Halloween Spooktacular # 10: Wild Zero

If a study is ever done on what would make the perfect film, the title Wild Zero deserves to be brought up several times. I don’t think I’m overhyping this at all when I say that it is not only the greatest film that has ever been made before, but is the greatest thing in general that has ever, or will ever be created, be it by humans or anything else. Penicillin and the wheel ain’t got shit on this movie.

The film follows around Ace, a teenager who’s desperately trying to become cool, and who wants to find true love. His life changes when he meets his idol Guitar Wolf after a concert, and soon he’s falling in love with a girl that he then has to rescue from a zombie invasion brought about by aliens as the prelude to a possible invasion or something. Soon, the fate of the world rests in the hands of Ace, his new girlfriend Tobio, Guitar Wolf (and band mates Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf), and a few other scattered survivors.

Rock and rolllllllllll!

Let me explain to you just how badass this movie is. At the beginning, Guitar Wolf’s concert is so hardcore that the band members begin spontaneously generating electricity, because they rock so hard (later, at another concert, fire actually leaps out of Guitar Wolf’s microphone because he sings so powerfully). Despite this proof of the power of rock and roll, we get a treacherous villain in the form of the Captain, a promoter with a fondness for drugs, guns, and wearing really short shorts that show off his bulge, who wants to replace rock with sanitized pop bands, a crime so heinous that I think we can all agree that it has led directly to the Iraq war. Later, we are treated to such sights as Guitar Wolf taking down a wave of zombies with guitar picks fired out like shuriken, a Japanese guy with a huge afro that randomly whips out a pair of switchblades to try to rob a gas station, a woman who keeps a gun in her shower with her just in the event of a zombie attack, and Guitar Wolf leaping out of an exploding window and wailing out a power chord on his way to the ground. I won’t reveal what happens at the climax, but let us just say that it involves a super villain, a transforming guitar, and the alien mother ship, and it is so beyond awesome that it would make Steven Wright start talking like Harry Knowles.

Even with all the action going on, too, the film finds time to give us a handy moral message, as Guitar Wolf tells his rock and roll blood brother Ace that “Love has no borders, nationalities, or genders!” Indeed, this film shows that true love can survive anything, even being turned into a zombie. It is, if admittedly not quite actually the best film I’ve ever seen, then it is damn close to it. If you want to see just a completely incredible film that you’ll find up raving about to all your friends about for weeks afterward, this is the one.

Rating: ****

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Halloween Spooktacular # 9: Uzumaki

Just so you know, even after a second viewing this still ranks as my favorite of all the recent onslaught of J-horror films. A large part of that has to do with its avoidance of the standard type of scares and horrors common to the genre, in favor of making a fairly Lovecraftian horror tale about a town doomed by forces more powerful than anything anyone can deal with.

Set in three chapters (Premonition, Erosion, and Visitation), this shows a small town that comes under the sway of spirals (uzumaki) that slowly begin to take over the entire landscape. At first, only one person seems to be infected, the father of Shuichi, one of the two leads, as he becomes obsessed with seeing spiral patterns everywhere and fills up his home with anything with that pattern on it. Before long, however, it becomes clear that the entire town is being transformed. A dark spiral-shaped cloud covers the sky, with tendrils reaching down into the lake. Classmates begin transforming. A body count starts to accumulate, as people begin sacrificing themselves to the glory of the pattern. It is swiftly clear that Shuichi and his girlfriend Kirie need to get the hell out of Dodge before they’re all taken over as well.

There is nothing creepy or Dark City-ish at all about this picture.

One thing I really enjoyed about this is how it doesn’t make any real effort to explain all this. They do uncover some small clues that give hints as to what exactly is causing this (ancient mirrors being found in Dragonfly Pond), but nothing really substantial is ever unearthed. Like some ancient Lovecraftian elder being, something just awoke and decided to claim everyone in town, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

As long as we’re on the subject of Lovecraft, I should mention that, much like the Re-Animator series, this movie also has a fair amount of humor going for it too. Despite the dark subject matter, it knows that most great horror needs a laugh or two to break the tension, and so plays it just this side of silly. Much like in Exte (another very well done J-horror), it’s a tight balancing act between the scares and laughs, but it manages to pull it off brilliantly.

Rating: ****

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Halloween Spooktacular # 8: Torso

I realize I said that gialli may not hold up perfectly in general upon repeat viewing, but this one actually managed to hold steady at about the same level of ability that I thought it had upon first seeing it. Part of that is no doubt due to how it mostly doesn’t seem to care about the required mystery of who the killer is, in favor of just giving us occasional murder scenes and filling the rest of the film with as many gorgeous women as it can fit in its running time. I for one salute them in their efforts.

The plot mainly concerns a killer who’s been murdering beautiful young women and cutting their bodies up near a university, so four girlfriends decide it’s high time they got out to a villa in the countryside until the killer is caught. Sadly, our heroine potentially knows too much about the killer, so he follows them there and wreaks further havoc. It's not the most elaborate plot, compared to some other gialli, but it serves its purposes well.

For one, it’s got an absolutely fantastic murder scene fairly early on. A woman walks away from a party, and after realizing she’s being followed, runs into a set of woods that are one of the great triumphs of location scouting. It’s one of those patches of woods where, upon seeing it, you’d never for a moment believe a series of murders hadn’t been committed there. There’s also a great bit of tension nearer the end, too, as another character has gotten locked in a room while hiding from the killer; thinking she’s finally safe, she slides a newspaper under the door and tries to knock the key out of the keyhole on the other side of the door onto the paper so she can free herself. We see from outside the key falling just off of the paper, and as she starts to pull it in to retrieve the key, the gloved hand of the killer helpfully places it on the paper so she can greet him.

See, it’s called Torso because he removes them from his victims.

This film is as trashy as they come, so it’s no wonder it was chosen by Tarantino as part of the double bill he showed all the actors in Grindhouse to get them prepared (the other film he showed was Zombie) for their roles. I wasn’t kidding when I said it flooded this movie with beautiful women. This movie has the most stunningly attractive ladies I have ever seen in a giallo, and if they spent any more time unclothed I’d probably have to tag this as porn. As it is, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable sexy thriller, the sort of film movies like Basic Instinct and Jade have aspired to be, but didn’t really match up to. If you’re in the mood for that type of film, this would be a fine choice to check out.

Rating: *** ½

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Halloween Spooktacular # 7: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

I have to admit to some amount of curiosity as to how this movie originally got made. Coming a good twelve years after the original film, director Tobe Hooper finally got around to making a follow-up to his second movie, which itself is one of the most enduringly popular horror movies ever made. While the original was famous as being incredibly scary and realistic, Hooper evidently had a somewhat different vision for the sequel, and instead made it what was, one year before Evil Dead 2, what may well be the first sequel that functions as a full-blown parody of the original.

Everything about this movie is just brilliantly ridiculous. We’re given two main characters; Stitch, a female radio host on a station so inept that they can’t figure out the technology needed to hang up on a caller, and Lefty, a former cop (Dennis Hopper) trying to hunt down the killers responsible for the death of his son in the first film, and who at no point in the entire film seems even the least bit more sane than the cannibalistic family. After a call is recorded on Stitch’s show that seems to include the callers’ murders by chainsaw, Lefty makes a brilliant battle strategy, that seems to have been no more thought out than to have Stitch lure them out by playing the tape of them committing murder constantly on her show, and then after they deal with her, follow them back to their home where he can kill them. Curiously enough, he didn’t actually fill Stitch in on all these details, like the part where instead of coming to the rescue when they arrive at the station, he was actually just going to wait until she was long dead before making his play. It’s a bit of a dick move, I know, but that’s what you get when you trust Dennis Hopper.

The family, as in the first film, is brilliant. There’s Grandpa, who is 135 years old but whose liquid diet keeps him healthy. There’s Cook, the only returning character from the first film, and whose chili is renowned throughout the southwest. Representing the younger generation we also get Chop Top, a hippie with a metal plate on his head who has flashbacks and scratches at the itchy skin on his head with a heated wire hanger, and of course, Leatherface, who in this film finally discovers girls. Their home is also a wonderful bit of overstatement, as they have left the small home they had in the first film in favor of a vast subterranean lair with an unending series of tunnels, pits, and corpses.

Chop Top, Stitch, and Cook, in happier times.

Saying the film is ridiculous is kind of missing the point, as it transcends ridiculousness to the point where it almost turns into high art. Take the scene where Dennis Hopper decides to stockpile weapons for the confrontation. Rather than buying guns and ammunition like a normal vendetta driven madman might, he goes instead to buy three chainsaws, two of which are smaller so that he can double fist them. The shopkeeper is alarmed at first, since Hopper is waving them all over the place like he’s trying to murder imaginary people around him, but still encourages him to test them out on some logs out front before he buys them, and then giggles in delight as Hopper takes the big saw and tries to hack away at the log like it had just been caught sleeping with Hopper’s wife. There is no reason for any of this whatsoever, other than to be awesome.

The rest of the film, while not quite as awesome as that, is still riddled with great moments like that. The climax, in particular, is brilliant, with a number of chainsaw battles and the sad lament that “the small businessman takes it in the ass every time!” It’s as good a follow-up to such a great original as one can feasibly expect to see, and makes a rather inspired double bill. Just make sure to stop after the second one, it all kind of goes downhill from there.

Rating: *** ½

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Halloween Spooktacular # 6: Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural

This one also kind of snuck up on me last Halloween, as I had just ordered it in a mass frenzy of horror movies for no real reason beyond that it came up in a bunch of Amazon’s “Explore Similar Items” lists for movies I liked. From such humble beginnings I unwittingly snagged one of the best unknown horror movies of the 70s.

Almost like a much, much better precursor to Underworld, this film concerns the fate of a girl named Lila as she’s fought over by a pack of vampires, led by the seductive Lemora, and a pack of werewolves, possibly led by Lila’s father. It’s about so much more than that, though, playing almost like a nightmare, as Lila begins to blossom into puberty, and suddenly is thrown into this nightmare world where even the normal humans have become hideous creatures and nothing looks safe. While not quite as effective as The Descent, this also does a great job at using darkness and shadows, to where even a normal house and shed look like something out of some hellish landscape where safety is a dubious prospect at best, even in the daytime.

This movie knows full well how monstrous children are.

I said this looks like a nightmare, but perhaps a dark fairy tale would be more appropriate. Lila almost looks like Alice, if she had gotten stuck in the wrong part of Wonderland, and the story’s simplistic style feels more like a dark fable than anything else. It’s handled extremely effectively, and should appeal to anyone that enjoys reading the non-sanitized versions of Grimm’s fairy tales. This one is a must-see.

Rating: ****

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Halloween Spooktacular # 5: Dust Devil

This is a somewhat lesser known horror movie from the early 90s that I first stumbled upon entirely by accident, happening to notice it mixed in with a bunch of random horror movies in someone’s folder in DC. While I didn’t see it then, it always stuck with me, so I was quite happy when it finally got a DVD release about a year ago.

I’ve long been a big fan of horror movies and westerns, and so have always been eager to see a mixture of the two genres. Sadly, filmmakers themselves tend to disagree with me on this, and so this is the only one I’ve seen that’s actually good. Set in South Africa, it observes a truism to all good horror movies: location is vital. Most of the film is set in the vast expanses of the desert, which, unlike the pleasant and friendly seeming deserts of American westerns, looks harsh and alien and all too eager to kill. The plot concerns the fates of three characters as they slowly entwine around each other: Wendy, a troubled woman that flees her abusive husband and attempts to go westward to the shore, to possibly try to eke out a new life, or to at least end the one she’s got, Joe, an aging policeman that’s trying to strike a delicate balance between solving a series of serial killings while not stepping on the toes of any U.N. officials who want to take over for him, and the Dust Devil himself, a shape shifting demon who feeds on the souls of the suicidal, and who may actually be an ancient African god himself.

The Dust Devil is out on the prowl.

The movie is nice in how it is willing to take its time and build a mood and characters, rather than rushing into things. We’re given the time to actually grow to care about and empathize with our cast, even the Dust Devil himself, and we’re given enough nuggets of information on how he operates and what it would take to stop him that we start to get an idea of how its going to all play out, but do we necessarily want it to play out that way? The film keeps wisely ambiguous as to just how villainous he actually is, and kept me surprised at the end, with the characters arriving at somewhat different endings than I would have thought. I can’t understand how there are so many much more famous bad horror movies out there, while an actual intelligent and well-made one like this languishes in obscurity. It’s a damned travesty, is what it is. You should frankly all be embarrassed to not have known about this before now.

Rating: *** ½

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Halloween Spooktacular # 4: Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary

This is a wonderful version of the classic Dracula tale, and may be second only to Werner Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu in my mind. This is another film by Guy Maddin, maverick Canadian director whose every film looks completely different from anything else that has ever been filmed. Here he makes a silent film adaptation of the ballet based on Dracula, and uses all of the tricks he’s learned from a youth spent studying silent movies and trying to figure out new ways to wield the camera based off of them.

Part of his efforts to play with the visual feel of the film involves him calling attention to some of the subtext of the original novel. Bram Stoker got a good deal of mileage out of racial tensions of the time towards eastern Europeans, and so here Maddin updates things a bit by making Dracula an Asian, played by Zhang Wei-Qiang. He further includes an opening of a map of Europe with a black ink-like substance oozing in from the east towards our precious England, with appropriately inter-titles like “FOREIGNERS! FROM THE EAST!!!” Dracula’s wealth, which also got a good deal of mention in the novel, gets the royal treatment here. While the film is mostly in black and white, there are a few splashes of color scattered throughout, particularly when Dracula himself is involved. One of the most notable visuals towards the end is that of a big pile of green money he has villainously hoarded at his castle, stolen from English coffers! The fiend!

It really is a beautiful film.

It’s amazing to watch this and see what a perfect fit silent movies and ballets are with each other. The lavish dances are something to see (particularly Dracula’s dance with Lucy after she arises from the grave), and seem to go fairly naturally with the normal exaggerated acting style common to the silent era. Not only does it fit perfectly with the rest of the film, it matches Maddin’s general over-the-top look and tongue in cheek nature, combining to create just a delight of a film. If it’s not Maddin’s best film, it’s only because The Saddest Music in the World set the bar pretty ridiculously high. You should definitely check this one out.

Rating: *** ½

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Halloween Spooktacular # 3: The Devil Rides Out

Having seen it twice now, this has managed to retain its status as my favorite Hammer film. Unlike most of their horror films, this one’s actually set in the 20th century, and in an even bigger shocker, it stars Christopher Lee as the hero instead of the villain. I had seen over a dozen of his films when I first saw this movie, and this was the first time I had seen him not play a villain. To this day, I’ve only seen him as a good guy in roughly two films, to give you a further idea of how much of a rarity this is.

Savor this, it’s about the only time you’ll ever see him being heroic.

As might be obvious from the title, this is a story of the occult, as Lee discovers that a young friend of his has gotten mixed up with a coven that plans to sacrifice his soul to Satan in a few days. Stealing him away from them, we get an ongoing struggle between Lee’s holy magic, infused with the Lord, and the coven, deriving their dark powers from the Devil, and I must say, the Devil certainly does spend most of the movie looking a good deal more powerful. The head of the coven conjures up a genie to attack them, summons up a choking thick fog to make one of the heroes crash during a tense car chase, and even goes so far as to summon the Angel of Death and the Devil Himself in his mad schemes. It develops into something so over-the-top that even a hint of the actors being in on the joke would have ruined it; thankfully, under Terence Fisher’s skilled direction, it manages to strike a perfect blend of over the top madness without ever lapsing into any goofiness. This is especially impressive when considering that at one point Lee mentions that he has a trump card of powerful white magic that he dares not use because it would alter the space/time continuum.

Even factoring that in, there are some great scenes in this film. The attack by the genie is the first indication Lee’s friend, and we as the audience, get that this coven actually knows what they’re doing, and it’s a great bit of understated danger. The greatest scene, though, comes near the climax, when Lee leads his friends and family into a protective circle to wait out the night, as the coven’s head uses every trick he can think of to lure them outside the circle. This includes having the voice of one of their absent friends calling from outside the house for them to let him in, and summoning a vision of one character’s daughter getting attacked by a giant killer spider. It’s a great game of escalation that’s pulled off wonderfully.

I am quite a fan of the Hammer horror movies, and have seen pretty much all of their major ones, so keep that in mind when I say this is their crowning achievement. If you were ever curious as to what their stuff was like, this would be a perfect place to start. Even better, it works as a nice double feature, coming in a two pack with Rasputin the Mad Monk. That film isn’t as good, but it’s still quite entertaining, and has Lee in his more normal villainous role.

Rating: *** ½

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Halloween Spooktacular # 2: The Descent

Upon my second viewing of this film, I managed to confirm what I had originally suspected: this is one of the best non-comedic horror movies to come out in years, More than that, though, it’s one of the few horror movies I’ve ever seen that I would consider to be genuinely scary and doesn’t just do the standard “Oh look, here’s something jumping out from off-screen while the soundtrack screams at me” nonsense.

This is the second film from director Neil Marshall, whose debut film Dog Soldiers I think ranks as possibly the very best werewolf movie of all time, despite its crappy ending. This is even better, focusing on an all-female group of friends who, years after a personal tragedy broke them apart, are attempting to rekindle their old bonds by going cave diving in the Appalachian Mountains. Naturally, Everything Goes Wrong, and after a cave-in the group finds that one of them decided they should all be exploring a new path that nobody else has tried yet, so they have no rescue coming when they’re noticed missing, and so they have no choice but to find their own way out. Sadly, the other way out is somewhat blocked by an undiscovered species of cave-dwelling monsters that have grown very used to eating everything that comes within their range.

A screenshot from the movie?

It’s a fairly simplistic story, but the film is rather brilliantly directed, particularly in its usage of darkness. Put simply, I have never seen any other movie that uses a lack of light as well as this film does. Once they’re in that cave, there is no light but what the characters generate from their flashlights and flares, leaving a good chunk of each scene just coated in blackness. It’s creepy and claustrophobic and awful, especially since Marshall took the time to flesh out most of the characters so that they actually feel like real people rather than movie characters. The ending is also nicely ambiguous, as there are certain small clues left throughout the film that indicate that the actual story may not have quite played out the way we think it did.

Neil Marshall is currently working on his third film, an end of the world movie titled Doomsday. Apocalyptic doom films are like porn to me, and I am dying to see if he can top himself a second time. One can only hope.

Rating: ****

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Halloween Spooktacular # 1: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

This film didn’t hold up quite as well as I’d remembered it being, and I suspect this may be a fairly common problem among gialli. After all, so much time is spent on the mystery of whodunit in each one that, when you watch it already knowing, it decreases the value a bit. Still, while I no longer consider this to be far and away the best giallo I’ve seen, it still ranks as a superior entry in the genre.

The plot, while still noticeably giallified, is actually a bit different than normal. An American vacationing in Italy witnesses a woman being stabbed in the lobby of an apartment building, and, while stuck in between the glass walls at the entrance, manages to attract a crowd and get the police to arrive before the dark figure who stabbed her can finish her off. Naturally, his position as a witness cannot be tolerated, and so the killer begins to try to finish him off as well. What follows is a number of great twists and turns, as we slowly assemble a pile of clues about the killer that are mostly taken from a few threatening phone calls made to our hero’s apartment. Where the film really shines is during a few scenes of incredible tension, such as a grand chase through the streets and an auto yard, with someone shooting at him who may or may not be the killer, or another, even more powerful scene, when he decides to do one last bit of sleuthing before he and his girlfriend fly back to America, only for his girlfriend to be targeted. These moments are as tense as anything you’ll find in any Hitchcock film.

This is about as useful as he gets the whole film.

The main problem here, that brings its score down a bit, is the incredibly wooden acting of our lead. Tony Musante, known for pretty much nothing else of note outside of this movie, delivers a terrible performance. Granted, the acting isn’t really the main highlight of a giallo, but all the same he does bring the movie down a good bit. Outside of him, though, the movie is still golden. You should definitely check it out.

Rating: *** ½

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Bloody Birthday

I guess it’s a little refreshing to see a film that so unashamedly steals from its betters. This film has a soundtrack that’s almost directly taken out of the Friday the 13th movies, and just in case some found that too subtle, also throws in a scene where the two main girls talk to the one girl’s cop father that’s pretty much taken wholesale from Halloween.

The rest of the film isn’t all that much better. The plot is basically what you would expect if a hippie were to try to write a horror movie. One night, three children are born during the peak of a total eclipse of Saturn, the planet that controls our emotions, and so the children are all evil. Well, shit. If only our parents had managed to really bring about the Age of Aquarius back in the 60s, so many lives would have been spared here. As it is, the kids reach ten years of age, and then a switch seems to be flipped in their heads, as they go on a killing spree, murdering people with such abandon that you at first wonder how they think they can get away with it all, until you realize that all the adults in this filmic world are deeply retarded. Seriously, there’s a teacher who, after punishing one of the demon spawn, finds him in her home pointing a gun at her, and proceeds to make a sandwich for herself like nothing is at all the matter here. With adults like this, these monster kids are a serious risk of taking over the world.

The main problem with this film is one that’s actually quite common to these evil child movies, and that’s how poor the acting always is. Despite some notable exceptions (mainly by children who would never be caught dead in shitty movies like these), children are terrible actors, and basing a movie around them demands that you find ways around their nonsense. This does not quite manage that trick. As movies with evil children go, it’s a couple steps above, say, Beware: Children at Play, but very far below the level of The Omen. Even at the low price of $5.99, it’s for die hard horror fans only.

Extra: I’ve decided to do a little something extra for Halloween tomorrow, so you’re all going to be benefiting here. You know, unless you really hate my writing. No, instead of the two a day I’ve been doing all month, you’ll be gifted with a full blown ten reviews, as I run through a collection of horror movies in my collection that I had really enjoyed the first time I saw them, and then hadn’t gotten around to seeing again until now. Be sure to expect lots of *** ½ and **** reviews to follow.

Rating: *

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Planet Terror

While I’m still impatiently waiting for the proper Grindhouse DVD release, at least the better half of the film is now available for me to tide myself over with. Indeed, there was a curious dichotomy among the two halves, as, while Tarantino made the weakest film of his career, Rodriguez here really stepped up his game and made the best movie he’s done yet.

Both directors, in their respective films, based their movies off of 70s exploitation films, but while Tarantino took his cues from the old car chase movies like Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (both of which he constantly name dropped in his film), Rodriguez wisely based his off of the old Italian zombie apocalypse films, in particular the works of Lucio Fulci. Of course, being a smart man, he merely takes on some artificial appearances of Fulci’s zombie movies and quickly moves on from there, giving us a film that, while taking on Fulci’s general look, is actually much, much better.

One major improvement would be the pacing. While Fulci’s films tend to move at a somewhat more glacial pace, Planet Terror is pretty much racing at full speed from the opening onward. By the time the movie begins, a trio of zombies have already managed to escape from a military installation in southern Texas, keeping us free from the normal required slow build of most zombie movies. Our main cast isn’t the normal panicky bits of uselessness one normally finds in such films either: as soon as they figure out what’s going on, they start loading up on the guns, all of which, of course, make zombies outright explode when hit. The film is as much an adrenaline-soaked action flick as much as a horror movie.

There’s also a slew of great cameo appearances. Naturally, being a zombie film, Tom Savini has to appear in it, as a cop in search of his wedding ring after an initial encounter with a zombie goes poorly. We also get Naveen Andrews as a rogue scientist with a love of collecting precious body parts from those who displease him, and best of all, Bruce Willis as the head of a mutated group of special forces. His monologue at the end, tying in the zombie outbreak to Bin Laden while he slowly transforms into Pizza the Hutt, is one of the film’s many highlights.

The visual appeal, too, cannot be overstated. Not only does it take the best cues from Fulci’s works (such as Marley Shelton’s great perpetual wide-eyed stare) while ignoring the rest, but it makes a great use of lighting as well. Under the premise that this was all filmed at rapid-fire speed like the old exploitation films, Rodriguez uses a great deal of harsh lighting, often leaving the characters’ faces covered in shadows, or even just leaving them as black outlines of people. Further, he went a great deal farther than Tarantino did at making it seem like an old, worn-out print, with constant scratches, flickering, altered colors, and other fun stuff that really adds a great deal to the whole experience. It’s an amazingly fun film, and is the main part of why Grindhouse was, in my opinion, the best film to come out so far this year.

Extra: while Tarantino staunchly refused to include any of the fake trailers that were in Grindhouse on the Death Proof DVD, Rodriguez did feel free to include his own fake trailer Machete that opened the film up. It’s a great bonus I was not honestly expecting.

Rating: ****

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Bloody Reunion

I watched this film back to back with The Maid, which meant that I got to watch that delightful Tartan Asia Extreme video twice, as they won’t let you skip directly to the main menu on either disc. That’s not obnoxious at all, no sirree!

The movie itself is at least better than The Maid, in part because, rather than being another in a long line of Asian ghost stories, it’s actually an attempt at recreating the 80s slasher movie. For most of the movie, this actually works pretty well, with the cast actually having some characterization thrown to them, and an interesting motive for the killer. The violence is also pretty graphic, as each character is taken out in an increasingly gruesome way, from one being forced to swallow razor blades, to another having her eyelids stapled open, to another having ants crawling inside of his ear.

This is marred a bit by the required twist ending, which really kind of sucks. It’s not as terrible as the twist to, say, High Tension, which it bears some similarities to, but it’s certainly within spitting distance of it. It at least makes a bit more sense than High Tension’s does, but it does still mar an otherwise very good movie. Still, it’s the best horror movie I’ve yet seen from Korea that didn’t have the name Chan-Wook Park anywhere in the credits, so if you’ve been feeling a little down about the dearth of slasher movies being made since the 80s, you should definitely check this one out.

Rating: ***

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The Maid

I think I’m just about done with modern Asian ghost movies. You know the ones I’m talking about. After Ringu and The Ring became such massive hits, people the world over were flooded with ripoffs, as literally dozens of films got made that revolved around little ghost girls with long black hair going around jumping out at people and sometimes killing them. While there have been some good ones in the mix, for the most part they’ve all been pretty average at best, like this one.

The thing I most enjoyed about The Maid is its truly international feeling. A Filipina maid comes to Singapore to work for a Chinese family, and they all overcome their language barrier by speaking English. Sadly, that’s where the film’s innovation ends, as unfortunately for the new maid, she has begun working for them during the seventh month on the Chinese calendar, when, as we all know, the gates of Hell are flung open and zombies eat everyo—sorry, ghosts roam the land. Of course, not being Chinese, she doesn’t know what to do to avoid offending the ghosts, and soon they’re pestering her at all moments, driving her crazy. Of course, in any story like this, there has to be some shocking twist ending, though the first twist here was pretty obvious, and the second was just dumb.

There are much better examples of this type of movie in existence. Even if you’re jonesing for a fix of some ghostly Asian girl with long hair menacing people, you can go with a film like Exte, which was a pretty borderline brilliant film I saw at the New York Asian Film Festival over the summer. This one is just second rate.

Rating: **

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Night Train Murders

One thing about the makers of cheapo exploitation films; they know how best to wring every last drop of blood out of a stone. Case in point, this was one of about five million ripoffs of Last House on the Left that were made back in the 70s, this one keeping so close to the movie it’s stealing from that it comes dangerously close to being a predecessor of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho.

The film follows two girls on a train ride through Europe to see their family for Christmas (I fully believe this was set at Christmastime for no reason other than to try to be that extra little bit shocking), only to run afoul of two men and a woman who abuse them physically and sexually before killing them. Later, their killers happen to go to stay with the family of the murdered girls, who, upon finding out about the situation, go crazy and kill them. If I ruined any of the plot for you, I apologize, but if I didn’t, that’s because, with some superficial changes, it is the same exact plot of Last House on the Left (itself an unofficial remake of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring).

Since the film makes no effort at achieving some level of artistic merit, we have only the exploitative features to look at. They’re done more or less well enough, with the obvious goal being to out-do its creative ancestor on the shock factor (the peak here being when they find that one of the girls is a virgin, and so decide to rape her with a knife), since director Aldo Lado knows full well he isn’t going to be able to out-direct Craven. The overall effect, however, is that of a deep moral vacuum. I know it’s a bit odd for a horror junkie to start commenting on morality in movies, but when a film is as deeply and openly misogynistic as this it needs to be pointed out. I’d say this film is on the level of Straw Dogs or M*A*S*H*, but those two films at least had some amount of artistic merit going for them. This is just worthless.

Rating: Zero stars

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The Call of Cthulhu

I had been looking forward to seeing this a little too much, perhaps, as not only is this my favorite Lovecraft story (and, by extension, one of my favorite horror stories ever), but I had been hearing some pretty rave reviews about this, some going so far as to call it the best possible version there could be for Lovecraft’s “unfilmable” story. Not exactly faint praise here.

I guess it’s to the film’s credit that I went in with retardedly high expectations and came away still thinking it was good, if not great. The filmmakers, in a brilliant bit of reasoning, decided that since the novella was first published back in the days of silent films, then a proper film adaptation should also be done as a silent movie, complete with black and white photography that’s had hairs, lines, and spots added to it to make it appear properly aged. Coming hot off the heels of The Cat and the Canary, I can add that the film really doesn’t have the visual flair of the best silent movies from back in the day, but it’s still done competently.

The dread land R’lyeh, home of Cthulhu, is done in an interesting style, in a clear homage to the art design of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. If it’s not quite what I had personally imagined the place to look like, Lovecraft’s descriptions of it as “crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity” isn’t incredibly helpful to any set designer out there. Cthulhu himself, in a bit of inspiration, is done in claymation, as the filmmakers correctly realized that no amount of CGI could properly convey him. Even more wisely, we mostly only see him in shadows and quick glimpses; if the mere gave of him can turn a man mad, then it would have just been highly irresponsible of them to show him to us in all his glory, don’t you think?

All told, it’s not the best Lovecraft adaptation I’ve ever seen (the Re-Animator series still has a lock on that), and it rips through the story so fast that it clocks in at only 46 minutes, but for what it is, it's done well. Of course, now that we have a perfectly satisfactory version of his “unfilmable” story, what say Peter Jackson or some other enterprising horror junkie that can command a big budget try to make a film out of At the Mountains of Mandess? Plz k thnx.

Rating: ***

UPDATE: Apparently I should really read more articles, as apparently a good three weeks before I wrote this, Guillermo Del Toro announced that he had been greenlit to make At the Mountains of Madness his next film, before the impending strikes grind everything to a halt. So yay for that.

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New Mr. Vampire

I gotta say, being a big fan of the original Mr. Vampire, this film let me down. I’m a pretty big fan of these martial arts horror comedies, having been inducted into them by an old co-worker at Borders, but as such films go, this one is pretty second rate, feeling more like a rehash of its predecessors than anything actually new and exciting.

Part of the problem, I guess, can be seen in the numbering of this series. After Mr. Vampire, there was also Mr. Vampire 2 and 3, neither of which was in any way connected with the original aside from also having martial arts and hopping vampires. Then along came this one, called New Mr. Vampire, bringing back the cast of the original film for a story that’s a good deal less fun (there were also like three more regular Mr. Vampire movies after this, but they matter not for our purposes). After all these films, and all the others in the genre that came before, maybe they just couldn’t think of any new ideas, and just figured they’d go back to the well.

Whatever the reason, this film suffers heavily from a dearth of new ideas. Everything here, while mostly done competently enough, I guess, just feels like something I’ve seen done, and better, in several other movies. You’d be wise to spend your money on the original Mr. Vampire rather than this.

Rating: * ½

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The Cat and the Canary

This was famed silent German filmmaker Paul Leni’s first film after fleeing Germany to the U.S., closely followed by a good number of his contemporaries (the rise of the Nazi party pretty much permanently crippled the German film industry, though it turned out quite well for Hollywood), and it’s further proof that the Germans were far and away the best in the world at making great art out of the silent film medium.

This is not to say that the film is without flaws; it is, after all, pretty much fluff all the way through, and while Leni was much better at wielding the camera than any American directors were at the time, he still paled in comparison to his German contemporaries Lang and Murnau. Still, this is pretty much the definitive Spooky Old House film, upon which all others were based, and it gets a lot of mileage out of its premise and location. The plot, which should be more than slightly familiar to anyone reading this, concerns a family gathering at the old mansion of a dead relative for the reading of his will. He leaves his entire fortune to one relative, but throws in enough complications and addendums to the will that all the others have to do is drive her mad and the fortune will go to another of them. You can naturally see where this is going.

Like pretty much every horror movie made in Hollywood by then, it’s played for laughs as much as screams, and it all holds up pretty well. Some of the jokes are a bit creaky by today’s standards, but it still has enough charm and visual flair to entertain all the way through. Now I want to see the late 30s remake that helped launch Bob Hope’s career. It’s not often a movie is so big that it can be remade just a decade later.

Rating: ***

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Wrong Turn 2

I was a bit on the fence about getting this until I saw BC’s glowing review of it over at Horror Movie a Day and felt I had to check it out. I’m glad I did, as this wound up being one of the best horror movies of the year.

The West Virginian mutant cannibals from the first film are back, but this time, rather than merely doing the standard horror sequel thing and copy the plot of the first film, we get a group that’s out there filming a reality show called the Ultimate Survivalist Apocalypse. The whole premise is milked for all it’s worth; with Henry Rollins hosting the show as a retired colonel and a long set of rules to explain how they’re supposedly in a post-apocalyptic wasteland fighting to be the last survivor (a concept that leads what is by far the most annoying character to assume this story of mutant cannibals killing one of their friends to be a hoax perpetuated for the show, though he is able to figure it all out quickly enough). The music works well with this conceit, as it is exactly the type of awful music you always hear in the background of terrible MTV style reality shows, with lots of soft drum machine work to fill up the gaps in between dialogue.

As befitting a horror sequel, the violence has been ratcheted up a notch. The original was no slouch in this department, either, but here we get such things as a character with their lower mouths bitten off, a character who gets their back sliced open enough that their spine is exposed, and a character tied up with barbed wire. We even get some pretty shocking deaths in this, too; there was one character that I would never have thought would have died, and another character who I had a feeling was going to but who I was really hoping would live all the same. It’s a bit uncommon in a slasher movie to actually care about any of the characters, really, so it was a rather pleasant surprise here.

I was serious earlier when I said this was one of the best horror movies of the year. Grindhouse, Bug, and Black Sheep are the only three I can think of that I liked more (and Black Sheep apparently came out last year), so this would be the best straightforward one. That this would go straight to video while drivel like Halloween and 28 Weeks Later would not only get theatrical releases, but would actually do good business, is a borderline criminal offense. If you have any interest in slasher movies at all, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

Rating: ****

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Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Now THIS is what I’m looking for in a zombie movie. While I managed to mockingly brush off the high praise for Don’t Torture a Duckling on the grounds that “Best Fulci EVAR” wasn’t exactly the highest possible standard to live up to, when I see a film like this, which is boldly labeled as one of the best zombie movies ever made, well, that’s just another matter entirely.

Naturally, it does not live up to that lofty promise. The fact that it came pretty damn close, though, now that’s impressive. The plot is, well, silly, as any zombie movie is going to be, and involves a new machine that kills insects by emitting ultrasonic radiation that affects their nervous systems, causing them to fly into uncontrollable rages and kill each other. This was being used for farming purposes, which surprised me, as I have rarely heard of farmers wanting all insects on their farmland killed, but they’ve always seemed a rather shifty lot. As one might expect, there are some complications with the tech, mainly that they also affect the nervous systems of the recently deceased, causing them to return to life craving the destruction of all living things. I can relate, as I often find myself fighting down that very urge whenever I’m in public or sometimes when I think about times in the past or in a possible future in which I have to actually interact with others.

The film starts off rather alarmingly slowly, and doesn’t really get going until about halfway through, but once it does start it doesn’t really relent at all. Being a British horror movie from the 70s, it’s got a great look to it, with a good amount of grim countryside and dark fog to look at, and the almost hand held nature of the camerawork really adds a lot to the immediacy of the danger. The zombies themselves are pretty hardcore, too. Not only do they look better than the ones in American movies at the time (though not as good as the decayed ones in the Italian zombies movies that came out a few years later), but they seem to be immune to such paltry attacks as a bullet to the head, and now need to be burned to ashes to finally die. They’re smarter than normal, too, as is evidenced by when a group of characters barricade themselves in a tomb, and a group of zombies grabs a log to use as a battering ram. To make things even harder for our intrepid duo, there’s also one of those detectives that you only see in movies, that automatically assumes our heroes are to blame for all the murders, and even tells the guy he knows it was him because of his “hippie hair” and “faggot clothes”. If I ever get transported into a movie, I hope I never need to go to the police for help.

I’m digressing, though. The movie, once it wakes up, is very enjoyable, and you should go check it out. It’s got some good tension, a keen visual sense, and an appropriately nasty ending as befits a zombie movie. If it’s not one of the best zombie films ever, it’s at least a very good one.

Rating: *** ½

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Sasquatch

This film came highly recommended to me by my friend Erika. After this and the copy of City Heat she and her husband got me for Christmas last year, I can only conclude that she is harboring a deep hatred of me and wishes me to be miserable at all times.

This film, “based on actual accounts”, according to the back of the DVD case, concerns an expedition into the wilderness of Canada or somesuch unnecessarily cold place in the hopes of retrieving a downed plane and its passengers. As one might infer from the title, however, things are complicated by the fact that this is sasquatch territory. As one might infer from a movie that prides itself on being about people being menaced by fucking bigfoot, it’s not good at all.

The film stars Lance Henriksen, who is normally fully reliable even when he’s in a completely dogshit film like this one, but even he is beaten down by this awfulness, spending the entire film looking cranky and miserable. Led by his proud example, the rest of the cast is equally useless, taking their undeveloped roles and making sure each of them has one character trait to rely upon and nothing else. The directing is typical Sci-Fi Original Movie nonsense (I don’t know for sure that this was actually a Sci-Fi channel movie, but I refuse to believe this was made with the intention of a theatrical release), complete with ridiculously overdone camera flashiness coupled with endless scenes of walking through the woods. It reminded me at first of Survival Quest, another film where Lance Henriksen leads a group of people through the wilderness, with the obvious difference being of course that that film was half-decent while this movie is all bad.

Perhaps the best, and by best I of course mean worst, part of the movie is the title character. The sasquatch is a piece of work here, and when I describe him to you you’ll understand completely why these characters just had no chance against him. He was able to drag a 2+ ton plane through a few miles of wilderness, is fast enough that he can be standing still when someone fires at him from about fifteen feet away and still dodge it, and he’s somehow smart enough to understand what a DNA analyzer and GPS tracker are, and knows to specifically target them. Add to this the fact that, when finally revealed, he pretty much just looks like an ape, and it all becomes clear: they haven’t been sparring with a sasquatch at all, but Gorilla Grodd! Hell, if the Flash has trouble with him, of course this pack of tools isn’t going to stop him. If only the rest of the Rogues Gallery had shown up, then this movie could have really cooked.

Rating: ½ *

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The Manitou

I had been a little nervous about getting this film. The only other movie by director William Girdler that I had seen before was Grizzly, and saying it sucked would be rather kind. Fortunately for me, this was a vast improvement over that earlier film.

I guess part of the overall increase in quality could have been guessed just from the plots of the two films. If nothing else, a film about an Indian medicine man sending his essence 400 years into the future so that he can be reborn into the present day by way of growing as a fetus off the back of a girl’s neck is certainly a good deal more ambitious than a film about a giant grizzly bear eating people. As could be expected from such a synopsis, Girdler just tries with all his might to pack this movie full of the kind of stuff you always love to see (well, okay, that * I* always love to see, at least). When the growth on the poor woman’s neck is first discovered to be growing, an attempt is made to surgically remove it, only to have the operating surgeon’s body taken over and him forced to slice into his own wrist with the scalpel. A follow-up attempt, this one involving lasers (no sharks were harmed in the making of this film), turns out even worse. The film also finds time to throw in a séance, a levitating woman, and a climax that I won’t spoil, but which is every bit as over the top and delightful as the climax to Altered States was. Okay, I can’t resist spoiling it a little bit. At one point the entire hospital shakes with what appears to be an earthquake, only to have a medicine man they brought in to counter the 400 year old medicine man growing out of their friend say that the quake was actually the arrival of Satan. And no, that’s not the most over the top part by any means.

The acting has also been heavily improved from Grizzly, most notably in his big star coup of Tony Curtis. Curtis plays the lead here, as his career had pretty much been over for some time by this point, and he does a fully capable job. If it’s not quite up to the level of his classic roles in films like Sweet Smell of Success or Some Like It Hot, well, I’m certainly not going to hold it against him.

This is one of those films where you just need to sit back and let it all wash over you in a torrent. It’s completely ridiculous, but you sometimes need that in a film just to keep you honest. Let’s be honest with ourselves here: the holiday season is coming up, and that means that we’re all going to be bombarded with really weighty, Serious Issue films until February sometime when we’ll go into our annual filmic wasteland. If between now and then you start feeling a bit bogged down by the self-importance of all the movies you see, a viewing of this will make everything feel all right again.

Rating: *** ½

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Don't Torture a Duckling

Whatever your feelings on gialli, one thing is certain: they have the most awesome titles ever. This is another giallo from Lucio Fulci, and it came highly recommended by the frequenters of IMDB as his best movie. This would be high praise indeed, were I a bigger fan of his, but the film certainly managed to impress me all the same.

The film revolves around a murder mystery, as several young boys are being murdered in a small town in the Italian countryside. With the police at a loss, it’s up to an intrepid reporter and his recovering junkie girlfriend to figure out who’s committing these foul acts. The visual flair on display in this film is great, as Fulci is truly in fine form here. If anything, it almost feels like he was trying to channel the style of Dario Argento, who was his big competitor at the time. The film is appropriately nasty, as a film revolving around children being murdered should be, but what’s more interesting is how the plot is as close to being sturdy and plot-hole free as any I’ve ever seen from him. It’s also got a great deal of tension to it, and just keeps ratcheting it up higher as it approaches its climax.

Of course, I’d be lying if I said there were no problems at all with it (anyone with a more than passing familiarity with the genre will be able to guess who the killer is as soon as they first appear), but it is still a superior example of the genre, and easily the best film I’ve ever seen from Fulci. If you were thinking about seeing what all the fuss is about this giallo nonsense, this would be a good place to start.

Rating: *** ½

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Lizard in a Woman's Skin

This was an early effort by famed Italian horror director Lucio Fulci. While I’m not as big on him as I am his contemporaries like Mario Bava and Dario Argento, I had heard enough good things about his early gialli that I felt I had to at least try them. Fortunately, his early work seems to have been a bit better and (slightly) more coherent than his later horror movies were.

The plot is about a woman in a high rise apartment (women in gialli always live the high life, you know) who, after describing to her therapist a series of erotic dreams she had had about her loose neighbor, finds that her neighbor was murdered in the exact same way that she had described in her last dream. While this would normally seem a pretty open and shut case, but as her father is the head of the police force, he is determined to discover who might be setting her up, and why. So yes, the plot is somewhat incoherent, as all gialli are, but it is quite entertaining all the same. For one, being a Fulci movie, it doesn’t shy away from violence, and there’s a scene with cut open dogs that’s more gruesome than anything you’ll find in his more famous film Zombie. There’s also a great scene where our heroine is chased through a cathedral and barricades herself in a dark room filled with a vicious army of rubber bats.

There are some pacing problems, as there are in most Fulci films, and the first half of the film, largely taken up by the police investigation, is a tad boring whenever her insane dreams aren’t being shown. The second half is much better, though, and ranks up with the best of his horror films. If you’re not already a giallo fan, this is not going to change your mind, but to genre fans, it won’t disappoint.

Rating: ** ½

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Shock Waves

This is yet another addition in my ongoing love fest with Peter Cushing on this blog. I’m not sure why I’ve been reviewing so many of his films recently (you know, as opposed to five years ago when this blog didn’t exist), but I can’t really complain when the overall quality of the films is up to the level of Shock Waves.

Shock Waves was a bit of a necessity for me to get, as it combined three of my ongoing man crushes: Peter Cushing, zombies, and nazis. Yes, the zombies in this are the result of nazi experiments to create invincible SS soldiers, but due to their insatiable bloodlust (not represented in this curiously bloodless film) the experiments were scrapped and these grand soldiers were never properly utilized. Sent away on a U-boat to avoid capture by the Allies, they, along with their nazi commander Peter Cushing, crashed on a deserted tropical island, where they slumber to this day. Only now, as a group of idiots goes off course and crashes into the island, do they awaken to wreak terrible revenge against all enemies of Deutschland.

It’s a delightful premise, really, and it’s carried off well, though with some odd peculiarities. The most glaring one is that, for a movie that purports to be rated R, there is no blood or nudity to be found, and while there may have been some profanity, I certainly didn’t notice any. The nazis don’t really bite or rend or anything like that; having been specifically bred for underwater combat, they simply hide in the unending water-filled locations on the island and drown any passers-by. You may find yourself, film unseen, asking why the characters don’t just avoid any areas with water then, if that’s their big gimmick. Well you’re a fool for asking this. A damn fool. There is water everywhere these characters turn. There are rivers, streams, suspiciously large puddles, ponds, canals, a pool in the building, hell, one of the cast is even found dead after having been drowned in a goddamn fish tank. Questions about how this character was killed in such a manner without ever thinking to perhaps break the glass on the sides of the fish tank would be justified, I suppose.

There is a lot to like about this movie. It has a good deal of goofy charm to it, the zombie nazis have a pretty badass look to them, the island pretty much looks exactly like the type of place where you could expect to see old nazis experiments still roaming the land in search of fresh victims, and to my surprise the cute girl that spent the entire film in a bikini actually survived. It’s a bit slow paced, but believe me, you could do a lot worse than this.

Rating: ***

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Grapes of Death

Much like with Chaplin, this is only the second film by French director Jean Rollin I’ve seen, though he’s obviously not quite held in as high regard as the Tramp. In fact, he’s mostly known for making “erotic” vampire movies, which would ordinarily turn me off of him, but since all of his movies that I’ve seen thus far have involved zombies, I suppose it can be forgiven.

The movie is pretty standard zombie fare, though with a couple small twists. One is that the zombies, at least the ones in the early stages, can still speak. Another is that they don’t seem to eat people, but rather just want to destroy everyone that’s not one of them. The plot concerns a girl on her way with a friend to visit her fiancée at his vineyard. While on the train she is attacked and her friend is killed by a man that’s just rotting away, and flees the train into the countryside, where after meeting a few oddballs and a lot of zombies, she discovers that the local vineyard where her fiancée works is responsible for the outbreak.

Rollin is known for using haunting, dreamlike imagery, and it’s good that the French countryside looks so nice, because we get a lot of shots of our heroine running around with nothing on screen to chase her. To be fair, there’s often a zombie or twelve chasing after her, but a lot of the time, no there isn’t. There’s also an incredibly irritating blind woman that she befriends early on, that got on my nerves so much that I kept having to unwind by reminding myself that horror movies almost never turn out well for the handicapped. The rest of the movie is decent, if uninspired, though it has a retarded ending that was very, very, very, very clumsily foreshadowed. It’s not terrible, overall, but I don’t think I’ll be checking out any more of Rollin’s films.

Rating: **

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City Lights

This is only the second Charlie Chaplin film I’ve seen (the first, by necessity, being The Great Dictator), and while I’ve rather enjoyed both, I’ve yet to see a reason why he’s thought of more fondly than Buster Keaton, who was easily the superior silent comic. That little bit of thoroughly unwarranted snottiness out of the way, let’s get on with this film.

For some reason, Chaplin was afraid to make the transition to sound (The Great Dictator, made in 1940, was his first talking picture), and so City Lights, released about 4 years after the rest of Hollywood have moved on from silent films, still had no dialogue, and only featured audio in the form of music and sound effects. The film’s plot was simplistic enough not to really need any dialogue, so it didn’t really matter (it does open with a politician giving a speech, but his speech is vocalized by a kazoo); instead, we are treated to an almost pastoral series of vignettes, as Chaplin’s famous Tramp character careens into the lives of his town’s various inhabitants, most notably a blind flower girl and an alcoholic millionaire. He plays these scenes alternatingly for light hearted comedic or sentimental value, as romance blooms between him and the flower girl and he undertakes a series of jobs to help her out.

It’s a pleasant enough film, with a nice air of whimsy about it, but the jokes never really build up enough to where it becomes truly hysterical. Still, even if it’s not a great comedy (or romance), it kept my interest and ensured I had a smile on my face the whole way through, and I guess there’s not too much more you can ask for than that.

Rating: ***

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Brainiac

This here is a good and proper creature feature from the start of the 60s. While these things died out a long time before I was born, in part because they mostly weren’t very good, it’s still fun to revisit them every now and again. It’s especially fun when they don’t really suck like Monstroid did, and this film achieves that lofty goal.

The film opens with an evil baron being burned at the stake for dabbling in witchcraft. As he’s being burned (though he seems strangely unharmed by it) he yells that he’s going to reappear on a passing comet 300 years in the future to kill his attackers’ descendants. Naturally, in the interests of time, we immediately jump ahead 300 years to the present day of 1961, as the comet he hitched himself to returns to Earth and he immediately sets out to kill off pretty much everyone in town.

One key thing that sets this film apart from other creature features is that the baron in this doesn’t really get by by being a big scary monster that just overpowers people. Instead, he teleports, paralyzes and bewitches people with his eyes, and then transforms into a goofy hairy bug eyed thing with only two pincer-like fingers on each hand that sucks the brains out of them by piercing their skulls with his overlong forked tongue (I’m assuming this is where the film gets its atrocious title). It’s over the top and silly, and what’s what always makes movies like this fun to watch. One particularly amusing part of the film is how each batch of descendants is made out to be even more noble and wonderful a group than the last, just before he kills them anyway, kind of like the characters played by Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets.

As with any of these films, it’s pretty damned uneven, with more parts that don’t work than do. It does, however, manage its own goofy charm and insane troll logic (the police in particular, once they realize that the mysterious baron who appeared in town immediately before the killings began is actually the killer, are amazing in what they decide is the best way to deal with him), and that’s really all you can hope for from a film like this.

Rating: **

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Faust

How exactly would one explain a Jan Svankmajer film to someone who has never experienced him? He’s a Czech filmmaker mostly known for short films that work as eerie combinations of live action, stop motion animation, and claymation, generally put to fairly hallucinatory effect. This, his second feature length film (after his ultra-creepy adaptation of Alice in Wonderland), continues in that mold, and throws in a good amount of humor in the form of a jester to break up the craziness.

The film is almost like a silent movie at first. There’s no dialogue in the film outside of lines taken from Goethe’s version of Faust, and they don’t start until close to a third of the way through the film. Instead we get some random guy wandering around his town in the Czech Republic after finding a map leading to a seemingly abandoned theater, where he’s forced to play the title role in a stage production of Faust. Somewhere along the way, he loses himself within the part, and truly becomes Dr. Faustus, right a variant of his tragic ending.

This loose plot provides for some appropriately weird images. All the other characters in the play, for instance, are marionettes, with an all-powerful puppeteer hiding above the stage, only his/her hands visible. At points the marionettes even jump the tracks and flee the theater entirely, still somehow able to maneuver in the real world outside despite the lack of anyone wielding their strings. Another great visual, just as one last example before I stop, comes when he goes to sign the contract selling his soul to Mephistopheles for godlike earthly power. The idea of angels and devils warring over his soul is made physical here, with miniature puppets of angels and devils duking it out by his feet, with the devils dominating the fight as he signs his soul away.

It’s a fairly powerful story the film is based around, and the film does manage to achieve some of that emotional strength, but the main allure of this or any other Svankmajer creation is the visual power. It certainly succeeds admirably on that level, so if you’re looking for something a little bit out of the norm, you’d do well to check this one out.

Rating: *** ½

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From a Whisper to a Scream

This is a rather obscure movie (you know, as opposed to all the others I review) from the 80s, more known for being one of Vincent Price’s last films than for anything else. Despite that, it manages to be a fairly amusing anthology, with each story (including the framing story with Vincent Price) giving us a neat twist ending.

A key to assessing how well a horror anthology works is to examine the strength of the humor involved. For whatever reason, though most likely involving old EC comics, the genre has grown to demand a healthy dose of gallows humor in the proceedings. The masters of this were the old Amicus anthologies and the original Creepshow, but this does a decent job of it too, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise what with Price hosting it. For instance, in the first story we get a tale of a man who murders the woman he loves after she rejects him, and then has sex with her corpse. Instantly we’re given the message “9 months later”, which are ominous enough words at the best of times, even when one of the sexual partners wasn’t already deceased. Another story, even better, features a captured soldier trying to talk tough to his young captors, only to get a knife to the cock for his sass.

One of the film’s big sells is that each of the stories has a “surprise” twist ending, though, much like the twist in the first story, most of them are telegraphed pretty heavily. In addition to the necrophiliac love story, there's also one with an outlaw hiding out with a voodoo priest, a tragic love story with a carny, and a yarn from the Civil War that’s like Children of the Corn, only not as completely shit. All of them end pretty gruesomely, particularly the middle two, though outside of the circus one there wasn’t a single twist I didn’t see coming. Still, it’s a mostly entertaining film, and unlike From Beyond the Grave it understands the need to close with its best story, helping to ensure fond memories of it. As anthologies go, it’s pretty mid-range, but you could certainly do worse.

Rating: ** ½

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Sleepy Hollow

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship going with Tim Burton. His films tend to range pretty widely in quality, from the brilliant (Ed Wood and Big Fish) to the terrible (Batman and Planet of the Apes). While this one isn’t great, I would place it in the upper echelon of his films, sitting comfortably alongside films like The Corpse Bride and Charlie & the Chocolate Factory (Hey, fuck you, I liked it).

It’s fairly impossible to watch this film without being consciously aware that it’s a Tim Burton movie. Everything in the entire movie has been twisted into a dreamlike version of a late 18th century world, with a muted color scheme and a layer of fog that even permeates indoors, keeping us in perpetual gloom to better accommodate the subject matter. Were this not the type of story that it is, it would probably be pretty annoying, but as it is it works very well.

The acting is mostly top notch too, with Johnny Depp leading the pack. Much was made of how he impersonated Keith Richards for his role in Pirates of the Caribbean; here, with Ichabod Crane changed from a schoolteacher to an investigator, he tackles the role by impersonating Angela Lansbury’s character from Murder She Wrote. It provides a level of off-kilter charm to the proceedings that are matched by the supporting performances of Jeffrey Jones, Michael Gambon, Christophers Walken and Lee, and others. Christina Ricci, as the love interest, is the only weak note in the cast, though in fairness she’s not really given much to do. She does manage to accomplish one of the key necessities for women in movies set in this type of time period, which is to have a suitably large chest that it can fill out a low-cut bodice, and she succeeds admirably here, as do all the other women in the cast. Outside of that, though, she’s not really given anything to do beyond looking frightened a lot.

This is kind of a fluffy film, and it falls into the standard trap of becoming a more standard film at the climax, but for most of its run it is extremely entertaining. Depp’s investigation, and the various tools he uses to carry it out, is a great deal of fun, and while the film is rated R for violence it’s really the sort that an early teen could easily handle. The film is kept to a light gloom, like an early Hammer film (perhaps this is why Christopher Lee has a cameo), and is one of the most consistently enjoyable films Burton has ever made.

Rating: ***

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Barricade

I don’t know how they pulled it off, but they somehow found a way to make a film about people getting murdered by mutant cannibals in Germany’s Black Forest that completely sucks. I can, off the top of my head, name any number of mutant cannibal movies that I enjoy a good deal more than I should, and the delightful idea for the setting should have been just icing on the cake, but alas, it was not to be.

Let me start with the good, I guess. I haven’t heard any German rap music since I was in college, so it was a nice moment when everyone’s listening to it in the car. Now that I’ve spoken about the good, let’s delve into how this movie fails. First, we have the characters. Two guys and a girl, and there is not the slightest reason to care about any of them whatsoever. Indeed, the girl in particular (the one we’re supposed to root for the most, based on what happens, I guess) is really bitchy and irritating, even rudely yelling at a stranger for trying to warn them away from the killers in the woods. It’s hard to really appreciate the killers either; they’re retarded, so it’s not like we can really delve into their psyches and find out what makes them tick, and they don’t even at least manage to have cool looks to them. They’re just utterly wasted.

Another major problem is the terrible editing. It’s clumsy and amateurish and completely ruins any kind of continuity within the film. A perfect example comes from one of the random throwaway deaths early on. A girl is sitting in a clearing, waiting for her newly dead boyfriend to return from peeing. We get a shot from behind her, with the camera moving into a sneakier position to show us the killers’ eye view. Then the camera cuts to a shot of her from the front, and we can see a complete lack of anyone behind her. Then we cut back to the killer sneaking up on her, then another shot from the front with no killer to be found, then back to sneaking up, etc. I can only conclude that the director was drinking heavily the whole time he was in the editing room. This is to say nothing of one of the film’s main ways of padding out the running time, which is to intercut scenes with our main characters with scenes of random people being tortured and murdered. This is a very bloody movie, mainly from all these random shots of gore shoehorned into the film, but not only do these scenes not really connect at all to the main plot (aside from reaffirming that the cannibals kill a lot of people), the gore really isn’t all that impressive. The lack of a proper budget really shines through here, as it does with the crappy video cameras. Apparently there wasn’t enough in the budget to afford filmstock, or at least proper digital cameras, causing the whole film to look fuzzy and slightly out of focus.

There really is very little to recommend about this film. If all you want is a film packed with blood and guts, then by all means go for it. Just keep in mind that the film fails on pretty much every level. The acting is terrible, the story is terrible, the filmmaking is terrible, hell, even the nudity is terrible (Note to any woman reading this: don’t get your nipples pierced. Seriously, it just makes you look like trailer trash). Even if you’re just looking for constant gore, there are much better choices to go with. I’ll suggest Ichi the Killer for now. If you’re good little boys and girls I might make more recommendations later.

Rating: Zero stars

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The Revenge of Frankenstein

Yes, you’re getting a Peter Cushing two-fer. Sit there and enjoy it, bucko. This, by the way, was his second turn as Baron Frankenstein for Hammer Films, and while he doesn’t quite have the role perfectly nailed down like he would in later films, he’s got the main bits down pat, and brings his usual charm to all the proceedings.

Set right after the first film, it opens with the Baron facing the guillotine for the murders committed by his creation. He manages to escape, and makes his getaway to another small town elsewhere in Germany. For those not big on European history, I should point out that Germany was not actually a unified nation until the middle of the 1800s, and spent most of its history existing as a collective of city states. This lack of unity provided an ideal living situation for any mad scientists living at the time, who found it much easier to pack up all their things and find a new home elsewhere than their modern day equivalents do. Really, fleeing to a new town within a hundred miles or so is a good deal better than having to travel all the way to Argentina, don’t you think?

Naturally, once he arrives (under the clever pseudonym Dr. Stein), his experiments continue, though he’s been able to refine things quite a bit. Outside of a few scars, he’s now able to make his new attempt look perfectly normal, unlike the ghoulish monster played by Christopher Lee in the first film. In a nice twist, he even has a living, willing subject ready to provide a brain, as his assistant suffers from partial paralysis and wants the new body so he can function like a normal person. It all seems to be coming together a bit too well, so you just know it’s going to end in a good deal of tragedy. Exactly what form this tragedy takes I will not reveal, but it simply wouldn’t be a Frankenstein movie without at least one angry mob of villagers forming at the end ready to carry him off, and this film does not disappoint in that regard.

This is not Hammer’s best Frankenstein movie by any means, but I haven’t really seen them doing an actual bad one. They managed to change up each of these films enough to keep them fresh right up until the company folded close to two decades after this one, which is something they didn’t always manage to do with some of their other franchises like Dracula. This probably shouldn’t be the first one you check out, but you’ll enjoy it all the same.

Rating: ** ½

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The Beast Must Die

I think this may be the best of the non-anthology films I’ve now seen from Amicus (yes, out of all two). This is even more surprising when considering that I had been going in expecting a completely different type of film, not only thinking this was another anthology, but having been deeply misled by the DVD cover into thinking that it starred Peter Cushing, rather than merely having him in a supporting role. No, I don’t know how I could have made such a mistake, what with Cushing being the only actor on the cover, brandishing a rifle, with the image of a werewolf in the sky behind him. No misrepresentation of the story there at all, no sirree.

But yes, despite that, this was quite a fun film. It openly proclaims itself to be a detective story in an amusing opening message in which a narrator ominously reads to us the words printed on the screen, opening with “This film is a detective story – in which you are the detective”, and promising there would be a moment near the end where we could try to determine for ourselves which character is going to turn out to be the werewolf, before it’s finally revealed. It’s incredibly gimmicky, yes, in the grand William Castle tradition, but quite entertaining all the same. The film actually stars Calvin Lockhart as a millionaire big game hunter who has invited a crew of friends and acquaintances to spend a few days with him, only for them to discover after they arrive that he’s called them all in because one of them is a werewolf, and he is determined to hunt them down. Lockhart, as he would have to be with such a character, is rather brilliantly over the top, menacing everyone so much that, until his first encounter with the werewolf, I had had him pegged as the one. The rest of the cast follows suit, with a healthy assortment of character quirks and overall silliness to keep the whole film rather light and pleasant. Peter Cushing, as one would expect, comes dangerously close to stealing the show, as a goofy German doctor whose scientific explanation for how werewolfism works is rather inspired. There’s also some good work done by Tom Chadbon, playing a suspect so ridiculously obvious that you can take one look at him and know there’s no chance he’ll be the one.

The hunting scenes are quite effective as well. Lockhart has the entire house and the grounds around it rigged with cameras and microphones so that he can better track the beast, and goes out on two hunting expeditions after it, the second of which, rather prudently, is by helicopter and utilizes an assault rifle after the first hunt gets his guide killed. If that doesn’t exactly seem to be all that sporting a hunt, then I would just like to point out that, even with such an advantage, he still can’t defeat it there. This werewolf is pretty damn hardcore.

One thing that I really like about this is that it manages to rise above most of its genre. For whatever reason, there are very few werewolf movies of any real quality (I can come up with a top five pretty easily, but a top ten would necessitate some filler), perhaps in part because they aren’t made nearly as frequently as, say, vampire or zombie or ghost movies. Perhaps the male-dominated field of film directing just gets a little skeeved out by a movie monster whose attack cycle closely resembles women’s menstrual cycles, I dunno. But I’m digressing a bit here. This is a superior werewolf film, and should you wish for a wolfish fix, you’ll find this flick a tasty dish.

I cannot believe I just wrote that. Such a queer.

Rating: ***

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Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust

You know, I’m not normally one to criticize the DVD instead of the movie, but I really must take exception here. This DVD, to put it bluntly, really sucks the root. I would have thought that, as the sequel to a pretty famous anime, this would at least be able to enjoy a fairly standard treatment, but instead we got one that a) is dubbed only, and with one of the worst dub jobs I’ve heard in my life, and b) had such an atrocious sound mix that I had to constantly change the volume throughout the movie. Seriously, it would be so quiet during scenes of dialogue that I had to strain to hear it, and this would be interspersed with action scenes so damn loud that I had to turn the volume down to levels so low they’re normally reserved for when I’m trying not to wake my mother up while watching nazi porn. Even though the movie itself isn’t very good, this is just a flat-out disgrace.

But yes, on to the movie itself. For those that haven’t seen the original, D is a dunpeal, which is the offspring of a vampire and a human, and he goes around his vaguely post-apocalyptian world killing vampires and other monsters for exorbitantly high prices. He’s accompanied by his trusty talking hand and whatever Strong Independent Women fall for him. Here he’s hired to rescue the daughter of some rich guy who’s been kidnapped by a vampire that intends to make her his bride. The plot isn’t much, but it does provide us with some nice monsters, and a visual flair that’s superior to the original film. My personal favorite of the monsters was one that killed people by stabbing their shadows, kind of like the Shadows from Dungeons & Dragons. No sight of a Beholder, sadly, but I guess they have to leave something for the third film.

I think one of the main problems with this film, as with the original, is that everyone’s powers are so poorly defined. At no point is it ever explained just how powerful D is (though, much like the Tick, or Superman in his last movie, it seems to be “just as strong as required for the scene at hand”), or what exactly he can do. He just wades into battle killing everything with his comically oversized sword which can somehow kill everything, even monsters that are generally somewhat renowned for needing somewhat convoluted executions. The vampires are no help either; they all seem to know magic, and can shapeshift, and survive in daylight long enough to at least start a dramatic fight at sundown. It’s hard to really care about anything, when it seems to be random chance whenever a non-human dies. Perfect example: one of the monsters is a woman that can transform her body and take the substance of whatever she’s touching. So when she’s run over by a tank, she of course clings to the bottom, turns into steel, and sends a bunch of steel spikes of herself up through the bottom of the tank to attack everyone inside. Later she transforms into wood, because clearly that’s going to turn out better, and is beheaded and chopped in half by D, and certainly seems to die, but after he leaves for a nap she’s back up to menace a human character, only to be finally killed by a bolt of lightning. Why did the lightning work when a goddamned beheading didn’t? Don’t know, and didn’t really have any reason to care. I won’t even get into what the main villain Carmilla could do, because I really haven’t the slightest idea.

There’s also a problem of how preachy and melodramatic the film is. Since D is a half-breed, there’s much ado made about how intolerant small town folk are about him (and about the human girl trying to run off with a vampire), dragging whatever momentum the film had to a screeching halt to give us lame sermons on the evils of racism. What happens during the overly long epilogue, I will not reveal, but it is quite tedious.

This film does have some good moments to it, but is pretty poor overall, and the abominable DVD just hurts it even further. If you’re looking to expand your anime collection, this is not the way to do it.

Rating: * factoring in the terrible DVD, * ½ for the movie in general

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The Banquet

I had been hoping to see this over the summer at the New York Asian Film Festival, but it wasn’t playing on the day my friend Emily and I went, so we had to content ourselves with an admittedly really good double bill of Big Bang Love and Exte. It did help that the Banquet, like the delightful I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK and Zebraman, was available on all-region DVD, so I was finally able to snag a copy.

For those that don’t know, this is a fast and loose adaptation of Hamlet, set in 907 A.D. China, when rebellion was commonplace and Life Was Cheap! Ahem. I may have been watching too many exploitation films lately. Anyway, as said before, while this film kept the basic plot of Shakespeare’s play, director Xiaogang Feng didn’t really have much of a problem with changing it to suit him better. Case in point, much like how Branagh set his As You Like It in Japan so he could have ninjas in it, placing this in the context of a war-torn ancient China enabled him to fill this with epic wire fu battles. It would be a bit hypocritical for me to complain about this, I suppose, since I thoroughly enjoyed it whenever Kurosawa would reshape one of Shakespeare’s plays into a samurai tale, but what can I say, I like samurai movies a good deal more than I like wire fu.

Other changes to the story are a good deal more encouraging, however. The Crown Prince’s mother-in-law, played by Ziyi Zhang, is a much more central figure to the proceedings than in the original story, and is one of the more abominable schemers I’ve seen in a film. She pits her new husband, who’s taken the throne after poisoning his brother, the previous emperor, and the Crown Prince, against each other, hoping they both kill each other so that she can have the throne to herself. More than that, though, she takes a great delight in hurting others, ordering extensive punishments for any who cross her path. If at times she seems to be human and feel some actual remorse for her actions, it must be noted that it only happens when she has an audience around her. Lady Macbeth has nothing on this woman.

Another key change comes in the form of the Crown Prince (Daniel Wu). While it’s certainly true that in Hamlet his inability to take action against his uncle was his fatal character flaw, he certainly wasn’t a weakling overall, and had no problem with attacking people when he felt it necessary. Here, however, he’s a total milksop. His refusal to take action comes not from some inner turmoil, but because he’s a total weakling who, as one character puts it, is capable of singing and dancing and nothing else (this is not a metaphor, mind you – he hides himself in the country with his theater friends at the film’s beginning until an assassination attempt forces him to return home). One gets the definite feeling that, even if he were to bring down all his enemies and take the throne, China would be in bad shape.

It’s a very good film, overall, and the changes to the plot achieve enough surprises that, while I knew the general tune of the story, I still was unable to quite guess what was coming. There’s an amazingly grim ending that, even knowing how Hamlet normally ends, seemed a bit excessive, and the steady stream of battles, as well as the various intrigues and machinations being devised by almost every character around the prince, keep things moving along swiftly. As an adaptation of Hamlet goes, it’s not up to the level of Branagh’s more standard version, but it’s a quite accomplished film all the same.

Rating: *** ½

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