by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 13: Shocktober 2014

The Descent 2 (2009, Jon Harris)

The baddies are people with goblin ears and bald caps. Three bloody, flashlight-and-handicam-wielding women walk among them in a cave trying not to be heard, but fortunately when they are inevitably discovered, they prove to be masters of rapidly-edited blunt-instrument combat. Survivor of part one (there was a survivor?) sacrifices herself to save her friend, who gets surprise-wasted above-ground by a Yankees fan with a shovel. Director Harris edited the first movie, and one cowriter made Eden Lake and The Woman In Black.

An American Haunting (2005, Courtney Solomon)

Thought I watched this already but that was The Haunting in Connecticut. Donald Sutherland’s here so it’s gonna be good. Flashbacks reveal the ghosts tucking in the girl who played Wendy in the 2003 Peter Pan movie, and maybe beating her up or raping her, or maybe Sutherland did that I dunno, then the girl poisons Sutherland while Sissy Spacek (of The Ring 2 the same year) watches. Attn: screenwriters: notice how horror movies that end with explanatory backstory are less good than the ones that end with mayhem? The director also made Dungeons & Dragons, the one with Marlon Wayans and Jeremy Irons. Hulu’s up-next bullshit is making my night difficult, so it’s off to netflix.

Texas Chainsaw (2013, John Luessenhop)

Aha, it was called Texas Chainsaw 3D in theaters. Tied-up girl about to get chainsawed by Leatherface, but the pacing of the scene implies that she’s not really gonna. “It’s your cousin Heather,” she yells, as rednecks enter the abandoned factory, beat up Leatherface and make him cry. Who wrote this? Lots of people, including the director of Jason Goes to Hell, writer of a Val Kilmer revenge flick and American adapter of The Grudge movies. Anyway, rednecks rig a slow-moving certain-death machine to dispatch Leatherface – those always work, right? Nope, rednecks get chopped up, and two Texas Massacrists live to see a new sequel (your cousin Heather can also be seen in the next Joe Dante movie).

Stake Land (2010, Jim Mickle)

Second one in a row with redneck baddies calling people “boy,” only this time it’s a rasping bald vampire who is stabbing a mustache dude. Now he calls a guy “child” instead of boy, but this is his last word as he gets staked by mustache dude, whom he really should have killed instead of taunting for so long. Surviving guys wander off into apocalyptic vampire world, running into soap star Bonnie Dennison. Ooh the child in this played Young Colin Farrell in Alexander and Young Kevin Bacon in Mystic River. Mickle made this year’s Cold In July, which mustache dude cowrote.

We Are The Night (2010, Dennis Gansel)

Not to be confused with We Own The Night. Loving vampire couple (Dani from Passion) is thrown in jail and menaced by vampiro lesbo Nina Hoss, star of Barbara. Cool gravity-defying fight ensues. Hoss is plunged into sunlight, Dani is just as gorgeous as in Passion, and it’s funny how good German actresses become instantly ridiculous when dubbed with bland American accents. Nice going, netflix. Gansel followed up with a Russian spy drama.

Dead Snow (2009, Tommy Wirkola)

How have I not already watched the last ten minutes of the nazi zombie movie? Think I was tempted to watch this for real, but Trevor says it’s terrible. I like the white snowy setting, unusual for a horror. Oh good, subtitles. Very bloody faced guys are fighting off nazi zombies, one gets bit on the hand so chainsaws off his arm, then looks bloody pleased with himself until something too stupid to mention happens, and the movie is playing for cheesy laughs. The premise had promise. Next the director made Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and a sequel to his Kill Bill parody (Kill Bill is parodyable?) before this year’s Dead Snow 2.

Carrie Remake (2013, Kimberly Peirce)

Wait, there was a Carrie remake from the director of Boys Don’t Cry?? I am cheating and watching the last 20 to catch the prom scene – not only is she covered in blood at the prom but her date was murdered? Chloe Moretz gleefully, psychically murders her classmates. No out-of-control hormonal rage, she does each one on purpose then literally flies outside, catches escaping schemers and murders them. I miss Sissy Spacek. Home to mama, jeez it’s Julianne Moore, how many people are slumming in this remake? Moore prays as she stabs Carrie, who takes flying-scissors revenge, then best friend Gabriella “Olivia’s sister” Wilde” is saved as the house collapses. Nothing improves a horror movie like a courtroom ending, amirite? Wait, there was another Carrie remake in 2002 with Patricia Clarkson?

Carrie 2: The Rage (1999, Katt Shea)

People are getting Scanners-style bulging veins then the locked-doors psychic blood massacre begins, and yay, kids are killed by flying CDs just like in Hellraiser III. This time instead of prom we’re at a party in the house of a spear gun enthusiast. A girl’s eyeballs are made to explode, then she spearguns a dude’s dick into the pool, and I’m thinking this movie didn’t take itself very seriously. New Carrie’s mom is a religious nut just like Real Carrie’s mom, but what is mom doing at the party? The boyfriend is Jason London (twin brother of Mallrats star Jeremy), who survives to the dream-sequence CGI epilogue. From the writer of Hackers and director of Stripped to Kill.

by ·Comments Off on Bad Biology (2008, Frank Henenlotter)

Not really a horror movie, more of a John Dies at the End supernatural comedy with a ton more sex and even less of a point. Nympho Jennifer has a surplus of clits, reclusive dude Batz has “a drug-addicted dick with a mind of its own.” Will these two meet and find true love? Yes… well, not really, since nobody survives the ending.

More shocktastic details: she tends to have babies a few hours after sex, and leaves them everywhere. She also tends to kill her partners, and is a pro photographer celebrated for double-exposed photos of her victims. His penis finally wanders off without him via stop-motion, its perspective shot as a purple-tinted fish-eye as it tears through a condo building filled with hot naked women.

Co-written/produced/featuring rapper R.A. The Rugged Man. Nice to see an aging white filmmaker connecting with youth culture of today, even if the results are so mixed. I’ve seen Frank’s Basket Case and Brain Damage, but not Frankenhooker, which is probably the key reference point.

by ·Comments Off on Stereo (1969, David Cronenberg)

“As an aphrodisiast, Dr. Stringfellow proposes the use of synthetic aphrodisiac drugs to assist those who wish to attain a fully three-dimensional sexuality.”

I rented this on VHS from Movies Worth Seeing (RIP) back in 2000-2002, watched and hated it. Now it’s in lovely high-def on my Scanners blu-ray, and I am older and more tolerant, so time to give it another shot. And I still hate it, but the visuals are extremely sharp and it has interesting resonance with Scanners.

The story, or perhaps the backstory, is told via narrator, with total silence at all other times (so no sync sound on the action). Eight subjects underwent brain surgery to extend the natural electrochemical network of the human brain to provide telepathic capabilities. So far so Scanners, but there’s more. The psychics are said to have strange reactions when in the same room as each other, and one “pierced his skull with an electric drill, an act of considerable symbolic significance.”

It’s set at a sanatorium in the woods, which I admit is wonderfully well photographed, as are the actors. The guy who we’ll call the star wears a cape with a giant amulet and carries a cane. I wish I could get away with this look, but I can’t – and neither can he. He appears at all times to be a pretentious film student, which would sink the movie if it didn’t sink itself in other ways, by being dull at all times, by depriving us of sound except for the posh intellectual narration, by having the psychics suck on pacifiers. He even uses slow-mo at times, as if the movie wasn’t already slow enough. In recent interviews, Cronenberg says it works better if you’re stoned. Four of the seven actors were also in Crimes of the Future, which I was going to double-feature with this but chickened out, and one actor got as far as The Dead Zone 13 years later.

by ·Comments Off on Antiviral (2012, Brandon Cronenberg)

“Celebrities are not people. They’re group hallucinations.”

I wanted to double-feature this with a Jennifer Chamber Lynch movie, the children of my favorite horror filmmakers, but couldn’t get a copy of Boxing Helena in time so I settled for the Xan Cassavetes instead. Pretty sure that even if I hadn’t known the Cronenberg connection I’d have been able to spot it: a total body-horror flick with a cool and clinical atmosphere. Plus someone says “shivers” within the first five minutes, and lead actor Caleb Landry Jones even reminded me of Cosmopolis star Robert Pattinson.

Speaking of Pattinson, the movie is about a future where the public’s hunger for celebrities has become literal, buying lunchmeat grown from the stars’ cells and getting themselves sickened by viruses that come from the stars’ bloodstreams. I think the movie is acknowledging that this is farfetched by having the virus thing be a premium specialty business (no huge lines out the door) run by a small staff of technicians also acting as salesmen.

Caleb is magnetic as Syd, whose celeb-virus business contracts exclusively with star Hannah Geist, and who is always trying to turn a buck in black-market virus sales while trying to get close to Geist himself. The black-market aspect already brings mystery to the movie before the new twist where Syd has injected himself with Geist’s newest illness, which kills her – or so the story goes, but really she’s being kept alive while people in the Geist business fake her death while trying to figure out the poison plot and deal with the leak perpetrated by Syd. Really it’s more complicated than this, and either I missed some information or the big picture is never fully revealed, while Syd ends up where he wanted to be, selling Geist by day and having (parts of) her to himself by night.

Plus: viral copy-protection hacking, viruses represented with blurred, manipulated photographs, man-machine-fusing nightmares (and realities), and doctor Malcolm McDowell.

by ·Comments Off on Metamorphosis (1975, Jan Nemec)

A very good hour-long movie of the Kafka story, with Gregor Samsa played by a first-person camera and off-screen voice, so there’s no creature effect to ruin the weird mystery.

First movie I’ve seen by Czech new wave director Nemec whose early features were released by Criterion alongside Daisies. An eccentric movie with long roving takes. I’d forgotten the three initially-silent tenants who move into the family’s apparently spacious apartment to help pay the bills after Gregor stops being able to work. Gregor’s disappointed father is played by Heinz Bennent (Heinrich in Possession).

I’ve also seen Caroline Leaf’s 1977 animated version, a 2008 short where post-death Samsa returns as a flock of CG butterflies to torment his family and coworkers, and the meta-version where Richard E. Grant plays Kafka. Apparently Tim Roth starred as Gregor in 1987, and there’s a well-reviewed Russian feature from 2002.

by ·Comments Off on Altman (2014, Ron Mann)

A career retrospective of Altman, with short celebrity cameo definitions of “Altmanesque,” none of whom mentioned overlapping dialogue. Narration and interviews with family members, many of whom were at our screening. Some good Altman stories within, but not much to say about the doc itself, so instead here’s a list of his movies I should watch (or *rewatch) soon:

– The Long Goodbye
– Gosford Park*
– Kansas City
– Popeye*
– Brewster McCloud
– Buffalo Bill and the Indians
– Thieves Like Us

by ·Comments Off on Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (1968, Hajime Sato)

This is a completely looney Japanese horror oddball movie released in the Eclipse Shochiku set. It’s cheap, weird and highly entertaining, also atomic-bomb-obsessed and weirdly Vietnam War-referencing, with stock footage edited in at key moments.

The most doomed flight of all time encounters a UFO, receives a bomb threat and hosts a gun-toting hijacker at the same time. Large-faced hijacker Hirofumi has little effect as the plane flies through red skies filled with crazed engine-clogging birds then crashes, killing the pilot and leaving first officer Sugisaka in charge. On the ground, the hijacker runs off and gets possessed by aliens in his forehead (recalling Jeffrey Combs in From Beyond), while the bomb-threat fella hides his bomb and claims he was only kidding.

Potential bomber allowed to roam free:

The gov’t rep gets homicidal:

So the survivors are hiding in the plane from alien vampires who appear to kiss people to death (Yuko Kusunoki of Dodeskaden and Kurahara’s Thirst for Love is next to be captured/possessed) except for psychiatrist Kazuo Kato (Kurosawa’s Ran) who wants to go outside and study the aliens, while government representative Mano (Eizo Kitamura of the Yakuza Papers parts 2 and 3, and Modern Porno Tale: Inherited Sex Mania) proves to be a bigger asshole than the aliens or hijacker, getting people killed in order to save his own skin. Bomber dies blowing a hole in the side of the plane, and American Mrs. Neal (Kathy Horan of Genocide and The Green Slime) comes after the vampire with a rifle and loses. When our hero Sugisaka (with his woman on his arm) finally lights the hijacker on fire, the alien oozes out of his forehead and possesses Rep. Moto’s underling then kisses Moto to death.

Sugisaka and the girl leave the crash site and find out they were about a mile from civilization, but everyone in the city has been killed by aliens – much more efficient aliens than the one attacking the downed plane, I guess. Burned bodies and atomic blasts are invoked in the apocalytic finale.

Sugisaka was Teruo Yoshida, in Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon a few years earlier, must’ve starred in too many horror movies in 1968-69 (including this, Horrors of Malformed Men, Inferno of Torture and The Joy of Torture) because he disappeared from the screen in 1970, and his loyal stewardess was Tomomi Sato of the 1979 Jigoku remake and Blackmail Is My Business.

by ·Comments Off on Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski)

Took a couple weeks off the blog, now back to the SHOCKtober backlog. Got a new visual theme to support larger images (and incidentally phones/tables/etc) so beginning with this post, screenshots are no longer limited to 640px wide. Party!

After enjoying The Tenant, I decided to rewatch the rest of Polanski’s “apartment trilogy:” this and Repulsion, both of which I’d seen on cable so long ago that I may as well have never seen them at all before now. Obviously these movies were the highlight of Shocktober this year, alongside Hellraiser, Scanners and Possession. After not paying him much attention until 2011, I’m a big Polanski fan. All three apartment movies have terrific peephole shots, and this and Repulsion both have a dream sequence in which a ticking clock is the only sound. I found out in the extras that Polanski threw off the lipsynch in another dream sequence on purpose – I’d been annoyed at the technical flaw but he meant it to add to the unreal atmosphere.

Omaha native Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and husband Guy (John Cassavetes, same year as Faces) shop for an NYC apartment with realtor Elisha Cook (Phantom Lady, The Killing), settle on a place with nosy neighbors whose previous tenant passed away just a few days before. Mia’s first friend (Victoria Vetri, Playmate of the Month right before this filmed) jumps to her death soon after they move in. Already this is sounding like The Tenant, but instead of the new tenants going slowly insane, aspiring actor Guy makes a deal with the intrusive Castevet couple next door to have his wife impregnated with the antichrist.

Collateral damage: the suicide woman, who it’s assumed was meant to be the demon child’s host before Rosemary came along, Hutch, the couple’s best friend before the whole demon pregnancy thing (Maurice Evans, a lead ape the same year in Planet of the Apes), Guy’s competition for a major acting role (he goes inexplicably blind). I think Rosemary’s doctor, the great Charles Grodin (as opposed to the doc the Castevets choose for her, Ralph Bellamy of The Wolf Man), is allowed to live.

Even without the demon baby, moving in next door to the Castevets seems like horror movie material – this may be what led to The Tenant. Paradoxically, the crazy Castevets also keep the mood light, injecting humor into the horror. Ruth Gordon won an oscar (beating the star of Cassavetes Faces), would star in Harold and Maude a few years later, and Sidney Blackmer played Leslie Nielsen’s dad in Tammy and the Bachelor. The ending is intense, though – Rosemary discovering the whole conspiracy, walks into a room with her demon baby, her traitor husband and a bunch of revelers yelling “hail Satan,” and instead of hurling herself out the window or burning the place to the ground, she approaches the cradle and starts to rock it gently.

Polanski’s first American film after Repulsion and two others in England. There was a sequel! It starred Pontypool‘s Stephen McHattie as the demon kid now in his twenties, with Patty Duke and Ray Milland. Mia Farrow starred in Secret Ceremony, another disappearing child/hysterical mom movie the same year as Rosemary’s.

Author Ira Levin in 2003:

Lately, I’ve had a new worry. The success of Rosemary’s Baby inspired Exorcists and Omens and lots of et ceteras. Two generations of youngsters have grown to adulthood watching depictions of Satan as a living reality. Here’s what I worry about now: if I hadn’t pursued an idea for a suspense novel almost forty years ago, would there be quite as many religious fundamentalists around today?

by ·Comments Off on Repulsion (1965, Roman Polanski)

Catherine Deneuve is pretty and timid, a bit spacey, but nobody suspects (except possibly her older sister Helen, if she has ever paid that much attention) the extent of her psychosis until Helen goes on vacation with her awful boyfriend Michael (Ian Hendry, philandering zombie in Tales from the Crypt), leaving Catherine alone in their apartment with her thoughts. It turns out her thoughts are dangerous.

Maybe this is just a 1960’s thing, but when Catherine finally starts murdering people (first her stalker who thinks she’s in a relationship, then her landlord who offers an alternate method of paying the rent), I felt they were creeps who deserved it. But it seems from the extras that the movie just wants us to believe that Catherine is mad (and has always been mad, according to the final zoom into a childhood photo where she looks distracted/possessed).

A stylistic triumph on a tiny budget. Polanski’s follow-up to Knife in the Water and his UK debut, bankrolled by porn producers who would work with him again for Cul-de-sac. This one was written as the commercial hit that would fund the next one, a more personal work for Polanski. It’s lovely that slow-moving one-woman psychological horror with unproven stars (Deneuve had done Umbrellas of Cherbourg but wasn’t yet internationally renowned) used to be considered a sure hit.

Michael: John Fraser of Tunes of Glory

and Helen: Yvonne Furneaux, of La Dolce Vita

When Catherine is alone, the walls crack and ooze, rapist ghosts appear, hands grab her through the walls (a Cocteau-meets-Cronenberg effect using latex sheets bought from a condom factory). Polanski already showed a strong visual style with Knife in the Water, and here he’s got a ringer of a cinematographer: Gilbert Taylor had just shot A Hard Day’s Night and Dr. Strangelove. The film won a silver bear in Berlin alongside Le Bonheur (Alphaville got the gold).