sharp scenes and cool editing, cutting back and forth in time during each major incident. Tourist dies first after offending the locals, but that doesn’t set a pattern, and the savage wolf attacks get more gruesome (decapitation, dead baby) until a crazed taxidermist with a wolf suit is caught. The next movie by Cummings is already out, and sounds good.

The Family Force: Robert Forster, Riki Lindhome (Knives Out, Under the Silver Lake), and our fearless writer/director

A killer, but not The killer:

The main cop’s daughter has a LOVE WITCH poster in her room!

by ·Comments Off on Wolfwalkers (2020, Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart)

Okay, Soul had its moments, but it’s almost a shame that just a few days later we watched this movie which so thoroughly blew it away. Such intricate illustration and character design, fun perspective tricks, it all looks so handcrafted and amazing.

No shocker after Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea that the plot concerns Irish mythology, and as in Kells there’s a supernatural girl on the outskirts of a besieged town. This time the girl is leading the wolf army they’re all afraid of, and new girl Robyn’s dad is hired to trap and kill them, but Robyn (with her cool pet falcon, oh my heart) ventures into the woods, meets the red-haired wolf girl, and accidentally becomes a wolfwalker herself. Later her dad will become one, and they’ll turn on the wolf-hating tyrant who rules the town. Not a grim, doomsy movie at all – the baddie is the only death, and there’s nearly as much friendly romping as there is story.