House of Wax

To help wash the bad taste out of my mouth that Witchfinder General left, I decided to rewatch this film for the first time since I was in high school, in the hopes that it would hold up at least as well as I had remembered it being. Fortunately, while it’s not a total knockout film by any means, it is a typically fun and ghoulish Vincent Price vehicle, the likes of which one would generally expect from him.

Price stars in this as the creator of a small house of wax, and his refusal to pander to audiences by making a house of horrors section to the museum causes his backer to set fire to the building in an effort to make his money back from insurance fraud. Price naturally survives the fire, but is now hideously deformed in both body and mind, and begins rebuilding his treasured house of wax, this time by taking newly dead bodies and dipping them in wax to be his new attractions. All of this is done with Price hamming it up to the hilt, and just showing off how much better an actor he is than anyone else in the film (as with most Price movies, the film noticeably weakens whenever he’s not onscreen, particularly the moments made for 3D gimmickry, like when a showman fires a paddleball at the screen while openly talking to the audience). He’s particularly good when he opens up his new museum and its house of horrors, adding his grim one liners when describing each new attraction for the crowd. The big reveal near the end when his face is torn off is also quite effective, though lessened a bit by how we’d already seen it in shadow by then.

While the film itself is good light fun, the DVD is well worth getting just for a great bonus feature. Included on the flipside of the DVD is the original Mystery of the Wax Museum, which Price’s film was a remake of. I have to say, the original plays like nothing so much as a rough draft for which the remake was a final product. I guess that feeling is in large part due to the early attempt at Technicolor used on the film, giving only a two color palette rather than the three colors used in films today (apparently green hadn’t been discovered yet), making the film look like it’s been so ill-kept that its colors have all gotten washed out and faded. The lack of Vincent Price also hurts the original, as the guy they have in his slot here just doesn’t match up. Still, it’s certainly one of the better horror movies of the thirties, if not really one of the best, and for a DVD that’s as bargain priced as this is, it’s a great addition to sweeten the pot. If you’re looking for a fun pair of older movies to watch while on a budget, you could certainly do a lot worse than these.

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Isolation

I’m going to, if not necessarily lie, then at least randomly guess that this movie started off really slowly, if only because my mom and sister were talking so much for the first fifteen minutes or so of the film that I was completely unable to follow it, and so I am now quietly hoping that I didn’t really miss anything important. Regardless, despite such a clearly dull opening, once this film actually got going it wound up being pretty effective, in an “I don’t really know who these characters are, but we shall overcome all the same due to their being menaced by a really creepy monster created by science gone awry” type of way.

The plot, from what I eventually gathered, involves a scientist and his crew performing experiments on cows and their fetuses on an isolated farm out in Ireland (I’m guessing this location due to their accents and the director’s last name being O’Brien. Never let it be said that I am above casually stereotyping things). Something Goes Wrong, and one cow’s babies all turn out to be deformed monsters with insatiable appetites for intestinal tracts, and which can infest other animals either by burrowing inside of them, or merely by biting them. All but one of the monsters is killed right at birth, which I’m going to guess is because that one is so damned dangerous by itself to this crew of misfit toys that if his brothers and sisters were around too there wouldn’t even be the slightest chance of survival for the human race. It would be Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things all over again.

It becomes a very effective, though somewhat cliché, monster movie at this point, with some nice directing and a good dose of bad taste permeating the scenario, with blood coating walls so much one might almost think Stuart Gordon had directed it. There’s also one particularly gross scene in which they try to flush the monster out from its apparent hiding place in a goddamn lake of liquid cow feces by having one of the less important characters driving a vehicle through it that doesn’t quite go up high enough to keep him from having the liquid shit sloshing around his feet while he drives. If I made mention of how this scene culminates with the poo clogging up the engine, requiring him to wade back to the others, only to find something even nastier in the pool with him, would it really be much of a surprise to you?

If there’s one problem I had to pinpoint with the movie (you know, beyond the bafflingly dull opening), it’s that it becomes consistently less fun the larger the monster gets. It devolves a bit from being a really creepy movie about a deadly creature that’s so small it could really be hiding just about anywhere into a movie about a really big creature that just charges straight at everyone, and it’s just not as much fun then. Still, it’s a good sight better than most horror movies that actually show up in theaters these days, so I’d suggest you all go give it a rental, at the very least.

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Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for this movie to work as well as it does. It’s terribly acted, poorly written, clumsily directed, the zombies don’t even show up until we’re two thirds of the way through the film, and yet I was thoroughly entertained the whole way through. Given that most of the people involved with this can’t possibly have been involved in the film industry beyond this one movie, I’m going to have to lay most of the praise upon the director of the film, Bob Clark.

You may know Bob Clark as the man who directed A Christmas Story, one of the most beloved holiday movies of all time, and Black Christmas, one of the early forays into the slasher genre, before Halloween determined that all slasher villains must be somehow superhuman. Here he goes by his birth name Benjamin Clark in the credits, the reasons for which I can only guess at, but which probably had something to do with not wanting to be hassled for autographs everywhere he went for this. The plot, it must be said, is pure brilliance. An acting troupe, led by the film’s co-writer Alan Ormsby (in a ridiculously overacted performance that is easily the highlight of the film), arrives on an island somewhere (I must have missed where they said they were from originally, though a city can vaguely be made out across the water) for the purposes of going to the island’s cemetery and raising the dead using a spell book Alan bought somewhere. One might wonder as to why exactly a theater troupe would be so interested in raising the dead, and that’s partly where the film’s brilliance kicks in. See, while Alan makes a lot of vague mention as to how doing this will make them all huge stars, he never actually gets around to explaining how it will work, leaving it up to us to interpret it all. This is, of course, much like when you’re watching The Seventh Seal and get to interpret what the chess game with Death signifies. Just. Like it.

As I said, the zombies don’t actually come to life until we’re just past the one hour mark, so it’s a good thing that everyone in the acting troupe is so amusingly terrible and fun to watch. Rather surprisingly, the guy who co-wrote the script somehow wound up with all the best lines, like when he reacts to another character being annoying by dramatically touching his hand to his forehead and going, “Give me a moment. The magnitude of your simplitude overwhelms me!” Or his classic rant that begins with “The dead are losers!” which of course was said well before the dead start coming back to life, and so just came off as randomly mean and hurtful.

The zombies themselves are pretty badass, too. While not racing around like the zombies in the Dawn of the Dead remake, they are some of the most vicious lurching zombies I’ve seen, heading straight at the humans without a moment’s hesitation and ready to just tear them to fucking shreds. Right from the moment they first tear ass out of the ground, it’s pretty obvious the whole acting troupe is done. Ain’t no way those people are getting back to that boat with these crazy things blocking their path.

In short, this movie is awesome, and I haven’t the slightest idea why. It is as retarded and lame as any other bad movie I could name off the top of my head, and yet it is so much more than the sum of its parts that there’s no way you can watch it without falling in love with it just a little bit. You owe it to yourself to give this one a watch, now that I’ve overhyped it enough. You won’t regret it.

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Severance

I think we can all thank the British by this point for ensuring there is a good amount of gallows humor infesting our horror movies. Sure, we’ve gotten the occasional horror comedy here in the U.S. (usually involving zombies or mediocre efforts to make children’s movies out of classic horror monsters), but I think that, after giving us decades of the likes of Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Donald Pleasence hamming things up in their search for new graves to despoil or new victims to kill, the Brits have more than shown their overall mastery of this particular genre blend. Hell, they even gave us what is by far the best horror comedy of this decade in Shaun of the Dead, all of which, I guess, is my needlessly long-winded way of saying that I really enjoyed Severance.

Sort of a blend between The Office and a slasher movie, it concerns a group of employees of a British weapons manufacturer traveling deep into the woods of Hungary on a company retreat to promote teamwork or whatever the hell people do at those awful things. Of course, things don’t go as planned, and when the main road is oddly blocked off, they naturally decide to ignore the advice of a local and travel down an alternate road, a time honored tradition in movies, horror and otherwise, that has never once, in the history of cinema, merely turned out to be a shortcut with a pleasing view.

I’m delving too much into plot here, I know, and not doing a proper job explaining why the film is so good. A lot of it has to do with the dry British humor infesting the film. I wasn’t lying when I said it felt a lot like the cast of the Office being thrown into a horror movie (maybe not the specific cast, but certainly people fairly similar to them), and their British stiff-upper-lip-ness when they find what is clearly the wrong lodge out in the woods and attempt to make the most of things is delightful. The murders, when they begin, are just as funny, as when an early discussion on the guillotine and Marie Antoinette being able to live long enough to see her own headless body at her execution pays off an early death, or when a character loses his leg to a bear trap, and they decide to keep it cold by stuffing it in the mini-fridge on their bus, or how what appears to be just obligatory throwaway deaths at the beginning actually pays off at the climax, or…but I could go on like this for a while.

If it’s not quite as amusing as Edgar Wright’s films, then it’s still very good, and you should definitely check it out. It manages to achieve that tricky blend of when to go for humor and when to go for horror that most horror comedies don’t quite manage, and when to just go for broke on both. It’s not a perfect film by any means, but it’s certainly better than the bulk of the movies out there. Go check it out.

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Death Proof

I guess the main problem with this movie is that it doesn’t have Planet Terror immediately preceding it. The extremely slow pace of the first half of this film worked as a nice breather from the frantic pace of that film and the fake trailers while watching Grindhouse. Outside of that context, unfortunately, it’s nothing more than poor pacing, with the film’s first half seeming to drag along interminably until we get to the midway point, at which point the film finally gets good.

I may have made that sound a little too harsh. I do actually think this is a good movie, but it was definitely the weaker half of Grindhouse, and Tarantino’s weakest effort in general. The plot concerns a homicidal stunt man played by Kurt Russell who spends the first half of the film stalking and killing a group of the most obnoxious, irritating women ever captured on film, and then going for a repeat performance in the second half without remembering the cardinal rule of how sequels never turn out as well as the original. Now Kurt Russell, it must be said, does give one of his greatest performances in this, but he doesn’t really get a huge amount of screen time early on (this would go back to the pacing problem, I guess). Another problem, though not as major, is that Tarantino was unwilling to go all the way with the Grindhouse motif like Rodriguez did. Both filmmakers tried to make their films capture the style and look of the old 70s grindhouse films, including altering the film to make the film stock look aged and beaten up. Rodriguez did a magnificent job of this, but Tarantino seems hesitant to really go very far along with the plan, playing around a little bit, but not really committing (he also seems to completely forget to do any of this in the second half of the film). We’re then left with a film that’s curiously too polished to be a proper grindhouse film, but which is still not nearly polished enough for a “normal” movie.

This is not to say there isn’t anything to like about the film. As I said already, Kurt Russell does a great job, and pretty much everything from the assault on the first group at about the fifty-minute mark onward is quality. Indeed, Tarantino’s effort to make this an ode to the big car chase films of the 70s gives us a climax with one of the best car chases in years (offhandedly, I’d have to go back years before I could name one that was better than here). Tarantino’s masterful use of music is also on display here, as we are not only treated to a number of great rock songs, but some outright 80s slasher music right before Russell goes on his killing spree, a musical number when he’s secretly photographing the second group of girls at the airport that sounds just like one of Ennio Morricone’s old giallo scores, and there’s even some sitar music thrown in for good measure. He even throws a bone to fellow director Eli Roth by giving him a cameo as (shock and surprise) an asshole in a bar. So there is a good deal to enjoy here, you just have to take a surprising amount of bad with the good. And don’t buy this for the express purpose of seeing what the extra half hour of footage is, either. All you get is a thoroughly unerotic lapdance, an extra bit of Russell stalking the second group, and a whole lot more talking.

One final note: recently Tarantino said in an interview that the next genre he wants to make a film out of is the Swedish sex comedy. Given how a) he has never had any nudity in any of his films up to this point, and b) he is so overwhelmed by his foot fetish (you get even more of that in this extended cut, by the way, which I know you were all hoping for) that he has to work it into all of his movies, I can only shudder in horror at what monstrosity he has planned out in his fever-ravaged brain.

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The Running Man

I think this may well be the ultimate video game movie. This is not to say that it is the best video game movie out there (I’m holding fast to the surprisingly entertaining Silent Hill for that one), but it does most perfectly capture the idiotic action mindset of the old NES games better than any else I’ve seen.

Right from the start, you know you’re dealing with a video game. While a normal dystopian future sci-fi flick would generally try to offer up some attempt at an in depth explanation as to how this nightmarish future world got the way it is, here we just get a text crawl explaining that food and oil supplies are depleted and now the government is evil. Cue the Capcom logo. We are then treated to hero cop Schwarzenegger refusing a direct order to open fire on a crowd of civilians, and then being jailed on falsified charges. After a bit more rigamarole, he and his cohorts are tossed into The Running Man, a live game show where prisoners of the state fight goons with super-powered weaponry in the hopes of winning prizes, or even freedom. Here is where the film manages to simultaneously be at its best and at its worst. Its worst comes from the sheer repetitiveness of the game show: each of the villainous thugs is announced, appears to menace Schwarzenegger and co. with his wacky new weapon, and then is obligingly killed with that same weapon. Then it’s on to the next one for a repeat performance. It’s not unlike watching a friend blast his way through a game of Mega Man. While it’s entertaining enough, and while some of the villains are quite amusing (my personal favorite being Sub Zero, who, as an Asian hockey player with a razor sharp stick and exploding pucks, is much more interesting and amusing than the one from Mortal Kombat), it just starts getting old toward the end, as they fail to change up the material enough to keep it fresh.

What mainly keeps it all together during this period is a delightful performance by Richard Dawson, fresh off of Family Feud and essentially repeating his act there as the Running Man’s host. He spends the entire time chain smoking, walking with the careful steps of someone who is quite drunk but doesn’t think anyone else has figured it out yet, and just shamelessly steals every last scene he’s in. He makes the movie a good deal more entertaining than it otherwise would have been, even if they don’t utilize him nearly enough for my tastes.

Still, he is used a fairly good amount, and the action scenes (the reasons most people would be watching this film, naturally) are pretty good, at least until they all start blurring together. However, the film as a whole really just starts to drag somewhat by the end, and also takes a while to get going, which isn’t a particularly winning combination for a film. It’s good enough for a watch or two, but it doesn’t really stack up well to Schwarzenegger’s other 80s action films. Go check out Predator or the Terminator or Total Recall instead, if you want to see him blasting his way through a science fiction scenario. Unless this happens to pop up on TV sometime, don’t waste your energy.

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The Exorcist 3

The original Exorcist is enshrined in film history as being one of the all-time greatest, perhaps the very greatest, horror films. Its inevitable sequel, with Linda Blair reprising her role from the original film, was unseen by me but which was fairly universally panned. Expectations were rather mixed, then, for this third film, with the Exorcist’s original screenwriter, William Peter Blatty, signing on to write and direct the film a good seventeen years after the first, and a good ten years after the Ninth Configuration, his largely unseen previous directorial work. So how does it largely hold itself up? Well, if it can be considered a given from the start that it wasn’t going to match up to the original, then we can at least take comfort in the fact that it is still quite good.

The film deftly sidesteps the problem of how to deal with a sequel that nobody liked by simply pretending it never happened, and instead having the third film spin directly out of the events that the first one ended with. Set fifteen years later, with George C. Scott playing a world-weary detective investigating a new series of brutal murders that seem to have been committed by the same serial killer as a number that had been done back around the time of the original exorcism. The film mostly plays as a detective story, with Blatty preferring to keep things fairly low key throughout the film until the obligatory fire and brimstone climax, with only the occasional outburst from the man famous for chewing the scenery and everything else he could get his hands on as Patton.

The plot mostly works, though it does get a bit convoluted thanks to studio demanded rewrites designed to include a few roles for returning cast members from the original. Despite that occasional wonkiness, the film is quite effective, held together by Scott’s great performance. The other cast members, while not at his level, do their jobs well, and the film manages to evoke a nice grim mood all the way through. While not up to the level of the original, it wouldn’t fare too poorly as half of a double bill. Now I’m just really curious to see Blatty’s lost original cut of the film, before the studio demanded all the changes.

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

As you may know, I’m a pretty big fan of the novel Frankenstein. Put simply, I think it ranks right up there with Macbeth as one of the greatest tragedies ever written (a fitting comparison to be had here, as Branagh directs the film with all the majestic sweep of his Shakespearean adaptations). Now, while I’ve liked a number of the film adaptations of the novel, there’s never really been one that perfectly captures it (which I guess isn’t surprising, since that generally never happens with any great novel). Now, with that in mind, I have to say that Kenneth Branagh’s effort at capturing the essence of the story is, while not perfect, the best I’ve seen yet.

The first thing you notice when watching this film is the lavish attention paid to set design and the overall visual feel of the film. It’s kind of hard not to pay attention, really, when we’ve got characters walking around a room that appears to be roughly five stories tall. Had I but known that doctors make that kind of scratch, I would have had a thoroughly different major in college. Regardless, the early stages of the film are also the weakest, as Branagh realizes we’re not here to witness Victor’s childhood, and so rushes us along at such a breakneck speed we largely have to be explicitly told bits of character developments, like the growing love affair between Victor and Elizabeth, because the movie is barreling toward Frankenstein’s first experiments and is unwilling to slow down until then (Indeed, he rushes the beginning so much that he failed to notice that his opening Star Wars-ish text crawl dates the movie to the early 19th century, then immediately afterward telling us the film ends in 1794). Once it finally does come time for the grand experiment, though, Branagh finally lets us begin to savor things, such as the joyously elaborate setup of his lab, which manages to look a good deal more like a lab of that time period might have than any of the other Frankenstein movies I’ve seen. What follows should be well-known to anyone familiar with the novel, as the film adheres pretty closely, but let me just say that the film is cast perfectly, with Branagh doing a great job in the title role as a brilliant young doctor who is tragically fully aware of his brilliance and doesn’t mind flaunting it, and Robert DeNiro perfectly capturing the almost crippling emotional outbursts and great sorrow of the Monster.

Never is this better used than in the second real meeting of the two, in the ice-covered mountains near Frankenstein’s home in Geneva, as the Monster sits him down to ask him some painful questions about his creation, and of Frankenstein’s treatment of him. Just look at his quiet anger and pain as he spits out questions like, “What of my soul? Do I have one? Or is that a part you left out?” It’s a role that’s been unjustly forgotten by DeNiro fans, as he manages a level of drama here that stands, if not quite at the same level, then at least within spitting distance of his more famous roles with Scorsese. If Branagh doesn’t quite match him, well, it’s a pretty damn hard performance to quite match up to.

No, this film is not perfect. In his efforts to capture the novel, he has still been forced to cut out parts of it for time and pacing reasons. Still, it is a powerfully moving film, and one that actually had me getting a little weepy-eyed at the painful climax because I revert into a ten year old girl when I watch movies. This is something everyone should see. And read the book when you’re done, if you’re one of those sad few who haven’t done so yet.

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Transylvania 6-5000

This is not going to be an easy one to review, since there’s not much to really say about it. It’s a horror comedy made specifically for children, and it succeeds on that level in that its pleasant enough all the way through, with some good moments of humor scattered here and there. All quite pleasant enough, really.

The film stars Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr. as they get assigned by their newspaper editor to go to Transylvania to check out a story about the possible existence of Frankenstein’s monster (simply referred to as Frankenstein throughout the film, in a seemingly intentional effort to confuse children when they go about reading the novel). If this seems like an odd subject for two newsmen to be assigned, it may be helpful to note that their editor’s office has front pages strung up around the walls with headlines like “I WAS DEAD FOR A WEEK AND LIKED IT”, just so we fully get that the paper is verging on Weekly World News territory (or at least New York Post territory). Once they arrive in Transylvania, it becomes a standard Abbott & Costello routine, with them running into a number of comic stalwarts in their investigation (Jeffrey Jones as the town mayor/hotel owner, Michael Richards as the hotel’s butler, etc.), all of whom sound like they came by their vaguely Eastern European accents completely independent of each other. What they eventually uncover I will not reveal, except to say that the film offers up a curious moral value, in openly professing that we should not judge people by their looks, while simultaneously having most of the villainously ugly characters show that they aren’t really ugly physically anymore at all, giving us a wee bit of a double standard. Given how many films I’ve seen that glorify violence while also paying lip service to how violence is wrong, I guess it’s forgivable, but it’s still a bit jarring to see the condemnation of superficiality and everyone’s transformation into beautiful, or at least non-hideous, people happening on screen at the same time.

It’s a minor point really, compared to the main problem plaguing the film, which is that the movie is nothing but fluff. It’s pleasant enough to watch, to be sure: Goldblum and Begley work well together and have some pretty good comic timing, and the parade of guest stars all do their jobs well. The film just doesn’t take things to the next level, to take things from decent to something really memorable, as previous horror comedies like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein or Young Frankenstein, the clear spiritual successors to this film, managed, nor does it really succeed on just the level of a children’s horror movie, as the Monster Squad does, or the unrepentantly cheesy Silver Bullet does. It’s a thoroughly forgettable film all around, not really worth your money.

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Witchfinder General

This movie was a chore to get through. I’ve long heard of its semi-legendary status among horror movies as one of the most extreme 60s horrors out there, and with Vincent Price leading the picture I figured how could it go wrong, right? So of course when it came out on DVD this month for the first time ever I figured I just had to snatch it up. I am a damn fool.

One would think that with Vincent Price’s presence throughout, it would at least achieve some level of gallows humor to the proceedings, if nothing else, but no. What we have instead is Price and his cronies torturing people under the pretense of rooting out witches, and then killing them. Then he moves on to a new victim and repeats the process. There’s some love angle thrown in to give us someone to root for against him, but it’s really not anything amazing, certainly not enough to make up for the film’s overall meanness.

Probably the biggest problem with it was its rampant misogyny. The female in the love angle (and the only female in general of any major importance, except perhaps for the one accused witch who begs Price to spare her because she’s with child, before everyone laughs at her and kills her anyway) offers up her body to Price to save her uncle’s life, is later raped by Price’s second in command while he’s away in another town, has her husband killed anyway, is later tortured, and at no point does she ever managed to get utilized as anything beyond an object for men to fight over or abuse. This is including her husband, who kindly rushes off to kill Price and avenge her honor, but who we never truly see treating her as anything beyond something he wants and doesn’t want others to have. It’s rather typical of the film that it ends with her screaming.

This is just a bad movie all around. While yes, Price does do some decent acting (though not as good as his normal effort; perhaps even he felt a bit uncomfortable making this) and the film looks good, but that hardly does anything to save a film that is so poisoned at its core. This is not vile in the good way that From Beyond was, this is just repugnant and hateful, and its makers should all be told they’re bad people every day for the rest of their lives.

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From Beyond

And my curious need to turn this blog into a Jeffrey Combs fansite continues on with this film, reuniting him with director Stuart Gordon, after their successful pairing with the cult classic Re-Animator the year prior. If Re-Animator was a tad over the top, to put it mildly, this is just completely frenzied.

Let me explain the opening scene, just to show you what I mean. We open with Combs working on a machine straight out of a science fiction nerdfest, with bulky, 70s style computers lining the walls and an oversized machine in the center with a big glowing ball and unnecessarily large tuning forks on the top, complete with a big fuckass flip switch like you’d see in the old Frankenstein movies. Combs flips the switch and turns the machine on, and we’re instantly enmeshed in a pinkish purple glow, at which point a flying worm thing suddenly appears and bites him. He gets his boss, Dr. Pretorius, to share in the delight at their experiment finally working, only to have the machine begin to spin out of control. As Combs checks the machine and ominously warns his boss, “Edward…it’s running itself!”, a neighbor notices the loud noises and flashing lights coming from the room and calls the police, who in proper fashion arrive in time to arrest Combs, but not in time to keep Pretorius from getting his head bitten off by a monster From Beyond *thunderclap*. If the movie doesn’t quite manage to maintain that level of franticness quite all the way through the entire film, it’s only because no director save Billy Wilder could accomplish such a feat.

To steal a line from Mel Brooks, this film rises below vulgarity. The monsters are all dripping pink goo to ensure that extra bit of disgustingness, the machine is found to stimulate sexual urges just to give things that extra bit of kink (and to provide an excuse for a cute psychiatrist to dress up in leather bondage attire), and one character, changed by overexposure to the Resonator, develops a taste for eating people’s brains out through their eye sockets. It is trashy, filthy, sleazy, and just pure magic. This is everything a person could possibly want in a horror movie. If you don’t enjoy this film, then I question the wisdom of your reading of this blog.

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Scarecrows

This films plays like its been cobbled together from a number of other films. The opening scenes, with a paramilitary group stealing 3.5 million dollars from the army, has the look and feel of John Carpenter’s classic Assault on Precinct 13. Once we move ahead to the shack out in the woods, they start getting attacked by scarecrows that look like the decayed, nasty zombies you’d see in Italian horror movies, but who go around killing everyone as though they were standard slasher villains.

While there are moments where the film manages to achieve a nice tone, but the constant switcheroos of how the movie plays keeps undermining that effort, and the acting does not help in any way. Put simply, the girl playing Kelly, who I guess we’re supposed to be rooting for since she’s a kidnapping victim while the rest of the cast are her kidnappers (except for her dad, but he dies right away so he doesn’t count), is a terrible actress, and she brings down any scene she has lines in. She manages no range at all beyond wide eyed panic, which starts to grate on the nerves so quickly you begin to actively want them to throw her to the killer scarecrows just to be done with her. This is not to say that the rest of the cast is much better, as they aren’t, but compared to her they may as well be part of a professional Shakespearean troupe.

There are a couple more major flaws with the film, like how everyone is so beyond stupid that, even after the scarecrows are found to be openly tossing bait on the ground to lure people over to be killed, everyone still goes rushing after whatever bait they drop, over and over and over again, or the fact that it takes them two thirds of the film before the characters finally figure out that the scarecrows are killing everyone (to be fair, given that the scarecrows are apparently fast enough that they can steal the engine out of a car that’s in motion, they may have been a bit more capable of covering their tracks than the average horror monsters). It’s just a pretty lame movie all around, don’t check it out.

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Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and The Heart of the World

If Archangel was kind of out there for film in general, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is rather out there even for Maddin. The other feature length film of his in the Guy Maddin collection, it has him tossing aside all of his normal visual language in favor of a completely new bag of tricks.

It’s the only one of his films I’ve seen that’s in color, for one, and instead of using all his normal visual tricks to give it the feel of an old silent film, he instead chooses to make it rather hazy and dreamlike. The film is fuzzy around the edges; there’s a golden glow surrounding everything for most of the film, keeping everything seeming not quite real, but more like a nostalgic memory of a time gone by that never actually quite existed. It works well with the characters themselves, given that they’re playing mythological people that live inside of trees and who dress like they’re in some Renaissance era play (or perhaps the Russian ballet would be more apropos, given how they occasionally move to music).

I shan’t reveal what comes at the end, except to say that when twilight finally comes, and the golden haze is exchanged for the more sinister purple glow of night, the film loses none of its visual power. And frankly, even if it weren’t quite up to par, it’s the only thing I’ve seen with Shelley Duvall in it since 1987’s Roxanne. She could use the extra bit of change from the royalties here, don’t you think?

As you may have gleaned from the title, this review’s going to be a bit of a two-fer, as, in addition to Archangel and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, there’s also the delightful six minute short The Heart of the World in this collection. It was made for the 2000 Toronto Film Festival and had a number of attending critics claiming it was the best film they saw there, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a frantically paced silent science fiction romance, plowing along so swiftly that I gave up even the pretense of taking notes for it after about the half-minute mark. It’s so visually dazzling and funny that, even though it’s a mere six minutes long, it stands as the single greatest thing in this collection, and is one of the most entertaining short films I’ve ever watched. This collection is worth checking out just for it.

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Archangel

This one’s going to be a hard one to critique. If you’ve never seen a Guy Maddin film before, I have no idea how exactly to convey what it’s like to watch one of his films. Imagine a modern update of silent cinema, with sound effects and spoken dialogue, but still utilizing the visual language of pre-sound cinema, sucking us into a thoroughly absorbing, dreamlike world that looks almost, but not quite completely unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

The plot isn’t an entirely sturdy piece of work, and it is not intended to be. The film, set in the fictional town of Archangel in northern Russia, begins by following a series of vignettes about the townfolk before leading to a scene of battle that perfectly evokes the feeling of silent war movies (it’s set three months after the end of the Great War, but nobody had yet gotten around to informing the town). It’s mostly there to provide Maddin with the opportunity to show off his great skill at crafting great visual images, as well as showing off his great wit. For instance, during a war pageant, a man playing the role of a heroic Russian soldier announces “We’ll beat the Huns with our guns, and we’ll make the Kaiser roll!”, which gets enough applause that he feels foolishly confident enough to say it again in the sad hopes of getting another applause break. One noticeable difference from real silent films from days of yore are the brief moments of sudden violence; this is only the second film I’ve yet seen where a man strangles another with the first’s intestines (the other, of course, being Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky).

It’s not one of Maddin’s best films, of course. It was a very early effort by him, being only his second feature length film, and he hadn’t really perfected his signature style, or really learned how to go all out on the visuals and humor. Still, it’s well worth watching, and is certainly better than at least half the films I review here. Go hunt it down.

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Heroes Season 1

It’s been interesting reading the general fan reaction to this show when it first started airing. People seemed to be of fairly equal amounts declaring it to be one of the best shows of the decade, if not all time, or declaring it one of the worst piles of garbage spewed forth from the foul, bilgeous maw of the idiot box. Since the Internet is generally pretty renowned for its refreshing honesty and lack of hyperbolic statements, I was curious as to which camp I would fall under, since clearly there was no room to find it pretty good but not incredible. The episodes (hopefully I’ll be able to avoid overmuch plot summary, despite the plot-heaviness of the series):

Genesis: The series premiere, this had the thankless task of introducing roughly five hundred characters (remember, no hyperbole is to be found online). The episode largely focuses on Dr. Mohinder Suresh and his efforts to validate his father’s theories, and a political candidate (Nathan) and his brother Peter, while the other characters (Niki, Micah, Hiro, Isaac, Simone, Ando, Claire, Zach, and Claire’s adoptive father) mostly get five minutes or less to establish themselves before being shuffled offstage. On of my main pet peeves with this show starts here, also, with an opening and closing voice-over with Mohinder spouting faux philosophical nonsense (he does this to open and close almost every episode, and it’s a little much to get through). Still, it serves its purpose for an intro episode.

Don’t Look Back: We’re introduced to another character named Matt, a telepathic cop whose abilities get him drawn into the search for a super powered serial killer named Sylar, a manhunt that encompasses most of the season. This is a bit of a problem, as Matt is as vanilla a character as they come, and is probably my least favorite of the main characters. His newfound FBI partner who brings him in the search for Sylar, despite looking uncannily similar to Hilary Swank, is also rather bland. The portions of the episode following Niki and her flight from some mobsters and burial of same, and Hiro’s discovery of a pending nuclear disaster, work much better.

One Giant Leap: Claire’s healing powers come in handy here when a member of her school’s football team tries to rape her at a party, and accidentally kills her in the struggle. There’s a bit too much of Matt and his early encounter with Sylar here, but that’s more than made up for by Hiro and his early rescue attempts (and shameless product placement). If they do a spinoff show, it needs to focus on Hiro and Ando.

Collision: So titled because the various plot threads slowly begin to intersect here (and because of a little attempted vehicular homicide on Claire’s part), this one has Niki and Nathan meeting in Vegas, Matt, and HRG (Claire’s stepdad) meeting under rather less than ideal circumstances, and Peter running into a future version of Hiro. The various plot threads of the season really start to pick up steam here, and the show begins to really cook with this episode.

Hiros: Armed with a quest from Future Hiro to rescue the cheerleader, and thus save the world, Peter and Isaac team up to try to locate her and find out how she’s going to be killed. HRG and his silent Haitian partner also indulge in a nice bit of touching creepiness, as they set out to mindwipe Claire’s would-be rapist so that he can’t harm anyone else again. We also get yet another new character in DL, who’s been on the run from the law since escaping prison, but who’s decided now’s the moment to catch up on old times with Niki and Micah. We don’t really get to fully enjoy him until the next episode, though, as he’s more of a cliffhanger moment here.

Better Halves: This one’s all about the plot threads of Hiro/Ando, Claire and her efforts to learn more about herself, and Niki/DL/Micah/Jessica. Hiro and Ando learn the hard way just how difficult it is to be heroes, as they completely choke when faced with their first real danger, Niki discovers her husband was innocent after all, as it was her stronger split personality Jessica that was the real killer, and Claire meets her “bio parents” for the first time. One of the least plot-heavy episodes, this one’s mainly a character building one.

Nothing to Hide: The title here is, of course, ironical, as Claire is trying to hide a video of her surviving death from everyone, Nathan is trying to hide his family secrets while having brunch with some reporters, and Matt gets suspended for hitting a coworker after reading his thoughts. Micah is the only one that really feels he has nothing to hide, being a child, and so reveals some info that he absolutely shouldn’t, because he’s an idiot child. We also get yet another character in Ted the Nuclear Man, who unintentionally killed his entire family through radiation poisoning. Considering the familial interactions some of the other characters here have, he may have gotten off lucky.

Seven Minutes to Midnight: While Matt and Ted bond a bit over having both been abducted by HRG’s group, Mohinder goes back to India to scatter his father’s ashes and have a bunch of flashbacks about his dad like he’s on Lost or something. Hiro also fails to save another person, but this time is determined to use his powers to go back in time to save her. Because that’s how he rolls, yo.

Homecoming: With Hiro still gone, it’s up to Peter and HRG to save Claire from Sylar. Peter does this in the only way he knows how, by almost getting his dumb ass killed because he has no idea what he’s doing. It’s a nice, tense way to finish off the first act of the season.

Six Months Ago: We get to see what happened to Hiro here, as his efforts to go back in time a day to rescue Charlie fail miserably, and he actually goes back six months. We get a lot of backstory here, the biggest of which is seeing Mohinder’s dad trying to contact various super-powered people, and in doing so inadvertently setting Sylar down his path. This episode is one of the weakest in the season for two reasons: one, it shows half the cast finding out about their powers for the first time all at the same time six months before the main story, despite other characters having had powers decades prior, and two, it shows the writers being thoroughly unequipped to handle time travel stories, and so they construct clumsy artificial rules around Hiro’s abilities so that they don’t have to deal with any of his stories getting too out there. Case in point: here we learn that he’s somehow physically unable to change the past, as despite spending a few months with Charlie (and learning how to speak English from her), he’s warped back to the present weeks before her death, and just writes it off as something he’s not meant to be able to do. It’s a really forced and lame way to weaken Hiro’s powers, and if this wasn’t bad enough, they do it again later in the season.

Fallout: We finally get back to deal with what happened at Homecoming, as Claire tells her father about herself, Matt and his partner interrogate Peter, and attempt to question Claire and her dad. Claire also learns for the first time just how creepy her stepfather is, as he goes to cover up the situation before it can spread. We also close on a major plot element of the season, as Peter has a prophetic dream in which he learns just how the nuclear disaster that destroys the city occurs: he blows up.

Godsend: Another good episode, this one has more of the Heroes meeting up, Claire getting some reshoots done to counter the effects of her father, and Hiro and Ando go on a quest to retrieve an ancient samurai sword to properly channel Hiro’ power and save the world with. Also, Ted the Nuclear Man returns, which is always good for a laugh, and Peter finds a new Hero. Because, y’know, not cluttered enough yet.

The Fix: A lot of poor solutions to various problems are attempted here, as Nathan and Mohinder team up to try to find a cure for Peter’s condition, Micah uses his powers in a rather unscrupulous way to help with his family’s money troubles, and Hiro’s dad (George Takei) tries to get Hiro and Ando to return home and avoid this life of herodom.

Distractions: There’s two main reasons I like this episode – it’s got a nice bit of training, as Claude tries to teach Peter how to properly wield his powers, in the hopes that he then won’t blow up and kill everyone, and Sylar makes his grand escape from HRG’s company and immediately rushes off to menace HRG’s family. I’ve been neglecting Niki, DL, and Micah’s storyline, as I wasn’t really too into them (perhaps because they don’t start connecting with everyone else until the last couple episodes), so let me add that Jessica has fully taken over Niki’s body, and Linderman (more on him later) gets her released from prison. We also find out who Claire’s birth father is, and it shouldn’t be too much of a shock that it’s Nathan, since he slept around behind his wife’s back once already this season.

Run!: Hiro and Ando get back to Vegas to get the sword from Linderman, and Ando decides to take up the worst possible charity case along the way and nearly gets them both killed. Jessica finally gets to interact with one of the other Heroes, as she’s assigned by Linderman to kill a man that’s hired Matt as his bodyguard. Matt, of course, due to his intensely lame nature, completely fails as a guard, despite being able to read her thoughts and figure out exactly where she’s looking for them at any moment. Completely rubbish hero. Also, Mohinder, trying to finish his father’s work, begins tracking down other superpowered individuals, only to meet Sylar, who suggests they team up to find the others that much faster.

Unexpected: Ted gets recruited by a woman whose brain emits Wi-Fi, which is as thoroughly nerdy a power as one could possibly have. Claire’s mom meets with tragedy, after years of memory removal, and Hiro’s journey takes another awesome turn, as he comes face to face with a surprise cameo by Stan Lee. The episode ends in theoretical tragedy, as Peter and Isaac get into a big fight, during which another character that I never liked is shot to death. C’est la vie.

Company Man: The big episode revealing HRG’s backstory, where we really don’t get to learn that much. Apparently he started out with the company partnered up with Claude, he and Hiro’s dad are colleagues, and he’s been hiding Claire’s abilities so that she wouldn’t be taken in by the company. Beyond that, total mystery man still. We also get to see, in the present day, why it’s not necessarily a good idea to shoot a man that’s basically a walking nuclear reactor, and after Claire saves the day and shows everyone what she can do, it’s up to HRG and the Haitian to spirit her away so the company can’t have her. The bits in the present day were really good, but the backstory bits, as is par for the show, were really a bit clumsy and didn’t serve to accomplish much.

Parasite: Nathan’s true dealings with Linderman are revealed, and Mohinder shows he’s not completely retarded after all, drugging Sylar and tying him up. A new character shows up in Candice the illusionist to help Isaac cover up the body. Also, after hearing his name a dozen or more times every episode, we finally get to meet Linderman, and they pulled out all the stops and got Malcolm McDowell to play him. That’s even better than when Dennis Hopper showed up in 24.

.07%: According to Linderman, that’s the amount of the world population that will die in the nuclear explosion, a perfectly acceptable loss if it will rally humanity together. HRG, Matt, and Ted all try to break out of prison together, in what is my favorite subplot of Matt’s the entire season (probably because of his close proximity to two characters I love), Peter gives Sylar his first real challenge before getting his as kicked, and another character, this one not exactly unexpected, dies. Hiro also screws up his time travel again, this time taking Ando with him five years into the future. A great episode all around.

Five Years Gone: Another time travel episode, as Hiro and Ando team up with Future Hiro to try to save the past. This one suffers from the same problem as the last time travel episode, in that the writers are afraid to do anything too wild or out there, so they just settle for making the future into a nightmare Bush Administration parable, with Matt heading up a division of Homeland Security charged with hunting down “terrorists” (anyone with super powers), under the command of the villainous President Nathan and the Linderman Act. Hiro’s my favorite character in the series, but they really do seem like they’re on a concentrated mission to make any episode primarily about him and his powers crap.

The Hard Part: Back in the present, and armed with a comic by Isaac showing how to defeat Sylar, Hiro vows to put an end to the danger facing New York City. Peter also learns about Ted from Claire, and figures out how he's going to go nuclear. Meanwhile, Sylar, now with precognitive abilities, is terrified he’s going to be the one to go nuclear and kill a bunch of innocent people (as opposed to the merely quasi-innocent people he’s been killing all this time), and goes to his mom for advice, only to meet with tragedy. Hiro’s initial effort to kill Sylar ends poorly, with his hard-won sword getting broken in two, much like his self-confidence. Poor guy, you kinda just want to tousle his hair and say “Good try, man”.

Landslide: Linderman gets Micah to use his computer powers to get the electronic voting machines to elect Nathan in a landslide victory (remember, no paper trail equals evil conservative villainy), and all the characters finally make their way to New York for the big predicted throwdown in Kirby Plaza. The lesser villains start getting taken down now to clear the way for Sylar, as HRG takes down his old boss, and Jessica and DL kill off Linderman. It’s not all fun and games, though, as my hero, Ted the Nuclear Man, gets killed by Sylar, who’s now evidently okay with wiping out the city.

How to Stop an Exploding Man: Everyone finally gets tied together, as they all meet in Kirby Plaza for the late night showdown against Sylar. Each man gets to take him on as per their own abilities (Matt, showing his own level of abilities, tries to shoot Sylar, only to have his bullets come back at him and gets taken down without accomplishing anything, much like in the rest of the season). We also learn that apparently every older person on the planet is in on this grand conspiracy, as Simone’s dad that died before the show even started was apparently in on things too. Nathan makes good by his brother and saves the day at the end, showing everyone he’s not the villainous politician type everyone had come to believe he was. It’s a good resolution, while leaving quite a few plot threads open, in the grand serial storytelling fashion.

Overall: This was a fairly enjoyable season, and I’m looking forward to the next. That is not to say, however, that there are not some glaring problems that need to be corrected. The first is the lame voice-overs that open and close the episodes that do nothing at all. The next, and also easily correctable, is how late in the season they began reusing material from the episode prior to start off the new show. That is incredibly lazy, and needs to be stopped. I also have one nitpick, and that is that, for a show that’s all about people developing superpowers, the show doesn’t really seem to want to use them all that often. The big fights between super powered individuals tend to only go on for a minute or two at a shot, and in between is just a lot of talking and angst. Even a character that enjoys using his powers, Hiro, is stuck spending half the season unable to use them for no discernible reason, beyond, presumably, that Sylar would be stopped too easily otherwise.

That’s not to say that this is all bad; as I said, it does a good job at developing the characters (for the most part – Matt still blows), and it knows how to drag out a mystery while still knowing when to finally pull the trigger on it, unlike Lost. It’s a pretty fun show, you should go check it out.

Also, one formal request to the show's creators for season 2: Given that you already had a couple big Star Trek cameos in George Takei and Malcolm McDowell, would it be too much to request the appearance of Jeffrey Combs for this new season?

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Short Night of the Glass Dolls

We turn a new corner on this blog, as we have reached the final film in the Giallo Collection with this. This one was placed last in my box set most likely at random by whoever was stuffing the cardboard case with the individual DVD cases, but I choose to believe they were placed in an intentional order so that this could be the coda to the whole experience.

The film feels like a proper ending to the “series”, at least, as it’s got by far the most callbacks to other films. First and foremost, it’s by the same writer-director as Who Saw Her Die? (Aldo Lado) and, like that film, also features a score by Ennio Morricone, though this one is admittedly not as good. Further, its plot is kind of a mashing together of Johnny Got His Gun and that episode of the Twilight Zone where a guy is paralyzed but conscious and has to find a way to convince the doctors that he’s not really dead before they start an autopsy. You may have guessed by now what the film’s plot is. I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say that it somehow involves a guy who is paralyzed but conscious and has to find a way to convince the doctors that he’s not really dead before they start an autopsy.

Most of the film is told in flashback, however, with him remembering the days leading up to his unfortunate condition, where he meets a girl and, in true giallo fashion, she suddenly disappears and he takes it upon himself to lead the search for her after the police show their normal level of uselessness. It’s not exactly difficult to figure out the various twists and turns of the plot even without factoring in how cobbled together from spare parts this film is, and I can’t claim the visual feel of the movie is anything but a bit of a step down from the other three films (You never really notice how visually necessary Venice is until you can no longer look at it, you know?). I suppose its biggest weakness is simply that it comes after three films that were all better movies than it, making it even more difficult than it otherwise would have been not to notice how second rate it is. It doesn’t even manage to go entertainingly over the top when it should to salvage the whole operation, it just sort of plods along at its own meandering pace, never really getting the voom needed in a giallo. I made fun of the Bloodstained Shadow yesterday, but that was at least entertainingly bad, this one’s just…dull. It so does not live up to its fairly interesting name. Don’t check it out when you’re watching the others.

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The Bloodstained Shadow

This is a much more standard, and quite coincidentally much less good, giallo than our last entry, which is a bit of a shame because the back of the DVD helpfully informs me that this film contains one of the final scores by the legendary Italian rock band Goblin, and anyone familiar with Italian horror movies would not want their talents wasted on a weak film. Unfortunately, the band seems to have somewhat phoned things in for this film, much like everyone else.

The plot concerns a professor returning to his old hometown to visit his priest brother just as a series of murders begins rocking the small community. Reminding them of murders that happened in their childhoods, the two begin to investigate the murders in the hopes of finding and stopping the killer. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, in a movie like this, you generally actually would like the standard giallo cliché of having about a dozen or so characters that could conceivably be the actual killer, leaving you to try to guess which one it might turn out to be. Here, though, your options are a tad more limited, as both brothers act dangerously insane from the first time you meet them up until the end, where *SPOILER one of them is revealed to be the killer. When one of your main characters makes his first appearance by ranting about how sinful and evil everyone in town is, and the other main character is constantly having mental attacks and flashbacks to a childhood murder, you’re not really going to cast the widest net you could in search of who the killer might be.

After praising it yesterday, I’m going to staunchly ignore that this film seems to have also been filmed in Venice, except to note that the nice location shots are indeed the primary appeal of this film. There’s not too much else to recommend, really. What can I say, into each box set a little crap must fall.

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Who Saw Her Die?

I am rather baffled as to how this got included in a box set of giallo films, as it bears only the most superficial similarities to them. There are no models to be had in this film, and a depressing lack of nudity as well. Indeed, it plays much closer to Don’t Look Now than it does to the Case of the Bloody Iris, and not least because it’s set in Venice and involves an English speaking actor (George Lazenby, still recovering from being thrown to the wolves as the replacement for Connery in the Bond franchise) coping with the death of his daughter.

I trust mentioning his daughter died isn’t spoiling anything, since it’s kind of the entire premise of the film (indeed, the title of the film does sort of mention it in passing). Indeed, one of the weirdest moments of the entire movie comes when her body is discovered floating in a canal, and we see a group of rubberneckers, most looking completely bored, with a few actively trying to suppress giggles. I can only conclude from this that Italians are heartless monsters and should have been wiped off the map 60 years ago, but I guess the beauty of film is that you can all draw your own, possibly different and thus less correct, conclusions about this.

So yes, as I was saying, Lazenby is a Venisian sculptor (I got that from the back of the DVD case, as if they ever mentioned him sculpting I must have missed it) whose daughter is murdered, and after the kind of typical police incompetence one generally gets whenever a murder is committed, he takes it upon himself to hunt the killer down. This involves him visiting abandoned buildings that, if you saw them, you would not for a moment believe a murder had never taken place there. He also begins assembling the required group of suspects and witnesses, though in a way that’s unsubtle enough to tip off the killer and get many of his witnesses and suspects killed (one effective scene has him stumbling across a freshly strangled witness, but is unable to catch the fleeing killer due to the crowd assuming he himself was the killer trying to flee).

It all ends with a fairly nice climax and – shock of shocks – a killer that actually kind of makes sense, rather than just a character chosen at random, another sign that this doesn’t fit properly in the Giallo Collection. All in all, though, it’s a pretty damn good thriller. The use of Venice as an almost living entity in this film helps it a lot too; I’ve yet to see a film set in Venice that didn’t look amazing (the location was also the main appeal of the somewhat overrated Don’t Look Now). Furthermore, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film does not exist, so hush. So far this collection has been two for two – let’s hope it continues.

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The Case of the Bloody Iris

This was the first film in a box set called the Giallo Collection, which I picked up because, well, giallos are totally awesome. For those not in the know, giallos (I think the proper plural is actually gialli, but fie on that) are a sub-genre of Italian film that were fairly prominent in the 70s, and involved models, murders, models being murdered, gratuitous nudity, fairly nonsensical stories, and a mystery killer that almost always seems chosen completely at random from the cast. A more perfect genre of film I cannot imagine.

This one manages to fit into every last one of the criteria above, with a killer stalking beautiful women at a lavish high-rise apartment, a laundry list of suspects, each more outlandish and over the top than the last (an architect with a crippling fear of blood, a hideously deformed son of an elderly neighbor, etc.), and a cop that decides the best way to flush out the killer would be to use the new tenants as bait, and to hell with their safety.

I know I’m making this sound like a terrible film, but it really is quite entertaining in its own way. It moves at a fairly fast clip, there’s not a single one of those damnable “character developing” scenes that does nothing for us but slow the film down, there’s just tits, chase scenes, and murders left and right, and god bless Italy for it. There may only be a certain type of crowd that would like this kind of movie, and they already know who they are, and frankly, there should be more of them in existence. I can only hope the other three movies in this collection are just as good.

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El Ataud del Vampiro

A couple changes to the blog beginning with this review. First, you’ll notice that I’ve learned how to copy and paste code off of other sites in order to hide the bulk of the blog from view short of clicking on a link. This is to keep a proper level of order to the proceedings, and to keep the main page from looking so damned thickly-choked with text. Additionally, from now on each review will be followed by a link for you to buy the movie on Amazon, so you can all share in my enjoyment or lack thereof. Happy now? Great, then let’s get on with the review.

This film is the sequel to yesterday’s El Vampiro, which you may have guessed, and they came as a two-fer from Casanegra. While the original had its fair share of flaws, which you may recall from my review in which I cheerfully listed them, it did manage to build up a solid mood with a keen visual sense, and when it began to get a little silly, as vampire movies generally tend to, the filmmakers were unafraid to just go completely over the top ridiculous with it, and I can rather admire that. Its sequel, which assembles most of the cast from the original film, including the villainous count, back from the dead after a foolish doctor decides to steal his corpse to perform experiments on, only to have a thief accidentally remove the stake from his heart, freeing him to theoretically wreak havoc on those who had opposed him.

There are two main problems with all this, and they are the complete absence of the two things I liked about the original. There’s no creepy, moody visuals; most of the film’s set in a generic looking hospital set, leaving me with nothing to work with. It also never really manages, or even attempts, to go over the top with anything, making sure the whole film is very paint by numbers. I can’t even get worked up about it being bad, it’s just generic and lifeless. Now, having said that, feel free to use the link below and buy five copies of it and its predecessor. Help feed my movie addiction, people!

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El Vampiro

This film had a pretty big legacy to live up to. It’s a DVD release by Casanegra, the same company that released such other classic Mexican horror movies as The Black Pit of Dr. M, Curse of the Crying Woman, and the Witch’s Mirror, all of which kicked so much ass that one viewing will literally cause your ass to explode. Needless to say, El Vampiro had its work cut out for it. It also had an additional hurdle to overcome, in that I generally dislike vampire movies. Filmmakers usually do not get this when it comes to vampire films, but I want my movie monsters to be scary rather than sexy. This film gets it half right: while the two vampires featured in this movie are in no way scary, they are at the very least unsexy, and I can get behind that.

The film does have its fair share of troubles beyond that, though, such as the amazingly clumsy and distracting visual effects. While most of the film’s visuals manage to convey a genuinely creepy mood, the teleporting nature of the vampires, accomplished by literally just stopping the camera and starting it up again once one of the vampires is in front of the camera, is so awkward that it dragged me out of the film each time. The vampires themselves are also rather goofy in the end. I don’t know how I was really expecting the film’s big climactic struggle between the courageous doctor and the villainous count to play out, but I was certainly not expecting the vampire to panic at the sight of the doctor and decide to sword fight him. Nor was I expecting the way the other vampire was dealt with, which shan’t be revealed here except to say that it was about as silly a way of stopping a vampire as a person could conceivably think of. No, sillier than that.

That said, there are some things I could recommend about this. Outside of the frankly sad attempt at special effects, the overall visual feel of the film is very effective, and I just can’t find it in my heart to dislike a movie that has people discovering secret passageways. Overall, though, it’s definitely the weakest of the Casanegra films that I’ve seen thus far, and you should only check it out if you’re really big on atmospheric horror movies.

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Hamlet

I have a small confession to make: I have never actually read Hamlet. I had intended to a couple years ago, but whilst perusing Act I Scene I I got distracted by something shiny and never got around to finishing it. This is part of the reason why I was so interested in seeing Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation, now on DVD uncut for the first time. It’s widely heralded as one of the best Shakespearean films of all time, so it seemed like a good way to familiarize myself with the story.

Let’s get it out of the way here: this is a very, very lengthy film. Hamlet was Shakespeare’s longest play, and Branagh’s method of dealing with this length was to film everything and trust that he could entice an intelligent enough audience that would keep from being bored. As a result, the film is four hours long, though for the most part it moves amazingly swiftly. This is largely due to the impressive array of actors held together by the lynchpin that is Branagh’s performance in the title role, spitting out most of his lines as though he hoped to stab everyone else with his words. It should then come as little surprise that the only part of the film that does drag is when Hamlet leaves for England and we are bereft of his presence for a good half hour, though his continued beautiful directing helps to make up for the loss.

While I still would have to say Macbeth remains my favorite Shakespearean play (a shocking admission, given the nature of this blog), this film definitely resides at the same level as Polanski’s Macbeth, which up to now had been my favorite Shakespearean film. You owe it to yourself to seek this film out. I personally am now eagerly awaiting the release of his adaptation of As You Like It, Shakespeare’s much-ignored comedy that I rather love.

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The Frighteners

This is the first time I’ve seen the Frighteners since it was in theaters, so there was some worry that I’d been remembering it unnecessarily fondly due to me being an idiot teenager that loved almost anything back then. As it turns out, while my memory had been overrating it just a tad, it does hold up fairly well.

Let’s start with the bad. For some reason, Peter Jackson’s attempt at blending the humor and horror together never quite clicks as well as, say, the Re-Animator movies, or even Jackson’s own prior work. The jokes don’t extend far enough, really, and are all but forgotten entirely when it comes time for the climax. This is, of course, with the notable exception of the seemingly unstoppable Mr. Jeffrey Combs, who completely steals every scene he appears in. Him aside, though, the movie never quite gets where it needs to be.

This is not to say that it’s outright bad, though. It’s certainly pleasant enough. The acting works pretty well, the pace is pretty good, the special effects are great considering when it was made, it’s all very decently done in general, it just doesn’t manage to take things to the next level. It’s one of Peter Jackson’s weakest films, but it’s still a pleasant enough way to kill two hours if you’ve got the time on your hands. If for no other reason, it should be watched at least once just to see Combs going so ridiculously far over the top that one wonders if he’s ever going to find his way back down.

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Shock

This is a rather curious film. Theoretically it’s Italian horror master Mario Bava’s final movie, though most of the directing was actually left to his son Lamberto, as a means of getting his son’s career a jump start before the elder died. I’m sure this was considered quite nice and wonderful for the Bava family, but since Lamberto was not even a third as good a director as his father was, it is not quite so nice and wonderful for us.

There’s not really anything wrong with the film that couldn’t have been fixed by getting rid of the two main characters. It’s a mother-son combo with a dark past and a deceased ex-husband that now seems to be haunting them in their new home. The mother is prone to hysterics and madness, and the son is the sort of precocious lad that Hollywood bewilderingly thought was just adorable and vital to any number of films back in the day, and whenever I see one of those old movies I spend the whole time on edge and wanting to strangle the stupid little brat. Remember when you first watched the Sound of Music, and all the little children lined up to introduce themselves and give a cutesy one liner? “Hi, I’m Dieter, and I’m incorrigible!” Yeah, I sat through that little abortion of a film too. Now try to imagine sitting through a feature length film version of that scene, with a child misbehaving adorably, having cute little fits, talking to nobody all sweetly, and generally just making you wish the technology existed to enter into films so that you could keep rewatching the movie over and over again, finding a new way to kill the little bastard off each and every time.

Had Mario actually done the directing, we could have at least got some nice spooky scenery and music to partially make up for it. Unfortunately, Lamberto lacks a trait his father had that I would refer to as “talent”, and so we get nothing but that little shit making me punch my dog in rage for an hour and a half. There’s no real plot to speak of, either, to at least manage some kind of pacing. It’s just the son trying to be all adorably spooky and possessed pretty much from the start, and the mother going crazy, until the end of the film. I’m going to spoil the ending here too, and mention that the son tragically lives, and the film ends with the camera on him. I almost feel bad for having criticized the Halloween remake as much as I did, as for all of its faults it at least didn’t have an awful child mucking up the works all the way through. Only watch this film if you want to do an endurance test to see just how much pain you can survive before you just give up entirely.

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Beyond Re-Animator

As promised, here’s the third (and currently final, though a fourth has been announced) Re-Animator film, and it’s just about as good as the second one. We open at a pleasant suburban home, whose gentle tranquility is soon shattered by the arrival of a re-animated corpse that quickly kills a teenage girl living there while her younger brother watches on in horror, then watches as we cut to the police arresting Dr. Herbert West (once again played to the hilt by Jeffrey Combs) before jumping ahead to his fourteenth year in prison.

The cast quickly assembles itself as much as it needs to. Combs obviously steals the show, as he did in the first two films, but a psychopathic warden played by Simon Andreu gives him a run for his brilliantly overacting money. There’s also the new prison doctor, who of course was the young boy that witnessed his sister being murdered at the beginning, and who now wants to join West in his experiments, and the plucky young reporter chick that’s trying to get a big story to make her career. There’s also the standard hodgepodge of violent and crazy prisoners, and they come into full use in the second half of the film, when a riot breaks out and the dead begin to come back to life (my favorite of the prisoners was a Tommy Chong lookalike that took the opportunity of the riot to swipe some of West’s serum to shoot up with, with some hilariously grotesque results).

Things go from bad to worse, as they always do in these films, and the warden quickly sees the potential in West’s serum to punish prisoners indefinitely, as a mere execution ends their pain far too quickly, and starts killing and reviving everyone so as to torture them further. The bad guys do eventually get punished, of course, as do most of the good guys (it really isn’t safe to be friends with Dr. West), and West makes his escape to delight us all in House of Re-Animator, which won’t be coming soon enough. This series is everything horror movies should be – funny, vulgar, grotesque, and, above all, entertaining. I think the lengthy delays between each film has definitely helped the series, as, unlike with its more famous horror brethren, the filmmakers actually had enough time to properly plan out each one to make them so damned impressive. Go hunt down the entire series, you won’t be disappointed.

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Bride of Re-Animator

I had some trepidations about watching this film, as it’s not only a sequel to a film I greatly enjoy, but a sequel directed by Brian Yuzna, who already had a track record with me for making poor follow-ups to beloved horror movies with Return of the Living Dead 3. Fortunately, he really stepped up his game for this film (and for the third in the series, which I’ll get to tomorrow), making it, if not quite as good as the original, pretty damn close.

Set eight months after the blood-soaked ending to the original film, this reassembles the surviving cast members (and some not-so-much survivors) as Dr. Herbert West (played beautifully by Jeffrey Combs) and Dr. Dan Cain have continued their experiments at bringing the dead back to life. These experiments have taken a rather odd turn, however, as West is now attempting to bring back Cain’s dead girlfriend by way of Frankenstein, assembling a Greatest Hits version of a female body to bring her back in. Complicating this are the still re-animated bodies that West’s nemesis, the likewise re-animated Dr. Hill, revived at the climax of the original film, a returning Dr. Hill himself, still without a body (but not without a way of getting around), and an unstable cop whose dead wife is one of the revived. Along the way, there are a number of great sight gags that one would expect from a Re-Animator film, such as West’s early experiments involving, say, an arm and leg sewn back to back that, when revived, try to show their displeasure, or when he tries to bring back a dead dog, but has to improvise a bit over its missing limb. Or Dr. Hill’s eventual means of mobility despite having long lost his body. Or…but I could go on like this forever.

It’s a really fun movie, all in all. The only complaint I really have with it has nothing to do with the movie itself, but with the rather slapdash DVD. It’s full screen only, and the volume control is fairly poor, with scenes of dialogue irritatingly quiet while other scenes are close to deafening, requiring you to be fairly quick on the trigger with the remote. Still, that grievance aside, it’s a really fun, funny movie, and you should definitely check it out.

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Psycho 4: The Beginning

As promised, here is the sad, uncomfortable finale to the Psycho legacy. It really shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that this one was so much worse than the first three, when it holds the ignominious position of being the only one in the series that was released straight to TV, much like the straight to TV sequel to the Birds that was such a hit.

What’s wrong with this film? Well, I guess I should start with the main premise of it all. You remember in the original film, after Norman was caught? And the film ground to a screeching halt as they over-explained everything for ten minutes? Yeah. Now try to imagine that stretched out for about three quarters of a film, as they try to delve into Norman’s childhood, and over-explain things that really didn’t need to be explained in the first place. Then, just to force an attempt at a thriller-ish conclusion, they tack on some contrived bit where he’s thinking of killing his wife for getting pregnant.

Anthony Perkins is no help in this film, either. He completely phones in his performance, seeming to be fully aware that he was a terrible film, and the other actors (including the Shield’s C.C.H. Pounder) follow his lead, doing everything completely by the numbers. The directing is similarly flat and lifeless, telling this tale as dully and routinely as one could make it. I almost wish it had been outright bad, just to make it somewhat interesting, instead of the crushing tediousness that I got stuck with instead. If you get the three pack (and despite this one, I do still recommend it), stop after Psycho 3.

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Psycho 3

Hot on the heels of being really impressed by Psycho 2, I put this in, hoping the momentum would continue and the series would just keep being awesome all the way through. Well, that was obviously a silly pipe dream, but this one, with Anthony Perkins making his directing debut, still managed to be an entertaining film all the same.

To be sure, much like in Psycho 2, the worst part of the film comes right at the beginning. After the pretty carefully controlled second film I can’t say I was really expecting quite such a ridiculously over the top opening scene as I got here. We start off at a nunnery that has a frenzied nun threatening to plummet to her death while screaming “There is no God!” before accidentally killing a nun that’s trying to save her. After she’s summarily drummed out of the nunnery, she hits the road searching for a purpose and gets a ride from a guy that then tries to rape her in his car. After escaping him, both she and the car’s driver find themselves at the Bates Motel, where the film finally calms the hell down and gets good.

It’s set shortly after the events of the second film, so I can’t really go into too much detail about the plot once Norman gets involved without spoiling parts of that, but outside of the fairly absurd beginning it’s actually pretty involving. In a nice way of moving the series on (something few series in any genre bother to try), the girl tries to commit suicide again, but is rescued by Norman, who then becomes convinced that she is going to be his means of atoning for his past sins. Of course, the would-be rapist driver, now hired on as assistant manager of the hotel, finds out about some of Norman’s secrets, and his attempts at blackmail soon spiral downward and envelop the whole film in tragedy. If the beginning is too over-the-top, the climax manages to find just the right note, with Perkins’ acting and directing abilities finding just the right note to play each scene.

It would not be giving anything away to say that this ends in tragedy, when the first two were fairly tragic as well. Indeed, there is a surprising death in this film that once more echoes one from the original, and that is every bit as surprising and terrible as anything that can be found in the previous films. While I can’t give quite as glowing a recommendation of this as I did the second film, it’s still definitely worth watching, and offers more proof that you should hunt down the three pack of Psychos 2-4. Tomorrow you’ll of course get my review of Psycho 4: the Beginning, where you will learn how NOT to make a proper Psycho film. Until then...

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Psycho 2

I had some rather mixed feelings going into this one. While I had heard some rather good things about it, sequels to horror movies are generally a pretty major step down from the original (assuming, of course, that the original was any good), particularly ones that get made over twenty years after the first. The only reason I got this, in fact, was because of its recent DVD release along with Psycho 3 and 4 in one $11 set. At that kind of price, it could have been four and a half hours of Anthony Perkins watching TV with ominous music playing and it would have been okay.

As it turned out, though, I needn’t have worried. This is one of the rare cases where a sequel winds up being every bit as good as the first one. It’s smart, it manages to play off of the original film without ever repeating it, it has a clever ending; in short it has everything a person could possibly want in a follow-up to a classic. This is despite the rather worrisome beginning, where they replay the shower scene from the original, in the rather dubious concern that there would be a single person in existence that would watch this film without having already seen the original.

The plot follows Norman Bates, freshly cured and out of the sanitarium, as he tries to adjust to life as a free man, while still being plagued by the memories of his mother. Soon, as we are all waiting for, the bodies begin to pile up, and it’s a case of trying to figure out if Norman has slipped back into his old habits, or if family of his earlier victims is now trying to frame him and get him locked up again. It provides for some genuinely tense moments as we see Norman slipping dangerously close to his old dementia, and there’s quality acting from just about everyone in the film, and from Perkins especially. There are also some clever nods to the original, as when there’s another stabbing near the end that plays as a nice twist on the old shower stabbing, and a final summation by the police that cleverly echoes the original summation, while also being completely wrong. I freely admit that most of the films I praise on this blog are great trash and nothing more, but this is actually a great film without any caveats needed. Go get the three pack now, you won’t regret it.

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Dead Man's Shoes

Just for a change of pace, here’s something that’s not connected to a single horror franchise. More than that, though, it’s not even a horror movie at all, despite some small similarities to a slasher film in the way the main character dispatches several of his enemies. I know what you’re thinking, is it even possible for a movie to be good when it’s not a horror film? Well, read on, and be amazed.

The plot is pretty basic, as revenge movies tend to be. After several years in the military, a man (Paddy Considine) has returned home to wreak his revenge upon a gang that systematically abused and eventually caused the death of his younger brother. He does so. The end. With some slight tweaking, this describes the plot of a couple hundred movies, though this one does enact its well-worn story with no small amount of skill. The film wisely keeps mostly to the perspective of the gang members that are scared out of their minds about getting killed by someone that blatantly outclasses them all. His early appearances, showing up at night with a World War 1 era gas mask on for no reason other than to look that extra little bit scary, help this tremendously, as does the fact that some of the earlier deaths happen off-camera, leaving us with naught but the aftermath to worry about.

Not everything works. The flashbacks showing the gang’s abuse of the brother show that, while being assholes, they really weren’t bad enough to warrant being tormented and killed. The ending is also a little wonky, though it does contain a couple nice revelations about Considine’s own feelings towards his kid brother, and about the situation in general. The film also starts off pretty damn slowly, with the gang members just sitting around chatting about nothing memorable until they finally start being attacked. Overall, though, it’s a pretty satisfying film, and you’ll probably enjoy it more than the upcoming Jodie Foster film The Brave One, another film in this genre that I have little confidence in. Go check it out if you’re tired or rewatching all the Death Wish movies.

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