I’m not really sure what the intended audience for The Willies was, exactly. I would have to assume, from the incredibly juvenile humor and urban legends found within (and by how the film revolves around theoretically elementary school age children) that it’s a horror movie for the young ones. However, they then throw in just enough violence and blood to ensure themselves a PG-13 rating with such things as a woman getting her throat cut and some bloody, dismembered arms, as if they cynically decided that young children would refuse to watch any horror movies that were actually rated as suitable for children. Of course, the point is somewhat academic, as the film is so bad that its actual target audience is idiots that buy tons of cheap movies for review material for their blogs.
Anyway, the film is an anthology that uses the framing device of three kids (Sean Astin and two others that never developed actual careers) out in a tent in the woods telling each other urban legends to try to scare/gross out each other. They start with a few of the more famous ones, like a woman at a fast food place getting a fried rat mixed in with her bucket of chicken, and the haunted house ride that was originally so scary that a man actually died of fright so the operators had to tone it down (a sample of this film’s idea of humor: the ride’s obviously meant to be Disney’s Haunted Mansion, but I guess they couldn’t get the rights to that, so they just made allusions to other rides at the park like “It’s a Wee World” and “The Enchanting Wiki Hut” -- if you just threw up in your mouth a little, that’s only to be expected), before they get to the two main stories.
That’s right, two. While most anthology films go for three to five stories to accompany their wraparounds, this one just gives us two main stories (No, I am not counting the fried rat or the others as separate stories, not when all of them combined are maybe five minutes long), perhaps under the assumption that this would help them dodge the complaint that most anthologies wind up with one story that’s just not as good as all the others. Unfortunately, this just means that the two stories instead go on much longer than is justified, until you can almost feel the padding being added as they panic over having almost blown through the script and still having a lot more time to kill to reach 90 minutes.
Plus, it also still has that very problem I’m casually assuming was the intended reason for the dual stories, in that the second story is much worse than the first (Its also a good deal longer too, which may have something to do with it). The first is lame, but functional, and follows a kid that has to alternate between dealing with bullies and dealing with a horrid teacher (Kathleen Freeman of Gremlins 2 fame). While the school custodian reaches out to him a bit, his fortunes really change when he discovers a monster in the bathroom, which is obviously the custodian there to help the boy out by killing and eating all of his enemies. The second one, about a thoroughly loathsome boy obsessed with flies, rambles on for so long without anything approaching a point to it that our government could have used it to crack prisoners at Guantanamo. The boy, played by Donkeylips from Salute Your Shorts, is fat, has a lisp, constantly insults others, collects flies anywhere he can find them, and at one point even convinces a female classmate that he’s not really that bad, and all he needs is a friend, and when she takes him at his word and tries to befriend him he goes on to give her a cookie he made filled with dead flies. He of course gets his comeuppance at the end by the tragic irony of the very flies he was so obsessed with, but it’s pretty abrupt and unsatisfying.
I can only wish the movie itself had been so abrupt, as watching it I felt like it might have been twice as long as it actually wound up being. The humor was so lame I have a hard time even envisioning six year olds laughing at it (actually, strike that, I can easily see six year olds laughing at it, assuming their parents actually let them watch it), the film is so slow paced as to be coma inducing, there‘s a completely random cameo from Kirk Cameron and Tracey Gold as their Growing Pains characters (odd that Cameron didn‘t make it into Expelled as one of the ID experts) that goes nowhere, and presumably only exists due to writer/director Brian Peck having been a frequent actor on the show; this may be the worst horror anthology I’ve ever watched. If you ever take my advice on anything, let it be this: be very, very careful just which mostly forgotten children’s horror movies you seek out, because not all of them are awesome.
Rating: *
P.S. Also, notice in the trailer below (which is unfathomably in HD) how every last “scare” in the film is fully displayed without ever needing to watch the movie itself. Also, notice how awful all the acting is. Notice it, I say!
Sunday, February 20, 2011
The Willies
Friday, August 27, 2010
Kwaidan
We’re back once more in 1960s Japan for another supernatural tale. Actually, in this case we’re back for four supernatural tales, as the HROHFYSSBYD finally arrives at its first anthology. I know some horror fans don’t really like anthologies under the argument that there’s always one story that’s not as good as the rest, but that’s just foolish talk. When done properly, an anthology gives you several good stories, all short enough that they don’t have time to wear out their welcome like the majority of horror movies end up doing. This one (based on the stories by Lafcadio Hearn) is one of the best I’ve ever seen, though it does tend to be more of an art house horror film than something more instantly crowd-pleasing like Creepshow.
The four stories (titled “The Black Hair”, “The Woman of the Snow”, “Hoichi, the Earless”, and “In a Cup of Tea”) mostly function more as traditional ghost stories rather than outright spooky horror stories, giving us tales designed to evoke feelings of melancholy and loss rather than fright or shock. The first gives us the story of an impoverished samurai who decides to gain a new fortune by leaving his wife and seeking fame with a new lord and family. Years later, he regrets his actions, and returns home to find his old wife still waiting for him, looking perhaps a little too perfectly like she did when he left. In the second, a young woodcutter and his master are caught in a terrible blizzard and try to take refuge in a seemingly abandoned cottage. Unfortunately, they find the Woman of the Snow in there, who kills the master and promises to let the younger one live as long as he never tells anyone else what has happened for as long as he lived. Years later, he finds himself with a wife and three kids and makes a very bad decision. The third, and my favorite, follows a blind musician at a temple who attracts the attention of the Heike royalty, whose ghosts have haunted the area since their deaths in battle seven hundred years prior. The head priest, discovering his night time travels and seeing the effects on his health, tries to help him repel the ghosts, but makes a terrible error in doing so. The final, and most bizarre, follows a samurai who sees the reflection of another man inside of his cup of tea. Later, he encounters the man himself, but after trying to stab him with his sword finds that the man disappears when stabbed. It’s got a very unusual ending (some would even call it a non-ending) befitting its overall strangeness.
The film was directed by Masaki Kobayashi, who was mostly known for his incredible films like Harakiri and the Human Condition trilogy (both of which are available from Criterion, as is this), as he made his only horror movie as though he were making another serious dramatic work that just happened to have Japanese spirits in it. It’s an approach that really works, as it means that the very first thing you can say about each of the four stories is that they all look completely gorgeous. The stories themselves are fairly simplistic, and indeed somewhat repetitious (particularly the first two, which both revolve around a man who finds his wife is not what she seems), but are still done extremely well, to the point where I don’t know which one to point to as the weak link in the group. The third one is certainly the goriest (in fact, it’s the only bloody one) and the fourth is the weirdest, but that doesn’t make either stand out so far as quality goes, only in uniqueness.
This film should appeal to anyone that enjoys old ghost stories. It fits with the tone of them perfectly, giving us a film full of quiet sorrow and beauty. At over two and a half hours, it’s a bit on the lengthy side, but it’s a thoroughly absorbing, rewarding film, and one that should not be missed by anyone. While I certainly don’t have anything against filmmakers who spend their entire careers making horror movies like Wes Craven or George Romero, I always enjoy it when a major filmmaker known for his more serious films decides it’s time to make a horror movie, and that’s just what we get here. It’s like if Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese suddenly decided they had to make a horror movie (and no, Shadows & Fog and Shutter Island do not count, however good both films are) and just making something incredible in the process. We certainly could do with more films like this.
Rating: ****
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Tales from the Hood
This movie was a fond memory from high school, where it played on HBO fairly frequently, but I don’t think I’ve managed to see it once since college started. As such, I was slightly nervous that this would be yet another youthful favorite that I wound up hating when I saw it again years later, but my fears were thankfully completely unfounded. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that, of the nearly nonexistent number of horror anthology films of the 90s, this definitely ranks up at the top of the list.
The film is structured around three gang members that go to a funeral parlor after being lured with promises of drugs by one of the most beautifully creepy morticians ever put on film. I wish I could find a picture of him, but he’s essentially an elderly black version of Amadeus, all wild hair and bug eyes. As he takes them to their rewards, he relates to them stories of four of the people in his parlor. There’s the story of a rookie black cop who fails to stop his white veteran officers from beating a political activist to death, a story of a young boy who can hurt people with his drawings, a story about a racist politician running for governor that runs afoul of some Southern voodoo, and a surprisingly serious story about a gang member that gets experimented on in prison.
Whenever you get an anthology, there’s always one story that’s weaker than the others, and while in most it tends to be buried somewhere in the middle, here, because of how it ties in with the three gang members of the wraparound story, it’s placed squarely at the end. While the first three stories are told more than slightly tongue-in-cheek (the second story even has David Alan Grier playing a dangerous boyfriend, which is somewhat along the lines of us being expected to find Jim Carrey frightening in The Number 23), this one starts to tread dangerously close to preachiness, as the prisoner comes face to face with all of his past victims, and sees just how much pain gang members cause even to strangers. A real laugh riot, that one.
The best is easily the one with the racist politician that was so blatantly modeled on former presidential hopeful David Duke that he’s even named Duke and has the same former KKK affiliations. While running his campaign, he decides to set up shop in a former plantation whose owner massacred all of his slaves after the Civil War to prevent them from leaving him. Unfortunately for the would-be Governor, their souls still remain at the house, bonded to a set of voodoo dolls that begin raising all kinds of hell. It’s all told with a great deal of fun and humor to it, as when he flings a vase at the first reanimated doll and wildly screams out “No reparations!” It’s find political insight like that which you rarely find in movies these days.
I am admittedly a pretty big fan of horror anthologies, due no doubt in large part to how I’ve managed to successfully avoid most of the clunkers out there. Regardless, this still manages to be a superior entrant, ranking up with the likes of Creepshow and Amicus anthologies like Asylum and Tales From the Crypt. That it came out in the mid-90s, when the horror genre was largely on life support, just makes it all the more impressive. This is a movie that definitely needs to get re-released on DVD pronto.
Rating: *** ½
Sunday, October 21, 2007
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
Saturday, October 13, 2007
From Beyond the Grave
For those of you who aren’t diehard horror junkies, let me provide a bit of backstory to this. Back in the 60s and early 70s, there were a lot of really good horror movies coming out of England, often starring the likes of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The main film company responsible for these was Hammer studios, which had reinvented itself in the late 50s by remaking old Universal horror stories, with a then-modern British twist to them. While they were the top company, they did have some competition from a company called Amicus, who couldn’t really compete well enough on the standard horror films, so they began to specialize in anthology films, where they’d throw three or four (or even five, as in the case of Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror) horror stories into one film, loosely held together by some goofy framing story. This is one such film, the framing story here being that Peter Cushing is an antique shop owner who has four people come in and rip him off, each paying the price for their greed.
As with every other anthology out there, not all the stories are of equal quality. In this case, the final story, about a man who gets an antique door that opens a portal to an evil nobleman from the past that wants to sacrifice the man’s wife, is the weakest (odd, since they usually tend to bury the weakest story in the middle of these things). The others all work better, particularly the first and third stories, the first, about an antique mirror that is home to an evil spirit that forces its owner to bring home young women and kill them (a prelude to Hellraiser), being the bloodiest and scariest of the bunch to kick the film off right, and the third, about an "elemental" that sits invisibly on the shoulder of the main character and tries to kill his wife, being what essentially amounts to an outright comedy, complete with a hysterical exorcism scene that completely exposes how nonsensical haunted house movies tend to be. The second part, while not great, has its moments, and features Donald Pleasence in a great role as a seller of shoelaces and matches who gets a little too close to the protagonist, and has the greatest closing line out of all four stories.
As it stands, it’s not one of Amicus’s best anthologies (that honor would be reserved for the likes of Asylum and The House That Dripped Blood), but I have yet to see one from them that wasn’t at least good. It’s another fine addition to the Twisted Terror Collection, helping to make that one of the best horror box sets to come out this entire year.
Rating: ***
