Day Twenty-Seven: The Old Dark House (1932)
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-Six: The Roost (2005)
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-Five: The Mummy (1932)
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-Four: Braindead (1992)
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-Three: A Mild Romero Sermon Masquerading as a Review of Night of the Living Dead (1968)
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-Two: The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
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-One: Infection (2004)
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: The Monster Squad (1987)
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 Nineteen: Severance (2007)
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 Eighteen: Cronos (1993)
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.
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