This was the biggest head trip of a film I’ve seen since Altered States, and that’s a damn shame. There definitely needs to be more joyously strange films like this out there to blow the minds of unsuspecting cinema goers. I can’t even give you the general premise – a blaxploitation vampire movie – because that would just give you the impression that it was nonsense like Blacula or something, when it actually just exists on a strange cosmic plane all to itself.
The film opens with text explaining that, while living with a native tribe and exploring their culture, Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones, of Night of the Living Dead fame) was ritualistically stabbed in the heart three times, once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Ghost. After this, he could not die, nor could he be killed. That’s pretty heady stuff for a genre that’s normally little more than people with pointy teeth running around biting people and getting naked a lot. The film then follows him at home, now addicted to blood (tying it in with problems with 70s black culture, the film views it the same as any other drug addiction). The film rejects normal stereotypes, as he has no fangs, can travel around in the daylight, and normally gets his blood supply by stealing from hospitals rather than committing murders (though when a pimp and prostitute try to murder him, he is fine with utilizing them). Further, rather than the normal street level character one would find in a blaxploitation film, he’s an educated professor that lives in a mansion with his own servant. Bill Cosby may have made that seem acceptable for a black family in the 80s, but that was certainly a rarity for the times.
Eventually he meets, and falls in love with, Ganja, who comes to stay with him while looking for her husband. Her husband, she knows, was staying with Hess before he disappeared, but she doesn’t know is that her husband killed himself and Hess has been pragmatically keeping him on ice for a handy supply. Her reactions to Hess both before and after she discovers what has become of her husband, are very well done. I can’t reveal the ending or climax, but I will say that it ends in a unique manner perfectly befitting the rest of the movie.
And now that I’ve gone on about the plot for two paragraphs, let me explain that the film really isn’t about the plot. This is a movie that focuses heavily on religion, with him gaining his immortality through a dark religious ceremony, giving us a number of scenes at a black church, and featuring a soundtrack of spirituals and African tribal chanting. Even the unrevealed ending focuses deeply on this, and deals with a vampire’s relationship to God and Christianity in a much deeper and more intelligent way than the mere “touch of a cross burns them” scenario I’m used to dealing with. The film is also pretty slow paced, focusing more on the visuals and sound rather than a story, and is edited pretty loopily. Scenes jar against each other dischordantly, and the film’s sole real framing device, three title cues that tell us the various stages of his existence (“Addiction”, “Survival”, and “Letting Go”), doesn’t exactly go out of its way to explain things. It’s a surprisingly challenging film for a horror movie in general, but in particular for a vampire movie, and after one viewing it’s already earned a place as one of my favorites.
It’s disappointing, but unsurprising, that this isn’t a more well known film. It’s essentially an art house horror movie, and I can’t think of a one that’s all that popular, but it should be all the same. The 70s are renowned for being arguably the best decade for films in general, and that’s certainly just as true for horror movies as it was for dramas. Ganja & Hess may not quite be the Godfather of vampire movies, but at the very least it’s the Nashville of the genre.
Rating: *** ½
Monday, March 31, 2008
Ganja & Hess
Friday, March 28, 2008
Blood & Lace
And Midnight Video Week comes to an end with one of the best movies in the mix, giving us multiple deranged killers, some oddly brilliant music, and a home for orphans that’s even more horrid than the halfway house in The Halfway House (though with a tragic lack of lesbian sex and cameltoe). It even gives us not one, not two, but three surprise twists at the end, one of which was pretty blatantly obvious, though the other two did catch me a bit by surprise.
Blood & Lace (not to be confused with the Bava film Blood & Black Lace) opens with a POV shot of a killer creeping around the exterior of a house at night before sneaking in through a door, grabbing a hammer, and heading for the bedroom. Inside the bedroom, a man and a woman are sleeping, and we get a delightfully retarded moment as we see the door opening from inside the room, but as the identity of the killer must be kept a mystery, rather than a hand pushing the door open, we get the hammer, which I can only assume was also used to turn the knob. Naturally, both sleepers are quietly bludgeoned to death (rather than the normal creaming one would expect from such a scene, the most either can muster up is a sort of lustful moaning), and the house is burned down.
We then cut to a newly orphaned daughter (in her late teens, I guess, though she looks like a full adult), who now has to live in a house with a bunch of other orphans. This house, of course, is a big scam, as is shown when a boy tries to escape in the night and has his hand taken off when the groundskeeper throws a cleaver at him. If that’s not enough for you, then I feel I must add that there are a number of bodies of previous unruly orphans kept in a meat locker in the basement, and that Mrs. Deere, the master of the house, has a truly inspired speech about modern medical advances and how someday soon we will have conquered death through the dark power of cryogenics (well, not in those exact words, but you get the idea). Really, she’s doing everyone a favor by killing them and keeping them perfectly preserved.
This film is truly inspired in its badness. There are unfortunately parts where it drags a bit, and it’s not extremely well made or acted, but there’s so much delightful silliness contained within it that I can’t help but love it. I couldn’t help but grin, for instance, at how every last action sequence had overly dramatic music blaring like Captain Kirk was duking it out with a deadly alien. Or the spontaneous catfight that occurs when our young heroine finds that she has a rival for the affections of the theoretically hot orphan boy there. Or the film’s final line, which may not be on the level of “Nobody’s perfect”, but it certainly ain’t bad for a horror movie.
I have to say, while there weren’t any grand slam **** films in the bunch, I really dug most of the movies I got from my impulse purchases at Midnight Video. It’s a shame the place is shutting down shop at the end of the month, it was nice being able to grab some otherwise unavailable obscure horror films like Hunchback of the Morgue and Spider Labyrinth from them. If you’ve got the cash, I’d definitely recommend checking out their site and seeing what they have left in stock before they’re gone. You likely won’t be disappointed.
Rating: ***
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Death Weekend (a.k.a. The House by the Lake)
Well, as rape-revenge pictures go, this one has two things going for it: it at least managed to wait until the end of the film before it goes all the way into morally reprehensible territory, and unlike I Spit on Your Grave the filmmaking technique is fairly passable. That being said, this is a genre that relishes extremism more than filmmaking, so there’s two ways that one really has to judge this by.
On the filmmaking side, at least, the movie works better than most of what I’ve seen from the genre. The film follows a man and a girl he’s trying to get with as they go to spend a weekend at a lakehouse together, and run afoul of a gang of misfits that go on to torment and torture them both. This is done in a fairly unusual manner, for while most films like this portray the victims as young and innocent, here the man is a complete sleaze, caring only for his possessions, and lying to the girl and telling her there was going to be a big party at the lakehouse to get her down there. It does, however, make sure to include the required “villain that’s not really as bad as the others, except when he is” that we feel the need to have in every one of these films. I don’t know what that’s about. A) Why do we need to have one villains that we can half sympathize with, and B) how sympathetic is he expected to be when he goes around beating the girl, tearing apart the house, assaulting a cop, and cheerfully joining in in the killing of two old men who show up solely to provide early victims to keep the film moving along faster?
Still, the film is surprisingly restrained for the genre. The rape in question doesn’t occur until the final third of the film, is short, features no nudity, and ends badly for the rapist. Indeed, it’s so oddly filmed that it may well have not been a rape at all, but rather just the guy dry humping her with all their clothes on and nutting just from that. Hardly the sleaze you would expect from a genre that includes such “delights” as Night Train Murders and House on the Edge of the Park. As such this curiously manages to be both a better and a worse film than either one of them is.
I do confess to not being a very big fan of rape-revenge movies, despite having seen a startling number of them. Usually their efforts to bring something new to the table are something along the mentally vacant lines of Rape is a Circle making the rapist a woman. I’m not saying Death Weekend really brings anything new to the table, but at least it’s comparatively well filmed, and manages to go most of the film without being as morally vacant as most of its brethren (the ending is still atrocious, but I guess it was expecting too much to think we could make it through the entire film without a problem). It’s not a good movie, but it’s an alright one, and sometimes that’s all you can really ask for.
Rating: **
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Toxic Zombies
This film is a rarity among the videos I ordered from Midnight Video, as it’s the only one in the bunch that I could have also gotten a copy of from Amazon (hence the link at the end of the review). Also, much like yesterday’s Blood on Satan’s Claw, it manages to be consistently entertaining throughout its running time without ever managing to really differentiate itself from the pack at any point.
The story, at least initially, involves a clash between a group of hippies secretly growing marijuana on federal land, and two bloodthirsty federal agents trying to get them. After an initial failure to capture the hippies, they hit upon what seems like a perfect solution: crop dust the whole area with an experimental new poison to wipe out all of the marijuana, and if it turns out to be toxic to human life, hey, nobody’s supposed to on the land right then anyway, right? Naturally, there are Unforeseen Consequences, as the hippies doused with the poison are transformed into zombies, who then go on a rampage against everyone in the woods. As it should, this provides us with some nice moments, as when the zombies stumble upon a family camping out in the woods, and the dad immediately hightails it and leaves his family for dead. There’s also what has to be the single dumbest truck driver ever, who picks up the mom, crying hysterically, her clothes torn, starts driving her back to town, sees another person crouching down by the road, sees the mom start screaming at the sight of him and yell that he’s the one that came at her, and then parks and leaves the truck to see if the newcomer needs a ride too. Frankly, at that point you have to start wondering how he managed to live long enough to make an appearance in the film to begin with.
We do eventually get an actual hero, in the form of an EPA officer who occasionally patrols the region, and who stumbles across the grand cropdusting plot and the zombie hippies, and it becomes a showdown between him and the two agents who inadvertently created the zombies. This is made tough for the officer, as the feds are apparently trained specifically to shoot through people’s necks, doing so multiple times throughout the film, just to show off their marksmanship, I guess.
The directing is pretty generic, which can admittedly be a blessing, after the distracting visual styles of more recent films like See No Evil and Automaton Transfusion, so while it never excels it at least isn’t actively irritating. The pacing works well, keeping the various killings coming at a fairly steady clip so you never get bored. It needed a little bit extra to make it truly memorable, but as it is it’s entertaining enough for at least one viewing.
Rating: ** ½
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Blood on Satan's Claw
We’re at Day 2 of Midnight Video week, and we’re dealing with what is easily the most famous movie I got from them. Blood on Satan’s Claw is a staple of early 70s British horror, about a small village that becomes host to the rise of witchcraft after a demonic skeleton is uncovered. It doesn’t quite work perfectly, but it is an enjoyably moody enough thing.
The film opens in a field in 18th century or so England, where a young man and his plow have just accidentally dug up a skeleton that’s not completely human. Before he can get to his master, a judge that occasionally dabbles in smiting witches, and return to the scene, the skeleton has vanished, and soon an ever-growing collection of townsfolk is dabbling in Satan worship, and conducting human sacrifices for their dark lord. The group is led by a girl named (of course) Angel, who not only leads the band (mostly comprised of children and teens) in their murders, but who also strips down to try to seduce a reverend over to her side, and when she is unsuccessful, accuses him of rape and murder. She’s a good egg, that one.
While the film is entertaining enough, it never really manages to go far enough in any direction to really make it stand out. It thankfully doesn’t have the vile core to it that the similar film Witchfinder General did, but it’s also too slow paced to really garner any excitement up until the big battle at the end between the Satanists and the Christian army. There’s also surprisingly little blood or nudity, at least in my estimation – I had heard tell that there was quite a lot of both in the film, and so was a little disappointed that it didn’t have nearly the violence of Hunchback of the Morgue, and a comparable amount of nudity (possibly even less than the previous film). It does have a nice overall visual appeal, but that’s hardly uncommon for British horror movies of the time. After all, Hammer Films was still going strong when this movie came out.
Still, there’s enough quality moments in the film to make it worth at least one viewing. After all, how many films can you name where you see a mob, whipped up into an anti-witchcraft frenzy, grab a girl and toss her into a lake to see if she floats? Or where the leader of the Inquisition’s right-hand man is a large bald mute whose main contribution to the witch hunt is to point at a captured witch and go “Uh! Uh! Uh!” like he’s a bloodhound or something? Not too many, I’d wager.
Rating: ** ½
Monday, March 24, 2008
Hunchback of the Morgue (a.k.a. Rue Morgue Massacres)
In celebration of not dealing with the Tomb of Terrors collection this week, I thought I’d indulge myself by spending the week reviewing rare horror movies that I got from the sadly soon-to-be-gone Midnight Video. First up is this weird little Paul Naschy gem, where he plays a hunchback that goes around acquiring bodies for his mad scientist friend in the hopes that the scientist’s experiments in creating artificial life will enable him to bring the hunchback’s love back from the dead.
If that sounds a bit similar to Frankenstein, well, it should, but the film diverges pretty severely, starting with how the bodies aren’t just acquired from graverobbing. While there are the obligatory scenes of that, the bulk of the physical specimens used are acquired fresh, with Gotho (Naschy) or the scientist murdering people for their work. There’s also the matter of the artificial life form the scientist is creating. While in Frankenstein the creation started and ended as a freakish, patchwork human, here we start with a single, overlarge cell in a jar that rapidly grows organs as it consumes more human prey until it grows large enough to escape the confines of its jar and must be locked up for the safety of the scientist. If all that sounds uninteresting to you, then why on Earth do you come to this blog?
It’s that kind of delightful over the topness that makes the whole film so fun to watch. Obviously Gotho and the scientist play things to the hilt, but they’ve enlisted everyone and everything in the film to join them in their madness. At one point, an exaggerated drunk is leaving a pub to go home and one of his friends bids him a fond farewell with the line, “Be careful, Hans, and don’t bump into the devil on your way home!” I’m sure you’ve all said similar things to your friends at the end of a get-together. There’s also a group of children near the beginning that see the hunchback and decide that the logical course of action is to start pelting him with rocks, as any normal children would do in such a situation. Even the animal life gets into the act, as on two different occasions Gotho is attacked by a swarm of rats that jump so high at him that they seem almost to have been flung through the air, before he fights them off with the natural enemy of the rat, a flaming torch.
There’s a fair amount of violence and nudity in the film, as one would expect from a Spanish horror movie from the 70s, and the look of all the different locations (when it’s not too damned dark to see them, at least) is quite nice. Like the rest of the films I’ll be reviewing this week, you’re going to have an uphill battle getting ahold of this, but if you should happen to find a place selling it, it will be well worth your money.
Rating: *** ½
Friday, March 21, 2008
Wendigo
I will admit to being a little suspicious of this film at first, based on a combination of a cumulative Amazon score of 2 out of 5 and a general disenchantment with recent movies about big monsters hiding in the woods a la Sasquatch. Still, after seeing it listed on a list of great horror movies that nobody watches, I felt I had to at least get a used copy of it, and I’m very glad I did.
The film was made in 2001, but stylistically is largely quite similar to horror thrillers from the 70s. In the happy vein of movies such as Deliverance, it follows a happy family as they decide to spend a weekend out in the woods, only to run afoul on some villainous townies. While the father of the family (Jake Weber of Medium fame) deals with a local who’s resentful of where they’re spending their weekend, his son (Erik Sullivan of Malcolm in the Middle), after speaking to a local old Indian, becomes fascinated by the legend of the Wendigo, a shapeshifting spirit that devours people. It may be a bit of a misnomer to label this a horror movie, as the film largely leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not there actually is anything supernatural going on, or whether or not it’s all in the boy’s head (yes, they do take a fairly decisive stand at the end, but I won’t reveal which way it goes), but given how much he daydreams about the Wendigo attacking him I felt it fit.
It’s interesting, coming as it does on the heels of See No Evil and Automaton Transfusion, to see how the camerawork manages to be just as flashy in this film as in those two while actually working with the story rather than distracting from it. This is a pretty slow-paced film, and we get a lot of shots of the wilderness, but they and the music are so well done that they manage to draw us further into the film rather than bore us like they would in a lesser film. Writer-director-editor Larry Fessenden really did a superb job here, and while this is the first film of his I’ve seen, I hope it won’t be the last.
There’s a lot of great moments to the film, not least of which is the opening credits sequence. As the credits roll against a black screen, a series of children’s monster toys move on and off the screen, while the boy makes sound effects for them. It may not sound like much, and really, it isn’t, but it certainly got me in touch with my childhood and made me happy. There’s also a nice bit of understatedness to the film, as characters are witness to events that are shown to us without explicitly stating what happened, something that happens in almost every movie. For example, there’s one part where the wife is in the kitchen and goes to grab at the sugar, only to see that the sugar is leaking out of the bag. Leaving the bag, she goes across the room to see that there’s a hole in the window. Just form that, we’re able to piece together that someone had shot the bad through the window, but in most movies the director or producer would have felt the need to dumb things down and overexplain what had happened. I’m very grateful to this movie that it trusted me not to be an idiot.
This movie probably will not appeal to everyone. It’s slow paced, and doesn’t have much in the way of action. However, it’s smart, has characters that actually seem like real people rather than a parade of cliches that serve no purpose beyond dying, and has a curious hypnotic manner of drawing you further into the film. I have to believe there’s an audience for a film like this, otherwise why do I even have this blog?
Rating: *** ½
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Automaton Transfusion
I saw this movie as part of my ongoing efforts to see every last thing featuring zombies that looks anywhere close to non-terrible, and while by those fairly low standards this film certainly succeeds, it really doesn’t excel at all. It’s certainly not a bad movie, by any means, but it has all the same flaws See No Evil had: wonky directing, a paint-by-numbers story, and an ending that, to put it nicely, really sucks.
Here’s the situation: we’ve got a small town where all is not as it seems, which finds itself at the heart of a plague of fast moving zombies, the result of a government experiment gone horridly awry. At the center of this grim scenario are a group of high schoolers that all look suspiciously like they were in their 20s, that are all trying to find each other and escape the surrounding area to safety. I know, never been done before, right?
Still, these kinds of movies aren’t watched for their originality, they’re watched for their violence and humor. The film is fairly light on humor, per se, but there are some pretty nice bits of violence here and there. My personal favorite, which should surprise nobody that knows me, comes when a pregnant woman comes face to face with a zombie, who decides to helpfully alleviate her condition. There’s also a couple nice touches, like how these are the first zombies I’ve yet seen that actually sleep (though I did read about such things in Stephen King’s Cell). There’s also the added adrenaline rush that only comes with the onset of zombies running full speed at our heroes, and (for perhaps the first time ever) having no difficulty whatsoever with opening a door, all of which keeps the film moving along at a pretty steady clip.
Still, though, the unnecessarily flashy directing is a distraction more than anything, if not quite as bad as with See No Evil, and we get an ending that literally flashes a “To Be Continued” on the screen at us, something I haven’t had to deal with since The Matrix Reloaded. And I think we all remember how that all turned out. This isn’t a lousy movie by any means, but it’s something that could have been a lot smarter than it was.
Rating: **
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
See No Evil
I had resisted seeing this film for some time, as a horror movie produced by the WWE and starring one of their top pro wrestlers as the villain seemed to give it a greater than average chance of failing. A surprising number of positive reviews of it convinced me to give it a try, however, and I have to admit, while not exactly a good movie, it isn’t half bad.
The plot is fairly standard slasher fare. A group of co-ed convicts agrees, in exchange for reduced sentences, to help clean up an old, decrepit hotel that happens to be the secret hidey-hole of a deranged killer (played by the WWE’s Kane) that enjoys cutting out women’s eyes for religious purposes. It’s a fairly standard film, though for what the genre requires, it’s largely done well. The setting is always crucial in films like this, and the old hotel here does have a nice amount of grunginess and creep to it (though, just for comparison’s sake, it’s not quite up to the level of the apartment complex in Tobe Hooper’s Toolbox Murders remake). Kane himself also looks appropriately badass, and spends a large chunk of the film attacking people with a big old meat hook on a chain. I wish we could have done without all the character explanation at the end, but I’d say he still qualifies as a quality entrant into the horror ranks.
In addition to the weak climax, there’s one main problem with the film, and that’s with the editing. For whatever reason (presumably having something to do with how it was produced by the WWE), the director felt he had to be all “hip” and “edgy” in the editing room, and so half the scenes in the movie felt like they were edited by someone with an extreme case of ADD. People aren’t allowed to just walk across the room, oh no. That would take far too long. Instead, they’ll take one step, then the camera will cut to them halfway across the room, whereupon they’ll take a second step, then the camera will again cut to them walking out the door. Why? Is the audience really expected to have such a short attention span that if a camera shot lasts longer than two seconds, they’ll pass out? I can see from IMDB that director Gregory Dark’s previous directing credits are pretty much all music videos and softcore porn, which does offer up a good amount of explanation for this, but an explanation is not an excuse, I says!
Still, that aside, the film does qualify as a pretty decent slasher movie. There’s actually a small effort made to give our cast of characters some measure of depth, at least moreso than with most films in the genre, so you actually do care some small amount when a few of them get killed. There’s also a character that is not far removed from a character in Bug, which was one of my favorite borderline horror movies of the past few years. I can't say which one, though, without running the risk of ruining part of the films’ endings. If you’re a slasher fan but have been avoiding this one because of its pro wrestling connection, you needn’t worry. This film will largely treat you right.
Rating: ** ½
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3
So here’s where the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series collapsed upon itself, never to return. The original film stands out in the world of horror as one of the scariest damn movies ever made, and, knowing he couldn’t top that, Tobe Hooper went for broke on the humor with the second film, making it a delightful horror comedy. This film, however, the first not made under his watchful eye, lacks the nerve to go in either of those directions, instead preferring to just kind of sit there and quietly stink.
The film follows a guy and a girl on their way through Texas, and after stopping at the required Awful Gas Station where they run into a young Viggo Mortensen (I guess starting a trend of the series showcasing eventual film stars that would continue into the next film with Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger) and the required Horrid Gas Station Attendant, who chases them to an unmapped road. If you’ve never seen this film before, you should already know where this is leading. Of course, they all run into the cannibalistic family from the first two films, and of course both Viggo and the gas station guy are connected to them, though I admit I didn’t quite expect the two additional comrades they acquire in their struggle. One is a survivalist that they almost drive into while fleeing from Leatherface, the most impressively charismatic of the family, and one is a young girl who fled from Leatherface in the film’s opening scene. She has such a small, useless role in the film I have to question why she wasn’t just killed right at the start.
I guess the biggest problem with this film is that every character in it is so far beyond stupid that their deaths would seem, if anything, a wasted effort. At one point, the two main characters have had their lives threatened twice already, and at least two of the last three people they’ve met have turned out to be crazy psychopaths, and so naturally when a man claiming to be a survivalist offers them unnamed pills to relax them they down them without question. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me and my hang ups about taking strange pills from strange men during life or death struggles, or maybe it’s just my aversion to what certainly seems to be an eagerness to do the most counterproductive action possible at any given moment. Then there’s the survivalist himself, who listens to the two talking about how there’s people trying to murder them, sees that their car has been attacked with a chainsaw, and then decides the best course of action is to go back onto the unmapped road and flag down help from the first car that passes by. Then there’s the girl from the beginning, who, after drawing Leatherface away from another victim, runs from him for all of half a minute and then just starts to roam the woods like she’s on a Sunday stroll. These are not people even interesting enough that you can be satisfied when they’re killed, whether they live or die you just feel kind of sad about the whole situation.
There’s also another pretty big problem involving the film’s rating. Originally rated an NC-17, it was pared down to an R for theatrical release. The DVD claims to have both the R rated and unrated versions, though when I watched the unrated version, not only did I notice nothing that would warrant anything more than an R, I noticed several moments where they cut away from the violence right before it got really graphic, leading me to the inescapable conclusion that the unrated version on the DVD is still edited. I hardly require gore to be entertained (hell, the first film was all about implying rather than showing, and I loved that), but when the film has little else to offer, it would be nice to not have the absence of graphic violence be so glaring in its omission.
I don’t know that I’ll ever find a horror franchise that didn’t fall apart somewhere along its path. Halloween held out surprisingly long, and I’ll always have a place in my heart for all of the Nightmare on Elm Streets, even the one where he kills someone with the Power Glove. This series did not last as long as them, obviously. I haven’t seen the most recent one (the prequel that was intended to explain how the family got the way they are), but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all the others now, and every one from this film on was ass. Stop after the second film, there’s no reason to tarry.
Rating: * ½
Monday, March 17, 2008
Hellraiser: Inferno
I think this may be my favorite film in the Hellraiser series. Made after the franchise had fallen into straight to video hell, it largely eschews the series’ apocalyptic overtones in favor of telling a grim detective story. It’s not really like any of the other films in the series (at least of the ones that I’ve seen), and that definitely works in its favor.
The film follows a corrupt detective that’s trying to solve a series of murders orchestrated by a man known only as the Engineer, who seems to be specifically targeting people that the detective knew, starting with a prostitute he had slept with. Of course, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to fans of the series who eventually gets involved in these shenanigans, or that a mysterious puzzle box would present itself at the first crime scene, but it’s nicely done in how subtly they’re dealt with. There’s no screaming in your face demons here (even though I admittedly enjoyed the third film in the series for just that reason – what can I say, my reasoning skills are not without their inconsistencies), just a man and his own personal demons, and how he allows them to slowly destroy him. Of course, there are the required Clive Barker moments, like how his initial leads to the Engineer take him to a gay bondage club, because why not, and there’s always the requisite punishing chains that always accompany Pinhead and the rest of the Cenobites, but these elements are all very surprisingly held in check for most of the movie, for the most part only used to wrap everything up and explain what exactly has been going on.
I of course will not say what is going on, as that would be unfair to the movie, and since I try not to spoil the endings of movies that I hate, you can rest assured that I won’t do it to one that I actually quite liked. Indeed, given how most of the movies in the series, at least from what I’ve seen (parts 1-3 and this one), don’t really connect to each other aside from the Cenobites and the puzzle box, you could easily make this the first or only Hellraiser film you ever see, and it won’t leave you lost.
As I said in my review of the third film, I’m really not a big fan of this series. Compared to the Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street series, this one is definitely second rate. However, despite this film’s occasional flaws (after all, despite all my championing of its understatedness, it’s still a Hellraiser film and still goes retardedly over the top at a few points), I would give it an unreserved recommendation as the best film the series has to offer. If you were thinking of trying the series out, definitely give this one a whirl.
Rating: ***
Friday, March 14, 2008
Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth
Big fans of the Hellraiser series may be a little surprised, even disheartened, to find that I actually like this film more than the original. This movie gets pretty universally dumped on by fans of the series for being really campy, but frankly, while it’s no great shakes, I do still prefer the camp and over-the-top hysterics of this film to the overwhelming dullness of the first film.
The film revolves around a large sculpture acquired by a rich, violent prick that seems to be curiously made out of Cenobites, the demonic villains of the series. After bedding some ditzy chick and then trying to kick her to the curb immediately afterward, he is surprised to see the statue come to life and murder the girl, and then talk to him about a deal wherein he will continue bringing girls back there for the statue to feed upon, in exchange for power or something. Of course, he eventually brings back the wrong girl, who manages to overpower him and make her own deal with the statue, and the statue of course eventually gets enough victims to bring it to roaring full life, whereupon a gang of demons descends upon the city, but frankly, these are obvious plot elements that I’m personally quite fine with.
Let’s be honest here, what would you rather see in a movie? Would you like a movie that’s got one monster in it that spends the entire film hiding in a room in someone’s house waiting for some unlucky people to intrude on him? Or would you rather have a whole group of monsters charging through the streets going on a killing spree while the main characters all run around screaming and panicking and over-dramatic music thunders all around? I know which one I’d go for. The first movie was boring as hell, with nothing really happening for most of its running time. This movie, on the other hand, tries to throw everything it can think of at us, up to and including a Cenobite that fires horrid-looking CG discs at people to kill them, like the alien in I Come in Peace. This may not be the best film ever made, it may not even be a good one, but it is a decent film, and after way too many atrocious budget pack movies from the Tomb of Terror collection this week, I’m willing to accept decent for now.
Rating: **
