October 2015 Horror Movie a Day

[soguru]

I watched the hobbit, part 1.

You didnt like it?

[Miku Fan]

I watched the hobbit, part 1.

You didnt like it?

You're supposed to say, "That's not a horror movie."  And I reply with, "Oh.  No, it's a horrible movie." 
So, no, I didn't like it.  I HATED it! 

[Edward J Grug III]

I stopped that movie when they were still singing and washing dishes an hour into it.

[Johnny Unusual]

Finished my season with Black Christmas and the Rifftrax The Dark Power.

Black Christmas

After watching so many slashers this season, I was worried I'd be sick of this one, but while it does have a few of the tropes I'm sick of, this really felt like a palate cleanser.  It's a pretty good movie for a number of reasons: it doesn't feel like it's putting on airs.  It's very paired down, with minimal music (mostly some stings and Christmas carols), enigmatic villain (what he looks like, where he comes from and what his deal is remains a mystery) and the feel of an old campfire tale (down to the classic "the calls are coming from inside the house" which would make little sense these days).  I also like that the killer... well, he's scary not just because he's a killer but also because he seems confused and scared himself.  It doesn't have the strongest characters, though the actresses do a good job (and it is a good set, with Margot Kidder, Andrea Martin and Olivia Hussey) and it... well, it's really quite scary.  And though the calls from inside the house is pretty predictable (I don't know how well it would have been known in the 70's) there are actually a couple neat and creepy twists at the end.  Definitely worth checking out.

The Dark Power - Rifftrax

Oof, this is a rough one.  My favourite bit is a tour through a musty modest house and trying to claim how amazing it is.  But the interminable time before the monsters show up is awful and the actual monsters only liven things up a little.  It's always weird to see things in movies where the director somehow thought "yeah, they'll care about the silverware."  Also, not enough Lash LaRue.  He's not a great hero but his silliness makes the film much more interesting.  Though maybe I should be ashamed about how much I enjoyed his slurred speech.

[Edward J Grug III]

Coroline - This is such a beautifully directed film, with lots of fun stuff in it, but I feel like it drags a bit in the middle.

The Omen - Such a great and fun movie. Must upgrade to blu ray. Plus my son had been a bit of a nightmare so that added to it.

We got much closer to daily than I thought we would.

[soguru]

I stopped that movie when they were still singing and washing dishes an hour into it.

Fair enough. I had no idea how the Hobbit book ended, otherwise I might have just abandoned the entire cinematic trilogy altogether.

[SJP]

I don't mind The Hobbit movies, but I also don't hate the Star Wars prequels with the hate of a thousand burning suns, either, so take my opinion as you will.

Anyway, finished all 31 days.  The 31st was a cornucopia of stuff, since we ended up having no trick-or-treaters show up.  The weather was awful in the area, solid rain and cold, so it was a good time to stay in and watch stuff.

Day 30: Bad Milo!
Duncan (Ken Marino) discovers that the irritable bowel he has is not usual...it's actually caused by a small, grumpy demon who lives in his colon, and only comes out to murder the various idiots who surround him on a daily basis.

With a premise like this, you have to go full tilt at horror and comedy at both ends.  Instead, the movie plays things mostly tame and the results are mixed.  It has a few funny moments, but not enough to sustain the running time.  It has a few gore scenes, but even they seem half-hearted at best.  And the heartwarming message at the end doesn't quite fit in with what we've seen earlier in the film.  The movie also doesn't do much with Stephen Root and Peter Stormare, which is a crying shame.  It wasn't a bad film, but I expected a movie in which a puppet crawls its way out of a member of The State's butt to wreak havoc to be a little more memorable.

Day 31: South Park (Pink Eye/Spookyfish), Garfield's Halloween Adventure, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!, Halloween
I tried to get the wife to watch Halloween.  She fell asleep before it started.  But we enjoyed watching the other stuff.

Well, as a wrap-up to the year, the best and worst, and well as a few other awards:
Best: Ginger Snaps
While not my favorite horror movie of all time, it was far and away the most quality of this year's picks.  The humor still holds up quite well, the acting is good, and it balances scares, humor, and heart in equal measure.  Still a winner.
Runner up: Creature from the Black Lagoon
While it's no longer a scary film by any means, this is still one of the premiere horror films of Universal's golden era.  It is well-written for its era, has a lovely actress in the lead, there is genuine tension in its buildup, and the monster suit is still surprisingly effective.  Its status as a classic is well deserved.  Plus, the 3D is better than most 3D movies made today.  Filmmakers should be taking notes.

Worst: Demons
Again, let me reiterate...this is not the Argento Italian classic from the 80s.  This crapfest is all-American and from last year.  Poorly acted, poorly written, poorly edited, and also has the cardinal sin of being boring.  I hope every copy of this movie gets accidentally deleted off of every hard drive and server that it exists on, and I'm the kind of guy that was glad Manos got an HD upgrade.  It is truly a blight on the cinematic landscape and no one should ever have to be subjected to it.
Runner up: X Moor
This was a pretty big tie between Hellraiser III, until I realized Hellraiser III benefits from Doug Bradley and the fact that you can see what the hell is going on it for its running time.  X Moor has decent enough acting, but between the bad night shots, the rescue of the world's most ungrateful harpy, and the idiotic death of the villain, it took the prize.  Though still not as bad as Demons.  God, the more I remember it, the more I hate it.

Most surprising: Dark was the Night
Seeing its numbers on Netflix, I expected worse.  But this little sleeper gem was a lot better than I thought it was going to be.  And I continue to praise its night cinematography as some of the best I've seen, and that includes big budget films.  It's not a fast-moving film, but it is at least intelligent.
Runner up: Frankenstein's Army
Again, based on its numbers, I expected a real crapfest.  But even not being a fan of found footage, I was able to put the simplistic story aside and enjoy it for the ride it was.  Cool monster effects and the closest thing you can get to a haunted house experience without paying $48.

A special mention to Dead Snow 2, which was probably the 'most fun' I had with a movie this month.  It wasn't the best movie, and far from the worst, but its enjoyability was not surprising in the least.  Think of the series as the "Evil Dead 2" and "Army of Darkness" (in that order) of northern Europe.  Gory as hell, funny as hell, and just an old fashioned blast to watch.

[Miku Fan]

I stopped that movie when they were still singing and washing dishes an hour into it.

   As all MSTies know, that's called "padding."

[ScottotD]

It's perhaps indulgence if anything, padding would be if Jackson felt the movie wasn't long enough and he seemed to take the complaints on board as the second two movies moved noticeably faster.

I actually did most days with this, will fill it out later.  Sorry I just wasn't up to updating all the time

[Edward J Grug III]

It's perhaps indulgence if anything, padding would be if Jackson felt the movie wasn't long enough...

The ONLY logical conclusion to come from watching Peter Jackson films is that he doesn't feel they are long enough.

[JimJ]

Day 30: Circle (2015) 3/5

Pretty good movie that's similar to something like Cube.  A bunch of strangers wake up standing in a circle, and they're forced to vote for who dies next until one is left.  The main flaw of this movie is the sheer amount of characters.  There's like 50.  You can't really get to know any of them or care about what happens to them. I still enjoyed and I found the ending pretty interesting.

So, Day 31 was a clusterfuck since I was hanging out with some friends and we watched several movies but I didn't get to pay much attention to most of them, so I won't be rating or reviewing them.

Day 31:
What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
Funhouse (1981)
Pumpkinhead (1988)
Knock Knock (2015)

Yeah, I watched Knock Knock again.  For some reason the rental was still active on my Google Play account.  I was drunk enough to enjoy making fun of it and I felt I needed witnesses to how awful it is.

Anyway, this has been fun but I'm kind of glad it's over so I can have time to watch other things and get caught up on TV.  I look forward to next year though.

[soguru]

While I don't think the Hobbit movies are nearly as bad as the Star Wars prequels, they are still completely lacking in everything that made the Lord of the Rings trilogy so special. There's a general lack of suspense, a strong story, emotional drive, and characters we really care about(I mean besides Bilbo and Gandalf). And then of course there's all the songs...

[SJP]

Well, I do hope everyone had fun, even if you didn't get every day.  It can be a slog at times, I know, but what I'm most glad about this year is that most of my watches were new ones; the old ones I did watch were fun and enjoyable, but even though not everything was great, I don't regret watching them...except Demons (2014).  I suppose it's safe to unsticky the thread now.

[Charles Castle]

Sorry for the late entries. I didn't have a chance to participate fully this year because of obligations to festivals not focused on horror, but I did manage to rack up 13 lucky views, 12 of which I've written about. (I didn't bother with the 1976 Carrie, which is a personal favorite I revisit often)

Tales From the Dark side: the Movie

I originally saw Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990, directed by John Harrison) in theaters and then never thought of it again. Subsequently, I had forgotten almost all of it. I had forgotten that there was a framing story, in which Debbie Harry plays a suburban witch whose "meat" for her dinner party - in fact a small boy - Scheherezades her with stories from the eponymous book. I had forgotten that the first story, an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lot 249," stars young Julianne Moore and young Steve Buscemi and already on a career downswing Christian Slater. I had forgotten that the second story was written by Stephen King and that it's not one of his finer efforts. I had forgotten that David Johansen played a hit-man in the lead in the second story, and that the film itself chooses not to include any music from him. I did remember that the third story is a version of "The Woman of the Snows," the Japanese ghost story that memorably kicks off Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan. I might as well never have seen the film at all for all the impression it made on me.

The first segment, a mummy story cross-pollinated by EC Comics, in which horrible people get their comeuppance, is the most gleefully entertaining, but that doesn't necessarily make it the best part of the film. It's fun watching Julianne Moore in full-on bitch mode as a woman who helped her boyfriend swipe a fellowship from creepy archaeologist Steve Buscemi. Christian Slater works okay as the audience's point of view, a classic "nice guy" who turns out to have a fatal flaw of his own. This is an agreeably mean story, in which the guy who would be the villain in most horror stories actually gets his revenge. The mummy in this story is pretty good, and its means of dispatching his victims - by reenacting the process of mummification on living people - is delightfully gruesome.

The second segment, King's "The Cat From Hell," finds hitman Johansen hired by retired pharmaceutical tycoon/racketeer William Hickey to do in the family cat. The cat, Hickey's character says, has done in the rest of his family. This is a riff on Poe's "The Black Cat," and it's pretty silly. It's filmed in a 1980s direct to video noir idiom with flashbacks utilizing a bunch of distorting lenses, which lend it a hothouse ambiance, but this segment is poorly conceived.

The third segment, as I've said, is a version of "Woman of the Snows," in which a man (James Remar) witnesses a grotesque murder. He's spared by the creature who commits the murder only after vowing never to disclose what he's seen. He returns to his life and meets a woman with whom he falls in love and starts a family (Rae Dawn Chong). Ten years after the murders, he finally feels safe enough to disclose what he saw to his wife, with tragic consequences. This was the segment that I carried away with me after I first saw the film, and in revisiting it 25 years later, it's easy to see why it stands up. It's got a better story than either of the first two segments, one that's romantic and tragic rather than one that's contingent on a twist at the end. It has a twist, but the twist is the kind of thing one finds in a fairy tale rather than a conte cruel. In its formal considerations, it's not much different than the rest of the film. Writing will out. It does have a pretty spiffy monster, though. It's an elaborate animatronic puppet that is perhaps not a sophisticated as the ones in Little Shop of Horrors or Gremlins 2, but its a lovingly-made thing at the twilight of practical effects.

I found the framing sequence to be the most engaging thing in the film this time around. I had forgotten Debbie Harry's chirpy witch character, and the little kid is snotty enough that one hopes to watch him roast. Of course, that doesn't happen. The kid escapes and gives a wink at the audience, which is unearned. That's okay. There's enough fun involved to forgive the film for how it ends.

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Body Bags

Even though John Carpenter's Body Bags (1993), has a headier pedigree - where Tales from the Darkside's director, John Harrison, came from the TV show and returned to TV afterward, the segments of Body Bags are directed by Carpenter himself and Tobe Hooper - in some ways, it has the same drawbacks. This is a film that's also influenced by EC Comics, it's also a film in which its ambitions outstrip its resources, and Debbie Harry is on hand again. Not that Debbie Harry is a liability, mind you. It's just fun that she's in both of these movies.

The framing sequence in Body Bags finds a ghoulish coroner played by Carpenter himself piecing together the stories of how the various cadavers in his care were done-in. Carpenter totally plays him as a version of the Crypt Keeper, complete with macabre bon mots. In a lot of ways, the framing sequence is what gives the film its personality, because the three mainline segments are typical anthology short stories. What sets them apart, especially when set against Tales from the Darkside, is that this has the services of major directors. Film, after all, is a director's medium.

The first segment finds a woman arriving for her first overnight of work at a remote gas station. The radio informs her that there's an escaped serial killer out there somewhere, so her every interaction with customers from inside her glass booth is loaded with menace. As it turns out, the psycho does show up and lays siege to the cashier's booth as our heroine scrambles to stay alive. This gets the movie started with bang. Carpenter directs this with all the merciless tension of his best films, where each shot counts and there's no fat to trim. It's a compact little masterpiece, and Carpenter's best filmmaking of the 1990s.

The second segment finds a middle aged business man trying to preserve his sex appeal by a engaging a radical hair restoration cure. His vanity is an annoyance to his girlfriend, but he forges ahead anyway, and soon enters the care of one "Dr. Lock," who operates on his scalp. Lock's cure is as good as advertised, and the man soon has a mane of flowing tresses. Unfortunately, the treatment has side-effects, and he soon feels sick and fatigued. Worse, soon, the hair is growing everywhere. When he returns to Dr. Lock, he discovers the horrifying truth about his new hair. This segment is a lark, both a satire of male vanity and a funny shaggy dog story. The sight of Stacey Keach sporting a Conan the Barbarian hairdo is one of the funniest things Carpenter has ever filmed. If the payoff isn't worthy of the build-up, well, the build-up is pretty good.

The third segment is directed by Tobe Hooper rather than Carpenter, and it follows the travails of a baseball player who loses an eye - and hence his ability to play ball - in a car accident. Fortunately, he's in luck: there's an experimental surgical procedure that can transplant an eye for the one he lost. Unfortunately, the eye sees things differently than what other people see. Worse, our hero begins to have nightmares about killing and raping women. The eye, it seems, came from a recently-executed murderer and necrophile. The spirit of the man was carried with his eye to a new host. When he wakes up near the scene of another murder, he confesses his suspicions to his wife. Unfortunately, the spirit of the dead killer attempts to kill his wife, and radical measures must be taken. This segment is the most brutal part of the movie - in keeping with Hooper's more visceral approach to horror rather than Carpenter's elegant suspense. This is a story with its foot in the past and the present, too. It's in the tradition of The Hands of Orlock and its obsession with eye injuries is worthy of Lucio Fulci, but it also looks forward to films like The Eye from the Asian horror boom later in the decade.

Body Bags is one of Carpenter's most self aware movies. Never shy about including in-jokes for horror and other movie fans, those jokes are right up front in this. The various supporting characters in the first segment are played by the likes of David Naughton, Sam Raimi, and the late Wes Craven (Craven's passing, I should note, is the reason I revisited this film). Certainly, casting himself as the host is Carpenter stepping into the shoes of Alfred Hitchcock and signing his work with a flourish, though his character here is more macabre than any persona Hitchcock ever adopted. Sometimes, the film's self-awareness is too on point, but for the most part, it's fun. It might be Carpenter's best film of the 1990s, though to some that's faint praise.

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[Charles Castle]

Candyman

Candyman (1992, directed by Bernard Rose) is the best film adaptation of Clive Barker. It's a film that fulfills the promise those blurbs on the original Books of Blood trumpeted ("I have seen the future of horror..."). It's one of the most profoundly frightening films of the 1990s, a decade short on really effective fright films. Oh, it plunges off a cliff in the end, as most films based on Barker do, but before then? Oh, it's the primo stuff.

The story finds graduate student Helen Lyle researching urban legends, particularly a variant on the "Bloody Mary" story, in which the subject says "Candyman" five times in front of a mirror and summons the ghost of a hook-handed murderer. The story, it turns out, has taken deep root in the Cabrini Green housing project in the north side of Chicago, where Helen and her research partner, Bernie Walsh, head to investigate. It turns out that there are very real deaths going on there, beyond the usual gang murders and drug casualties, deaths unexplained and uninvestigated by the police. Meanwhile, Helen casually says "Candyman" into a mirror five times, though Bernie stops short. Helen's second trip to the project finds her encountering a man posing as the Candyman as a gang enforcer, who lands Helen in a police station with a battered left eye. Helen presses charges, which no one heretofore has done, but her grasp on reality starts to slip. She begins to see the Candyman, who begs her to become his victim. She awakes from a swoon in the apartment of one of the women whose story she is collecting, covered in blood. She finds herself accused of murdering the woman's baby, then framed for the murder of Bernadette, then institutionalized as a dangerously insane. And always in the margins is the Candyman, whose existence depends on the credulity of his community. Helen's skepticism is a threat to him, so he intends to convince her...

This has a lot of ideas and tropes circling around each other, not least of which is an overt self-knowledge of the roots of the horror film in urban legends. The tale of the hook is mixed in with Bloody Mary, then given a new shot of urban menace and mixed with some more cinematic horrors. The film noir trope of being suspected of a murder while you're blacked out is here. So is the commitment in a mental hospital where no one believes you. Hitchcock's wrong man, falsely accused. Also in the mix is the movie version of academic politics, with its infighting and middle-aged professors screwing their students. It's a bitches brew and it turns the screws tight. The fact that it all coheres for as long as it does is a testament to the skill of director Bernard Rose, whose acquaintance with horror movies falls on the more poetic end of the genre.

This is an unusually good-looking movie; it's more attractive than the American genre usually provided. Its Chicago locations, often filmed in sinister aerial shots, its academic chic, its throbbing Gothic Philip Glass score, all of these provide it with a texture uniquely its own. Rose deploys his leitmotifs subtly. A Guy Fawkes mask prefigures the film's final act. Creative uses of graffiti. The easy way it suggests that everything in the film is real even though it has ample opportunity to paint it all as the result of Helen's blow to the head. The idea that gods thrive on the belief of the congregation. It's a film rich with avenues to explore, though in truth, some of them are blind alleys. The "visionary" elements of Barker's story tend to remove the film from what's really effective in favor of ideas that aren't particularly scary. It saves most of these ideas for the end of the film, which is ultimately disappointing. This is a film that gets a good deal of its best effects from racial unease, and racism is a subtle continuing thread throughout the film, from the back story of the Candyman himself through the poverty and crime in the projects to the depiction of a solitary white woman being menaced by a quartet of young black men. This pushes buttons in a way that almost makes me wish that Kasi Lemmons rather than Virginia Madsen had been cast in the lead instead of as the sidekick. Still, this has an effect.

For her part, Madsen acquits herself admirably as Helen, a role that's equal parts Final Girl, Savant, and film noir hero. Rose obliges her with good scenes to play. Indeed, it gives her the opportunity to absolutely devour the scenery, if she had so desired. It's surprising that she underplays so effectively. In the early parts of the film, Madsen's character is mostly reactive, but when everything heads down the rabbit hole about halfway in, she becomes a more ambivalent figure: not a victim, really, though the film makes a point of making her one. The more the events of the film constrain her agency, the more agency she asserts. The best scene in the film isn't even a horror scene: Helen escapes from the psych ward with the intervention of the Candyman and heads home, only to find her husband and his student redecorating. Madsen's performance in this scene is terrific. Tony Todd, by contrast, is done no favors by the role or by the film. He's mostly given dialogue that seems like catch phrases to be spoken by the Cenobites in the Hellraiser movies. He's not asked to emote, really, and his speaking voice is altered in post to make it sound supernatural. The guy who plays the gang leader pretending to be the Candyman is almost more frightening a figure, particularly in the scene in which he appears when Helen is on her own and out of her depth. Still, Todd doesn't really need to do much more than he does, either. It's not a complex character.

This film is fairly violent, though not nearly as violent as other Barker adaptations. It doesn't really need the violence. Importantly, it's aware of this and deploys what violence it chooses to use with deliberate care. This is a movie, rare for its time period, that understands the difference between terror and horror. Horror is mostly visceral. You feel it in your gut. Candyman doesn't shy away from this, but it's more interested in terror, which you feel in the back of your head. For most of its running time, it succeeds in evoking exactly that. And if it can't sustain it? Well, there are plenty of films that never get it off the ground in the first place.

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Cold in July

Some of the grisliest of the horror stories from the old E. C. Comics were published in their crime titles. The covers that got them in the most trouble with the Kefauver hearings were for Crime Suspense Stories and Shock Suspense Stories (though, in all fairness, Tales from the Crypt et al. weren't far behind them in terms of horribleness). When Robert Bloch bolted from the horror genre in the 1950s, it was to crime novels that he went, one of which was an unassuming potboiler named Psycho. I mention this because Cold in July (2014, directed by Jim Mickle) is one of those movies that straddles crime and horror. It's got a mean streak. Joe R. Lansdale, upon whose novel the movie is based, has been writing crime horror hybrids for decades now, and this one is salted a bit with the western. It's a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do sort of film.

The plot here finds frame-shop owner Richard Dane shooting a man who has broken into his home. The man's father, Russell, is recently released from prison and begins to menace Dane to the point that he asks for police protection. When he makes his move, the police come down on him hard. When Dane goes to fill out the paperwork at the station house, though, he sees a wanted poster for the man he supposedly shot and discovers that it's not the same person. More, the police haul Russell out of the jail in the dead of night, drug him, and leave him on the railroad tracks. Dane drags Russell to safety and the pair of them begin to investigate what's really going on with Russell's son. Russell's friend, a private detective named Jim Bob, tracks him to the witness protection program, but manages to ferret out his location anyway. What Russell's son is really up to is a horror show. Dane could just walk away from it, but it gnaws at him. The horror is simply too great for him to simply walk away and do nothing...

On a basic level, this movie is a study of masculinity and fatherhood. Both of its principle protagonists are fathers and it's their sons that provide them with their initial conflict. What kind of sons they raise provides them with a unifying motive. It's a film that probes violence as an essential component of masculinity, while inverting the way it codes this. Richard Dane, played in the film by Michael C. Hall, is a variant of the character Dustin Hoffman plays in Straw Dogs. He's essentially a coward who is provoked into violence by circumstances beyond his control. By contrast, Russell is raw aggression and menace from the get go. In a film that admires violence, Russell would be the hero and Dane would be the weak link. In this film, which does not admire violence even as it paints the walls red, Dane is the hero and Russell's sense of wounded manhood drives him to heinous acts. At the end of Straw Dogs, Hoffman's character lets a little smile flash across his face. He enjoyed the violence he perpetrated. In this film, Dane is revolted by it. He often looks as if he is going to puke in its aftermath. Dane isn't particularly good at it, either. Both of the men he kills in the film are killed by accident.

This is the kind of buddy movie that John Carpenter used to make. The movie is aware of its influences: when it quotes from Carpenter, it leaves a notation. The best of these quotations is the scene where Russell has broken into Dane's house and is standing over his son's bed. He's illuminated by a flash of lightning and for a brief instant, he's transformed into something from the outer dark, into The Shape from Halloween perhaps. The boogeyman. The film is set in 1989, and apropos of its time frame, it indulges in a Carpenter-ish synth score. Perhaps as a nod to the kind of film this aspires to be, a video store figures prominently in the film's plot. This is certainly the kind of hybrid thriller that used to find a cinematic half-life on the back shelves of video stores.

That said, its roots remain literary. Lansdale's book is largely preserved in this film, but it does lack a bit in the flavor of Lansdale's prose. That may be something that's beyond the ability of film, but I don't know. It's not like people haven't captured the flavor of other distinctive prose stylists before. Chandler, for instance, or Ray Bradbury. For want of a better word, this film is colder than what you find in Lansdale's novel, perhaps because it substitutes a schematic sense of style for the writer's local color and verbal humor. Mind you, it has his appetite for the grotesque. The scene near the end when Dane is struggling for a gun and it goes off, painting the light fixtures red, is pure Lansdale, as is the sick humor in the titling of a snuff film that figures in the plot. This is a weird thread of criticism for me to pursue, actually, because Lansdale's prose is partly derived from an immersion in cinema culture. I don't know how else to describe it, though.

The closest this comes to Lansdale's prose is in the portrayal of Don' Johnson's Jim Bob, who is almost a cartoon. The actor relishes the outlandishness of the role and whenever he's on screen, the film has a kind of manic glee behind it. Oh, don't get me wrong: Michael C. Hall is terrific in the lead, a character who is dramatically different from either Dexter Morgan or David Fisher. Hall is one of those chameleonic actors who seems to fade into his characters. Sam Shepherd for his part oozes menace as Russell before settling into a groove as a man whose very manhood is offended by what his son has become. For that matter, Jim Mickle continues to evolve into one of the few solid genre guys still working, one mostly untouched by self-conscious post-modern reflexivity. I'm not going to complain about the feast laid out by this film even if it tastes different than what I was expecting.

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The Howling Reborn

The Howling Reborn (2011, directed by Joe Nimziki) is what you get when exploitation filmmakers try to ride the zeitgeist. It's about as good as any other movie that bears the title, "The Howling," whenever said movie is not directed by Joe Dante. Which is to say, it pretty much sucks. This is not the worst episode the franchise has ever produced - the standard of comparison is ridiculously low - but it's probably in the conversation after the second film.

The Howling Reborn finds high school senior Will undergoing another kind of change of life: he suspects that he has somehow become the victim of lycanthropy. This, on the eve of his graduation and on the occasion of finally connecting with the girl he's been lusting after for months. After she spies her own image in his sketchbook, she invites him to a rave. Things don't go so well once he finds it. Unfortunately for him, he's the son of an alpha werewolf, who wants him to join her pack. Mom want's more than that, though. She's plotting the annihilation of humankind as she creates an army of werewolves. It's up to Will to stop it, all the while navigating the heartache of young love...

Truth: there's a good movie hiding somewhere inside this mess. That movie is part werewolf fang and frenzy, part zombie apocalypse, part James Bond film. The premise that comes to the fore offers the possibility of werewolf mayhem on a truly grand scale and I'd love to see that movie. I would. What's actually on the screen here? That's a mixed bag. There's a big werewolf showdown at the end of this movie in which Will, all wolfed out, and his mom duke it out while treating walls like cardboard. It's a lot like the final fight in a superhero movie. To this point, the werewolf attacks in this movie have been filmed in a shakycam run and gun style, mostly in low light to that the viewer gets the impression of werewolves more than she gets the actual visual image of the werewolf. That changes in this final showdown, as the filmmakers devolve into slow motion destruction. When we finally get a look at the werewolves? Eh. I've seen worse. It's possible, after all, to make a good werewolf movie when your werewolf is less than convincing (see: Snaps, Ginger).

The main downside of this film is the central relationships between Will and Eliana. Will provides the film with narration, which proves to be a huge mistake because it renders the film's best ideas as an opportunity for adolescent profundities about the meaning of life. The love conquers all nature of Will and Eliana's courtship is the sort of thing you get in Twilight fan fic, and it seems to me that the entire reason this film exists is to make some bank on the backs of Twi-hards looking for their werewolf romance. Whatever I may think of Twilight and its fans, they deserve better than a cynical cash grab. They deserve a full blooded romance or horror movie (or horror romance), and they don't get either. Some of this is down to the casting of Landon Liboiron and Lindsay Shaw in the lead as our doomed lovers. Neither of them can hold the screen for very long and their characters are signficiantly underwritten. The film is on firmer ground when it equates lycanthropy with sexual awakening, which is a time-honored theme in lycanthropic cinema. The Oedipal elements of the film tend to make this theme of awakening ickier than necessary.

The end of the movie finds the filmmakers groping for a way to tie this into the mythos of the Howling franchise. It does this by repeating the scene from the 1981 film when Dee Wallace turns into a werewolf on television. This ends up faceplanting, in part because The Howling Reborn doesn't have an instinct for the jugular. Where the final scenes of the first film is a sly satire on mass media and how we react to it, this film provides a hollow echo.