“That frog ripped me off. Little asshole, little fucker.” Awkward shithead Tim Robinson gets invited to local rocker weatherman Paul Rudd’s friend group, blows it by being too weird and desperate and needy, loses his wife Kate Mara in a sewer adventure, ends up delusional in a squad car.
Aggro Fr13ndsh1p:
A half-hour cut-up musical about attempting to settle down during the subprime mortgage crisis, incredible.
Billy Woods released the best album of the year, and on the eve of his followup Mercy he surprise-releases a remix album and accompanying video. I had a very good time watching it.
In a blog first, K took a gowillog pilgrimage to Mork’s and brought back this photo:
Think I prefer Luci-Hadz’s bizarre movies where I don’t ever know what’s happening to the ones where a runaway girl hides out on a movie set, ending up as stand-in then rival to the movie’s diva star, the titular Ice Queen. Feels like they’re telling a story but not getting anywhere with it, all long pauses and people staring silently, while that approach seems to work for me if I’m as lost as the characters. Either way, Hadz has conjured another couple hours of splendid images.
Marion Cotillard (only the second time I’ve seen her in the last decade) is our Queen, Clara Pacini the runaway, August Diehl (A Hidden Life) a sinister assistant. The Ice Queen movie doubles as Clara’s childhood storytime and present fantasy world. There’s a crystal / refraction / kaleidoscope theme, the movie’s distorted ending recalling the fever dreams of Mysteries of Lisbon.
Joseph comes to visit his dying father and gets trapped in a hazy somnambulist stuttering time-loop zone. I didn’t like the devil man who destroys bird nests. I guess it’s a Bruno Schulz adaptation, but the story is less important than the Quays using their little puppets to create images nobody has ever seen before.
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Ancha es Castilla, N’importe Quoi (2014, Sergio Caballero)
Extremely homemade puppetry, as in Sergio is refusing to use any construction materials that weren’t already in the house – if it didn’t say 2014 I’d swear this was a pandemic project. Divided into chapters/episodes, like the Quay (and as hard to follow), but more primitive and absurd.
The perfect 1980s movie. Mom smokes pot while dad reads a Reagan book. The family is snacking constantly! Family members are introduced while asleep, the dog making the rounds of the household eating snacks out of their hands and beds, and then no amount of haunting can make them lose their appetites. Horror movie I watched at a formative time and haven’t really revisited in forty years – fortunately it holds up.
First casualty is the family bird, who dies before we even meet her. The chairs-move-by-themselves bit escalates quickly to the tree/clown/closet/TV horror night, then the family calls in a university team (led by Beatrice Straight of Chiller) who faithfully documents the haunting but is in way over their heads. When the house gets too dangerous the other two kids are sent away and the great Zelda Rubinstein is summoned to provide self-contradictory advice, successfully rescuing Carol Anne from the TV dimension. Then they do not leave the house immediately: Coach Dad takes a late meeting at work (the real estate company that built the neighborhood on a graveyard) while the house attempts to eat the others. Then in part two they’re followed by an evil preacher and Coach gets possessed by a tequila worm, and part three was maybe set in a city parking garage? Maybe we’ll revisit these next shocktober.
The member of the research team who decided not to come back:
Mom is JoBeth Williams of The Big Chill:
How did Gordon get mixed up with Full Moon Entertainment? Guess I shouldn’t act like he was in a position to choose his own studio, between Fortress and Space Truckers – at least this one’s a Lovecraft story. Probably the only time the editor of Puppet Master 2 worked with the cinematographer of Dillinger Is Dead.
Jeffrey Combs inherited a spooky castle, always a bad sign, arrives to claim it with his wife who hates him (Barbara Crampton in a thankless role) and blind daughter, and without their son who he recently killed in a drunken car crash. And inside the castle lives the titular freak, who recently murdered its keeper/tormentor, and now chews off its thumb to escape the cuffs and go exploring (finger-trauma handcuff escapes are becoming a theme this month).
Combs brings home a local hotgirl – she wanders into the castle and gets freaked (it chews her boobs off). Combs is arrested because people are going missing, and you’d think it would help his case that the freak kills two more cops while their suspect is in custody, but Combs still has to conk a cop on the noggin and escape to save his imperiled family and battle the freak to their deaths on a rainy roof.
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.
Not much backstory – we go from the stuff being discovered in a hole in the ground to its mass marketing within four minutes, then get to business following Moriarty, an industrial spy working for an ice cream company threatened by the stuff’s sudden popularity. Obviously primo Cohen, though the first time I watched I wasn’t yet a Moriarty-head and didn’t groove on its wavelength.
When your family has all enjoyed the dessert product and wants you to have some too:
Moriarty accrues teammates along the way: marketing exec Andrea Marcovicci (The Hand), some kid who fled his zombified family, and M’s old friend Chocolate Chip Charlie (Garrett Morris of Cooley High). Feels at times like they’re the only survivors of a stuff-pocalypse, but when the tide finally turns against the sentient brain-eating alien dessert product and our heroes force its distributors to eat stuff, there are enough unaffected people to revolt and reclaim humanity and the TV news tells us “the casualties were in the thousands.”
The team in an unguarded moment, right before Chocolate Chip gets melted:
Moriarty and the girl find the stuff mines – fortunately he brought along timed explosives. They go to see a crazy recluse racist colonel worried about commie infiltration – he’d send in the army to blast stuffies with machine guns. Stuff addicts become empty vessels who crack apart when punched – the effects range from cheap and hilarious to nightmarish (some beautiful shots of antigravity flaming stuff).
Nightmare on Stuff Street:
