What was the last movie you watched?

[Charles Castle]

The most disappointing thing about Case 39 (2009, directed by Christian Alvart) isn't that it's ridiculous. That's a given in any movie about evil children and if you're in for horror movies about evil children, you had better be willing to ride that roller coaster off the rails. No, that's not it. The most disappointing thing about it is how unimaginative its monster turns out to be. I don't mean in the literal sense of its conception, though that's kind of disappointing, too. I mean in terms of its visual design. This is kind of a crisis in horror movies for a good while, but I think it was truly at a low point in the aughts, because too many effects houses were concepting the same damned monsters. I'm giving away the plot, but screw it: there's a demon in Case 39, and it's a demon that looks EXACTLY like the creepy old woman that goes berserk at the beginning of Legion and the vampires in I Am Legend and any number of other human-ish monsters of that era. From my perspective, horror filmmakers tasked with creating monsters have the best fucking job in the world and it's unconscionable to me that most of them don't give it their all and rely instead on boring designs already out in the world. It's lazy. Say what you like about Guillermo Del Toro or Peter Jackson, they at least take the job of creating monsters seriously.

Anyway, as I say, Case 39 is ridiculous. It gives us Lilith Sullivan, an evil child who insinuates herself into the life of one Emily Jenkins, the social worker who "saves" her from being burned alive in an oven by her parents, then takes her into her own home as a foster parent. It turns out, the girl's parents had just cause for their actions, and pretty soon, our social worker heroine learns all too well what those causes are, but not before a sizable number of her friends are dead through ghastly and mysterious circumstances. When she eventually questions the girl's parents about her nature, she is told that Lilith is a demon, and that she's only vulnerable when she sleeps. Emily then contrives to burn her own house down with Lilith inside, and when that doesn't work, she resorts to even more desperate measures.

Okay, I need to pause here after synopsizing the film to note that I hate, hate, hate it when horror movies ignore their own rules. The movie goes to great lengths to convince the audience that Lilith is only vulnerable when she's sleeping. Her parents tell Emily that they waited for weeks before they had their opportunity. And then, in the end, it doesn't matter. Lilith is fully conscious for the final confrontation at the end of the film and the whole sleep business is completely forgotten. I'm also surprised that the authorities let Emily walk away from the scene of her housefire, but she's going to be answering some questions about arson shortly afterwards, methinks. The movie doesn't care about any of these small niggling details. The word I would use for the plotting on display in this film's screenplay is "feckless," which would be charming if the film had any sense of its own absurdity (see, for instance, Orphan). Unfortunately, it takes it all too soberly.

This is a glum, movie, too, with its wintery exterior shots and its flourescent-lit interiors. Even spaces that should be warm have a coldness to them. The movie is literal minded to a fault about staging its set pieces, and when the scene arrives when Lilith's mother suddenly finds herself in an oven rather than her cell at the asylum, the movie has parted all company with any kind of insinuation or creeping menace. This, after we already had a particularly ghastly scene of Bradley Cooper's character being assailed by hornets, though I admit to enjoying these scenes because I like watching Bradley Cooper suffer on screen. He has that kind of face. Renee Zellweger is a surprisingly big name star for the lead in this film and she's okay in the role. I don't think the actress had much invested in the part because she plays it at two levels: exhausted and desperate, two emotions she can conjure in her sleep. Ian McShane really ought to be playing a bad guy rather than mentor, but that's just me.

Jodelle Ferland, for her part, had creepy kid down pat, but I wonder if her performance isn't down to how she's filmed rather than any innate quality of performance. The way creepy kids are filmed in most films reminds me of Kathleen Byron's assertion that half of her performance in The Archers' Black Narcissus was in the lighting and make-up. The trouble with Jodelle Ferland is that there's a smugness even in her "sweet" phase, and the movie always, always contrives to make her appear sinister. There's no ambiguity involved, and some ambiguity would go a long way toward making this film more interesting than it is. Although I guess that a horror film that names their evil child "Lilith" has pretty much already decided to stomp out any traces of imagination. As it is, the fact that the audience knows how bad the kid is almost from the get-go makes the second half of the movie into an exercise in make-work.

In any event, Case 39 was one of those orphan productions that sits on the shelf for a while after going into the can. It was completed two years before it made it to theaters. This isn't always a barometer of how good or bad a movie is, but it's usually an ominous indication.

[Charles Castle]

Fright Night turned 38 last month. I didn't see anyone mark the anniversary, so I thought I'd raise my own glass. You don't look a day over 30.

Well, that's a lie, actually. Fright Night hasn't aged particularly well. The combination of eighties fashions, Spielbergian idiom (horror comes to suburbia), comedy relief, and gooey special effects is very much of its time. More than that, it's a kind of nostalgia piece in itself, one that pines for the late-night horror show and the classical horror movie (in reaction, I suspect, to the slasher films that were dominating the genre at the time of its release). All of that is receding in time.

Still, it has its pleasures. Prime among them is a barnstorming performance by Chris Sarandon as our urbane vampire, Jerry Dandridge. Is Dandridge the first movie vampire who's smart enough to lock his coffin from the inside? He might be. But he's still dumb enough to play the talking killer with poor hapless Charley Brewster. The rest of the cast isn't up to his screen presence, not even Roddy McDowall, playing a gentle homage to the old school Gothics of the 50s and 60s.

What Fright Night does well is update the vampire archetype into the idiom of the special effects film. Oh, vampires have always had some interesting effects--the resurrection of Dracula in Dracula: Prince of Darkness is particularly creative--but not to the extent of this film. The story is almost incidental, given that the last forty minutes or so are a carnival of prosthetic monsters. The actual action sometimes grinds to a stop in order to watch the effects play out. It's almost as if writer/director Tom Holland looked at a list of the legendary abilities of vampires and picked them a la carte for their effects potential, then, having paid for the gags, made damn sure he got them on camera, whether it made logical sense or not. The most obvious instance of this is the disintegration of Dandridge's familiar, at which our heroes stand and gawp while Dandridge makes good his escape.

The end result of all this is that we get some pretty good monsters, including one of the movies' first really convincing vampires in monstrous bat form (which the movie emphasizes in its parody footage from one of Peter Vincent's movies depicting a toy rubber bat on a string), a terrific werewolf transformation, and the first real attempt to reconcile the various divergent cinematic images of vampires: the sexy, Byronic anti-hero and the foul ratlike creature of the night; between Dracula and Count Orlock, if you will. As an aside, a friend of mine really resents the fact that the werewolf effects in Fright Night are better than the werewolf effects in just about any actual werewolf movie made since Fright Night was in theaters.

This is also an interestingly gay horror movie, not that it's overt about it. I mean, Dandridge and his familiar seem like a gay couple moving into an old home to gentrify it. Amanda Bearse was one of the first prominently out lesbians in Hollywood. And Stephen Geoffreys went on to a long career in gay porn. I suppose you can't really blame the film for the later careers of its actors, but the plot asks us to believe that our teen-aged hero is more interested in the two guys across the way than he is in his willing girlfriend. Mind you, I'm perfectly aware of the fact that this last element is cribbed from Hitchcock's Rear Window (which asks us to believe that James Stewart is more interested in his neighbors than he is in Grace Kelly, but I digress). None of it may be intentional, but it is still worthy of notice.

In any event, my experience of Fright Night back in the day was that it was a nice change of pace--the other prominent vampire movies of the 1980s, The Lost Boys and Near Dark, were still two years in the future when Fright Night was released--and that it was a pretty good summer popcorn movie. It works best with an audience, I think, and as a first-time viewing experience, too. I just wish I didn't feel so old knowing that I saw this when it was first released. 38 years went by fast.

[Cyrusso]

I recently watched the Amazon original movie "totally killer", a horror movie with a unique premise, starring former Sabrina actress Kiernan Shipka, portrays a young lady who goes back in time to try to save the life of her mother and her friends in 1987.

Pretty far from the goriest movie I've ever seen. It sure as hell is no final destination film, but horror fans I'm sure will enjoy it quite a lot.

Also, Kiernan Shipka is really friggin' cute. Seriously, that lady is absolutely adorable.🥰

[ihavemyreasons]

Five Nights at Freddys (2023)
Decent premise for a fun B horror movie, but totally wasted by just being dumb, slow moving,  and boring and lacking any gore (not even any dumb fake gore), suspense, or even jump scares

[Charles Castle]

After an experiment goes awry at his previous educational establishment, Dr. Herbert West takes an internship at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, Massachusetts. There, he takes a room with fellow intern, Dan Cain, who is on a track to a bright future: he's an up and coming doctor and he's dating the dean's daughter, Megan. West's unorthodox theories about death run afoul of hidebound Dr. Hill, whose views run diametrically counter, and once again is forced to perform his experiments on his own. He sucks in Dan and soon, demonstrates his success at re-animating dead tissue on Dan's cat. Unfortunately, Dean Halsey is stumbles onto one of their experiments and is accidentally killed in the process. West uses his re-animation reagent to revive him in hopes of covering everything up. Unfortunately, Dr. Hill gets wind of West's success, and covets the discovery for his own reputation. He decides to blackmail West. West, nobody's patsy, decapitates Dr. Hill with a shovel, then, in a fit of intellectual curiosity, reanimates Hill's body and head separately. But Dr. Hill is still jealous of West's discovery, and has a discovery of his own to add a wrinkle to things.

The trend in horror movies during the 1980s was towards the horror comedy. Most of these were of a teen-aged variety. Movies like Fright Night, Return of the Living Dead, Vamp, The Lost Boys, and even The Evil Dead II played horror film conventions, including the genre's penchant for violence, for slapstick. In this mainstream, Re-Animator (1985, Directed by Stuart Gordon) is something of an anomaly. It's a genuinely funny movie, but it's one that plays fair with its horror movie trappings. It functions like a horror movie better than just about any of its contemporaries. The humor is so deadpan in Re-Animator that some audiences will miss it entirely amid the various dismemberments and zombie rampages. Stuart Gordon, directing his first feature, eschews the comic role models of Porky's and the Three Stooges, and goes in for the more cerebral comedy of Monty Python. Like the Pythons--especially the Pythons of The Meaning of Life--Gordon is in the business of one-upsmanship. For every ghastly idea Gordon puts on the screen, the next one trumps it. It's almost as if Gordon is challenging himself to provide an ever-escalating series of "oh my god" moments for the audience, culminating in a marvelous defilement of the creamy Barbara Crampton. But in spite of its intent to outrage, Re-Animator builds deliberately towards a magnificent punch line. The signifiers are all in place as the movie goes on: Gordon wittily prefigures the movie's denoument by placing a Talking Heads poster in Dr. Dan's apartment, and to make sure that the audience hasn't missed the true thrust of the gag, gives West the line (putting down the now decapitated Dr. Hill): "Who's going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow..." Re-Animator is a one-joke movie, but, damn, it's a GREAT joke.

The real key to Re-Animator is the tone. The actors and the director play everything perfectly straight. The source for the story is the Dark Prince of 20th Century horror, H. P. Lovecraft himself, a writer notoriously short on humor. The score recalls the most baroque of Bernard Herrmann's scores for Hitchcock. The look of the film is as clinically gloomy as a film set in a medical school can look. If you are dead set against laughing at the audacity of the film, it still manages to function as a terrific horror movie, as the characters' and the audience's worst fears are not only realized, but exceeded. The movie, surprisingly, meets Lovecraft on his own terms. The source material, in reality a series of the pulpiest stories Lovecraft ever wrote, lends itself wonderfully to the screen, even if Gordon and company freely abandon the text for their own concerns when it suits them. Certainly, this is the best feature film ever made from Lovecraft, a writer who has been ill-served by the movies. Even so, I can't really imagine Lovecraft himself enjoying this movie much. It shows more than Lovecraft would.

The tone of the violence in the movie walks a knife's edge between slapstick and horror. Gordon knows what makes the gorge rise, and he knows how to pitch his gore so that it is right at the edge of what the audience can take. One of the first scenes in the film, where Dr. Hill demonstrates to his class how to remove the top of the skull for brain surgery is a portent of things to come. It's funny, though it elicits a nervous laughter at best because it has the audience guessing about what could possibly be worse. Gordon provides worse, but he's wise enough to cut the violence with wry wit. Watching Dr. Hill's body stumble around without the guidance of his head, for instance, is hilarious in spite of being sick as hell.

The movie belongs to Combs, though. Jeffery Combs is among the cinema's all-time great mad scientists: he's never really been able to escape Herbert West in his subsequent roles, his recurrent appearances on Star Trek not withstanding. West is a tremendous pop creation: part Norman Bates, part Whit Bissell, and part Colin Clive, he seems rational behind the twitchy exterior; he's even sympathetic. But the only reason West isn't the film's marquee monster is because David Gale's Dr. Hill is even more monstrous. Gale's performance isn't the glue that holds the film together--that's Combs's job--but his character throws West into stark contrast and permits the audience to sympathize with West. No small feat, truth to tell, especially considering that he spends the last half of the movie as a head in a pan. These dueling personalities manage the astounding feat of upstaging the baroque violence Gordon puts on the screen.

Re-Animator is one of those rare one-of-a-kind weirdies that manages to gain a substantial cult following while remaining largely untouched by would-be imitators. In part, this is because what Re-Animator manages is so difficult--not even its principle creators have been able to match it (Combs comes closest as the deranged FBI agent in Peter Jackson's The Frighteners). Comedy, as they say, is hard, but dying is easy, and the same is true of horror. Doing both well at the same time? Hell, that's a minor miracle.

[Charles Castle]

It seemed fitting that after watching Case 39 that a few days later I wandered in to The Resident (2011, directed by Antti Jokinen), a film that has an excellent cast and style to burn, but squanders both. I mean, it's watchable. It's even heartwarming to see the venerable Christopher Lee in another movie bearing the Hammer Studios imprimatur. But watchable isn't the same as good.

The story follows ER doctor Juliet Devereau (Hilary Swank) as she moves into a new apartment. The landlord is seemingly nice guy Max (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who runs the place for his grandfather (Lee). Juliet is exhausted from her job and coming off a bad relationship. She kind of fancies her new landlord, who seems kind and shy. But there's something about her new place that makes her feel watched. She never feels alone there, and with good reason.

This is a variant of every woman in danger thriller of the last thirty years or so, and it doesn't really have any surprises built into its plot. How can it? There is a conservation of characters going on in this movie in which there are only two candidates for the role of menacing creep, and it's painfully obvious who it is. The movie doesn't hide its hand and lays down its cards a third of the way into the movie. After that point, it's an exercise in make-work, as it goes through the motions of escalating threats and false climaxes. But it also does something that's inherently alienating.

As I say, the movie lays its cards on the table at about the thirty minute mark, at which point, it changes its point of view. Up to that point, everything has been seen through they eyes of Juliet, and the movie has gone to great lengths to emphasize that part of her viewpoint is influenced by emotional exhaustion. There's a film there, one the filmmakers here abandon. The new point of view is Max, and here, the filmmakers are operating on the assumption that the audience wants to get inside the head of a creep. I mean, I see what they're trying to do. They're trying to balance the psychology of predator and victim. But it doesn't work. Max isn't that interesting. He's certainly not as interesting Juliet.

A lot of this comes down to the actors. Hilary Swank is a two time Oscar winner, and even though she's taken some ill-advised roles over the course of her career, she can and does bring her A-game most of the time and her A-game is considerable. She brings it here even if the filmmakers refuse to take advantage. The part is a good one for her, and she invests it with considerable humanity. I like Jeffrey Dean Morgan. I think he's a fine actor. He's in a bad situation here. Not only is he saddled with an unsympathetic character, he's playing opposite someone who acts rings around him. It's an unequal balance of power, and it harms the movie, unfortunately.

It's not all down to the actors, though, and it would be wrong of me to lay the film's ultimate failure on Morgan. It's not his fault. He does what he's asked as well as anyone. The ultimate fault is with the screenplay, which doesn't reach beyond the woman in peril cliches even as it looks for tricky narrative gimmicks to sell the audience on them. This is yesterday's fish wrapped in today's newspaper. Minus the cast, this is direct-to-streaming/Lifetime movie fare.

[Charles Castle]

There are a lot of film versions of Washington Irving's evil fairy tale but none of them come close to the somber, Halloween feeling of Disney's animated version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949. Directed by Clyde Geronimi and Jack Kinney). Originally paired with the studio's rendition of The Wind in the Willows, this film became a holiday staple of Disney's long-running Wonderful World of Disney television show, where entire generations of viewers first saw it. I suspect that more people have seen this movie than any other horror movie. And it IS a horror movie, one of the best horror movies, one whose entire reason for existence is to scare the living daylights out of the viewer. That the principle audience for this film is children is immaterial, and I daresay that as many adults have enjoyed being thrilled by this film as have their children.

Ichabod Crane, the new schoolmaster in Sleepy Hollow is smitten with the Katrina Von Tassel, the daughter of the township's wealthiest farmer. This doesn't endear him to the locals, particularly Brom Bones, who has an eye for Katrina himself. But the women of Sleepy Hollow are charmed by Crane, so Bones has to stew in his resentment, until the Halloween dance. Brom has carefully observed the schoolmaster, and realizes that he has a superstitious streak a mile wide. Brom brings down the house with his tale of the legendary Headless Horseman, said to haunt the road to Sleepy Hollow, collecting the heads of unwary travelers unless they can cross the covered bridge, where his power ends. Crane eats it up, but laughs it off as a good natured story. On his ride home, however, the tale isn't so easy to dismiss, can Ichabod cross the bridge before the Headless Horseman takes his head? Is the Headless Horseman real?

This film's construction is particularly cunning. It is divided into three distinct parts: the prelude, in which we meet Ichabod and the other citizens of Sleepy Hollow, the Halloween dance, and Ichabod's fateful ride home. All three movements have a different feel: The movie begins as a nostalgic reminiscence of New England's rural past, rendered in a resplendent palette of autumnal colors. At the end of the 1940s, Disney was entering the sunset of their classic period, but the artistry lavished on their animated products was still near the peak of the art of hand-drawn animation. If there is a more attractively mounted horror film from the 1940s, I can't think of it. The first third of the film looks like it could have stepped whole and breathing off a Currier and Ives calendar.

The Halloween dance has a different feel: there's an air of the good-natured aspects of Halloween in this segment, the Halloween of bobbing for apples and telling ghost stories. Certainly, Brom Bones's song, "You Can't Reason With a Headless Man," is good fun; it's ominous and funny and raucous, the ideal song for Halloween short of the advent of Rock and Roll. The look of this section is still autumnal, the dominant colors are earth tones and oranges, but the oranges are beginning to edge into a more sinister symbolism, there is a hint of the diabolical during Brom Bones's song, and the orange of autumn fades into the orange of the infernal.

The last act of the film abandons the colors of autumn for the colors of night. The dominant colors in this part of the film are black, midnight blue, and purple. There are still orange highlights, but they are associated with the Headless Horseman and are not suggestive of autumn, but of the demonic. The last third of the movie is one of the most carefully constructed suspense sequences in horror movies. After the movement and sound of the dance segment, the first part of Ichabod's ride is quiet and solemn. The animators have created a setting for this part of the film that positively drips with menace, a place that captures the loneliness of a night ride home perfectly. The sound design of this segment builds on the visuals, and as Ichabod jumps at every small sound, so does the audience. The small details here are wonderful: the fireflies that are the "eyes" of a hollow tree, the "Ichabod" murmur of the frogs, the drumming of the cattails. By the time The Headless Horseman makes his appearance, the audience is already on the edge of its seat. The filmmakers are particularly canny in this sequence: they cut it with small bits of humor and slapstick, centered specifically around Crane and his cowardly horse. The Headless Horseman himself is a spectacular creation, and reveals some of the true power of animation: there is no zipper running up the back of the monster, no matte line around his missing head. No exaggerated height to the torso where the costume department has hidden an actor's head. This sequence has a freedom of movement that the live action movies of the day wouldn't be able to match, either. The chase is entirely cinematic: there is no dialogue in this segment of the movie, nor is there any narration. The final images of this chase, the jack-o-lantern zooming at the camera and then the aftermath in the morning, where the only sign of the missing schoolmaster is the shattered remains of the pumpkin, lend the whole thing a wonderful ambiguity. There is no happy ending here. Our hero does not escape the Headless Horseman, and we don't really know what happened to him.

The other element of the film that really sells it is the narration by Bing Crosby. Crosby's voice has a wonderful, sepulchral resonance. It's a folksy, American voice, too, one that recalls the paintings of Norman Rockwell, one that would be at home wrapped around the darker poems of Robert Frost. Crosby's voice winks at the audience in the first act of the film, sings wonderfully in the second act, and communicates the lonesome menace of the third. Paired with the text at hand, the voice transforms the story into folklore, and like the best Halloween folklore it has kept generations of children awake at nights, wondering about the final fate of Ichabod Crane.

[Cyrusso]

Five Nights at Freddys (2023)
Decent premise for a fun B horror movie, but totally wasted by just being dumb, slow moving,  and boring and lacking any gore (not even any dumb fake gore), suspense, or even jump scares

I saw what you said, but I have to see it, if for no other reason than well... I'm kind of, sort of part of gamer culture and it's kind of mandatory viewing. 

[Pastor of Muppets]

I watched the 2019 psychological horror movie Ma.  The film stars Octavia Spencer as Sue Ann Ellington, a lonely middle aged who is out walking her dog one day when a group of teenagers ask her to buy them alcohol.  She agrees, although later on she calls the police on the teens.  A few days later, she buys the kids alcohol and lets them drink and party in her basement.  She soon becomes popular among the local teenagers, gaining the nickname "Ma" as this cool older lady that provides booze and a place to party.

This goes on for a while, but she becomes increasingly addicted to the adulation of these teenagers and gets a little overbearing.  She pesters them to come over and party even when they don't really want to. Eventually, the kids decide it's not worth it and they block her number.  Well, this is where things go to pot.

She does not handle this rejection well and goes kinda psycho.  I won't spoil too much, but it was a very disturbing yet engaging movie.  Sue Ann is a sympathetic villain.  The movie is not too bleak, or too gory, which I like.

[stethacantus]

That Man Bolt ( 1973 )

How stupid is Amazon? So I already ordered a movie from them that took them more than a month to admit they did not have. Then I reordered it. This time it only took them five days to send me this e-mail...

....except when I looked up the same movie again, this is what I found...

Amazon is still relying on third party sellers to fulfill their stock, but many of these third party sellers are resellers.  If you don't know who a reseller  is, look up the thousands of reseller tutorials on YouTube. But basically, a reseller lists hundreds of thousands of items  that they have in stock, and if someone orders it on Amazon, they buy it off of eBay or from a local flea market, or from a number of overstock sites. So I order an out of print item from Amazon who says they have it in stock, they order it from a seller who is a reseller, and the reseller finds out he can't get that item to resell and has to tell Amazon some BS excuse why they don't have an item they claimed they had. In the meantime, another movie I ordered from Amazon is going to be late. I ordered The Perfect Weapon more than a week ago, and Amazon gave me a November 24th delivery date. Even if I pay extra for delivery, the earliest Amazon can send it is November 21st. N, this is not a pre-order. I am guessing Olive Films promised Amazon more copies would be delivered on November 21st and Amazon failed to mention on their website that they are temporarily out of stock. So with no Chuck Norris films, no Jeff Speakman film, the only one I have this week is That Man Bolt

It is a curiosity to the history of martial arts films. It was the first major Hollywood studio martial arts film to be released after Enter the Dragon, and the first theatrical martial arts film to air on American  television. That is if you can qualify it as a martial arts film. It began as Universal's attempt to cash in on the Blaxploitation genre when they hired Fred Williamson for what was to be the beginning of a Bolt franchise modeled after the James Bond films. I am not sure if during production Universal decided to make Bolt a martial arts expert in response to Enter the Dragon, or they had planned to make Bolt a martial arts expert all along and it was a happy accident that Enter the Dragon paved the way, or that Williamson insisted that Bolt be a martial artist as the first film in the series was in pre-production. It seems most likely that Our Man Bolt was modeled off of Doctor No and retooled to have martial arts in it midway through filming. With the exception of ABC's Kung Fu series and the movie pilot that began it, martial arts was seen as too violent to be allowed on Broadcast television.  Even films like James Bond's Man With the Golden Gun and Billy Jack were kept from broadcast until the late 70s because they had elements of martial arts in them. Kung Fu got a pass for beginning prior to the martial arts genre becoming popular in the United States, and because they followed strict standards and practice guidelines limiting how many times the hero could hit another character per episode. Although as a western, the amount of times anyone could be shot was unlimited as long as no blood was shown.  The first hit martial arts film in America, Five Fingers of Death, was just ending it's late theatrical run when in February of 1974 New Line Cinema got the first X rating for violence in a motion picture for the film The Street Fighter. From that point on, martial arts movies were seen as too violent for broadcast television.  This prevented Warner Bros. from selling either Five Fingers of Death or Enter the Dragon to the networks for broadcast. In 1980 World Northal was the first television distributor to offer martial arts films for broadcast, and when those films aired in New York City and other markets without any repercussions and huge ratings, the unofficial ban on martial arts films came to an end. It was between 1974 and 1980 that a handful of martial arts films were snuck onto broadcast television. That Man Bolt was the first, given a one time  late night airing by CBS. Thats where I saw this film years ago. I think the television broadcast may have cut out some of the fights. The network certainly must have cut out the ending of the final fight, as it ends with one of the combatants accidentally getting impaled on a statue.

Bolt is not actually a spy. But much like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, asked to do a mission for a  British spy organization. In the case of his movie, the organization threatens to jail Bolt for his past crimes. He is described as an international courier who has transported items  in the past, presumably by smuggling them. A bank has been hiring couriers to transport briefcases full of money  from Hong Kong to New Mexico, only for each to be found dead with the briefcase empty. Forced by the spy agency to become the next courier, Bolt goes on a mission to find out who is behind the murders, and uncovers an intricate and quite frankly ludicrous  money laundering scheme. Pretty much an excuse to have Bolt travel to different locations, such as Las Vegas and back to Hong Kong. Like every American Martial Arts movie made in the 70s, this film is  very light on fighting. And when you do finally  do get some on screen martial arts, the choreography  is very basic with the same moves being repeated over and over. But what would you expect from an American martial arts film from the 70s?



The Day the Earth Moved ( 1974 )

From one 70s movie fad, we go to another.  I put up a poll asking what genre of movies I should start collecting next. The choices were he Pink Panther franchise, Every Pixar film, Every Steve Martin film, animated superhero films, Musicals, 70s Disaster films, every Stanly Kubrik film, And the Star Wars rip-off films from the 70s through 90s. While this poll is still ongoing, the results so far are 70s Disaster Films in the lead with three votes, Pink Panther franchise in second with two points, and Kubrick and Martin with one point each.

Disaster movies didn't begin in the 70s. Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr. depicts an entire town being destroyed by a hurricane and it's storm surge. The first American one reel film, Life of an American Fireman depicted firemen rescuing a woman from a burning house. There were also disaster movies in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. What set the 70s apart was that disaster movies became a trend. And picked up a formula many of the previous Disaster movies didn't have. The trend began with Airport in 1970, which was in response to an adaption of another Arthur Haily novel Hotel. In fact, Airport was promoted more as Hotel in the air than a disaster film.  It earned a lot of money, which at the least meant Universal would make a sequel. It's success got Irwin Allen to produce The Poseidon Adventure which was also a tremendous hit. This all lead up to 1974, perhaps the best year for the Disaster movie. Irwin Allen followed up the success of [i}The Poseidon Adventure[/i] with The Towering Inferno, Universal not only released the sequel Airport 75, but after recently investing in Sensurround, released Earthquake. The disaster movie officially became a genre, with the all star cast formula originating in Hotel.  About half of the disaster films made in the 70s were television films, with half of the theatrical films not being true disaster films but movies with a disaster added to the end, or science fiction films which technically qualified as disaster movies. Television movies outpaced the theatrical films for a good reason. In order to sell tickets, theatrical films needed to show be special effects extravaganzas that showed maximum destruction.  This made them very expensive to make, so were not greenlit as much. Television networks didn't care if their disaster films had expensive special effects, an all star cast of a-list actors, or had massive sets built to be destroyed. Television disaster films were made as cheaply as possible, so were made more often.

So like I said, Amazon has been off with delivering in a timely fashion.  A movie that was to be delivered this Wednesday was postponed  until Monday, and it was looking like I would have nothing this weekend. But then when I was food shopping on Saturday, I saw a bin of budget DVDs and thought that maybe the Chuck Norris set I had been trying to buy would be in there. There were quite a few releases from Echo Bridge.  A lot of your "Five Family Films" and "Five Westerns"  variety. No Chuck Norris, but I found this....

...and it had a film on my list. Also four other movies from other decades. None of which take place in New York or involve frost as the disaster, so yeah, the cover art for this set makes no sense. If not for this set only costing three dollars I would feel ripped off. All five movies are on one DVD disc, meaning they are all compressed. They all look like they were sourced from either a YouTube download or a bootleg tape. And these were all originally full screen releases for the old analog televisions, which means they should all be square. Yet Echo Bridge chose to stretch the picture to fit modern sets, and I don't know why. As if someone with a modern set would return the DVD for having the left and right side black, and not because of the horrible compression or substandard prints used for the films. As for the other films in the set, I will probably get to them in the future when I have the extra time.

The Day The Earth Moved  was one of those films I was hoping to have in my collection, due to how ridiculous it was. A film that somehow RiffTrax, MST3k, Cinematic Titanic and all the other riffers missed. Turns out it was on YouTube, uploaded in it's proper aspect ratio.

The film stars Jackie Cooper as an airplane pilot and Cleavon Little as his photographer sidekick. Amazingly, Little chose this as his follow up to Blazing Saddles. Together they run a business that takes aerial photos for developers, and are commissioned to photograph a desert.  They soon realize the film stock they are using can detect areas about to be hit by an earthquake, and a small town hey took pictures of is about to be hit by a major quake. This was the same town Cooper was arrested in earlier in the film for speeding, and unable to pay the fine, was forced to do a week of community service where he had to clean up an abandoned Santa Claus village.  An ultra cheap roadside attraction you have to see to believe. ( About 12 minutes into the YouTube video. )  The town long in decline ad the population down to about seven people including an orphan girl, their only hope is to reactivate the attraction so that the motorists passing by on their way to Las Vegas will stop to visit. I don't know if the director intended this to look as insane as it is in the film, or if the budget limited them to a Santa Village that looked  that crappy.  Cooper and his friends fly back to the town to warn everyone to leave, but the mayor refuses to believe an earthquake is coming.  They probably could have gotten another half hour of Cooper trying to convince the townspeople to leave and the mayor insisting they stay to open the Santa Village, but I guess the  producer ran low on the budget and removed a bunch of pages, because the earthquake begins almost immediately. After a few townspeople run back to their homes to get stuff during the earthquake,  everyone gets into Jackie Cooper's plane so they can escape to safety. Or maybe instead of taking off in a plane during an earthquake, they could have just walked over a few feet away from any structures and waited for the earthquake to stop, seeing the town is surrounded by a flat desert. Obviously the producer found a ghost town to destroy for the earthquake as a couple of the structures collapse. his is a n earthquake film on a low budget, and the big quake des not happen until the final ten minutes of this 72 minute film. ( ABC Movies of the Wee were originally shot for 90 minute time slots. That's how cheap they were. )

[Charles Castle]

Although it has its share of contrivances (boy, howdy, does it!), Adam Green's Frozen (2010) turns the screws about as tight as any movie I've seen this month. I'm kind of gobsmacked by this, actually, given that I hated, hated, hated Green's Hatchet and given that when I heard the premise of this movie, concerning a trio of snotty bourgeoisie college kids (played well by Emma Bell, Kevin Zeggers, and Shawn Ashmore, who are better than the characters with which they've been provided) trapped on a ski lift, I wondered about the terror potential of the situation it creates. This turns out to be one of the nastier horror movies I've seen recently, and bully for that. It's always nice to know that one isn't so jaded with horror movies that a really brutal one can't work one over (but good).

Anyway, this concerns three skiers who have wheedled their way onto the lift for one last run down the mountain in such a way that no one knows they're there. When the lift is stopped, they're basically screwed because it's the last run of the week, a bad storm is moving in, and none of them has a cell phone. So, yeah, it's bad, but by the 45 minute mark, I started to wonder how they could milk any more suspense (or, indeed, any actual horror) out of the situation. Silly, me. This one goes for the throat once one of our intrepid skiers jumps from the lift and breaks both his legs. And then the wolves come. And frostbite. The singlemindedness with which this examines its premise makes me rather forgive the contortions it goes through to set up its situation. Most movies start well, then go downhill. This one gets noticeably better as it unfolds.

This movie is unusually good at the gross-out, from compound fractures to the singular effect of a hand freezing to a metal bar. This put its finger on a raw nerve I didn't even realize was exposed. Bravo. But it does more than gross the audience out. Like most good genre pieces, this acts as a crucible to examine its characters. While the characters here aren't particularly interesting, the movie manages to connect with their humanity, which is something I might have thought beyond Green (again, on the evidence of Hatchet). The film's best scene, and the one I'll take away from it even more than it's thoroughly nasty grue, finds the female member of our cast wondering who'll take care of her puppy in her absence only to realize that it will starve to death because no one will know that she's missing. This scene doesn't rely on any of the characters' bland backstories for the audience to plug into a shared experience. It works wonders on the movie, because prior to this scene, I didn't much sympathize with our heroes. It also suggests that the director has more to say beyond a desire to make horror movies, and that's an ambition that many genre directors never come to. Good for him.

[Cyrusso]

I thought it was darkly ironic that there was both a horror and family film named "Frozen". Not exactly a huge coincidence, but imagine this, back in the days when somebody could have easily rented the wrong movie from Blockbuster/Hollywood video.

I've heard about Frozen, and holy shit, it sounds pretty merciless with the gore, and the very realistic fear that the ski lift could stop, and you could easily get trapped up there, desperate for any way to get the fuck down. .

Those of you who have NOT read Charles Castle's reaction... do NOT jump from the fucking ski lift to the ground... you will end up wishing you had just frozen to death instead...

[Charles Castle]

I kept looking at the Wikipedia entry for Frozen over and over to make sure I didn't type the wrong year.

[Charles Castle]

Snotty bourgeois college students have the life expectancy of a fruit fly, if you believe horror movies. Nuts with machetes, satanic cults, Eastern European sadists, remote Mayan ruins, ski lifts; you name it, the universe has it in for them. I have this theory about the repeated use of these characters in contemporary horror (I mean, apart from creatively bankrupt screenwriters kowtowing to perceived demographics or to tried and true formulae). These characters are like all of those affluent characters in Italian giallo movies, the ones who are massacred in the midst of their bourgeois splendor as a kind of class warfare. Same here.

The latest iteration of the college student as chum to cross my retinas is found in Altitude (2010, directed by Kaare Andrews), in which our stock obnoxious college students are put into a plane that malfunctions, causing it to climb ever higher. I have to admit to a certain level of admiration for the various horrific situations that some screenwriters are dreaming up. This joins the situation in Frozen as a situation that I've not seen, nor even imagined, before. The story follows a group of five friends who have chartered a plane to take them to a Coldplay concert (which, by the way, suggests that they all have more money than sense, but that's another discussion). The characters are: The film student, the musician, the shy nerdy guy, the asshole, and the pilot. The pilot is Sarah, and she's our ostensible protagonist, the final girl if you will, who is fighting some demons from her past (her mother was killed in a plane crash) and the expectations of her military father. Unusual for this kind of movie: all five characters play the honorary Bill Paxton "We're all screwed!" character. It makes them all more unlikeable than they might otherwise be, and by the time the Lovecraftian entity in the sky shows up, I was ready for all of them to be eaten. The screenplay does the whole enterprise no favors by invoking the Curse of the Krell at the end.

For his part, first-time director and former comic book artist Kaare Andrews does fine with what he has to work with, which is basically one set and some low rent special effects. The "one set" problem is mostly solved by this point by movies going back to Hitchcock's Lifeboat and Andrews has obviously studied the techniques used to make this work. The special effects work well enough by virtue of being mostly obscured by clouds, rain, and darkness. A few of the shots of the exterior of the plane in the film call to mind old school travelers in peril movies like Zero Hour and The High and the Mighty, but, hell, they aren't any worse than the sky squid that shows up in the last act, so what the hell. One wonders what Andrews could do with a better script and with better actors, because the visual sensibility is certainly there. The dramatic beats are another matter entirely.

Jessica Lowndes is as close to a "name" as the movie provides, having made a splash on the revival of 90210, and she's typical of this film's casting strategy. The filmmakers have placed "hot," young, inexpensive talent in front of the camera. It should be noted that the "hot," young, inexpensive talent in contemporary film is a lot better than the equivalent thirty years ago, so this isn't necessarily bad, though it pays no dividends here. The performances, for the most part, are all pitched just this side of hysterical. None of these characters is developed beyond a type, and their "types" are signified by their props more than they are by any actual personalities. We know that the film student is a film student because she always has a video camera running. The musician is carrying a guitar (to a concert where he himself is not playing. Really.). The asshole jock is wearing a letter jacket. The geek has comic books with him. Frankly, this is all just lazy and bespeaks filmmakers who are either unwilling to let their actors work, who don't know how to work with actors, or who just don't care. This is the movie's crippling flaw, because the relationships at the end of the movie are paramount to the resolution of the plot, and lacking strong central performances and strong, well-written characters, it tends to leave the film dangling. Flapping, if you will, like tentacles in the wind.

[Charles Castle]

I suspect that diminished expectations are to blame for this, so bear with me. I had a great time watching Darkness (2002, Directed by Jaume Balaguero). I probably had more fun with this movie than I had any right to have. Even as I watched it, I knew that I shouldn't be enjoying it. I should have been outraged at the blatant thievery going on in the movie--it takes a lot from The Shining and The Amityville Horror and The Ring and Rosemary's Baby and The Sixth Sense, et al, after all. But I wasn't. In fact, I have this sneaking suspicion that the borrowings one finds in this movie are all intended as an elaborate ruse. It sets up a long series of deliberately transparent cliches only to subvert them entirely during the last twenty minutes of the movie. Writer/Director Balaguero seems to be aware of the fact that the audience for horror movies has been programmed to expect certain things when specific stock elements are assembled in front of them, so he sets these elements into place only to rampage off in an entirely different direction at the end of the film.

Regina and her family have moved to a remote country house in Spain. As her family settles into the house, strange occurrences begin to happen. Her younger brother begins to show signs of abuse and is obsessed with the way the darkness under his bed consumes his colored pencils. Her father is recovering from a "condition" and begins to show agression towards his family, all the while spending time exploring the darker nooks and crannies of the house. Her mother is indifferent to the strange things happening in the house. Are her fathers's "episodes" the result of what happened to him in his childhood--an abduction that has never been completely explained? Is her father abusing her brother, or are his bruises being cause by the ghosts that seem to be haunting the house? And who is the strange man watching the house from across the street? There is an eclipse of the sun approaching. The last time there was an eclipse, Regina's father underwent his ordeal.

The movie starts out as a Ring rip-off, but it ends up in the universe of Lovecraft. Even if this isn't entirely successful--and it isn't--I'm willing to be forgiving. The biggest influence on the film isn't any of the other films Darkness is pilfering for material, it's Ramsey Campbell. Campbell is one of the most important and prolific writers of horror fiction, so it comes as a bit of a shock that Balaguero's previous film, Los Sin Nombre (The Nameless), is the first film ever made from Campbell's work. Campbell's shadow hangs over Darkness, as well, with its transposition of the yawning gulfs of Lovecraftian horror into the interior landscapes of dysfunctional people. It's an intensely subjective kind of horror, and I sympathize with people who look at something like Darkness and shrug it off. At the very least, there is a broad vein of unexplored possibilities in the Campbellian horror story, though it's possible that movies aren't a good medium for them. Darkness, for instance, is only conditionally successful in the attempt (or a conditional failure, depending on your point of view).

In any event, there is an absolutely crackerjack moment late in the film when a photograph that previously had three people in it now only has two that put me into a forgiving mood. This is the sort of image that transcends the limits of plot and performance. It's a scary moment almost independent of its context. The film has an apocalyptic feel in the end which also puts me in a forgiving mood. The end of all things is a purview that the horror movie is well equipped to examine, though it rarely does. The film's biggest blunder is simply that Balaguero clearly doesn't have a feel for the English language. Because he has a tin ear for the language, his actors are adrift. This film probably features Lena Olin's worst performance, and Anna Paquin isn't far behind her. It may work enormously better if you turn on the Spanish or French language track on DVD.

As I say, all of this may well be the result of diminished expectations, so a word to the wise.