MY CALL: This sequel maintains everything we love about Freddy while delivering a very different (however sloppily told) story. I think it’s a worthy sequel even if not comparable to the original…after all, so few sequels are. MOVIES LIKE Freddy’s Revenge: First off, you should first see the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Other classics everyone should see include Poltergeist (1982; discussed at length in our podcast episode #16) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes series (1977). For more recent horror with a similar sense of humor try Wishmaster (1997) and Hatchet (2006).

With the original written and directed by Wes Craven (Cursed, Deadly Friend, Deadly Blessing), our new director Jack Sholder (Wishmaster 2, The Hidden) has some big shoes to fill. Thankfully, much as with Clive Barker’s step back after the first Hellraiser (1987) film, the original writer/director (Craven) contributed to the writing of this sequel. And further similar to Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Freddy’s Revenge continues where the original left off (5 years later anyway) but advanced with a unique storyline clearly separating this second installment as more than simply a rehashing of the first with a different set of victims.

Opening as playfully as the original ended, an obvious nightmare depicts a school bus ride gone wrong accompanied by some effects that could only be described as silly by today’s standards—yet I still love them. Clearly this sequel has brought every bit of humor from the original, and then added more of its own—but we also maintained the dark and dire evil aspects. From his very introduction Freddy laughs noticeably more frequently in this film as his malicious and cruel humor cuts into our moral fiber. This notion was a trend set in part 1, but now Freddy has a new dark desire; he wants Jesse (Mark Patton) to kill for him now!

The new kid attending the same school as part 1’s victims, Jesse learns that his family has moved into the very house in which Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) killed Freddy five years ago. The timeline offers a new student body of potential victims including classmates Lisa (Kim Myers; Hellraiser: Bloodline) and Ron (Robert Rusler; Weird Science, Sometimes They Come Back, Vamp).

Things get more than a little weird in this sequel. At one point Jesse wanders off to an “alternative lifestyle” bar of sorts (or some metal/biker bar with some BDSM undertones) and encounters his gym coach (Marshall Bell; Total Recall), who takes him back to the school gym to run laps and shower it off. During this surreal sequence, his coach is killed. I was 100% certain this zaniness was a dream, but apparently I was wrong. On top of that, at one point a finch becomes murderous and kills its mate before attacking Jesse’s father and then exploding for no apparent reason; no one questions this as unnatural. Speaking of weird, Freddy seems to be crossing over into reality on his own accord, which seems to violate the rules we once learned about him.

Freddy (Robert Englund; Wishmaster, Hatchet) returns as the same demonic power with the now iconic ugly red and green sweater, a single clawed glove, a face still-moistly burned beyond recognition, and a penchant for painfully raking his claws over metal objects. The main difference is that he is no longer a shadowy mysterious entity of few words. He is now a known quantity with more lines and screentime.

What makes this sequel completely dissimilar to its predecessor is that almost everything takes place in a dream-touched reality rather than in the victims’ nightmares. Freddy uses Jesse’s unwilling body as a conduit to exact his revenge. Whereas part 1 introduced us to the terrifying notion that someone (or something) can hunt and kill us in our dreams (and we really die!), this sequel removes from us not only control of our dreams but also control of ourselves. This sequel also largely replaces “scary” with an almost “perverse awkward unease” and injects a bit more humor into the Krueger formula. For example, we briefly see twisted distortion of a cat attacking a monster rat, and there are two sort of guard dogs with evil baby faces. This does well to keep us out of our comfort zone and taunts the line between reality and Freddy’s dreamworld.

Freddy is a twisted and pure evil. It’s intended to be sick and disturbing, and more perverse than humorous—although fans laugh at it today. We find these kinds of scenes delivered with a deliberate humor in Hatchet (2006), Wishmaster (1997) and so many more releases of the past 20-30 years…and also blatantly more deliberate in later installments of the Nightmare on Elm Street or Leprechaun franchises.

This film isn’t “great” but I find it a worthy successor to the original and still a more-than-decent 80s horror movie; it’s good. We call backto the elements that worked before, replacing shadowy, steam-spewing boiler rooms with a creepy power plant where Freddy worked in life; instead of impressions on Nancy’s bedroom wall we find Freddy’s form emerging through Jesse’s stomach and his claws piercing through his fingertips; and rather than slicing off his own fingers he now peels away the flesh of his scalded head to reveal “I’ve got the brains!” Without going into detail, I should add that I still enjoy ALL of the practical effects in this film. Sometimes the simplicity makes it more gross, weird, off-putting, or even a bit funny—and I loved the transformation scene. But these crowd-pleasing callbacks pale in the novelty of the story, however sloppily it may be told.

The ending is deliberately sort of silly and illogical, leaving us with the tongue-in-cheek play that Freddy wasn’t really defeated. But that was and remains a fun staple of horror—twists and surprise endings, even if stupid, that make us smile. Perhaps not comparable to the original, this remains a fun movie experience and worth the ride. It certainly made me smile.

MY CALL:  This is one of the more campy and fun anthologies from the days before anthologies were the “in” thing.  Looking for a film that features sea zombies, silly murderous revenge, alien weeds, angry arctic man-eating primates and goofy bug infestations? Then this may be for you.

OTHER HORROR ANTHOLOGIES:  Some other anthologies include (in order of release date):  Black Sabbath (1963), Tales from the Crypt (1972), The Vault of Horror (1973), The Uncanny (1977), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye (1985), Creepshow 2 (1987), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), Necronomicon: Book of the Dead (1993), Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996), Campfire Tales (1997), 3 Extremes (2004), Trick ‘r Treat (2007), Chillerama (2011), Little Deaths (2011), V/H/S (2012), The Theater Bizarre (2012), The ABCs of Death (2013), V/H/S 2 (2013), The Profane Exhibit (2013), The ABCs of Death 2 (2014) and V/H/S Viral (2014).

Much like Tales from the Crypt (1972) and The Vault of Horror (1973), Creepshow sweeps us away to a youthful horror comic nostalgia characterized by uncomplex (often unreasonably silly) stories of various hokey campy flavors. So if you’re one to analyze plots or the decisions of characters, you’ll surely find yourself frustrated. Consider this film to be scary only for much younger and more virginal horror fans and more of a nostalgic throwback to lifetime lovers of the genre. Not that I know anything about it, but I’ve read that this is an homage to 1950s EC horror comics. It certainly does have a comicbook-esque simplicity to the stories.

Featuring five stories written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero (Dawn of the Dead), this anthology is often revered as a fan favorite. The movie opens with a young boy, his Creepshow comicbook, and a disapproving father, and we subsequently flip through the comic pages in cartoon clip scenes delivering us to the short stories within…

Father’s Day is about murdered father who returns as a zombie to exact his revenge on…you guessed it…Father’s Day. This is an excellent example of how analyzing the plot will only upset you. Our zombie father’s grave is right next to his estate and, for whatever reason, it’s only after years and years of posthumous family Father’s Day dinners that the undead patriarch randomly rises. I found it enjoyably hokey and laughed. But make no mistake, this is stupid. LOL. The highlight for me was seeing a young Ed Harris (Snowpiercer) dancing the night away.

The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill offers a similar pleasure in that we find a young Stephen King playing a seemingly retarded hillbilly who discovers a meteor in his backyard. The meteor cracks open and oozes a glowing slime which our simpleton touches and finds himself “infected” with some sort of alien weed that grows all over his body, house and yard. The plot may be simple, but it’s not dumb. Sure, there are some hilariously stupid sequences with lame dialogue, but these are the fantasies of a simpleton. So it makes sense. It is funny, a bit creepy, and ends in a brutally practical manner.

Something to Tide You Over may have been the most dramatically engaging of the stories, about a methodical husband (Leslie Nielsen; Dracula, Dead and Loving It) who exacts his revenge against his adulterous wife and her lover (Ted Danson) in a rather cruel way…and he records it!!! In this story the humor is subtle and dark, and only campy in the very end for our surprise ending. This and the remaining stories are all a bit more mature.

The Crate is far-fetched but I certainly enjoyed the ride. A professor (Hal Holbrook; The Unholy) with a domineering alcoholic wife (Adrienne Barbeau; The Thing, Swamp Thing) encounters a crate that has been long forgotten in storage in the zoology department. Inside the crate waits a hungry, humanoid monster from an Antarctic expedition at the dawn of the century. This story features the most elaborate plot.

They’re Creeping Up On You was by far my least favorite story of the anthology (followed by Father’s Day). Some rich business man with an overly modern, tech-rich condo and a roach-centric germophobic hypochondriasis finds himself plagued with his perceived incompetence of others and a domestic insect infestation. This drives him mad and drove me to boredom. Roaches crawling all over everything is not creepy or satisfying to me; it’s just dumb. That’s what this short story was: dumb.

OVERVIEW: I found the middle three short stories to be very engaging and the first and last to be considerably less satisfying (with Creeping Up being almost intolerably awful while maybe drawing one grin). This anthology would have been considerably better in my opinion if it was limited to the middle three stories (Jordy, Tide and Crate) and reduced from 120 to 90 minutes. But I know some people (e.g., the occasional Amazon reviewer) rather enjoyed Father’s Day and Creeping, so I’ll just say the middle stories are what won me over and got me to buy this.

In either case, this is a classic anthology from the days before anthologies were the “in” thing. You should probably watch it.

MY CALL: Featuring a very different setting and more creative kills, this may be the most re-watchable NOES film. The franchise is getting slightly sillier, but it remains eerie and dark. MOVIES LIKE Dream Warriors: First off, you should first see the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985). Other classics everyone should see include Poltergeist (1982; discussed at length in our podcast episode #16), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and The Hills Have Eyes series (1977). For more recent horror with a similar sense of humor try Wishmaster (1997) and Hatchet (2006).

The saga continues as Freddy returns to kill off “the last Elm Street kids,” whose parents took part in burning the child murderer Fred Krueger to death years ago. Director Chuck Russell (The Blob) delivers this third franchise installment in a mental hospital (6 years after the events of part 1) which houses several teenagers who all share the same nightmare of a man with claws on one hand, a burnt face and an ugly sweater. Coming to their aid, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp; A Nightmare on Elm Street) returns to Springwood with a Master’s Degree in psychology and supports the young patients’ claims, which are largely dismissed as mass hysteria by the staff. How convenient [diabolical laugh].

The five troubled teen patients are an eclectic bunch and include Patricia Arquette (Stigmata), Rodney Eastman (I Spit on Your Grave) and Jennifer Rubin (Screamers, Bad Dreams). You’ll also enjoy a young Laurence Fishburne (Event Horizon, The Colony) as an orderly to round out a solid cast in this surprisingly well written horror movie in which, as seems to be a trend in the NOES franchise, Freddy’s menace becomes increasingly iconic of sick humor rather than terror.

The by-now iconic Freddy (Robert Englund; Wishmaster, Hatchet) returns as the same demonic power with the red and green sweater, a single clawed glove, a face still-moistly burned beyond recognition, and a penchant for painfully raking his claws over metal objects. However, unlike part 1 and Freddy’s Revenge, Freddy is now more outspoken and no longer hides in the shadows like a mysterious boogeyman. He has a much more active role on screen.

What makes this sequel completely dissimilar to its predecessor is that it doesn’t take place in the residences or high school on Elm Street. The mental hospital offers an eerie new medium for Freddy, and a convenient one since the hospital staff readily considers the teen deaths (as they mount in the story) to be the suicides of troubled youth!

Another interesting touch is that, in their nightmares with Freddy, each of the teen dreamers retains a sort of special power they always had in their dreams. A wheelchair-bound Dungeons and Dragons dork becomes a physically capable wizard, the hard-ass attitudinal token black guy has super strength, the drug addict becomes a mohawked punk knife fighter, the mute gains the ability to speak, and our heroine becomes an acrobat. These abilities help them combat Freddy in the dreamworld while, in turn, Freddy uses their fears and weaknesses against them.

This third installment also plays with the rules of Freddy’s dreamscape. In part 1 we were introduced to the terrifying notion that someone can kill us in our dreams (and we really die!) and Nancy was able to pull Freddy into reality, part 2 removed from us not only control of our dreams but also control of our body while awake, and now in Dream Warriors people can pull each other into their dreams and Freddy is able to depart the dream world and enter reality on his own—which doesn’t seem to follow “the NOES rules.” That last bit (Freddy choosing to crossover into reality) may seem like a horrible rule violation, but I forgive it. It happened only once, it was prefaced with his increased power from accumulating souls, and it made for a great scene in which he possessed his own burnt remains (a charred skeleton) to prevent Nancy’s father (John Saxon; Blood Beach, A Nightmare on Elm Street) from burying his remains on holy ground. Watching the skeleton battle Nancy’s father and the hospital psychiatrist was pure joy!

This sequel has also (thankfully) steered clear of the perverse awkward unease of Freddy’s Revenge, instead offering more diverse kills to the Krueger formula. The wrist tendon puppeteering scene was brilliant and very hard to watch; “welcome to prime time, bitch” is one of Freddy’s best lines ever; a cripple faces the wheelchair from Hell; an addict meets a syringe-fingered Freddy; Joey and the sexy Freddy-succubus nurse was a great teen-fantasy-gone-wrong; and the Freddy-snake swallowing scene was appropriately shocking, unique and gross. Overall, this was the Freddy movie that started making the kills “fun” in addition to being creative. Freddy’s dreamscape has become a twisted carnival funhouse.

This is the kind of sequel the franchise deserves! We call back to many elements that worked before, like replacing shadowy, steam-spewing boiler rooms and the creepy power plant where Freddy worked in life with the junkyard where his remains were hidden; instead of face impressions on Nancy’s bedroom wall and Freddy’s form emerging through Jesse’s stomach and his claws piercing through his fingertips, we find Freddy manifesting himself through a television set; where once Freddy licked through the phone or lengthily licked the stomach of Jesse’s love interest, he now tethers a teenager’s limbs in a sick fantasy; and rather than slicing off his own fingers or revealing his own brain, he uncovers his soul-embedded chest. Also continuing to flavor the franchise, we revisit Nancy’s dilapidated dreamworld house and unnerving little girls, likely the ghosts of Freddy’s victims. I should add that I still enjoy ALL of the practical effects in all three of the first NOES films. Sometimes the simplicity makes it more gross, weird, off-putting, or even a bit funny; and thrillingly FUN.

Oh, right! And Dream Warriors has contributed to the Freddy mythology in the form of Amanda Krueger, a ghostly nun tells the horrible story of Freddy’s conception, the product of rape in a mental hospital. “Son of a hundred maniacs.”

Being presented in a completely different style, this is not comparable to the original. It remains a fun movie experience and well worth the ride for the first time or for a good re-watch. It certainly made me smile.

MY CALL: This film is strange, loaded with disarming comic relief, geriatrically creepy, twisted, and doesn’t feel like found footage…all in a good way. The theme would have worked better if rated-R, but this still stands out as an exceptional with solid performances from our young actors.

M. Night Shyamalan (Signs, The Village) has always been a favorite writer and director of mine. I don’t care what the haters say. He picked up some flak for The Village (2004), The Happening (2008) and The Lady in the Water (2006), but I tend to enjoy his movies despite the noticeable drop in quality after The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002). I won’t even get into The Last Airbender (2010)—we’ll just call that a mistake. And I was captivated by Devil (2010; which he did not direct).

More playfully approached than in his past endeavors, Shyamalan returns to tell the Grimm-undertoned story of two young children going to meet their estranged grandparents for the first time. Their mother (Kathryn Hahn) is conflicted about the visit, having not spoken to her parents in the fifteen years since she left on bad terms as a teenager. We all know from the trailers that the grandparents seem nice yet weird. Perhaps just early onset dementia…? Or perhaps a big Shyamalanadingdong twist! Because that’s what we’ve come to know Shyamalan for, right? Big twists. Bruce Willis was dead the whole time! Sam Jackson was the villain! Everything happens for a reason—SWING AWAY! So it’s fair to say that there is almost definitely something behind the curtain that isn’t evident from the trailer.

The performances by the two child actors are compelling and manage to direct us through the story surprisingly effectively. The 13 yr old boy Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) seems gawky at first, but he turned out to be great and what seemed the least credible about him at first quickly became his most endearing characteristic. He provides the more naïve perspective along with the comic relief, rapping in front of Nana, joking about dead bodies in the work shed (far before anything strange has happened), and being the first to frighten. The first two thirds of this film will find you smiling quite often and nearly entirely due to this character’s welcomed antics. It may downplay the urgency but it also contributes to lowering our guard.

The older sister Becca (Olivia DeJonge), our filmographer in this odyssey of estranged family reunification, is the serious one. Intent on uncovering and documenting her grandparents’ forgiveness for her mother’s alienation, she keeps the story grounded and provides a credible case for found footage as she sets out to simultaneously feed her hunger for filmmaking and mend a sundered family. She is articulate, perceptive beyond her years, and along with Tyler she harbors a powerful insecurity after recently being abandoned by her father.

Both children excel in offering refreshingly sincere performances and credible characters. Between their anxious mother and their quirky senescing grandparents, these children serve as our home base in terms of sanity. But we also watch as they turn a blind eye to some red flags in the name of senility and their desire to have a more complete family.

After some understandably awkward introductions, their week of family bonding kicks off with some home cooking by day and an intro to the weirder side of senility by night. It turns out that Nana (Deanna Dunagan) suffers from a form of nocturnal dementia called sun downing. Her mornings are filled with a sweet, meek farmhouse manner. But her late nights are filled with projectile vomiting, charging through the hallways, and nude wall scratching—making her a good candidate for a home visit from an old priest and a young priest. But it’s not just Nana. Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie; Daredevil) is occasionally non-responsive, paranoid, confused, and he’s doing something in his work shed. He also doesn’t want the kids in the basement or to leave their bedroom after 9:30pm. Many elderly folks run a tight ship and have some reasonable rules of the house, but these just raise suspicions.

“Eat all you want.”

“Could you get in the oven to clean it?”
How Hansel and Gretel-esque.

With each day they seem to encounter increasingly strange behavior lending less and less credence to the grandparents’ mental wellness or the kids’ safety. However, our guard is dropped with the understanding that “they’re just old.” We are reminded of this notion repeatedly by the grandparents themselves. We want to accept their frailties and overcome our feeling of uneasiness. We, too, have grandparents and we don’t want to take away their independence should they start to fade…at least, not until they’ve faded too far. And how far is too far? This story tests that boundary.

“What do you mean they’re acting weird?”

As if serving as a countdown of some horrible conclusion, each day is marked by a caption on the screen…Monday….Tuesday…Wednesday… The visit wears down to its last days and the weird behavior mounts, and so does Becca’s penchant to film interviews and capture the catharsis of forgiveness to help heal their long-estranged family. No matter how strange (or bad) things seem, she still wants her interview—and Nana really doesn’t seem comfortable giving that up. One must wonder why.

I often questioned just where this ride was taking us? Some people stop by the house and I start to wonder if the grandparents are possessed by some unconventional means, or if they are part of a cult, or if they are being compelled or threatened to do something to the kids. Was their mother unknowingly going to be a victim of one of these things until she escaped by running away?

With The Village (2004) and The Lady in the Water (2006) under his belt, it should come as no surprise that Shyamalan festoons his story with dark fairy tale imagery. “We’re off to grandmother’s house” located far from the nearest neighbors with Nana filling her fare with freshly baked confections, a Grimm flashback as she urges her granddaughter into the oven with a bizarre smile, a grandfather smacking of a twisted “woodsman” role, things start out so nice but slowly degenerate into their true nature, and all of the house “rules.” Further seasoning this fairy tale stew is Becca’s reference to a magical elixir (i.e., forgiveness) to cure her mother and Nana tells tales of another planet where everyone can be happy together. This is framed as a cautionary tale, but with the caution kept secret until the end.

More creepy than scary, littered with down-to-earth comic relief, and with a premise that makes found footage appropriate–this is an example of film done right as it distracts us from the finish line while providing all the signs that clearly point us in the right direction. It also hardly feels like found footage after the first 10 minutes as the shots are typically steady.

The final twist is horrifying in concept but doesn’t translate to film as effectively as Shyamalan’s past reveals have. But I don’t care. I liked it a lot for what it was. The scenes are all entertaining, whether funny or tense. Truly, though, from the light-hearted and often comical opening acts, Shyamalan was trying to transition us to more dire feelings. It only sort of worked. I must also admit that this was something that really wanted to be rated R. Of course, that’s not Shyamalan’s style. But I think that an R-treatment would have improved it; it would have fueled the shift from comic relief in the beginning to a third act of greater gravity.

Overall, I was very pleased with this.

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Let’s be clear, there’s a porn star, a bloody foot, an ant monster and a power drill on the DVD cover.
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Don’t read this article at work, bro!
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MY CALL: This is a strange, uber-cheap, home-made Canuxploitation film with abject writing, acting and editing, featuring a clothed porn star and cheaply made ant-like mutant monster babies. This is all you need to know to decide if this is for you. It’s probably not. MOVIES LIKE Things:   Better for gore and less awkward was The Abomination (1989), followed more recently by smutty horror like They Bite (1995; the worst in this list), The Killer Eye (1999), Night of the Tentacles (2013), Bio-Slime (2010; the best in this list) and Blood Gnome (2004); all of which were much better than Things.

Evidently this film serves as a cautionary tale of the dangers of artificial insemination.  Meet baby!

This bizarre film is about two guys (Don and Fred) who visit their friend Doug’s remote cabin only to find a breeding ground for monstrous creatures that look like surreal (but cheaply made) hybrids between ants and meatballs.

Evidently, she elected to have a natural childbirth.

After about 20 minutes of painfully slow scenes where little more happens than opening a beer and eating a sandwich, Doug’s girlfriend gives birth to some sort of insectoid monster. In fact, off camera, she evidently gave birth to many of them as the result of some experimental artificial insemination. The acting is “off” and nothing seems to “fit,” making this feel a lot like a weird dream. It’s surreal, but not in a flattering way.

From the opening scene there is something very perverse and disturbing about this film, like a more theater-centric approach to Troma. The dialogue feels dramatized for a mix of some twisted Broadway stage and an NC-17 MTV music video. If that didn’t make this sound classy enough yet, there is also full frontal nudity in the first 90 seconds of the film!

The DVD dust jacket reads “it remains perhaps the most bizarre, depraved and mind-boggling chunk of ‘Canuxploitation’ ever unleashed upon humanity.” I’m not so sure about that, but it is certainly depraved and bizarre. It even featured porn star Amber Lynn as a newsreporter; probably just to fool adult film enthusiasts into watching it. Apparently Amber was trying to really “act” for a change because her role in no way contributed to the exploitation aspect of the film. She had many lines (all delivered poorly by reading cue cards as she looked away from the camera) and she kept her clothes on.

What is she looking at!?!?!?!?!

Despite the zany, very dark exploitation of this film, what is most disturbing is the homemade score. Probably produced with a Casio keyboard, the “music” (if we’ll call it that) rarely matches the tone of the scene and is complemented by echoing background of creepy laughs, whispers of having babies, and begging for death in the opening scenes. The film quality, likewise awful, is grittier than an amateur 70s porno. The sound was so terrible; like it was dubbed with the volume set too high. To call the dialogue inane would be polite. It was like the writers were all severely mentally handicapped. But that’s ok, because the editing is horrible, too, with each scene lasting far longer than necessary to the point that the film moves at a sluggish pace.

But we don’t care about the score, dubbing or dialogue do we? No. We sought out this extremely obscure film because we wanted some 80s super-gore exploitation. And there’s a lot of that here. A skinned hand being prodded, all sorts of dismemberment, eyes and tongues are pulled out with squishy sound effects, lots of corpses and severed heads, the ant-baby monsters, sloppy gore…it’s all here. Just understand that there are much better ways to see this stuff nowadays.

Let’s just say I can’t recommend this. But maybe some would be interested since one Amazon reviewer called this “The Hope Diamond of bad movies.” So I’ll let you decide.

This image is how I felt while watching this film. By the way, this might have been the first ever straight to video Canadian horror movie.

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MY CALL: Did I care about the characters? Not at all. Was the creepy, dire atmosphere captured? No. Was it a fun tentacle monster movie? Yes. Was it more of a blatant rip-off than an homage to The Thing (1982)? Also yes. BUT IT”S FUN! MOVIES LIKE Harbinger Down:   The Thing (1982), The Thing (2011), Leviathan (1989), Blood Glacier (2013; aka, The Station).

Back in our Trailer Talk Podcast Episode (the 3rd trailer we discuss in the episode) we reviewed why fans of practical special effects and tentacle monster movies should be excited about Harbinger Down. Before seeing the film, it appeared to have all the makings of an admirable callback to The Thing (1982)…along with the newer The Thing (2011) and Leviathan (1989). Instead this was more like a lackluster rehashing and–while I must admit I had A LOT OF FUN watching this flick–it failed in properly honoring anything of the aforementioned sacred horror canon. But again, it remains a solidly entertaining way to spend 90 minutes of a monster movie lover’s evening. Especially if you enjoy tentacle monsters and squishy effects.

The meager budget is evident from the opening sequence, featuring a space shape “CGI-crashing” through the Earth’s atmosphere. Not gonna’ lie…I wasn’t impressed. The film quality (to a trained eye anyway) offered further indications of financial constraints. Worse yet, as we are introduced to the characters I feel I am also being introduced to writer/director Alec Gillis’ first time writing. I’m really not impressed. But hold on just a second! We’re not here for CGI space ships, gorgeous film quality or Oscar-worthy scripts are we? No. We came here with the promise of creature effects. So while I felt obligated to warn of the aforementioned flaws, these are not the kinds of flaws that should deter monster movie overs from watching this kind of movie.

The story follows an academic troupe (two grad students and their professor) who join the crew of the Harbinger, an Alaskan crabbing boat in the Bering Sea. The scientists aim to study a pod of Beluga whales and how their biology has been affected by climate change. After recovering some Soviet space wreckage embedded in an iceberg, the scientists’ interest change. It seems that this Russian space crew was returning from a moon mission researching tardigrades (also known as water bears or Tardigrada; biology’s most extreme environment-tolerant microorganisms known).

As quickly as characters are introduced, they find reasons to be catty or confrontational–not a good sign for when things undoubtedly take a bad turn later. After recovering the contaminated wreckage, we get the news that radio and phone communication is down because of the approaching storm! Making the smartest decision in the entire movie, the Harbinger’s captain (Lance Henriksen; Aliens, AVP, The Pit and the Pendulum) orders that the wreckage be placed in the ship hold until they return to the mainland.

Much as in Species (1995) and Apollo 18 (2011), and much to the delight of horror fans, the astronauts were exposed and their remains are now thawing in the Harbinger’s ship hold; safely away from the crew. But of course, some scientists just can’t wait and sneak down there. Upon examination, the scientists and Harbinger crew are exposed to the tardigrades, which evidently mutate at an alarming rate, even hijacking and changing the DNA of those they infect.

First time writer/director Alec Gillis has had loads of experience with special effects: Aliens (1986), Leviathan (1989), Starship Troopers (1997), Evolution (2001), AVP: Aliens vs Predator (2004) and AVPR (2007) to name a few of his wins in terms of creature effects. The effects in this film may roll a few unconvinced eyes, but he did all right with the creature effects. The effects were abundant, often gross or somewhat disturbing, and quite squishy! Contrastingly, Gillis has had no experience with writing or directing, so we hear terms like “climate change” thrown around a dozen times among a sea of stale line delivery. We even endure a crooked nod to Jaws (1975) in the form of “we’re gonna’ need a bigger bucket.” But let’s focus on the good, shall we?

We see many call backs to the familiar. An infected victim’s bloody goo self-coagulates and moves around on its own like The Thing (1982; blood test scene), the scientists seem to be experts on all things science (an annoying trait among scientist characters across the genre), the monstrous infection lies latent in the infected for a time like The Thing (1982), we have a scene with a woman waste deep in dangerous water reminding us of Newt in Aliens (1986), a naked woman is monstrously modified like The Thing (2011), the monster combines with the sum of its victims and eventually assumes a semi-insectoid crustacean-like form (after absorbing two tons of crab) like in Leviathan (1989), and in the end (like in The Thing (1982)) we resort to refreezing the monster (and everyone infected) in the ice.

Yup. I’ve seen something like this before…

Overall, this movie is simultaneously disappointing and entertaining at the same time. It captured none of the urgency, care for the characters, creepy atmosphere or gravity of those films it clearly emulated. Steering clear of the dire fear of “who goes there?” we know almost right away that just about everyone is infected, and no effort is properly manifested to make us fear who is or isn’t infected. On the other hand, there were loads of satisfying tentacles and monster shots! I, for one, will not be buying this for my collection. However, I do not at all regret spending a few bucks to see it OnDemand/PPV.

I have to point this out.  What a great tagline!
“They were searching for proof…they found it!”

WHAT MAKES THIS A GOOD HALLOWEEN MOVIE?  Just because it’s Halloween doesn’t mean all horror movies are a good fit.  Some fit the October’s mood better than others and I consider Grave Encounters to do just that.  It has what we love: great characters, humor, staging, dread and atmosphere.  I don’t think I ever rolled my eyes at this film…I was too busy loving it!  Flicks like this and The Hazing (2004) inspire me to continue taking chances when Netflix or Amazon throws a weird suggestion my way.  I give this a direct-to-DVD horror “A”.   IF YOU LIKE THIS, WATCH:  The Paranormal Activity films (2007, 2010, 2011), White Noise (2005) and Session 9  (2001).  Also, The Last Exorcism (2010).

This movie operates much like The Last Exorcism (2010).  We follow Lance Preston and his Ghost Hunters film crew into a haunted mental hospital in search of the paranormal.  It comes off as a satire, with a lot of sophomoric sarcasm and a totally fake medium.  They laugh about things being “too over the top” between cuts and they pay a gardener twenty bucks to lie about seeing a ghost on the property.  This works out fantastically!  Normally the first 20-30 minutes of any horror are painful.  They have barely-trained actors and a perfunctory storyline.  Grave Encounters, however, has good acting and draws a lot of smiles as we learn about the film crew.  This also serves as a superior directorial device to engage the viewers into caring about these characters.

The story is simple and certainly nothing new.  The crew locks themselves into the abandoned hospital from 10pm-6am, giving them eight hours in total darkness to catch some paranormal activity on film.  They get a tour from the caretaker and hear a few “real” ghost stories about the place to hype up their show (called Grave Encounters) and choose where to place static cameras.  The execution is more like the Paranormal Activity films (2007, 2010, 2011).  There’s a lot of slow tension build-up and you find yourself concentrating on the screen; staring waiting for something to move and listening for a subtle sound (like White Noise (2005)).  This is a style that I love, but many people don’t like this.

What caught me off guard is that while everything was done surprisingly well in terms of acting, effects, sets, scares, and directing, the writing seemed very misguided.  Not the dialogue, but the events.  At first things seem sensible.  Some random objects move here and there.  But as the movie progresses and the intensity of the paranormal activity amplifies, the events seem less connected.  The writers mix elements of “ghost” movies with elements of “house” movies.  In the movie, Lance explains that there are static and intelligent hauntings.  Static haunting account for the “house” movie subgenre, in which there is an energy echoing a past event (but there is no specific ghost, demon or spirit).  Intelligent hauntings are our “ghost” story subgenre, in which a paranormal entity has some motivation and responds to human presence.  In most horror movies, the writing will choose one subgenre or the other.  Really never both.

Anyway, this subgenre combo doesn’t work.  People start disappearing or dying and we don’t know why.  Some weird things happen that make me want to guess “why this is happening” or “what the ghost wants” or “what happened in the hospital” or “are the crew members somehow linked to the hospital?”  Ultimately, I was hit with a lot of red herrings which served no end.  As a result, the end of the movie was simply when we ran out of people to kill or mysteriously disappear.  I wanted a little more.

Despite this big overall writing flaw, each individual scene worked well.  I enjoyed every five minute piece of the movie.  Some scenes actually utilized some really cool (all be they disconnected) ideas to add to the eerie atmosphere.  But after the first 30 minutes, the scenes just failed to make a story when assembled chronologically.

However critical I may sound, I really enjoyed this and strongly recommend it to any of you who enjoy occasionally taking a chance on an unknown direct-to-DVD horror.

MY CALL: Fresh, hilarious and smartly scripted, this film was a joy. The gore, humor and story fall shy of Shaun of the Dead, but this horror comedy remains something very impressive. MOVIES LIKE Cooties: Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009), Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010), Zombeavers (2014) and Love in the Time of Monsters (2015).

Within minutes of hitting play I already love this film. It’s well-scored, much like some dark children’s fantasy in fact, and visually visceral for reasons having nothing to do with conventional gore. During the playfully-fonted opening credits we enjoy a serious sequence depicting a chicken factory of sorts complete with neck-breaking, rich bright colors as a fly defecates on the chicken carcass (hinted as the cooties virus introduction), limbs being clipped with sheers and separating organs while music reminiscent of child-like discovery plays in the background. From the slaughterhouse and factory, to the fryer and the elementary school cafeteria we are welcomed to Cooties with a sense of jovial adventure.

When we meet Clint (Elijah Wood; Maniac, The Faculty) and his mother (Kate Flannery), they instantly resurrect an almost resentfully nostalgic and entertaining dynamic. Poor Clint is a good-intentioned, likable loser substitute-teaching at his elementary alma mater which is now overrun with over-entitled, legally empowered kids with profanely bad attitudes. These kids are heinous and say some truly awful things (that made me laugh out loud). For example, “If my butthole had a butthole, it would look like you…You look like you have Chicken Pox, if Chicken Pox was made out of hemorrhoids.” Yeah, kids are adorable aren’t they?

A sort of viral, flesh-eating zombie outbreak ensues when a pig-tailed patient zero eats a contaminated chicken nugget and bites off a 10-yr old douchebag’s cheek. After opening with loads of awkward humor, the film now builds comedic inertia in the form of the most forgivably zany mayhem of violence against children accompanied by a storm of snippy quips which will draw smiles until the movie’s end. Why is this violence against children so acceptable? Because it’s completely cartoonish.

Wonderfully written by Leigh Whannell (Saw 1-3, Dead Silence, Insidious 1-3) and directed by a pair of newcomers, Cooties is as fresh as the flesh it infects. Everything about this movie is done well: the camera-work, the writing, the characters and the decisions they make, the story, the humor, the gore and the acting. I rarely get to say this about horror, but I just loved these characters. Jorge Garcia (Lost) is a joy as the drug-using crossing guard; Leigh Whannell is delightfully awkward as a socially disconnected science teacher; Alison Pill (Snowpiercer) is the sweet, unavailable love interest; and Rainn Wilson (Six Feet Under, Super) and his handlebar mustache dominate the screen as the jockish gym teacher.

Here’s Leigh Whannell.  Everyone had show-stealing lines and he wrote himself some, too.

Everyone had something valuable to offer! This goes doubly for the filmmakers on the other side of the camera of this film which knows exactly what it is in all the best ways. Deviating from recent horror comedies like Zombeavers (2014) or Love in the Time of Monsters (2015), Cooties delivers a high quality product whose re-watchability does not rely on alcohol; rising far above the likes of “fun B-movies.”

This is more than a B-movie, but falls shy of the theatrical greatness of Shaun of the Dead. We have a disembowelment-dismemberment scene that tips its hat to Dawn of the Dead (1978), Rainn Wilson goes all-state football (complete with spins, fakes, clotheslines and spins) through a horde of children, and a guy dies right after saying “Follow me, I do CrossFit!” The humor is sharp and abundant, right up until Rainn goes Rambo, the janitor turns out to be a Japanese martial arts master, and they medicate the ravenous kids with Ritalin and Adderall.

It’s surprisingly satisfying seeing teachers kick the crap out of these kids and, just as we’d want it, Rainn Wilson gets all of the most dramatic scenes. He may hog them, but he owns them.  We even enjoy some jabs at the state of overly anti-sexual-harassment workplaces, political control over teaching evolution versus religion, and contemporary views on cellphones in schools.

I was impressed. Everyone should see and enjoy this movie. Think of it as Shaun of the Dead’s younger brother; he shows loads of promise but hasn’t fully grown up yet…but just wait until he does.

WHAT MAKES THIS A GOOD HALLOWEEN MOVIE?  Just because it’s Halloween doesn’t mean all horror movies are a good fit.  Some fit the October’s mood better than others and I consider The Conjuring to be a perfect choice!  Poltergeist (1982) meets The Exorcist (1973) in this modern horror classic that only fails to meet perfection because its predecessors already claimed the title by pioneering the scenes and atmosphere that form modern horror filmmaking dogma as we know it today.  But James Wan kicks up the competition and demonstrates his mastery of storytelling and character development in a genre that normally relies entirely on atmosphere and gore-slathered effects to fill seats.  The atmosphere of this film oozes October Halloweeniness. IF YOU LIKE THIS THEN WATCH:  Poltergeist (1982), in case you missed it.  Also, anything from my series The Best Horror Came from the 80s or the upcoming The Best Horror Came from the 70s–back when horror actually came with a story and characters worth watching.  SIDEBAR:  Mark (not a major fan of horror) also wrote a very positive review of The Conjuring and offered an overview of director James Wan’s impressive work.

http://realtalkrealdebate.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/the-conjuring-2013/

Let’s just start by saying that this wasn’t just a great horror movie.  This was a solid film and a horror movie based on a true account of Ed and Lorraine Warren’s case with the Perron family in the 1970s.  There were loads of scares and—while, yes, they were often “jump scares”—the creepy tension-building on the approach was finely crafted.   You would know that “something” was about to happen and it was going to be scary, but it would still manage to catch you off guard, and you wouldn’t feel that the scare was “cheap.”  Already this film has rightly stepped away from the last several dozen theatrical horror releases by engaging viewers with more than just funny satirical demons and loud noises masquerading as scary things.

http://butlerscinemascene.com/2013/07/19/the-conjuring-things-that-go-boo-in-the-night/
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as Lorraine and Ed Warren

Director James Wan’s (Insidious, Saw) film is consistent and smart, feeding viewers a steady and even diet of story and character development for both our haunted family and the paranormal investigators.  Instead of taking the first twenty minutes to introduce us to the characters and hope that we invest ourselves enough to care when their lives are threatened, Wan piece by piece reveals the nature of the Perron family, their house and the paranormalists who come to their aid.

Roger (Ron Livingston; Office Space) and Carolyn Perron (Lily Taylor; The Haunting, Hemlock Grove) have just moved their five daughters into a secluded house in Rhode Island and, as we’ve come to expect in horror movies, all horror movie houses come with a dark past.  Upon realizing that their troubles eclipsed the simplicity of a sleepwalking daughter and the stress of adapting to a new home, the Perrons seek help from Ed (Patrick Wilson; The Watchmen, Insidious) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga; Source Code, Safe House), two married paranormal researchers with an impressive résumé  when it comes to purging evil.

http://butlerscinemascene.com/2013/07/19/the-conjuring-things-that-go-boo-in-the-night/

The big success in storytelling and direction here is that because Wan presented the Warrens to us in the opening scenes–to set the tone and show us how these paranormal investigators work–and fairly alternated between their college lecture circuit and the escalating situation in the Perron house before the two couples had met.  We weren’t force fed some ghost hunters halfway through the movie (or later) who we are “supposed to like.”  Instead, we’ve already met them and learned that they’re not some spirit hunting hacks who “hope” to find ghosts and get evidence so they can be taken seriously.  They hope there “aren’t” ghosts, they’re not in it for the money or fame, and they just want to help people (with an understandably fearful reluctance) utilizing their strange gifts.

http://antifilmschoolsite.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/the-conjuring-2013/
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as Lorraine and Ed Warren

http://rhinews.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/the-conjuring-and-its-true-story-3/
A VERY evil doll

http://netflixroulette.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/summer-the-conjuring-2013-james-wan/
A VERY evil music box

Score one for character development and great direction in a horror film, James Wan!

Following in the obvious footsteps of Poltergeist (1982) and The Exorcist (1973), we are met with some very familiar scenes.  However, I felt this was a respectful nod executed with a succinct sense of urgency rather than simply riding coattails and milking past horror axioms for all they’re worth.  The Conjuring skips most of the “are they just nuts” skepticism that would normally dominate the first half of a movie like this and gets right to dealing with the problem in a surprisingly practical manner.  As a result, most horror moviegoers’ maddening frustrations are avoided in this film; no one does anything dumb or too perfectly right, the characters develop to protect their own and don’t turn into sudden superhero evil-slaying experts over night, they don’t walk into any traps when they should’ve known better, there are no ridiculous “Antichrist baby-Hell on Earth-chosen one-omen-gypsy curse-ancient relic-house built over sacred burial ground and angering the spirits” reasons justifying the spirit or what it wants or why it chose them, and they even address why the Perron family doesn’t leave the damned house and if it would make a difference at all if they did.  All of this is done with simple explanation and for good reasons.

Score for the writers!  By the way, the same writers (the Hayes brothers) will be doing the already announced sequel The Conjuring 2!!!  However I have not found anything indicating Wan’s involvement.

As we slowly relax our muscles between creepy tension, scares, “wait is there more?” and then the next creepy tension, we wade through some shocking imagery, disturbing shots, a little bit of brief gross stuff (but nothing truly gastro-intestinally gruesome and gore-slathered as we find in Tucker and Dale vs Evil, The Cabin in the Woods, Drag Me to Hell or Evil Dead) and eerie sounds.  Then there’s the perfect–PERFECT–atmosphere that Wan spins.  Only with this paramount atmosphere could a small child staring into her dark bedroom corner (as we view nothing but out of focus “black”) be as terrifying as the most horrible monster leaping from behind a corner drooling all manner of evil yuck.

http://netflixroulette.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/summer-the-conjuring-2013-james-wan/

As most horror is rushed and features a slapped together story-and-victims-sandwich as a vehicle to shock us with cringing brutality, creature make-up and buckets of rubber guts, Wan demonstrates a mature and tactful restraint which, contrary to most horror filmmakers’ training, is wildly successful and eclipses most horror of the last two decades!  Even Wan’s shot transitions were thoughtfully discomforting and artistic.

http://ccpopculture.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/the-conjuring-2013/

The Conjuring is rated R rating but actually seems less scary and intense than Poltergeist (1982)–of course, Poltergeist was WAY scary and I’d keep the kids over 14 to watch it!  I mean, it is scary–very scary.  But the gore is by no means a highlight and I didn’t even notice the profanity (whatever there was).  All I noticed was that I was never bored or “waiting” for something cool to happen.  I was immersed and loved every minute of this modern classic horror.

WHAT MAKES THIS A GOOD HALLOWEEN MOVIE?  It’s Halloween!  And when we think of Halloween we often think of the classic monsters: Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster and, of course, the Wolf Man!  Well, if you’re in the market for a great werewolf movie that has a dark sense of humor, a wicked transformation scene and loads of brutal gore, then see An American Werewolf in London (1981)–hands down the best werewolf movie ever made!  [A+]  IF YOU LIKE WEREWOLF MOVIES THEN WATCH:  Second best might be The Howling (1981), which takes itself quite seriously.  Another fun one is Cursed (2005), which is loaded with clichés and honors many past horror flicks.   Ginger Snaps (2000) is a metaphor for puberty, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004) is a worthy sequel that takes a strange turn, and An American Werewolf in Paris (1997) serves as a coming of manhood from college man-childhood–but it’s more of a positive journey.  If you want another utterly ridiculous werewolf movie, then move on to Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985) and Howling 3: The Marsupials (1987).  But skip Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988), Howling V: The Rebirth (1989), Howling VI: The Freaks (1991) and The Howling: Reborn (2011).

Steering clear of formulaic horror movie plot clichés, An American Werewolf in London avoids immature promiscuous summer campers and delinquent drug-using twenty-somethings with loose morals as we are introduced to our protagonists David (David Naughton; Ice Cream Man, Big Bad Wolf) and Jack (Griffin Dunne; 40 Days and 40 Nights).  Yes, they’re twenty-somethings.  And yes, they have their quippy repartees.  But their immaturity is no more than an otherwise responsible pair of men enjoying a night of manhood away from the wife and kids.  They’re actually somewhat mature when things aren’t crazy.

Oh, yes!  Let’s stop there for a drink. That’s a great idea!

They unintentionally make their way to The Slaughtered Lamb Pub, a northern Englishman’s locals-only sort of place adorned with a pentacle on the wall.  They are a backwoodsy, superstitious and secretive lot.  More fearful of the locals than anything they could encounter among the full moon, dreary weather and local fauna, they flee into the wilderness to be met with some sort of animal attack.  David in injured by this “animal.”

During his recovery David dreams about some in-the-buff jaunts in the forest followed by some very disturbing visions of evil “werewolf soldiers.”  As clearly indicated by the movie’s title, this recovery occurs in London, he occasionally turns into a werewolf and people get eaten.  David’s lovely nurse Alex (Jenny Agutter; Logan’s Run, Child’s Play 2) takes a shining to him and invites him to stay with her.

While David lives with the curse of lycanthropy, his victims are also cursed.  These now undead victims appear before David, flayed and gory, and serve as an “everything you ever wanted to know about werewolves, full moons and lycanthropy” guide.  As we see David’s undead victims throughout the film their level of decomposition advances and you can’t help but to smile when they point that out.  Great make-up, by the way!    Sprinkling more comedic charm on this gory horror are the sharp-tongued jokes and off color behavior of David’s haunters.

The transformation scenes are really something.  We see his hands slowly elongate and HEAR his bones  and tendons stretching, giving root to the maddening pain he seems to be going through–shit, I almost FELT it myself.  So then, when his vertebrae elevate, his shoulder blades protrude and his skull begins to elongate you predict more pain as if you were watching someone brace themselves before resetting your dislocated shoulder.  His nudity during this scene properly conveys his vulnerability and you genuinely feel sympathy for all of his suffering.  All the while, some ironically pleasant music is playing in the background on Alex’s record player in her kitschy living room.

Fully transformed, he looks like a wolf after an “evil” HGH binge on chest and arms day.  But not so much like a wolf-man.  This is a nice change of pace even when compared to today’s werewolves in which our shapeshifters become regular-sized normal looking wolves (e.g., Hemlock Grove), giant normal looking wolves (e.g., the Twilight Saga, Red Riding Hood), wolves from a twisted R-rated Alice in Wonderland (e.g., Ginger Snaps), classic wolfmen (e.g., The Wolfman, Wolf, Teen Wolf), the wolfman on steroids (e.g., Van Helsing, Cursed) or the reversed man-wolf (e.g., the Underworld series, Being Human, An American Werewolf in Paris).

Writer/director John Landis is epic in comedy–having brought us Animal House (1978), The Blues Brothers (1979), Trading Places (1983) and Coming to America (1986) to name a few–and he’s even had other successful forays in a least semi-humorous or satirical horror (e.g., The Twilight Zone movie, Innocent Blood), but I find it stunning that he was responsible for the greatest werewolf movie of all time!  And this is hardly just my opinion.  While some favor The Howling (1981) or Ginger Snaps (2000), online lists tend to include London in the top five or six (if not #1) more than any other.

The Undying Monster (1942)

The story is good, but clearly not without some forgivable issues.  What made this movie truly great was Landis’ ability to be brilliantly funny at times, while keeping a straight, serious, even brutal tone during the violent, rending scenes, the wincing transformation and the final scene with nurse Alex and David such that I wouldn’t dare call this a straight up horror-comedy or a satire; simply a great, very serious werewolf movie that also happens to be often funny when things aren’t dire.

It doesn’t matter how old you are.  The effects truly hold up and stand the test of time so don’t worry that the lack of CGI will make it uncool.  Just see it!!!

WHAT MAKES THIS A GOOD HALLOWEEN MOVIE?  Not quite as scary as it used to be but every bit as fun, Wes Craven’s original Nightmare is a creation that no horror fan should be without.  It remains creepy and satisfying.  Plus, all the night scenes in alleys and boiler rooms are perfect for a chilly October movie night with the lights off.  MOVIES LIKE A Nightmare on Elm Street: Other classics  everyone should see include Poltergeist (1982; discussed at length in our podcast #16) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes series (1977).  For more recent horror with a similar sense of humor try Wishmaster (1997) and Hatchet (2006).

Now over 30 years old, I think it’s safe to say this is a horror classic…and it’s a classic I still enjoy and revere.  However, like many “classics,” there are aspects of this film that will disappoint horror fans reared by films of the last 10-20 years.  The effects are dated (although I love these practical effects still much as I do those in The Thing and The Fly), the plot and characters are a bit hokey at times (but that’s forgivable in the horror genre), and it feels more campy by today’s standards when it felt drop dead serious at the time of its release.  So I contend that it is my duty to defend the importance of the classics to our younger readers and assign some homework to those who have not yet seen the pre-remake/reboot Freddy Krueger.

This film opens with a nightmare, and an inherently creepy one at that.  We are taken to a shadowy, steam-spewing boiler room where a mysterious stalker rakes his “claws” across old pipes as he slowly advances upon his prey, his dreaming victim Tina.  The evil assailant swipes his claws at her and she awakens with her nightgown shredded four-fold.  Rattled by the experience, Tina shares her horrible dream with her friends Rod, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp; Star Trek Into Darkness) and Glen (Johnny Depp; Tusk, Dark Shadows), who have all eerily had similar dreams about the same “clawed” killer.

Written and directed by Wes Craven (Cursed, Deadly Friend, Deadly Blessing), we are introduced to the terrifying notion that someone (or something) can hunt and kill us in our dreams…and you really die!  Our killer is Fred Krueger (Robert Englund; Wishmaster, Hatchet), a demonic power with an ugly red and green sweater, a single clawed glove, and a face still-moistly burned beyond recognition.  As a villain, Freddy is iconic and has graced the screen for 9 films!

This film may not have the emotional power of Poltergeist (1982; discussed at length in our podcast #16) or the blunt-force trauma holy shit factor of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), but is instead its own entirely different animal.  Freddy gives us hints of a twisted sense of humor as he cuts off his fingers and slices open his own maggot and pus-filled chest or licks Nancy and laughs through a possessed phone, but (unlike many of the sequels) there is nothing slapstick or comedic about it really.  He is a twisted and pure evil.  It’s intended to be sick and disturbing, not funny (to anyone but Freddy, that is)—although fans laugh at it today.  We find these kinds of scenes delivered with a deliberate humor in Hatchet (2006), Wishmaster (1997) and so many more releases of the past 20 years…and also blatantly more deliberate in later installments of the Nightmare on Elm Street or Leprechaun franchises.

Simply meant to be terrifying back in 1984, Freddy looks a little hokey today—in a fun way.  He runs down alleys like a crab with a limp waving his glove hand in the air, he jumps atop Nancy and rolls around instead of wisely slicing at her, laughs after mutilating himself.  My movie companion actually said the movie, at times, felt a little dorky.  And I couldn’t agree more.

Starkly contrasting these “dorky” scenes are dream sequences with a bodybagged Tina calling for help and being dragged away through the school hallway, the boiler room scenes, the harrowingly weird death scene of Nancy’s mother towards the end, Tina’s gravity defying death scene, and Freddy’s twisted laughter in the boiler room.  These scenes remain “effective” to me, but they lack the right kind of production to remain sufficiently creepy or scary today (even with all the lights off as I watch).  Of course, I’m a bit numbed by the hundreds of horror films I’ve seen.  Perhaps these scenes will make you all quiver a bit.  If not those, then at least the little girls jumping rope while reciting Freddy’s dark nursery rhyme.

 Whoa! A cool death scene in any decade.

 Timelessly creepy.

Look for John Saxon (Blood Beach, Enter the Dragon) and Lin Shaye (Insidious Chapter 3, The Signal) as we watch Nancy and her friends discover what drives Fred Krueger, learn his origin, and figure out how to defeat him through a combination of booby traps and bringing Freddy from the dream world into reality.  Just try to ignore the lamely written controlling nature, denial and alcoholism of Nancy’s mother.  It should also be noted that as Nancy, Langenkamp (not Robert Englund) carries the film.  Freddy is done well with creepy execution, but he has almost no lines and little screen presence until the end.  It’s Nancy who validates our fears, rallies awareness despite her parents’ disbelief, and battles Freddy.

Without going into detail, I should add that I still enjoy ALL of the practical effects in this film.  Sometimes the simplicity makes it more gross, weird, off-putting, or even a bit funny.

The ending is deliberately sort of silly and illogical.  But that was and remains a fun staple of horror—twists, even if stupid, that make us smile.  If there was a deliberately funny moment, it had to be the last scene with the car and Nancy’s mother being cartoon-yanked through a tiny window on the front door.

Is that prop a blow-up doll?

This is a truly fun movie experience and worth the ride, even if you laugh today in 2015 whereas others screamed back in 1984.

If you need another trusted opinion, check out this review from Rivers of Grue.

LOADS OF SPOILERS      LOADS OF SPOILERS
LOADS OF SPOILERS      LOADS OF SPOILERS
LOADS OF SPOILERS      LOADS OF SPOILERS

MY CALL: Barf! This religious ritual/possession movie will leave you unsatisfied and annoyed with dozens of unanswered questions. MOVIES LIKE Nothing Left to Fear: I’d suggest that you instead watch The Last Exorcism (2010), Children of the Corn (1984) or The Shrine (2010).

The film starts out in a rather familiar but promising way. A wholesome and outwardly religious family stops to ask for directions to their new home in Stull, Kansas. The father of the family is relocating to serve as the new pastor of the quaint, God-fearing hamlet. Reminiscent of The Last Exorcism (2010) and Children of the Corn (1984), the vast openness of the countryside hints at a socially remote and geographically isolated Bible Belt society living under a patriarchal theocracy in lieu of modern government. And that’s exactly what we get.

Of course, everyone in town is hospitable to their new pastor, despite being a bit on the weird side. And, also of course, things start to get weirder…and slow! After a brisk start, the pace becomes sluggish after we are introduced to our protagonist family and the residents of Stull.

The introduction is acceptably tropey and features good acting, but sadly the scares fail to follow suit. The delivery behind a nightmare sequence featuring creepy townspeople and decaying ectoplasm-spewing ghosts failed to provoke even a flinch out of me. They may not have used loud noises to get the job done, but the scares never really connected; feeling ill-staged and randomly inserted.

And, not that I expect or demand much in the way of monster originality, but the evil entities smack a little too hard of Grave Encounters (2011), The Apparition (2012) and Pulse (2006), featuring wispy black ectoplasm that creeps like a supernatural infection afflicting flesh and inanimate objects alike with an abyssal decay. Once our evil antagonist assumes a more consistent form, it resembles a mix of Bughuul and a J-Horror stringy-air-in-the-face poltergeist with its victims appearing much as those drained corpses in Lifeforce (1985) or Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988). Sure, this film borrows a lot and, sure, I’m okay with borrowing horror elements. It’s just that this film failed to pack any punch.

Further failing to elicit any interest was the misplaced plot device of an inhuman “tooth” serving as some sort of unexplained (and completely unnecessary) unholy artefact. This wasn’t subtle. This tooth was discussed a lot by characters and we see it change hands multiple times. This is the first sign that the film is falling apart before our eyes because, when we’re introduced to the tooth, it is evidently used as a form of “God’s hand” to choose a victim for a dark ritual…and that choice is made when someone eats a piece of “welcome to town” cake with the tooth in it! There are better, creepier and still easier ways to have accomplished that task in a horror movie.

In an attempt to create a dire atmosphere, we encounter lines like “Have you made the choice? There can be no mistakes…We’re doing His will.” Clearly the locals have plans for their new pastor and his family. A sacrifice…a possession…an infernal impregnation (i.e., devil baby), perhaps? Suggesting that some impending evil is somehow the work of God, nightmare sequences now shift to undead demonic sheep afflicted with some manner of evil plague. Like the previous nightmare, it doesn’t seem to make any sense. Sure, there are some Biblical plague references in the imagery, but they are sorely misapplied.

So, I have now twice mentioned nightmare sequences. These are the dreams of the new pastor’s quite attractive older daughter (Rebekah Brandes) and, it turns out, that there is no reason for her to be having these dreams! Nothing is explained, implied, metaphorically paralleled…I couldn’t even invent a reason for her to be having these foreboding dreams indicating that something bad was going to happen to her family—especially because she is not the “chosen one.” Screwing up the already scrambled synthesis of this messy story even more is that her nightmares imply that specific townspeople will do her (or her family) harm…but that doesn’t actually happen except for one indirect case. Some townspeople do poison the other daughter and, again, there seems to be no reason behind it at all given the events that follow.

Many things are introduced that warrant explanation, aspects of the ritual being a lot of them…

Why is a sacrifice required?

What happens if they don’t do the ritual?

How often must the ritual be performed?

How do you know when it’s time to do the ritual?

Do you always use the tooth to choose the victim?

What if the new victims are gluten-intolerant and don’t eat the cake?

Where the Hell did this tooth come from? A demon? What demon?

Why is the victim later poisoned?

Why does the victim’s sister receive warnings in the form of nightmares?

How do they know when to end the ritual?  Because, YES, that happens! The ritual and the awful things that come with it has an “off switch.” Here’s a good one.

If this happens every 10-20 years, how is the occasional death of an entire family (save one survivor who keeps her mouth shut for some reason) explained?

Does no one (e.g., police/FBI/PIs) ever look for them and connect the dots that a new-to-town family (except one locally adopted survivor—as if that’s how adoption worked) is wiped out within days of moving once every decade?

Here’s another winner. What happens if the surviving family members flee the town?

It turned out that a surviving family member was used to end the ritual. What if they died or got away…demon apocalypse? End of Days for Stull…the world?

There are movies that get away with leaving things mysterious. The Shrine (2010) is an excellent example. However, The Shrine doesn’t keep dealing out things that merit explanation—so it actually works! Children of the Corn also leaves a lot to the imagination, but it does so flawlessly and doesn’t pelt us with seemingly important things that go unexplained.

The effects are fine, even sort of good. They’re just not “effective” in delivery. The same can be said for the story and other components of this film. Despite some capable performances by Clancy Brown (as the retiring pastor) and Anne Heche, this was a largely unsatisfying movie experience. While the idea behind the ending was okay, the execution was a bit weak—but maybe a “bit” satisfying as well.

The only thing that really worked in this movie was our introduction to the characters, the opening atmosphere and the notion that something was weird about this town—all in the first 20-30 minutes. After that it all failed to find any form of synthesis, urgency, thrills or concern on my part. The characters didn’t do things that made sense, they didn’t react appropriately to situations (yes, even for a horror movie), and I left annoyed by the things that weren’t explained. A better movie would have left me curious, not annoyed.

As if it made any difference, Guns ‘r Roses’ Slash was a producer on this film.

I recommend this to no one.

MY CALL: This film is all about celebrating metamoviedom. Not kills, not gore, not action, but geeky commentary and smart, playful satire. I highly recommend it and would even prescribe it to people who generally don’t like horror movies. MOVIES LIKE The Final Girls: While they’re far more serious (yet satirical), I’d suggest the Scream movies (1996-2011; discussed in our podcast). Those looking for more smart horror comedy should try out Tucker and Dale versus Evil (2010), Cooties (2015), or the extremely silly Love in the Time of Monsters (2014) and Zombeavers (2015; discussed in our podcast).

Director Todd Strauss-Schulson is responsible for this playful metamovie, presenting a “movie within a movie” premise in which the protagonists must follow the classic horror axioms in order to survive the film into which they are magically transported. As a true honorarium to early summer camp horror, the film in question has a poster reminiscent of The Burning (1981) and is called is Camp Blood, which was the original working title for Friday the 13^th (1980).

Clearly mirroring Camp Crystal Lake, the film is complete with “ch ch ch ka ka ka” which our protagonists can actually hear as if they were watching the very movie that has entrapped them! They also make interesting use of flashbacks as a metamovie filmmaking device to escape the killer. The flashbacks tell the killer’s origin story and it’s very much akin to that of Jason Vorrhees, including the flashback timeframe (1957) and the “present day” timeframe of Camp Blood (1986). It’s all in good fun and it will light up smiles on fans of 80s horror.

This film knows exactly what it is and it uses that effectively to entertain viewers with nods to things we love about the 80s horror era. Manic power geek Duncan (Thomas Middleditch; Silicon Valley) assumes Jamie Kennedy’s Scream role as the meta-analyst and Camp Blood expert of the group. His knowledge of horror movies and Camp Blood helps them to safely navigate this horror fantasy world and understand the rules—for a while anyway. He makes silly comments about how the characters behave, knowing the lines of the script, and how they should treat their experience like they’re in a nature preserve: “don’t interrupt, only observe.” He is the key character that connects us to the theme.

Max (Taissa Farmiga; American Horror Story) is the typical final girl, a likable sympathetic virgin. Perhaps a namesake in honor of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Max’s mother is Nancy (Malin Akerman; Watchmen), a single mother struggling to find work who was a scream queen in the cult classic Camp Blood (fictionally made in 1986). In the real world Nancy died in a car accident, so when we find her character again in Camp Blood, Max has the opportunity to reconnect with her even if it’s under the guise that they are peers working together for the summer. This gets particularly entertaining when Nancy talks about sleeping with Kurt (Adam DeVine; Pitch Perfect), the over-sexed alpha bro.

Kurt brings loads of comic relief and the characters are rounded out with Chris (Alexander Ludwig; Vikings, The Hunger Games), Vicki (Nina Dobrev; The Vampire Diaries) and the stereotypical slut Tina (Angela Trimbur; Halloween II). I was pleased with the acting and story, and even more pleased with the nuances. Most notably the color correction of the forest plants and flowers was starkly in brilliant contrast, as if the protagonists had just been displaced to Oz.

As if their horror microcosm comprised only the scenes and sets of Camp Blood, attempts to escape the camp site loop them right back and it even affects the behavior of the Camp Blood characters. Once the group has a handle on the metamovie rules they discover that one of them has to be the “final girl” and, in fact, their idea of who that should be and why shifts a bit. They also use tropes that lead to death (i.e., implications of nudity) to set a trap for the killer. How that turns out will delight viewers.

There are some very funny death scenes but gore is kept to a minimum and scares are completely absent (in lieu of comedy). One kill even reminds me of the gymnast’s death in Final Destination 5 (2011).

Overall, this film was smartly scripted and a true delight. It should please diehard horror fans and even occasional visitors to the genre.
 

WHAT MAKES THIS A GOOD HALLOWEEN MOVIE?  More like why is this “the” Halloween movie?!?!?!  This is 77 minutes of impressively nuanced Halloween anthology goodness with diverse effects and expertly interwoven stories.  Anthologies in general are great for Halloween because of all the different flavors of horror they offer us.  This movie blows away expectations and is loads of fun.  MOVIES LIKE Trick ‘r Treat:  Some other fun, decent and/or clever anthologies include (in order of release date):  Black Sabbath (1963), Tales from the Crypt (1972), The Vault of Horror (1973), Creepshow (1982), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye (1985), Creepshow 2 (1987), Tales from the Dark Side: The Movie (1990), Necronomicon: Book of the Dead (1993), Campfire Tales (1997), 3 Extremes (2004), Trick ‘r Treat (2007), Chillerama (2011), Little Deaths (2011), V/H/S (2012), The Theater Bizarre (2012), The ABCs of Death (2013), V/H/S 2 (2013) and The Profane Exhibit (2013).

This fun little Halloween romp includes several interwoven stories.  Unlike most anthologies, all of the stories herein share the same writer and director (Michael Dougherty; only feature film as director).  So, also unlike most anthologies, there is a more consistent level of quality as we move from one short story to the next and there is no obvious beginning or end to each segment–instead they all overlap one another quite well.  So much so, in fact, that some would even argue that this isn’t really an anthology film.  Like in Creepshow, comic-book text boxes flag-post story shifts as light comedy and some downright silliness shine through to keep us smiling.  After all, who said Halloween couldn’t be both gory and light-hearted?  Mixed among the stories is a nice variety: vampires, werewolves, zombies, serial killers and midget monsters.

Here is a brief summary of the stories:

1.  Four girls in cleavage-rich fairy tale costumes go out on Halloween night seeking manly fare.  The girls are played by Anna Paquin (True Blood, Scream 4, Darkness), Rochelle Aytes, Moneca Delain (Lost Boys: The Tribe) and Lauren Lee Smith (Pathology).  Paquin plays the shy virgin among a pack of experienced man-eaters.

Well, as we know, Disney always has been generous in the cleavage department.

Whoa.  There’s a change up.  From innocent school girl (above) to R-rated Van Helsing extra (below).

2.  A bus driver attempts to kill a bus full of mentally disturbed children and sort of succeeds.  This event (which is told as a scary story) is linked to a mean prank that some kids pull.  The kids include Britt McKillip (Mission to Mars) and Jean-Luc Bilodeau (Piranha 3DD).

What’s down there?  I’m guessing a trick.

3+.  The overarching intro-to-closing story observes trick-or-treating and trick-or-treaters or all ages in a pleasant neighborhood.  Pleasant, that is, until people start dying at the hands of a strange diminutive murderer and a kid-killing school principal.  This “story” features really more than one story of its own and the cast features Leslie Bibb (Hell Baby, 7500), Dylan Baker (The Cell, Fido) and Brian Cox (Zodiac, The Ring).

Dylan Baker is pretty handy with a carving knife.  Check it out, fat kid from Bad Santa.

While not “maturely” or seriously presented, the writing felt sound, credible and free of any flaws that would provoke criticism.  Great, in fact, for this kind of movie.  A finer detail in this film is the effective use of jack-o-lanterns as a symbol of death.  Pay attention to what happens after someone blows a jack-o-lantern’s candle out.  Also note that the bus driver and the principal each find themselves in more than one story.  Also pay attention as a murderer’s child dresses as the murder, complete with a blood-stained shirt after murdering someone earlier in the film!  Now that is META!

A fine job was done with the special effects.  There’s no CGI (that I can tell) and every nuance worth showing got plenty of skillful attention.  The gore includes geyser-like vomiting, bloody bodies, severed heads, rubber guts, broken legs with exposed bones, stacks of corpses and a breasty flesh-stripping transformation scene.  I really dug the artistic license taken on the werewolf transformation scene!  It may seem a little dumb to horror fans at first glance, but it was done VERY well and it mingled fantastically with the “girls in slutty costumes” theme; they literally “stripped” off their human skin to reveal the wolf within.  Given the tone of the movie and the scene, it felt perfect.

It saddens me that Michael Dougherty (the man behind this tactful movie) hasn’t done anything in years.  I’d like to think he’s working on his next horror masterpiece.  But I fear he’s fallen into obscurity.

This is far more worthy than any anthologies of the last 20 years in terms of overall quality.  So take the time this Halloween to enjoy this light-hearted masterpiece.

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MY CALL: This may not be softcore porn, but it’s absolutely an exploitation film with nothing to offer anyone looking for any form of horror movie at all. My entertainment derived solely from the ridiculous awfulness of this movie and the amazing amount of screen time dedicated to bare breasts.  Now I remember why I liked this so much when I was 13 (over 20 years ago!).  MORE SHAMELESSLY BOOB-FILLED MOVIES LIKE The Haunting of Morella:  To name a few for you skin-flick horror fans, how about Killer Workout (1987), Death Spa (1989), Barbarian Queen (1985), Conquest (1983), Deathstalker (1983), Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans (1987), The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984), Evils of the Night (1985), Head of the Family (1996), Piranha 3DD (2012) and Bio Slime (2010). That ought to keep you busy.

Based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe (probably rolling over in his grave) and brought to you by Roger Corman, The Haunting of Morella is a film that leaps into the deep end of its own melodramatic insanity with reckless abandon from its first few seconds of running time as we witness the colonial crucifixion of the young, attractive witch Morella (Nicole Eggert; Baywatch, Clan of the Cave Bear, Decoys) whose last words curse her family that she would one day return to possess her daughter and welcome them to the gates of Hell.  This curse (and the three minutes of film surrounding it) are the only fraction of this movie’s story that makes any sense at all.  After this point, the story components and even the characters themselves seem a bit confused.

Director Jim Wynorski (Chopping Mall, Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans) has had a long history of exploitation filmmaking. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to the abundance of nudity and general dearth of substance in this schlocky film.  Clearly he spent every dollar he could tipping the actresses to disrobe and spared a few remaining crumbled bills for the obviously inexperienced special effects team to transform Lenora (also played by Nicole Eggert) into the occasionally monstrous-faced Morella.

Your Day of the Dead make-up sucks.  Just sayin’.

Like any Roger Corman film, the cast features a slew of exploitation vixens including Maria Ford (Necronomicon: Book of the Dead, Deathstalker IV), Gail Harris (Sorority House Massacre II), Deborah Dutch (Sorority Girls and the Creature from Hell, 976-Evil II) and the statuesque Amazon Lana Clarkson (Deathstalker, Barbarian Queen), who was tragically murdered in real life by Phil Spector.

Look at Lana Clarkson next to Nicole Eggert.  It’s like a Mastiff next to a Pomeranian!

Back when I reviewed Piranha 3DD (2012) I came up with a sort of “Movie Metric” for gratuitous nudity…  “If there was a movie Freakonomics calculation called breast time it would be measured in breast seconds—the total number of breasts in a movie times the number of seconds that each breast is bare.  [Piranha 3DD’s] breast second tabulation would result in a breast time of 300% of the movie’s actual running time.  It’s truly shameful.”  Perhaps they should rename this film The Breasting of Morella as it puts Piranha 3DD to shame

Flashbacks inform us that Morella turned to the occult to remedy some unnamed terminal illness that would soon kill her—however healthy and hot she may appear. So, of course, she finds a completely naked bathing virgin woman to kill with the least convincing on-screen throat slit of 90s horror.  Afterwards, Morella bathes in her blood, also naked.  Shifting back to present day, we find Lenora’s uber-tall guardian (Lana Clarkson) naked taking a bath.  Such a smooth transition, right? How ever did the director muse the shift from a flashback with two naked women taking a bath to a present day naked women taking a bath? Impressive and seamless.  This naturally develops into a lesbian massage with continued and markedly needlessly prolonged on-screen nudity.

As a teenager of the early 90s without a computer, naturally I loved this. As an adult with the internet, this film now feels like a 90% waste of time with 10% nostalgia.

The plot lumbers forward at a sluggish pace…that is, of course, unless you came here to count on-screen boobs. With the exception of disrobing the female cast (which was done in an instant with the pull of a string), everything seems to take way too long to unfold, occur and explain itself.  And on that note, everything is over-explained in nauseating detail.  Much to the contrary the one scene that should find elaborate development, the possession and its process, is completed almost instantaneously with no effects to speak of except for a corpse with some glowing eye sockets.

This corpse talks.  Not scary, not creepy.

From one temporary possession of Lenora’s body to another, we learn that Morella needs to be fully resurrected because this whole possession thing is like way harder than she expected it to be. So now her old Amazon friend who lives with the family (no clue why) and somehow didn’t age at all in nearly 20 years (maybe it’s Maybelline) must help her to find virgins (because, yeah, you know, virgins!!!).  So we find yet another naked lady who, for some reason, is written an entire back story despite being on screen for five minutes…and she’s killed.  Now stronger after absorbing another soul, Morella again possess Lenora and…more sex! It seems sex is like filling the tank before taking your newly possessed body out for a spin. Then some more painful acting, cheap and terrible effects, and an evil mirror “other world”…and then yet more sex.

The bombardment of retched effects continues along with the general story-based stupidity. Speaking of stupid, yet another 5-minute character with too much back story is drained by Morella’s Lifeforce (1985) kiss of death to replenish her further a la Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988). As if we hadn’t yet endured enough pointless characters and gratuitous nudity, here comes more of both in the form of a grotto-like lesbian skinny-dipping scene.  This smutty scene is immensely drawn out as if to accumulate several breast minutes to the aforementioned breast time metric.  And worry not, the gross over-exposition continues to plague this already awful film with such blunt statements as “After one more feeding I’ll be completely resurrected.”  How does she even know that? Is this like a Subway punch card that’s one hole-punch away from a free 6″ sub?

For those who could possibly care, the only noteworthy point to this movie is that every female member of the cast gets naked (even though Eggert uses a body double). The movie ends without a single scary moment to its credit, rather abruptly, stupidly and with no semblance of build-up, tension, urgency or conclusion.  Lenora’s father simply grabs her, now possessed by Morella, and breaks his oil lamp to burn them both alive.  Roll credits.  Shit this was awful!  Haha

MY CALL: This is one of those movies that you “hope” will be good, but isn’t.  Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve seen this month either.  I won’t recommend it to anyone looking for a good “scary movie” night.  But this would make an excellent drinking game or “friends’n’beer” flick.  MOVIES LIKE The Pyramid:  The Last Exorcism (2010) and Grave Encounters (2011) take similar approaches but find considerably more successful results.

With the same playful and cheeky approach of The Last Exorcism (2010) and Grave Encounters (2011), this film opens like an upbeat documentary about an anthropological expedition that would air on the Discovery or History Channel.  A team of scientists aim to excavate and explore a completely buried pyramid whose age predates most Egyptian history, indicating possible extraterrestrial origins for this uniquely three-sided pyramid (others being four-sided) and nods to the SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).  With one archaeologist being an extraterrestrial skeptic and his daughter the “alien hypothesizer” we find satisfying witty exchanges that stage not only their character dynamic but the story itself.  At this point, the film has promise.

Once the pyramid is discovered to be defended by deadly booby-traps, they send in a cute little NASA Mars rover that looks like Wall-E’s cousin to probe the interior.  Of course, the rover encounters “something” and is disabled.  So, again of course, the team has to go in to recover the important NASA robot and ends up trapped inside this giant labyrinthine tomb along with what seem to be very large, hairless, flesh-eating rats.  This is about where the movie shifts from promising to…well, something less palatable.  Let’s just say Of Unknown Origin (1983) was a much better “man versus monstrous rat” movie and AVP (2004) was a much better “trapped in an alien pyramid” movie.

First-time director but experienced horror writer Grégory Levasseur (High Tension, Mirrors, The Hills Have Eyes, Maniac) introduced this film nicely in the first 15-20 minutes, but then completely lost his footing and fell face-first into a spiked pit quite early in this film.  It should be noted that he had no part in actually writing this film and also that, while some scenes are presented through handheld camera POV, this really isn’t a found footage film.

So these rats actually turn out to be Egyptian cats (of the Sphinx breed) which, by some super strength, manage to pull a PA3 “Toby backbreak” pulling a victim down a tiny corridor.  I guess this was very entertaining, but simultaneously very awful.  The general menace of these cats persists for quite a while and eventually my concern was growing that this whole movie was going to be about these feral Sphinx cats hunting down our scientists.  <<FACEPALM>>  But then, pretty much out of some random grab bag of plot ideas pulled from a hat, the CGI jackal-headed Egyptian God Anubis arrives to “weigh” our protagonists’ souls on the myth-told scales.  Now he is the bad guy…and a dumb one at that.

The scenes with the poorly CGI’d Anubis aren’t cool, the plot goes nowhere interesting, the cats attack Anubis in a lame CGI mess, and a young scientist defeats the God Anubis with a road flare…did you get that?  Defeated a GOD with a flare!!!  OMFG, I can’t believe this lunacy hit theaters.

So this happens.  And no, it’s not from a ScyFy Channel direct-to-TV movie-of-the-week.

After the characters entered the pyramid, I really never gave a damn about them or what happened to them.  The charismatic introductions of the first act have been completely squandered.  That short first act was good, even great by horror standards.  But everything fell apart thereafter.  In an attempt to cultivate tension and the need for escape, people were being infected with some sort of flesh-rotting fungus.  That didn’t work either.

Nothing in this film worked except for our introduction to the characters.  The cast includes Denis O’Hare (American Horror Story, True Blood) as the lead scientist, Ashley Hinshaw (Chronicle, True Blood) as his scientist daughter, and James Buckley (The Inbetweeners).  They all did very well in the beginning and then fell prey to the writing before the Sphinx cats could finish them off.

This is one of those movies that you “hoped” would be good.  It wasn’t.  But maybe it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve seen this month either.  I won’t recommend it to anyone looking for a good “scary movie” night.  But this would make an excellent drinking game or “friends’n’beer” flick.

MY CALL:  This is campy 80s horror at its best.  Gory and sexualized with a diversity of special effects, zany scenes and plot elements that are melodramatically over-explained…this put a 90 minute grin on my face.  MOVIES LIKE Night Angel:  Want more bewitching women?  Try Spellbinder (1988), The Kiss (1988), and more on the smutty exploitative side of things is The Haunting of Morella (1990).  For more sultry life-drainers aim for Lifeforce (1985) and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988).  And for more flesh-melding sexuality maybe a little From Beyond (1986) and Society (1989).

Earning the award for “Most Melodramatic and Over-Explanatory Opening Monologue” in the first few minutes, this wacky 80s horror flick was entertaining from start to finish.  Make no mistake: this movie is dumb.  But it also brimming with 80s charm.  Much to the satisfaction of any 80s horror fan, we jump right into a creature effects scene that really isn’t bad at all as a slimy filth-covered woman with monstrous claws pulls herself from the earth.  Just to keep things classy, let’s also have a look at her boobs like right away since we’re already 4 minutes deep into the movie and we don’t want anyone to get bored.  See what I mean?  We’re in for a fun ride with this one!

This movie is loaded with things that are silly.  In the middle of the night a guy hears a weird sound outside and it turns out to be a llama in his backyard.  What!?!?!?  Then we transition to a bloody, murderous and horrendously campy sex scene.  But this is just victim number one…let’s get into the meat of the story.

An editor for Siren magazine, our protagonist Craig (Linden Ashby; Mortal Kombat, Prom Night) has nightmares of the murderous sexcapades of the succubus Lilith.  Little does he know, his dreams are really happening!  Not sure why he was chosen to have these dreams, but he has them nonetheless.

Craig encounters Lilith in the flesh at a party for Siren’s fashion magazine at a club.  The overtly sultry Lilith (German soap opera star Isa Jank) licks foaming beer bottles for waaaay too long, turns every man’s head in the house, and embraces every opportunity to take off her clothes and lead men to the sex-driven demise.  Why?  Because evidently the best way to disseminate Lilith’s lusty evil is by being on the cover of the next issue of Siren.  And now Siren magazine executives are dying one by one.

For one random death Lilith basically uses seduction and illusion to lure a man into falling down an elevator shaft to his gory demise.  This was an interesting choice.  I’m a big fan of the soul-sucking kiss of death techniques from Lifeforce (1985) and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988).  But this was still pleasing enough—a bit on the silly campy side, which suits me just fine.  Not that I expect consistency from a movie like this, but later she squeezes her victims’ essence from their heart.  These heart rip scenes are reminiscent of the heart removal from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) by the Kali Priest and, coincidently, it is suggested that Lilith was known as Kali among other names in history.  She basically plunges her fingers deep into her victim’s chest, grabs their heart, and they slowly die.  It’s pretty cool, albeit unoriginal.

But the movie hasn’t slipped off the deep end just yet… cue the surreal party scene with face melding a la From Beyond (1986) and Society (1989), men’s faces on breasts, people being tortured and eaten… oh, right, and Lilith spits evil leech monsters from her mouth like she has one of those Aliens mouth-within-a-mouth deals.  Thankfully—just to keep things sane—there’s an elderly voodoo-practicing taxi driver (who’s been stalking Craig babbling nonsense for the last hour) to explain everything: “[Lilith] is Satan’s whore.  Lust is her lifeforce.  She was Adam’s first wife…before Eve…”  Oh, good.  NOW it all makes sense.  Meanwhile, the Siren office slowly becomes a lecherous domain in which everyone is randy, rape-y, lasciviously sauntering about, and obsessed with worshipping Lilith.

Fans will enjoy finding Doug Jones (Absentia, Love in the Time of Monsters) playing the uber-horny office guy who want to bear Lilith’s children.  He provides the comic relief complete with a gangly night club dance scene and he gets a shocking amount of screentime throughout the movie.  Also keep an eye out for a brief spot by the diminutive Phil Fondacaro from Ghoulies II (1988) and Meridian (1990).

This turned out to be a pleasantly gory little jaunt.  Lilith’s slimy emergence, the infernal body-melding torture orgy party, people getting impaled through the torso, more than one scene with a heart rip life-drain that we get to fully see, and various cuts, slashes and stabs peppered in here and there.  Then there’s Lilith’s demonic transformation which we see it in two phases: one with her clawed hand and a hybrid face (heavy latex and make-up), the other just a slime-tastic, oozing Hell beast (full monster suit).  She looks like a cool mix of the demons from The Unholy (1988), The Terror Within (1989) and the transformed gargoyle from Lover’s Vow (1990; Tales from the Darkside: The Movie).  Lilith’s defeat is lame and abrupt (like most 80s horror endings), but I didn’t let it bother me too much.  This movie was FUN!

I’ve gotta’ say this movie surprised me.  It’s dumb, but I was thoroughly entertained and I’m a little disappointed this isn’t available on DVD.  I’d seriously buy it.  Also, given the premise, I expected something smutty or trashy.  That really wasn’t the case here.  Sure, there’s some nudity (a few women’s worth and easily more than average), but this is not exploitation horror or smut per se.  This is just typical 80s horror that happens to have a sexualized story.

Recommended for 80s horror fans.

MY CALL: Critics may justly tear it apart for its screaming exposition and limp secondary characters, but ultimately I thought this was spectacular popcorn entertainment and the Ratcliffe-McAvoy chemistry is fantastic.  MOVIES LIKE Victor Frankenstein:  The Bride (1985), Re-Animator (1985) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) all offer tellings of monstrous creations whereas Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) capture the mass action entertainment appeal and style.

Director Paul McGuigan (Push, Lucky Number Slevin) and writer Max Landis (Chronicle) have both proven their ability to successfully weave stylistically unconventional stories.  So imagine how thrilled I was to see them teaming up to retell Mary Shelley’s harrowing tale of hubris, creation, obsession and playing God.  But whereas past approaches to the story orbit the notion of reanimating a stitch-work monster and the inevitably ensuing consequences, this story instead focuses more on the journey of “the man” than his monstrous creation and serves perhaps as more of a cautionary prequel to the more familiar story of Frankenstein’s monster.

Rather than simply expounding on the life of Victor Frankenstein (James McAvoy; X-Men: First Class), we have the story presented more from the perspective of a briefly hunchbacked Igor (Daniel Radcliffe; Horns, The Woman in Black).  These two share a brilliant, boisterous, aggressive on-screen bromance, which is truly the selling point of the movie.  Not the monster, not the creations, not the alchemy…but the exchanges they share; Victor’s monologues of rage and rhapsody, and Igor’s attempts at mitigating reason while getting caught up in the addictive synergy of scientific discovery.

The characters have their emotional ups and downs.

After seeing the trailer, this film probably already looked strangely familiar to everyone—and visually scintillating. It didn’t quite grasp the grandiose Sherlock Holmesian atmospheric scale…but it got hold of just enough of that splendor to please. You’ll even recognize the identical Holmes/Watson character dynamic as if Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr were meant to read the lines for Sherlock part 3. My opinion was admittedly guarded and dubious at best in the first 20 minutes, unsure of where this was all heading. But I found myself less critical and simply enjoying it more and more as each chapter unfolded before my eyes across impressive cityscapes and mechanized laboratories. This was much more than what some feared might have simply been just “a Frankenstein’s monster” movie with a bigger budget and cast.

Partners in good times and bad.

The downfall of the film is its coarseness. There is zero subtlety. Consider the phrase “if someone has to explain to you that they’re important, then they’re not.” Victor Frankenstein doesn‘t “show us” that he’s obsessed, narcissistic and socially disconnected. No, Victor himself screams it at us with frothy saliva rabidly flaring from his mouth. It’s certainly entertaining and commands attention—you’d literally have to be deaf not to be captivated—but it lacks the satisfaction earned by the careful revelation of nuance and story development; a fine trait completely lacking in this film.

An interesting and unexpected strength of the film was the antagonist, Inspector Turpin (Andrew Scott; Spectre, Sherlock), a deeply pious detective whose drive to halt Victor’s blasphemous experiments were more personal and morally driven than professional; a witch trial would be a good analogy.  But again, he “explains” everything about Victor’s God-offending actions not just to the audience, but with Victor’s face knowingly grinning back at him.  The Turpin character is performed well, but the writing and direction transmuted him (and all other aspects of the movie) into something too blatant to be considered “great.”  There isn’t a laugh, line or even facial expression that isn’t somehow loud.

This cacophonous film was a visual joy that features so-so writing rescued by the Ratcliffe-McAvoy chemistry.  Sadly other than Turpin (somewhat), Victor and Igor, all other characters are somewhat forced upon us and feel underwritten.  Turpin would have benefited from more development and subtlety; but then, NOTHING about this film is subtle.

Critics may justly tear it apart for its screaming exposition and limp secondary characters, but ultimately I thought this was spectacular entertainment.  I really enjoyed it and can’t wait to buy the Blu-Ray.

MY CALL:  This was a really fun movie experience.  Not at all scary, hardly even jumpy, and with minimal gore…yet very funny (in the first act), thoroughly entertaining and perpetually delivered with a dark, tongue-in-cheek atmosphere.  The ending is equal parts awesome, appropriate and predictable—but most importantly, the ending suits this dark holiday fairy tell perfectly.  MOVIES LIKE Krampus:  For more holiday horrors try Gremlins (1984), Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010), Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), Black Christmas (2006) and Black Christmas (1974).

Ever since Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) I’ve been waiting for the next great holiday horror movie. Rare Exports was pretty good and I consider it a very special holiday horror fantasy that holds a place in my heart, but it didn’t quite live up to the two short films (“Rare Exports, Inc.” (2003) and “Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions” (2005)) that generated all the hype leading to its creation.  But there is hope yet!!!  Michael Dougherty—the brilliant mind that wrote and directed the much celebrated Halloween horror anthology Trick ‘r Treat (2007) and is working on the upcoming Trick ‘r Treat 2—has returned to bring us the twisted cautionary Christmas fairy tale of Krampus… (TRAILER HERE)

Krampus opens with an all-too-familiar but appreciated social commentary of our long forgotten family values.  Sharing, forgiveness, love and togetherness have been cast aside in lieu of rude comments, sharp-tongued jabs and obligatory gatherings.  The film doesn’t take itself too seriously in the beginning, which is good—great, in fact—as the introductory act is littered with holiday humor, including chaotic shopping scenes illustrative of our materialistic oblivion and crotchety family members clashing with one another.  There’s drinking to take the edge off dealing with family, unwanted relatives you can’t stand yet didn’t want to leave alone, children fighting, in-laws bickering, adult siblings competing and judging each other’s family values.  Needless to say, this will satisfy more sarcastic fans.

The plot is simple.  A boy who loses faith in his family inadvertently creates a terrifying holiday by summoning the Christmas demon Krampus.  Our monster’s victims boasts an impressive cast, including Adam Scott (Hellraiser: Bloodline, Piranha 3D), Toni Collette (Fright Night, The Sixth Sense), David Koechner (Final Destination 5, Cheap Thrills) and Conchata Ferrell (Edward Scissorhands, Two and a Half Men)—all of whom with a fair share of horror and comedy experience.

Writer/director Doughertys’s Trick ‘r Treat was an impressively nuanced Halloween anthology with diverse effects and expertly interwoven stories.  The movie blew away my expectations and left me hopeful that Dougherty has just as lovingly and patiently architected Krampus.  Well, Trick ‘r Treat fans should be quite pleased with Krampus, which likewise features a good diversity of Christmas-esque monsters presented in tongue-in-cheek scenarios.  I may not have been overly pleased with the elves or the baby angel doll, but the Jack in the Box and teddy bear monsters were absolutely delightful, the Krampus itself was pretty damn cool, and the gingerbread men had to be my favorite!

To my disappointment, the humor from the first act hardly transitioned through the rest of the story.  However, as it becomes increasingly obvious that something is amiss, witty exchanges are abandoned for darker scenes such as harrowing snowmen mysteriously appearing in the front yard, a dire chase with Krampus leaping across rooftops (all CGI, but very exciting), and the harbingering of toys and wrapped presents that offer us an eager but dark anticipation.

Budget limitations were apparent with inexplicably “masked” elves and the completely stationary Krampus face—like, he had a single frozen, open-mouthed facial expression.  That said, the elves still adopted an effective Gremlins-like menace and the Krampus monster still looked awesome.  And, again, I must say how much I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED the scenes with the Jack in the Box monster and those gloriously fiendish gingerbread men!

This was a really fun movie experience.  Not at all scary, hardly even jumpy, and with minimal gore…yet very funny (in the first act), thoroughly entertaining and perpetually delivered with a dark, tongue-in-cheek atmosphere.  The ending is equal parts awesome, appropriate and predictable—but most importantly, the ending suits this dark holiday fairy tell perfectly.

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MY CALL: I wouldn’t call this film a conquest for the genre, but instead just a stop on the tour of ludicrous 80s horror films to be enjoyed.  Impotent acting and incontinent story synthesis are somewhat redeemed by creepy atmosphere and a diversity of moderate effects.  MOVIES LIKE The Church:  Looking for more bonkers 80s horror that fails to keep a straight face?  Try The Gate (1987), Society (1989), or any of the Italian horror mentioned in this review.

Let’s get something straight, people. This movie is weird.
Like…demon copping a feel weird!

The 80s blessed horror fans with numerous bonkers Italian movies with randomly fragmented stories—especially when considering Fulci’s (Conquest, Aenigma, Manhattan Baby) contributions.  These films are seldom “good” but often enjoyed at the very least, if not celebrated.  Today’s surreal film is such a movie…

Watch for a young Asia Argento.

We begin with a group of knights following some weird dude into a cave to meet an accused witch with a cross-shaped stigmata on her foot.  Upon visual (and laughably momentary) confirmation of her damnation, they naturally kill her and everyone in her obviously Satanic village.  Seems practical that a single purported witch results in citywide extermination, right?  Among the montaged savagery we find scores of bloody corpses, some of them naked, piled in a mass grave.  The site is blessed, they drop a giant cross on the pile of bodies and they build a church atop the macabre mass to “trap the demon” forever.  This sets the tone for a brutal Italian gorefest—and there are several somewhat gory efforts—but that’s not exactly what we’re in for…this is more eerie than gory.

Skip to present day and we find our gigantic gothic cathedral led by an inordinately venerable (and weird) priest.  Not sure if this is normal, but the church recently hired a new librarian, a young woman (Barbara Cupisti; Opera, Cemetery Man) to restore its art, and contractors jackhammering away in the catacombs below.  Pretty active for a European church, isn’t it?  Anyway, there seem to be some hidden cavities and caverns below the church and an old parchment scroll discovered in its walls begins to unravel mystery and subsequent mayhem.

Our intrigued librarian Evan (Tomas Arana; Gladiator, Frankenfish) believes that artefacts and secrets are hidden away buried beneath cathedrals, and this ignites his sense of adventure and discovery.  Do they grant supernatural power or other-worldly knowledge?  Who knows…let’s find out!  He solves the encrypted scroll, searches for “a stone with seven eyes” found atop the mass grave’s cross and resembling a mixture of Lovecraftian tentacles and the demon Baphomet.  It seals an abyss below and, as in The Gate (1987), some accidently drawn blood opens this infernal doorway.

Perhaps now partially possessed, Evan starts acting super weird…in fact, the whole movie starts getting super weird.  He pulls out his own beating heart for no reason at all, there is a demon goat home invasion, Evan turns into a sex-hungry creeper and he aims some of his unwanted affections toward a very young Asia Argento (Mother of Tears, Demons 2), Asia’s dad kills someone with a spiked fence and then suicidally jackhammers himself through the stomach to “finish” opening the infernal gate, an elaborate Indiana Jones mechanism is triggered to lock down the church and trap its occupants, more people get briefly possessed, a monstrous amphibian leaps out of the holy water and attacks someone…

…trapped people get feverish and delusional, an old lady uses her husband’s severed head to ring the church bells, a demon cops a feel of a girls bare butt, the old priest goes mad and gets impaled, there’s a mirror who’s reflection shouldn’t be trusted, and a sex scene with a goat demon and a woman on an altar.  Some of these things seem to be hallucinations whereas others are really happening but, as the movie viewer, I’m questioning my own sanity while watching this hilariously eerie nonsense transpire.  No clue why any of it is happening…but it’s happening!  So many bonkers things happen in this movie and it culminates in a giant mass of conjoined bodies emerging from the depths.  It reminded me of Society (1989) for just a moment, but not nearly as perverted.

The acting is completely stale and it feels like every scene was shot in a single, unrehearsed take.  And while the pace of this film could certainly be quicker, I enjoyed the creepy atmosphere.  The first act played out much more like an eerie mystery than a horror story and this set a solidly uneasy tone—one of the best aspects of this movie, by the way.  I may have wanted a more blatant gorefest, but the healthy diversity of moderate effects complemented the tone well.

Although not directed by Dario Argento (Phenomena), this film (originally released as La Chiesa) certainly wears his mark.  Rather Italian director Michele Soavi (Cemetery Man) is responsible for this zany Italian horror film.  I wouldn’t call this film a conquest for the genre, but instead just a stop on the tour of ludicrous 80s horror films to be enjoyed.  Aside from the impotent acting and incontinent story synthesis, a lot was left to be desired in terms of special effects, make-up and gore…none of which offered what I’d expect for a lower budget 80s flick.  Although the effort was readily apparent especially when the woman’s face is smashed (like a birthday cake; no really, it looked like a birthday cake!) onto a subway car and the mirror’s reflection scenes.  The macabre mass of bodies at the end was satisfactorily messy, yet should have been more harrowing.  But it just shows up briefly, then is dispatched; it doesn’t “do” anything but appear and shake a few limbs.  Similar can be said for the entertaining goat demon, which doesn’t really do anything other than look pretty neat…and have sex with someone.  LOL.

The movie ends typically, implying that the cycle of evil will continue but presenting it in a way that will draw no grins of satisfaction.  This was surely entertaining to this campy horror fan, but also surely not so great.