October Horror Movie a Day 2013

[SJP]

Yep, that one's the big one Val Lewton's most famous for.  Hearty endorsement on that one from me.

Anyway, since it's late on the 15th and I didn't get a chance to post yesterday's, I'll do both right now...

Day 14: My Bloody Valentine (1981)

I'm doing pretty good so far on watching stuff I haven't seen before (or, at least, in a long time), and this is one I honestly didn't have high hopes for, since it's one of those slashers that I've heard people love or hate.  Turned out I liked it.

20 years earlier, a small town was rocked by a mine cave-in, in which the only survivor went crazy waiting for rescue, resorting to eating the bodies of his fallen co-workers.  After brutally murdering the supervisors of the mine by ripping out their hearts and wrapping them in candy boxes (the mine collapsed on Valentine's Day), he was locked away.  Now the town's young people are planning on having a Valentine's Day party after years of having none, but someone has decided the festivities need to be put to an end.  Has the nutbar miner returned to exact vengeance...or is somebody else taking up his pickaxe?

Watching this kind of reminded me of that one old South Park episode where they thaw the Iceman who's several years behind everyone else, and they send him to Canada where everyone else is in the same position.  Even though this Canadian film is from '81, it really does feel more like a movie from the late '70s, especially the hairstyles.  Doesn't mean it isn't actually well done...it is.  I managed to watch the version with all the gore put back in, and it's a surprisingly brutal film.  But, the kills are clever, it actually has a moment that made me a little sad (a rare event in a horror film), and best of all, Don Francks as the Chief of Police.  If you don't know who Don Francks is, then go watch Rock & Rule and report back.  That man is legendary in my book, even if I only know him from two movies.
RIFFABILITY: High.  It's good, but it's not THAT good.

Dementia 13 (1963)
The movie that put Coppola on the map...sort of.

After her husband dies of a heart attack, a widow gets the idea to pretend he isn't dead so she can score a portion of his inheritance when she goes to visit his family's castle in Ireland.  Unfortunately, more people start turning up dead when the rather odd family gets paid a visit from a mysterious figure wielding an axe...and who isn't afraid to use it.

It probably sounds bloodier and more vicious than it really is...this is more suspense and terror, but it is actually pretty gory for a 60s film (not Blood Feast, but certainly tougher than Psycho, which it is aping to some degree).  It is a bit plodding at times, and outside of the handful of murders very little actually happens.  But hey, it could've been worse, and Coppola certainly directed it with a steady hand.

RIFFABILITY: I think this might be my next VOD.  Seriously.  This one could be lots of fun.

EDIT: By the way, I could've sworn Dementia 13 was the movie that had this scene in it, but it's not.  There's a really famous shot of a black and white movie where a woman is standing in a doorway, while a weird hand holding an axe passes by her head.  If I can find a picture of it, I'll post it, but I kinda want to know what movie this is from, since I know it's not this, and it's NOT House on Haunted Hill.  I'm guessing it's probably a William Castle film of some sort, but even that's just a guess.

If you're wondering, the only reason I thought it was this movie was because of a horror special on TV that talked about the infamous "D-13" test that prologued the movie in theaters, and they showed this clip in the middle of a bunch of clips from Dementia 13, even though it's not the same movie.

[Johnny Unusual]

The Vault of Horror

The sequel to 1972's Tales from the Crypt.  This one is actually better than the first in my opinion.  There's more of a sense of humour and the stories mostly feel more appropriate to the British aesthetic.  Still not great, but enjoyable.

The movie begins with 5 men getting in an elevator and ending up in the subbasement with a table with drinks set out.  The men start talking about there dreams (an presumably bore each other)

- Midnight Mess: A scheming brother heads to a small town to kill his sister and claim the inheritance.  However, everyone he meets in town warns him not to be out after dark.  Though the twist is mostly predictable, this movie remembers to play it like a joke and the last shot has the exact kind of fun visual I love from these stories.

- The Neat Job: Terry Thomas drives his wife to distraction with his neat and tidy ways and berates his wife for not doing the same.  Terry Thomas isn't quite as nasty enough to really enjoy his ironic fate (the original comic is one of my favs), but Thomas is fun to watch and the big death scene of the story is hilarious.  But I don't know, this is one of those stories that's too American (specifically suburban) to feel right for Britain.

- This Trick'll Kill You: A magician visiting India kills a young woman to steal her magic rope trick... only to find out that it isn't a trick.  There is a woman where a woman climbs up the roof, sees something horrible, disappears and leaves a blood stain on the roof.  I thought "whoa, this is getting interesting), but then it got more generic.  Shame.

- Bargain in Death: The weakest story, a guy gets himself buried alive to get insurance from himself.  It doesn't work very well.

- Drawn and Quartered: By far, the best one, in no small part to Tom Baker.  He plays an artist who discovers that men had conspired to rip him off and sell his work for thousands while he is in a self-imposed exile in Haiti.  He goes to a voodoo priest, who teaches him that his paintings can come true.  Baker brings a lot to make this story fun and his last murder feels like a scene from Doctor Who (in fact, Baker would have made an amazing Master).

Overall, still not great, but an uptick in quality from the first one.

[Charles Castle]

I'm still trying to catch up with writing about all I have watched this month, but I thought I would drop these in here.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space


Are great movies always sui generis? Are they always innovative? Not at all. I mean, when you have a movie based on a samurai version of a Dashiell Hammett novel and recast as a western, you're not dealing with originality but the result is A Fistful of Dollars. Digging back through the detritus of genre will unearth a lot of cases like this. Influences are like rocks thrown into placid water, with the ripples creating interference patterns and waves. I couldn't help think about that while I was watching It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958, directed by Edward L. Cahn), which is such a primary influence on Alien that I can't believe that there were no lawsuits. (There was a lawsuit from A. E. Van Vogt over Alien's similarities to his story, "Black Destroyer"). Alien is a legitimately great movie, though, and It! is not.

I should note that I'm giving It! too much credit here, too, because at a fundamental level, it's a mercenary cash-in on The Thing. There's even a sequence where our erstwhile heroes attempt to electrocute the movie's beastie just like the heroes in the Hawks movie. Of course, having it not work just serves to demonstrate how bad-ass it's monster is relative to The Thing. It's fanboy one-upsmanship in its formative years. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The story here follows the lone survivor of a failed mission to Mars, who is being escorted back to Earth by the relief force to face trial for murdering all of his comrades. Carruthers, our hero, vows that it was something indigenous to the Red Planet, but no one believes him, until that something hitches a ride with them on their way back to earth. The rest of the movie is spent devising ever more elaborate ways to kill the alien, all of which fail. The set pieces in the movie are shockingly familiar: the trip through the air ducts, the opening of the airlock. Seriously, this is the same damned movie as Alien, but for its gender politics...

Ah, women. Even when you're competent professionals, you're just glorified secretaries, whose sole purpose in the movie seems to be to wait on the menfolk hand and foot. None of the men gets their own damned coffee in this movie. And the two women are a medical doctor and a biologist--apparently the "hard sciences" of physics and math are too much for them, which also casts aspersions on medicine and biology as hard disciplines, if girls can do them. Bleh. Very much of its time, which is a shame. Where's Howard Hawks and his competent women when you really need them, eh? Come to think of it, the future postulated by this film is really, really white.

It! plays more than a little bit like an episode of The Twilight Zone with a bigger budget. This shouldn't be surprising given that it was written by TZ veteran Jerome Bixby. The creature, too, seems more like a TV monster than a movie monster. It's kind of cheap, but that may be because the suit and rubber mask had to be altered to fit. It's not much of a monster, to tell you the truth. The interior set of the spaceship is pretty good, if a bit Spartan, but we don't get any exterior sets. It's a modest programmer, and I suppose it's fair to take it on those terms. But, man, the existence of Alien just serves to demonstrate how badly the filmmakers here have wasted an amazing premise.

I'm not entirely sure how I missed It! The Terror from Beyond Space as a kid, but watching it for the first time as an adult is probably not optimal. The Golden Age of Science Fiction, after all, is 12.

********

Phantasm

Phantasm (1979, directed by Don Coscarelli), is a film that I hadn't seen since it first showed up on cable in, oh, 1980 or so. I remember not really liking it way back then, but I had such dim memories of it that I was eager to revisit it when the roulette wheel spun it my way. I mean it's one of the foundational late-seventies cult movies. I fancy myself a student of the horror genre, so I should probably have an informed opinion, right?

It turns out that I still don't like it, though I'm amused at the way it assembles its story elements at random, occasionally from pop-culture allusions. Post-modernism was all the rage among the young turks of horror in the late seventies. I'm also struck by how much like a childrens' movie it plays.

Most of Phantasm was lost on the younger me: It has a Gom Jabbar and the Bene Gesserit invocation against fear! I missed that all those years ago, because at the time, I hadn't read Dune. Coscarelli makes sure that you don't miss the reference by naming the bar in the next scene "Dune's Cantina," which pulls double duty as an allusion, I guess. There's a paperback edition of Roger Zelazny's My Name is Legion on a table at one point, too, which tips the filmmakers' hands. This is a sci fi movie masquerading as a horror movie. Anyway, the Gom Jabbar made me laugh and redirected my attention to it's sheer ridiculousness. The story is a mishmash, in which our teen hero, Mike, eavesdrops on a funeral for one of his older brother's friends and notices some odd things about the proprietor of the mortuary. It seems that he's a front for a race of extra-dimensional dwarves who are plucking slaves from this world. The proprietor, The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), is a shape-shifter who occasionally assumes the form of a beautiful girl to lure her victims. One of the victims in his/her net is Mike's brother, Jody, who is all Mike has left in the world after their parent's death. Weirdness ensues...

Phantasm was a hot item among my schoolmates when it originally hit cable, mostly for the boobs, but also for that nasty little flying ball. The ball reminds me of the kind of stuff that kids imagine as the worst kinds devices dealing bodily mutilation, like imagining sliding down a railing and having it turn into a razor. The stuff of EC Comics, in other words, but not connected to anything that's actually scary. It's a gross-out effect. It's not a movie that stands up to close scrutiny, because it doesn't make a lick of sense. It's a shambolic enterprise full of ideas, but lacking in both the talent and resources to bring them fully to life.

********

The Black Belly of the Tarantula

The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971, directed by Paolo Cavara) is one of those middling giallo thrillers that Eye-talian filmmakers churned out without number during the early 1970s. It's pretty anonymous but for its very attractive cast. It provides an early role for a young Giancarlo Giannini as a police inspector and assembles an entire cadre of attractive actresses as foils, including Claudine Auger, Barbara Bouchet, Barbara Bach, and Stefania Sandrelli. This movie operates on a principle discovered in Hollywood by Howard Hawks: whenever there isn't anything interesting going on in the movie, throw beautiful women at the camera (see, for example, The Big Sleep or To Have and Have Not).

The story here finds our hero, Inspector Tellini (Giannini), investigating a series of murders in which the killer uses a poisoned acupuncture needle to paralyze his victims so that they're alive and conscious as he murders them. This is equated with the tarantula hawk wasp, which does something similar to tarantulas before laying its eggs--the tarantula is alive as the wasp larvae devour it. Nasty creature. Meanwhile, the killer seems to have become aware of Tellini and actively subverts his investigation by filming him with his wife and leaving the film at a crime scene as evidence. Meanwhile a mysterious woman hangs around the investigation, apparently involved with a blackmail ring out of a snooty, upscale spa. These two threads collide at the end, of course.

The major failing of this movie is that none of the characters is intelligent except when the plot demands it. That Tellini doesn't connect the victims to the spa right off is hard to swallow. That he doesn't actually ask the character who turns out to be the murderer any questions when given the chance is even more vexing. For the most part, the investigation scenes are filler. The filmmakers are mainly interested in the murder sequences, which are usually filmed as sexual violations as an excuse to show off the film's cast of willing actresses. Yay, voyeurism.

For the most part, it's a pretty lame movie, without even the weird politics that sometimes infests the giallo (Italian audiences, it seems, never tired of watching the bourgeoisie get massacred). But the scenery is nice.

********

The Hole

For a film that plays squarely in the realm of young adult horror, Joe Dante's The Hole (2009) goes to some very dark places. I mean, this is a movie for people who grew up reading Goosebumps and watched movies like Poltergeist or Arachnophobia or Gremlins (natch) on long autumn Saturdays back when Reagan was president. Had this been made back then, this likely would have had the imprimatur of Amblin and Steven Spielberg. It might even have been directed by Dante himself. But this film is different from the films Dante made in those halcyon days: more introspective, more in touch with psychological horror than with the antic possibilities of cinema. It's more of a horror movie than of Dante's features since The Howling. That's a long stretch of time.

The story in The Hole finds single-mom Susan Thomas moving into a new house with her two sons, Dane and Lucas. The new house has a basement and in that basement is a trap door that has been padlocked shut. Bereft of things to do with themselves before the start of the school year, Dane and Lucas open the door only to find a bottomless pit. The pit is the proverbial abyss, and as the saying goes, the abyss gazes also into you. Soon, Dane, Lucas, and Julie, the girl next door, find themselves being tormented by their worst fears. For Lucas, this manifests itself as a sinister clown doll that mysteriously appears and disappears around the house. For Julie, it's the memory of a childhood accident and the death of her best friend. For Dane, it's the legacy of his abusive father. They tromp out to the edge of town to find answers from the house's previous owner, "Creepy" Carl, who has squatted in an old factory and lit the place with hundreds of lamps. He knows what's in the hole, and he tells them that it's seen them, and that it's coming for them. There's nothing for it, it seems, but for the kids to face up to their worst fears and get past them. That's not such an easy thing when those fears are real and utterly malign...

This was made on a budget in Canada and occasionally it shows. The scope of this film is narrower than in any of Dante's older films, which were sometimes downright apocalyptic. There's a shortage of recognizable faces in the film, too, though Teri Polo is familiar enough from her long TV career, while "Crazy" Carl is played by Bruce Dern. The three kids are played by Chris Massoglia, Nathan Gamble, and Haley Bennett, and they're all good. Dante has always had a knack with adolescent actors. The Hole was made in 3-D and you can occasionally catch Dante having fun with it, using old-school "thrusting things at the audience" compositions. What he hasn't done is indulge in a texture of cinematic allusions. Oh, Gorgo shows up on TV once, and the factory where Crazy Carl lives is named "Gloves of Orlac," and the evil clown seems like a direct reference to Poltergeist, but compared to his older films, this one is positively reticent.

Otherwise, The Hole follows a familiar pattern for Dante's films: he's a firm believer in showing the vacuity of middle America by letting the dragons into Eden and letting them wreck the place. In the past, he's skewered Christmas and corporatism and the early 1960s and conformity and authority. He's always believed in movies as a safety valve while growing up a misfit, but you don't get much of that here. I wonder if the long period between this film and his last has soured him on the healing power of movies. In any event, his eye for family dynamics is keen and it plays out here with a beautifully observed relationship between Dane and Lucas. Dante takes his time setting things up, and we've spent a third of the movie getting to know them by the time the film starts to turn the screws.

Dante used to be thought of as one of the young turks of 1970s horror filmmaking, but whatever sensibility that encompasses, the director is nothing if not adaptable. The horror beats during the film's long middle act occasionally play like Spielbergian variants of J-horror tropes, particularly the ghost girl who torments Julie. All of that gets blown apart in the film's finale, which sucks Dane and Lucas into the hole and thus, into Dane's private hell. This section of the film is pure Dante: an amalgam of Looney Tunes and The Twilight Zone (recalling the weird geometries of Dante's version of "It's a Good Life" from the 1982 film) but overlaid with deeper psychological resonance. This is the nightmare world of an abused child, complete with futile hiding places and an ogrish avatar of a brutal parent. This is territory that most makers of family-oriented thrillers would never go near, but Dante has always been the id hiding behind such films.


More to come.

[Malt]

Damn if I had been here a few weeks earlier I could have pulled this off, it would have been magnificent. Well, better late then never I suppose.

I watched half of 'The Brain that wouldn't Die' (mst3k) last night, I'll finish the other half tonight. That will count as my Oct. 15th entry.

Anyone who sees NotLD Live on the 24th should get triple points, no? 

[Compound]

Damn if I had been here a few weeks earlier I could have pulled this off, it would have been magnificent. Well, better late then never I suppose.

Just watch what you can.  It's not like the internet police will be kicking down your down for starting late or not watching a film everyday.

Anyway, one of mine today was:

Wrestlemaniac aka El Mascarado Massacre

The crew of a porn film gets lost in the Mexican countryside and stumbles across the home of El Mascarado, a luchadore who went bezerk years ago and was locked away from society. Things don't go well after that.

Well, let's see here. The cast is rather bleh, except for the guy who looks like Hurley from "Lost" who's actually not bad. The F/X are rather done actually. El Mascarado celebrates a victory by ripping his opponent's mask off, in luchadore style. Except when his opponents don't have masks, in which case he simply rips off their face. It's actually not a bad effect.  But sadly, for a film about Luchadores, especially one played by Rey Misterio Sr. , there's a rather dramatic lack of, well, wrestling. You would think that a film with Wrestle in the title might, you know, have a little bit of that in the film. It's a bit like having "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and never actually going to the factory. Well, to be fair, there's about 2 or 3 minutes of a bit of wrestling, which means Highlander had more wrestling in it.

All in all, it's rather mediocre. Yeah, you'd think that a film about a killer luchadore would be enjoyable, but it's rather bland. The cast is there basically to get chased and then murdered and never really offer any resistance to the luchadore. Not really worth the time.

A Haunted House
After his girlfriend moves in with him, a man discovers that she brought along a supernatural housemate as well.

Okay, this is the parody of Paranormal Activity done earlier this year by the Wayans. Little late on the parody target there guys. But aside from that, it's actually okay. I never laughed uproariously, but I at least chuckled a few times, which is more than I did with most of the "Noun" movies.

Frankly, I think the film benefited from, you know, actually having a plot. Oh, it's not any more elaborate than the Paranormal Activity plot. (At least the first one. Add in the meta plot of the next few sequels and it gets quite messy.) But they actually tell a frigging story. And it's sad that I have to remark on how unusual it is to have a plot in a parody. Stupid recent trends.

Anyway, it's worth a chuckle, but it's not on the upper tier of horror comedies.

[Malt]

Just watch what you can.  It's not like the internet police will be kicking down your down for starting late or not watching a film everyday.

Yes yes this is what I had in mind. Still going for 1 a day for the rest of the month.

[Compound]

Okay, one more.

The Darkroom

Fifteen years after being found wandering on the side on the road covered in blood, an amnesiac  is befriended by a young boy who enlists his aid in investigating his father's strange activities...

I kinda liked this one. I don't want to say too much about it to give anything away, but it's a nicely done little film. Plus, it's got Xena in it. Granted, she's mostly playing a drunk in it, but hey. Still Xena.

Up next- Kung Fu Panda 2! Because apparently the fact that it's 18th in the queue doesn't mean that it shouldn't be the next one shipped.

[Malt]

Oct.15th-The Brain That Wouldn't Die (mst3k) - I'd seen about half of the actual movie before. Pretty good riffs. Funny ending with Dr. Forrester & Frank.
Oct.16th-Manos: The Hands of Fate (mst3k) - Crow's Torgo impersonation kills me every time, and the Torgo's Pizza bit was great as well.

[Darth Geek]

Day 14: My Bloody Valentine (1981)
RIFFABILITY: High.  It's good, but it's not THAT good.

It's already been riffed by Hor-Riff-ic Productions.
http://www.rifftrax.com/iriffs/hor-riff-ic-productions/hor-riff-ic-my-bloody-valentine-1981

[Johnny Unusual]

Child's Play

An utterly ridiculous and a tonally odd movie.  I really don't know what this film wanted to accomplish.  I was scared of the character Chucky when I was a kid, like many people, but the whole thing is far too ridiculous to be scary (in fact, it's easy to see why they went for comedy later on).  Certainly something about him captured imaginations for a full franchise, but this really feels more like a Charles Band movie.

It really is a mess.  It feels like the film is stepping on it's own toes the whole time: it's clear that somehow they intended to make you think that maybe the kid (who is a REALLY bad actor.  I know he's just a kid, but you'd think the director would get in there and try to help him) is the killer, except it tells you pretty up front that this isn't the case (apparently, the original film was a whodunit, which sounds FAR more interesting).  Chucky acts like a thug from a really dull Dirty Harry rip-off and feels out of place in the horror genre.  The "rules" of Chucky's powers seem inconsistent and it feels like the screenwriter bent over backwards to create some sort of tortured logic when it could have just been a killer doll rather than a serial killer who learned voodoo and then needs to transfer his soul blah, blah, blah.

The tone feels really like Tom Holland didn't know what he was attempting.  It's possible it also got messed up in the editing room, but I think this one feels lost without a map from day one.  Tom Holland did much better at being both scary and fun in the original Fright Night, so I think that he should have succeeded.

I will say, I was hoping the film would be a little scary so that I would be less embarrassed of how scary I found it when I was a kid and while I was disappointed on that front, I found the film surprisingly watchable.  It's kind of a fun movie and in that respect, I can see why it was popular.  Plus, Brad Dourif seems to be having fun.

My favourite bits of unintentional comedy:
- People keep picking Chucky up.  And I mean he's clearly alive and stuff.  No one thinks to just kick him.
- The mother reminds me of the mother from the cymbal-playing monkey story from Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders in that there's a lot of manic forced cheerfulness early on.
- After Chucky falls to pieces, he is telling his torso to strangle a guy.  Wait, does this imply that his torso has agency of it's own or needs to be told to do things?  To be fair, that might be intentional comedy, but it's an odd touch.
- That kid acting.

[SJP]

To go along with the Child's Play review, I did want to add something I forgot for my People Under the Stairs review...namely. that while the movie is incredibly stupid, it is actually quite entertaining.  Of all its failings, it's certainly not dull.

Anyways, to today's:
17: Black Death (2010)

Ok, this one is probably the closest I got to being fooled into watching a non-horror movie.  It still works, though, since there are hints of supernatural powers (even if it later turns out there may not be), but the violence in it is incredibly brutal and effective (in a way that makes it unpleasant and uncomfortable as opposed to the goofy fun of a Jason film, for example) and the horror is the "man's inhumanity to man" sort of thing.

Osmund (Eddie Redmayne) is a young monk during the time of the titular Black Death, who seeks God's guidance to know what he must do.  Just then, Sean Bean (Sean Bean) enters with a group of other knights, stating he believes there is a village which is unaffected by plague.  Offering to lead them there, Osmund learns that this isn't simply a mission to discover why the village has no plague: it is because they believe witchcraft is responsible.  From there, things get ugly as they find that, while the witch may not be quite the power she says she is, two religious ideologies go toe to toe in a violent stand-off.

While the movie's main themes deal with fanaticism, it really doesn't make fun of religion; rather, it shows more of how people can be deceived into acts of evil simply by allowing themselves to be led by the wrong kinds of people.  It's an interesting dynamic, but the movie doesn't delve into it as well as it could have, and handles some of its final act a little clunkily.  However, it does have a nice, sinister performance in the form of Lord Percy Percy (Tim McIner...no, you know what?  I prefer to think he's an actual evil incarnation of Percy Percy from Blackadder), and Sean Bean plays Sean Bean quite well once again.

[Compound]

Trapped

Mary Ann, an executive, is trapped in her high rise, high tech office  after it closes for the evening. But she's trapped in there along with a killer....

What did I learn from Trapped? I learned that in the 1980s, if you had a dead monkey, you could just get rid of it by tossing it in the dumpster. I would have thought you'd need to use an incinerator or something.  What does this have to do with the plot? Well, nothing. It's just a random scene in the film.

Otherwise, pretty standard "person trapped in a place with a killer" film, ala P2, Horror Train or even The Thing. It's not bad, but it is pretty light on the horror, although the tension levels are pretty high. It's decent enough as a film, but as a horror film, I'd head somewhere scarier.

Oh, and yes. This came out a year after Die Hard.

[Johnny Unusual]

Oh, guys, guys, guys!  Can someone recommend a good short horror film?  I'm doing a horror film night on the 27th and I want a short feature between 5-40 mins before the main one.

[Compound]

Nothing comes to mind of that length. How about tossing on an appropriate Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode?

[d00hickey]

Oh, guys, guys, guys!  Can someone recommend a good short horror film?  I'm doing a horror film night on the 27th and I want a short feature between 5-40 mins before the main one.

Check these out
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?genres=horror&sort=user_rating&title_type=short

I personally haven't seen any of these but after finding this list I plan to.