31 Days of Horror

Each day for the month of October, Bowen’s Cinematic highlighted a different horror film, 31 in all.

• Day One: Shivers (1975)
• Day Two: The Descent (2006)
• Day Three: The Howling (1981)
• Day Four: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
• Day Five: Pumpkinhead (1989)
• Day Six: 1408 (2007)
• Day Seven: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)
• Day Eight: From Beyond (1986)
• Day Nine: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
• Day Ten: Trilogy of Terror (1975)
• Day Eleven: May (2002)
• Day Twelve: Black Christmas (1974)
• Day Thirteen: Dead Silence (2007)
• Day Fourteen: The Haunting (1963)
• Day Fifteen: Black Sunday (1960)
• Day Sixteen: The Unknown (1927)
• Day Seventeen: Cat People (1942)
• Day Eighteen: Cronos (1993)
• Day Nineteen: Severance (2007)
• Day Twenty: The Monster Squad (1987)
• Day Twenty-One: Infection (2004)
• Day Twenty-Two: The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
• Day Twenty-Three: A Mild Romero Sermon Masquerading as a Review of Night of the Living Dead (1968)
• Day Twenty-Four: Braindead (1992)
• Day Twenty-Five: The Mummy (1932)
• Day Twenty-Six: The Roost (2005)
• Day Twenty-Seven: The Old Dark House (1932)
• Day Twenty-Eight: A Bucket of Blood (1959)
• Day Twenty-Nine: The Shining (1980)
• Day Thirty: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
• Day Thirty-One: John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)

Day One: Shivers (1975)

Last modified on 2008-05-24 03:15:54 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

David Cronenberg is one of the few horror filmmakers that has survived the prejudice that almost always greets one who chooses to work in the genre. It’s not hard to see why. Cronenberg respects the genre, respects the need for ambiguity, for slow burn, for inescape. Audiences do not go to horror films to be let off the hook by the filmmakers, they want to revel in the fear, and let themselves off the hook later, by assuring themselves of the film’s fiction. A happy ending, generally, is an anti-climax in a horror movie, you leave the theatre wondering “is that as bad as it can get?”

Cronenberg also deals, particularly in his early work, with the most sensitive of audience pressure points, the frailty of the human body and, much scarier, the changability of the human body. Early Cronenberg films are about caterpillars changinging into butterflies*, only they haven’t been blessed with the foresight of the process’s result. The films, and this has been said many times before, take the POV of the agent of change, and are generally actively rooting for said change, ending with an ironic sigh of relief.

All of this is true of Cronenberg’s first major release, Shivers, which plays a bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers reborn as a satire of the just say yes liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. You don’t have to dig deep for subtext in the film’s plot, which concerns a bunch of little leech penis creatures who invade a remote high rise apartment building and turn its citizens into sex crazed zombies.

The remoteness of the setting is established in typically efficient, curt, masterful fashion by Cronenberg in the opening credits, where we see an advertisement for the Starliner Apartments complex bragging about the remoteness of the location. By minute three of the film we’re watching a couple’s introduction to the apartment, but, also typical to Cronenberg, this couple is not our POV, they are only our entryway into the picture (much like the Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen switcheroo in Eastern Promises).

Cronenberg is obviously an intelligent person. He knows he’s working in B subject matter on a B budget with a B (two weeks) amount of time to complete the picture. It’s fascinating in Shivers to watch how Cronenberg skates around the potential pitfalls of the subject matter. The acting in Shivers is, at best, adequate. Cronenberg works around this with limited exposition, limited back story, and a terrifying lack of feeling.

Like much early Cronenberg, Shivers feels less like a movie about penis leech creatures, and more of a retrospective documentary about a penis leech creature outbreak. Yes, this clinical style is born out of Cronenberg’s sensibility, but I think its also logical self-preservation. The less sentiment there is, the less potential there is for bad acting to laugh you out of the picture.

The potential hazard of going back and looking at the early work of a great filmmaker is that we give the earlier picture a special break because we know how these themes will be refined in the future. I tried not to do that with Shivers as I revisited it for this post. I found a film that holds up, its dated aspects (clothing, decor) only enhance the satire of the picture. The film’s climax is unnerving in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on. It involves a total invasion, that’s easy to pinpoint, but it occurs in a public swimming pool, and this is queasy in a way that I can’t identify. Maybe its something about all the fluid in a sexual invasion metaphor movie, but I’m not sure.

One final thing about Cronenberg’s satire, you can’t quite pinpoint which side of the satire he’s on in any given movie, especially Shivers. One could say that’s he’s totally in favor of what eventually happens, or one could say that he’s mourning a perceived loss of the discriminate fuck. Or he’s ambivalent (as he’s often accused.) Either way, its one of the principle reasons his films last, and linger, and will be revisited by anyone who gives a damn about the genre.

*I hadn’t considered this upon initial posting, but Cronenberg almost literally did the butterfly thing in his masterpiece, The Fly. The footage was rightfully discarded, but you should take a look on the most recently issued DVD (out a couple of years ago).

Day Two: The Descent (2006)

Last modified on 2007-10-14 13:05:08 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

We know the structure of most horror films. They are, to borrow an unoriginal metaphor, like mousetraps. The first act or maybe two is the pulling back, the latching. The last act or maybe two is the snap of the spring-the explosion of the tension the filmmaker has, hopefully, artfully set up.

The latching, the snapping into place of the elements that will bite you in the ass later on, is, of course, the most fun part of a great horror movie, and the part the amateurs tend to take the least seriously. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974*) is as good as people say it is, but it set a bad example of the the two act exposition that goes nowhere, that’s almost literally just watching paint dry until the killer shows up, the recent Wolf Creek is an example of this, but there are plenty more.

Even great horror films though, have a bit of nearly unavoidable inevitability, and this can damper the scares (or at least the shock). I’ve never seen a horror film that has a true coitus interruptus, that represents a total invasion, an authentic break from another story that was going on before the horror set in. You never feel that lives are being entered upon and shattered.

Instead, you feel you’re watching a bunch of people waiting for the horror to show up. Imagine a romantic comedy with Meg Ryan, where she’s brutally murdered halfway through after a charming evening of miscommunication with Hugh Grant, that would get people talking. And that would be true horror. People who are murdered in real life, haven’t, normally, been politely advised beforehand.

The Descent is one of the greatest pure visceral boo movies ever made, and, while we know we’re going into a horror movie before the horror starts, it comes about as close to capturing the violation mentioned above of as any film I can recall. Two thirds of The Descent’s running time concerns a group of over-zealous British female adventurers who venture into a cave that’s unmarked and dangerous, and details the humbling that Mother Nature deals as a result. This isn’t marking time, this isn’t a goof. The Descent is a gripping, convincing, claustrophobic, adventure film, all up until minute 55 or so.

The last third?

The last third is possibly the scariest monster movie I’ve ever seen.

But, as effective as Act III is (and its a doozy), much of The Descent’s effect can be credited to that opening hour. Neil Marshall, the writer-director here (this is his second film, after the charming but dorky Dog Soldiers) has talent, but, equally important, he actually gives a shit. He’s steeped in this stuff, the more movie saavy people in the room can play spot the homage, but Marshall doesn’t let his love for horror films past block his desire to contribute to the genre himself.

There’s a scene, about ten minutes before the true menace appears, where the women, convinced they’re trapped, find a map on the wall. They should be slightly happy, or at least buzzing with hope, which has been on short supply. We, as the audience, indulge in a little hope too, and that’s exactly when Marshall allows the primary riff of the score (familiar to anyone who’s seen John Carpenter’s The Thing) to be heard for the first time. It’s one of the great “oh, they are truly fucked” moments the movies have given us.

Marshall’s script should also be commended, as its a bit lighter on its feet than most in the genre. The ladies don’t have a whole lot of individuality, and they tend to fall under the James Cameron Fetish-Macho school of screenwriting, but their inner-relationships are confidently, organically established, with a minimum of fussy, boring exposition. Marshall even works in a betrayal that is  shocking and ironic.

The Descent, with its images of people wriggling around in a Hellish underground populated by old, forbidden things, also recalls Henry Kuttner’s short story “The Graveyard Rats”, as well as Stephen King’s “Graveyard Shift**”, which was probably inspired by Kuttner’s story. I remembering reading Kuttner’s story as a child and craving a film that truly captured that dank, terrifying clamminess. Neil Marshall made that movie fifteen years later. And its a classic.

*Damn all these remakes! A horror title can’t be listed without including a year of release anymore.

**The story, not the movie, which leans a bit on the goofy side, though its fun in the right frame of mind.

Day Three: The Howling (1981)

Last modified on 2007-10-10 17:08:32 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Joe Dante’s The Howling is a special object of nostalgia for me, as it was the first R-rated film I saw as a child (I almost said Jaws but then I remembered that somehow got away with a PG). The Howling was also my very first encounter with full frontal nudity, and its one of the most simulataneously arousing and terrifying bits of sexual business not featured in a movie by David Lynch.

Joe Dante is appreciated by the nerds, but it seems the more vaunted critics never really gave him a fair shake*, which is typical but too bad. Dante’s films, at their best, have wonderfully unhinged tones: part screwball comedy, part in joke, and part jolting malevolence. Watch Gremlins again, before the ending that was probably written by exec. producer Steven Spielberg (and the ending is fine), the film is one of the most subversive, unhinged so called children’s movies of the 1980s. 

The Howling, a werewolf movie largely set in a bizarre backwoods rehab center, is another film that continually blindsinds you with tonal corkscrews. The film is truly goofy in places (there are even more werewolf puns here than the more obvious An American Werewolf in London), affectionate in others, and, at times, quite horrific. 

The Howling doesn’t use its sense of humor as a license to not give a shit though. One of the cliches of the genre is that humor enhances fright, and The Howling is a lesser known Exhibit Z in support of that theory. The opening attempted murder scene that sets the story into motion is sleazy and claustrophobic, and the more explicit wolfiness that ensues at the rehab center is as impressive and weird as you’d hope from the f/x guy behind John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Dee Wallace Stone and Christopher Stone (married in real life) root the film in something a bit more tangible than what your usual scream queen would bring to the role. Dee Wallace always seemed very vulnerable, and just a little bit off, spacy, to me. You want to protect her but there’s an edge there that’s a bit of a mystery. She could be one of those housewives’ whose keeps their husband in the back freezer. This intangible domestic frustration served her well in Cujo and E.T. and it serves her even better in The Howling, which is her best personal showcase.

Christopher Stone (oh, how I miss when people in movies were allowed to look like normal, cool, middle aged people) plays off his real life wife well here, and he convincingly sells his frustration with his Dee’s growing remoteness. He betrays her early on here (a bit reminiscent of Cassavetes in Rosemary’s Baby) and both Dante and Stone know precisely how to undersell it so it lingers among the more obvious thrills.

As is normally the case with Dante, the remote rehab center is seemingly populated with a cast of nearly anyone who appeared in a horror film during a certain twenty year period of Dante’s adolescence. But, again, and this should really be stressed because so many filmmakers today don’t seem to get it, THIS DOES NOT DISTRACT FROM THE NARRATIVE.

The injokes, the background players, these add an element of appreciation, of tradition, of fun, of history, but they are never used in place of a story that wouldn’t work just as well without all of that. It should be noted that the script was written by acclaimed filmmaker John Sayles, and that he imbues the thing with a bit of the flakiness that can be found in his cameo appearance here as a morgue attendant.

I feel like I’m spinning my wheels here. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of why this film works so well, there’s something light, airy, eerie about it, a very specific sensual tone (its more than a little empathetic to the creatures and that helps) that carries on after the terrific effects have maybe worn off a little. Something about the dislocation of the rehab center, deep in the woods. The Howling, regardless of your appreciation or dedication, should also be seen for that priceless ending alone, which plays like Network as re-written by Stephen King.

*I say that having done little to no research in the matter.

Day Four: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Last modified on 2007-10-10 17:07:01 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I love that the director of a few of the greatest American movies ever made, particularly the first two Godfathers and The Conversation, would, a decade and a half later, still have the inner fervor to make something as intense, enraptured, poignant and just plain masturbatory as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Granted, Coppola, with many of his 1980s projects, had been down the intense and masturbatory road before, but most of those are little more than film school curiosities. Bram Stoker’s Dracula doesn’t feel like a test tube movie though, its felt, it means it, and its my favorite version of the novel.

The film was also my introduction to Gary Oldman. I was twelve when Dracula was released, and I had never seen anything as committed and deliriously oddball as Gary Oldman as Count Dracula. I had seen the Browning/Lugosi picture (which I find overrated, both men have done better), and I had seen the Palance film by this point, but Oldman was an entirely different thing altogether. I was used to my monster movies being a little more square, and now I’m watching a brilliant fusion of DeNiro method and presentational 1920s silent act to the rafters and back acting. Oldman, like the movie in general, was overwhelming. 

The entire film was, and still is, overwhelming. I’ve already found that certain words, phrase, or thoughts have begun to dominate why I’m choosing certain movies for this series, and why I respond to certain horror films. “Means it”. “No apologies”, and so forth. I can deal with some bad acting, or low budget, or maybe ideas that should have been left on the cutting room floor. But I, in this genre, can’t deal with self-consciousness, with hedging your bets, with playing to the cheap seats. Horror should be about what we’re afraid of, but also what we’re afraid to admit we think about it, what we like, what turns us on, what we’re most afraid we’ll lose, etc. There’s no room, at least in the Greats, for parlor room tricks. I don’t give a shit about that stuff usually, life is too short.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula does play a lot of parlor tricks and it isn’t one of the Greats. Some of Coppola’s casting stunts don’t pay off (Cary Elwes, Keanu Reeves), and some of the scenes are overbaked even for this (a moment of temptation for Anthony Hopkins’ Van Helsing comes to mind.) The film has this unshakable, amazing lunatic intensity though, and Coppola’s experimentation with silent movie, in camera technique should make this required viewing for even the snobs who don’t buy into its purplish love story.

The love story works. Not drowning under all of Coppola’s ideas would be impressive enough, but Oldman, despite being a vicious, inhuman killer (his immorality is not shortchanged in a bid for sympathy either) elicits our sympathy anyway. Dracula’s romantic hunger and more base, animal instincts compliment, electrify one another, and Ryder contrasts, underplays into herself into the relationship beautifully. The building of the relationship here, subtracting the more obviously out of place plot points, would be acceptable in a more straight romance.

My favorite scene of the film is a perfect crystallization of every florid element I love: the costumes, the ripe music, the two actors going for it, the blunt passion. The self-loathing. It all comes together when Mina finally gives herself to Dracula, and his fangs slide out and he rasps (like an orgasm): “I can’t, I love you too much!” She begs and he finally sinks his fangs into her, and for a moment the bad guy who’s really become the good guy surrogate for the audience wins.

Besides Oldman and Ryder, who truly are the movie; Tom Waits and Sadie Frost also contribute memorable charaterizations. I like Tom Waits’ music, but I really like Tom Waits in films, particularly as himself in Cigarettes and Coffee and paired with Lily Tomlin in Short Cuts. He’s Renfield here, and his working man hipster dementia builds the foreboding of Dracula’s pursuit wonderfully.

Sadie Frost is Lucy, and she’s the most purely erotic object in an already overheated movie. She also, like Christopher Stone, is privy to the joys of werewolf nooky. Not sure if that counted as bestality in Old Time Britain, but I imagine Stone would have had some legal problems.

I love this big tangled erotic creepy mess of a clusterfuck of a movie, but, there’s a very simple image that always comes to mind as I ponder Bram Stoker’s Dracula: of Prince Vlad, watching Mina window shop. They don’t get along at first, and after a curt exchange, he says “I shall bother you no more.” And he disappears. I’ve followed Oldman’s career, like any movie lover, pretty intently since then, but he’s never had a line delivery that has haunted me quite as much.

Day Five: Pumpkinhead (1989)

Last modified on 2007-10-10 16:58:21 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Another trip down memory lane here. I remember seeing Pumpkinhead on VHS with my father more or less as soon as it was released. I was constantly casing the video store (remember those?) for new releases, particularly in the horror genre. I was young so forgive the amount of time it may have taken me to realize that new movies hit the shelves the same day every week.

I remember the Pumpkinhead of Pumpkinhead as a huge, spidery, vine riddled agent of destruction. Not quite. Particularly when you compare him to the CG beasties of today, Pumpkinhead is a rather quaint man in a costume, a less specific Alien costume to be exact. As usual our imagination pumps up something in retrospect, but I wasn’t really disappointed to revisit this creature. I found him, and the movie, rather endearing.

Lance Henriksen is our lead, a leathery backwoods man who, as a child, gets an early education in the titular demon. Many years later, as an adult, Henriksen finds himself in the unenviable position of contracting Pumpkinhead’s services, and even novices of the genre can see that this will probably be a mistake.

Henriksen is, of course, a genre pro, a real man who invests characters that usually haven’t been given much on the page with a poignant, charged world weariness. He looks like a tough guy, and he’s played the tough guy before, but there’s usually a hesitation to Henriksen’s characters. He seems like the kind of guy who sits and drinks a beer in the roughest bar imaginable, but is reading a book in the corner, and isn’t being bothered. It’s a mild injustice if Henriksen has somehow managed to go his entire career up until this point without being asked to play the scene I just described.

Pumpkinhead was directed, in his debut, by special effects master Stan Winston, and his affinity for the genre shows. The film doesn’t feel calculated or impersonal like a random hack ’em up. The film’s atmosphere is over stylized (though effective) but imbued with a sense of passion. Winston likes Pumpkinhead, whether he be a vengeance demon or a misunderstood creature pulled out of a graveyard in the deepest, darkest nook of the woods.

The film isn’t too good, and the subjects of Pumpkinhead’s ire are as embarrassingly performed as the kids in your worst Jason movie. The film was obviously shot on very limited means with long passages of characters walking around because you know that’s all the crew could afford to shoot. But there are moments, such as Henriksen telling his dead wife that he’ll get revenge, or a few moments between Henriksen and a fellow woodsman who knows Pumpkinhead’s secret, that stick. 

Day Six: 1408 (2007)

Last modified on 2007-10-10 16:55:27 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

1408 is an unusually classy mainstream ghost story, and one of the very best films to have come from a Stephen King work (its based on a short story of the same name, and is most easily found in the collection, Everything’s Eventual). John Cusack stars here as Mike Enslin, a man who once aspired to be a novelist and has resorted to writing Top Ten Scariest Fill in the Blank books to make ends meet. He resents this, he feels its beneath him, and the script, at first, does a ripe job of setting him up for retribution.

The first act is the best in the movie, and we revel in the return to slow build basics that have made past films such as the original The Haunting so pleasurable. 1408 is very old school: polished, lush atmosphere, economic character development, solemn, mysterious connections to past tragedy. Cusack is an ideal stand in for the contemporary movie goer; effectively bridging the gap between old school spooks and a society that finds them ridiculous.

Of course there are nitpicks. I think 1408 is a very enjoyable 90 odd minutes at the movies, and you may want to turn back if you haven’t seen it yet. Because I do want to address a few crumbs that have fallen in between the pillows on the couch.

The second and third acts are primarily effective but more problematic than the superb opener. The script doesn’t continue to trust Cusack’s performance to tell us that he’s a cynical SOB. Which is too bad, because Cusack’s performance does just fine without the added filler that connects the dots a little too concretely for my taste.

The room 1408 turns out to be a sort of scrambler of its’ occupants’ center of reality, and this is a provacative idea. Its been done, but as presented here its still scary. The majority of the past deaths have been suicides, and its made chillingly clear toward the end that this is the only escape from a never-ending cycle of madness.

The last third of the film is too schematic, more A Christmas Carol than The Haunting. Cusack eventually finds a depressingly banal means of escape and finds out that there indeed will be a Christmas morning and that all of his problems have been solved, because he looked within himself to, you know.

What if that was just the final joke of 1408? For a charged moment or two, I thought that was where they were heading, and it would’ve been a hell of a cherry to walk out on, but the filmmaker (Mikael Hafstrom) and the writers (who include Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, of Ed Wood and The People Vs. Larry Flynt) want to teach us a Valuable Lesson, and nothing is less scary than the assertion that life is indeed governed by a kinder, divine set of rules.

I was worried from the trailer that the effects would drown the movie, but they are fairly thoughtfully integrated (a few typical moments of modern overdirection notwithstanding) and work well. Its been a while since I’ve read the King story so I’m not certain, but I think things were a little more up in the air in his version. But who knows? Maybe the movie was never made to begin with.

Day Seven: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

Last modified on 2007-10-10 17:26:49 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Wow. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death really isn’t the movie I expected at all. I remember seeing the VHS box at the movie store, and being afraid to rent it based on that title alone. I had already been appropriately desensitized to violence with Freddy, Jason and whatever other vengeance seeking corpses were available, but the idea of a group of people getting together to drive a young woman insane was too much for this nine year old. I wasn’t interested in (or willing to deal with) psychological violence just yet.

So I never watched the film until last night, and I have to say that the nine year old Chuck (though it was Charlie at the time), would have been disappointed. For one the film is atmospheric instead of gory (a no-no for nine year old Charlie) and two the film isn’t what the title implies. The atmospheric part is better for 28 year old Chuck. The plot is neither better or worse, though, as we’ve already established, few horror films live up to the imagination of a frightened child.

The title doesn’t entirely lie. The film is about a young woman named Jessica, (Zohra Lampert) who’s feeling a bit fragile after a recent stay in a mental institution. Jessica and her husband decide to buy a house in a remote countryside so Jessica can recoup in peace; a good idea in real life, but never in the realm of the horror movie. Her friends aren’t the problem though, its a more traditional, less scary, force at work, and the film, if you’re paying any attention at all, tips its hand real early with a photo found in the newly acquired, possibly haunted house.

I complained yesterday that 1408 was well crafted but let us off the hook too easy. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is not as well crafted, but doesn’t let us off the hook. Jessica solves the mystery, but the movie is quick to point out that that doesn’t really improve her situation, in fact, the mystery may not even exist to begin with (though the movie doesn’t do a whole lot with that possibility.)

The reason to see this low budget little chiller is the atmosphere and an impressively sustained all around general eeriness. I was never too involved in Jessica’s plight (she’s not particularly sympathetic) but the sound design and that creepy as hell lake in late autumn worked on me the way I’m sure it was intended to. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death feels like the way you’d dream about a horror movie the night after watching it; things are hauntingly vague and tradtional filler scenes seem to be missing. People come and go here for long stretches of time unaccounted for. This may have been poor juggling in the script department but it ultimately works in the film’s favor.

The director here, John Hancock, has a light touch. He doesn’t pound away on the score or the things in the background or the faux jump scares, everything is hushed and every shot is held a beat longer than you expect or want. About an hour in you realize that you may be authentically uneasy when Jessica decides to take another dip in the lake. What is it about lakes in Autumn anyway?

Maybe its because only certain things can stand to be in water that cold.

Day Eight: From Beyond (1986)

Last modified on 2007-10-10 17:25:53 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Fans of horror films owe it to themselves to be familiar with director Stuart Gordon. Like David Cronenberg, he is a director who could have “graduated” to more reputable genres long ago, but continues to visit the murky, the slimy and, for most people, the unappealing. Most of us know his debut, Re-Animator, and if you don’t you should, its as good as people say. I could also go on for quite some time about two other mean little mothers of Gordon’s: Dagon, another Lovecraft venture that occasionally flirts with masterpiece status, and Edmond, a fearless adaptation of the David Mamet play that features some of William H. Macy’s best work.

From Beyond is another keeper: lean, mean, dazzling, one of the most sheerly pleasurable horror comedies ever made. I call the film a horror comedy, but I can’t, as I write this, recall too many actual jokes (and the film is running a second time in the background as we speak). The film derives its humor from its skewed sensibility, its dry point of view. From Beyond is probably the most cheerful movie about insanity, S&M and creatures from beyond our dimension ever made.

The danger with a horror film with a sense of humor is that it newters itself, limping along the theatres as some sort of mutant that doesn’t work in either genre. This was one (of many) problems with the Tales From the Crypt HBO movies, as well as, to a much lesser extent, the over praised Evil Dead 2 (the first Evil Dead however, struck a perfect balance.)

Gordon sidesteps this hazard gracefully with both Re-Animator and From Beyond; the films are ticklish spoofs of our id, and the creepy crawlys that punish us for having to invent excuses to indulge it. Think Hellraiser, only without all that boring crap that Clive Barker seems to think is profound, or think a lighter, brighter version of the great remakes of The Thing or The Fly.

The cast of From Beyond is completely in tune with the material and how it should be played. Jeffrey Combs, as the assistant to a scientist who loses his head trying to find a sixth sense from the titular location, has the presence of a super fey Jim Carrey. We expect scientists to be weird in horror movies, but he trumps even those expectations. He is always a step or two behind the action, and he’s always paying for it in ways that shouldn’t amuse us but do.

Barbara Crampton is the psychiatrist (har-har) who intially investigates Combs, but quickly decides to take over his mentor’s position as the film’s control crazy mad scientist. Crampton is a remarkable object of lust here, and you will remember more than one of her scenes (hint: involves the S&M I mentioned earlier), but it should also be noted, both to her and Gordon’s credit, that Crampton’s character is allowed to do more than bend over for the camera. Her character is tougher than Combs and even stranger, more obsessed, and, in the end, more interesting.

Ken Foree appears here as the third and final member of the party: a former football player now paying the bills as a cop (I think). Foree was memorable in Dawn of the Dead as the audience’s voice of common sense, and he effectively serves a similar purpose here. He also exhibits more self-control than any other hetero-sexual in any horror film that I’ve ever seen. Ever.

My post has been indulgent and rambling, giggly and tongue in cheek. I can’t help it. From Beyond is a joyously gross film, made with talent, discipline and good humor. The only real note I can offer is that it should have further explored the S&M element of the story, but that probably says more about me than the movie.

Day Nine: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Last modified on 2007-10-10 16:49:29 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

The musical that most people watch around this time of year is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but, excluding the Meat Loaf number and Tim Curry’s performance, I always found that film to be better in theory than reality. Phantom of the Paradise is that reality, a pop culture blender imbued through and through with director Brian De Palma’s pure cinematic fervor.

You may exhaust yourself trying to play the game of spot the reference. Here’s a head start: The Phantom of the Opera (clearly), Faust (also pretty clear being that the film, typical of its super reflexive nature, works it into the plot), The Picture of Dorian Gray (tied to Faust in an amusingly ludicrous way), Edgar Allan Poe, German Expressionism, Glam Rock, The Twilight Zone, Folk, The Beach Boys, Psycho, etc.

Those were the things I caught watching it myself, I read a few reviews after watching the film and they mentioned others, but I will be fair and not include those here. The most remarkable thing about Phantom of the Paradise is that these references don’t bog it down. The film is a lean, hellfire 88 minutes, and the references fuse and compliment one another in ways that mark De Palma as a swifter and more inventive screenwriter than is generally acknowledged.

The film’s more contemporary at the time musical numbers may be dated, but De Palma’s central black theme is as ageless as a certain someone’s portrait: our infinite moral and artistic flexibility in the pursuit of fame and money. De Palma’s film isn’t weighted down by this though, its a joke, and its underlined by how many people in the film are revealed to have made a Faustian pact (at least three characters, and there aren’t too many more characters in the movie.)

The Faustian pacts ultimately bring our three characters down though, because one of them, Swan (Paul Williams, who also wrote the music, and is very effective here), has an ego too large to properly protect his contract with Satan. It’s hidden along with other records and documents helpfully labeled: Contract. Our hero, Winslow Leach (William Finley), now the Phantom, finds it and turns the tables in a garish climax that’s a comment on garish climaxes, but is still a garish climax in its own right.

The third character is Phoenix (Jessica Harper, from another genre milestone, Suspiria) and she is the object of Swan and the Phantom’s rivalry. Swan seems more interested in her as an instrument to torment the Phantom, and the Phantom is the sort of perpetually hung up artistic putz who thinks she’s the only one to sing his music. Phoenix sells out too, gets hooked by Swan on various drugs, and becomes the embodiment of everything the Phantom loathes, though he doesn’t ever seem to realize it.

De Palma’s techinique can sometimes drown the story he’s chosen to tell (though that’s the point most of the time), but Phantom of the Paradise is the kind of reflexive hall of mirrors that perfectly suits his masturbatory, speed demon cineast tendencies. The film is one of De Palma’s fastest and surest, and works confidently as musical, slapstick comedy, post modern art, and, at times as a straight piece of intense operatic melodrama. It’s also, and this is important, not afraid to be a little silly. It’s a Brechtian Mel Brooks horror film, which, in short, means its a classic Brian De Palma film.

Day Ten: Trilogy of Terror (1975)

Last modified on 2007-10-10 17:24:29 GMT. 13 comments. Top.

What is it about Karen Black? She’s like one of those horror stories about the houses that contain geometrically impossible angles that drive people mad. Something about her doesn’t fit with other intangible things that I can’t describe. She’s sexy even though she shouldn’t be. She looks clueless and intelligent at the same time. Cross-eyed but focused. Vulnerable but vicious.

In short, she looks tee-totally deranged, whether she’s supposed to be or not. Karen Black has appeared in several legendary films (Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Easy Rider) as well as films of less prominent status. Few have worked with both Roberts Altman and Zombie, and that’s a testament to the various seemingly disconnected sensibilities of Ms. Black.

I go on about Ms. Black because she’s the sole reason to see the cult TV horror anthology Trilogy of Terror. She’s most certainly the terror of the trilogy, it’s charge. The first two stories (based on work by the great Richard Matheson) are completely forgettable, save the sexuality that Black injects into the material. Her not quite what she appears to be school marm from the first story deserves a swifter vehicle with a better, less predictable punchline. The second story doesn’t even have a character going for it, its humorless, Grade Z Psycho.

The third story is quite famous, and is also taken from a Matheson story, the primal, effective “Prey”. In “Prey”, retitled “Amelia” here so the stories can all be named after their protagonists, Karen Black is terrorized by her gift to her prospective boyfriend, a Zuni Fetish doll, who, she tells her mother, she picked up at a curiosity shop. The doll madness that ensues isn’t bad as that sort of thing goes, but one has to sit through ten minutes of superfluous exposition to get to the good seven minutes that follow. That may sound a bit impatient, but keep in mind that we’ve sat through two underbaked shorts already by this point. The final image, though, is quite creepy, and sets up a story that may have been scarier than any we’ve just watched.

And let it be said that Karen Black sticks a knife in a floor like no one I’ve ever seen. And those teeth…

Day Eleven: May (2002)

Last modified on 2008-04-25 22:32:12 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

Lucky McKee’s May is not a great horror movie, it’s clunky in places, but it’s a good one, and it has a wonderful lead performance by Angela Bettis in the title role. Bettis and the film were compared to Carrie in more than one review, and the comparison is easy but apt. Both films deal with confused young women whose decision to reach out to society is met with vicious rejection. Both films deal with confused young women who snap.

Both May and Carrie belong to a horror subgenre that doesn’t exist but should called the Compassionate Horror Film. Awful things still happen, and our hero is usually directly responsible for at least a portion of those awful things, but we can’t help but feel for them, and we’re usually even rooting for them at least a bit. The heroes of the Compassionate Horror Film usually haven’t gotten a fair deal (a rather nice way to describe having a bucket of pig’s blood dumped on you in your Sunday best) and they usually have the disadvantage of being at least partially insane. It’s the old nature versus nurture trick, only with death, pitch black humor and an obvious bit of vicarious revenge on the part of the filmmakers.

Angela Bettis is one of the more vulnerable young women to appear in a horror film that I can immediately recall. She always seems to be on the verge of floating away, or evaporating at any given moment, and she has a pensive melancholy that suggests that evaporation might not be the worst thing in the world to happen to her. Bettis looks like a live action Tim Burton doll (this has probably been said before) and its remarkable and sad that more hasn’t been done with her. Tim Burton should give her a call, at the very least, if he ever decides to do a live action remake of The Nightmare Before Christmas. That would be a bad idea, but at least it would give Bettis more work.

McKee knows what he has with Bettis, and he has the refreshing confidence in both his film and his central character to take time with his small story, and build gracefully to the harsh notes that must eventually come. McKee said somewhere that he wanted to make a beautiful horror film, and he’s achieved that with May. The killings are May’s only real connection with these people who’ve betrayed her until the end, and as such the killings are treated as sensual, slow farewells, though they are notably not exploitive, nothing eclipses McKee’s compassion for May.

And then we come to the end, which, unlike most horror pictures, is the strongest portion of the story. We see May at the height of her despair, her bizarre plan a failure, and she tries one last desperate sacrifice…and it works. It’s intensely poignant, mysterious and creepy. Even better yet, its a happy ending in a horror film, one of the few such happy endings that fits perfectly within everything else that has preceded it. May finally finds friendship, in spite of odds or sanity.

Day Twelve: Black Christmas (1974)

Last modified on 2008-04-25 22:31:48 GMT. 5 comments. Top.

Bob Clark’s Black Christmas is a sort of feature length reworking of the urban legend (that also inspired When a Stranger Calls) where a maniac continues to call a woman. Eventually she gets the call traced and the caller’s location turns out to be a little too close for comfort. Clark’s film is set in a soriority house right before Christmas, so its several women hearing the strange, barely coherent calls. We can make out a few things: the names Billy and Agnes, and a whole lot of gibberish and vicious sexual threats. The ladies, boozing and excited about the Holidays, brush it off, but the calls continue, and the ladies’ plans begin to seperate them from one another.

Slasher films are usually too rigid and predictable for my tastes, but Black Christmas is not just a great slasher film, but a great horror film in general. The film, maybe its because its set during the holidays, has a certain sadness. The deaths feel remote and lonely, the corpses of friends shut off in the attic or the bedrooms as everyone else goes about their plans. A subtle wail of winter wind can be heard throughout the soundtrack and that only exasperates the melancholy, and the relentless calls of the killer who seems to refer to himself as Billy.

A sort of plot eventually arises amongst the soriority girls (Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder are the most famous of the ladies) but that’s primarily there as a red herring that we never fully buy, and to set up the absurd but perfect ending. The ending would never happen, but as the credits roll you find yourself wondering, what if it did happen?

Bob Clark’s work here is stylish, and economic. Our characters are no richer here than in any other slasher film, but they are convincing and devoid of any major expositional howlers. No “This reminds me of the story I read about the guy who got out of the insane asylum” type crap here, the girls are too drunk, and they never know they’re in a horror film. One of the girls eventually finds out, and that’s fifteen minutes before the picture ends. Until then, Black Christmas has an appealingly loosey goosey catch as catch can structure, our characters are all over the place doing a variety of things, but they eventually always have to go back to where they sleep, where Billy can kill them.

I said the characters don’t have any expostional howlers, but it should also be noted that there’s really no exposition at all. The murders could be random, the sorority house could have been picked out of a phone book or just the first stop in the neighborhood. Our opening shot is the now de rigueur killer’s POV shot, and he just walks into the house by climbing through the window on the side. That’s it. Black Christmas is so airy, so surreal, that it could just as easily be a haunted house film, only the spectre is one very deranged human that we are never able to see.

The ending has the primal terror of an Edgar Allan Poe story. The superb final shot returns us to the corpse of the first victim, frozen mid death cry, wrapped like a dime store mummy. The red Christmas lights and easy access (the characters could see her if they looked up) mock her demise. She was celebrating Christmas a day earlier, now she’s another forgotten relic of the attic. No overly mannered directorial ticks here. This is unlanced, true dread. Black Christmas is easily the most unnerving slasher movie I’ve seen.

Black Christmas would also work as a nice double bill with the 1970s anthology film Tales from the Crypt, which also features a Christmas that goes belly up at the hands of a madman. Both films also have a certain ’70s, clammy cinematography that looks partially like embalming fluid. If you don’t like that idea, you could also pair Black Christmas with Clark’s other Christmas film, A Christmas Story and tell your little nephew that Black Christmas is the sequel and that Ralphie is the guy making all the funny calls to all those pretty girls.

Day Thirteen: Dead Silence (2007)

Last modified on 2008-04-25 22:31:22 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Today’s post was originally going to concern William Castle’s Homicidal, but I’m afraid your humble writer fell asleep right around the time a chilly blonde nearly disemboweled a priest, and woke up to find said chilly blonde now acting as some sort of chilly caretaker. A transformation had clearly been missed, and it would be unfair to Mr. Castle to proceed. So instead of a woman with a Norman Bates complex (I wouldn’t even know that much if it weren’t for Robert Osbourne’s intro), we get an army of ventriloquist dummies to compliment last week’s killer Zuni fetish doll.

The dummies are the co-stars of Dead Silence, which was released earlier this year by director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, who a few years ago ushered in the now yearly tradition of the Jigsaw Killer with their first film, Saw. These two seem to be trying to create a similar superhero here as well, this time its called Mary Shaw, and dummies aside, she bears quite a resemblance to Freddy Krueger.

No one of a sound mind can call the first Saw a good movie, but it had gumption. I respected how two men only a few years older than myself could scrape a few bucks together, lure a few decent stars, and make a shoestring thriller that caught on. The acting and writing are, to be nice, not good, but its important to note that they’re not awful in that calculating mannequin Gilmore Girls/Maxim spread way that plagues most bad horror movies these days. Saw is awful in that refreshing, nostalgically awful way that you remember from 1980s movies, or further back in, yes, William Castle movies. Cary Elwes’s performance in Saw is particularly diffcult to believe, and even more difficult to forget.

I go on about Saw because there isn’t too much in Dead Silence to go on about. There’s remarkably little ventriloquist dummy action for a film about an army of ventriloquist dummies terrorizing a small town. There’s even less screen time devoted to Wan and Whannell’s new boogeyman, Mary Shaw, who’s the keeper of the dummies. Primarly we’re treated to bad dialogue between Donnie Wahlberg’s cop and a bland actor not worth looking up who’s returned to his hometown of Raven’s Claw (I think) to avenge the death of his wife, who’s the victim of a particularly nasty curse placed on his family many years prior.

Your inner gears may already be rejecting this. Why kill the wife and not him? There may have been an explanation offered, but I think its because the movie would only be about ten minutes long otherwise. Wan and Whannell should’ve further examined this possibility: lower budget, lower shooting schedule, the same amount of dummy action, and a gimmick worthy of Castle: The movie too scary to be 90 minutes long!

Dead Silence is not an offense, you won’t leave it angry, but it is boring, and its just competent enough in the acting department to deny us the unintentional pleasure of the first Saw. The film has a twist at the end that is stupid, but appealingly nuts, it should have been promoted to Act I to start things off in a wilder direction. Wan has a few nice atmospheric touches (like the old Universal logo, or the theatre that looks like Frankenstein’s castle from Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman) but they aren’t enough. Unless you’re trying to smooth things over with a significant other who’s notably taken with dummies, I’d skip this one.

Day Fourteen: The Haunting (1963)

Last modified on 2008-04-25 22:31:02 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

This week we’re going to look at a few movies that favor dread over any major grotesquerie, and The Haunting is one of the landmark examples of such a film, a psychological ghost story that holds up very well some four decades after release. The Haunting is Robert Wise’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and it stands as one of the legendary director’s most purely pleasurable films. Beautiful, creepy, exciting and memorable.

There are two major reasons the film holds up. Firstly, Wise favors exacting, subtle scares that rely more on the unstable mental terrain of the heroes than the usual F/X charged ghosts. The most we get here is a bit of slight movement, or awful, overbearing sound that suggests a group of giants marching up and down Hill House’s immense halls. Or, much worse, of an ancient heart that’s somehow learned how to beat within the house’s walls.

Secondly, the script, by Nelson Gidding, maintains the novel’s subtext of repressed and misdirected sexuality. Our protagonist, Eleanor (Julie Harris), bears an unmistakable resemblance to one of the House’s past victims: the daughter of its builder who holed herself up in the place for her entire life. Both women are probably untouched, shy, and faintly bitter. Both women were involved in a death that may have been purposeful, and both women are happy to channel all of this rage and loneliness into a malignant building that is more than happy to swallow them alive. Their names even have the same amount of syllables. Don’t laugh, nothing means nothing in a haunted house.

Eleanor is attracted to Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), who’s heading the experiment on Hill House, and it’s interesting to note that her obsession with becoming part of the house doesn’t reach fever pitch until she discovers that the doctor, who’s not entirely discouraging of her awkward advances, is married. At this point her true love no longer has a rival. At this point Eleanor, fragile, possibly mentally ill and emotionally broken from a just recently concluded lifetime of servitude, has no chance.

Further confusing Eleanor is the sexual current she also happens to share with Theo (Claire Bloom), one of the others along for the experiment. Theo is obviously meant to be taken as Eleanor’s opposite: free, confident, brash. But Eleanor is denied this potential pleasure also, because she’s too repressed for a man much less a woman, and also because Theo is as much a threat as an attraction. Theo resents the attention the doctor lavishes on the needy Eleanor, further ensuring that everyone has quite a bit to be stewing over as the house slowly works its mojo.

The Haunting is confident and rousing, and Hill House itself, while maybe a touch obvious, has been masterfully realized. The creepiest thing about Hill House isn’t the angles, or the towers, or the stairwell that looks to have been shipped in from Dr. Caligari, its the sheer clutter of the place: a suffocating, nauseating, inescapable clutter of mad furniture, books, mirrors, and tables, etc. Watching it you want the characters to go outside not so much to avoid the ghoulies as to not trip over a damn ottoman.

Day Fifteen: Black Sunday (1960)

Last modified on 2008-04-25 22:30:38 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Black Sunday is the first film by the famed Italian horror director Mario Bava. The film is visually delicious, with a crisp, ripe atmosphere (think the Universal horror movies of 1930s and 1940s as shot by John Toll) that’s as impressive as any I’ve seen, but the story is just too poor, too non-existent.

The opening is impressive and promises a rich, flamboyant bit of gothic. We begin with a witch, or a vampire (the terms are used interchangably here) having an iron maiden hammered into her face, blood spurts and just before she’s to be burned, she swears her revenge. But she won’t burn, Satan seems to be protecting her, and so she’s thrown in a crypt that’s protected by a cross that can be seen by her corpse via a window in the coffin (a nifty image). The witch is Princess Asa (Barbara Steele, also in Shivers), and needless to say, she gets her reprisal when a couple of academics come screwing around the crypt two hundred years later.

Steele has presence, she’s sexual in that death kissed way that films like this require, but she’s given little to do. Over an hour of the film is the, slow, slow, slow set up of the rise of Asa. Bava spends an inordinate amount of time photographing doors closing, or opening, ominiously. I love a rich, dread inducing slow build, but its all in the service of very little. The Universal sequels of yesteryear were silly, but they at least had snap and a sense of fun. Bava takes himself dangerously seriously here, and that can be a killer for a film as purplish as this one.

Black Sunday does, as I say, have incredible black and white cinematography, it should maybe be seen once for this alone, but the story itself is bare bones and uninvolving. If you aren’t into this sort of thing, the ripe Italian horror of the 1960s, you may find the eightyish minutes to be a bit of a chore.

Day Sixteen: The Unknown (1927)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:10:37 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The Unknown is a frank, nasty bit of business by collaborators (and professional legends) Tod Browning and Lon Chaney. Browning directed and created the scenario, Chaney starred as Alonzo, an armless knife thrower who’s madly in love with the circus owner’s daughter, Nanon (a very young Joan Crawford). Alonzo’s disability looks to actually be an advantage with this young woman, as she’s terrified of men groping her (don’t ask, just go with it.) A strong man steps in the way though, spurring surprisingly brutal complications.

Chaney is, as usual, committed and superb as Alonzo, and two of his moments here are authentically scary and devastating. One of these scenes is justifiably famous: Alonzo, who turns out to be a criminal who really has arms, has them amputated so he can appeal to Nanon’s phobia. While he’s doing this, the strong man wins Nanon over, rendering Alonzo’s self-sabotage moot. Chaney’s realization of this, the slip from happiness to madness to madness dressed as happiness, is chilling, and in league with the unmasking scene of Phantom.

The second scene is toward the end, and again is centered on Chaney’s remarkable face. Alonzo watches as the strong man falls into his trap, and a devious, uncontrollable joy invades what’s left of the tortured Alonzo. I know the Joker from Batman is credited to The Man Who Laughs, but I have to wonder if Bob Kane saw The Unknown.

Browning would later go on to do the more famous Dracula and the (even better) Freaks, but, with The Unknown, we can see that the Browning sensibility had been in place long before those later pictures. The Unknown, like Freaks, sticks so well because Browning’s sympathies clearly lie with the deranged. The deck isn’t stacked here as it is Freaks either, Alonzo’s rage isn’t given any remotely rational excuse. It’s a testament to Browning and Chaney’s skill though, that we feel a pang of regret when Alonzo is trampled and the strong man and Nanon are allowed their happy ending. Alonzo was evil, selfish, insane, but he was the only character with any force to him. Everybody else is a pretty boy. Maybe the deck was stacked.

The Unknown is part of a two disc Lon Chaney Set from Turner Classic Movies. This also includes an engaging documentary on Chaney, as well as a still picture recreation of the “lost” Chaney/Browning film, London After Midnight. Chaney is essential, iconic, every bit as good as you’ve read from crusty film journals. I admit that I haven’t seen nearly as much as I should’ve myself. What better month to catch up with a neglected master?

Day Seventeen: Cat People (1942)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:10:20 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

A wonderful movie, one of the very best examples of the “heard not seen” type of filmmaking. Cat People has three very memorable sequences and none of them involve any wolfman style transformations on the part of the lead, Simone Simon. Simon plays a strange young woman who’s hesistant to make love to her new husband because she fears that stirring feelings of intense passion (or jealousy) will cause her to turn into a large panther.

There’s certainly a black joke in that summary somewhere. I’m not sure if Cat People was meant to be any kind of satire of bedroom politics (particularly of a time when couples slept in seperate beds on TV) but there’s a subtext there if you want to go looking for it. I doubt producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur were too interested in exploring the hypocrisy of marriage at the time, but that’s the fun of all these people turning into other creature movies, subtext can be mined in even the flimsiest entires of the genre (maybe not the Stephen King movie Silver Bullet, but that has Gary Busey in one of his best parts, a fair trade).

The funny thing is you don’t really root for Simon’s husband (played by Kent Smith) much at all. He’s ostensibly the hero but, like most heroes of these kinds of movies, he’s bland and uninteresting, a pretty boy who doesn’t appreciate what he has. There’s a particularly annoying scene where Smith confesses that he doesn’t know what to do with his potentially crazy wife, he’s never been unhappy before, he says. Never been unhappy before? Fuck you man. Its also clear that he would rather be off canoodling with his best friend (Jane Rudolph) anyway.The psychiatrist who tries to cure Simon of her suspicions may be a sleazy lech, but he at least knows a hell of a cat woman when he sees one.

Let’s get back to those three scares. One is set on a street near a park, one is in a swimming pool (its one of the most gorgeous scare scenes of any time or movie) and the final is set in the Simon-Smith home, when the good doctor finally discovers the truth of Simon’s heritage. All of the scenes work so well because Tourneur has patiently built to them, and has trusted that the scares would be worth the wait. The film also plays its secrets remarkably close to its vest, the nature of Simon’s problem is debatable until the very end.

I love this movie. The direction, that perfect, dreadful atmosphere, the wonderfully strange Simone Simon, the script that feeds us exposition at just the right times, that final look in Simon’s eyes toward the end of the film. Cat People is one of my favorite horror movies of the 1940s, and you’ll be surprised at how well it holds up. If only that doctor could’ve patented some sort of protective vest for indulging in the elusive, immensely pleasurable, but always difficult to survive panther nooky .

Day Eighteen: Cronos (1993)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:09:59 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Cronos is an unusual vampire film. You don’t become a vampire by being bitten by another vampire, you don’t spend long nights carousing and screwing and joyously killing bystanders. You are simply a corpse who is still animated, and who is powered by one urge, to drink blood so you can continue to be a corpse who’s sole purpose in life is to drink blood. But, even worse, you still have your soul, you still know what you’re doing, and you have to forever live with the mistake you made. Cronos is about greed, and the danger of a “quantity over quality” approach to life.

It’s also about the horror and the sadness of waking up one day to find that your grandpa (you’re father has died much earlier) is dying. Dying, and much worse, dependent on some mysterious golden bug that he found in a statue a few days ago. Most children, at one time or another, are afraid of something happening to their loved ones, and Cronos takes that primal fear, and fuses it with a black comic tale of a classic difference between youth and the elderly. The youth take life for granted, the elderly have a finer appreciation for each moment while it lasts, maybe too fine an appreciation.

I was going to post on Del Toro’s superb The Devil’s Backbone as an example of a contemporary ghost story that understands so well how the ghost story works, but I decided Cronos may have been a little less appreciated, and that perhaps a reminder was in order. Like all of Del Toro’s work, Cronos is a work of amazingly confident tone, Del Toro knows how to tug at the heart strings without mooting the horror. As wonderful as the relationship between Federico Luppi and Tamara Shanath (and grandfather and granddaughter) is, its never played for cheap sentiment and there are still revolting images to be found.

Including one of the more disturbing blood drinking scenes I’ve encountered in the vampire canon. Lupi, an elderly antiques dealer, now under the influence of the Cronos device, desperately licks a sick person’s blood off of a public bathroom floor. The taboo of cannibalism isn’t enough for Del Toro, he laces it with something much closer to home, and much scarier. Imagine seeing someone eat a twinkie off of a 7-11 floor, much less drinking blood.

Above all though, Cronos has a truly felt fear of death that puts it in the league of more primal, classical horror work. The deaths here, whether they occur out of vegeneance or greed or by accident, count, and aren’t laughed off or played as a gorehound come shot. Del Toro takes this genre seriously, and he makes some of the most transporting films in the business (regardless of genre.) His Pan’s Labyrinth is one of the best films of our current decade. It started nearly fifteen years ago with Cronos, which also deals with a young girl’s initiation into the complexities of death.

Day Nineteen: Severance (2007)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:09:40 GMT. 6 comments. Top.

The tedium and hypocrisy of office work is ripe for a smart horror film, but I’m afraid that Christopher Smith’s Severance is not that film. Severance is really just the same old slasher business, the old bit where nothing happens for two acts and we twiddle our thumbs and wait for the good stuff. We go to slasher films for rowdy ultra-violent perversity but the most perverse thing is usually how long we have to wait for the film to finally get on with it. We feel that time is being killed, and that if the director had made the film he really wanted, it would have been about twenty five minutes long.

Severance’s first couple acts do include a few nice barbs, but the film’s set up is really about as primitive as any other slasher movie. We have the goof ball, the sexy girl, the nerd, the clueless boss, and none of them are allowed too much personality. In the hands of a virtuoso (Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) this can be effective, but usually it winds up being about as hypocritical as anything Severance pretends to be lampooning.

To Smith’s credit, the third act here is pretty good. There is a truly wow moment featuring a rocket launcher, and a couple of the hack and slash scenes with the villians (a pack of possibly deranged soldiers freshly escaped from a loony bin) deliver the goods. But deep down you really don’t give a shit, and this wait until the third act structure (that’s probably a mutant of the structure of better movies such as Psycho or the original Chainsaw) needs to be retired or saved for the pros. Remember that film we discussed a few weeks ago, The Descent ? That film employed a similar wait and see peekaboo structure, ONLY THE FIRST TWO ACTS BOTHERED TO BE A REAL MOVIE TOO.

Day Twenty: The Monster Squad (1987)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:09:21 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

It can be risky to revisit a film from your childhood. As children we don’t have the calculation that we do as grown-up, full fledged film obsessives and it seems a little perverse to go back and ruin a past movie for yourself when you’re so busy ruining present movies for yourself. Let a bad film at least be a good film in false memory if nowhere else. You can’t go home again as the famed literary someone wrote, and he may have been thinking of 1980s childrens films that skate dangerously close to self-parody when he wrote it.

My fear of revisiting The Monster Squad could be summed up in two words, “the” and “goonies”. I knew even then that Squad was more than a little indebted to the Richard Donner film, and this is bad news indeed. The Goonies has aged terribly, and if I had been an adult at the time, I imagine I wouldn’t have gone for it at all. The film is loud, obnoxious, vaguely offensive (particularly with Chunk) and just a general headache of 1980s tastelessness. I’m not trying to steer us down the PC road that seems to be strangling our art today, but it should be made known that not all fat kids are bird brained, food crazed mad men. Chunk is to fat children what the Mickey Rooney landlord in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is to Asian stereotypes.

The Monster Squad is still a ripoff of The Goonies, but, aside from a regrettable Chunk wannabe, its not nearly as overbearing or desperate to be liked. The Monster Squad is agreeably slight, only 75 minutes, and makes sure to give most of the featured monsters, particularly The Gill Man, the Wolf Man, and The Mummy, a moment to shine. The Mummy gets a clever send off, and the Wolf Man has the opportunity to prove beyond a doubt that a silver bullet is the only way to kill him. For further analysis consult the aptly titled Silver Bullet.

Dracula and Frankenstein are a little disappointing though, even by the standards of nine year old boy who doesn’t question how easily the Van Helsing diary comes into a twelve year old boy’s possession. Dracula looks like a host of a notably unappealing Italian restaurant, and Frankenstein’s monster has the unenviable task of playing this movie’s version of Sloth. The Monster isn’t nearly as annoying as Sloth (it helps that he’s embodied by Michael Mann vet Tom Noonan), but one still can’t help but think the big guy’s getting sold a little short.

I’ve saved the best moment in the The Monster Squad for last and this scene alone marks the movie as ok to revisit: a scene of a boy and father, eating burgers and watching a slasher movie from the roof of their home through binculars as it plays at the local drive-in. This one moment, a reprieve from the trouble the father is having with the mother, gets at why some people turn to the movies at a very young age and never turn back. It has the gentle bliss of a Joe Dante film and for this I’ll forgive quite a bit.

Day Twenty-One: Infection (2004)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:08:59 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

Infection opens with several vignettes that gradually reveal to us the various nurses, doctors, and patients that populate a barren hospital one night. The stafff is overworked, underfunded and in danger of mental collapse. The patients, those that aren’t rotting away from burns or a very mysterious disease, are probably clinically insane, or don’t exist to begin with. The entire thing is absurd, particularly the design of the hospital from Hell, but then so are most nightmares, and for awhile director Masayuki Ochiai plays phenomenally on all the little things that nag you while you sit in a hospital waiting room. What if they re-used diseased syringes? What if something really deadly is incubating in the person who sits next to you? What if the doctor is crazy?

Infection appears to be one of those “people get picked off one by one by a mysterious thing that may or may not mutate them” kind of movies. I was thinking John Carpenter’s The Thing or Leviathan. Ochiai does incorporate some of those conventions, but there is also an emphasis placed, particularly in the third act, on something less tangible. Reality begins to crumble for these characters, and we wonder whether the disease is of the tell-tale variety, some sort of mass guilt that plagues the staff over a cover up that happens earlier in the film. The doctors turn on each other, try to figure out the source of the disease and…

…that’s right around when the film totally shoves its head up its own ass. Imagine the end of The Sixth Sense, only instead of Bruce Willis being the ghost, it turns out that yes, he’s the ghost, then, no, he’s not a ghost, then, well, yes, he may be a ghost, but then, no Haley Joel Osment is the ghost and he’s imagining that Bruce Willis is a ghost to deal with his own fear of being a ghost. What I just wrote is much more coherent than the last twenty minutes or so of Infection, which turns into an inescapable house of mirrors for its characters. By the end, convolution has become the disease and, believe me, Ochiai isn’t offering a cure.

It works though, and I normally don’t go for the Japansese horror films that get shipped to the U.S and are, inevitably, remade as more sensical but even more boring American films for teens. Infection maintains interest even in its knottier sections because it’s grounded in a very true, tangible anxiety of a total loss of control, of a fear that people who should know what they’re doing don’t.

Day Twenty-Two: The Devil’s Rejects (2005)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:08:39 GMT. 5 comments. Top.

What are we to make of The Devil’s Rejects ? I admit that I didn’t much care for Rob Zombie’s film when I first caught it over summer of 2005. I thought the film reveled in a certain vile killer chic, and laughed along with its band of madmen (who seem to be modeled after Charles Manson) as they indulged in relentless, prolonged scenes of torture. Zombie even perversely denies us the pleasure of a good guy, the cop pursuing them is just as insane as they are, the fact that he’s on the right side of the law seems to be more by accident than design.

I thought House of 1000 Corpses, his prior film as writer-director, was stylish, a more watchable than usual entry in the neverending chain that is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff. Rejects is interested in more though and I got on its wavelength in subsequent viewings. The film has an appealing lunatic bite, a flamboyant sting of lawlessness to it, and it’s in this acknowledgement of lawlessness that the film’s one truly great scene emerges. One of the killers, (Bill Mosely, in a performance that should get him more work) notices a potential victim praying to God, and laughs, and screams to the sky, if there is a God then strike me down with lightening. For a moment, we’re dealing in the pure, primal, animal fear of breakdown, of chaos that powers most great horror films.

You sense, like many recent horror directors, Zombie’s infatuation with past horror junk, but Zombie’s too head over heels in love with the tropes of the genres to overly intellectualize it or quote mark it like other filmmakers who’ll remain nameless. Zombie gets carried away and roots for the bad guy because the good guy’s squareness is repellent to him. He’s too busy embuing The Devil’s Rejects with a hellfire energy to instill it with any moral compass, and I dig the lack of hypocrisy, the cojones of Zombie. This thing rocks and rolls, and seems to be entirely uninterested in anyone’s opinion beyond it’s creator’s.

It also helps that Zombie has a found a mildly more original schtick this time. If Corpses was TCM, then Rejects is TCM part 2 as remade by Sam Peckinpah. The MTV splatter is gone here, and replaced by a dry, oversaturated Western cinematography that’s a breath of fresh air for the genre. We open with the mentally diseased Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe, if you’ve thought he’s chewed scenery in the past, you’ve seen nothing yet) opening fire on the Firefly Clan’s home, the family from Corpses, who murdered his brother in the prior film. Right away Zombie lays on the hyperbole: killers dressed in homemade armor, shotguns blazing with no apparent kickback, a Sheriff who walks in the line of fire like the Terminator, the mayhem reaching a gorgeous crescendo when a character fails to off themselves to spite someone else. Cue the Allman Brothers.

Zombie’s zeal is both his greatest asset and strongest limitation. One can’t tell where the satire ends and the misguided begins. Zombie lays on the purpilish dialogue, the Lynard Skynard, and the Tarantinoish digressions (though Tarantino would probably never sideline from the plot long enough to consider chicken fucking) and you’re left wondering if this filmmaker has any self-consciousness at all. That is, ulimately, the thrill of a Rob Zombie movie, or at least the first two Rob Zombie movies.

A teensy bit of self-consciousness might help though. Zombie could stand to learn that certain moments don’t need slow-mo to sell them or that some people don’t talk like ironically articulate white trash sailors (a much bigger problem with his Halloween) but, even as he is, Zombie is something to appreciate, he’s seemingly untouched by doubt, and he’s the only person working who’d showcase Sid Haig in something that could be called a star performance. What’s a matter honey? Don’t you like clowns? Don’t you think they’re fucking funny?

Day Twenty-Three: A Mild Romero Sermon Masquerading as a Review of Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:07:07 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Essential. Iconic. Let’s go ahead and say a few more unoriginal things about George A. Romero’s debut, Night of the Living Dead. The film is one of the greatest of all horror pictures, and, unlike some, I respect the importance of such a statement. Night of the Living Dead is one of those perfect, wonderful accidents where the usual disadvantages of a making a movie (any movie, much less one of a significantly low budget) are blessings.

Dead looks like a home movie you might find in your attic one day. Something that documents an attack that went undocumented amongst all the other outrages of the time, such as Kent State, or the assassination of Martin Luther King. Imagine your grandfather, in the midst of boring you with a family history, suddenly saying “and this was the day your aunt ate your grandmother on your father’s side.”

This sort of macabre humor permeates Night of the Living Dead, though, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it doesn’t defuse the horror. The film has a strong script that feeds you bite size portions of exposition at just the right moments, amping the dread and violence as the dead slowly close in on our heroes. I’ve seen many films that attempt to dramatize the falling apart of a group, but few are as convincing as Dead. It has something to do with the total lack of artifice here, the performances are clipped and efficient, the dialogue unshowy. People say what they might actually say in this situation, not what a screenwriter needs them to say to ensure that his name is remembered for another project.

Romero would go on to push it further in subsequent films, but I find the scene where the ghouls eat whats left of the characters that have blown up in the truck to be one of the more unsettling scenes of violence I’ve ever seen, much less of Romero’s oeuvre. The gore is there, but its teasingly just out of sight. The creatures munch the guts in the shadows, and you catch a little glimpse of something and wonder if that was a stomach lining you just saw the creature eating. In Dawn, or Day, this question is resolutely answered.

With Dawn of the Dead, Romero would begin to push the series towards a more purposeful satire. His zombies are as much a joke as menace here, and he manipulates the tones with the seeming ease of a master. I’m a little split on the Dead pictures, I think Dawn of the Dead is the best film of the series, while Night is the sweat inducing, pretense free, single minded shocker of the bunch.

The satire or subversiveness of Night never takes reign over the story, and some have claimed that the pereceived commentary that Night offers on 1960s war torn, racially cancerous America was largely arrived at by accident anyway. This doesn’t really matter much either way, Romero made a film that caught the zeitgeist at the time, and could fuel one hundred different imaginations to go one hundred different ways with it. He didn’t have that level of trust in the other pictures, and it finally got a little out of control with his most recent, Land of the Dead, a God awful preachfest that was inexplicably acclaimed in certain circles.

A zombie learning to speak (sort of) English and recognizing that he has rights? Not scary. A zombie that’s a feral thing that’s all lumbering instinct that looks like your sister? Scary. A zombie that actually is your sister that you catch eating your dad in the basement? The stuff that nightmares are made of. We don’t need to have our nightmares rationalized for us, the nightmares and the real co-mingle in a way that’s best, at least in art, left in the realm of the sub-conscious. Romero once knew that, and his crude, low budget, little shocker is the one of great American horror movies. It doesn’t matter if the zombies are eating us out of social protest or not, what matters is that they’re eating us.

Day Twenty-Four: Braindead (1992)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:06:46 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

I miss Peter Jackson from the early days, the unhinged horror comedy filmmaker who hadn’t yet conquered the world with a certain fantasy trilogy. I am quite fond of Lord of the Rings, but King Kong lost me somewhere in the two hours it takes for Kong to show up, and I wondered what happened to the Jackson who would’ve had a baby eating a person’s head in half that running time. I miss Jackson’s indulgences of the NC-17 variety.

Bad Taste is impressive primarily from a wannabe filmmaker standpoint. You respect how much Jackson does with so little but the movie, by movie standards, leaves you wanting. Meet the Feebles is foul and gloriously deranged. Braindead, though, is Jackson’s doctorate in the genre, it’s no wonder he left “splatstick” after this one. I’m not sure what else there would be left to do. Zombie sex? Check. Pus mistaken for custard? Check. Climactic set piece requiring a football field’s worth of plastic body parts? Check. Baby zombies? Check. Baby zombies ripping heads apart? Check. I know I already wrote that one, but “baby ripping heads” or “baby eating heads” are surprisingly fun phrases to type, they make the coffee go down that much easier.

The gory cartoonish horror comedy is harder to pull off than it may sometimes appear. The danger (I feel I wrote this somewhere before, my apologies) is that the comedy and the horror moot one another and yield just another exercise in filmmaker attitude that doesn’t make it as a real movie. Braindead works so well because it’s devoid of any attitude to begin with. Braindead isn’t chic, isn’t hip, isn’t cool, its the bubbly collective of Jackson’s daydreams while watching every possible monster movie he could get his hands on. Jackson is a wit and a talent, and he recognizes both the absurdity and the essentiality of these fantasies. The viewpoints of “absurd” and “essential” bounce off one another like billard balls in Braindead and yields what could be called a junior Buster Keaton cover of the zombie movie.

The zombies that Lionel (Timothy Balme) has to nursemaid throughout the movie are not that much worse than taking care of the human version of his mum (Elizabeth Moody), whom he has a conflicted, Norman Bateish relationship with. Jackson shoots the human scenes the same way he does the carnage that eventually ensues: in jarring, three ring circus style close up. The sound effects that accompany human Mum’s actions are also stylized and digusting. Lionel handles the zombies so well because he’s had experience with the vaguely living dead, and this isn’t that much of a stretch.

The madness that Jackson orchestrates toward the end of Braindead has to be seen to be believed, but part of me wishes that the film played in the “having to shield zombie Mum from society” sandbox a little longer. There is one truly uproarious scene in this vein: a dinner sequence with Lionel, Mum and a couple they need to impress. I won’t ruin the various grotesqueries that Jackson unleashes, but the obviousness of Mum’s condition, and Lionel and the couple’s determined obliviousness, is inspired. Part of my (mild) regret stems from Moody’s performance, she’s too good to be so quickly discarded in favor of a plastic zombie.

For all its violence, Braindead is surprisingly square and dorky, lovable even. Whatever your taste, Jackson’s passion is too damn pure to dislike. There’s a romance here, and it’s naive in a very old school silent movie way. Jackson’s playful indulgences are still evident in his more recent films, but he’s polished now, put on his tux so to speak. The little rugrat genius who throws mud at your windows and dreams of different ways to blow up a corpse occassionally returns in fits and starts (the T-Rex/Kong three way for instance) but he’s in disturbingly short supply these days .

Day Twenty-Five: The Mummy (1932)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:06:26 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Bowen’s Cinematic’s 31 Days of Horror has largely been a catch as catch can affair. No master plan, no attempt at writing a horror canon. I always knew there would be a Karloff film though, and I always knew it wouldn’t be Frankenstein. Nothing wrong with Frankenstein at all, actually there’s quite a bit right with it. But we all know Frankenstein. We all know The Mummy too, but how many of you have actually sat down and watched The Mummy?

The Mummy was directed by noted German cinematographer Karl Freund (he shot Metropolis, Dracula, Key Largo, among others) and he lends this film, as expected, an assured visual tone that resembles the crumbly, dusty, old as the ages look of the mummy himself. Freund’s framing is cramped, stuffy, entombed, impressive. Watch how Freund handles the marvelous opening scene, a mummy resurrection scene as suggestive as any of the feline shenanigans in Cat People, we see the young moron laughing madly, and we pan to a strip of the mummy’s wrapping disappearing out the door. The most terrifying part has already happened though, and that’s the opening of the great Karloff’s eyes.

It’s fitting that Freund shot Dracula, because The Mummy is essentially a remake of that film with a different creature. Unfortunately, The Mummy inherits Dracula’s flaws too. Both films devote quite a bit of running time to the spouting of various romantic banalities by the boring heroes, and both films keep the monster off screen for far too long. Dracula was stilted and obviously lifted from the stage, the superb atmosphere by Freund and the legendary Tod Browning its only real asset. Dracula himself, as embodied by Bela Lugosi, has always been a bit of bust for me. I think he’s one of the more overrated approaches to the monster. He’s overdone, clownish, and not nearly as frightening as some of the other vampires of the time.

The Mummy may have the boring heroes, the laughable dialogue, the creaky pace, but it has a wonderful monster. Karloff’s work here isn’t as showy as his (also brilliant) work as the Frankenstein’s monster, but he’s no less interesting. We nearly sympathize with his aim here, his single minded urge to find his love, but Karloff’s portrayal is couragously unsentimenal. Karloff’s Imhotep may have began his quest with a romantic desire, but the ages of unrewarded pursuit have whittled him down to pure, malignant rage. He truly is a corpse, a forgotten relic who refuses to surrender to the inevitability of time.

Beyond this performance, the film is hit or miss. The other performances are largely awful, and the story is, as I said earlier, Dracula all over again. The Mummy setting up shop in the museum is rather nifty, as is Imhoteps’s scheme in the beginning of telling the archaelogists where the ruins are so they can dig them up for him. It’s also worth noting that the only real mummy shot is near the beginning, the rest is Karloff. I was reading a bit and playing with the extras on the DVD, and it was said that Karloff was so huge after Frankenstein the year before, that all the marketing had to say was “Karloff….Mummy”. Karloff more than justifies the fervor here.

Day Twenty-Six: The Roost (2005)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:06:08 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The Roost is an exceptionally low budget shocker that concerns a group of young adults (heading to a friend’s wedding) who run afoul a deadly roost of vampire bats. This would be awful enough, I’d imagine being eaten alive by killer vampire bats to be extremely unpleasant, except, the bats also turn you into a sort of zombie upon biting, and then the zombie can turn another person into a zombie, and before long we’ve got more bats and zombies than we know what to do with.

The Roost is not very good, in fact, its so poor in places that it plays more like a film you’d see on campus than a real theatre. The writer-director, Ti West, is obviously trying to pad a short into a feature film, and the result is some of the longest 78 minutes you’ll find at your videostore, or mailbox, or however you come about meeting your viewing needs. Among other things The Roost features a particularly pointless framing device: Tom Noonan (always welcome) appears in the beginning, middle and end to comment on the story like a host from one of those 1970s specials, or the Crypt Keeper. What this has to do with vampire bats and zombies is beyond me. The first five minutes of the film is the camera almost literally spacing out around Noonan’s castle. You may not make it all the way through this one.

Still, there’s some potential here. West is very young, and I imagine he had little to work with, and there is the occasional image that works. West has also found a slightly different menace and an effective setting for his film. The horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden executive produced and appears in The Roost, and he did the same for West’s forthcoming Trigger Man, which has already received some very favorable notices. West is also currently finishing Cabin Fever 2. If West makes it, perhaps The Roost will one day be a bizarre curiosity, until then though, its something you’d watch five minutes of before flipping the channel.

Day Twenty-Seven: The Old Dark House (1932)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:05:51 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

James Whale’s horror films (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man) age better than most other movies of the era, even the good ones. This has something to do with Whale’s sense of humor, his dry wit, Whale manages to tweak the genre without playing as if he’s above it (truly having your cake and eating too). I’ve recently said that horror and comedy shouldn’t be mixed by amateurs, Whale may have been the ultimate pro in this regard, and The Old Dark House is one of the most purely enjoyable of his work.

The story is simple and well traveled. A group of travelers (including Gloria Stewart, Melvyn Douglas, and Charles Laughton) get lost in a storm and stumble into a creepy, old mansion that looks to be abandoned. Lucky for us though, it isn’t, it’s occupied by Boris Karloff (in a much smaller role here), Ernest Thesiger (Bride of Frankenstein) and Eva Moore in one of the film’s funniest performances as a deaf, superstitious woman who’s given up on anyone taking her frequent warnings seriously. Throughout the film we discover other inhabitants, but to reveal more would diminish some of the fun.

The Old Dark House doesn’t quite have the lunatic sting of Whales’ Bride of Frankenstein (there’s no moment here to equal Karloff’s final words in that film) but House is equally effective in a more free form, shambling way. The film is a revue of haunted house cliches, a buffet that bounces from one joke and character bit to another. Like other Whale horror films, the pace is superbly even, the tone sustained remarkably well. There are no groaners, no long stretches, this is well-performed tonic by a master of low key dread and quiet chuckles. The Old Dark House of The Old Dark House, is little more than an insane asylum, but the desperation rarely undermines everyone’s good manners, which is, of course, Whale’s ultimate joke.

Ironically, legendary ham Charles Laughton lends House one of its subtler performances. He has a wonderful scene, played relatively straight, where he defends his ambition, his aim for what others see as profit above all else. Laughton’s character has never gotten over his lost wife, and he loses his new girl too over the course of the picture. His acceptance of this, and his ultimate character, compliments the farce of The Old Dark House with something sadder, he shows you why one would consider living in such a place.

Day Twenty-Eight: A Bucket of Blood (1959)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:05:32 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I first noticed Dick Miller as a reoccurring supporting performer in the films of Joe Dante. Miller has one of the best scenes in Dante’s Gremlins as a man who seems to know more about the creatures than anyone else in town and subsequently pays for it with a bulldozer through his living room window. Miller is also terrific in a small part in The Howling, which we discussed earlier in our celebration, as one of the only people who respects the delicacy of werewolf execution. Dick Miller is always the guy in the know, the seasoned character kinda badass actor who’s never the star because he’s too competent. He’d kill the monster in fifteen minutes, and we’re conditioned to expect that it take our heroes at least ninety.

Dick Miller was called Walter Paisley in The Howling, and that name turns out to be another of the dozens of horror movie references to be found in that very endearing film. Paisley may be a small town bookstore owner looking to make a buck in The Howling, but he was once a very troubled young man who bussed tables at a pretentious cafe, where he hoped to one day make an impression with it’s self-absorbed, hypocritical patrons, particularly a sweeter girl in the group played by Barboura Morris. Paisley wants to be an artist like the others (who seem to talk of creating art more than actually creating it) but he’s painfully untalented. Then he discovers that sculpting is a breeze when you kill the subjects and just dump a little plaster on them. Quicker that way too.

Roger Corman directed A Bucket of Blood and my typically half assed research indicates that it’s the only film to feature Dick Miller front and center as the star. Miller was only twenty nine or thirty when he made A Bucket of Blood, and it’s a bit jarring to seem him devoid of some of the wrinkles that the years would eventually carve. That no-nonsense tough guy rasp is softer too, Miller sounds a little like Jerry Lewis in his nerd days, and, murder subtracted, it’s a similar kind of part.

A Bucket of Blood is charming and self-aware, not afraid to be a little (ok, a lot) goofy. The film’s idea of Bohemians is hilariously broad (very much in the “ok daddy yo” line of caricature) and it’s hard to separate the intentional from the unintentional. Corman keeps things zipping along, and, we find ourselves rooting for Miller’s serial killer to get the girl and rescue her from all of that blinding self-importance. The film has one very inspired line, a sorta poet approaches Miller and tells him that his work might net him twenty five grand. Miller looks at him, incredulous, and says that he thought money didn’t matter. The poet, startled, considers this and replies “of course money doesn’t matter, but this is twenty five thousand dollars!”

We’re in the middle of a remake craze now, mostly unnecessary, but I would like to suggest to Hollywoodland that A Bucket of Blood get the remake treatment. The film is a one joke movie, but it’s a funny joke, and one that could really be explored in a sharp satire of the various artistic putons that critics, artists, and viewers put themselves through on a daily basis. I only have two requests, an exec producer credit and Dick Miller again as the lead. Surely he can put the Gremlins and werewolves aside for a moment to stick it to the artistic elite again, old school style, with, of course, new school rules.

★★

Day Twenty-Nine: The Shining (1980)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:05:13 GMT. 5 comments. Top.

I read in a Stephen King interview somewhere that claimed Stanley Kubrick aimed to make the scariest movie of all time with The Shining. He certainly made one of the most interesting, one of the most debatable. I’ve always been mixed on The Shining, it’s a very effective piece, but I thought the traditional emotional remoteness that goes with a later Kubrick picture sabotaged him a little here. In other words, I was with the Stephen King guys who said that Kubrick had undermined the humanity of the novel in favor of something more cynical and abstract.

It’s not surprising that Kubrick said that he wanted to make the scariest film of all time, Kubrick certainly had that chutzpah, but he doesn’t seem to like horror movies. The Shining feels like a professor’s doctorate on the limitations of the horror film. Kubrick doesn’t believe in anything, and he doesn’t want to really get his hands dirty. He’s Stanley Kubrick the Great American Filmmaker after all, why would he lower himself to make a typical haunted house movie, based on something by that novelist Stephen King of all people?

The above would have represented my thoughts on The Shining up until about a year ago. In high school, I revered Kubrick because I was supposed to. Then in college I wondered why I was supposed to and began to resent the idea that I’m supposed to like anything if I’m to appear well read. I began to dislike the films, and was frustrated by Kubrick’s overly deliberate technique, which I viewed as posturing to maintain his acclaim and nurture the legend. I preferred earlier, livelier work like The Killing and Dr. Strangelove, films that seem to be blessedly free of such pressure.

A year or two ago I began to revisit the films, and, excluding 2001, which I can’t bring myself to pretend to like on any level, I’ve gotten to a place where I authentically love the majority of Kubrick’s work. Both prior viewpoints were the posturing of an insecure child. Now I’m an insecure child who likes Stanley Kubrick movies. His films are remote, are chilly, but there’s an element of friction, particularly in the masterpiece, Barry Lyndon, you where sense the presence of two Kubricks on the set, the cynical intellectual, and a more approachable guy who’d like to believe in things beyond cruelty and isolation.

The Shining, upon revisitation, has a similar friction. This is Stanley Kubrick’s Death of the Family picture, and viewed in a particular light, it is a supremely moving achievement. Yes, Jack Nicholson appears to be crazy from the outsight, that’s one of the bigger cliches that detractors use to dismiss the film. But let’s think about that, yes, it subtracts something from the story that King wrote, but it adds something to the film that Kubrick made. That the Jack Nicholson character is crazy in the beginning is the point. The life of this family is a charade, and it’s through the intervention of The Overlook Hotel that the family is forced to realize it. This is a more original, more daring take than the story that Stephen King wrote (and I say that as an admirer of the novel.)

As in other Kubrick films, the only emotion that comes through with any real conviction is the malice of the Nicholson character. The nicer words, the exposition are plain and flavorless and delivered as so. The Nicholson character’s relationship with his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) is a farce of the father/son dynamic, and some of the most unsettling material in the film. The Shining is about Danny’s realization that the world is a violent, dangerous place, and it’s one of the least sentimental coming of age stories I’ve personally seen.

Wendy’s (Shelly Duvall) relationship with Jack is even worse. Jack addresses Wendy with naked contempt before they get to the Overlook, though she turns a frequent deaf ear to it. Jack’s hostility is a little harder to ignore when he picks up an ax. Here Kubrick again plays a different note than expected, Duvall’s character IS shrill, IS annoying, her sunny side up exterior a very real defense again her husband’s introverted self-absorption.

It’s a mark of The Shining that we’ve gotten this far before even mentioning the supernatural goings on that fuel the second half of the film. Again, Kubrick’s conflicted attitude powers the picture. He evidently didn’t believe in the supernatural, and it shows, the film has an uncertainty, a lack of conviction in the subject matter, that actually enhances the dread. Again, it does feel more like a college doctorate on the horror film, removed, aloof, a Godless world where anything goes, safety is guaranteed nowhere, particularly in your family.

Let’s go back to the cliche of the Nicholson casting, which is partially legitimate. Nicholson’s performance is problematic not for the “insane at first glance” reasoning, but for the “insane in a chic, stylized way” reasoning. Nicholson is doing his cool cucumber Nicholson thing here, and it’s a bit too much for the movie. We watch The Shining and think, “yeah that’s pretty cool, so cool in fact that Nicholson would spend twenty years doing it”, but it doesn’t mesh with the other performances, particularly Duvall, who is terrific. I’ve never much warmed to Shelly Duvall, but she’s fearless in playing someone so afraid; this is strong, raw work, and one of the best performances in the later Kubrick canon.

If The Shining had absolutely nothing going on beyond Kubrick’s technique in realizing it, then the picture would still be worth seeing. The amazing tracking shots have been endlessly elaborated upon, so I won’t belabor the point, but they accomplish a sense of geography that is rare in the horror film. Kubrick’s vision of The Overlook is amazing, the building is a timeless creature that waits to swallow it’s inhabits whole. My favorite shot is the very first, the God’s Eye View as we watch Jack drive to his interview as that iconic score sounds. The credits sequence is impressive the first time you watch it, the second and third and fourth it’s quite moving. There’s a mourning to be found in these opening images, an unforgettable inevitability.

★★★½

Day Thirty: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:04:49 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Tobe Hooper’s film opens with a bit of narration (courtesy John Larroquette) and then fades into a series of news reports explaining a bizarre series of grave robbings. We then fade into an image of a corpse real close, and pull out to reveal that the corpse has been perversely dug up and rearranged on top of a tombstone. We then cut to the title: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

No further than three minutes into his picture, Hooper has set the mood, and established a tone that he will masterfully maintain for another seventy nine minutes. I haven’t read the script, but I would imagine that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would read like a slightly above average example of the kind of movies that have been popular ever since: A group goes where they shouldn’t, receives a little off the track vengeance, the end. Hooper’s film though is one of the masterpieces of the genre, and that’s because it’s an unusually precise, evocative exercise in pure terror.

The characters continually talk about the unforgiving heat, and Hooper makes you feel it. You can feel the sweat beading up on the character’s skin, the filth under their collar. You feel the clutter, rot and chaos in the deranged Sawyer family’s house, you feel the weeds blowing in the scant wind the environment will allow. Like many films that would follow, Hooper takes his time setting up the carnage the title promises, but it doesn’t feel like he’s padding a slim running time. The deliberateness of the film sets us up for a fall, leaves us vulnerable, with the title we obviously know we’re in a horror picture, but we don’t know when we’re going to get a horror picture.

Ten minutes in, the lead characters, a group of early twenty somethings, pick up a hitchhiker on the side of the road. Hooper plays with us here, we feel that we’re meeting one of the villians of the picture, but we can’t be sure, it may just be one more stop on the seemingly unending tour of backwoods weirdness. The dialogue is natural and unforced, the dread mounts with an unsettling lack of calculation. Then, before we’ve caught up, we realize that we’re in one of the scariest scenes of the movie, and a scene that will come back to haunt the characters in surprising ways.

This Texas town feels like no other weird little town in the horror genre. We don’t sense an art director high fiving a cinematographer immediately outside of the camera’s periphery. We wonder why the hell these dumb kids want to see their grandparent’s old house so bad. When an older gentlemen says “You may want to be careful, some folks don’t like you poking around, and aren’t afraid to let you know about it”, you laugh at the delirious understatement. This is a chaotic, apparently lawless town that’s inspired, not by hundred other movies, but by an authentic fear of the tearing of social fabric. Some people just don’t fucking like you, and they’re not afraid to show it.

Let’s go back to word authentic. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is so damn good because it feels real, uncalculated, unscripted, untested against a hundred age groups to see if it’s the next Saw, it just feels like it’s always existed somewhere waiting to be found. Thank God it was found before the idiotically overused catch phrase “torture porn” was coined.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was probably a happy accident, Tobe Hooper certainly hasn’t made a film ever again of it’s caliber, but that doesn’t matter. Hooper probably set out to make a little shocker that would get his foot in the door, and he accidentally made true art that remains relevant and unshakably disturbing, regardless of how many times it’s ripped off or remade. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a cathartic, relentless, black comic realization of the most familiar of nightmares: the one where you are chased by people you don’t know for no reason, and you can’t ever seem to get away.

★★★★

Day Thirty-One: John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)

Last modified on 2008-03-25 00:04:30 GMT. 6 comments. Top.

And so we reach the end. I, after some debate, have decided to conclude our little month long thing here with one of my very favorite movies of any genre, John Carpenter’s The Thing. There’s a strange thing about Carpenter’s film, I re-watch it once a year, and I always forget some of the surprises of the movie, the identity of some of the attackers, the timing of some of the scares. The Thing is an almost incomparably satisfying shocker, and it’s a horror movie that keeps on giving throughout the years.

I remember that creepy VHS cover of The Thing in the video store when I was child, showing a man in a heavy coat with a face that appears to be a pure beam of light. The cover promised the ultimate in alien terror, and I was too young to find that honor dubious. I also remember early conversations with my father regarding The Thing; he considered it a gory, junky reworking of a movie he held dear, the 1951 Howard Hawks film of the same name. At the time my dad’s opinion was scripture, and I assumed that it was some mental infirmity that kept me from understanding that the 1951 version was better when the Carpenter movie chilled me so much more.

The mental infirmities issue may have never been entirely worked out, but it has nothing to do with preferring the Carpenter approach to the story. I don’t wish to have a Thing cage match here, I think the Hawks version is very good, and holds up remarkably well. But Carpenter’s is scarier, and takes a track similar to one of the incarnations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or perhaps an early Cronenberg film, the thing isn’t a giant vegetable space man. It’s you, or your buddy; unless it’s provoked and forced to reveal an ever changing true form that’s an incalculably hideous combination of every specie it’s come in contact with.

Carpenter’s film doesn’t have the deeper sociological scares of a Cronenberg or Body Snatchers movie; it’s a mean, single minded thing that’s only interested in scaring you. Carpenter is a long time Howard Hawks aficionado, and he’s revisited Hawks subject matter time and time again, so it’s a wonderful bit of poetic justice that he finds his masterpiece in a remake of a Hawks film. Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Thing is one of those magic movies where everything goes right. Carpenter’s usual habits, which can be mannered and overly ticky in lesser films, serve him in The Thing.

The bare character development fits the limited time frame of the story, and adds an element of impersonality that makes the thing’s assimilation that much scarier. The clean, uncluttered, very obviously composed framing suits the wide open Antarctic desolation beautifully, the minimal (usually synth) score (by Ennio Morricone, though he’s been directed by Carpenter to do a Carpenter impersonation.) is the best to grace a Carpenter film. I remember humming both The Thing and The Shining scores at an early age, I couldn’t get them out of my head.

Russell gives his most authoritative performance here as MacReady. It’s inarguable that Russell is, disappointing filmography be damned, one of our definitive badasses. It’s also no accident that he was asked to do a John Wayne impersonation in Death Proof. Russell has the same man’s man vibe; an I don’t give a shit because I don’t have to give a shit electricity that can’t be faked. Russell is also a better actor than Wayne, funnier, looser, and can play more of an everyman without compromising said badassery.

MacReady is more effective than Snake Plissken because there’s no quote marks around him, MacReady isn’t a goof, and his motivations are fueled by a basic, unglorified self-preservation that this picture’s script builds to quite elegantly. Russell has a few great tough guy lines here, my favorite (I’m paraphrasing) being his response to Wilford Brimley’s plea that he doesn’t know who to trust: “Trust is a tough thing to come by these days.” It’s a very movie line, but it’s delivered as a desperate throwaway, Russell’s attempt to keep face in an increasingly terrifying situation.

Hawks famously said that a good movie should have three good scenes and no bad ones. This is the one Carpenter film that passes that test. Besides the exchange I just mentioned between Russell and Brimley, there’s the justifiably famous “alien blood test” scene, and the ending, which is one of the best of all horror movies. Russell and Keith David sit down in the snow and watch as the remains of their compound, their only shelter and means of heat, slowly die. They have a drink, and smile, and slowly drift towards death themselves. After all the carnage that has taken place, these two are allowed the dignified demise of a Howard Hawks hero. Except one of the heroes may not be human, and he may not be dead. Only contagious.

★★★★

Posted on October 12th, 2007 in Uncategorized |

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