by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 33: SHOCKtober Revisits Part 3

Shocker (1989, Wes Craven)

Lawnmower Man-esque story of an electrocuted guy (Mitch “Skinner” Pileggi) who becomes electricity. Our hero (Michael “Tanner” Murphy) jumps inside the television to chase the guy through a montage of TV shows, like a crappy Sherlock Jr. Tanner harnesses the power of the TV Remote Control to gain the upper hand. Someone’s head goes through a TV set (two years after Dream Warriors) while I’m watching this wearing my Videodrome shirt.

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Deadly Friend (1986, Wes Craven)

First I had to rewind far enough to see Momma From The Train’s head get exploded by a basketball, presumably the main thing people remember from this movie. D.F. (OG-Buffy Kristy Swanson) dives out a second-story window to kill Tom (of biker flick Savage Dawn), then she attempts suicide-by-cop, melts into her true robot form and kills Paul (of Little House on the Prairie) offscreen. Murder-bots turning on their owners is a timely topic since I also rewatched M3GAN tonight – after that movie’s expertly uncanny droid, this one’s robot is just a girl wearing too much eyeshadow. It’s always remarkable how bad the ADR was in 1980s movies, like nobody knew what “sounding natural” felt like, or could replicate it using any existing recording equipment.

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976-Evil (1988, Robert Englund)

No recollection what this is about, maybe a blend between Pillow Talk and Unfriended? Mrs. Wilmouth is being devoured by her cats, then Big Hair Angela is molested by Mrs. W’s goblin child. The goblin is called Hoax – his cousin Spike (the only actor who’d return in the sequel) distracts the kid then tosses him into hell, which is in the backyard. I kinda like that every single line reading is awkward, makes the movie less generically bad and more specifically bad.

devil in a sweatervest:

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Fright Night (1985, Tom Holland)

Piecing together what’s happening based on having watched the remake five years back… the vamp Chris “Jack” Skellington is too dentally distorted to recognize, old Roddy McDowall is fighting him back but the nerdy boy Herman’s Head Charlie gets bitten after a really nice bat transformation, while in the basement his girl Amy has already turned vampish. Smashing the windows to let the sunlight in is also how they won in From Dusk Till Dawn, the green-burning vampire skeleton pretty sweet. Coda: everything’s back to normal, Roddy on TV, the kid making out with his girl, and vamps living next door awaiting the sequel. Hoax from 976-EVIL is in this, but either he’s dead by now or I can’t recognize him without the demon makeup. Holland is best known as codirector of The Timekeepers of Eternity.

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Prom Night (1980, Paul Lynch)

There are a lotta kids at this prom and I don’t care to figure out who they all are. Thugs beat up the prom king and steal his crown, then the movie gets its Carrie blood-bucket moment when the masked killer rolls the false king’s severed head out on stage. Hero vs. Villain fight ensues, awkward choreography but a nice disco song. The queen was Jamie Lee Curtis??

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The Kindred (1987, Obrow & Carpenter)

Hat Guy has arrived to collect his killer mutant baby or whatever, says the mutant beastie is John’s brother, but there’s no convincing John, who electrocutes the thing until it explodes and takes Hat Guy with it. Rubber baby beasties attack until Brad (The Hills Have Eyes 2) blows up the whole damn house. Fortunately his dead girlfriend Sharon (of Crawlspace) is somehow alive in the crawlspace. Very gloopy gloppy movie. Nobody seems to like it, but I remember it being good, oh yeah, I was eleven. The directors had made two others together, and separately Obrow did a Dean Koontz adaptation with multiple Twin Peaks actors and Carpenter did a Luke Wilson/Ken Marino ghost movie.

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Fiend Without a Face (1958, Arthur Crabtree)

“They’re becoming visible!” Stop-motion spine/brain creatures climbing trees, cool, apparently caused by “the atomic plant,” so Jeff is going to go blow it up. “Perhaps I can control them” says the professor moments before he’s killed by brains, which make funny sputtering ketchup bottle sfx when they’re shot. Post-explosion, the brains immediately melt – this is one of the goopiest 1950s movies, the Kindred of its time.

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Alucarda (1977, Juan López Moctezuma)

Bloody naked Justine savagely claws at a religious lady – they’ve come to a truce when the lady’s idiot doctor friend comes in splashing around beakers of holy water, J gets skeletonized and the lady bitten. As a result(?), young supervampire Alucarda speaks the magic words that cause all nuns to burst into flame. There is a lot of screaming! Al has a holy water protection field, and these bozos only had one idea, but fortunately Al is a girl, and these last two movies have demonstrated that girls’ reaction to horror is to scream and be useless to stop it, so Al goes mad from her own fiery destructive wrath and vanishes. Director made the also not-great Mansion of Madness, Al was recently in a netflix movie called Grumpy Christmas.

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Phenomena (1985, Dario Argento)

Uh oh, Jennifer Connelly is stuck in a maggoty flooded dead body dumpster, someone has been watching Poltergeist. The man chained up nearby breaks his own thumb to escape the cuffs (a common tactic lately) and attack Jen’s cackling tormentor, but Jen escapes on her own. It’s not an Italian movie until we encounter a horribly dubbed child, and this one’s got a scary face and a halberd. Jen’s terrified screams summon a swarm of flies that eat the kid’s mutant face off. She tries to escape by boat but is so technically unhandy, the boat explodes leaving her trapped in a ring of fire, then she’s saved by a razor-wielding monkey. Every line and edit and action seems a little odd – I think this is what makes Argento’s movies stand out, and I didn’t understand his vibe when I first watched this on VHS.

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Session 9 (2001, Brad Anderson)

I remember this and The Machinist being a big deal, a hot new Anderson on the scene, but haven’t thought about either one in a long while and never watched his follow-ups. Gordon is lobotomizing guys through their eye sockets while dreaming that an imaginary labcoat guy is responsible. We’re doing the post-Fight Club pre-Shudder Island thing of revisiting all the past kills with the knowledge that our delusional protag was the killer all along. Seems like a just-alright indie movie in retrospect.

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Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988, David DeCoteau)

Think this was more USA Up All Night than Channel 11 Shocktober. Our intrepid heroes (a hotgirl and nerdy Calvin) are searching a foggy warehouse for she-demons, manage to clumsily set Evil Babs With Unidentified Accent on fire after she kills Nude Victim Lisa offscreen. Some more stuff happens, it’s not worth recounting. The lighting and acting are very bad – there’s boobs, but USA wouldn’t have shown them, so why did anyone watch this? We get a demon puppet, at least. Nude Victim was later in Puppet Master 3, Babs is from Slumber Party Massacre, and our heroes were both in Nightmare on Elm Street 4 the same year.

by ·Comments Off on New Nightmare (1994, Wes Craven)

For years I’ve suspected I was wrong to hate this movie, which I saw in the dollar theater where they spray windex on the popcorn, and now can confirm it’s actually a good movie. They try hard to sink it, having two out of three scenes turn out to have been only a dream, which becomes tiresome, and including a haunted child (who Poltergeists and Shinings and Exorcists) and giving digital assistance to the claw effects, and evoking worst sequel #5 in the climax of a mom searching for her kid in dream world, and Craven learning to make everything All About Trauma, and Freddy looking like a Dick Tracy villain.

Linking the Elm Streets with the Scream series, Freddy interferes with the making of an Elm Street movie, killing the effects crew and tormenting Heather/Nancy and her kid. Englund and John Saxon play their actor selves, concerned friends of Heather, then gradually turn into their Nightmare selves, pulling her back into the movie-world. Since the kid is full of fairy-tale bedtime stories, Freddy gets wicked-witched again – after the silliness of the last few movies this one is trying to get darker and more serious with higher stakes, then she stabs Freddy in the eye with an eel and he fights back by extending his hundred-foot tongue.

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 Scream 2 (1997, Wes Craven)

Wes Craven got sent to diversity training after the first movie, and this time Drew Barrymore and her doomed bf are played by Jada Pinkett (Demon Knight) and Omar Epps (Dracula 2000), who get killed during the premiere of the movie Stab based on Cox’s character’s book about the events of part one. This sort of meta-spiral inevitably leads to the Cinderhella scenes in Detention.

Neve is at college now, even more traumatized than she was in the last movie, with boyfriend Derek and roomie Hallie, who will both end up in Mission to Mars after failing to survive this movie. Also not surviving: Jamie Kennedy (this is for the best, he’s much less charming here than in part one) and sorority sister Buffy, who gets a big solo scene.

Or maybe Buffy is the Drew Barrymore, I dunno:

Arquette comes to campus after the killings start, crippled from getting stabbed in the first movie, as does Cox of course, and they are cute together. Her new cameraman Joel (Duane Martin of The Faculty) quits his job before getting killed, amazing. Jamie explains the sequel rules (bigger setpieces, higher body count) and Wes leans into the clever references with Friends jokes and generic Hollywoodized scenes of his own movie in Stab (feat. Luke Wilson as Skeet Ulrich), and there’s even a play-within-the-play (Neve is playing Casandra for drama teacher David Warner), which gives us a location for the final showdown.

They’ve kept the tradition of ghostface getting beat up in every encounter, and that of ghostface being two people. Everyone thinks it’s Neve’s boyfriend again but he’s innocent, fake-tortured by frat guys to a Jon Spencer song then murdered by film student Timothy Olyphant (Dreamcatcher), the crazy Lillard-type partner of Skeet’s revenge-seeking mom Laurie Metcalf. The ending needs work – we are asked to believe that a high-stacked pile of stones in a college theater production is made of actual stones. Liev Schreiber, wrongly imprisoned for Neve’s mom’s murder before part one, just wants TV interviews and fame and cash, keeps getting overlooked because of the second wave of killings so he will presumably get fed up and become the killer in part three.

Liev found your cat:

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 Swamp Thing (1982, Wes Craven)

Adrienne Barbeau visits swamp scientist Ray Wise, when bad guys attack, wanting the secret formula. I saw Barbeau last week in The Fog, and saw this plot last week in Five Dolls for an August Moon… but in Five Dolls the scientist got dispatched with a rifle, and in this one Ray’s plant-animal-hybrid concoction turns him into Swamp Thing.

S.T. uses his E.T. healing powers on the cool kid who assists Barbeau:

I guess it’s nice how the wide shots emulate photos of bigfoot sightings. Everyone seems to have done the best they could, given low budget and talent. Shapeshifting baddie Arcane also starred in a 1977 Dracula and a haunted mirror movie. His strongman Bruno returned to the swamp for Hell Comes to Frogtown, and the guy in the monster suit would be back in Return of Swamp Thing.

Bruno gets turned into a little beastie, just for fun:

by ·Comments Off on A Nightmare on Elm Street 1 / 2 / Remake (1984-2010)

A Nightmare on Elm Street Remake (2010, Samuel Bayer)

Unexpectedly ended up watching the second half of this (and up through the first kill of Freddy’s Dead) on the ceiling of the dentist’s office while getting a filling replaced. Same ol’ thing, Nancy and her bf trying to stay awake, then trying to figure out why this is happening, then pulling Freddy out of the dream world to kill him. Jackie Earle Haley, now a repeat-offense child abuser, has some cool makeup, distinct from the original design, but that’s the only thing here that’s distinct. I didn’t recognize Rooney Mara at all, blaming the poor lighting for that. The bf was Kyle Gallner, just off Jennifer’s Body, who had worked with Craven on Red Eye. The parents are blamed for killing an innocent gardener (the three-pronged garden cultivator as finger-knives, get it?), then Mara discovers FK was not innocent at all, and isn’t killing them as revenge on the parents, but just because he’s a real bad man. The hearing aid scene in Freddy’s Dead holds up well, but the best Freddy movie I’ve seen this year is still Buzzard.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, Wes Craven)

The dentist remake viewing experience combined with the Plaza screening part 3 got me curious whether the original Elm Street series was available cheaply on blu-ray, and yes, very cheaply, so it’s marathon time. My first time seeing any of these in HD, and in at least twenty years. Part one doesn’t look too distinctive, and human behavior wasn’t the writers’ strong suit, but all a horror movie needs to become legendary is a cool concept and good theme song, and we’ve got both of those covered.

First to die is Tina (Amanda Wyss, between Fast Times and Better Off Dead), victim of some memorably anti-gravity claw work. Her pretty-eyed boyfriend Rod (Jsu Garcia would appear in a couple Soderbergh films and Candyman 3) is blamed by the cops, led by Heather’s dad John Saxon. Rod later hangs in his cell, leaving only Heather (also of Shocker and Hellraiser 10) and her bf John Depp (later of Secret Window and Tusk).

“What the hell are dreams anyway?”
“Mysteries… incredible body hocus pocus.”

This is dialogue between two people who WORK at the DREAM INSTITUTE, a Cronenbergian facility where Heather is checked in. She also tried watching The Evil Dead to stay awake. Depp doesn’t make it (both of the movie’s cool kills are in bedrooms, bloody and gravity defying). Heather’s parents are complicit (mom is Ronee Blakley of A Return to Salem’s Lot) and we hear Freddy was “a filthy child murderer who killed at least 20 kids in the neighborhood.” He’s ultimately defeated through some childish magic: Heather turns her back on him and demands her friends back. But:

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985, Jack Sholder)

Jesse (Mark Patton of an Altman film) is new in town, a Simple Minds fan who just moved into Nancy’s house. Straight away he’s being followed by Freddy when asleep, and local girl Lisa (Kim Myers with Meryl Streep vibes, of Hellraiser 4) when awake. Nancy was nice enough to leave her diary behind, so the kids learn more about Freddy, who is trying to emerge into the waking world by taking over Jesse’s body – no glove here, the blades grow through his fingers. When this happens, Jesse ends up “inside,” and Lisa braves some seriously unconvincing mutant animals in the power plant where Freddy used to work, and they burn the Freddy off, Jesse emerging safe from within. A decent sequel, from before they’d fixed a formula for these things. Sholder would make The Hidden next (about killers possessing innocent bodies), writer David Chaskin would do I, Madman (about a disfigured killer wearing the skin of his young victims), both carrying on themes from this movie.

The human behavior here is about 10% better than the original Nightmare. I remember the chaotic pool party, not the leather-studded gym teacher. We get real “Parents Just Don’t Understand” vibes from Jesse’s dad Clu Gulager. The kids are lame, but it feels more like they’re meant to be lame. School jock Grady (Robert Rusler of Sometimes They Come Back) has a Zappa poster. Was everything in the 80’s so very 80’s? Sure the music, but the wallpaper and decor and clothes too.

First victim is the family bird, boooo:

by ·Comments Off on The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988, Wes Craven)

Bill Pullman goes to Haiti to investigate a zombie rumor with the help of a local doctor – but he didn’t expect the DOCTOR to be a PRETTY LADY, he tells us in voiceover. Pullman has been good in comedies (Spaceballs the year before this) and dramas (or whatever Lost Highway is) but I don’t buy him for a second here. The pretty lady is Cathy Tyson of Mona Lisa, and she and Paul Winfield almost make the movie worth watching.

The day after our guy makes sweet love to the pretty doctor, the government declares martial law and to show him they’re serious the local badman (S African Zakes Mokae of Dust Devil and Dilemma) pounds a nail through Pullman’s scrotum, but Pullman persists, and gets Mozart (Lodge 49 star Brent Jennings, I didn’t recognize him!) to mix him up some zombie powder to bring home. Everybody either dies, or dreams they’ve died, or comes back to life, and the silly explanatory titles at the beginning and end trying to frame this buncha nonsense as news/science don’t help anything.

by ·Comments Off on The Hills Have Eyes (1977, Wes Craven)

Part two of my Wes Craven tribute, because when a horror giant dies just before SHOCKtober, memorial screenings are in order. I used to have this movie’s sequel on VHS (bought at a garage sale), and saw the awesome remake in theaters, but have probably never watched the original until now.

Stupid family taking cross-country trailer trip breaks down in the desert at the foot of cannibal-infested mountains, send a few guys in different directions looking for help. But first we set up the Harbinger hillbilly gas-station attendant (and incidentally the grandfather of the cannibals) who tells them not to go poking around, and mountain thief Ruby, who’s looking for help escaping her murderous family.

Ruby:

Bobby (Robert Houston, later an oscar-winning documentary filmmaker) runs after his escaped dogs, discovers one of them murdered but doesn’t tell anybody. Mustache Doug (Martin Speer of Killer’s Delight) finds nothing and comes back. And Big Bob (Russ Grieve of dog-horror Dogs) returns to the old man in time to see him get slaughtered, then Bob is captured, crucified and set on fire, distracting the family into leaving their trailer unguarded, in what’s probably one of the most intense sequences of the 1970’s. Bald Pluto (Michael Berryman of too many horrors to list, also One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and curly Mars invade, shoot Mustache’s wife Dee Wallace (star of The Howling and The Frighteners) and her now-insane mom (Virginia Vincent of The Return of Dracula and Craven’s Invitation to Hell), eat the parakeet, steal the baby and flee.

Family portrait, pre-invasion:

The next morning it’s payback time. Young Carolyn Jones (Eaten Alive) and Bobby plot to use their dead mom as bait and blow up cannibals who return to the trailer. Not sure how head mutant Papa Jupiter escapes that explosion, but they kill him good, with gun and hatchet. Mustache Doug climbs the mountain and attacks head-on to rescue his baby, unexpectedly aided by a rattlesnake-wielding Ruby. I can’t recall if Bald Pluto dies (think Bobby’s other dog gets him), but he’s definitely on the VHS box cover of part two.

Papa Jupiter:

Craven did interesting things to the horror genre with New Nightmare and Scream, and made some great thrillers with A Nightmare on Elm Street and Red Eye. One of the movie sites pointed out he’d been interviewed by Audobon, and had lately been writing short stories for Martha’s Vineyard Magazine about local birds, which include a strong pro-bird environmental message as well as time travel, the ghosts of passenger pigeons, and an osprey using a shotgun.

“It’s hard convincing a bird of anything in words. They’re musicians.”

Rest in peace, Wes. The birds have lost a friend.