by ·Comments Off on Marrowbone (2017, Sergio Sanchez)

This actually ended up being worse than Serpent and the Rainbow, an achievement. Mom moves the four kids to her childhood home in America so “they” will never find the family, then the kids meet Anya Taylor-Joy, who will “change their life – forever.”

This ghost-child is foreshadowing:

A year later the mom dies and they become increasingly secluded, barely seeing Anya, who’s being pursued by local realtor Tom. When Tom’s new job offer turns out to be a scam he extorts oldest son Jack for their killer dad’s stolen money, which Jack has to retrieve from the haunted attic, and spawns all sorts of flashbacks and revelations – the dad found them and killed everybody, and Jack locked him in the attic and has been pretending the others are still around.

Family Portrait:

Sledgehammer Realtor:

Jack was just one of the leads in 1917, and the realtor dude was in Poldark. Other son Billy got to hang out with Anya again in The New Mutants, and daughter Mia Goth woukld reteam with Anya in Emma. From the writer of The Orphanage, which I fully intended to watch this month but after this, I’m gonna push it till next year.

by ·Comments Off on Dellamorte Dellamore (1994, Michele Soavi)

“Everything’s shit. The only thing that’s not shitty is sleep”

I’ve apparently seen this before, under its Cemetery Man title, in some 90s VHS horror binge-watch, but remembered nothing of its greatness. Hard to believe that after the cool The Church, then the excellent The Sect, Soavi made a great English-language (with proper sync!) horror-comedy, as crazy as his others and just consistently high-quality in every department.

“Go away, I haven’t got time for the living.”

Gaunt Rupert Everett is our cemetery man, disaffected as he blasts the heads off the reanimated bodies of townspeople he buried the week before, living in a split shack with his assistant Nagi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro of City of Lost Children), keeping things pretty quiet and off the grid until Nagi falls for the mayor’s daughter, who goes riding with her biker boyfriend’s gang and gets into a wreck with a bus full of boyscouts, which brings public and government attention to the cemetery, along with a busload of new zombies. Rupert falls in love with a Mysterious Woman who keeps reappearing, sometimes as a zombie and sometimes as a whole new character.

An American movie might’ve kept this story going and lead to a conventional climax, but Soavi has to go bigger and weirder – after the grim reaper tells him to stop killing the dead, Rupert wheels into town and mass-murders the living – or somebody does, but even though we see him committing these crimes, the cops refuse to treat him as a suspect. “Somebody’s stolen my crimes.” Nagi digs up his beloved’s head, which can move on its own and takes up residence in his broken television. Rupert tries to make himself surgically impotent so the new mayor’s hot secretary (the Mysterious Woman again) will stay with him… he sleeps with a student then sets her on fire… then he and Nagi flee town and discover the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

by ·Comments Off on The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007, John Erick Dowdle)

Fake documentary following the exploits of an area serial killer after the discovery of a room full of videotapes documenting his crimes. Much of this movie is footage “from” those tapes – not just VHS quality, but with an effect like the tapes or camera suffered magnetic damage, the picture bending in waves.

It’s a bummer of a movie that makes you feel bad for watching it. The guy’s first known crime is the abduction/rape/murder of an 8-year-old, the central case is a girl he keeps for a decade and subjects to Martyrs-level torment, and the interviewees are a parade of FBI guys impressed by the killer’s craftiness, which includes railroading a cop to a state execution for the killer’s crimes. So the killer is portrayed as an evil genius still at large at the end, but Se7en or Memories of Murder this ain’t. Let’s stay away from the real sordid feel-bad movies this week and look for more horror-comedies.

by ·Comments Off on Hellraiser II (1988, Tony Randel)

Some sequelly repetition here to be sure, but adding the mad doctor and the puzzle girl, then sending Kirsty and the resurrected Julia through the labyrinth with them, all great ideas. Overall made by people in sympathy with the spirit of the original, though that wouldn’t last through many more sequels. Too many flashbacks to the first movie, but in fairness you could never follow it without them. A powerful movie, never truly scary because you don’t quite buy it, but no acting missteps either. Leviathan, Lord of the Labyrinth should’ve played a bigger part in later movies, instead of continuing to obsess over Pinhead’s human origins.

Skinless Julia:

Stolen Skin:

Barker wrote the story, and screenwriter Peter “Martin” Atkins would write the next two, then Wishmaster, before turning to novels. Randel went on to make the haunted-clock Amityville sequel, the famously bad Fist of the North Star, and most recently a kids movie about a telepathic dog.

“Help my daughter”

Julia and Channard:

Poet horror lobotomist Dr. Channard is my dad’s age, was in Prospero’s Books and Hot Fuzz. Julia is in The House of Mirth which I also need to rewatch. Kirsty’s boyfriend Steve flakes off forever and is quickly forgotten, as Nurse Kyle becomes her sympathetic new guy: William Hope went from Aliens to this, then nothing, and twenty years later found his calling as a Thomas the Tank Engine regular. “Get them off me” guy was Oliver Smith – appropriately the same actor who played Skinless Frank.

by ·Comments Off on Two by Shinya Tsukamoto

The Phantom of Regular Size (1986)

Industrial-sounding mayhem, and did I hear a Psychic TV song? Nervous guy is attacked by a Freddy Krueger type in the subway, transforms into a scrap-metal mutant-man who kills his girlfriend with his giant spinning drill cock. A psychically linked rival appears, they face off and travel in stop-motion like The Wizard of Speed and Time. Looks wonderfully cheap and frantic, even the titles are scrawled Brakhage-style in rapid partial title cards.

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Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988)

Guy goes to a workshop, cuts his leg open and shoves a metal rod in, but only seems to realize the horror of this after it becomes infected, then he runs down the street until hit by a car. Our new guy, who turns out to have been the driver in that last scene, finds metal in his cheek while shaving, woman next to him on the train station touches metal thing on the floor and it becomes her hand, she chases him down and they battle… he defeats her but his feet turn into rocket shoes.

Between Maniac and Tsukamoto, subway restrooms are gonna be a theme this month. This is also my second movie in a row where the male lead is butt-raped, but this time it’s by a Doctor Octopus lady in a possible dream sequence. It’s a semi-remake of the short, but in this version the girlfriend does stab him a bunch of times with a kitchen knife and burn him with a hot pan before he drills her while unconscious. Tetsuo’s off the hook, if not the filmmaker.

See Also: Haze

Girlfriend (who helped dump the guy from beginning in the woods) is dead in the tub until the metal guy outside infects the house through its pipes and she attacks again, then transmogrifies into him, and they go speed-and-timing through the streets.

I’m sure the director had a good idea of what was happening in the last ten minutes, two metal-encrusted mutants in an extreme stop-motion battle, but I didn’t. Most of the movie is very watchable, which is only surprising since I’ve seen this before on VHS, and remember it bring a spastic, plotless, ear-piercing nightmare. In either event I wouldn’t have pinned this filmmaker to direct a prestige remake of Fires on the Plain, looking forward to that one.

by ·Comments Off on Deanimated (2002, Martin Arnold)

Crappy old horror movie The Invisible Ghost is given the Arnold treatment. In this case it’s less time manipulation – there might be some but I’m not sure since this is the same length as the original film – than erasing dialogue and actors from the frame. The storyline of the original sounds nuts – there’s little sign of it here as Bela Lugosi, Clarence Muse, and our interchangeable young lovers roam a house, giving each other meaningful looks or having semi-conversations or just standing around looking haunted. Often the camera will just look through an empty room, and towards the second half, even the semi-conversations dry up, which is too bad since they were my favorite part. It’s more technically impressive than his other films, but it’s less of everything else. No credits because it was an installation – I should’ve guessed.

The catalog description says:

Death becomes the fury of disappearance which gives witness to an “unbearable transition beyond existence” (Georges Bataille). The madness has been inscribed into the faces. The ecstasy of effacement, the annihilation of being, the hypostatization of the inorganic,

and so on, because you don’t become a catalog description writer by saying “crappy movie is digitally altered, parts of the image and sound painstakingly erased, to create different crappy movie.”

by ·Comments Off on Raw (2016, Julia Ducournau)

Opens with someone in wide shot leaping from behind a tree in front of a car that swerves away and hits a tree, which is how the girls hunt for bloody victims at the end of the movie. But here at the beginning, it’s the youngest in a vegetarian family going off to veterinary college which is dominated by violent hazing rituals.

Justine rooms with Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella of Girlhood), follows after her older sister Alex, and quickly gives into meat temptation and stops eating veggies at all – then she eats sister’s finger, sister eats her roommate, and they have to hold a family meeting and figure out what’s going on. Dad who gives J a Teen Wolf speech is Laurent Lucas of two movies in that wave of French horrors 15 years ago.

by ·Comments Off on Twentynine Palms (2003, Bruno Dumont)

Earliest Dumont I’ve seen and my least favorite, which suddenly makes me hesitant about the two that just came out on Criterion. Also our second movie in a row with a girl peeing on camera. I’d heard this might be a horror, and it’s not, it just has really bad vibes.

David and Katya ride around the American West in his hummer, listening to twangy French songs, never wearing seatbelts. She gets unaccountably sad after asking what he’s thinking and he says nothing. They have splashy hotel pool sex, sulk at each other about basic things, later do some nude rock climbing. He’s a film person of some sort, and yeah this is what I imagined film people do between shoots. The sex and the fights both escalate and she almost leaves one night. Then out of the blue, truckers drive them off the road, smash his head and rape him, and I guess back at the hotel he loses his mind and kills them both.

Katya was in major films by Claire Denis and Leos Carax before her premature death. David’s been in a couple things, but most importantly, when he wears his round sunglasses and lets his hair flop around, he looks like Michael Showalter’s Doug from The State.

Doug and Katya:

by ·Comments Off on Notes on Notes on Film (Norbert Pfaffenbichler)

Notes on Film 01: Else (2002)

Five-panel video up top, starring a woman in what look like camera tests, sometimes holding numbered cards, while down below the word IF transforms into THEN and ELSE via lines slowly sliding. Big string music, the sliding lines are fun but the woman is far more eye-catching. The URL in the credits has expired.

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Notes on Film 05: Conference (2011)

A cacophony of cinematic Hitlers, one after the other, their voices replaced by distorted static which gets louder according to how much each Hitler is shouting. After a Mel Brooks appearance we see film leader then a Hitler in a movie theater, so maybe all these Hitlers are being screened for another Hitler. The footage has all been processed with some heavy grain so it’ll match better.

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Notes on Film 04: Intermezzo (2012)

Escalator chase scene from Chaplin’s The Floorwalker remixed to a rock song. “Play Loud,” it says, so I did.

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Notes on Film 06A: A Messenger from the Shadows (2013)

Another multi-film montage, but this time Lon Chaney instead of Hitler – an improvement. The montage is fun, but really works because of the great music and sound design. More distorted-Hitler when people talk on the phone, at least one piece of actual sound footage. Love the climactic death-and-destruction montage.

Watched all these because of a rave article in Cinema Scope 56 about Notes on Film 06B, which takes the Lon Chaney approach but with Boris Karloff, and which I cannot find.