by ·Comments Off on Black Sabbath (1963, Mario Bava)

Lots of afraid-looking ladies standing in finely arranged rooms with mysterious glowing green light sources, speaking with absolutely appalling lipsync, the worst I’ve seen. This was made a few years after Black Sunday, which is somehow a different movie. Their original Italian titles are something like Mask of Satan and Three Faces of Fear, which are far more descriptive, since Black Sunday is about a mask of satan, and this one is an anthology of three fear-based short stories introduced by Boris Karloff.

The Telephone

Pretty good suspense story, with your usual black-gloved Italian knife murderer. Rosy (Michele Mercier, friendly prostitute in Shoot The Piano Player) is being harassed by telephone, thinks her just-escaped-from-prison ex Frank is returning for revenge, so calls over her former friend Mary. But Mary was making the calls as a fun prank in order to get invited over. As she writes a letter explaining this, Rosy’s just-escaped-from-prison ex Frank arrives and strangles Mary, then he’s killed by a knife-wielding Rosy, who now has no more friends. Fun fact: if you speak into the phone through a folded handkerchief your voice sounds just like Frank’s.

Dead by dawn! Dead by dawn!

Old friends hangin’ out:

The Wurdulak

Count Vladimir arrives at an inn where the locals are holed up in fear of wurdulaks: zombies who “yearn for the blood of those they loved most when they were alive.” When Father returns from hunting wurdulaks, it’s clear to the viewer that he has become one, because he’s Boris Karloff and looks insane. Yup, Boris kills his son Massimo Righi (of Danger!! Death Ray and Planet of the Vampires), steals his grandson and rides into the night. Vlad hangs out through all this because he thinks some girl is pretty (“my lips are dead without your kisses”), so he’s as doomed as they are.

The Drop of Water

Helen (Jacqueline Pierreux, Jean-Pierre Leaud’s mom) is a nurse, I guess. She’s called to the house of a dead recluse by Milly the maid, interrupting Helen’s plans to sit alone and get drunk, so understandably she is annoyed. While dressing the dead woman in funeral clothes, she steals the woman’s ring. This ring was apparently the source of the old woman’s fatal ghostly torment, because when Helen goes home and resumes drinking, after being harassed by flies and not-at-all-scary drops of water, she becomes possessed and strangles herself. Her landlady steals the ring, etc. This would have easily been the worst chapter if not for the dead old lady’s amazing death mask.

After all this, Karloff reappears and Bava reveals the studio artifice, Taste of Cherry-style. Karloff, a few years after Corridors of Blood, looks like he’s having fun.

Segments were written by Tolstoy and Chekhov (really). IMDB says Polanski choking himself in The Tenant was a reference to this, and apparently the mom in The Babadook is seen watching it.

by ·Comments Off on Life Is Sweet (1990, Mike Leigh)

Sometimes in the middle of SHOCKtober you need to take a break and watch something called Life Is Sweet. Hoping the title isn’t a pun on the faux-punk character’s episodes of binging on candy bars then vomiting them up. The whole thing’s a bit less cheerful than the title would suggest, but it’s implied that everyone (except maybe poor Timothy Spall) will turn out alright.

Jim Broadbent (not yet an internationally beloved figure, he was at the time a Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam regular who’d recently appeared in Superman IV) and Alison Steadman (also in a Gilliam movie, and Mrs. Bennett in the Pride & Prejudice mini-series) live in a row house with twin daughters Nat (a boyish plumber) and Nicola (unemployed punk with gross food issues). There’s not much to the movie plot-wise – Jim buys a fixer-upper food truck from buddy Stephen Rea (The Crying Game, V for Vendetta) but doesn’t fix it up, and the family helps a very goofy Timothy Spall (who was unsurprisingly absent from cinemas for a half-decade after this performance, hopefully toning it down for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies in 1996) with his restaurant opening.

The restaurant thing is a huge failure and seems to take up half of the movie’s runtime. The simple family relations held more of my interest, especially when involving the grounded Nat (Claire Skinner of Leigh’s Naked) and unstable Nicola (Jane Horrocks in Roeg’s The Witches the same year, later star of Little Voice) who has a breakdown after her poseur politics get taken down by boyfriend David Thewlis, finally allowing herself to be consoled by her mom. Also, Broadbent and Steadman laugh constantly, all movie long, which is extremely comforting given what’s going on around them.

Mike D’A:

The mid-film reveal of Andy as a chef in charge of a large staff remains one of my all-time favorite “plot twists” … Life Is Sweet accomplishes everything Leigh would later attempt in Happy-Go-Lucky, except far more subtly and spread across multiple characters.

by ·Comments Off on Evil Dead double-feature

Nice intro to the upcoming Alamo Drafthouse, a free outdoor double-feature at the nearby Sokol Ampitheater. I’ve seen these a bunch of times, but not lately.

The Evil Dead (1981)

Still more horror than comedy, but some over-the-top punishment and gore got chuckles from the crowd. Screened in its original 4:3 (I hadn’t realized there’s aspect-ratio controversy, but apparently Raimi advocates a cropped widescreen version). Don’t think I’d noticed before how great the music and sound is on this movie.

Cheryl is attacked by trees then possessed by demons and locked in the cellar. Shelly’s possessed next, dismembered by Scott. Linda gets possessed and finally she and Scott and Cheryl are all tormenting Ash, who takes no meaningful action until about the last 15 minutes when he beheads one of them and tosses the Necronomicon in the fire, causing the rest to decompose.

Evil Dead II (1987)

I love how ten minutes into the movie there’s only one living character and he’s possessed by demons. Fortunately two archaeologists and two local rednecks soon show up in order to get possessed and torment Ash some more… and of course Henrietta is discovered in the cellar. I wish this hadn’t been screened with singalong subtitles over the scenes that somebody found quotable, but it wasn’t too distracting. Bobbie Jo starred in the recent We Are What We Are remake and Ash’s girlfriend Linda married Steve Guttenberg.

The first Evil Dead came out the same year as The Howling, Scanners and Possession, though sequel-mania had already hit the genre, with Friday the 13th 2 and Omen 3 and Halloween 2. Raimi made the disappointing Crimewave before joining the sequel craze with Evil Dead II in 1987, which was my Year Zero of horror, with Hellraiser, The Gate, House II, Elm Street 3 and The Lost Boys.

Cowriter Scott Spiegel later made Intruder (“gore galore” says the IMDB review). Appropriately, Evil Dead II cinematographer Peter Deming shot Cabin in the Woods (and Mulholland Dr. and Lost Highway!). Looks like Raimi hasn’t made anything since Drag Me to Hell, and those rumors of an Evil Dead remake and TV series never came to pass.

by ·Comments Off on Burying The Ex (2014, Joe Dante)

Anton Yelchin (Ian in Only Lovers Left Alive) likes ice cream girl Olivia (Alexandra Daddario of Texas Chainsaw 3D), is tired of his vegan environmentalist girlfriend Evelyn (Ashley Greene of Butter) but before he can break up with Evelyn she’s killed by a truck (unconvincing death scene weirdly scored by a Phosphorescent song) and later comes back as a bitchy zombie.

Full of easy horror references, out-of-date gender politics and default-sounding movie-dialogue. Anton’s half-brother, the Ed to his Shaun, is Oliver Cooper (Project X) who I think gets nearly killed by Evelyn but comes back at the end, or wait, does he come back as a zombie? I’m trying not to give this too much thought and pretend it’s not by the same Joe Dante who made Gremlins and Matinee. Also: it’s another movie where someone is keeping a secret for no reason other than plot contrivance, and Anton is a massive horror movie fan but doesn’t know how to dispatch a zombie.

by ·Comments Off on Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, Don Siegel)

Doctor Kevin McCarthy returns from vacation, finds that his ex-girlfriend Becky is back in town and single again. This allows both of them to be reasonably smart characters and still not notice that their small town is being overrun by pod people, because they’re focused on each other. Eventually though, even Becky becomes a pod person (not entirely convincingly, after falling asleep for a few minutes in a mine) and Kevin ends up raving to passing motorists on a highway, nobody paying him any attention, finally screaming “they’re here already – you’re next” into camera.

At first McCarthy (oscar-nominated five years before for Death of a Salesman, would go on to appear in every Joe Dante movie) is so ignorant of the pod invasion, he seems to be helping it out. When little Jimmy is brought in shouting that his mom isn’t his mom, Kevin drugs him and sends him home, surely dooming Jimmy to pod replacement. He investigates but dismisses Becky’s cousin Virginia Christine (of both the Siegel and Siodmak versions of The Killers) who says her uncle Ira isn’t Ira, but catches on to the pattern, and finally his friends Jack (King Donovan of The Defiant Ones) and Teddy (Carolyn Jones, Morticia in The Addams Family) find Jack’s pod replacement just out on the pool table being formed, and they figure out the whole thing.

L-R: Becky, Jack, Teddy, Kevin:

Local psychiatrist Larry Gates (a cop in Underworld USA) works against them, was probably a pod person early on (or just a bad psychiatrist). Becky (Dana Wynter of Sink the Bismarck, The List of Adrian Messenger) follows along for the adventure after her dad becomes a pod and she finds her own pod waiting for her to fall asleep (wonder if this influenced Nightmare On Elm Street). Speaking of influences, it’s got the Shaun of the Dead scene where they try to act like pod people in order not to be noticed. Sam Peckinpah, still working his way towards directing, plays a gas man. It’s weird that between this and The Visitor I just watched two of the few movies with him as an actor.

Peckinpah:

Apparently scripted as a horror-comedy but the studio didn’t understand such a thing and ordered the jokes cut. Speaking of studio interference, a suspicious framing story has McCarthy telling his story to some doctors at the beginning, making the bulk of the movie a flashback, then some evidence leads them to believe him and take action at the end, so theoretically the world can be saved, though it’s clear the movie is supposed to end with him screaming impotently on the highway. Joe Dante obviously didn’t mind the bookend scenes, cast doctor Richard Deacon in Piranha. The other doctor, Whit Bissell, appeared in I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.

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.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes Vol. 16: Wes Craven R.I.P. Edition

I grew up on Nightmare On Elm Street movies, and loved horror in part due to Wes Craven. So what better way to celebrate his life than to watch the last ten minutes of all his worst movies via Amazon Prime (and one good movie, The Hills Have Eyes).

Deadly Blessing (1981, Wes Craven)

Girl is walking around a dark farmhouse chanting thees and thous when she’s swiftly murdered by Battlestar Galactica‘s Maren Jensen. Climactic shotgun shootout, and glamorous Sharon Stone wakes up at the last minute to help out. Beardy amish guy shows up at the last minute after the women are finished killing each other off, then after a comforting epilogue, sudden Drag Me To Hell ending. It all looks very murky and VHS-generic. I guess Craven was having trouble finding work between the cult classic era (The Hills Have Eyes, Last House on the Left) and the mainstream hit (Nightmare on Elm Street)

Chiller (1985, Wes Craven)

Michael Beck (Xanadu) returns from cryogenic sleep with no soul, and his mother is disappointed, so he stalks her with a metal hook. Beck walks into a giant freezer, and any fool viewer knows she’s going to trap him in there, but he fakes out some cops and forces her to shoot him. Also appearing: horror regular Jill Schoelen (The Stepfather, Popcorn, Robert Englund’s Phantom of the Opera) The sound on this one is awful, and it’s weirdly listed as a 2007 release, and I’m starting to think quality control might not be Amazon’s highest priority. Wes would follow this up with the killer-robot-child movie Deadly Friend. I mainly remember people jumping fences in front of a creepy house, and someone’s head exploding from a robot-propelled basketball.

Night Visions (1990, Wes Craven)

“Bland mystery with obvious killer,” raves the IMDB of this most obscure Craven tv-movie, made between Shocker and The People Under The Stairs. Loryn Locklin (Fortress) is at the studio of killer/photographer Jon Tenney (Beverly Hills Cop III), cop James Remar (the gargoyle story in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie) comes to save her and immediately gets run over by a truck, haha. There’s some unconvincing multiple-personality schtick and Tenney is dropped off a tall building. This was even worse than Chiller – what happened, Wes?

Wes Craven presents Mind Ripper (1995, Joe Gayton)

Bald shriekling madman is tearing walls apart and Claire Stansfield is leading an injured Lance Henriksen to safety. Whoa, the madman has a long pointy finger for a tongue, is menacing Natasha Wagner (John Carpenter’s Vampires 2: Los Muertos), but young Giovanni Ribisi (in his first film) plugs the tongue into an outlet and they run like hell (out of what looks like The Keep from The Keep). They drive away in a van but the madman’s on the van! Then they escape in a plane but the madman’s on the plane! Cowritten by Wes Craven’s son Jonathan.

Wes Craven presents Carnival of Souls (1998, Adam Grossman)

Bobbie Phillips (Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain) runs past creepy clowns and creaky rides then shoots the king clown. But it was all a dream and now she’s in a waterlogged truck. But it was all a dream and she’s outside the carnival having flashbacks. But it was all a dream and she’s actually dead in the river, survived by her sister Shawnee Smith (Amanda in the Saw movies). Not as cool-looking as the 1962 original. Grossman also made Sometimes They Come Back… Again.

Cursed (2005, Wes Craven)

Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg! “I’ll check the circuit breaker” will be probably be Jesse’s last words. Joshua Jackson (The Skulls, Apt Pupil) arrives as Ricci and Jesse start morphing into vampires. Vamp-fight ensues, including ceiling-crawling and a silverware stabbing. Josh catches fire and everything’s cool. Doesn’t seem awful except for the music, but I can’t imagine it was great either. Written by Craven’s Scream series collaborator Kevin Williamson and directed the same year as Red Eye.

Wes Craven presents They (2002, Robert Harmon)

Laura Regan (Hollow Man 2) is trapped in a subway tunnel, which seems to be tormenting her with surround-sound effects. Actually it’s not at all clear what’s happening, so I assume in the end she’ll just turn out to be crazy. Oh yeah here we go, mental ward where a condescending doctor is telling her she just needs to rest. But oops, she is sucked into another dimension and tormented forever by beasties. Harmon also made the 1986 The Hitcher, which I saw a million times at the video store and never rented.

–
Speaking of video store mainstays that never quite looked good enough to rent, here are a few more I found online (not Craven-related).

Waxwork (1988, Anthony Hickox)

Whoooa, monster effects a-go-go, as Zach from Gremlins and Sarah (Deborah Foreman of April Fool’s Day) fight an orgy of monsters alongside Zach’s butler Joe “not Don” Baker. Did I just see the baby from Demonic Toys? And a riff on Audrey II? Zach defeats a pirate then drops waxwork man David Warner into a vat of wax, obviously. Hickox made Hellraiser III, which is also absurdly entertaining.

Waxwork II: Lost In Time (1992, Anthony Hickox)

Shootout/swordfight in a zombie-filled mall. These Waxwork movies look quite good. Zach time-travels at random, stops Jack the Ripper, distracts Nosferatu, interrupts a melty-looking Godzilla, while Sarah (who is now Monika Schnarre of the Beastmaster TV series, because women are interchangeable) stabs some guy. When did Zach’s hair get so big? He pushes her through the time door back to the normal world, and she uses the disembodied hand she brings along as evidence in a jury trial.

Ghoulies (1984, Luca Bercovici)

They’re like flying-squirrel puppets, the ghoulies. Becky (Lisa Pelikan of Swing Shift) falls down the stairs and our hero Jonathan faces off against glowing-green-eyed Michael Des Barres (of Waxwork II: Lost In Time!) when Jack fuckin’ Nance, Eraserhead himself, comes to the rescue. Barres and Nance shoot each other with eyeball-lightning for a really long time. I love how during this whole scene two terrified dwarfs are shaking their heads at Jonathan. From the writer/director of Rockula.

Ghoulies II (1988, Albert Band)

Another carnival, jeez. Kerry Remsen (Pumpkinhead) climbs a ferris wheel then Phil Fondacaro (the troll in Troll) reads from a magic book, summoning a ghoulie-eating demon. It strolls around murdering ghoulies, which suddenly seem pretty slow and helpless, then our heroes trick it into eating a stuffed animal with a bomb inside. Albert “father of Charles” Band also directed Doctor Mordrid and something called I Bury The Living, which looks like it would’ve gone direct-to-video if there’d been video in 1958. Ghoulies 1 & 2 are free, but Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies Go To College costs three bucks, so we’ll have to stop here.

by ·Comments Off on My Winnipeg Redux

I rewatched My Winnipeg in glorious (glorious!) high definition. Great extras on the blu-ray: shorts and an hour-long interview with Maddin. “I liked the idea of leaping from one subject to another with that paranoiac certainty that the two are connected.”

Spanky to the Pier and Back (2008)

In which Spanky walks to the pier and back. I’ve watched this one before. Inspired by From Munich to Berlin by Oskar Fischinger, edited in-camera. “Spanky was my best friend at the time.”

Sinclair (2010)

Camera slowly spins around a plain white room with wide angle lens, Sinclair passed out in a wheelchair to one side, tuneless doom music on the soundtrack. The second half (at least) is a single take, unusual for fast-cut freak Maddin. Guy says it’s a protest film about the death of a native paraplegic in an emergency room, shot in the style of La Region Centrale.

Only Dream Things (2012)

Mesmerising. Low-framerate, Begotten-processed home movie footage overlaid with dream images, pop songs and swimmy sound effects. The home movies were shot by his older brothers, from “the summers of our lives before anything went wrong.”

The Hall Runner (2014)

“When you’re gone I have no memory.”
Extension on the My Winnipeg bit about rugs that can never be adequately straightened.

Louis Riel for Dinner (2014, Drew Christie)

A girl is alarmed that the duck her dad has cooked for dinner has the head of Winnipeg hero Louis Riel. Animated!

Winnipegiana (2014, Evan Johnson)

“The city blighted by these sickly trees is a city that dreams too much and lives too little.”

A series of wonderful “educational” shorts with a verbose narrator whose scripts only barely make sense. Johnson is Maddin’s codirector of The Forbidden Room.

Since that still wasn’t enough Maddin-on-Winnipeg, I also read the book of the film, with the script, another interview, deleted scenes, rough drafts, photos, scans, collaborator essays and more.

Now, back to worrying over the eleven minutes supposedly cut from The Forbidden Room since its Sundance premiere, and whether they’ll be on the Kino blu-ray out in March.

by ·Comments Off on The Visitor (1979, Giulio Paradisi)

Lance Henriksen is sent by a corporate board of sinister white men to date and impregnate Barbara, who is afraid of her own eight year old daughter Katy, who caused an explosion to win Atlanta a basketball game. But first: bald children, wicked clouds, John Huston in an Obi-Wan robe and an unhappy-looking Franco “Django” Nero, who I found out from the closing credits was supposed to be Jesus Christ and whose opening narration sounds an awful lot like Star Wars with the names replaced by Bible characters. This all sounds nuts, and it is – a lost classic of cheesy/weirdo horror cinema revived by Drafthouse Films.

Unhappy Jesus:

After the bonkers intro it’s back to the family scene, which is playing out like We Need To Talk About Katy. Soon Katy shoots her mom (Joanne Nail of Switchblade Sisters and Full Moon High), who is then confined to a wheelchair and hires Shelley Winters (of Bloody Mama and Tentacles) as a housekeeper who might be working for God/Huston. Shelley affects nothing in the household besides bugging everyone by singing “mammy’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread” and saying things like “A great philosopher said that our characters are our fates. And some scientists now believe that planets somehow understand this.”

Shelley introduces herself and her finches:

Huston (the same year he made Wise Blood) is God, who works in mysterious ways, allows Katy to kill the Atlanta cop (The Big Heat and Experiment In Terror star Glenn Ford) investigating her mom’s shooting, then after many scenes standing on Atlanta roofs frowning at the sky (and after playing Pong on a projection screen with Katy) he finally kills her and Lance with a flock of pigeons.

Playin’ Pong with God:

Huston looks surprised at what he’s done:

Have I mentioned that Katy’s Satan-Falcon kills a cop by messing with the street lights?

Or that between Pong and the pigeons, there’s a Lady From Shanghai funhouse scene?

Lance was just off The Omen 2, which this movie is ripping off. We’ve also got Sam Peckinpah (who I just saw in Invasion of the Body Snatchers) playing Barbara’s ex, and the leader of Lance’s white-man cabal is Mel Ferrer (of two unrelated films both called Eaten Alive). Director Paradisi had bit roles in some Fellini films, also made a movie called Spaghetti House, and cowriter Ovidio Assontis also produced Pirahna 2: The Spawning, as his IMDB bio mentions proudly. And have I mentioned this was shot in Atlanta?