Don't Go In The House (1979)

OCTOBER 31, 2012

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)

While you can get nitpicky with the exact order, the OVERALL scheduling of the Video Nasties midnight series at the Cinefamily this month was intended to be a gradual decline into true depravity. Thus, the first week would be the tamer efforts, while the final selections would be the ones that truly deserved the scorn of censors, which is why I Spit On Your Grave was given the next to last slot (with Cannibal Holocaust taking the coveted "Nastiest" title). However, some unknown issue (print availability, I assume) forced them to swap out Grave with Don't Go In The House, and I pity the person who sat down assuming it was equally depraved.

Really, if you take out the infamous blowtorch scene (the movie's original title was The Burning; thanks Cropsey!), it's hard to imagine a censor batting an eye at the rest of the movie even back in 1979, let alone today (whereas Cannibal Holocaust largely remains a "How did this even get MADE?" affair). Indeed, this scene is pretty hard to watch - the FX are solid, and even if it was clearly a Barbie doll in closeup or something, there's no way that a chained up and naked woman being immolated with a blowtorch doesn't make you feel a bit dirty for watching it.

But that's only a half hour or so into the movie, and it's also the only, er, "nasty" bit. The rest is a pretty tame Psycho wannabe (making this big/only shock's placement, roughly at the end of the first act, just another influence from Hitchcock's film), with our "hero" Donny going about his day and occasionally trying to pick up women to bring home to kill. He fails as often as he succeeds, and at least one other kill isn't even on-screen. Please note - I'm not pointing this out to complain, merely to stress, again, that the British censors were insane to outright ban some of these movies.

Thus, because of this one 30 second scene, British audiences were robbed of an imperfect but peculiar psycho killer movie in the vein of (fellow Nasties) Maniac or Driller Killer. Dan Grimaldi gives a solid performance as Donny; he's got a bit of a Dustin Hoffman demeanor to him, and is on-screen for pretty much every second of the movie, so if he was a shit actor the movie would be unbearable (or hilarious). He doesn't talk much though. Unlike Norman Bates, who would get pretty chatty at times, Donny keeps pretty quiet; he offers quick responses to those who talk to him and you can practically see him wince whenever he has to talk first, like in the scene where he goes to buy a new outfit in order to go to a disco with his pal. Having no idea how to clothes shop, he waits until someone leaves and then asks the clerk to look at the same thing they were! It's pretty awesome.

Speaking of his pal, this guy is somehow scarier than the murderous Donny. Despite the fact that Donny is a standoffish weirdo (we meet him as he watches/doesn't help a coworker that is burning alive due to an incinerator mishap), the guy forces himself into Donny's life, calling him all the time, encouraging him to go have beers with him or maybe just come over to talk. At first I thought perhaps the guy was gay and interested in him, but the whole disco thing comes about because he wants to meet up with some girls (without his wife knowing). And after something ugly happens there, he tracks down Father Gerritty, Donny's priest, and begs him to help him find Donny before it's too late. All of this for a guy he saw at work sometimes? Whenever I see someone from work out in public, it takes me a few moments to even recognize them. I sure as hell wouldn't look for their priests.

Another interesting thing about the movie is the New Jersey setting. You'd think there would be a lot of horror movies filmed there, given its proximity to (presumably more expensive) New York and variety of locations (woods, beaches, small towns, cities) in a relatively small area, but then and now it's actually pretty rare to see one. Donny's house in particular looks like a great horror movie house - it's almost a shame that they don't set most/all of the movie there, as it sort of resembled the Spider Baby mansion.

I also wish the movie wasn't so repetitive. We get a number of flashbacks to the mother abusing him (with fire, of course); they're all pretty much the same and don't tell us anything new. And the girls all blend together, which I'm sure is part of the point, but doesn't help make the movie any more exciting when the climax revolves around whether or not he'll kill a girl who we just met five minutes ago. Psycho's switch of focus worked because Norman was sympathetic (and we didn't know he was also the killer, just covering it up), but here only a sociopath would root for Donny to get away. It gives the movie a sort of matter-of-fact feel, and the goofy epilogue does it no favors as it practically suggests that there's a supernatural element at play. I'd say cut it, but if you took that and the repeated flashbacks out, the movie would only be like 60 minutes long.

If you're a fan of Psycho ripoffs, you can certainly do worse. The title makes no sense and it can be a bit too slow for its own good, but a solid performance and above average filmmaking are enough to make it worth your while. AND it has some awesome disco tunes, so there's something.

What say you?

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All Day Horror-Thon- Update #2

 

The Shrine is a cheap little movie that should have sucked, but ended up being an example of how filmmakers can make a decent, scary horror flick on the (relative) cheap.

If you can get past the whole "girl does stupid shit that puts everyone's life in danger because she wants her career to take off" thing, which really annoyed us to no end, the rest of the movie is a smart, taut little supernatural thriller that ends in a place that I didn't expect it to.

There were some genuinely creepy scenes and moments in this one, and we're sad that it's still a largely unknown flick to most people. See it if you can, you won't regret it. We think. *Tastes can be subjective, you know.

The more we watch The Collector, the more we love the hell out of it. Filled with all kinds of great TV character actors and one of the most clever maniacs to come along in quite some time, this movie is an absolute instant classic around these parts.

So a guy (Arkin) breaks into a house, intent on robbing it, and finds himself interrupting a serial killer's torture and murdering of a family, which kinda kills his whole robbery scheme. Trapped in the middle of a trap-filled house, he has to fight for his life, and the lives of the family that he's trapped with, and so a battle of wits unfolds between he and The Collector...

Originally intended as the basis for a Saw prequel, it became its own movie, and are we ever glad that it did; it was nice to see a movie that involves nasty and elaborate traps away from the Jigsaw mythos, and given its own life. The traps in this movie are quite something to witness, and for the record, they are nothing like those seen int he average Saw movie. There's no moral lessons doled out here by some maniac on a mission, only death. And some collecting. Hence the title.

We can not wait to seethe sequel to this one, The Collection, which comes out in theaters this November. With the first one being so enjoyable, we can only imagine the 2nd one will be at least as good. Hopefully even better.

More to come.....

I never meant to see: Exorcist: The Beginning

Well it looks like I'm just creating new periodic features on my blog left and right these days. I created a new one yesterday, and a Devil's Night screening last night inspired me to create another new one today.

This periodic series will be called "I Never Meant to See," and it will highlight films that were thrust into my path quite unwittingly. In an age when we have so much choice about what to watch that we rarely have to settle on something just because "it's the only thing on," it's become increasingly rare that we need to see things we hadn't otherwise planned to see. It seemed interesting to me to explore how we end up watching movies we wouldn't have normally sought out.

First up is Exorcist: The Beginning.

I love love love William Friedkin's The Exorcist, but I've never seen any other films in the Exorcist series and suspected there was really no reason to. Exorcist: The Beginning came my way because I recently received it as a birthday present. A friend who also regularly reads my blog (hi!) gave me this and another DVD that I really hope he got out of the cheap bin (just because I hope he didn't spend too much money on me). The other DVD, Traffic, was, I believe, the serious half of the gift -- an excellent film I have probably praised to him before, which he correctly surmised I did not already own. I don't want to sell Exorcist: The Beginning short by calling it the joke half of the gift, and he certainly didn't describe it as such after I opened the present. But let's just say this movie has less of a logical impulse behind it, given that he and I have rarely discussed horror, and I don't think we've ever talked about the original Exorcist and my love for it. Besides, it's directed by Renny Harlin, who has become something of a Joel Schumacher-style punching bag in cinematic circles.

I hope my friend isn't offended if I admit that I decided to watch it while carving my jack o'lantern last night. Hey, what can I say, multi-tasking is a part of our everyday lives these days. Even with movies I'm really loving, I pause them regularly and sometimes do other things. I knew it would make an ideal companion to my exercise -- something that would fit the Halloween theme perfectly, but would probably also be okay only to be receiving 87% of my attention at any given moment.

I remembered that there had been an Exorcist: The Beginning, but so little was it still on my radar that I couldn't remember how recently it was released. It could have been anywhere from 2002 to 2008, I figured. The release date was not immediately evident from a cursory scanning of the box, so it wasn't until I started watching it and made a general assessment of the age of Stellan Skarsgard that I put it closer to 2002 than 2008. As it turns out, it's from 2004.

My first impression, and one that ended up lingering, is that the movie may owe more to Raiders of the Lost Ark than The Exorcist. In fact, I'll include an asterisk in my writing for every direct link to Raiders. The Beginning follows the story of Father Merrin, the character played by Max Von Sydow in Friedkin's movie, as a younger man who has strayed from the church. He's now an archeologist*, and is involved in a dig for a buried religious artifact* -- actually, a church that has no business being here as it dates to an era before Christianity was known in this region of Africa. He's no longer a priest as a result of events involving the Nazis* in World War II, which are revealed to us as we move along. People who enter this subterranean chamber* continue to have strange things happen to them, signs of possible devil possession. And in a climactic scene, he even tells a character "not to look at or listen to"* any of the devil's lies.

Sorry, by synopsizing the movie by only showing its Raiders connections, I didn't give you a very good synopsis.

For much of the running time, the movie is a lot less scary than it wants to be. Yes, there's some disturbing stuff -- in one memorable scene, an African woman gives birthday to a stillborn child that's basically a rotting baby corpse covered with worms. But there's also some stuff that's just plain ridiculous looking, like a child being attacked by digital hyenas that just don't cut it as organic parts of the environment. The problem really is that you feel a mounting impatience as you wait for what you know is coming -- a true devil possession that resembles, in some form, the possession of Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist. A variety of isolated and generally disconnected images of horror aren't really enough to sustain us in the meantime.

What turned the movie -- which is well executed in most respects -- from a mild thumbs down to a mild thumbs up is, in fact, the climactic devil possession requiring the exorcism. It gives us what we're expecting in terms of iconic imagery from The Exorcist, and here uses CG effectively to add to it. One of the scariest elements of The Exorcist is the devil's dialogue, not only the horrible and uncensored content, but the sound of that voice (or several voices) coming out of that body. The Beginning understands this part of what makes The Exorcist scary, and has a good amount of fun with it in the final 10-15 minutes.

More than anything, I'm glad I saw Exorcist: The Beginning for the same reason I wanted to create this new periodic feature on my blog. There sheer quantity of movies in existence means that many of them necessarily disappear into the ether unless we go out and grab them. And because I have a generally democratic concept of what I'll watch -- really, I'll watch almost anything -- sometimes it's nice to have random movies thrust back onto your radar, when they should have long ago been gone from it forever.

I mean, if I'm going to accomplish my stated yet admittedly impossible and also ridiculous goal of seeing every movie that's ever been made, I can't be forgetting about movies like Exorcist: The Beginning, now can I?

Happy Halloween everyone.

Final Girl Film Club - Martyrs (2008)

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.

Today, SHOCKtober comes to an end with the 2008 French film Martyrs.

As a child, Lucie was abducted and tortured, chained to a chair inside an abandoned building in a rundown industrial area. It's unknown how long she was in that building before she was finally able to escape, suffering from malnutrition, dehydration, and hypothermia. Lucie was taken to a children's hospital, where she made a friend of similar age named Anna, who cared for her and doted on her, the girls quickly becoming inseparable. Lucie's captors were never caught and she never gave details about them, never able to talk about her ordeal.

Fifteen years later, a pleasant, ordinary family's average Sunday morning is interrupted when an adult Lucie shows up at their door with a shotgun and opens fire on everyone she comes across - husband, wife, teenage son and daughter, all shot down.

Lucie then gives Anna a call. Lucie had seen this family's picture in the newspaper, accompanying an article about the daughter's swimming accomplishments, and became convinced that the parents were the same people who tortured her years earlier. As far as Anna knew, Lucie was just going to observe them to see whether or not she was right, then they would call the police. She took the situation farther than Anna ever imagined, and now she needs her friend's help.

Anna is very conflicted as she sets out to clean up the crime scene. What if Lucie killed the wrong people? What if her friend is insane? She knows that Lucie has hallucinations, often imagining that she's being attacked by a feral woman covered with scars, a woman who she believes is slicing her up with a razor when in fact Lucie is cutting herself.

The girls end up spending a long time at the house, Anna expending a lot of effort cleaning things up and disposing of the bodies in a pre-dug hole in the yard, all of which seems pointless to me. She's putting the bodies in an obvious place and there's no way she can remove all trace of her and Lucie's presence in the house, especially since Lucie keeps cutting herself. The bulk of the movie is set in 1986, but even though CSI might not have been at the level then that it is today, I still don't see how anything Anna does is going to help them get away with this.

When the sun rises on Monday morning and the third act arrives, the SHOCKtober schedule comes full circle. The month began with Sunshine, and like that film, this movie deals with characters who are obsessed with the afterlife. Lucie was one of many people who have been captured over the years by a cult that is searching to find answers to the question of what lies beyond death. They believe that if they push a victim to the limit through torture and neglect, keep them in a perpetual state of suffering, once they're at the edge of death they might be able to glimpse the other side and tell them what's there.

Anna spends so much time in the murder house that she's still there when the rest of the cult comes by to check on their fellow members, and she becomes their latest victim. Like Sunshine's third act, the end of Martyrs is a divisive one. Viewers tend to be either blown away or turned away by what happens after the cult element comes into the picture. The final 30 minutes of the film is all about Anna being tortured in horrible, disturbing, disgusting ways. Anna becomes witness to the beyond and gives the head of the cult an answer that isn't shared with the audience, but it's enough to bring the head of the cult to some sort of resolution. Was it all worth it? That's not quite clear. And whether or not the brutality of the movie is worth sitting through depends on the individual viewer.

I do think Martyrs is a good, well made movie, some questionable logic aside, and that it deserves a lot of the praise it gets, but it's definitely not an easy movie to watch, not exactly enjoyable, and those last 30 minutes are not something that I ever really need to see again. I've watched the movie a few times now, I give it kudos, but now I think I'm done with it.

Also done now is SHOCKtober 2012. Thanks to Final Girl for scheduling the month and giving me a reason to watch and write about a lot of interesting movies. There were ups and downs, there were times when it was a challenge, but I enjoyed participating. It's been a fun October, and now...

Happy Halloween!

Part of

All Day Horror-Thon- Update #1

As promised, we got the creepy ball rolling at 12 A.M. Eastern Time.

Suspiria is an all-time favorite that we need to see at least once a year. The Argento classic was one of the last feature films to ever be processed in Technicolor, and rightly so; it's a visual spectacle that uses vivid colors as well as any other movie I can recall.

The first of Argento's "Three Mothers Trilogy," Suspiria tells the story of an American ballet student abroad who runs afoul of a Coven of Witches, lead by one of the Three Mothers (Mater Suspiriorum, in this case). It's stylish, beautiful to behold, creepy, gory as hell, and boasts one of the best Scores of all time (courtesy of legendary composers, Goblin.)

If you've never seen this gem, get a hold of a copy and see it asap. It's as close to required viewing as a horror movie can get.

*For the sake of continuity, the other two parts of the "Three Mothers Trilogy" are Inferno and The Mother of Tears, both of which are worth a look.

Say what you will about the much maligned flick, The Last Exorcism, but for our money, it's one of the better Exorcism flicks that's come along in forever.

Shot Cinema Verite style, The Last Exorcism is about a shady preacher named Cotton Marcus, who runs around pretending to do miracles and such, while really being nothing more than a complete fraud. Things get interesting when he takes on a new case of a possessed girl, and instead of his normal gig he gets the real deal, which he is woefully unprepared for.

We liked this one mainly because the guy who played Cotton Marcus was likeable and played one hell of a role. Then there's the movie itself, which slowly unraveled to reveal a pretty creepy and intense supernatural story. Lots of people didn't like the end, but we thought it was kinda cool; the "it came out of left field" twist leaves things open for a possible sequel, which we'd definitely see.

We love the feel of this movie, and had the urge to make it a part of this year's Halloween viewing.

Now, back to it...

The 31 Days of Horror- Halloween!

All day, all night, nothing but one flick after another. Starting at Midnight, we're watching some old and new classics, until we can't watch anymore!

Or until we have to go do something, like you know, pee. Or eat. Go to work. Stuff like that.

But aide from those kinds of things, we're doing nothing else but watching movies for the entire 24 hours that Halloween is here!!!!!!!!!!

*Also, sleep will have to factor in there somewhere, so, yeah.

First up, at the stroke of Midnight, is Suspiria...

Film Appreciation - Remake of the Dead: We're them and they're us

Cody Hamman shows Film Appreciation for one of the better horror remakes, Tom Savini's Night of the Living Dead (1990).

We've talked about George A. Romero's immortal classic Night of the Living Dead (1968) a good bit over the two years of this blog's existence. Jay Burleson wrote an Appreciation article on it, I called it my favorite horror film of all time, have mentioned a documentary on its ghouls and a fan commentary by Mark Borchardt and Mike Schank of American Movie, met a lot of people involved with the movie at Cinema Wasteland conventions and had viewings of the movie at the Wasteland, as well as discussing other movies by Romero and cemetery ghoul Bill Hinzman. But, aside from one quick reference, I don't think there has been any talk of the 1990 remake. Since Burleson and I focused on the original film and Hinzman's zombie movie FleshEater last October, I figured that the remake's time had come this year.

The story behind the 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead begins with a mistake made on the original film, an error of oversight that left a copyright notice off of the movie and, under the rules of the time, immediately entered the property into the public domain. Some (like Wasteland's Ken Kish) would argue that this fact has helped the film over the years, its multiple unauthorized home video releases and compensation-free television airings enabling it to be viewed by many more people than might have seen it under stricter guidelines, allowing it to garner even more fans... But that is little consolation to the people who made the movie, and its producers have tried for years to get their creative copyright noticed. Since they weren't seeing any residuals from the money others were making off of their movie, Romero and his cohorts eventually decided that one way to capitalize on the popularity of the property and get some control over the rights was to remake it.

Romero himself reworked and modernized the original script he had written with John A. Russo, but neither Romero nor Russo (who had directed The Booby Hatch and Midnight in the years since NOTLD '68) opted to direct it. That honor went to Romero's frequent collaborator, special effects artist and horror icon Tom Savini. Savini had proven himself by directing episodes of the horror anthology television series Tales from the Darkside and would be making his feature debut on NOTLD '90.

The remake, of course, retains the basic story of a group of people trapped in one farmhouse location by a seemingly endless stream of zombies, the recently dead who have returned to life for reasons unknown, driven by a hunger for human flesh. The characters are the same and, while it's not a scene-for-scene remake, they have pretty much the same dynamics and the story follows most of the same beats. But there are twists here and there, moments where the movie will nod at the expectations the audience has due to their familiarity with the original movie while it takes things in a slightly different direction.

A lot of the original players were involved with the remake and some make cameos in it. Russ Streiner, the original Johnny, appears as Sheriff McClelland, delivering the "They're dead, they're all messed up" line in an interview with reporter "Chilly" Billy Cardille, the same man who was doing the interviews in '68. Romero's voice is heard on a radio, keeping listeners updated on the situation. One notable absence is Bill Hinzman, who wasn't asked to be involved because at the time there was still some hard feelings over the fact that he had gone forward with making FleshEater, capitalizing on his cemetery ghoul character, despite Romero and Russo's objections to the idea.

One thing Romero did in his rewrite of the script was add answers to logic questions that might have come up during the '68 film - for example, in the original, the character Ben was able to easily find a good amount of lumber stored away in the house for him to use to board up the windows and doors. Here, the house has been undergoing remodeling, explaining why there's so much wood to go around, and even then the characters really have to search for things to block the entrances with. Romero also adds some dimensions to the characters, like giving the character Tom a personal connection to the farmhouse - it's his uncle's place. In '68, the house was just a random location that all of the characters seemingly just happened to stumble across. The biggest changes are made to Barbara, here played by Patricia Tallman of Romero's Knightriders. Over the years, Romero had become somewhat ashamed that Barbara had been so weak in the original film, sinking into a catatonic state for most of the running time after the cemetery attack that opens the movie. He attempted to make up for that in the new version by putting Barbara through a transformation; she starts off as mousy and weak, but by the end she's become hard-edged and strong, toting guns and wearing boots, reminiscent of the Sarah character in Day of the Dead.

Like in the original film, the biggest threat to the safety of the people gathered in the isolated farmhouse are the people themselves and their inability to get along or agree on any compromises or course of action. Instead of being rational, the characters - particularly Ben and family man Harry Cooper - butt heads and argue over everything, both considering themselves "boss" of the situation. As bad as the in-fighting got in the first version, here it's even worse, the characters are more volatile, angry, high-strung, and unreasonable, and Harry is even more unpleasant, fuelled by cowardice.

The zombies are nastier looking in this movie, usually seeping some kind of gross substance and almost all of them having some kind of wound appliance to their face. They're a bigger immediate threat in the remake as well. In the original, Ben was able to get the house boarded up by himself rather quickly, making the zombies largely a danger that was lurking outside a house that was pretty well fortified. Here, the boarding is a group effort that continues throughout the entire film, everything that happens in the house coinciding with the hammering of boards and doors into place. That keeps the pace up and keeps the zombies busting in through entrances that haven't been covered yet, but to spend much of the movie having the characters deal with an ultimately useless endeavor does sort of feel like a waste of time.

The original film moves at a speed much more preferable to me, and I wish the remake would've taken more chances to slow down for a while, because in the quieter moments it does achieve a very creepy tone and atmosphere. The quieter moments also really enable Tony Todd to shine in the role of Ben. Todd is given some great scenes to work with, delivering a teary-eyed monologue about his experience before he reached the farmhouse, and a moment where we see that killing zombies deeply disturbs him, after all, they are still people in some way despite their grotesqueries. After dispatching a couple of them, Ben - kneeling on the ground - screams to the heavens, damning the zombies for putting him through this, then crosses himself.

To this day, NOTLD '90 is the only feature film that Tom Savini has directed, and he didn't have the greatest time making it. While the original was made by a group of friends who were investing in the project themselves, this time the budget was bigger, and there were more fingers in the pie, more people giving opinions and striking down ideas. The movie ran into budgetary and scheduling limitations, and Savini has said that he was only able to do about 30% (I believe was the number) of what he wanted to do. He had much artier ideas than appear in the final film, scenes that would've toyed with perception, an idea for the beginning that would've had the film opening in black and white like the original, then transitioning through sepia before reaching color. Savini also had to drop special effects, and he was not happy with the film's score by composer Paul McCollough, who was brought on the project by John A. Russo.

I quite like McCollough's score myself, particularly the track that accompanies the opening drive into the cemetery. I also really like the cinematography by Frank Prinzi, I think the movie has a great look. Oddly, for a recent limited edition Blu-ray release, Prinzi oversaw the transfer and chose to lay a blue hue over the picture, making scenes that are clearly meant to take place in broad daylight appear to be happening at twilight. Even after the segue into full night at the 21 minute point, the blue hue remains. That change has disappointed a lot of fans who bought the Blu-ray expecting to see the movie as they knew it. I have a copy of that Blu-ray, but haven't watched it yet. The picture may not be ideal, but on the bright side we do have a collector's piece that sold out very quickly. Maybe someday there will be another Blu-ray release without the blue look.

One of the things I like the most about the movie are the locations. Savini found some great places for the story to play out in, the cemetery at the beginning is in a wonderfully picturesque location, and the farmhouse property is downright awesome. I love that house and property and hope to visit it one day. I know fellow fans regularly cruise by to take pictures, and it does seem kind of awkward to be so into a house in which people are still living out their regular lives, but it's so cool looking... The most ideal situation would be to attend an outdoor "rolling roadshow" screening of the movie there. The area is so hilly, the property even appears to have natural stadium seating.

The remake reached theatre screens on October 19, 1990, and despite the hope of those involved that they might make some money off of the title this time, I don't think the movie did all that well at first. I don't know how it was received at the time, but over the years it has gathered a solid following of its own. I was aware of it when it came out, but didn't see it, and for some reason never even rented it on VHS. I didn't see the movie until sometime in late '94 or '95, after I recorded it off The Movie Channel in the middle of the night. As soon as I got home from school the next day, I hit play on the VCR.

I thought the movie was alright, but even then I felt that there was too much time spent on boarding up the house, the nonstop action was not what I was looking for. But I kept watching it over the years, it was always in rotation with Romero's trilogy, in fact I had Night '68, Dawn, Day, and Night '90 all recorded on the same video tape. I think it was even an 8 hour tape with Return of the Living Dead on there too.

The film gradually won me over with its charms, I hold it in much higher esteem now than I did in the early years of my viewing it. I get an urge to watch it quite often, especially on particularly dark summer nights in the country, when its creepy tone goes perfectly with the real life atmosphere. Even more often than I watch the movie itself, I listen to the DVD commentary by Tom Savini. That commentary is one of my favorites, largely due to the way Savini shares the information in it, speaking in a voice so soft-toned that it's like he's telling stories around a campfire. That commentary has become like a familiar bedtime story to me now, I love putting it on and drifting off to sleep listening to it.

I've met some of the '90 actors over the years and gotten signatures from Savini and Tom Towles, this film's Harry Cooper, on the DVD cover. I've met Bill Moseley, the '90 Johnny, a couple times, but didn't think to have him sign the NOTLD DVD, I was entirely focused on Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 while in his presence. Meeting Towles was a pleasant surprise, he tends to play such unlikeable characters and yet in real life he's a really nice guy, very appreciative of his fans.

Twenty-two years on, it's kind of amazing to think that as much time has gone by since the release of NOTLD '90 as there had been between it and the release of the original film. The remake may not be all that Savini wanted to be, but even so, it is a fine film. NOTLD '68's public domain status has enabled a lot of people to take advantage of the property and put out inferior products with the title on it, but NOTLD '90 isn't one of those. It's definitely a worthy companion to the classic.

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

Be warned: I'm going to spoil this movie and a lot of its happenings in this review. Why am I going to do that? Well, because  so many things that happened in this clunker confounded to no end, and I kinda have to.

It's a rant, kids.

We're fans of the Paranormal Activity flicks around here; they may not be perfect, but they are effective as hell and somehow manage to deliver a creepy atmosphere and plenty of scares, despite their shortcomings... at least they did right up until part 4.

It's safe to say that at this point the producers behind this series are just interested in getting a new PA flick out in theaters every Halloween for a quick cash grab. It's almost as if they're making up the story as they go along, and doing the best they can to make it all make sense, but it just isn't quite gelling.

And for the record, this is a Found Footage/POV/Cinema Verite movie. Some folks out there in cyber-moron land seem to think this movie beyond those confines, but it's not. Same old, same old.

The movie opens with a flashback recap of the end events of PA2, in which Katie murders her sister and makes off with her nephew. Five years later in Nevada, we're introduced to the new family that is to be put through the paranormal ringer; Mom, Dad, a young son and a too-hot-for-her-age jailbait daughter. So that's the setup.

The story really starts when  the creepy kid from next door keeps showing up wherever this family is; a soccer game, at their house, in their yard, in their tree fort, in their shower... and no one really seems to be all that concerned with a six year old kid just "showing up" all over the place, and alone at that.

By the way, the kids' "Mom" is Katie, so you get where this is all going.

Creepy kid talking to the Kinect.

One day, this kid shows up and says that his Mom, whom the family has never met nor even seen, is in the hospital and he has nowhere to go. Without batting an eyelash, the Mom of our moron family decides he should stay with them until she gets out of the hospital, because that seems logical. Don't call the cops and say that some kid showed up on your doorstep, don't even call the hospital to see what the deal is with his mom, just let him stay with you, because it "seems like the right thing to do." This absolute lack of any sort of logic pretty much illustrates just how inept this entire movie is.

From here on out, it's PA business as PA usual, minus any true scares; a knife moves, a chair moves, the X-Box Kinect is haunted, a ball rolls down some stairs, a chandelier falls, the toys are haunted... it's all riveting stuff.

There's lots of figures standing still in this movie...

The only one who suspects that anything odd is going on is the daughter, and her older boyfriend pretends to believe her because he wants to tap that 15 year old ass; honestly, the scene with them at the beginning had a truly rapey vibe to it. "What say we go for a walk through your dark backyard, and maybe examine that lonely tree house of yours, eh?" He was totally making his move, like a true creeper.

So after about 60 minutes of not-scary stuff, we get to the climax of the movie, which finds our young heroine running around with her Macbook, filming the most terrifying and chaotic moments of her young life, with a very professional touch. Then, 200 witches show up and we're left wondering WTF just happened.

There's lots of Katie standing still in this movie...

 

There are a few make-you-jump moments here and there, but nothing close to what the previous PA movies have given us. Even if there were, the story is so bland and disjointed, that I can't imagine how any truly creepy scenes would have played in this one. I wanted there to be a fast forward button on the theater screen. I wanted some NoDoz. I wanted it to be over.

About the only good thing in this movie was the performance of 15 year old Kathryn Newton. She's a pretty good little actress, and shes a looker to boot, so it wont be long before we see more from her. Hopefully she'll get to be involved in some better flicks though.

Good job, kid. Put this one behind you and keep on going.

The camera scheme for this one is brought to us via multiple Laptop Webcams.... which are turned on and recording all day and night, for no apparent fucking reason. Oh wait, the teenage daughter thinks that they are being haunted, again, for no apparent fucking reason. So I guess that that's the reason.

It's also neat that the daughter carries her laptop around throughout the whole movie, everywhere she goes, near or far, all so that the movie can exist. Even at the end, when she finds people dead and is running for help, she carries her laptop in front of her to capture it all on film. She climbs through a window, terrified for her life and with a demon on her heels, and still, she carries her laptop.  Once again; a terrified 15 year old girl, running for her life, has the presence of mind to film everything in front of her with a laptop...  it's so implausible that it borders on being ludicrous. Screw that, it is ludicrous.

Behind her, a figure stands still...

Was this script written in a day? The films' viral marketing on Youtube and its plot elements were better than those in the actual movie. Care to explain how Katie lost her nephew, and how he got adopted by some family in Nevada? And why does Toby (the demon) do useless shit like throw a ball down some stairs or make something move? There's no sense in it. Why did he trap the daughter in the garage and turn the car on to try and kill her, rather than just throw her against something like he does with everyone else?

Then there's the ending, which comes along and adds more questions to the already lingering questions that went unresolved from the previous movie. And honestly, how does a pretty white girl screaming her head off in a well-off, predominately white neighborhood, draw absolutely no attention from neighbors or the Cops? Come on, if Cops do anything with exacting precision, it's protecting upper class white folks in their time of need.

This white girl is unprotected!

PA4 exists only to be in theaters to make some quick Halloween cash, and it's written as such. When you put a movie on a fast track like that, and give it less than a year for its conception, writing, pre-production, shooting, and post-production, this is what happens.

PA5 has already been announced for next October, so again we have a rushed sequel that is going to get a fraction of care that a movie in development should get, and the results won't be much different than they were here.

This movie exists for no other reason than for it to exist; it explains nothing from the previous PA flicks like we thought it would, and leaves us with another ending that suggests we should seek answers in the already announced PA5. Like the Saw series, Paranormal Activity looks as if it's going to churn out a new sequel each year in time for Halloween, which absolutely tells you that the quality is going to be shit.

Go and spend your money on Sinister, which was actually a good and creepy flick, and pretend that the Paranormal Activity series ended with part 3. Trust us, it basically did.

A few years down the road, Kathryn Newton is going to be a Horror Hottie, and we will not feel bad about calling her hot. For now though, we will simply say what a lovely, talented young girl she is... just like we did with Emma Watson. See, we do have morals!

The Tingler (1959)

OCTOBER 30, 2012

GENRE: MONSTER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)

I gave up on Jaws 3-D, I to this day haven't seen Rocky Horror in a theater, but I put my foot down and REFUSED to ever see William Castle's The Tingler until I could do so in Percepto - aka the gimmick where joy buzzers were placed in certain seats and went off at a few key moments in the film, adding to the fun. The Cinefamily has done it a couple times now, but this was the first time I was able to make it, and got there early enough to ensure I had a seat with a buzzer.

And my diligence paid off, as there really is no reason to watch the movie at home without Percepto (or another in-theater gimmick that I won't spoil - somehow I had managed to avoid hearing about it, so maybe you aren't privy either). The plot is ludicrous even by Castle standards, and worse, it's SLOW. It takes almost an hour for the damn thing to make its first appearance, and by design it doesn't DO much, just crawls (reads: is pulled by visible strings) along near people and occasionally attacks by wrapping around their necks, but as soon as they scream it crumples to the floor and goes into a Tingler coma. In fact we never even see what would happen if the Tingler was "attacking" and you failed to scream - would it crawl inside your throat? Kill you by strangulation and then move on? Resuscitate you itself to demonstrate how meaningless it all is?

Or would it just attach itself to the new victim's spine, replacing the old Tingler? In this movie's (admittedly cool) concept, the tingle you feel up your spine when you're scared is actually this parasitic creature waking up (and growing to a size that's a bit too exaggerated, even for this movie), and after hero scientist Vincent Price discovers this, he sets about trying to extract one. After a botched LSD trip, he finds one when the wife of a friend of his dies... because she is mute and thus can't scream. The movie's OTHER idea (which is actually more insane) is that a mute person is unable to relieve their body of the stress caused from getting scared, so when a mute is REALLY scared they simply die. The simplicity of the movie's "rules" is what makes it so silly - obviously neither of these things would have just been noticed after centuries of medical study, so perhaps if they ever remake this one too, they can make it a little more complicated. Maybe a Tingler only appears when you're frightened by seeing your mom strap on a dildo and sodomize your grandfather or something else that's equally rare.

But really it's the slowness that would keep me from ever wanting to watch this as a regular movie. Unlike 13 Ghosts or House On Haunted Hill, the gimmick doesn't enhance the movie, the gimmick IS the movie. Strip out the showmanship and you're left with a slowly paced, nearly zero body count horror movie where the monster moves at a snail's pace and never really does anything. The design of the thing is cool, but the insane size and laughably bad "animation" cancels that out. And the end is abrupt; Price wanders away from a murder, an unexplained supernatural event happens, and then it ends, leaving us wondering if Price's assistant ever returned or at least let out that dog that was in his car (he picks it up on Price's orders, but as he goes to get it out, Price says he doesn't need it anymore, so he walks inside and leaves the dog in his backseat. Never mentioned again).

However, Price still makes it fun to watch, as always. He's not as devilish as he was in his other Castle effort (Haunted Hill), but he's got a similarly love/mostly-hate relationship with his wife, who is stepping out on him ("There's a word for you", she says, after he confronts her about it. "There's several for you," he quickly replies, and the next four lines are drowned out by the audience's cheers). It's a perfect Price role, as it toes the line between hero and villain, but then you add in his perfectly dry delivery and considerable charm, and suddenly it doesn't matter that you're 40 minutes in and the title character has yet to appear. I also like the random way that he met his future accomplice - the guy just wanders into his lab while he's performing an autopsy, claiming that the guy he's working on is his brother-in-law who was sentenced to death for murdering two women. From then on, they are best friends, and since his wife is a mute she never talks about her brother being a killer or if it had anything to do with her being mute.

Another thing I learned last night was that the film actually has a small connection to the Cinefamily. In the 50s it WAS a silent movie theater (like its old namesake suggested; it was only recently renamed to Cinefamily), and apparently William Castle was walking by, bemoaned that it was the last of its kind, and then had the idea of a monster loose inside of a silent movie theater. The silent part of it didn't have a damn thing to do with it, but it's a cool little anecdote all the same, and I'm sure Castle would love the full circle-ness of it, as people like me now bemoan that places like the Cinefamily are among the only ones still showing movies on 35mm (though not exclusively, as the New Beverly is for all intents and purposes*), and also keeping his gimmicks alive. It's a shame we don't have a modern day counterpart; there's 3D (and occasional "4D", where they blow fog and fake snow into the theater), but no one that makes it as specific to the movie as Castle did - Percepto wouldn't have made sense with 13 Ghosts, nor would Illusion-O have any place here. He'd probably weep at people converting random films to 3D just to cash in on a trend.

So if it comes to your town, I can't recommend it enough - it's among the most fun I've had at the theater all month, which is saying a lot since I've gone almost every day to SOMETHING (my friend also scares more easily than I do, so that helped my amusement). Also if you're a Price fan it's another solid, vastly entertaining turn from the man. However as a standalone movie, it's one of Castle's lesser efforts (of the ones I've seen), a bit too slow to get to the fun parts, and so silly that it's hard to even call it a horror movie.

What say you?

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I finally saw: A Nightmare on Elm Street

A couple times on this blog I've sought your feedback on what movie I'm most embarrassed I haven't seen.

I've mostly considered the true classics as primary contenders for this honor, but there are plenty of movies it's surprising I haven't seen because of my audience demographic. In other words, everyone else my age with more or less my background has seen this movie, but I haven't.

A Nightmare on Elm Street would certainly qualify. That is, until I finally saw it on Saturday night.

So I'm introducing a new feature on my blog called "I Finally Saw," where I'll discuss movies that were new to other people in the 1980s or 1990s, but are only new to me today. Will they hold up? Will I be able to put myself in the mindset those people had when they originally saw these movies? That kind of thing.

I may never have seen it, but I've definitely had impressions of A Nightmare on Elm Street since it came out in 1984. A lot of my friends saw it right around that time, even though we were only 11 going on 12. I wasn't one of those kids who gravitated to horror movies at a young age. I didn't like to be scared until the past decade or two, and the disturbing things I imagined happening in A Nightmare on Elm Street (I found this poster particularly disturbing) were things that I ran from rather than embraced.

Before I go on, I'll say that if you are like me and hadn't seen this, you deserve a SPOILER WARNING.

So one of the things that surprised me about this movie is the low body count. Unlike many other slasher movies, which offer up a good six or eight characters to kill off, Nightmare introduces us to a mere four teenagers, only one of whom ends up getting killed by Freddy Krueger's famous finger knives. Of the other two, one gets hanged and another (Johnny Depp) is basically vaporized into a geyser of blood.

Some of the structuring of the deaths kind of surprised me as well. In what should be a scene with life-or-death stakes, Depp's character falls asleep while standing guard as Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) enters her dream to confront Freddy. Given how much emphasis is placed on not falling asleep, thereby letting Freddy kill you in your dreams, it's rather amazing that the script doesn't kill off either of these characters when Depp starts to snooze. Under ordinary horror movie morality, death should be the just punishment for a weak character not taking the threat seriously enough and falling asleep on the job. But Depp's death occurs later under sort of lame circumstances. He's supposed to come over to help Nancy (a second time) at midnight on a particular night, but falls asleep. What's lame about it is that he actually falls sleep twice, and the first time is awoken at about 11:40 -- in other words, with plenty of time to cross the street to Nancy's house before midnight, but not so much time that he'll accidentally fall asleep again while waiting. Yet he does accidentally fall asleep again, and this is when he buys it.

Another thing I found strange is that none of the deaths show Freddy's actual participation at the moment of death. On the one hand, that's by design. Freddy is not actually present in the real world; he's only killing them in their dream. So when the first victim's stomach is sliced to ribbons and she's dragged up a wall, it's appropriate that we don't see it, because Freddy isn't actually "there." It's useful for the audience to see what her boyfriend perceives is happening to her. But once this is accomplished, wouldn't it be better to see Freddy taking a more hands-on approach in the next two murders? Instead, we just see a guy in a prison being hanged by his own bed sheets, and a volcanic spray of blood coming out of a bed.

Now, the stuff that surprised me in a positive way. The Freddy stuff we actually do see managed to be pretty disturbing. Oh, I'm not saying I had nightmares myself about it, just that it was objectively more scary than I thought it would be. Like, when he's struggling with one victim who manages to peel the features off his face, revealing a cackling skull. Or the ominous quality of Freddy's arms as they extend 15 feet out the side of his body. Or like when another victim asks Freddy what he is, and he slices open his skin as his wordless answer, unleashing worms and maggots.

And that leads to another surprise about Freddy: I thought he was a lot more of a talker, and specifically, a wisecracker. In fact, he doesn't talk nearly as much as I expected, and there are almost no groan-inducing puns. My guess is that this aspect of his persona doesn't really take off until the sequels -- all of which, not surprisingly, I have also not seen.

Still, A Nightmare on Elm Street seems a bit more dated than other seminal horror movies from this period. It doesn't have the timelessness of Halloween or even the original Friday the 13th, which is probably a reflection of it being filmed deeper into the 1980s than either of those films. (In fact, Halloween wasn't made in the 1980s at all, having come out in 1978.) So perhaps I'm just expressing a preference for the 1970s horror aesthetic over the 1980s horror aesthetic.

I can tell you one place that Nightmare steps horribly wrong. In an ending that leaves things wide open for the multiple sequels, and expresses for certain that Freddy isn't dead (the way he's dispatched barely even suggests he might be dead), Nancy's mother is pulled through the window of her front door in the film's final shot, presumably by an unseen Freddy on the other side. You're supposed to be chilled by this, right? Uh uh. It's so obvious that the body being pulled through the window is a doll that it's downright funny. The doll's legs even catch on the side of the window in a way that make them bounce in a completely doll-like and completely inorganic manner.

Regardless of this unintentionally funny image the film left me with, I'm glad I "finally saw" A Nightmare on Elm Street, and ultimately I rate it pretty highly simply for its place in horror history.

Also, now I finally get that Simpsons Halloween special where Groundskeeper Willie gets burned in the boiler room and attacks Bart and Lisa in their dreams.

Final Girl Film Club - Planet of the Vampires

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.

Today, Mario Bava's 1965 sci-fi/horror blend Planet of the Vampires.

The IMDb trivia says that fifteen different titles were considered for this movie before Planet of the Vampires was settled on. It's an odd choice, having the title promise an entire planet of vampires, when it doesn't actually feature any vampires at all. Alternate titles include Planet of Blood, The Haunted Planet, The Planet of Terror, and The Planet of the Damned, all of which are more fitting, while its title in Spain is simply and appropriately Terror in Space.

The planet of the title is Aura, a world so thickly enshrouded in fog that some don't think there's even any land to it, betting that it's merely a cosmic cloud. But beneath the fog it is a proper planet, and when spaceship Argos and its sister ship Galliott pick up a signal emanating from Aura, they decide they have to land there to check and see whether this signal is a natural emission or a manmade transmission sent by someone in distress.

As the ships prepare to land they lose contact with each other, equipment short circuits, the automatic controls go haywire and the forced manual landings are rough ones. Once on the surface of the mysterious planet, the Argos crew members begin to behave strangely, some violently attacking each other, others driven to go outside without helmets or to sabotage equipment. The crew is able to regain their senses, after which they have no memory of the uncharacteristic things they were just doing.

The Galliott crew were not so lucky, they didn't snap out of their violent trances. When Argos crew members traverse the rocky, barren Aura landscape to check on their nearby sister ship, they find that everyone on board the Galliott is dead. Soon after the bodies are discovered, the dead rise, their minds still controlled by whatever force caused their fatal impulses.

Surrounded by danger, the crew of Argos scrambles to get their controls fixed so they can escape from Aura before they too join the ranks of the alien-mind-controlled dead. But they're not the only ones who want to escape Aura.

Planet of the Vampires is often referred to as a sort of precursor to Ridley Scott's Alien, given that it deals with a spaceship landing on a strange planet in response to a signal of unknown origin, which turns out to be a deadly mistake for its crew. A sequence in which the Argos Captain and a cohort explore an ancient structure on Aura and find the remains of long dead, massive creatures has been cited as a clear inspiration for Alien's Space Jockey expedition, but Ridley Scott and Alien's writers denied having seen Planet of the Vampires before making their film.

POTV's greatest asset is the style director Mario Bava and his cinematographers bring to the visuals, the use of shadows and light, light that is usually shining through a colorful gel. The foggy locations of Aura are lit with a mixture of green, purple, red, yellow, and blue, and it looks awesome. Also impressive, and these days charming, are the film's effects. There were no opticals added, all of the effects were done on set and in camera, using mirror trickery, forced perspectives and models.

An AIP/Italian/Spanish co-production, the film also had an international cast, all of whom spoke their native languages on the set, their voices to be dubbed later, as was the case with most Italian movies. The script was the work of Bava and four Italian and Spanish co-writers, an adaptation of Renato Pestriniero's story entitled One Night of 21 Hours. AIP's Louis M. Heyward and writer Ib Melchior did another pass on the script for the American version. Melchior's filmography was largely made up of genre titles, a list that includes Reptilicus, Journey to the Seventh Planet, The Angry Red Planet, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, and the source material for Death Race 2000.

Planet of the Vampires is an enjoyable sci-fi/horror mix. I find that it drags a bit at times, but the overall story is interesting and the cinematography is always wonderful to look at.

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