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 The Legend of Hell House (1973, John Hough)

Good house and one good character: Roddy McDowall as a jaded, buttoned-up medium refusing to let the spirits in. He and some others are sent by a rich guy to live in the definitely haunted house to prove the existence of an afterlife. Arrogant scientist Clive Revill (CHUD II: Bud the Chud) almost sinks the movie, but fortunately the house wins, and Roddy outlives Clive. Roddy’s fellow medium is Pamela Franklin (Food of the Gods, The Nanny), the first to die, and Clive’s long-suffering wife Gayle Hunnicutt (Eye of the Cat) is allowed to live. Roddy defeats the ghost by taunting it relentlessly, which seems a bad strategy, but don’t underestimate the British weakness against taunting. Written by Twilight Zone vet Richard Matheson. Hough has made his share of cult faves, and also a Howling sequel, which I’ve probably seen but the sequels were all so shitty I’ve never tried to straighten out which movie was which.

by ·Comments Off on Mad God (2021, Phil Tippett)

A wordless stop-motion hell, resonant of the Quays and Bobby Yeah. A lone terranaut descends endlessly through a pitiless parade of horrors, guided by a crumbling map, apparently set on destruction of the core. It’s a mechanized hell, with rampant death of the half-human workers. Gruesome in every particular – even I was icked out by the surgery scene. Some maniac spent twenty years on this movie, and it shows.

EDIT: Watched this again at the Plaza… then again with Trevor.
EDIT DEC 2023: And again with blu commentary… he says it was inspired by Bosch and Bob Dylan.

by ·Comments Off on Errementari (2017, Paul Urkijo Alijo)

A making-deals-with-demons movie filmed in Spain featuring some really nice beards. Powerful blacksmith lives in seclusion, keeps a demon in a cage – a properly cartoonish red demon with pitchfork and tail – until the ignorant townsfolk break in and muck everything up. Rival demon masquerading as a bald government man is in there, an innocent girl with a dead mom gets mixed up in the mess, and everyone has to go to hell to sort things out.

This looked great, and the director is legit, channeling Danzig on his letterboxd photo… let’s see if we can find his short films.

by ·Comments Off on Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys (2004, Ted Nicolaou)

“Sci Fi Pictures presents”

The Full Moon era has ended. Sci Fi are producers of hundreds of TV movies I’ve never heard of, most of them involving sharks, and a few craptastic sequels (Species 3, Stir of Echoes 2, Firestarter Rekindled, Return of the Living Dead 4+5, lots of Lake Placid movies).

“Written by Courtney Joyner”

A cowriter on part 3, also video store faves Class of 1999 and Doctor Mordrid.

“Directed by Ted Nicolaou”

Ted made Bad Channels, which you’ll recall got mashed up with Dollman vs. Demonic Toys, and also made TerrorVision and the Subspecies movies, so he seems like the right man for the job.

It’s a Christmas movie! The Demonic Toys have been rebranded as Christmas Pals by a toy company run by Vanessa Angel (the fake woman in the 90’s Weird Science TV series). In a Child’s Play / Halloween III mashup, she’s helping a demon destroy humanity, and step one is getting cursed toys into every household.

Angel + Henchman Julian:

Meanwhile across town, Disgruntled Suburban Ruffalo Scientist Bobby Toulon has got a full collection of crucified puppets in his basement, is trying to bring them to life using ol’ Andre’s notes. It’s a funny thing to say about circa-2004 Corey Feldman, but he gives one of the finest performances of the franchise – I like the gruff crank voice he’s doing. He’s assisted by loyal daughter Dani Keaton (already a horror vet from Pinocchio’s Revenge and Carpenter’s Village of the Damned). Everyone else in the movie is Bulgarian, since that is a very cheap place to shoot a movie.

All the nazi-fighting magic is turned into toy company espionage. I don’t love the attempt to cross dark puppet magic with christianity, but whatever. Each side runs into setbacks: Six Shooter blows up the lab and all the puppets catch fire, and Angel is scrambling for a human sacrifice on Christmas eve and has to bleed her receptionist in the iron maiden.

It’s definitely a proper Puppet Master movie, in that it’s crowded with Toulon family mythology bullshit, and feels long at 90 minutes. Angel needs the Toulon secrets to complete her evil plan and kidnaps the daughter, but Corey upgrades the puppets’ weaponry, and they fuck up some demonic toys. The demon (wearing a santa suit, nice) is displeased and drags Angel to hell.

by ·Comments Off on The Amusement Park (1973, George Romero)

I watched The Lost George Romero Movie just because it’s hot from being freshly rediscovered. Should’ve watched Two Evil Eyes instead, but I hit my Argento quota yesterday. This is a basic Twilight Zone scenario, but unconvincing and overlong, the time-loop plot being the one cool thing about it. If you set an industrial film in a heavy-metaphor theme park, you’re gonna get Carnival of Souls vibes.

Lincoln Maazel explains that he is an actor (it’s true, he’s in Martin), then healthy Link interviews a beaten-up, agonized Link wearing the same suit. We follow healthy Link through various scenarios outside until he eventually becomes his miserable beat-down version. How did this happen? The movie wants us to think it’s elder abuse, but it seems everyone is just selfish dicks and society favors the rich. Anyway, the only Romero movie where the grim reaper rides a merry-go-round.

by ·Comments Off on The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970, Dario Argento)

American Sam witnesses a woman get attacked in an art gallery after hours, then gets stalked by the killer and suspected by the asshole cops, but seems fine just hanging around Italy and playing detective. He replays what he saw at the scene (nicely done, with freeze frames and zooms) and the Honeywell-brand police computer equipment prints statistics and an outline of the attacker. Sam follows some unusual leads, of course paintings are involved, while his friend gets killed and his girlfriend Giulia kidnapped. Turns out the killer is Monica, the apparent victim of the gallery incident, and we get neat psychological explanations of everything over the ending.

The bird > the poster > the movie. This was Dario’s debut feature. Sam is Tony Musante, who really is American despite the dubbing, has been in a couple James Gray movies. Giulia is British, a screamer in Berberian Sound Studio. The Inspector is from Hercules and the Captive Women, and murderess Eva Renzi from The Prodigal Daughter. DP Vittorio Storaro shot The Spider’s Stratagem and The Conformist, also in 1970, a productive year.

Sam, his girl Giulia, and their Black Power poster:

Victim Killer Monica:

This is the 500th horror movie in the blog, holy shit. We’ve been running for over 15 years, so that’s around 2.7 horror movies per month. We can do better, I know we can.

by ·Comments Off on Detention (2011, Joseph Kahn)

Extremely convoluted and vaguely offensive, with more ideas per minute than anything else I’ve seen this year… which is to say that my high expectations set by Bodied have been met. Set in a high school where all the kids are obsessed with the 90’s. There’s a “gotta fled” reference.

After a false start, Riley is our loser main girl (Shanley Caswell seemed up-and-coming then followed this up with a David DeCoteau movie) who decides to hang herself in the school hallway and ends up fighting off an axe murderer in a princess crown cosplaying the horror sequel all the kids want to see, Cinderhella 2. She and Josh “Hunger Games” Hutcherson try to stay alive long enough to solve the mystery. There’s body swapping and time travel and alien abduction. Dumbfounded from Bodied downloads an illegal workprint of Cinderhella 3 seeking clues from the future. Shout out to Adrian Martin for listing this as one of the century’s greatest films.

Kahn:

Horror was the bait that we were dangling so we could flip all the genres around … One of the conceits of the movie was to put each of the characters in their own genre: one of them is in a sexcapade, one of them is in a horror movie, one of them is in Clueless. And then over the course of the movie they sort of start to peek over into each other’s genres. The only one who can’t see outside of his genre is Sander, who is a version of those Columbine guys. He has no backstory.

JULY 2024: Watched again… great movie.

by ·Comments Off on Titane (2021, Julia Ducournau)

Before heading to the theater I checked the movie’s length on letterboxd, stopping to chuckle at their plot description about a fireman reuniting with his son, obviously a database glitch since everyone knows Titane is about a woman having sex with cars. But it’s both! Agathe Rousselle, obsessed with metal and fire, is hiding from the cops after a serial-murder spree, having killed at least five hot young people plus her parents, and decides to masquerade as the missing boy on a poster. Now her adoptive dad wants to bond with her, while she’s trying to hide the evidence that she’s been knocked up by a hot rod.

Movies do love to open with car crashes – good crash here, though I liked the Empty Man kid’s coin-on-teeth routine more than Young Agathe’s vroom sounds. After Annette and It Still Lives, this is my third mutant baby (titanium-spined cyborg) in a couple months, and after Videodrome and the Tsukamotos this has become a flesh-machine-themed week. Raw star Garance Marillier plays a friend/victim, and is again named Justine. In Raw, Justine’s sister was Alexia and her roommate was Adrien, and in Titane those are the two names Agathe goes by – something’s going on here. Alexia’s real dad is Bertrand Bonello, and in her new life she’s got Claire Denis regular Vincent Lindon as a dad and Dardenne regular Myriem Akeddiou for a mom.

The switch from car-humping icepick murderer to mute sullen teen firefighter is abrupt, but it works in the moment. Scott Tobias in The Reveal:

Its heroine’s body is stretched and mutated in Cronenberg fashion, and as she recedes ever more dramatically from social acceptability, Titane stirs intense alienation and loneliness. But a disarming sweetness sneaks its way into the film, too, as the conventional boundaries of gender and family are scrubbed away and a relationship defines its own terms.