While a great many people have seen and loved Tobe Hooper’s first film, a little ditty known as the Texas Chain Saw Massacre (well, not counting some weird hippie movie he made in the 60s that all of five people have seen), surprisingly few have seen or even know about his second film, Eaten Alive. One could argue that this is because it’s not as good, but that kind of argument would then require us to watch only the single greatest film by each director and ignore all of their other films. I don’t think I want to live in a world where I’d be missing out on films like Creepshow (Romero), Last House on the Left (Craven), or Chopping Mall (Wynorski) just because they weren’t the top films of their filmmakers.
The film centers around Judd (Neville Brand), the owner of a small Texas hotel that, much like the Bates Motel, has its own swamp in the back. Even better than the Bates Motel, though, this swamp has its own crocodile, to which he feeds his more troublesome guests. It’s a nice way for him to expand from Texas Chain Saw, keeping things somewhat similar while taking them in a completely new direction. This would be pretty much the only time Hooper would ever do this, as almost every other film he’s ever made has been wildly different stylistically from all his others, leaving it very difficult to fit him into any kind of auteur theory. But I digress.
Even if it’s not on the level of Chain Saw (and honestly, that is kind of a tough act to follow), there’s still quite a lot to like about the movie. First is the quality acting of the film, headlined both by Brand and by a very young Robert Englund, who before becoming Freddy Krueger and Willie plays here a charmingly violent yokel that always enjoys plugging girls from behind. Also, while not an actual sequel, this does still follow the formula somewhat of ratcheting up the sex and violence to compensate for not being able to be the first film all over again. Not only does the croc kill people, but Brand takes a pitchfork and a scythe to his enemies, and a dog gets eaten too, something I always appreciate in a film. Also, following the simple understanding that everything is scarier (or at least creepier) at night, every single scene in the entire film is at night. Watching this, one would have no idea such a thing as the sun exists. It’s that kind of genius thinking that leads a man to make a movie about a house cursed from being built on an Indian burial ground, and then deciding to use actual corpses as props in the movie.
This is a true grindhouse film – nasty, vicious, and ugly. It’s also quite a lot of fun. If you want to see the kind of film that people reminisce fondly about when they complain about the dullness of present day movies, give this one a viewing.
Rating: ***
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Eaten Alive
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Dog Soldiers
When The Descent wound up being a surprise hit among horror fans, I had had some hopes that this would lead to fans then seeking out director Neil Marshall’s previous film Dog Soldiers, which I hold up as being possibly the best werewolf movie ever made. Sadly (and perhaps obviously), this did not happen, and it still languishes in semi-obscurity.
The film follows a group of Scotch soldiers on what seems to be a routine training mission out in the wilderness, when they find that the team they are fighting against has been almost completely wiped out by a pack of werewolves. Taking the lone, badly wounded survivor, they pretty much run screaming away from the vicious pack and hole up in a local’s home, where they have to make a NotLD-style defense against them all.
One of the things that makes this work so well is the rather frantic pacing of it all. I mentioned how it plays out somewhat like Night of the Living Dead, but only if you remove those wussy slow-moving zombies with the ones from the Dawn of the Dead remake. And make them smart, so they can figure out all the extra-sneaky ways to break in and kill people. Also, I don’t know if Britain just takes extra care in training its actors, but unlike many (read: all) of the United States’ low budget horror movies, there’s not a single bad actor to be found here.
This is not to say that the movie is perfect. I did, after all, not rate it quite four stars, pretty much entirely due to the ending, which takes all the momentum the film had built up and lets it drop with an ugly thud on the floor. It’s admittedly not the worst ending I’ve ever seen (I think that honor may permanently belong to Atonement), and also admittedly it’s not like there’s not a small army of horror movies out there that completely fumble the ball at the end, but for a movie that’s been so great up to this point, it’s all the more glaring. Still, if you watch it, the option is always there to turn it off ten minutes before it ends and imagine a different, much better ending. You can’t get that with most movies these days, you know.
Rating: *** ½
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Death Ship
Like most people (I presume), the bulk of my knowledge of George Kennedy comes from Police Squad! and the Naked Gun movies. As such, it was a fun experience getting to watch him, not only in a horror movie, but as one of the villains.
Not the main villain, though; that honor goes to the title character. This ship is just vicious; after the main characters have their ship wrecked and float on their lifeboat to the main setting, this ship does just about everything to murder them. Originally a nazi ship, as these things often tend to be, it knocks people into its propeller, it drops cranes on them, it possesses their captain (Kennedy) and gets him to attack people; in short, it’s one of the most inventive killers since Freddy Kreuger. And no, I don’t care that this came first.
I will be straight with you – this is not a perfectly made film. There are some noticeable continuity glitches, such as the rather abrupt shifting from day to night and back again. Personally, I’m willing to accept such snafus if the movie is entertaining enough to warrant it. Hell, Evil Dead had that problem, and I love the entire series. Plus, the ship itself just looks amazing, and that does tend to go a pretty long way in horror movies. It’s not really one of the better movies in the HROHFYSSBYD, but it’s still a fun movie, and in no way deserves the crap that seems to frequently gets slung its way (you know, on those rare occasions when anything at all gets slung its way).
One more thing. While this movie is not available yet on DVD (link to VHS below), you can supposedly see the whole movie at the link provided on the Youtube link. I can’t really confirm that at the moment, however, as the site seems to be temporarily on the fritz. Still, if it’s there when you go, be sure to check it out. It’s worth a viewing, at the very least.
Rating: ***
Saturday, April 4, 2009
The Deadly Spawn
If there’s ever a low budget monster Hall of Fame, the creatures from the Deadly Spawn absolutely deserve to be among the first inductees. On a budget of roughly twenty five grand, Douglas McKeown and company crafted some of the greatest looking monsters in film history, easily besting the lame CG monsters we often get in films today. Seriously, go check out, say, the monsters from the Underworld movies, and then come to this film, and tell me which look better to you.
This is a good thing, since the film operates on more of a premise than a plot. The story: aliens crash on earth, initially looking like large tadpoles with lots of teeth, and just growing more and more the longer they stay on the planet. Enter a small, relatively peaceful New Jersey family, whose cellar the alien fiends set up shop in, and who wind up getting chewed on a lot. The End.
So yeah, on paper it doesn’t really look like anything particularly special, but it’s simply a very fun, fairly gory 80s monster movie, in the grand tradition of the old 50s monster movies. The main character is a young kid, raised on such movies, who creates his own monster masks and is surprisingly well-equipped to deal with this onslaught. Somewhat less well-equipped are the boy’s parents, but hey, someone had to get eaten, right?
The eating, by the way, is easily the best part of the film, as it should be. Most movies like this, the actual violence is almost non-existent, or looks like shit. Not here. These bastards go around eating people’s heads, invading a vegetarian party full of old ladies (one of the best set-pieces in all of horrordom), and making blood splash all over the damn place. It is pure, unadulterated mayhem, and even though McKeown never went on to make anything else, this film shows he could easily have hung with horror standards like Craven or Hooper, had he wanted.
Rating: ***
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Dead Eyes of London
For those unfamiliar with the subgenre of crime films from the 60s known as “krimi”, they basically came about as a result of the German public absolutely falling in love with the crime novels of Edgar Wallace, and making a frankly absurd number of movies based on them. Dead Eyes of London may not be one of the most graphic of them (the most violent of them I have so far seen would be The Bloody Dead, which was first known as Creature With the Blue Hand before extra shots of violence were clumsily added into it to make it more appealing to American audiences), but it’s still got enough horror elements to make it qualify for this collection.
The film involves a conspiracy of blind criminals that are going around killing rich foreign businessmen whenever London is overrun by fog (if you’ve never been to London they try to trick you and claim that it happens around forty days a year; in real life this means they’d be offing someone about every couple hours). Despite a lack of hard evidence, Scotland Yard begins to investigate a local church shelter for the blind, and their connection to a murderous blind man named Blind Jack.
The film has the traditional flashiness of all the best krimis, and also like many of the best krimis, it also features a supporting role by Klaus Kinski, who shows up looking so crazy guilty that we want to believe that he’s really the killer, even though the actual killer was the first character we saw. Don’t worry, I’m not giving anything away by that; not only is he on the cover of the DVD, he kills someone in the first scene of the film, so it’s not really all that ambiguous. Still, though, that Kinski, just as villainous as they come.
If you’ve never seen a krimi before, this would be a good place to start. The German film industry literally cranked out dozens of the damn things in the sixties, so there’s a lot to choose from, though most are not yet available on DVD in the US. Fret not, though, for if enough of you start buying up the ones that already exist, the studios won’t be able to resist releasing the other hundred or so in pristeen editions. Get to it already.
Rating: ***
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Dark Waters
The term Lovecraftian often brings with it a sense of great foreboding, particularly in the realm of film, where most movies made based off of Lovecraft’s stories have tended to be horrible. Fortunately, this film manages to sidestep that problem, perhaps because it’s only stylistically similar to Lovecraft’s work, rather than being based on any specific work of his. Granted, that didn’t really work for Cthulhu Mansion, but you work with that you’ve got.
The film, by director Mariano Baino (I’m eagerly awaiting the day he decides to grace us with a second film, so I can see if this one wasn’t just a fluke), a girl travels to an island monastery connected to her family. According to the IMDB synopsis, she’s there following her father’s death to discover why he had been funding the place, but I must have missed the sudden burst of exposition within the film itself. Strange of me, both given that I've seen it twice and still had no real clue why she had originally decided to go there, and because there is such little dialogue in the film that I like to think I’d have heard it. Seriously, there’s maybe a hundred lines in the entire film. I’d say it verges on being a silent film were it not for the sound effects and surprisingly rousing music.
Regardless, the lack of much sound greatly adds to the overall creepiness of the film, which as you have no doubt guessed involves the monastery being a front for a murderous cult that is sacrificing women to help free a demonic figure trapped within the building. While it’s not a true Italian production – it was filmed in the Ukraine, co-financed by British and Russian companies – Baino gives it so much of the feel of the Italian horrors of the 70s and 80s that I feel it proper to label it as such. Sadly, the nuns don’t all get naked, or I could have cheerfully filed this one as nunsploitation as well, but the general mood and tension of the film make up for that tragic absence, I guess. Plus most of the nuns are a little too old to still be considered attractive, some even seeming to be in their mid-30s! It’s scandalous, really.
Rating: ***
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Dark Night of the Scarecrow
TV movies would be a hell of a lot better today if they made them like they made this early 80s effort. Ignoring the fact that I never watch them anyway, I can’t think of the last time a network premiered a horror movie (yes, I’m specifying networks here, I’m sadly aware of all the horror movies that premiere on the Sci-Fi Channel) instead of whatever the hell they make TV movies out of nowadays.
The film opens with a retarded man (played by Dr. Giggles himself, Larry Drake) being falsely accused of assaulting a young girl and getting hunted down by a group of men and murdered. After seeming to escape punishment for their crime, the men now find themselves stalked by the scarecrow the retarded man had tried to disguise himself as when they killed him. One by one, they are killed, but who could their killer be? Could it possibly be the undead form of the slain retarded man????
While it’s a fairly standard plot for a horror movie, the film does function pretty darn nicely within its contexts. For one, it’s actually pretty surprisingly racy for a TV movie from 1981. While most of the violence is off screen, they all but outright state that the leader of the men wanted the retarded guy dead because he (the leader) had the hots for the young girl he (the retarded guy) was friends with. A strong undercurrent of pedophilia is always a welcome addition to any network entertainment, right guys?
Additionally, the film does a pretty nice job of keeping it a mystery of who the killer actually is. While there’s a good deal of speculation by the characters that it might be the dead man back from the grave, there’s quite a few less supernatural suspects that it could be, from his wrathful grieving mother, to the idealistic lawyer that basically declared a war against them when their case was thrown out for lack of evidence. You don’t get to find out definitively who it is until pretty much the very last minute of the film, which is rather nice for a time when most killers took pride in announcing their existence through sequel after sequel.
Rating: ***
P.S. While it’s outright impossible to purchase this movie in any official manner, you can still watch the entire film on Youtube. It’s certainly not an ideal way of watching it, but if you click on the trailer below, the user that posted it has the entire film on his channel for you to watch. Interactivity!
Sunday, March 1, 2009
The Crazies
I don’t know why, but one of my biggest thrills in movies is to see a devastating viral outbreak that requires a government quarantine to save everyone outside of the hot zone. It’s why I’ve read the first hundred or so pages of the Stand many more times than the rest of the book, and it’s probably connected to my similar love for zombies. How good for me, then, that the creator of the modern zombie story, Mr. George Romero himself, made this little-seen classic viral outbreak tale in the early 70s.
The film, set in a rural town in western Pennsylvania (curiously like a lot of Romero’s films – from what I can tell, western Pennsylvania is one of the most dangerous places in the world), concerns an experimental government bio-weapon that is accidentally released into the town’s water supply, and the military’s efforts to blockade the town so that nobody outside can learn of it, or be infected by it. The virus, of course, has a seemingly 100% success rate (just once, I’d like to see a movie about a deadly virus that’s like the flu and only has a crappy 20% infection rate), and everyone who gets it either dies or goes irreversibly insane. We then focus on a small group of locals that decide to hide from the government quarantine so that they don’t all get boxed into the high school to die like the rest of the town, only to find that they may have already been infected anyway.
This was Romero’s fourth film, after Night of the Living Dead and the as-yet-unseen-by-me There’s Always Vanilla and Season of the Witch. While those two middle films were largely panned and seem to have fallen into obscurity, this one is absolutely due for people to discover. Like Night and Dawn, this is not a very polished film; the acting is all done by local unknowns, and is average at best (with the exception of the delightful Lynn Lowry, whose creepy self I’ve also seen in I Drink Your Blood and Shivers, two other 70s films where she went crazy). What it does have going for it is a frenzied energy, of things crumbling apart around everyone, of events having gotten way out of control before anyone even noticed things were wrong (cue Grant Morrison hyping up Final Crisis some more). It’s a strong, bleak film, from a great director that finally seems to have ended his hiatus from filmmaking (though it would be nice if he’d continue making films that didn’t have zombies in them too, considering his past two films and his next are all part of his Dead series). It’s not quite his best (that will probably always remain Dawn of the Dead), but it definitely hangs with his top efforts. Go give it a try.
Rating: *** ½
Saturday, February 28, 2009
City of Rott
Of all the animated films I’ve seen in my day, I think this may even outrank Fist of the North Star as the most over-the-top violent. Also like Fist of the North Star, it starts to wear a little thin after a while. Still, this remains the only zombie cartoon I’ve seen to date and even if it doesn’t have quite enough variety to stand with the best zombie movies out there, it’s still well worth at least a viewing.
The film follows the adventures of an old man named Fred as he bludgeons a small army of zombies to death with his walker, which he also talks to. Apparently the zombie infestation was caused by a new species of worm that got into the water supply and is turning everyone into ravenous zombies, so whenever a person gets bitten, we get to see worms dripping out of the zombies’ mouths into the wounds so as to infect new victims. Being old, Fred’s kind of a prick, and spends his whole time ignoring any fellow survivors he sees in favor of trying to find something to drink that’s not contaminated with worms, and getting some more comfortable slippers so his feet won’t hurt so much. While it’s entertaining seeing him just slaughter zombies nonstop a la Dead Alive, it is nice that right when it gets to be a little too repetitive to continue, writer-director Frank Sudol changes it up by killing him and then starting to follow the adventures of Zombie Fred.
The animation is pretty interesting in a deliberately underdone Aqua Teen kind of way. It’s nice and detailed, so you can see just what body parts are getting ripped out of someone, or what’s left of a zombie’s head after half of it is ripped off with a walker. There’s also some nice bits of humor, as when he walks past a store named Tex’s Chain Saws, or when he meets a girl that’s been bitten, and lies about having a cure so he can get her to brave a zombie-filled mall to get him some slippers. Even at under 80 minutes it goes on a little long, but I think I can say with some assurance that it is still by far the best zombie cartoon ever made, and you should give it a whirl on that alone.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
The Church
The Church (a.k.a. Demons 3 – not Demons 3: The Ogre, the other one. The other one that’s not Black Demons) opens with a band of knights massacring an entire village and building a church overtop of the corpses, and then spends an hour and a half showing that this was exactly the right thing for them to have done. It’s uncommon to find a movie so willing to make its heroes a pack of vicious thugs.
Fast forward to the present day, and an exploration is being done of the basement of the church, which seems curious when at least one elderly priest at the church is familiar with the legend surrounding the place (though he later goes crazy and tries to end the world, so maybe this isn’t so strange after all). The church’s new librarian manages to find an underground cave where something possesses him and starts to turn him into a demon, and before long the church has been sealed off and it's now a race against time for one lone priest to stop all the demons before they escape and destroy the world~!!!
This film, by Argento protégé Michele Soavi (yes, the guy that did Cemetery Man), was originally intended to be the official Demons 3. For reasons I do not know, Lamberto Bava (the director of the first two Demons films) instead made the terrible TV movie Demons 3: the Ogre, leaving this one to remain an unofficial sequel, despite stylistically being an obvious continuation of the series. We have people getting possessed when injured, everyone trapped in a confined space, and tons of needless yet wonderful gore. Compare that with the official Demons 3, where we get one monster that doesn’t really show up until the end of the film, and possesses and frightens nobody at all. I’m still not certain how Umberto Lenzi’s Black Demons factors into this, outside of Italians being absolutely shameless at ripping off popular franchises (see Lucio Fulci’s “official” Dawn of the Dead sequel Zombie). Regardless, of the three Demons 3 films, this is the only one at all worth watching.
If you’re a big fan of Italian horror, then you already know what you’re in store for here: great visuals, lots of blood, a fine mix of heavy overacting and thoroughly wooden underacting, and a fairly incoherent plot to help you along the way. Seriously, you can just watch it safe in the knowledge that pretty much an entire class of schoolchildren is wiped out by demons. And who can’t get behind something like that?
Also, the main characters totally fucks the Devil in it.
Rating: ***
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Cherry Falls
One of the worst parts of slasher movies is the unbearable sameness of them all. It’s as though there were a firm blueprint they all must share in or else nobody will take them seriously, which severely weakens any attempts at originality they might try. While this film does not completely break free from the bonds of slasherdom, it makes a surprising enough try that I feel I must commend its efforts.
The film, set in the small town of Cherry Falls, concerns a mad killer that is slicing up all the teenage virgins in the town. Right from that we’re getting an inversion of the normal premise, where now a person is only safe if they have had sex before. The main heroine, Jody (played surprisingly by Brittany Murphy, as part of her ongoing efforts to prove to me that no matter how many times I see her, I still have no idea what she looks like), who has just broken up with her boyfriend, is now being pressured not only to start dating him again, but to immediately sleep with him so that she isn’t murdered. It’s a nice change of pace from the necessary virginal beauty we usually get in movies. This is further compounded by the general student body, getting wind of the killer’s modus operandi, deciding to engage in a big group orgy after school to keep themselves safe. Nice!
This is not to say the movie is perfect, mind you. I managed to successfully identify the killer from the first time they appeared, which does not really help when so much is made of who it could possibly be. There’s also the maddening cleverness of how a movie that’s all about arguing for young people to screw contains exactly zero nudity (sort of like the complete lack of anyone smoking in Thank You For Smoking, only not as fun because we are deprived of tits). The characters also tend to verge on the annoying side, which I guess is to be expected in a slasher film, but speaking just for myself I do always prefer getting a chance to actually give a shit about the characters before they start dying off. Still, despite its faults, it is definitely one of the better slasher movies to have come out since the 80s, and you should at least give it a try.
One more thing: if you watch the trailer below, you’ll notice Murphy spouting off about how your first time is supposed to be perfect and wonderful and magical and all that nonsense. For those younger readers that have as of yet not had sex yet, here’s how your first time is going to be, no matter how well you plan it: awkward, uncomfortable, and probably outright painful for the girl. The magical aspect of things doesn’t show up until you’ve had enough practice to actually be good at it. This is why you should in no way wait until marriage, as all that means is that your wedding night won’t stop being awkward, uncomfortable, and painful until well after the ceremony and reception.
Rating: ***
Sunday, February 15, 2009
The Changeling
It’s admittedly kind of a toss-up as to whether this qualifies as a ghost movie or a haunted house movie, but I’ve always counted it as a haunted house film just for the fact that a) the ghost is possessing the house, rather than just appearing by himself a lot, and b) were it not for this film, I would have been much harder pressed to name a single haunted house movie I unreservedly liked (the only other I can name is The Legend of Hell House, and I only saw that for the first time last year).
The film opens with George C. Scott watching in horror as his wife and daughter are killed by a truck that skids in the snow. Trying to pick up the pieces of his life, he moves into an old mansion, where he swiftly realizes that things are Not Right. Here’s where the film really stands out among other haunted house stories, because unlike the standard two responses to creepy things happening in the old house, where the main characters either try to pretend nothing is happening, or see something fairly minor and just immediately flip the fuck out and go completely crazy, Scott gives a great understated performance in acknowledging that something clearly supernatural is happening, but it’s not that big a deal. Presumably due to how his world has already been destroyed in the opening scene, he doesn’t bemoan his fate at having done such a bad job picking a new home, but instead decides that helping the young boy whose spirit lives on in the house might help him move on from the deaths of his own family.
It’s a nicely understated, fairly intelligent film, that manages to throw in some good visual style as well. One visual, in fact, was apparently so good, that of him going through the floorboards to search for the boy’s body in an old well under the house, that it was so totally ripped off for The Ring (I don’t care if this isn’t that famous a movie, Hideo Nakata must have seen it). Lest you think it ends with a whimper, have no fear: director Peter Medak made sure to fill the ending with fire and pain and the death of someone who wasn’t really much of a guilty party, just to ensure that everyone goes home somewhat uncomfortable and uncertain.
Rating: *** ½
